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Emotional Fitness

Releasing negative emotions to achieve your heart desires

Why Emotional Fitness?

Life comprises many emotions, yet the head will judge them as good or bad. Without fully understanding, all emotions can be valuable if we know how to use the full spectrum of emotions. Having a toolkit of methods to handle all emotions rather than suppress negative emotions is fundamental to using them as feedback and opportunities for growth.

True freedom is feeling and expressing all emotions, so we don’t need to hide and suppress negative emotions. This level of Emotional Fitness significantly influences the events that occur in life, as our emotions and emotional programming significantly influence our thoughts.

Emotional Fitness Definition

Emotional Fitness refers to our awareness and ability to respond rather than suppress our emotions. To be able to feel, sense and trust the full spectrum of emotions rather than blocking or suppressing certain emotions. Good Emotional Fitness is not judging our emotions as good or bad, which becomes more accessible as we drop deeper into the many levels of heart awareness by using tools to release and benefit from negative emotions.

Our emotions and emotional programming, hence Emotional Fitness, heavily influence the thoughts we create. Hence good Emotional Fitness helps us more efficiently create the circumstances, success and ‘flow’ we desire. So rather than forcing things, we naturally attract the circumstances in life and business we desire.

Like a muscle, our emotions only support us if we use them. Hence good Emotional Fitness refers to our ability to be in tune emotionally, understand and feel the full array of emotions. Not just being optimistic, able to handle and beneficially from the full emotional spectrum, to release negative emotions rather than suppress them.

A key outcome of good Emotional Fitness is that it forms the foundation of healthy self-esteem. Self-esteem can be defined as being made up of head esteem and emotional esteem. If we look at emotional esteem, which starts as a child, many people are taught to be good, don’t cry, hence not to validate feelings, so we suppress emotions, causing a void of hidden blocked emotions that are our unconscious triggers. These mostly are hidden but can show up as anger, sadness, anxiety, depression, PTSD and many negative emotions that reduce self-esteem.

The heart is a vital organ keeping us alive. It’s the source of our blood and life flow, directing our nervous system and many bodily functions, as shown by all the Neurocardiology research.

 

Our Heart and Emotional Fitness

The heart is a vital organ keeping us alive. It’s the source of blood flow and life flow. Good Emotional Fitness is the natural flow of desires, spontaneously becoming a reality, which is also known as “flow.” Often our emotions move between being blocked in fear and the much more desired peak-performance state of “flow.”

Good Emotional Fitness is demonstrated by how easily a person can attract the reality of their true desires to be in “flow.” The following chart lists some of the characteristics of fear compared to “flow.”

By comparison, an average person is more likely to be in a state of fear rather than “flow.” Fear is when our “stuff” gets in the way. Often, unconscious self-sabotage blocks us from achieving our true desires. This could be a high percentage of the population, which we could say is emotionally unfit. This is often shown as repeat non-desired patterns occurring in life and business, shown in relationships, financial situations, or in sports under pressure.

Our level of Emotional Fitness determines our mental state and our mindset due to our emotional “stuff”, which for most people is unconscious, significantly influencing our feelings which in turn create our thoughts and mental activity.

What drives Emotional Fitness?

Emotions are a universal force influencing everything that is happening in the world. Emotions drive behaviour, hence either creating or stalling action. The two ends of the emotional spectrum driving behaviour are fear and passion. Passion is the more connected, inspired motivation of “flow.”

Like a muscle, our emotional capacity is dependent on use. If we don’t use a muscle, it provides limited support. Emotions are the same. If we don’t understand and use emotions, we lack support and resilience in the critical emotional aspect of life. For example, society often teaches us to always be positive and happy. Yet, if we are only comfortable with positive emotions, we have poor Emotional Fitness and a limited range of expression. We are more likely to disown our shadow, the suppressed aspects that help determine our future reality.

Why improve our Emotional Fitness?

