Brave Little Things
Bravery isn’t always about facing your fears head-on or accomplishing the impossible. Sometimes, being brave means knowing when to quit, deciding you’re already whole and enough, or choosing not to do the so-called “brave thing” simply because it’s not what you want.
Brave Little Things is about redefining what it means to show up courageously in life and business, taking small, sustainable steps that help us feel more at home in ourselves. Through raw storytelling, diverse insights, practical tools, and real-life practices, we’ll explore all the ways bravery shows up in everyday moments. Most importantly, you’ll feel held as we navigate these conversations together. Because if there’s one thing I know about building a brave, full life, it’s that doing it together makes it so much easier.
What does it mean to choose a brave life—slowly, intentionally, and on your terms? Let’s go there.
Brave Little Things
How to Allow a Feeling (and Why It Matters)
We’ve all heard the advice: “Just allow your feelings.” Cool. But like… how?
Should I light a candle? Host a tea party for my anxiety?
In this episode, we’re breaking down what it actually means to allow an emotion without spiritual bypassing, overanalyzing, or losing your mind in the process.
I’ll share 3 surprisingly simple ways to work with your emotions in real-time, so you can stop stuffing them down or getting stuck in them.
You don’t have to love the feeling. You don’t have to fix it. You just have to let it be.
If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed, dramatic, or totally over it when a hard feeling shows up, this one’s for you.
And P.S., Want support practicing this work in real life? You can book a free 1:1 coaching consultation at tamarcoaching.com/consult and make the work we're discussing and learning about in these episodes even more personal to you.
Hey all, good morning or good afternoon or good evening, depending on where you are in the world and what time you're listening to this and all the stuff. But I hope you're having a beautiful day, a beautiful week, a beautiful year, wherever you are. I'm sending you so much love. So we are back together, guys. And today we're going to talk about probably, I know that I always say this, this is the most important thing. This is the hardest thing, but it's like just all this stuff is, but this is really, this is really what it comes down to guys, right? How to actually allow a feeling, how to actually allow a feeling. This is everything, right? Our bodies, we feel our feelings in our bodies. They are vibrations that we experience because of a thought triggered by a thought we were having. Our bodies are filled with this. And it is everything when we're talking about emotions and feelings, right? So I want to share with you guys the other day, I was coaching a client who was really struggling with her best friend. She felt like her best friend wasn't supporting her new business. And it felt like she left feeling awful every time she had a conversation with her. She felt abandoned. She felt rejected. She felt like she didn't get her. It was a real struggle. It really pushed them apart from each other because of it. Because she really just wasn't feeling the support from her best friend. So as we talked through it, I found myself saying something that, let's be honest, might have sounded like, I just come back from a week-long silent retreat in Bali. Just allow your feelings. Just allow them in. Sit with them. Make them your friend. Which, you know, by the way, I do say. I do say. But I think at the time it felt very like new agey. Just sit with them, you know. It was like as if I was like in this like cozy Brooklyn, lost, drinking, machan, journaling about our emotional landscape. And I just looked at my client and I just knew she was just like, what the hell? What the hell do you want me to do? I don't get it. What is this? Right? Because what does that even mean? Right? Just allow my feelings. I know we hear this all the time. Just allow your feelings. Just allow your feelings. It sounds so easy. It sounds so simple. And it's a thing. You got to learn it. Like it's not just a thing we know. It's not a thing that I think the way we say it, just allow your feelings.
UNKNOWN:Right?
