MODERN

EMOTIONAL
HEALTH
B Y B R O O K E C A S T I L L O
OVERVIEW OF
THE PROGRAM
MY STORY 3

WHAT IS MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH AND WHY DOES IT MATTER? 5

OUR MODERN ENVIRONMENT 6

OUR EMOTIONAL EDUCATION 8

EMOTIONS ARE IN OUR CONTROL  10

BUFFERING 13

WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN 14

WHAT IS AN UNHEALTHY EMOTIONAL LIFE? 16

50/50 IN RELATIONSHIPS 18

THE FIVE STEPS TO EMOTIONAL HEALTH  19

SUMMARY OF THE FIVE STEPS 25

DISCOMFORT IS THE CURRENCY TO YOUR DREAMS 27

TAKING IT FURTHER  30

MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH PAGE 2

 MY STORY
My life coaching story starts when I was 15 years old. I remember feeling so much
emotional pain after a devastating breakup. I didn’t know how to manage my painful
feelings, so I chose to eat instead. I buffered my way to feeling better by eating food
because I didn’t know how to deal with the emotional pain.

During this time, I went to Barnes and Noble with my mom, where I stumbled upon
the self help section. I bought the first self help book I ever read, Women Who Love
Too Much, by Robin Norwood.

I devoured the book in one night. It immediately helped me. The author shared ideas
about how to feel better. She actually offered some solutions to my problem.

In that moment, I decided I wanted to help people feel better, too. The author was a
therapist. So, I decided to become a therapist.

MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH PAGE 3

 I went to college to study psychology. I was so excited and eager to start
college to get to do what I love. But that is not what happened.
MY STORY
Instead of learning how to help people, I learned everything that
was wrong with the human mind, including diseases and abnormal
psychology. I was devastated. I wanted to help people like me—normal
people suffering with emotional pain.

I didn’t want to help people the way they had taught in my psychology
major. I left college feeling lost.

One day, Oprah was on TV and interviewed someone who identified

herself as a life coach.

That episode changed my life.

I was introduced to the career of life coaching, where you can help
normal people who are simply in emotional pain.

I knew in a moment this was exactly what I wanted to do, so I found

that coach and signed up for her training.

I started out as a solopreneur, and eventually started The Life Coach

School with my husband in 2010.

I love being a life coach. I am doing exactly what I wanted to be doing—

serving people who are suffering emotionally, and motivating them to
set big goals and achieve their dreams.

MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH PAGE 4

WHAT IS MODERN
EMOTIONAL HEALTH
AND WHY DOES IT
MATTER?
My latest obsession right now is modern emotional
health. Do you know what it means to be emotionally
healthy in this modern day?
I’m really going to talk about this from the perspective
of a beginner. No matter how much you think you
already know about emotional health, we are going to
start with the basics and build up from there.
Let’s start with the question, what is modern emotional
health? And I use the word modern on purpose, because
it’s really important that we understand that our brain,
and our cognitive and emotional life, in this modern
environment is a problem.
If we don’t learn how to manage our brain in our
modern environment, we are going to be in trouble.
Don’t worry, I’m going to take you through the whole
process. First, let’s look at emotional health.
What do you think emotional health is? How would
you define it? Have you ever thought about it? Do you
think you are emotionally healthy?
MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH
The main problem is that most people don’t even know
how to define emotional health, therefore how do they
even answer the question?
When you ask people, “Are you emotionally healthy?”
what most people think that means is, “Are you
happy?”
Happiness does not equal emotional health. Most
people don’t know how to differentiate them.
Happiness does not equal
emotional health.
I used to think that thinness meant happiness. I also
used to think that thinness meant healthiness. We
associate these things.
In a similar way, a lot of us think emotional health
means happiness. I believe that belief system has
caused more trouble and more emotional unhealthiness
than any other thing we’re focused on in our lives.
So first of all, we need to ask the question, are we
emotionally healthy and how do we know if we are?
PAGE 5
OUR MODERN
ENVIRONMENT
Let’s start with why we need to use the word modern
when we talk about emotional health.
THE FIRST REASON IS
FALSE PLEASURES.
Our modern environment is filled with false pleasures.
It’s easy to look at other people’s lives and think that
everyone is happy but us.
Have you looked on Instagram lately? What about
Facebook? Have you watched TV? Everybody’s happy.
Everybody’s having a great life. No one ever has any zits.
Everyone’s hair is perfect. Everybody eats gourmet food.
Everybody exercises. Everybody is happy.
THE SECOND REASON
IS OUR MOTIVATIONAL
TRIAD IS BACKFIRING.
What is the motivational triad? Think about us in the
cave. We had to be motivated to seek pleasure, avoid
pain, and preserve our energy in order to survive. We
can see how that served us.
MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH
The fact that we wanted to seek pleasure had us going
out and connecting with other people, and having sex,
and getting food and water, and seeking comfort and
warmth to take care of ourselves, and avoiding pain. We
avoided the emotional pain and the physical pain that
literally could have killed us, and preserved our energy
so we could stay alive.
This motivational triad—seek pleasure, avoid pain,
and preserve energy—is what got us here. All of those
things were necessary back in the day, but now they
are causing us all sorts of trouble because our modern
day environment has so many false pleasures. We are
constantly overseeking pleasure, overgetting pleasure,
and causing ourselves all kinds of problems with our
emotional health.
We spend way too much time avoiding pain because
we think the point of life is to be happy all the time.
We buffer our way away from pain so we don’t feel our
emotions. We don’t allow or process negative emotion.
We don’t experience what it’s like to be a human who
experiences pain.
PAGE 6
ENVIRONMENT
OUR MODERN Back in the day, we had to avoid pain.
Can you imagine? We were literally
in fear for our lives—no clothes, no
comforts, no air conditioning, no We need to do the exact
heat, nothing. Avoiding pain back
then meant avoiding having a rock
opposite of what our
stab you in the back when you’re brain initially was
trying to sleep. Versus now, avoiding
pain means you might feel a little bit
designed and evolved
uncomfortable. You for sure better to do.
avoid that.

