The Emotions You Avoid
Might Be the Ones That
Change You

At one point I was head of sales and marketing for a beverage company. Small operation, just a handful of us running different parts of the business, and my job was growing the brand and the revenue.

Most days I was on the road meeting with clients and building relationships. We were getting into restaurants and bars, expanding retail, growing awareness across the state. I would stop into the office a few times a week to stay aligned with the team.

One day the owner asked if we could talk. I did not think much of it. Nobody had ever raised a concern about my performance or hinted that my role was in question, so I assumed it was a check-in.

He looked at me and said they needed to cut me.

That was it. No buildup and no long explanation. A decision that had already been made somewhere else, and I was just being informed.

What made it land harder was everything I had put in. Long days, nights, weekends. Events. I had missed some of my kids’ games because I believed in what we were building. I cared about that company and I wanted it to work.

So it was not just losing a job. It felt like everything I had given had not been enough.

The first thing I thought about

Here is what hit me almost immediately, and it is the actual subject of this article.

I started thinking about how I would tell my wife.

I tell her everything. That is how we operate. And still, sitting there, I felt embarrassed. Part of me wanted to work out a plan first. Maybe line up another opportunity before I had to say it out loud, so I could deliver the bad news and the solution in the same sentence.

Think about what that impulse actually is. Not a strategy. A way of managing a feeling by hiding the thing that caused it.

I knew I needed to tell her, and I did. But the instinct to wait was strong, and I have watched enough people do the same thing to know it is not just me.

Hiding it does not do what you think

Most people spend a surprising amount of energy trying to get rid of uncomfortable emotions. Disappointment, frustration, embarrassment, fear, regret. The goal is always to make the feeling stop as quickly as possible, and the usual method is to put a lid on it.

That method has been studied carefully, and it does not work the way people assume.

Read that last part again. Holding it in raises the stress of the person across from you, even though the entire point was to protect them from it.

Which means the plan I was considering in that parking lot, wait until I have a solution so she does not have to worry, would have accomplished none of what I intended. She would have felt something was wrong, without knowing what. I would have felt exactly as bad. And I would have spent the intervening days carrying it alone for no reason.

What those feelings actually did for me

When I look back at the moments that redirected my life, almost all of them started with an emotion I would have paid money to skip.

The embarrassment I felt after leaving college is what pushed me to prove my future was not limited by a degree. Nothing else would have produced that much fuel. If I had made peace with it too quickly, I probably would have settled somewhere comfortable and stayed.

The frustration of being passed over turned into motivation to get better. Not immediately, and not gracefully, but it did.

The fear of failing, when I had my name on an office lease and my savings in a company that might not make it, is why I prepared harder than I ever had. Fear is a terrible advisor and a very effective alarm clock.

And after the beverage company, the disappointment is what made me ask a better question than the one I wanted to ask.

The better question

When something like that happens, your mind goes looking for somewhere to put it. You think about the market, the business, the decisions that got made. You start hoping there is an explanation outside of you, because an outside explanation makes the feeling smaller.

I did not want my mind to stay there. Partly because I cared about the people in that company too much to turn them into the problem. So I asked something harder.

That is not a comfortable question and it is the right one. When something goes wrong, most people stop at what happened. Ownership makes you keep going. What was my role in this. What will I do differently now.

I had to look at that honestly, and the honest answer was that if I had been creating the kind of value that made me impossible to overlook, that conversation probably does not happen.

That did not feel good. It gave me something better than feeling good. It gave me control.

Feeling it is not the same as being run by it

I want to be clear about what I am not saying, because this idea gets misused constantly.

I am not telling you to sit in disappointment and call it growth. Replaying something for months is not processing it, it is just staying there. There is a real difference between letting an emotion inform you and letting it drive.

The distinction is whether it produces a question or a conclusion. Embarrassment that produces what could I do differently is useful. Embarrassment that produces this is who I am is not, and that one will take years off you if you let it.

I did not sit in it long after that meeting. I decided fairly quickly that whatever came next, I would show up differently, raise my standard, and make sure I was not overlooked again. That decision led into a role that pushed me harder than anything before it.

What I would tell you

If something just went wrong and you are looking for the fastest way to stop feeling it, I understand the instinct completely. I have had it in a parking lot with my phone in my hand trying to decide what to tell my wife.

But the discomfort you are trying to get rid of is often the most honest information you have about what needs to change. Numb it, hide it, or explain it away, and you keep the pain and lose the lesson.

Excuses are easy for exactly this reason. They sound logical and they feel reasonable, and every one of them does the same job, which is protecting you from the discomfort of changing something.

Feel it. Then ask what it is telling you. Then go do the thing it pointed at.