SPEAKER_00:makes it sound like we should know how to do that, right? Like just cry. Like when you're a baby, you know how to cry, just cry, right? Our bodies know how to heal itself. There's things that we do know how to just do, we were born with. Feeling your feelings, not one of them. So, It's some things that we really kind of got to dig into. So, you know, when I first also heard this advice, right, I had zero clue what to do with it. I spent like so much time running from coach to coach to mentor to mentor, like really trying to like explain this to me. I have no idea what it means to allow an emotion, right? And I see this in my clients too, right? They just like kind of like we hear, allow your feelings. And either we assume it means we have feelings to like our emotions, which, by the way, no. Or we think we need to sit in some meditative state and do nothing, which sounds completely impossible. Or one of my personal favorites, decide we should just talk about them endlessly until they magically resolve themselves. This doesn't work, by the way. I've tried many times. So today I want to break it down because allowing a feeling... It's one of the hardest things we can do, but it's also one of the most powerful skills we can learn. And you can take wherever the hell you go, no matter where you are, you can take the skill with you. So what it means to, what it actually means to allow a feeling. Well, first of all, let's clear up what allowing a feeling is not just as important as knowing what it is. So what it is not is it's not pretending it's not there. It's not pushing it away. It's not rushing to fix it. Okay? But allowing a feeling, what is it? It simply is this. Not getting mad at yourself for feeling it. Not thinking you're broken because of it. Not needing it to go away before you can be nice to yourself. Not needing it to be different because you can feel worthy of love and celebration if it was away, if it was not with you. It's kind of like I have a coach who would say about self-love, sometimes loving yourself feels like a tall order. And if you're not there yet, try just not being a nasty yourself. And that's it, right? We could rebrand the whole self-love movement as like, just don't be nasty yourself. And it will do the trick, right? It's like, it doesn't need to be this like love festival, right? It's just like not being mad at yourself for having these feelings and not thinking that you're broken and you're like not enough because of it. Like being nice to yourself, right? Which is actually a really hard thing for most people to do, just to be nice to yourself. So I'm sitting there like not trying, you know, it's like sitting there not trying to stop it, not trying to make it move, flow faster, not judging it for being too slow or too rough or too muddy, just like letting it be. It's really the best metaphor, I think, is exactly the words I just used, truly, is kind of like a river. When I think about allowing an emotion, I picture a river, a smooth flowing river where it can be really rough. It also can be really slow. It can be filled with lots of mud. It can, all these kinds of things, and I'm just going to allow it to go right past me and just Really watch it and be aware of it. Our emotions are that same way. The moment you try to fight them, dam them up, block them up, redirect them, the pressure builds just like a river. And that's when things start to feel unbearable. But when you let the river flow, when you stop resisting and just let the feelings be there, that's when it moves through you instead of getting stuck inside of you. How do we practice allowing, right? Allowing the feelings without losing your damn mind. So if you're not resisting, fixing, or drowning in our emotions, what kind of things can we do here? All right, so here I want to give you guys three tools that you can use and be able to practice this, okay? And sometimes you might need one of them. Sometimes you might need all of them. Right. And that's why I kind of give you I always give you guys a variety because also people are different and what resonates with one person, what with the other. But here are three different kinds of tools I like to use to practice allowing a feeling. OK, so the first one is I like to call it name it, but keep it boring. OK, so instead of telling a dramatic story about your feelings, try describing them like you're reading a a weather report, right? So instead of I'm spiraling into a pit of despair, no one cares about me anymore and I'm going to never have any more friends and no one's going to love me. Try I'm feeling rejected right now. It's sitting right in my chest. It feels heavy. It feels hot and I feel exhausted. No backstory, no analysis, just a plain boring label. This keeps you from feeding the feeling with more intensity and just letting it be there. We oftentimes will make these stories so dramatic. The mind loves drama. It's probably why we all love all this TV. I mean, I, by the way, am a major TV reality TV junkie. I love it. I used to, my friends thought it was hilarious in college. I would watch Jerry Springer for any of those who know what Jerry Springer is. And I would literally come back from like, Psychology 101 or like something, you know, these like spirituality and da, da, da. And then I would just like want to watch Jerry Springer. And my friends thought it was hilarious. But our brains love drama and they will make anything dramatic. And when we make things dramatic, all of a sudden it becomes very hard to get out of because we're just so stuck in it. But we want to make it so boring. Describe your emotions in the most boring way possible, that they are something that we don't want to be so connected to, right? When we dress it up and we make it all this kind of stuff, we want to be close to it because it's kind of fun. It's a little bit of fun, even though it feels awful. There's also some kind of fun to that. Okay, so the other one is changing I am to I'm having. So this is right. Instead of saying, I am anxious. Or I am sad. Try, I'm having an anxious moment. Or I'm experiencing sadness right now. It's subtle, but it's very powerful because you are not your feelings. They are visitors, right? They're just coming in and coming out. They're not your identity. Think of it like this. It's like a dog runs into your house, right? You wouldn't say, I'm a dog, right? You'd say, there's a dog in my house right now. Right. Kind of a fun example, but kind of gives you the idea of it. Same thing with emotions. As much as we can separate ourselves from that, from the emotion itself, recognize that it's an entity outside of us and it's not who we are. Right. Already, the emotion itself will dissipate at least by 50 percent. Sometimes I find even more. OK. And the last one is stop looking for the exit.