What about preserving our energy?

Conserving our energy is what kept
us alive. We are now doing that to
the point of inaction and laziness.

This motivational triad that served

us so well back then is now causing
problems in our modern day. We
need to do the exact opposite of what
our brain initially was designed and
evolved to do.

We need to delay pleasure instead of

seeking it. We need to embrace our
emotional pain, open up to negative
emotion and experience it, and we
need to generate energy and utilize it
instead of trying to preserve it.

MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH PAGE 7

OUR EMOTIONAL
EDUCATION
So let’s talk about what happens
in our emotional education. What
are we taught about emotion? We
are taught that other people hurt
our feelings. We are taught that
other people make us happy. And
we are taught that circumstances
make us happy or sad.
That is what we are taught as
children. “Did little Sally hurt
your feelings?”
“Well, let’s go talk to Sally and tell
her not to do that anymore.”
“What you said really hurt John’s
feelings, don’t say things to hurt
his feelings.”
MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH
“That makes mommy sad when you
hurt other peoples feelings, don’t
do that.”
How often are we told these
things? In school, we are taught
not to hurt other people’s feelings
and not to let them hurt ours. We
think other people make us happy.
“That makes mommy so happy
when you do that.”
“You make me so happy.”
Get married. Find a husband that
will make you happy. Find a wife
that will make you happy.
PAGE 8
We’re also taught that
circumstances make us happy or
sad. When good things happen,
we’re happy. When bad things
happen, we’re sad. When we
achieve things, when we go after
things in life and accomplish
them, that will make us happy. If
we don’t get them, we’ll be sad.
If we’re thin, we’ll be happy, if
we’re rich, we’ll be happy, if we’re
married, if we have two kids, if
we’re normal, if we fit in, if we
have lots of friends.
This is what our emotional
education is reduced to. First of
all, it’s not like they have a class
to teach you about your emotions.
Why would they? They’re only
the most important thing in the
world.
OUR EMOTIONAL
EDUCATION
The most important thing.
Our emotions are the reason why we do or don’t do
anything. We want to accomplish things because of
how we think they will make us feel. We avoid doing
things because of how we think they’ll make us feel.
Our personality, the way we show up, everything is
based on how we feel or how we think something will
make us feel. It drives everything. It is the only thing
that matters.
Our emotional life is what matters because it
determines everything else in our life, but we’re not
taught anything about it. We’re taught, maybe in third
grade, happy face, sad face, mad face. That’s the extent
of our emotional education.
I have a degree in psychology, and even there, the
amount of time we spent studying emotions was
minimal. We studied the effect of emotions, and the
pathology of not processing emotion, but we weren’t
taught what causes emotions, or how to manage and
process them.
MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH
There is a severe lack in emotional education. Yet, if
you ask anyone what is more important in your life as
an adult—history, math, physics, trigonometry, what
happened in the 1800s, or what’s going on in your
emotional life—What do you think they would choose?
What would you choose?
Zero is taught about how to recognize, understand,
and manage your emotions. Zero.
I think that’s ridiculous. As I studied, and went
through the process of learning how to be a life coach,
I’ve had to dig deep to learn how to manage my mind
and emotions. I’ve had to study myself.
Zero is taught about how to
recognize, understand, and
manage your emotions. Zero.
PAGE 9
EMOTIONS
ARE IN OUR
CONTROL
I discovered that other people have no ability to hurt
our feelings. In fact, other people can't cause our
feelings at all, because our feelings are caused by our
thoughts.
I remember when I first learned this. I was listening
to a talk on a cassette tape. Remember those? When
the speaker said, “Your thoughts cause your feelings,” I
was like, what? What are you talking about? I thought
other people caused my feelings, I thought other things
caused my feelings. I thought feelings just happened.
You're telling me that my thoughts cause my feelings
and I have 100% control over my thinking? It was mind
blowing to me.
So what we are taught is actually false. Other people
don't hurt our feelings. Other people can't make us
happy. We try to change them. We try to teach them
how to behave. We try and teach them all the things,
but they don't behave the way we want them to, so they
don’t make us happy. Even if they did every single thing
MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH
we wanted them to do, they still wouldn't make us
happy. Because you know what makes us happy? Our
own thinking.
And remember, being happy isn't the goal anyway. So
let's talk about the worst lesson that we are taught—the
goal is to be good and the goal is to be happy. That
message is in the undercurrent of everything we are
taught.
You know what makes us happy? Our
own thinking.
We are taught that negative emotion should be fixed,
and that it can be fixed by something external.
If I see a little girl crying, "Oh my gosh, what's wrong?
Something's terribly wrong, you're having a negative
emotion. Let's fix it. What's wrong?"
PAGE 10
EMOTIONS ARE IN
That's how we talk to people who are having negative emotions.
We ask them what's wrong with them. What's wrong with you?

