Episode 1 – Introduction to Emotional Embuffination

Episode Summary

This episode describes what Emotional Embuffination is, where it came from, why it’s more than just emotional intelligence, how it involves principles of psychological empowerment and the law of attraction, and how it can help you to live a happier and more fulfilling life

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Show Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Emotional Embuffination podcast. I am your host, David Enevoldsen. And on Emotional Embuffination, we train to become emotionally buff enough to overcome any conflict in life. And just as importantly, it’s about soaring to new levels of success and happiness. On the show, we’re going to explore emotions, including a look into why we have them and how to use them. We’re going to look at principles of law of attraction and how that can make you feel better and how to get what you want in life, which in and of itself is going to make you feel better. And then ultimately we’re going to figure out how to get emotionally strong enough to be the best version of you and live the most amazing life possible. Emotional Embuffination is the product of my personal struggles. It’s what I’ve seen as an attorney and how people have been dealing with conflict. It is principles of psychology, and it’s the tenets of the law of Attraction. This podcast is just one of many resources I have available. If you want to learn a little more, go to embuffination.com. That’s e-m-b-u-f-f-i-nation.com. All right, this is the first ever episode and I am super excited about this because I’ve been wanting to do a podcast for a while. So, I finally have kind of sat down and am doing it. And so, I’m really excited to be able to do this.

Since this is the first episode on today’s show, what I figured I would do is talk a little bit about what the heck emotion embuffination is, because the concept I think is a little alien, and I think a lot of people want to just kind of paraphrase it as emotional intelligence. And I’d like to think it’s a little more than just emotional intelligence, although it’s very much along the same lines. And so, I’m just going to go into a little detail about what emotional embuffination is, where it came from, and why the heck you should even care about it in the first place. All right, let’s talk about the origins of this, where this started. So, several years back, this was really coming to a head in 2016, I had a moment that I would consider to be just the absolute low point in my life. And at that time, in fact, I know exactly where I was when that all happened. I had just started working as an attorney. I opened up my own law firm. I was married, I had kids, and my life sucked. At least that’s how I was viewing it. I had a lot of problems in my marriage. It was falling apart at that point, and I ultimately ended up getting a divorce. Although at that moment I wasn’t quite divorced yet, but it was definitely coming to a head. And I felt like the relationship with my kids sucked. It was I felt like being around them was awful.

I almost couldn’t stand it. I just felt like they were loud and they just had zero boundaries and it was just painful all the time. So, I definitely was not enjoying my kids. It just felt like they were this huge burden when I was already feeling super burdened. I had this business. I came out of law school and I was working as a family law attorney and I sucked at it. I was not making money. I was making way less money than I was before I went to law school. But then I had the student loans on top of it, and I was super stressed out because the family law work, which is all divorces and custody fights was super emotionally draining. And so, I got to this point where I just had on a regular basis, I was sticking a gun in my mouth and I really wanted to end myself constantly. And there was one day in particular where I went to the office I got into right before this, I’d gotten into this kind of heated fight with my then wife. I went to the office and there is just zero doubt in my mind that in this one moment if I’d had a gun with me or a razor blade or something, I would have ended myself. No doubt. But I didn’t have those things. I even had a letter opener and I tried to break open the letter opener so that I could get to the razor in there so I could slash my wrists open and I couldn’t break enough plastic off to get it to where I could hack at my skin.

I could only get these little plastic nubs that were sticking out, preventing the blade from getting close enough to the skin to really do anything. So, I just sat there for a long time. I remember I actually fell on the floor and I was laying on the floor and I felt like I could not get up. I just felt glued to the floor. And I sat there for a long time and eventually I pulled out of my wallet-I’d written down on a piece of paper and I’d been carrying it around with me for a while-the number to the National Suicide Prevention Hotline. And I’d never called it before, but I did that day. It took me a little bit to just get myself to. The courage to even give them a call. But I did. And that’s the one and only time I’ve ever called them. And I called and I talked to this lady and she kind of talked me off the ledge. But she essentially made me promise that I was going to talk to some sort of a mental health professional after that. And so if I didn’t, she said she was going to send somebody out to forcibly institutionalize me, essentially because I was acting suicidal.

