How To Ignite Human Brilliance : Feelings

In this series of blog posts, I will be exploring the 10 Components of a Thinking Environment® and bringing each component to life by sharing my own personal experiences and stories of how these components make a positive difference in the world.

All quoted text is attributed to Nancy Kline, unless otherwise indicated.

The 10 Components of a Thinking Environment® are: Attention, Equality, Ease, Appreciation, Feelings, Encouragement, Information, Difference, Incisive Questions^TM and Place.

Click on each component above to read a blog relating to each one.

This post explores the component of Feelings.

In a Thinking Environment® the component of Feeling is about “Welcoming the release of emotion.” As Nancy has observed: “Listening through the anger makes way for thorough thinking. Crying can make us smarter”, and “After laughter thinking improves”.

One of my favourite quotes comes from Jill Bolte Taylor “Although many of us think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel, biologically we are feeling creatures that think.”

The sad reality is that so many people are spending so much energy of surpassing, hiding, numbing our denying their feelings. This leads to blocked thinking because all our attention is focussed on suppressing our feelings. Once we express a feeling, we can turn our attention to thinking. And so, welcoming our feelings is essential to doing good thinking.

The practice of noticing and ‘letting be’ our feelings is about increasing our awareness and acceptance of both our emotions and the physical feelings in our bodies. By learning to better tune into our own feelings, we grow our capacity for thinking.

As I have been training in a Thinking Environment® and my thinking has come to a pause, being gently asked the question “And what more do you think, or feel, or want to say?” has often resulted in the tears falling. It was the same for my practicum – there were tears in the opening appreciative round as one of the participants, spoke about how she cherished the value of courage. She shared how important courage was to her, and how challenging it has been for her to embody her courage in a world that so often diminished and under-estimated her. Fortunately, I had already spoken about importance of welcoming the release of emotions in my initial introduction and the no-one flinched when the tears came for. No one looked down or away. No one said a word. One participant simply reached for the tissue box and gently passed it down to her, and she continued to think some more.

The Thinking Environment® welcome feelings. It is a space where we can, and must practice checking in with our bodies so we can also become more familiar with our emotional states. In a Thinking Environment® we find the courage to ask ourselves ‘What’s really going on inside of me right now?’ Our body will always give us a truthful response if we have the courage to listen to it.  In the words of Eckhart Tolle: “If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion, or rather feel it in your body. If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth. Not the ultimate truth of who you are, but the relative truth of your state of mind at the time.”

Asking ‘are my feelings important or justified?’ is like asking ‘do I have a right to be hungry?’ We all have a right to every emotion we feel. Our emotions carry important messages. We can access the information contained in those messages to make better decisions.

In a Thinking Environment® we are called to unlearn conditioned patterns of supressing, hiding or denying feelings – and instead give ourselves and others permission to feel, release and to work with our emotions in order to restore thinking.

In conclusion

The only way to really understand the power of a Thinking Environment® is to experience it. The more I practice embodying the ten components, and the more people I share it with, the more natural and easeful the components become.

“We will get to a new and better world with new and better thinking. Brave thinking that dismantles denial. Thinking that is the simplicity on the far side of complexity.” Nancy Kline

Hi there, I'm Cassandra Goodman.

I'm a former global executive turned accredited Thinking Environment™ Trainer and Facilitator.I love empowering people to activate their own brilliance - and the brilliance of those around them.

Are you ready to ignite the brilliance in your team or organisation? 

The Thinking Environment is both a framework you can learn, and a way of being you can practice.

Learn about my workshop offerings here.

Or reach out to explore possibilities [email protected]