"They ensure our survival. They make us smarter. If we didn't need them, they wouldn't exist." -Marc Brackett, "Permission to Feel."

Emotions influence

• Our attention and memory which determine our ability to learn.
• Whether we rely on our gut instinct or carefully weigh facts when making important decisions.
• Every aspect of the social relationships that are the most important element of our lives.
• The choices we make and the way our body functions that influence our health - from poor diet, excessive drinking, and inactivity to blood pressure, and healing time.
• Our ability to be creative in the ways that advance society and humanity through innovation and our ability to be creative in the ways that build resilience, like finding a way to get through hard times.

This is the tiniest snippet of the decades of research that clearly demonstrate the importance of emotion in our lives.

Sharing this with you, and you with others, is my effort to get people to give a damn about...

Too often, "emotional" and "strength" are seen as opposites.

There is an evolutionary component to this belief. We are instinctually wary of those who seem unpredictable - it feels threatening and dangerous. So if our inability to self-regulate makes us unpredictable to others, then we have a problem.

The bigger problem, though, is we have also come to believe that emotional suppression is the solution. The solution to appearing predictable. The solution to appearing strong.

It's not. Suppressing emotion makes us weaker - both mentally and physically.

I'll be adding content on emotional strength. I hope it challenges some of your beliefs about emotions and strength - and I hope you take the time to reconcile and work with those beliefs…changing them if necessary. I hope this series motivates you to assess your personal emotional strength. And I hope this series provides you with a few tangible strategies to adjust as needed.

Because the...

I have learned and grown immensely as a person and a professional over the last 10+ years of training, coaching, and consulting in the field of human performance. A few key lessons from the last 10 years are driving some major changes in the way I approach my work.

The lessons:
Training resilience, mental performance, and leadership skills to individuals is POWERFUL...And not sufficient.

Leaders have an exponential impact on the resilience, performance, and well-being of their people/team...And leaders don't always know how to help (and sometimes do more harm than good)

Mental skills and concepts need to be consistently reinforced to have the biggest impact...And I can't always be the one to reinforce them

These lessons are driving some changes in the way I train, coach, and consult:

I now focus on making training accessible
...By moving a bulk of individual training to a digital platform

I now focus on making change sustainable
...By empowering and supporting sport coaches and leaders...