So, I promised that I would do that. And I did. And then I ended up going to counselors and psychiatrists and psychologists and all sorts of different things. And I at the same time, I started working a lot on self help related stuff. And keep in mind also at this time, I had a psych background. I had my undergraduate degree was in psychology, so I already had kind of a foundation of psychology. But with all of that in place, I was talking to all these mental health professionals. I started going crazy listening to self-help things. Some of the things that I was listening to that had a huge impact on me were very law of attraction-oriented. There were a number of CDs I had. I would drive around in my car and I was listening to these things And after a while things started to get better and kept improving and kept improving. I had this whole exercise I did with a journal that I was journaling based on law of attraction prompts and based on various psychological concepts. And eventually, not only did I start feeling good, but things started going a hell of a lot better in my life. And it was like life was starting to unfold how I wanted it to. Eventually it got really good, and even though there were some short-term problems, like I said, I ended up getting a divorce and the business was really struggling at that point,

the kid relationship wasn’t good. All those things got a lot better. I ended up getting remarried to a different partner. Everything on that front is great. I have what I think is a good relationship with my kids. My business is doing way better than it was at that time. I feel like I have some direction on things. Every time I fixate on stuff, I mostly just feel good. And every year that has gone by, including in 2020 and I’m not trying to make light of people that had serious issues go down in 2020, but every year seems like it’s better than the previous year. And so I attribute all of this to this whole process that I’ve gone through of combining different things, the law of attraction, psychology principles, self-help principles, some of the dialogues with counselors and all this different stuff. And I’ve essentially boiled it down to this pattern I have called emotional embuffination. Now, keep in mind, some of the concepts that I have within emotional embuffination are sort of a rejection of some of the traditional ideas that people hear out there. The law of attraction itself is something that a lot of people reject, but I feel like that’s an important part of the psychological model and I’m going to get into that a little more in just a bit. I have some beefs with things that people that are very popular in culture right now, like the ideas of narcissism or diagnoses within the DSM at all, I think cause a lot of problems.

And so and there’s a lot of ideas that I will butt heads with about. Things that people traditionally think. For example, if you’ve heard any of my videos before or read any of the things I’ve written, you probably know I’ve got a thing against the idea of venting. And most people tell you when you’re struggling with something in life go vent. Go unload on a partner or go shoot beer bottles or something like that. And I think that’s a terrible idea. I don’t think that’s good advice. So, this this body of things that I have is a collection of stuff that that not only was coming out of my background in psychology, it was coming out of me in this awful place in my life, but it was also coming from my work as a family law attorney. Now, again, remember, I was doing like divorces and custody fights. So, I was seeing people in just the absolute worst times in their lives and they’re just like, I felt like I had my life falling apart. These people often see their own lives just collapsing under them. And every time I would talk to people with sort of a growth orientation as an attorney, most of the time people didn’t want to hear that. They just were going to do whatever they were going to do.

They were hurt. They were frustrated. And nine times out of ten people that I had as clients just made everything worse. They would do things that sabotage their situations or made themselves feel worse, or often times did things that had legal implications that sabotage the cases that we were working on. And so all this stuff got me looking at emotions collectively and wondering how do we essentially be the best version of ourselves? How do I continue this trajectory for myself, but also how do I show to other people all the different little things that you can do to put together to make their lives better. And that’s what emotional embuffination is all about. Now, at its core, what I like to say is that embuffination and emotional embuffination is just this idea of dealing with conflict. And if you read the book, I’ve got a book on emotional embuffination that’s on audiobook and in print form through both of Barnes and Noble and Amazon. Just my little plug there. But if you’ve read the book, you’ll know that the starting point for me is all about conflict because emotions for me in a vacuum are not really a problem unless you’re running into things that you don’t like. And that’s where conflict starts to pop up. And in the book, I specifically define conflict as a situation-this is not how most people I think would define conflict-

and so this is a little untraditional, I think. But my way of defining conflict is running into a situation where at least one person feels like they are a victim of someone or something. I’ll, let that sink in for just a second there. It’s a situation where at least one person feels as though they are a victim of someone or something. And the reason I framed it that way is because if conflict doesn’t exist, if you don’t feel like you’re being oppressed or shut down or injured or something negative, or if there’s you’re just walking around and you’re perpetually happy, then it almost doesn’t matter because we, with very rare exception, do we say, “Oh my gosh, I’m struggling because I’m too happy all the time. Oh, my God. I just. I’m so sick of feeling joy. Why do I have to always be happy? This sucks.” Now, the one exception is there are sometimes problems where people have, like, manic episodes and they go out and they’re like, super excited and then they blow all the money in their bank accounts. And the next day they go, “Oh, crap, I got a problem.” So, I’m excepting that. But for the most part, we don’t walk around in these optimized states of just being perpetually happy. And if we are in a reasonably happy state, most of the time we’re not complaining about it. The problem and the thing we need to learn how to both manage and prevent at the same time is the negative emotions.

