Tiago Forte's Mid-Year Check-in

In which I learned how emotions are made

Zoom screen from Tiago’s Annual Review Mid-Year Checkup workshop on June 27

To hear the 5-minute audio file that I uploaded today as my Morning Journal flash briefing for Alexa devices, click on the play button:

My grandsons Jake and Ryan are coming over to play in a few minutes, so I will avail myself of the following AudioPen summary of what I recorded:

Good morning. Today is the 1st of July.

I want to share with you a look back at last week. On Thursday, I attended an annual review mid-year check-in with Tiago Forte. One of the things he had us do was to answer the question, "What do you want more of in the remainder of the year?" We had to answer that question three ways: with the mind, with the heart, and with the gut.

I participated and wrote down my answers. When it came time to share, I was surprised at how different my answers were. My mind's answer was money and lower responsibility, my heart's answer was connection, love, and more friends in the world, and my gut's answer was rest and lightness of being. I don't think they conflicted; maybe they were like three views of the same possible future. It was interesting to see the differences when coming at the answers from those three perspectives.

After the exercise, Tiago mentioned a blog post he had written about how emotions are made, as well as a book on the topic. Sensations in the body are how emotions arise, according to this way of looking at it. Tiago's blog post, originally published in 2019 and updated in 2022, is titled "How Emotions Are Made: The Theory of Constructed Emotion." In it he provides a concise summary of a book by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett titled "How Emotions Are Made."

The main idea is that emotions, which are strong and often arise regularly through various triggers, are actually constructs of the brain. Their purpose is to help the brain categorize sets of sensations and input from the world into templates. When things align, the brain identifies the emotion, such as anxiety, sadness, or shame. These emotional templates are wired but can be unwired over time.

With work, there can be new concepts created to fit a situation in the present more skillfully than just reaching back in some cases, and it seems like decades. I can have something happen with my daughter, 45, who's next door, and I can feel that the brain had created something from back around the time of the divorce more than 40 years ago. Old stuff that gets in the way of the present, where life can be reimagined and perhaps rewired.

I'm thinking about this and hoping to act on the insight the rest of this summer. Starting today!