Diving Deeper Into The Rosenberg Reset

Last week, I told you about how there’s two pathways you can choose for dealing with life’s challenges: avoidance and awareness.

Yet, most people don’t realize that managing difficult feelings relates to confidence, resilience, and authenticity.

Let’s dive deeper into the Rosenberg Reset.

1 choice, 8 feelings, 90 seconds.

Step 1 – You make the decision to allow yourself to fully feel your feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations.

Choose awareness, not avoidance, as your approach to life.

Step 2 –  In any given situation, you experience and move through whichever of the 8 unpleasant feelings that have surfaced: sadness, shame, helplessness, anger, embarrassment, disappointment, frustration, and vulnerability.

I’ve had a front-row seat to emotional pain for more than four decades and what I’ve found is that avoiding difficult feelings gets in the way of confidence, happiness, authenticity, and success; these 8 feelings are at the center of it all.

Step 3 – You experience and move through these unpleasant feelings by riding one or more 90‑second waves of bodily sensations. These bodily sensations help you access and begin to understand what you are feeling emotionally; feelings are generally known at a physical level before you are consciously aware of them.

As much as it can seem at times that difficult feelings just linger and won’t go away, the truth is that feelings are temporary. Emotions provide vital information. Your body and brain are communicating this information so you can take action, most often to protect yourself or engage with others.

But these bursts of information are temporary in nature. Physiologically, our bodies cannot maintain arousal states for very long. Making your way through feelings—especially uncomfortable ones—mainly involves tolerating the bodily sensations until the body re‑regulates. The body prefers to be at homeostasis, its typical state, and will try to get back to baseline as soon as possible.

How we approach everyday experiences, events, and situations has a big impact over our day‑to‑day and lifelong happiness.

Decide today to make the one choice to stay in the present moment by remaining aware of and in touch with as much of your moment‑to‑moment experience as possible. This includes paying special attention to your thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations. When you’re able to notice and respond to the 8 unpleasant feelings with ease, you’ll experience a greater sense of inner peace and emotional freedom.

Here’s How to Check in With Yourself:

1. 1. Notice your experience in the present moment, absent judgment.

1. 1. When you start to feel any one of the 8 feelings, what do you do? Do you withdraw or shut down? Do you escape by staying distracted in obvious ways, for instance, through alcohol, drugs, food, social media, or shopping? Or do you distract yourself in less obvious ways, for example, by tightening your muscles or clenching your fists in an effort to make the feelings stop or go away?

1. Or do you stay present by noticing what you are feeling, thinking, or sensing?

Staying present is the choice I recommend to all of my clients in service of developing confidence and building a life of their own design. It’s the choice I hope you’ll make, too.

I offer many tools and resources in my new book to help you build awareness and apply this technique in your life. Imagine living life with greater confidence and resilience. It’s called 90 Seconds to a Life You Love and you can get it here (along with a few limited-time bonuses).