It’s when you don’t like how things are going down. It’s when you are interfacing with people and making your problems worse or better. And that’s the thing we need to learn how to manage. And that’s what emotional embuffination is all about. It’s dealing with conflict. Now it may seem obvious, but this deals with a lot of stuff because if you are alive, you have dealt with conflict. There is conflict everywhere. Some of the the key places that I think of that it pops up in are relationships. And that could be romantic or otherwise. But anytime you’re interacting with other people, everyone has clashing expectations and perspectives and sometimes people feel like they’re victimized, etc., etc.. So, relationships are a big place where emotional embuffination becomes relevant. Parenting is another big one. If you have dealt with kids, you know there is conflict inherent in that. And that starts right from the get-go. I don’t want to go to bed like you start running into conflict. Parenting is a big one. But it’s not even just the inner relationship stuff. When you’re dealing with kids or romantic partners or whatever, it also deals with you. Because you can have all sorts of internal conflict going on. You can do all sorts of things to impact yourself. So, a whole other part of emotional embuffination is dealing with things like abundance and money and careers and looking at, and this is where we start to get a little bit into the Law of Attraction concepts, looking at how are your internal thought processes either helping you or sabotaging you.

Do you have limiting beliefs that are secretly screwing you over, so to speak? Do you have anything internally that you’re going through struggle with? And so emotional embuffination is very targeted at that stuff. That can be a wide, wide range of things: fears, insecurities, mental health diagnoses. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. So essentially, if you’re alive, emotional embuffination is going to be relevant to you unless you’re already absolutely perfect and are happy all the time and never run into conflict, which I don’t know how that would even be possible. Now, the idea here is an analogy to going to the gym. Now, if you if you want, we often think about people that go to the gym to get more physically in shape as being buff. We have the guy that goes and works out and gets lots of muscle. I extrapolate the term buff to include basically anybody in really good shape where you can kind of see their muscles. They don’t have to necessarily have like huge tree trunk legs or arms or anything, but if you just go and you’re getting fit, that requires some work and it requires you go to the gym on a regular basis. And not only go to the gym but know what you’re doing there.

I mean, if I go to the gym and I get on a machine and I sort of flail around and don’t use it right, and then I go home after one day, I’m not going to become more physically fit. On the other hand, if I go to the gym every day and I make this a habit and I’m targeting all the right muscles and I’m using the right resistance types and I’m eating correctly and I’m doing all the things right, you start seeing a difference in how you feel and what your body looks like and how your body reacts to things. The idea with emotional embuffination is it’s the same thing, but with your emotions. So, in the same sense that you don’t just do it once and then ignore it. You go every day, you work on your emotions every day. You work on figuring out how to deal with what’s going on internally all the time. You figure out how to deal with what’s going on in the people around you all the time. And the more you work on it, the stronger you become. The more capable you become of interfacing with people and reducing conflict or managing the conflict really well or not feeling super bothered when somebody says something toxic to you. And being able to deal with it totally differently than before. And that’s where this whole embuffination idea comes from.

Now, one interesting side note is that part of emotional embuffination, I think to a certain extent, this this is a distinction between emotional embuffination and just the generic term of emotional intelligence is that a lot of the science that we have right now speaks about the connection between exercise and how your body is functioning and what you’re feeling. And how you’re operating. And so to a certain extent, exercise and dealing with your body is a big part of emotional embuffination because you have to have your body in optimal operating condition in order to feel good if you’re in pain all the time because you’ve got things that are breaking down or you’ve got some illness or you’ve got some injury, you’re way less likely to be happy and it’s much harder to be happy in those situations. And so you have to keep your body in shape too. And so emotional embuffination encompasses physical improvements. One of the sayings that I have about emotional embuffination is this phrase where it’s just two words where I say, “What struggle?” And that’s coming from in my mind. It’s very analogous to when guys at the gym, you may have heard this expression where they’ll say, “Do you even lift, bruh?” And the idea is to look at somebody who’s kind of struggling with weight and they’ll think, “Oh, this person doesn’t work out on a regular basis. Therefore, it’s really hard for them to lift this small amount of weight.”