UNKNOWN:Right.
SPEAKER_00:All right. Stop looking for that. Stop trying to get out. This one's sneaky because sometimes we think we're allowing a feeling when we're actually just waiting for it to be over. You know what I'm talking about, guys? Right. We're like, just kind of like, OK, if I do all these different steps, then it'll just be over. Right. And it's kind of like, well, that's not the point of it. Oh, sure. I'll sit with my emotion for about five minutes and then it better be gone. Right. We've got to give a time limit to it. But that's not actually allowing it. That's tolerating it while secretly checking the clock, right? So instead, try this. What if you let the feeling be there without needing it to change? What if you weren't in a rush and you just trust that it will be there for as long as it needs to and then it will leave, right? When you're able to be in that state, that's when emotions move the fastest. Bravery isn't about doing it perfectly, as we know very well, or we are learning it very well. When we talk about brave living, we're not talking about faking confidence or pretending everything's fine. That's not being brave. Bravery is about feeling every damn feeling, every damn thing, all the good stuff and all the hard stuff. And by the way, I once had a coach who would explain this as like, that 50% of the time, we feel these amazing emotions, happiness and joy and achievement and pride and all the good stuff. And half the time, 50%, we're feeling all the hard stuff, the pain, the sadness, the grief, disappointment, all that kind of stuff. And obviously it's not exact, right? It's not like 50%, but the idea is that the hard emotions are supposed to be there, just like the trees and the animals and the everything that was created in this world. And I believe, I really do believe that they've been here. They are here for a reason. And a lot of it is truly also so that you can feel these epic, amazing emotions, even at a higher level. Because when you're experiencing something that's hard, the harder feelings, and then when you go to a happiness, joy, pride, kind of emotional experience, you feel even greater and even deeper, right? I do believe that there's a purpose for that. So it's, you know, the bravery is really about looking fear in the face and saying, like, I see you, I hear you, and I'm moving forward anyway, right? I'm going to feel these hard emotions. You're going to come along with me. You're not going to go away. I'm not going to try to make you go away, but I am bringing you with me. And we're going somewhere where you might feel even more uncomfortable. But we're going to do this together. Because the truth, right, is when you allow your feelings, you're not just surviving this life. You're owning it. You're choosing to be the one who feels all of it and keeps on going. And that, my friends, that's where the magic is. So you guys, whatever you're feeling today, I hope you know that you don't have to love it. You don't have to fix it. And you don't have to fight it. You just have to let it be, right? This is like a lot of what we're talking about here in this episode. And also, if you didn't hear last week's episode, go ahead and go back to that, right? This is what this is about. The more you do that, the freer you're going to feel. That is the bottom line. Guys, I am sending you so much love today. That's what I've got for you. Sending you so much love for feeling all the things that you're feeling. All of them are supposed to be there. Everything, nothing has to go away in order for you to feel like you've got this. You're doing great. Keep on going. Love you all so much. And I'll see you next time.