Hey girl hey!
My name is Jardel and I've been a part of the DearGirls team for over a year (time flies when you're having fun). I currently study Psychology at university and work at a child protection facility in my “free” time. I also run a luxury handmade lip gloss business called Cocoa Cosmetics, feel free to check us out @cocoacosmeticsuk on Instagram. I've had the business for about 8 months, and I'm amazed at, not only the growth in the business but also in my skillset and my business mindset. I also play an active role in my local church as a youth and worship leader: @newjigniteyouth.
But onto the main topic of this blog post. Emotional mastery! When I told my friends I was writing a blog post on this topic they laughed. I'm a very emotional person. Let's start there. I cry when I'm happy, I cry when I’m sad, I cry at movies and I definitely cry in real life. But after further unpacking this revelation, I realised, I’m a person who feels deeply, in a generation that thinks it looks cool to not care about anything. I truly enjoy moments, and that makes me emotional – but in some places, it also makes you strange.
And for a long time, it was a difficult thing to deal with - being surrounded by people who didn’t express how they felt and felt uncomfortable with me expressing how I felt – so I stopped sharing.
And while this may seem a really strange place to start a blog on emotional mastery… It's the perfect place. I’m a very sociable person when I’m ready. I love meeting new people, talking to them, spending time with the people I love. In turn, there are a lot of people who see me as a friend however, I’m very specific about who I choose to be friends with.
A couple of years ago I moved out of my mom’s house to live with someone who had been my friend for years. We went to sixth form together, we'd been on holiday together, I'd stayed at her house and shed stayed at mine.
We both thought that it was a for sure win… *spoiler* it wasn’t.
During the seven months living with her, I went through every emotion possible. This isn’t an expose, but there was a huge range of emotions that we both endured. I found that my patience was tested because she wouldn’t clean on a certain day or because she wouldn’t clean the dishes after she had company – it wasn’t to say that she never did these things… she just didn’t do them at the time or in the way that I wanted her too. She had friends over who were people I might not have been friends with and conducted her lifestyle in a very different manner to me. She was frustrated because as her friend, she felt I should be accepting of her lifestyle.
However, you can’t be friends with people who have fundamentally different values.
Looking back, I’m able to see how a lack in my own personal areas of growth added fuel to a very unnecessary fire. I had lived with friends before and as a way of trying not to lose another friend I cared about I set a huuugeee number of rules and had very longwinded conversations – which, to be fair, she disregarded.
During this time, I had time to truly feel and master my emotions. Emotions in themselves are not inherently bad – even the negative ones. Incorrect actions based on emotions is what can be bad.
I mastered my emotions by understanding them, expressing them, and making the effort to understand other people's. During the day, we experience so many different emotions, it can be difficult to truly feel any of them. Our emotional state is usually so fleeting that when we feel deeply, for a significant period of time, we aim to end it as soon as possible. We rarely invest, yes invest, the time to uncover the ‘why’! Why do I feel like this? What is this feeling rooted in? Why has this person been able to bring out this emotion in me?
I have a standing rule: Take a nap. Regardless.
Understanding your emotions:
In the times that I was really angry, sad, frustrated, I would clear my schedule and nap before I did or said anything. There’s a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, I'm very grumpy when I'm tired so post-nap, I could be completely over it. But usually, when I woke up, I would take note of whether that situation was the first thing I thought of. Do I feel as angry as I did, am I as upset as I was? And usually… I wasn’t. But on the occasions that I did still feel angry, I’d lay in bed and think about it. I allowed myself to cry or get really angry and then I decided what I wanted to do about it. During this thinking time you can get to the root of the problem and then it allows for clarity when expressing how you feel to others.
Which leads nicely onto expressing our emotions.
I care so much about the people around me, sometimes I think I might burst. I pray for them more than I pray for myself. I regularly tell them that I love and appreciate them, because sometimes if you don’t tell people… they don’t know. A lot of the time we assume that people know we feel a particular way and we don’t actually say it. During my time living with my friend, I realised I needed to get into the habit of not assuming! It’s easy for us to assume that, even though we’re angry, people know we love and appreciate them. It’s easy for us to assume that people left the dirty dishes for you to wash, or that they threw away your food knowing you would want to eat it. This way of thinking can be problematic in itself.
It's so easy for us to get ourselves stressed and angry over something that isn’t true because we don’t think we need to ask.
From this, I learned how important it is to ask a lot of questions. I really like clarity and I like transparency, regardless of the information being negative or positive – so I ask a lot of questions. I hate guessing whether this is what someone might be thinking, or this is what someone might have done. In turn, you are able to truly understand and think about the situation from someone else’s point of view and realise that the situation was simply a misunderstanding, rather than a malicious act of deep hatred lol.
I've learned that you aren’t truly and completely healed until you're no longer sore. Whilst the new skin may have returned after a really bad burn if it’s still sore you know you aren’t completely back to normal. We need to take time out to completely heal and the only way to truly do this is to understand and express our emotions and consider other people's.
Check out the rest of our emotional mastery content here: https://www.instagram.com/deargirlsltd/