Episode 375: Do the opposite
Need a quick and effective mood boost? In this episode, Fiona shares a game-changing tip from YouTube. What if doing the opposite of your emotions for just 10-30 minutes could turn your day around? Tune in!
You'll Learn How To:
Encouraging audience engagement
Sharing the transformative tip
Personal experience and realizations
Importance of acknowledging negative emotions
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Welcome to episode 375 of the My Daily Business podcast. We are well and truly into the new year. I'm super excited, and today I wanted to share with you a really helpful tip that I found on YouTube. I love how I say on YouTube that I don't find all this stuff on YouTube. I love YouTube. I have to say I'm such a fan of YouTube and always have been. I use it often. Anyway, one of the things that I found on there has been game-changing for me for the last couple of months. I wanted to share it in today's quick tip episode. But before we get into that, I want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the beautiful land of which I am celebrating this new year and recording this podcast, and that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation.
I pay my respects to their elders past and present and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. The other thing I wanted to quickly mention is that group coaching will be starting again very soon. If you are keen on getting into that group, that will kick off at the very start of March. We do interviews and everything else in February. The earlier you can apply it, the better You can find all the information at @mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching. If you've got any questions at all just reach out to me, I'm at @mydailybusiness_ on Instagram, or you can email hello@mydailybusiness.com and we'll come right back to you. Let's get into today's quick tip episode.
As I said, I'm a fan of YouTube, and a while ago I was watching a video and I wish I remembered the person who I was watching. It was like when you watch somebody that you watch all the time and then it's like, here are some other videos you might enjoy. Somebody else came up, and I do remember she had blonde hair and she talked about minimalism. I've tried to find it, honestly, I've tried to find it again, and I can't seem to find the exact video that I watched. But one of the points that came up in that video was that if you are feeling stuck or feeling in a rut you can process enough to be able to understand what is the core emotion that I'm feeling right now. She had this sort of idea, and I don't know if this is just a psychological idea, I think it may well be, but instead of kind of sitting and dwelling in that feeling, you attempt to force yourself to do the opposite.
Now, I want to put in a caveat here that this is in no way the same as actually seeking out mental health help. When you are feeling in a rut or you're feeling a particular emotion very strongly in a way that you feel needs to be managed in some way, this is just if you are feeling like a general bit of a slump. She was saying that if you feel and she had a list of emotions, then you should try to do the opposite thing. For example, she was saying, if you feel kind of sad or isolated, often you want to curl into yourself and kind of not see anyone, not talk to anyone, not do anything, and just sort of lie in bed feeling crap. Again, just talking about base level, like basic, I have a having a bit of a crappy day, not like I'm feeling like this for months and months and months, in which case go and talk to a GP or a mental health professional.
But in this case, she was saying instead of sitting there feeling like, “I feel so sad,” and then just dwelling on that look at, “What would make me happy right now?” Then creating the action to do that step or to take a first step into that direction as opposed to sitting there feeling sad and feeling all of these things. When I was watching it, I remember her saying something like, if you are feeling, I can't remember what the exact emotion was, but it was you want to avoid doing anything. You're sort of like sitting there and then you are watching YouTube and you're avoiding taking action on actually getting stuff done, and this could be perfectionism and you're worried about things not working well that you just don't do anything at all. At that exact moment that she was saying it, I was like, “You know what?
Yep, I'm just going to get my notebook out. I'm going to write down all the things I want to get done today.” Some of them were small, like literally hanging out the washing. We had a bunch of glasses that needed to be hand washed that I didn't put in the dishwasher, and it was like this small stuff that was just annoying me contributing to this sort of feeling of like, “Ugh, blur.” I got up, I literally wrote this list and then I just started checking things off. It was that taking action as opposed to sitting there and dwelling in the, “I feel so crap, I feel so this, I feel so that.” It's the do the opposite. Doing the opposite of how you're feeling. It was amazing, honestly. It was like, I know it sounds simple, but it was like by the time I'd got through putting the laundry out and doing the dishes, I felt somewhat productive.