OUR CONTROL
What's right is to be happy. If you're crying, something's wrong
with you. This is what we're taught.

The problem with this is that nobody can be good and happy all
of the time because there is no good without bad, and there is no
happy without sad, and the world isn't meant to be happy and
good and right all of the time.

How do we know this? Because it isn't happy and good and right
all the time.

It's impossible to even have good without the bad. If we were

happy all the time, we wouldn't even know we were happy. If we
were good all the time, we wouldn't even know we were good
because there is no bad. There's no balance.

When we're taught that happiness is the goal, we are sold so much
BS and then we feel like there's something wrong with us when
we experience negative emotion. We think somehow it should
be fixed.

So let me educate you on how the world really is. This is your
modern emotional education.

EMOTIONS:
THE 50/50 CONCEPT
Life is half positive and half negative.

How do we know this? Have you been alive? Have you noticed
that is the case?

Yes, there is good and there is bad. There is positive and there is
negative. There is comfort and there is discomfort.

It’s a balance. Life doesn't exist without this. You can't have it. We
don't even know that something's positive if there is no negative.

MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH PAGE 11

 So when you have a negative emotion and we say there's something
wrong with you, what happens?

We think there’s We think there's something wrong with us when we're human.

something wrong We're like, oh my gosh, I feel anxious a lot of the time, I feel frustrated a
with us when lot of the time, I feel hate, I feel doubt, I feel scared. What is wrong with
me? Everybody on Facebook is happy all the time. All these other people
we’re human. are causing me all this negative emotion.

So you know what we try and do? We make an effort to be happy and
positive all of the time. But we were taught that what makes us happy
and what makes us sad is the world. So we go out into the world to try
and solve a problem that isn't even a problem.

This isn't a problem. This is humanness.

But we try and solve it. We try and solve this problem by telling other
people how to act towards us, by trying to get them to behave in a way
that doesn't hurt us.

We try to find people who will make us happy. But they are terrible at
making us happy, because it's impossible.

We feel bad when other people don't comply, and the circumstances of
our life aren't making us happy all the time. So you know what we try
and do? We try to fix the circumstances of our life.

MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH PAGE 12

BUFFERING
Now, let’s go back to what I originally said about the modern
environment. If you’re supposed to be happy all of the time and
you’re not, then you will try to fix that.
What do you do? You go out and find false pleasures. You get
concentrated pleasures that have been created by money-making
organizations who get rich on our pleasure.
Think about overeating and overdrinking and over-Facebooking
and over-porning and over-smoking and over-drugging and all the
things we’re trying to do to compensate for this. We’re doing all
this buffering to try and make negative emotion go away.
We resist it, we avoid it, we deny it, we hide from it because we
think it means there’s something wrong with us. But I want you to
know there is nothing wrong with you.
First of all, we’re supposed to have the human experience.
I want you to just look at the world. So many of us think there’s
something wrong with the world and we want to fix it. The world
should be kind and happy and peaceful and it’s not, so we need
to fix the world to make it kind and happy and peaceful. And yet
what makes us think that the world should be kind and happy and
peaceful? It’s never been 100% kind and happy and peaceful. It’s
always been a combination of good and bad, right?
When you look at back in the day, we had really amazing things
and we had really terrible things. And then you go forward 100
years. Really amazing things, really terrible things. Now, today,
a lot of the terrible things that we had hundreds of years ago we
don’t currently have, but you know what we have? All brand new
terrible things.
We’ve eliminated some of those terrible things and replaced it with
positive things, but then the negative thing is filled in with new
negative things.
MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH
Have you noticed the balance is there
all the time? And yet we’re so upset that
the negative is still there. If we could just
eliminate the negative, then everything
would be right, and everything would be
good, and everyone would be happy.
But we spend so much time being
upset by the negative that we become
inordinately negative about our own
negativity and we start trying to
compensate for it by adding more
negativity, and more buffering, and more
false pleasures, and more compensation.
And then we think there’s something
terribly wrong with us because listen, we
have this negative emotion, so we eat over
it and then we gain weight, and then we
hate ourselves for that, and then we eat
more and then we hate ourselves for that.
And then suddenly, we’re in this spin of
rejecting everything.
So people say to me, “Does it have to be
50/50? Can we go with 80/20 maybe?
Please 80/20.”
Here’s the thing, when you accept that
half of your life has negative emotion
and that half of the world has negative
things in it, then they’re not so negative
anymore. When you make them so awful
and so negative by trying to push them
away, they become worse than they are.
PAGE 13
WHAT IT MEANS TO
BE HUMAN
So I want you to think about this. Do you really want to be happy all of the time? Some of you may think you would
love to be happy all of the time. And the truth is you could try to be happy all of the time, but that also means you
would have to be happy when horrible things happen. You would have to be happy when people die, and when
people are raped, and murdered, and hurt. When all the terrible things happen in the world, you would have to be
happy in order to be happy all the time.

My students start to say, “Wait a minute, you know what I’d rather be? I’d rather be human.”

Humans aren’t happy all of the time. Humans feel pain and they feel sadness and they experience anxiety and
discomfort and fear, and I want all of that in my life because I want to be fully human. I want to open up to this
part of life.

MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH PAGE 14

WHAT IT MEANS
TO BE HUMAN
When I think it should be better than this, I miss out on the full human
experience, and I end up not showing up. I end up hiding, and trying to
compensate for my negative feelings, and cowering from my life because I
think there’s something wrong with me. Your whole life is going
to be 50/50.
So here is your education. Here is what I want to teach everyone when
they’re really young. I want to tell them, “Listen, your whole life is going to
be 50/50.”

