How to Understand and Manage Your Emotions Better with Dr. Amanda Tobe
When you’re feeling overwhelmed or anxious nothing feels more soothing than having a simple and supportive emotional toolkit of mindfulness practices to choose from. In this episode, I’m interviewing Dr. Amanda Tobe on why it’s important to design your life around how you want to feel, different ways to check in with yourself, and how your core beliefs affect your emotions.
Who is Dr. Amanda Tobe?
Dr. Amanda Tobe, Ph.D is an organizational psychologist (in supervised practice) based in Toronto and works with clients to build their confidence, manage stress, communicate effectively and overcome performance anxiety in the workplace.
She has developed several workbooks that she uses with her clients to empower them on their journeys. She also works with teams and leaders to build healthy, psychologically safe and mindful workplaces.
Amanda has written several publications on public-speaking and job interview anxiety and has been featured in media outlets such as Inc.com, Harvard Business Review, Men's Health Magazine and the Journal of Business and Psychology. She also maintains a blog where she aims to make research accessible and shares strategies and resources that she uses with her clients.
Amanda previously worked for 5 years in talent management and consulting and in the last 2 years made a major career pivot in wanting to help others find their inner voice and unleash their full potential.
Finding Clarity in your Path
During the beginning of her change in career path, Amanda realized that one thing she was most passionate about was making interesting scientific research more accessible and understandable. Amanda realized her passion for this “because I've been on the other side of producing publications and writing them and thinking, who's going to even understand this? I mean, even my own parents don't understand that. And they've been hearing me talk about the research for years, right?”
To get to this point of inner clarity she had to adopt a few habits first. She says, “For me, it was really about two things. The first one is really about learning to listen to your inner voice.” She started by letting the people in her life know that she was on her own journey, and not looking for opinions.
The next thing Amanda did involved creating her own personal compass. So she decided the most important word to focus on in her journey was “passion.” Amanda knew talking about her past research on interview anxiety sparked passion. She teaches us to find the things you do or talk about where you tend to “sparkle,” or that ignite a passion in you then follow that feeling.
Designing How You Feel
Another powerful thought Amanda shared was to think about how you want to feel and then design your life around the way you want to feel. It’s important to break things down. Think about how to build those feelings into your life.
The way Amanda teaches people about how to check into your feelings and stay at a higher vibration are:
A nighttime gratitude practice
Amanda and her husband practice “thankful threes.” This involves taking turns in saying something you’re really thankful about from that day. Be really specific, “it's not just oh, I'm grateful for my family and my friends. And, you know, my house that I live in.”
This practice allows you to go deeper than the typical “what did you do today?” and give you different insights into a loved one’s day.Taking daily walks
She says, “Walks make me feel really alive. And so I really try to build that into my day.”Taking a couple of really good deep breaths throughout the day
Amanda says that taking full, deep inhales and exhales through your nose is “more efficient and effective when we breathe in and out through our nostrils.”
Check in on your emotions during the day
How are you feeling? Pay attention to what your mind and body need. These practices overall should only take 5-10 minutes out of your day which is exciting. Such a powerful punch for so little investment.
Your Core Beliefs Cause Your Performance Anxiety
Have you ever felt that you’re not good enough or not liked? Do you fear rejection and failure? These types of core beliefs get us into trouble when it comes to performance anxiety. Amanda says, “We look to other people to see, you know, if we’re doing a good job, we see things as high stake situations. We place so much value on being liked by others. These societal standards and the importance of being liked, can mean that we sometimes see performance situations, and these feel really threatening. “
When we feel threatened, we feel unsafe. And feeling unsafe causes, as Amanda says, “certain emotional control centers in the brain to light up. Your brain tells you that this situation is scary, and you want to run from it. And so what happens is people aren't able to be as present. So it's really a perfect storm of core beliefs. We talked about fears, we talked about, you know, feeling threatened. And really all these pieces together really creates a lot of anxiety for people as well.”
How to Heal Performance Anxiety
The best place to start easing this kind of pressure is with your core beliefs. Amanda says it's important to remember this isn’t something that can be healed overnight. It's a process that takes a lot of commitment.
She recommends dissecting your core beliefs and evaluating the ones that aren't serving you and rewriting them. Another thing that really helps is doing your own mini experiments. Amanda says it's really about getting people to put themselves out there to be seen, to be heard, to be uncomfortable, and to put themselves in situations that they sometimes feel really nervous about and working their way through that. So you kind of have to take a step back, knowing there's a trigger and then kind of asking yourself, okay, what's triggering it? So is it kind of just asking yourself those questions and then backtracking.
Another strategy she recommends is grounding by using your five senses and taking note of what you see in a room. She says, “So for example, things you might see on the wall, things you smell, things you're hearing, even things you feel. Feeling the chair beneath you or your elbows on the arm rest. And really, what that does is it helps to distract your thought process in that moment.”
We learned from Amanda that your fears and anxieties grow stronger the more you avoid them. The key is to reassure yourself that you can do this. Tell yourself new stories. Learn to tell yourself that you can be comfortable sharing your voice. Practice positive affirmation. She says, “Thoughts are such an important part of that equation that we talked about earlier with core beliefs, because a lot of research has shown that core beliefs lead to negative thoughts, and those negative thoughts are then what creates anxiety.”
More From This Episode
To hear more about how to develop a better relationship with your emotions and how to create your own inner compass listen to the full conversation with Dr. Amanda Tobe here.
Affirmation
I intend to create stories that serve me and understand myself fully so I can rise to meet my highest self.
Resources
Follow Dr. Amanda Tobe on Instagram @dr.amandatobe.
Dr. Amanda Tobe's Official Site.
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