And so they go, “Do you even lift? Like, you’re clearly not lifting on a normal basis. So, it shows.” It’s kind of the idea. So, when I say, “What struggle?” it’s kind of a similar mindset because people run around all the time and say, “Uh, the struggle is real,” and they give this empowerment to the struggle. They love to say “The struggle is real,” to reflect how difficult whatever is for them at any given time. When I say “What struggle?” the idea is, I’m trying to flip this around. Instead of saying, “The struggle is real,” I want you to be able to say, “I am so emotionally powerful that when I run into situations that everyone else out there would see as being a real struggle that I think,”Eh, it’s no big deal. What struggle?” So, when you hear me say, “What struggle?” that’s when I’m making reference to. Okay. Now let’s talk a little bit about the different elements of emotion embuffination. Now, if you’ve read the book or if you haven’t seen the book, you’ll kind of see these same patterns. I break it out into a number of different categories. I just want to kind of touch on what they are here and I’ll elaborate on some of the stuff in later shows. But just so you have a sense of the focus of this. Part of emotional embuffination-remember, everything is kind of dealing with some sort of conflict-but part of it is dealing with conflict in the moment. Like when conflict is occurring, then you have to be able to deal with it.

And the analogy I always think of is like, let’s say that you’re going back to our gym analogy from before. Let’s say that you are working out regularly and then all of a sudden a tree falls over on you. And you’re super buff because you’ve been working out constantly and you’re able to just lift the tree off. You can push that tree because your arms are huge or you’re super fit or whatever. If you’re not going to the gym, in the same hypothetical, you haven’t been working out and the tree falls on you, you’re not going to be able to lift that tree because your arms are not like tree trunks themselves and you’re not super buff. But you’re still faced with the problem of having a tree on top of you. And so part of emotional embuffination is not-part of it’s the prep-but another part of it is, okay, let’s assume you haven’t prepped or you’ve prepped up to whatever extent you’re in. How do you deal with things right now? Because you’re right now, when you are running into conflict, you’re in whatever state you were in. Whether you’re super emotionally buff or you have just started on this journey, however it is, you’re going to start running into conflict. And you can start paying attention to it

and then if you think a little bit about what’s going on, and it’s not complex, you can start developing plans to kind of deal with your problems and thereby eliminate the existence of the conflict. So that’s one part of emotional embuffination, is dealing with stuff when it’s happening. Another part of emotional embuffination is understanding why people act emotionally and having an understanding of what emotions are even about. One of the things that I use to question all the time, especially when I was in my real difficult time, was why on earth we even have emotions. And I used to hear people give me all these answers about, “Oh, yeah, well, they are there, so you can appreciate life.” Now I would always think that that’s nice. That’s a benefit of emotions, I guess. But I don’t understand why we have to have them. Because what I was seeing was my own personal experience where emotions were making me do what I was perceiving as sabotaging myself. And I saw this constantly in the family law universe where people would get super emotional and make really dumb decisions. And so I kept saying, well, why is that even there? And so part of emotional embuffination, I’m not going to go into too much about why we have it right now, although I really want to elaborate on this on a later show. Part of it is just understanding why we have the emotions, but also being able to analyze the various psychological mechanisms that we run through, things like cognitive dissonance.

Many of you may have heard about that. The the emotion cycle that I describe in my book, things like psychological reactance, understanding fault and how fragile our egos are and how that can play into the way that we start interacting with people when conflict is going on. So again, I’m not going to go into all the detail about what these things are, but just understanding the psychology is a big part of emotional embuffination.