One reason to improve our Emotional Fitness is to ensure we get everything we desire more easily. By developing greater Emotional Fitness, we also become more fulfilled, passionate, healthy, connected and able to consistently perform at our peak in all aspects of business, sport and life.

Increased satisfaction and enhanced peak performance are the more obvious indicators of good Emotional Fitness. Yet, collectively within a group or team, individual Emotional Fitness can be magnified, providing an exponential influence or coherence to enhance or sabotage the team culture.

Learn more about doing an Emotional Fitness Workout by visiting this page, Emotion Fitness Workout.

For more details on how to apply Emotional Fitness for teams in sport and leadership, please visit Robert C Robertson’s site at www.robertcrobertson.com.

About Rob Robertson his Journey

His Emotional Fitness Journey

Below we share Rob Robertson’s journey, how self-doubt, abuse and anxiety inspired him to discover Emotional Fitness to build his resilience to gain healthy self-esteem, genuine inner trust and freedom. To live his dreams that always had previously seemed a distant reality.

Rob is a Founder & CEO, Author, Energy Healer, Spiritual Guide and Sports Mental Skills Coach specialising in Emotional Fitness, empowering people to move from head to heart to find flow, that high-performance business and sports performance edge.

Robs most significant gifts have come from the emotional learning from sexual abuse as a 7-year-old.  Not feeling good enough was the driver of his lifelong journey and fascination with personal motivation, emotions and mental skills to learn the best techniques to release anger and self-doubt. Those tools and associated lessons have led to Rob being recognised as an Emotional Fitness pioneer.

Today he feels very grateful for the enormous benefits his experience has taught him. Having experienced both sides of the self-esteem divide, Rob is passionate about helping people grow by teachings others what has worked for him. While he is always learning anything he can about emotions, the impact has been a massive personal transformation and vastly higher mental toughness in sports.

The Self-Doubt Journey

His love of sport started as a naive 11-year-old country boy growing up in the farming town of Methven, New Zealand. At that age, he was selected for the Mid-Canterbury rep soccer team. While very proud of the achievement, he felt out of depth at this higher level. This massive self-doubt was reflected in not excelling under pressure. Then a similar situation occurred a few years later when he was selected to play tennis for Mid-Canterbury. Massive self-doubt again stifled his performance. These experiences helped trigger his thirst to learn everything he could about growing his inner confidence, releasing self-doubt and gaining a high-performance advantage in sport, then applying this to business.

A significant junction was leaving home as a 17-year-old to live at Lincoln University in the halls of residence in New Zealand. After two consecutive nights with ZERO sleep, thinking he was going mad, considerable relief was found when a counsellor labelled his knotted stomach as anxiety. During that first year away from home, the anxiety became depression, providing a massive reality check on real life and the transition to adulthood.

Part of this journey is explained in the following 10-minute TED-style talk recorded on the 1st of August 2017 in Auckland. In this talk, Rob Robertson shares his Emotional Fitness journey, followed by 9 minutes of questions about Emotional Fitness.

Making it through year one of University felt like a victory to him with all these major emotional ups and downs. This was only possible due to the critical support of a counsellor. Then things changed in year two, after completing a 4-week Mind Power course by John Kehoe, as positive thinking changed everything.

The next ten years of using positive thinking was an escape from the reality of mental illness, although at a price. An unrealistic positive thinker was born by turning everything into a positive in the head. Yet this seemed like the answer to everything. Inner freedom to be able to escape from the uncomfortable emotions he was experiencing. To feel safe in the head.

While this provided a reasonable level of success in sport and business, under pressure, consistency was lacking due to his unconscious self-doubt. This was evidence that we don’t get what we want in life; we get what our unconscious ‘stuff’ creates.

Then in 2001, it all changed by discovering massive anger and suppressed emotions entirely hidden by positive thinking. This anger and many other emotions had been hidden for ten years by turning every negative feeling into a positive in the head, without knowing he was suppressing his negative emotions.