The topics change, but this is still

And here’s what I tell my kids, and this is really important for us all to
your life. Knowing this is amazing,
remember. Everybody’s life is 50/50.
because it saves you so much time.
You can stop trying to compensate
When you look at that person on Facebook or you look at that billionaire for this and you can decide what
or you look at that person that has the perfect body or the perfect life you want your life to be, knowing
or the perfect husband or the perfect children or the perfect face or the that it won’t get any better, it won’t
perfect hair or whatever, their life is 50/50. Your life is 50/50. get any worse. It is up to you how
you interpret it.
Now, the 50/50 is different. That person with the perfect body, do you
think they don’t worry about their body? The model that has the perfect If I can teach you this one concept,
body that’s on the runway, do you think she doesn’t hate her body and I have taught you everything.
think about her body and worry about her body? You think she’s just
like, “My body’s perfect, I’m so happy”? No. Everybody has 50/50. So even
the professional football players and the professional basketball players
and the ones that get the division one scholarships and the most popular
people and the most successful people, it doesn’t ever get better than 50/50.

So when you’re trying to go out there in the world and compensate for this
by accumulating and changing and nipping and tucking and dieting and
all of that, what you find out is that you’re still left with 50/50.

MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH PAGE 15

WHAT IS AN
UNHEALTHY
EMOTIONAL LIFE?
Let’s talk about unhealthy emotional life. So if we
have modern emotional health, what is an unhealthy
emotional life?

1.
A complete lack of awareness. You’re not aware of what you’re feeling, you’re not aware that feelings
matter, you’re not paying attention to your feelings.

2.
Avoidance and resistance to negative emotion. This means you’re buffering. So you’re going into your
house at night and you feel stressed and you feel frustrated and you feel overwhelmed and you feel
tired and you feel negative emotion, and you think that negative emotion needs to be fixed because
that’s what we’ve been taught.

MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH PAGE 16

WHAT IS AN UNHEALTHY
EMOTIONAL LIFE?
We have to do something about it, and you know how you fix negative
emotion? You find something outside of you to fix it. So you find something
to drink or something to eat or someone to talk to or a bath to take or You can’t solve an
something external to you to solve your internal crisis of negative emotion.
internal issue with
That’s what buffering is. That’s addiction—when we’re using drugs, when an external problem.
we’re using food, when we’re using porn, when we’re using obsession.

We get compulsive about things because we’re trying to solve internal Then we blame ourselves and feel
problems with external solutions. We have these urges inside of us and we bad for acting out our emotions.
use all these false pleasures to try and solve for them.
None of this works because it leaves
Of course that doesn’t work, because you can’t solve an internal issue with us totally powerless. We’re out of
an external problem. control with our emotions or we’re
blaming other people for causing
By the way, your negative emotion doesn’t need to be solved. It just needs them. That leaves our emotional life
to be accepted and processed properly. When you resist it and avoid it, in a very unhealthy spin.
that’s when you cause yourself problems.
The last thing we do is hide from
The third thing we do that’s unhealthy for our emotional lives is indulge in truth and from goals. When we
our emotions, which means we blame and we react to our emotions. don’t want to experience negative
emotion, we hold ourselves back
from life.
There are two ways that I like to see them:
1 The victim role I want you to think about this in
terms of goals that you’ve set in
2 Reaction your life. A lot of people tell me
they don’t want to set big goals
The victim role is all about blaming other people for causing our negative
because they’re afraid of failing.
emotion and holding them accountable for our emotional lives.
Instead, they spin in self doubt
and overwhelm. But not setting
Reaction is when we have an emotion and we just act it out. We bully goals is not telling the truth about
other people, we react to our anger, we yell at other people, we try to what you want in your life. It’s not
change them because we think they are causing frustration in our life. showing up. Not having important
conversations. It’s hiding from any
This is just indulging in self pity, in anger, in reaction, in self loathing, in purposeful negative emotion.
overwhelm, in worry. All of the things.

We get tied up and spin in all these emotions because we think we could
just solve them by changing someone else. So when we react to emotion,
when we bully, or get angry, or lose our shit, we blame the other person.

MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH PAGE 17

50/50 IN
RELATIONSHIPS
I see this in the coaching that I do on relationships all of the time. People come into
relationships and they think they’re responsible for the other person’s feelings and that the
other person is responsible for their feelings. So they don’t show up as the truth of who they
are because they want to be the version of the person this other person wants them to be.
Likewise, they don’t want that person showing up as the truth of who they are either because
of the fear that it might somehow affect them negatively.

So two people coming into a relationship, taking responsibility for each other’s feelings
can’t be truthful, can’t be honest. They have to try and be the version of the person that the
other person wants them to be. But they never have any true connection, which is what both
people desperately want. They can’t connect because no one’s even showing up as who they
really are because they’re afraid that they will hurt the other person’s feelings, or the person
will hurt their feelings.

What if you went into a relationship knowing that half of this relationship is going to be
negative emotion because half of the human experience is negative emotion, and that’s okay.
You don’t need to behave any differently, and I don’t need to lie about who I am. We can both
just show up as who we are and take care of our own emotional lives, and the rest of the time
just have a blast together because you’re in this space of fully accepting the other person as
they are. Isn’t that what we all really want? To be accepted for who we are?