Next part is specific tips and tactics strategies about dealing with others because most certainly other people are a big part or a big source of conflict. And so a huge part of emotional embuffination is just understanding a string of tools to put in your toolbox about how to minimize conflict or how to resolve conflict when you’re dealing with other people. That can be things like knowing when to fight or when not to fight. Understanding the implications of taking on a fight, arguing with people when you’re using facts. For anybody that’s listening to any of my stuff, you know I’m a big advocate for don’t argue with facts, which I’m definitely going to have to have a show on that because I want to elaborate a lot. Things like retaliation versus boundary setting versus should you even use violence? Does violence makes sense to use? A lot of people are advocates for not using violence.

Some people are. I mean, if you are, when should you use it? Things like reciprocity. If you are interacting with other people, how can that interplay into to your benefit or otherwise to what the conflict that’s going on, things like utilizing in-groups. Because understanding that people will act differently if somebody is perceived to be part of their in-group or part of their out-group. And then mental health disorders is a big one, how do you deal with somebody that either has a mental health disorder or if you have been diagnosed with some sort of mental health disorder, how do you interact with all that stuff? Those are big ones and those are huge questions because our culture right now is obsessed with the idea of mental health disorders. And I have lots of strong feelings about that. So we’re definitely going to be getting into that. Another big part of emotional definition is dealing with internal conflict. And internal conflict is all the, like I said before, all these little struggles that we go through, all the limiting beliefs, the the freaking out, the panic. And we’ll look specifically at different techniques we can use to calm yourself down when conflict is going on. Implications of Meditation. I’ve become a big advocate of meditation. I use that regularly and it’s got it’s got some amazing things that it can do for you. And there’s this is not woo woo stuff. There’s science supporting this, but there’s also just much simpler techniques like pattern interrupts.

How how can you apply that? Singing in the midst of conflict and learning how just singing something can alter the region of your brain that’s engaged in the middle of conflict. Analyzing. That can have a strange impact because the part of your brain that is engaged in digesting a situation from an objective perspective is very different than the emotional drivers that are going on when you get wrapped up in conflict. Walking away. That’s another big one and something a lot of people overlook frequently, even though it’s very common advice. There’s also issues about setting yourself up. And when I say setting yourself up. My what I mean by that is creating an environment within which you don’t have to deal with problems that you have created. And most people are bad at this. Most people kind of just bumble through life. And God knows I’ve done this. I’m not trying to make this sound judgy or anything, but most people just kind of bumble through life and in the process of bumbling through life set themselves up for failure. For example, if you are not eating well, you’re going to feel like garbage. If you’re not sleeping enough, you’re going to make yourself late in the mornings and you’re going to feel terrible and you’re going to be less productive. And that’s going to impact all, maybe you lose your job and all of a sudden it’s rippling out into all these other things.

So, by simply changing how you eat and how you sleep, often times physically altering your environment, who are you around? What people are influencing you? What are you hearing every day? Are you in a toxic relationship where somebody’s screaming at you nonstop? Those things have an impact. And the problem is our attentional resources and our willpower resources are limited. And so if you spend all day, every day dealing with little problems that you could easily prevent by just being a little more methodical about your life or more structured or just doing things like changing what you’re eating or how much time you’re spending sleeping. If there’s something simple you could do to fix those problems, then all of a sudden you’re not dealing with those. And then when real problems show up or unpredictable problems show up, because these are real problems. When unpredictable problems show up, you have a lot more energy and attention and willpower to deal with those things. So a big part of emotional embuffination is setting yourself up so you can deal with that stuff.

I also deal with things like auto-suggestion. Self-talk is huge. Auto-suggestion is the idea that your subconscious starts to absorb what you are saying over time. And so if you don’t pay attention to what you’re saying to yourself and you have a really negative string of self conversations, that can have a toxic influence on you and what you think of yourself and how productive you are, etc.

So, auto-suggestion is an important one. Gratitude. That’s one that’s pretty popular in culture right now. But there’s here again, there’s research supporting its efficacy. Venting: When do you do it versus do you do suppress it? As I indicated earlier, I’m an advocate for not venting, but you also shouldn’t suppress, which puts you into this weird position of what exactly do you do? And I think there’s kind of a balancing point between the two extremes. Owning absolute responsibility. I talked about that in a few of my videos and in the book, and I think this was a really, really life-changing perspective. This this idea that you own everything that happens to you. I’m going to get into more of this later on. But this is a huge one. Like, own everything. Just because it changes the mindset that you’re approaching problems with. Instead of just getting into blame mode, you start to say, “Okay, what did I tolerate? Or how did I set up a situation where this thing happened and how do I make sure it doesn’t happen again?” Now that’s different from just, “This is your fault and you ruined me.” Which is what a lot of people do. So, owning absolute responsibility is a big part of this as well. Self-love is another one. Most people have some really strong insecurities that end up sabotaging things and creating limiting beliefs.