This massive discovery of hidden emotions was terrifying, a critical turning point that started an incredible Emotional Fitness journey, learning to connect and understand emotions fully to move from head to heart.

In 2001, after uncovering all this suppressed anger, his Emotional Fitness journey led him to a Men’s Anger Group in Sydney, Australia. It was a good support network, which he chose to attend himself, despite the Police sending a number of the participants to this group to get help. This was the start of an incredible journey, opening up hidden anger, sadness and some challenging lows. This learning and his fascination with understanding all he could from countless personal development programs to understand the power of the heart provided critical insights for developing the Emotional Fitness Workout. Then, in 2023 his model is knowns as 1EnergyFlow.

Then it was in early 2017 when significant evolution became more apparent. The shift from self-doubt and low self-esteem to a more healthy self-understanding and belief was evident in his more relaxed inner calm and greater self-belief. It was no accident that it coincided with his business taking off, reaching a new level of turnover.

Further evidence of his journey into new bounds of Emotional Fitness was in mid-2017 when he noticed the ongoing anxiety of the first half of 2017 had subsided. The Emotional Fitness Workout helped him process this anxiety for wonderful new personal growth. This was an important milestone on the Emotional Fitness journey, to release the pattern of anxiety to reach a new level of inner calm and connected peace.

The outcomes have resulted in a much healthier inner self-belief and self-esteem, accompanied by a newfound zest, passion, and excitement reflected in his speech and connections with people, showing a significant improvement in his national rankings on the tennis court. Starting in 2007 with a national doubles tennis ranking as a D6, which was positioned just in the top 3000 NZ doubles players. However, through Emotional Fitness growth and improved mental toughness, he climbed into the top 250 as a D3 in 2019. Notably, these achievements were accomplished without significant tennis coaching or changes to biomechanics.

Then with tennis coaching in 2022 to modify his biomechanics, he experienced temporary setbacks. As he lost confidence when learning a new serve technique and improved his volleying skills, his NZ doubles ranking dropped to 349 at the start of 2023 in the male doubles ranking of all current players in New Zealand.

Rob’s business has evolved and changed over the years. Following redundancy from his role as 2IC of Combined Insurance, where he was responsible for over 100 staff in New Zealand, he established the Unboxed brand at the end of 2013, offering executive coaching and serving.

As an Executive Coach and team performance/ technology advisor to CEOs Rob, at the start of 2021 Rob purchased land 50 minutes from Auckland to create the Stargate Forest retreat space.

Life changed massively after the first-ever retreat in June 2022 at Stargate Forest. For more than 15 years, he had been Reiki Master, yet self-doubt had always stopped him from publicly discussing this passion. At that 2022 retreat, he learnt a new intuitive energy healing methodology. The passion for doing what he loved and the reduced self-doubt empowered him to reveal that he was a channel and spiritual guide publicly. He had been doing this work as a channel for more than ten years.

To read more, visit robrobertson.nz, which contains his blog. Click here for an example of one of his blog post, sharing his newfound vulnerability about the struggles of this Emotional Fitness journey.

True emotional strength is about being real, not afraid to say the truth, being vulnerable if appropriate, and living with passion from the heart. Rob Robertson, by not covering up his emotions, is the real strength, to be a real, driven by true inner strength of full emotional expression. To love life, both the highs and also to embrace the lows, to live with passion, purpose and genuine heart.

Emotional Flow

“The heart is seen as the seat of connection between the mind and the body, forming a bridge between the two. The mind or spirit is housed in the heart, and the blood vessels are the communication channels that carry the heart’s vital, rhythmic messages throughout the body.”

– Chinese Medicine, 2500 B.C.

Throughout history people have referred to the heart in ways that imply it has a natural intelligence.

Cultures around the world use metaphors expressing how the heart is more than a pump: Follow your heart. In your heart you know. Put your heart into it. Even our 21st century dictionaries refer to the heart as the centre of the personality.

“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched…they must be felt with the heart” – Quote from an unknown source.

