What emotion are you solving for?

Pooja Venkatraman

Jan 30, 2024

Everything you WANT, you want because you think it will make you FEEL a certain way.

You don’t want things. You want feelings.

Your brain just thinks that things are the PATHWAY to feelings.

So your brain keeps urging you to do things and want things and go after things.

But it’s not really about the things.

It’s about the feelings your brain believes the things will create.

The thing is just a means to an end.

So it’s very important to get this clear—
What feelings are you solving for?
What feelings are you trying to create?

Most people’s answer to this question is something like—

Happiness. Joy. Contentment. Peace.

Safety. Security. Adequacy. Good-enough-ness.

All of these are awesome emotions. There’s nothing wrong with aiming for them.

But let me give you an alternate option.

One I think you might like even better than happiness and peace and security.

What if you solved for absorption?

For engagement?

For that feeling when the sail of your mind is completely billowed out and full? ⛵️

What if you solved for flow?

There are no right or wrong answers here.

But I really like solving for this emotion.

Happiness and safety and peace are often conditional on nothing going wrong.

You can figure out how to feel happy and safe at at peace while things are going wrong.

But it takes more work.

Because your automatic brain is a problem-finding machine. Its whole job is to constantly scan your environment for potential threats.

And you can’t turn your automatic brain off.

It’s going to send you ⚠️ Problem Detected ⚠️ signals whether you like it or not.

Now, you CAN maintain an sense of peace or happiness or safety even while all those ⚠️ Problem Detected ⚠️ signals keep automatically flowing in.

But it takes a good amount of deliberate mental work!

But when you stop solving for happiness or contentment or peace…

And when you start solving for engagement and absorption and your mental sail being billowed out and full…

Those ⚠️ Problem Detected ⚠️ signals stop being a problem.

Instead, they just give you even more stuff to pay attention to and think about!

And it actually becomes kind of fun to work through and solve all these things.

You already know exactly what this feels like.

You have plenty of experience being in flow.

I actually think flow is your natural home state of being.

The point of coaching is not to CREATE or FIND your flow.

The point of coaching is to remove the blockers that are preventing you from coming back home to yourself.

Sometimes that blocker is a fight-or-flight flare-up. A stress response or protective mechanism that has unintentionally gotten too big and has become unhelpful.

Coaching will teach you how to calm down your fight-or-flight flare-ups so you can come home to yourself and get back to doing your best work.

Sometimes that blocker is an unquestioned assumption or mental model. You’re not necessarily stressed. You’ve just placed an artificial limit on what’s possible without even realizing it.

Coaching will teach you how to SEE your unquestioned assumptions and build new mental models that unleash your full potential.

Sometimes that blocker is just being in the wrong setting. You’re a bright, shining diamond — locked away in a dusty box. A beautiful, vibrant orchid — that’s been planted on Mars.

Coaching will teach you how to know for sure that’s it’s a Setting Problem, not a You Problem and then help you develop both the strategy and the courage for making a change.

Let’s start today.

Book a free coaching consult

What my clients have to say…

“I realized that you can always create a space of abundance, even when there's scarcity.

This process has allowed me to go so deep into myself and realize: Just be more yourself. You don’t have to change.

And that abundance helps me to make better, less fear-based decisions.”

—Client | CEO, PE-backed company

Less Stress, More Flow with Pooja V.

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