Another one is pushing out of your comfort zone so that you are continually growing. A lot of people get into these places where they just become stagnant and they are not growing. And so again, a big part of the emotional embuffination model is just finding all these little different techniques and mechanisms by which to push yourself forward in dealing with internal conflict. The last major part that I want to cover today, and this one is probably I wanted to circle back to this, this is probably one of the more potentially controversial ideas to incorporate into this. But this is also one of the reasons I think this is the whole idea of emotional embuffination is so distinct from emotional intelligence, and that is incorporation of ideas of the law of attraction. Now, if you’re not familiar with it, the law of attraction is this idea that in essence, you start to think and act in a certain way and you’re going to attract into your life things that comport with how you are thinking and reacting. So, for example, if I start thinking I’m going to be a millionaire, I’m going to be a millionaire, and you start acting like a millionaire, then all of a sudden you become a millionaire is sort of the theory. If I start thinking about a blue Volkswagen Bug, then if I’m just constantly thinking about that, then in theory, according to the law of attraction, that’s going to show up in my life.

Now, here’s why this sounds so controversial in my mind. I know a lot of people that are very not into the law of attraction, but bear with me for a second here. As a preliminary matter, much of emotional embuffination, if you’ve heard any of my stuff, you’ll know it’s very reliant on psychology. I have a psych background. I have the utmost respect for psychology. I’m fascinated by the research surrounding psychology. I make reference to it all the time. But in a vacuum, Law of Attraction is almost kind of the opposite of that. It’s this weird, almost woo woo spiritual kind of concept where you just say, whatever I think is going to come to me. And I think if there’s a little more to it than that, you also have to act in accordance with your beliefs as I interpret the law of attraction. But it’s hard to prove this or disprove it because it’s so easy to just say, “Okay, well, I’ve thought about a thing and it just showed up in my life.” And how do you say, scientifically speaking, how do you prove that your thoughts were really causally connected to the thing that showed up in your life? Or if it doesn’t show up, it’s so easy to just say, “Well, your thoughts weren’t lined up right.” And so in a sense, it feels like it’s almost the opposite of science, right? It seems like it’s the opposite of much of the other stuff that I’m preaching about within the emotional embuffination paradigm.

But, in my mind, the Law of Attraction and building that into emotional embuffination is important for a number of reasons. One is, as I said before, when I was in that really dark period in my life, Law of Attraction played a huge, huge role in me coming out of it. Like a really big role. The the publication I have now called My Reality Generator is a guided journal that all sort of spawned from the time when I was just writing in my journal, things that were positive about myself and things that I wanted to have come into my life. And this was part of this was an expansion of these law of attraction concepts. I was studying and I started seeing these things come into my life. And it started changing the way that not only I was interfacing with problems, but the way that I was approaching anything mindset-wise. And let’s assume for just a second, and this is kind of what I’m getting at with this, let’s assume for just a second that the law of Attraction is utter nonsense. There is no magical force binding things in the universe that makes it so that if you think about a certain thing that it’s just going to show up on your doorstep. Let’s just say that’s I’m crazy for thinking that. I don’t personally think that, but even if it is, I believe that by incorporating a mindset that you can control those outcomes just by aligning your thoughts that you are far, far more likely to act in a way that is consistent with you getting those things. If you, on the other hand, just say, “Well, this is reality and I can’t get that stuff.” And you just sort of resign yourself to whatever your fate is and you give up and you stop working towards the thing. On the other hand, if you say, “If I just keep the faith and I keep moving towards things that I want, I’m going to get the things that I want.” And then you just never give up. You’re way, way more likely to get those things or to turn your life into whatever you want it to be. So, a big part of this for me is just mindset. And so much of emotional embuffination hovers around mindset. Now another thing is that, this may be a little controversial and keep in mind that where this is coming from for me was largely out of what I saw in psychiatry, which I want to go into a lot more depth on in later shows. But for right now, just suffice it to say, as much as I appreciate psychiatry and psychology, there are certain beefs that I have with many of the paradigms that we have and, for me, the Law of Attraction is a reminder that science doesn’t always make sense.