Good Emotional Fitness is shown as a natural state of “flow.” The term “flow” was first defined by Hungarian Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who earned his fame by providing a detailed description of the “flow” state. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest living psychologists of our age.

We are all capable of reaching this state he calls “flow” which is an effortless concentration and enjoyable, connected state of mind, body and emotional “flow.”

Csikszentmihalyi’s flow model refers to the mental state in terms of challenge level and skill level and how it relates to happiness.

Credits for graphic above w:File:Challenge vs skill.jpg, Public Domain, Link

 

 

Recent Blog Posts

Webinar Replay – Emotional Fitness & Decluttering the Pain-Body

March 2, 2023 By Rob Robertson Leave a Comment

It was such a pleasure to be a guest on The Circle Of Excellence Webinar. The Circle Of Excellence is a trusted worldwide network in 50 countries.  The focus was Emotional Fitness and how the pain body is the filter creating our future. In today’s fast-paced and demanding world, the pain body is the cause of […]

Ep #7 Be Free, Be Fun, Be Fearless Interview of Rob Robertson

October 20, 2020 By Rob Robertson Leave a Comment

It was a delight to be interviewed by Rana AlFalaki for Episode 7 of her Podcast Be Free, Be Fun, Be Fearless. She has a fun style as we explore Emotional Fitness and the journey driving this huge passion. Excellent timing that this came out the same week I start my new Emotional Fitness Tribe, […]

Rocking Midlife Podcast with Rob Robertson

July 11, 2020 By Rob Robertson 15 Comments

“Emotional Fitness is like a muscle. If we don’t use a muscle, then we don’t benefit from its full capacity and range of movement.” ~ Rob Robertson  It was a pleasure to be interviewed by Cat Collucio in her Podcast guests. Cat starts by introducing me as an Entrepreneur, Speaker and Productivity Expert specialising in […]

Emotional Fitness Workout

Why an Emotional Fitness Workout?

The common benefits of doing a workout for the body are well known, yet few understand how to workout and strengthen their emotional resilience and capacity. Emotional Fitness Workouts help to build greater resilience, intuitive and a more consistent peak performance state of high productivity “flow.”

The starting point to increase emotional fitness can be to ask the questions “How do I feel?” This while simple can be used often to tune into our emotions and check-in. Awareness and listening within is a core skill of emotional fitness. This can also apply to our body to build Inner Game Fitness. To be present to your body, simply stop for a moment and do a body scan. Feel the body and appreciate its amazing nature, while feeling for any areas of tension.

Most illness or disease is created from an unconscious emotional block. So the fundamental principle of an Emotional Fitness Workouts, after the principle of listening, is movement. This can be physical, although mostly emotional our energetic flow is best to more rapidly stimulate the bodies natural self-healing mechanism.

An Emotional Fitness Workout has 6 different layers with each suitable at different times and emotional states. One of these six is Emotional Unblocking, which is a technique that can be learnt by downloading the following 4 -page PDF.

When do I workout?

Whenever we feel a non-positive emotion, this is an opportunity to do an Emotional Fitness Workout. This is a multi-stage flow chart to integrate and open our emotions. It is a process you do on your own, or it can be facilitated, which helps to resolve and heal old emotional baggage, creating a high-performance success state.

As we release more of our blocks, we feel different about ourselves. Without all the unconscious garbage hidden within we find we have fewer triggers. Our head slows down from wanting to always judge and think to just be present. We improve our Emotional Fitness by growing our emotional esteem, resulting in greater self-esteem, self-image and more positive expectations.

Ultimately with growth and more emotional self-understanding, we shift our unconscious programming, so that our emotions conspire to help achieve our desires. All based on the theory we don’t get what we want in life, we get what our unconscious conditioning creates.

One of the four core Emotion Fitness Workouts is called Emotion Unblocking (Emotional Clearing) which is a way of supporting peak human performance by healing the source of any negative emotions or thoughts that may occur. It is a method that allows a person to release past programming and emotions that block their ability to maximise future success.

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