We want to be in a relationship where we can just be accepted. A relationship where

we can just love the person we’re with without trying to change them because that’s so
ineffective anyway.

This is where I see so many of my clients hiding from their lives. They don’t want any change,
they don’t want to rock the boat because they’re at a point where they’ve been able to try
and manage their life so they don’t have any purposeful negative emotion. And if negative
emotions do come up, they’ve learned to hide from it by over-treating it with false pleasure.

MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH PAGE 18

 THE FIVE STEPS TO
EMOTIONAL HEALTH
Now that we’ve defined what it looks like to be
emotionally unhealthy, let’s talk more about modern
emotional health. What does it look like?

ST E P ON E: U NDE R S TA N D YO UR
E M OTI O NS
First, we learn to understand our emotions. We know how to name them, we know how to feel them, we know how
to identify them.

So if I ask you, “What emotion are you having right now?”, you’d be able to identify it. The more sophisticated you
get in being able to decipher between emotions, the more you’re going to be able to create the life that you want.

For example, when you understand, right now, I’m feeling really excited, or I’m feeling anticipatory, or I’m feeling
elated, versus I feel good, or I feel fine.

When you ask people how they feel, most people respond with good or fine. Is that all you have? Good or fine?

People don’t have any breadth or diversity to the types of emotions that they’re having, or they just feel bad, or they
just feel anxious. Anxiety is so common and is just the resistance to an underlying emotion. They’re not wanting to
experience whatever the emotion is, so they’re pushing it away and resisting it, which causes a tremendous amount of
anxiety and panic for so many people.

MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH PAGE 19

EMOTIONAL HEALTH
THE FIVE STEPS TO S T E P TWO : A L L OW
YOU R E M OTI O NS
Once you get good at identifying your emotions, the next step is to allow those
emotions without fear or resistance. This is much harder to do than it is to say,
because most of us have been trained to fix our emotions, or resist them, or
pretend they’re not there.

If I feel frustrated, the answer is not for me to tell you, “I feel frustrated when
you do that, stop doing that.” My job is to feel frustrated, to allow myself to
really feel that emotion. It’s totally harmless.

Emotions can’t hurt us. We don’t need to fix them. It doesn’t mean there’s
something wrong with you. In fact, it’s part of the human experience.

I want you to imagine your life if you didn’t experience frustration. Someone
would say to you, “I’m frustrated.” And you’d be like, “I don’t know what that
is. I don’t know what frustration is.” Would you feel less of the experience of
life? Frustration is part of it. It’s part of the deal. The same goes for every other
emotion we feel as part of this human experience.

The bigger the goals, the bigger your emotions, your positive and your negative
emotions, and that’s a beautiful thing.

One way I work with my students to help them experience emotions, and allow
them to be there, is by allowing urges. We feel an urge to do something that is
not healthy for us, and we allow it to be there without reacting, without giving
in to the urge.

We’re used to reacting to our urges. We have an urge to watch Netflix. We have
an urge to overeat. We have an urge to smoke a cigarette, and we just react to
those because we don’t know how to allow an emotion.

I teach my students to allow 100 urges. You’ll feel restless, but allow yourself
to feel anxiety and panic without reacting to it, without resisting it, without
buffering to avoid it.

So many of our urges, so many of the problems that we experience with

our modern emotional health, is because of our environment. We have
urges to overeat sugar, for example, because our brain thinks that sugar is
super important because of the way that it reacts in our brain. But when we

MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH PAGE 20

understand our emotion and we understand the reason we’re feeling that
way is because of the way our primitive brain is wired, and we understand You’ll feel restless, but
it from that perspective, we don’t have to react to it. allow yourself to feel
anxiety and panic
It’s important to remember two things when it comes to our emotions.
First, we identify we are feeling an emotion, and then we have a choice to without reacting to it,
react to it. Those are two separate things. without resisting it,
without buffering to
S T EP T HR E E : S TO P avoid it.
I NDU LG IN G I N
E MOT ION S
The third step to modern emotional health is that we’re not indulging in Think about self loathing and pity
emotions all the time. We’re not feeling sorry for ourselves and blaming and blame and hate. It doesn’t feel
everybody and worrying all the time. We’re not doubting ourselves and good even if you feel justified in
hating other people and hating ourselves all the time. it. Even if you feel like you have a
reason, who cares? Who cares what
Those emotions—worry, doubt, blaming, hating—are all very indulgent. the reason is?
And the way you know that they’re indulgent is that they don’t get you
anywhere. They keep you stuck in a spin. They make an excuse for why you If it feels terrible, you could be
can’t go out into the world. And the reason why we indulge in the familiar using up that 50% of negative
negative emotion is because we’re afraid of feeling any kind of new emotion on something that
negative emotion. But it’s still negative emotion. It’s still part of the 50/50. pursues a goal for you, that
creates something, that makes
I always say, you might as well get rich and get what you want while you’re a contribution to your life,
experiencing negative emotion, because indulging in negative emotion isn’t that doesn’t have a net negative
getting you anywhere and it feels terrible. consequence to it.

MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH PAGE 21

S T EP F OU R : B E
W ILL IN G TO F E E L I N
THE F U T U RE
Being willing to feel in the future is the opposite of hiding, right? When Allowing and not indulging means
we hide from our lives, we don’t set big goals for ourselves. We don’t you experience the emotion but
pursue anything we want because we’re hiding from negative emotion. you don’t react to it and you
But when we say, “I am willing to go do this…” and be rejected and be don’t succumb to it and you don’t
humiliated and feel failure and feel stumbling and fear and pain; when blame it on anybody else. You keep
I’m open to the human experience of life, that’s when I have the emotional moving forward with it.
health that I need to be able to pursue things that help our entire human
race evolve beyond where we currently are.
When you allow an emotion, it’s
almost like you digest it. You process
When we hide and indulge and avoid and try to be happy all the time, we it through. If you experience an urge
get the opposite result. Do you know how unhappy it makes you to try and and you really allow that urge to be
be happy all of the time? It’s crazy. But when you allow for the 50/50, when there, there is a beginning, middle,
you allow for the full experience of life, there’s nothing to lose. and an end to it. It isn’t going to
overtake your life.
You know that’s what your life is going to be, so you might as well pursue
the biggest dream you have. If you’re going to feel bad half the time When we feel like emotions are
anyway, why not? going to overtake us is when
we push them away and don’t
The reason we’re not pursuing our dreams, the reason we’re not going experience them, and then they
after what we want, is because we don’t want to feel bad when we don’t become this overwhelming
get it. Wait a minute, you already don’t get it. You already don’t have it. resistance.
You already feel bad. You might as well try. You might as well become
the person that you want to be, fully alive, fully human, experiencing
everything.

Let’s review the steps so far: When you allow for

1. The first step is really understanding and identifying your emotions.

the 50/50, when you
allow for the full

2. Then you allow them to be there.

experience of life,
there’s nothing to lose.
3. Then you don’t indulge in them.

4.  And then you remain open and willing to feel them in the future,
rather than indulging in them.

MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH PAGE 22

 When we allow emotions to pass in and through, because of the human
experience being 50/50, we start really experiencing life because we know
we’re going to go out into our day and probably experience some negative
emotion. But that’s okay—we’re human, it’s fine.

When we go out into our day and think, “I better not experience any
negative emotion today. I’m going to make sure these people don’t cause
me any negative emotion today…” what do we end up doing?

We end up creating all the negative emotion by trying to avoid all the
negative emotion.

S TE P FI V E : C R E AT E
E M OTI O N O N
PURPOSE
The last step is to create emotion on purpose. This means that you
understand that you are the person who generates your emotion. You
generate your emotion by what you think, with your brain. And you can
generate the emotion that you most want to generate to create the result
you want.

So for some of you, it’s motivation. For some of you, it’s discipline. For
some of you, it’s courage. For some of you, it’s love.

Just know you have the ability to generate emotion on purpose. Make
sure you don’t do it with the agenda of feeling happier more of the time
because that’s not the life you want. You’ve told yourself that’s a life you
want, but it’s not.

You want the human experience. You want to experience what it’s like to
be fully human. That’s why you are a human.

When you learn that you can generate the emotion that you want, to
create the result that you want in your life, don’t be fooled into thinking,
“Wait a minute, my thoughts cause my feelings, therefore I should be
happy all of the time.”

MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH PAGE 23

EMOTIONAL HEALTH
THE FIVE STEPS TO
No. Remember the rules are that you get to create
whatever emotion you want, but you want to be a
human being.

Ask yourself this question: Do you want to be a

person that’s just happy all of the time? “I’m just
happy about everything. All of the horrible things
are fabulous.”

Why do we tell ourselves that’s what we want? We

don’t want that. We want the full experience of life.

I want you to think about this. We know that life

sucks pretty much half of the time. There are terrible
things that happen in the world. People die, kids are
kidnapped, people are raped, people get stolen from,
people go to prison, people have accidents. So many
horrible things happen.
We would do it
all over again,
We all know this, and yet we have children and we go through the
bring them into the world knowing that they are
going to have pain, knowing that they’re going to
heartbreak all
experience frustration and heartbreak and despair. over again to have
We know that for them and we still bring them into
the world. And we still want to be here knowing
experienced what
that bad things are going to happen. we experienced, to
be alive.
So why do we make it seem like such a terrible
thing? It is what it is. It is the modern emotional
environment we have, and when we can embrace
it, that’s when we get some authority over our life.
That’s when we start enjoying our life instead of
trying to hide from it. Actually, we start enjoying
the parts of it that aren’t even supposed to be
enjoyable.

We’re not supposed to enjoy the negative part

of life, but when we see it as part of the experience
of being alive, that’s when those touching
moments, those deep moments, that deep love,
even the heartbreak happens—and we say we’d do it
again. We would do it all over again, go through the
heartbreak all over again to have experienced what
we experienced, to be alive.

MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH PAGE 24

SUMMARY OF THE
FIVE STEPS
So let’s review the five skills—
these are the skills I teach to
my students in Self Coaching
Scholars. These are the skills that
you can learn in order to have
modern emotional health.
First, you need to learn to identify
your emotions. This is a skill that
most of us need to take some time
to develop. What am I feeling
right now? Most of us don’t know
how to differentiate between
emotions.
Number two, we need to learn the
skill of processing and allowing
discomfort, delaying gratification,
being present with whatever the
truth is right now.
Number three, we need to separate
emotion from circumstance. We
need to stop telling ourselves that
other people and other things
cause our emotions. How much
money we have in the bank does
not determine how we feel. How
other people treat us does not
determine how we feel. Who’s
in the White House does not
determine how we feel.
We determine how we feel by how
we think about the things that
MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH
are in the world, how we think
about how other people treat us,
how we think about ourselves and
our lives.
When we allow ourselves to know
that emotion is separate from
circumstance, when we can see
facts as facts and emotions as our
experience, that’s when we get
some authority over our emotional
life and we stop trying to change
all the circumstances in order to
feel better.
We stop chasing all of the things
outside of us. We stop trying to
change other people. We stop
trying to control the world. We
stop trying to control other
people. We are able to be happy in
the space of the 50/50, which is so
ironic, right?
Can you be at peace and content
knowing that you won’t be at
peace and content 100% of the
time? Isn’t that a crazy thing to
think about? It’s almost like when
you accept the negativity and
you’re at peace with it, then you’re
at peace, because when you’re at
peace with negativity, when you’re
happy with the negativity, then
you’re more happy.
PAGE 25
Number four, identify your
thoughts. Remember, your
thoughts are what cause your
feelings. Those sentences in
your mind are what cause your
emotions, so you want to be able
to identify the thoughts that are
causing the emotions that you’re
experiencing.
It doesn’t mean you’re going to
change those thoughts so you’ll be
happy all of the time. It just means
you will know the true cause of all
of your emotion comes from your
brain. And once you understand
that, then you can change your
brain as much or as little as
you want.
Then you realize that the world
isn’t causing your emotional life,
other people aren’t causing it;
you are.
Finally, number five is you learn
how to create wanted emotion. So
what is the emotion that you need
to create in order to generate the
motivation to do the things that
you want to do?
How many of you have said, “I
feel stuck, I don’t feel motivated,
I don’t feel excited, all I do is
procrastinate, all I do is overeat, all I do is overdrink…” because you don’t
know how to generate the emotion that you need in order to achieve the
things that you want to achieve?

Here’s something totally fascinating about this: a lot of time, the emotion You realize that the
that you need to generate isn’t necessarily happiness. If our goal is to be
happy all the time, then shouldn’t we generate happiness all the time? world isn’t causing
your emotional life,
No, because sometimes what we need to experience is the discomfort of
change in order to achieve our dreams, in order to achieve our goals. other people aren’t
causing it; you are.
Now, here’s the question so many people ask me; what is the point of
achieving goals if the goal isn’t going to make you happy? Well, then you
have to go back to the premise. The goal of life isn’t to be happy. So the
goal of the goal isn’t happiness; it’s the experience of being alive.

MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH PAGE 26

DISCOMFORT IS THE
CURRENCY TO YOUR
DREAMS
So when we go back to the question, what is the
purpose of your life—if the answer is to be happy all of
the time, you’re in the wrong place, my friends. If being
happy all of the time is the goal of your life it is not
going to work. In fact, this experience on the planet is
not about being happy all the time.
What is it about for you? Is it about having the full
experience of life, being able to process emotion, being
able to be present with all the aspects, the good, the
bad, the right, the wrong, the positive and negative,
so you can have a complete experience? That complete
experience is what gives you emotional health.
People say to me, “I think emotional health has a lot to
do with confidence…” and I agree with that. But where
does confidence come from? It comes from not being
afraid of experiencing any emotion.
The reason I’m so confident when I go to speak to
a group is because there is no rejection, there is no
humiliation, there is no failure that I’m not willing
to experience. When I go in there, I know the the
worst that can happen is a feeling. The worst that can
happen is terror or embarrassment or humiliation or
fear, and I’m open to all of them. I can go in with 100%
confidence knowing that I can handle the worst that
can happen.
MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH
Insecurity and low self-esteem come from believing
you can’t handle, or that you should avoid, the negative
thing. So if I make you an offer and I’m terrified of you
saying no, then I’m not going to want to make a lot of
offers. But if I make an offer and I’m all in if you say no
and I’m all in if you say yes, then I can make that offer
from a place of confidence, and that’s how I show up in
my life.
I notice that the more negative experience I have, the
more positive experience that I have, and the more
experience that I have, the bigger my life gets. So if
I try to hide in this little tiny circle and avoid the
negative all the time by buffering my feelings away, I
end up with a very small life. But when I decide that
I don’t need the buffering, I just want more negative
and more positive, I can experience all that life has to
offer. I want a bigger life. That’s when it gets exciting.
That happens for me because I open myself up to more
positive and more negative.
My emotional mental health becomes bigger and it
becomes stronger and I become more agile because I’m
not pushing everything away, I’m not escaping in drugs,
I’m not beating myself up, I’m not indulging.
I’m open to feeling any emotion. I’m open to feeling
anxious. I’m open to feeling doubt. I’m open to feeling
frustration and I’m open to feeling joy and excitement,
PAGE 27
because here’s the deal—when
you’re hiding over here buffering,
when you’re escaping life in false
pleasure and drugs and getting
high and drinking and all that,
you’re not experiencing the
genuine human experience. You’re
hiding on the outskirts of your life.
Do you see that? You know that is
true because whenever you come
back, it just feels terrible because
you’re not truly in your life.
Think about it in terms of
relationships. When I show up as
100% me and I say to my husband,
“Listen, I have all the good and
all the bad. Here I come. I’m not
going to try and hide the negative,
I’m not going to try and hide the
things about me that I’m ashamed
of, I’m just going to show up as
me, 100% as me. And I want you to
show up as you. I want you to be
you 100%.”
And then all of a sudden, we both
come with our full selves, and
then we have this full experience
of being together instead of trying
to tiptoe around each other, meet
each other’s needs, be who the
other person wants us to be, and
hide the real truth of who we are.
You know what’s great? If you’re
not afraid to feel emotion, you’re
not afraid to feel embarrassed, you
can just tell everybody the truth
about you.
MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH
I tell everybody the truth on my
podcast, on my webinars, I tell
everybody. I have nothing to hide. Because the truth is,
So when people are like, “You
know that thing…” I’m like, “What, life is what it is, and
bring it, tell me everything.” we can spend our life
Because if you find something out
about me that I haven’t told the hiding from it, but it
world, I’m going to tell the world. doesn’t make us any
And I’m going to tell the world
and risk feeling embarrassed, risk more protected.
the rejection, risk the exclusion,
because there’s nothing I’m not
willing to feel.
We feel like if we just stay in our
house, then no one can hurt us.
And when I hide, what I notice is
that I exclude myself ahead of time But you know what we’re doing by
staying in our house? We’re hurting
versus just being open and being
myself. Now, here’s the other thing us. There’s no way to avoid it. It’s
50/50 whether you’re fully exposed
that’s true; when you show up as
the truth of yourself and you’re or whether you’re fully hiding. It’s
always 50/50.
willing to bring the good and the
bad of yourself, and you’re willing
to experience the good and the bad In fact, think about how you feel
in the world, and you’re willing when you’re hiding. Aren’t you
to experience the positive and the afraid someone’s going to find you
negative in your emotional life and when you’re hiding?
emotional health, there’s a freedom
that you can’t taste anywhere else.
That freedom is the freedom to
just be you, and to nod when The people who show
things are negative, and to nod
when things are bad, and to be
up and tell the truth
willing to experience the worst of are the people we can
the world. Because the truth is, life
is what it is, and we can spend our
relate and connect to.
life hiding from it, but it doesn’t
make us any more protected.
PAGE 28
I’m terrified. Whenever I play hide
and go seek, I’m like, “Oh my god,
somebody’s going to find me.” I’m
totally freaked out. I’d much rather
just be out in the open as the truth
of who I am.
Haven’t you noticed that when
people are the truth of who they
are, when they show up and they’re
like, “Hey, listen, I got all this
negative stuff and all this positive
stuff, my name’s Brooke…” it’s so
much more attractive than when
someone says, “Well I’m perfect and
I’ve always been perfect. My family
is perfect and my life’s been perfect
and I have a perfect job and I
weigh the perfect weight and I have
the perfect husband and I have the
perfect kids.”
Why are we all trying to be perfect
all the time? I look at people’s
Instagram and I’m like, holy
shit, how is anyone that perfect?
Because we think that’s what we’re
supposed to do to get it right and
to be good.
But the people who show up and
tell the truth are the people we can
relate and connect to. They’re like,
“Oh my god, I’m a mess… So am
I…” but not in an indulgent way.
Not like, oh I’m a mess because of
this, or this person, or because of
my boss, or because of my husband.
I’m a mess because I’m a human
and I’ve got messiness and I’ve got
cleanliness and that’s how they
work together. And that is the
MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH
balance of the human experience,
and that is modern mental and
emotional health.
Your mental health is what you
Your mental health is
think. Your emotional health is what you think. Your
what you feel. And what you think
is what causes what you feel.
emotional health is
what you feel.
There is nothing more important
than your emotional health. Your
emotions drive all of your actions.
Your emotions are what you
experience in your body as your
experience of the world. And when I tell them, “Wait, no
one told you? You’re not supposed
When you ask someone, “How do to be happy all of the time. No
you experience the world?” It’s all matter what you have, no matter
through emotion. And the way that what you’ve accomplished, no
you generate emotion is how you matter how you look, no matter
interpret the world. how thin you get.”
Now, if we go back to the
beginning and I ask you this
question, what is modern
emotional health? And you tell
me it is, “I’m trying to be happy
most of the time…” I will tell you Emotional health
that you probably are stuck in an doesn’t feel like joy
unhealthy emotional life.
and being ecstatic.
That’s where most of my clients It doesn’t feel like
begin. They’re so well intended. eating a chocolate chip
They just want to be happy and
can’t understand why they’re not cookie.
happy more of the time. They feel
like they should be happy because
they look at their life and they have
all the things that were supposed to
make them happy.
PAGE 29
 Emotional health requires accepting and understanding that we have both
positive and negative experiences.

I want to leave you with one more thing.

The negative part of the emotional experience can be the best part. It can be the
part that makes the rest of it so much better. So when you’re open to all of it and
you open up your life, that is when you have emotional health.

But it doesn’t feel like happiness. Please know that.

Emotional health doesn’t feel like joy and being ecstatic. It doesn’t feel like eating
a chocolate chip cookie.

It feels like being a human, which includes the positive and the negative of your
experience, of your life.

TAKING IT FURTHER
If you want to apply these concepts to your life, it requires daily practice. If you’re out there in the world, you’re
going to be taught that you should try to be happier and look prettier and be better and be good and be more
kind and fix the world.

I teach my students in my monthly coaching program, Self Coaching Scholars, how to apply the steps to Modern
Emotional Health to their life every single day.

I will teach you to set and achieve bigger dreams than you ever thought possible. Because the only reason you’re
not setting them now is because you’re afraid of how you’re going to feel.

When we can take away that fear of how you’re going to feel, your goals and your dreams become so much bigger.

What are you waiting for? I’d love to have you join me inside Self Coaching Scholars.

MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH PAGE 30