The Weekly Three 1/8/24: In defense of feeling your feelings in business.
Wading through sticky emotions before you can find what’s missing is part of the process of achieving success.
What do you do when your emotions are driving, but not very well? How do you take back the (literal) wheel? We’re taught to ignore, suppress or reframe our emotions in order to stay positive, take action and keep moving forward. But emotions are a valid and valuable part of the moving-forward process.
Last week’s call to let go might have felt harder than you thought it would. Don’t worry. You might feel like you’re at the bottom of the barrel right now, but remember: wheels are made to turn. What’s the missing piece that will let you turn it? Where does your potential energy become kinetic?
Welcome to The Weekly Three! Each Monday, I share a three-card Tarot spread to help you turn intuitive energy into real-life action within your business.
I pull these cards with the collective energy of my community in mind, but if you want a custom spread of your very own, you can get it right here.
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In The Cards: 🎶It’s just emotions taking me over🎵
Caught up in sorrow, lost in the song indeed. Sigh. Emotions may be big and sticky this week.
The VI of Cups reversed takes the sweet glow of nostalgia and turns it into overly-saccharine high fructose corn syrup. All of a sudden we’re stuck in something that isn’t real and the sugar rush befuddles our senses. We can’t seem to move on from “the glory of the good ol’ days” to find our way in the reality of the here and now.
The Wheel of Fortune reversed says our luck turns to stuck. Something might feel like it’s not exactly going your way or turning out the way you hoped it would. You might even feel like you’re going in reverse. This card isn’t just about “good” or “bad” luck, however. It’s also about cycles. You might be at the bottom of one right now. I might feel like gravity is working against you, but you absolutely can keep the wheel moving.
The VIII of Cups reversed has you revisiting an old situation. Maybe it’s toxic, maybe it’s just unfinished, you’re the only one who can say. Either way, forward isn’t a direction you’re facing with this card. These are not your greatest hits, but you’re feeling obliged to play them over and over right now. Again, the feeling here is stuck.
In Between: Searching for something that’s missing.
What are you looking for back there? What feels so important that you keep going back over and over? What’s so great about the good ol’ days anyway?…
My biggest moments of feeling stuck all parallel the panicked feeling of “Something’s wrong. I can’t find it.”
What is IT? What am I missing in those moments?
In the past, I have fumbled my way through the sticky sludge of stuck by wildly casting out around me for something, anything, that could pull me out. A shiny new distraction from the tension? Sure, I’ll take it. A familiar old habit to numb my discomfort? Why not.
And so I would, unbeknownst to me, just stay in the middle of the sticky sludge of stuck either caught in a frenzy of action that took me nowhere or comfortably sinking further into the goo. I didn’t think about the fact that if I could pinpoint what I felt was missing, I might be able to go about finding it and actually get myself unstuck.
While it would be easy to tell you that’s exactly and immediately what I do now that I have this awareness, it would also be a lie. Sometimes the overwhelming emotions that come up for me around being stuck in the first place take me right the fuck out. I am floored, literally and figuratively, by the rapid succession of realizations about my current situation and my feelings about those realizations to such a degree that I have no mental or physical capacity for any other stuff.
My particular flavor of neurospicy (ADHD + Autism) also comes with the totally-inconvenient-for-modern-society-but-still-important-for-me-to-hold-space-for-personally features of difficulty regulating emotions, rejection sensitive dysphoria, sensory overwhelm, neurodivergent burnout (which is different from already-awful “normal” burnout,) delayed processing, and difficulty with executive function (among other fun things. The grab bag is different on a daily basis. 💁🏽♀️🎒)
So when the emotions quite literally, quite viscerally, almost inevitably take me over and I am unreachably lost in the song, sometimes I have to stay there for a bit. I have to process what’s happening. If I am left to myself and I can give myself the temporary cocoon-bubble I need within which to regain my equilibrium, then I can emerge and act accordingly. But I have to be allowed—to allow myself—to clear the deck first.
Ordering myself to “respond differently” or “mindsetting” my feelings away does. not. work. And I firmly believe this goes for me and all humans. Much of what the coaching industry refers to as “mindset work” is really just dressed up gaslighting and forced ignorance of systemic inequity. It also really devalues emotions in a way that turns the very human need to actually sit with them and fully process before moving on into something to be pitied. “Look at that poor thing wallowing in her emotions when she could just reframe and take action.” I find it disgustingly superior and incompassionate and simply dishonest.
I also find it ineffective. Because as much as we try to squish our emotions away in some unnamed, unlit corner of our psyche, unprocessed emotions just come back to haunt us a new way on a new day. And while getting completely paralyzed by our emotions for an inordinate amount of time can be detrimental, acknowledging and processing emotions do not a wallow make. It just makes us what we already are: humans navigating a complex and ever-evolving world the best way we know how.
For me, making space to process my emotions and recover from the physical exhaustion of feeling so much, so big, is a need. And it’s a need I’ve learned to actively fulfill as part of getting-unstuck process. It’s a necessary part of running my business.
In Your Business: Filling in the gaps for an integrated approach.
In being taught to “serve” our clients—a philosophy I personally detest because it often plays on the patriarchal norm that women, even in their own businesses, exist only in relation to how we can fulfill someone else’s needs—we often forget to consider what we need as part of the equation.
It’s a wonderful thing to think about how you want to help who you want to help. It’s vital to the existence of your business. It’s also only one half of the whole. The other half is you: what you need your business to provide and how you need it to fit into the bigger picture of your life.
Notice in the inverted Wheel of Fortune how the jackal-headed figure of Anubis seems to be coming toward rather than moving away as it does when the card is upright. Anubis is the Egyptian god of funerary rites, protection of graves and guide to the underworld. In the context of cycles, this is a moment of death. The kind of death that precedes rebirth (kinda like the rebirth and transformation symbolized by that squiggly little snake following after Anubis, heywow!)
That clearing of the old before ushering in the new might be forcing you to reckon with your feelings about what’s happening and what meaning it holds for you. We talked last week about letting go. This week, your emotions about letting go might be running the show.
That’s ok.
They’re valuable and they deserve space to exist.
And your emotions about your current context might be exactly what points you toward discovering what’s actually missing right now. Emotions can also be data.
Please consider, once you’ve allowed yourself to process those big feelings, what you perceive to be missing from the kind of business you want to have. What are the pieces needed to fill in the gaps? How might you need to rearrange things in order to find and position those pieces?
That’s where you’re exit route from the sticky sludge of stuck lays.
(As always, if you’d like further intuitive exploration and coaching on how this is playing out in the specifics of your business, you can book a Tarot reading with me by clicking here!)
You can do this. 🖤
Until next week,
Zoha
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About The Author:
Zoha Abbas is a writer, Intuitive Tarot Reader and Business Coach who aims to explore the small business conversations around self-trust, critical thinking, reality checks and forging your (not so straight) path to success in the grey-area of real life. She is the CEO and Creator of The Ownership Method, a coaching practice where she helps fellow entrepreneurs and small business owners do business better through data, divination and dismantling harmful systems.
For inquiries, please email: zoha@theownershipmethod.com