Fear is possibly the emotion that I’ve become most aware of in my life. In particular fear of being wrong and someone starting as sentence “actually I think you’ll find…”, and I’m wrong all the damn time so this is such a pain! Sometimes the fear becomes decoupled from an actual event, this is anxiety to me. I can be sitting down having dinner with a friend and my stupid monkey brain will just read the whole situation as a threat. So I did a lot of nodding while reading your post today!

Being able to identify them is a huge step forward on the way to properly deal with fearsome expectations as well as to adopt measures that make you feel more stable overall.

To this point, I think an emotional intelligence, identifying our own emotions and the emotions in others, is such an undervalued skill in our education system. It sounds a bit fluffy but it really is a concrete skill that can mean the success or failure in many jobs and life relationships in general. I’ve gained more on this for an afternoon of group work at a retreat than I did throughout the whole of my formal education.

This is the first time I’ve read one of your posts (feeling slightly guilty about that as you’ve left such lovely comments on my) you have such a beautiful writing style, it really was a pleasure to read!