Let me give you an example of that. I have had the experience myself and have seen situations where people went to a psychiatrist and they were diagnosed with a thing and they were told, “Okay, well you got depression. Therefore, you need to take these medications and you’ll feel better.” And then they take the medications and then they go for years and years and years and they’re taking the medications and they’re taking the medications and they’re still depressed. That all seems to be coming from science. This idea that we’ve labeled someone in a certain way, we’re giving them these medications that are supposed to right the imbalance in their brain, and yet it’s not working-tells me something. I’ve seen this so many times where and I’m not saying psychiatry never works, but I’ve seen a lot of situations and my own personal experience was this way where I tried to do a thing that seemed to be following with the psychiatric paradigms and yet left me feeling awful. And so, for me, the law of attraction, the embrace of the Law of attraction is also, in part a reminder that I feel like I have to follow the emotions because I think that’s part of the Law of Attraction model, is you have to feel positive emotions and connect those things with the direction you want to go. And to me, it’s a reminder that if things don’t feel right and I’m going down a pathway and maybe it feels initially uncomfortable and it’s going to work out good, but if it feels initially uncomfortable and then things just keep feeling worse and worse and worse, to me, that’s a sign something’s wrong.

And that’s one of the big benefits of emotions in the first place. Those negative emotions is that if you have negative emotions, it’s telling you there’s a problem. Something is not right. That can be a check. And the law of attraction being part of emotional embuffination is a reminder that just sometimes you have to follow where the feelings are. And if things don’t feel right, even if they look right on paper, even if they sound logical, there’s probably some failing somewhere. Because we have seen so many times in what we call science, where later we end up reversing the conclusion and we think that whatever we thought before wasn’t quite right. But now we we’ve come to a different conclusion. And but for the longest time, until science caught up, there was this assumption that a thing was right. I mean, how long did we have lobotomies going on for? And that was a product of science where they figured, “Okay, you’ve got some mental problems, let’s go in and carve part of your brain out.” So, the idea here is just follow the emotions. I’m not saying throw science out but pay attention to what you’re feeling about things. Another thing I like about the Law of Attraction is, in my mind, mindset is critically, critically important.

And if I embrace a Law of Attraction model, it’s very easy to say. “Whatever is going on, I created it or I can change it.” And most people don’t do that. Most people will say whatever was going on out there, that stuff happened to me and therefore I became a victim of the world around me. And whether the law of attraction is true or not, that mindset is very problematic. Embracing victimhood is something that I expressly reject, and adopting the Law of Attraction as a model makes it such that you sit down and you start to say, okay, if this bad thing happened to me, or this thing I don’t like happened, I somehow have the power to change it. And that means I’m going to have to align my thoughts and my actions in a different way such that I can alter it. And that goes back to this idea of absolute responsibility. And so that to me also is a big part of the law of attraction. So all of that is why I think Law of Attraction is a big part of emotional embuffination. This, again, is going to be a huge distinction you see from many of the other thoughts about emotional intelligence or agility or whatever you want to call it. All right. So that covers it. I think that’s probably a good intro to the idea of emotional embuffination, and I think I’m going to cut it off there.

So that’s going to essentially bring us to the end of today’s show. I hope that you found some of this useful and can take some sort of nugget away from it. But again, this was primarily an introduction to kind of explain some of the broad categories that we’re dealing with and what emotional embuffination is. The we’ll get into a lot more detail later on. And so, I’m really hopeful that you can use some of this. I would love it if you join me on many of the other shows that I’m going to have here in the future for additional podcasts. I’m again very excited about doing this. I’m going to leave you with this idea that just remember keep becoming more emotionally embuffed. Keep working every day. You don’t go to the gym one time and then say you’re buff forever. You just keep working on it. So, whether it’s through emotional embuffination, the formal structure of that, or you’re just reading some other self-help thing, whatever it is, please keep working on it. If you do need some help. Again, please check out the resources on embuffination.com. And remember that at the end of the day, we want you to be emotionally strong enough to go from saying, “The struggle is real,” into saying, “What struggle?” Thank you all for listening and I hope you have a great week. See you next time.