Then I went into my office and I recorded a bunch of podcast episodes. I wrote two Sunday emails and it was like, “Okay, just get going.” As opposed to sitting there kind of frozen and procrastinating. I'm not saying that you need to like hustle all the time, or you always need to be productive or you always need to be ticking things off your list. But just that concept of like, if you feel this, what would happen if you did the opposite? If you just made yourself do the opposite for the next 10 minutes? If you're feeling sad or depressed about something, not serious depression, but I'm just saying that if you're just feeling a bit flat for that particular day, then it might be like, “I'm going to put on some music and just like force myself to dance.”
From the point of like where you just look like a worm that's barely moving to your full-blown Beyonce style concert era dancing. I think that's what we can sometimes fail to do is like, “If I'm thinking that I need to dance and I feel like really lethargic, then I need to go straight into the Beyonce concert era as opposed to like, what if I just like literally stood here and moved my hands a little bit, and then what if I move my feet a little bit? And then what if I like bop my head a little bit and suddenly you're like, I feel like dancing.” I just think that concept of doing the opposite and just doing it, even doing it for like 20 minutes, 10 minutes, something can get you out of that funk and shake it up so that you feel like, okay, I'm not actually in that space.
I felt like that, but I have the power and the agency to change things and I get to choose in lots of ways how I'm going to feel for the rest of the day. Now, I'm not saying that you should just bypass all negative emotions. Believe me, I have had my serious time of grief and loss and stress and overwhelm and sadness and sorrow and all the things. There's still much of that going on in the world. There always is. There's a lot, especially at the moment as well. But I think sometimes we can sit in that and then berate ourselves for sitting in it as opposed to what would happen if for the next 10 minutes. I just tried to do the opposite. I just tried to do the opposite of what I'm feeling right now and see how you feel.
You might get up and dance and be like the worm and not really do much and then just sit back down and it's like, but you might also get up and dance and then that might motivate you to do something else and be like, “Now that I'm up, I'm going to clean all that crap off the kitchen table, or I'm going to do this or I'm going to do that, or I'm going to go into my office and just work for the next 10 minutes on that thing or send that one email that I wanted to send off.” You just never know what actually happens when you start and you take that first small step. I've seen it many times with clients where they are like, “I'd love to do this big thing.” It's like, “Okay, what's one step,” one small step towards doing that and it can snowball and suddenly they're doing the thing that they dreamt about because they took that one small step.
Just that reframing of if I'm feeling like this, what would happen if I just did the opposite for like the next 20 minutes to half an hour and see what happens. Again, I'm not saying that if you are in a serious state of depression or anxiety or any other kind of mental health challenge this may work. I'm saying that this is for those days when you're just sort of having a bit of a rut, a bit of a flat time, but it's not serious enough to necessarily warrant going and talking to a GP or a mental health professional. That is it for today's quick tip episode. Just really thinking do the opposite and what would that look like if you just did the opposite of how you're feeling for like 10 to 30 minutes and see where it gets you? Honestly, I've tried this many times over the last couple of months and it has been good.
Even like when I'm getting frustrated with the kids or frustrated with something in my business or whatever else, or even frustrated with somebody else at like the shops or they're taking too long or whatever, and I'm in a bit of a rush, it's like, “I'm feeling like hurried and stressed right now.” What would it be like if I felt super relaxed and chill? It's like I'm just going to pretend to be this super relaxed, chill person waiting behind this really slow person at a cash register. Just that reframe can do so much for you. Wherever you are at the start of this year, I hope that that helps because honestly it's helped me so much in the last couple of months and I know that it can help you too. That is it for today's quick tip episode. If you wanted to find this in the format of the text, you'll be able to find that over at mydailybusiness.com/podcast/375 as this is episode 375. As I said at the start, group coaching is open for applications. You can find all the information at mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching. Thanks for reading. Bye.
