Honesty with self is required for both critical thinking and critical feeling

Internal critical thinking and processing requires one to be honest with one’s objective truths and thinking.

Internal “critical feeling” and emotional processing requires one to feel safe enough to be honest with one’s own feelings and emotions.

The challenge in counseling work is to create an environment/context for our patients to be “vulnerable” and feel safe enough to express these. If we cannot be honest with those, it’s going to be very hard to process them.

The problem is, some may have deeper challenges where they may find it very hard to recognize their own feelings.

Emotional literacy may help with these.

I wonder if you can relate….

The thinking mind, feeling mind and the observing mind

In a nutshell, counseling/coaching work can be framed as helping folks to integrate their “feeling mind” with their “thinking mind” by centering in the “observing mind” space.

Some folks are great with the “feeling mind”, okay with the “thinking mind” but terrible with the observing mind.

Some are great with the “thinking mind”, okay with the “feeling mind”, but terrible with the “observing mind”.

Some are great with the “observing mind” but not so great with the “feeling mind” or “thinking mind”.

There is usually a “blindspot” or “Achilles’ heel” in all of us isn’t there? It would be helpful to reflect on those.

Once we have clarity around those, we can have high expectation for our strengths but have more realistic expectation for our blindspots.

Be careful to not judge ourselves too harshly on our “blindspots” as these may lead to unhealthy self worth or shame.