In our physical body, we can train or “work out” for a few different desired results.
It might be fitness, strength, mobility, coordination or more.
Some of these areas though are lower on the immediate “stimulus” side and higher on the emotional labour side. This means that they can feel slow, frustrating, and require patience and seemingly way too much practice in order to move forward, or find characteristics such as “smoothness.”
When working in these areas, it may not feel much like the “exercise” you are used to.
Other areas are higher on the immediate “stimulus” – fitness for example is something that can be trained on a stationary bike and is fairly turn-key. You can join a group class and you’re good to go as long as you can raise or lower the seat.
When the activities are high on the emotional labour, it feels like there is less upfront payoff.
When the activities are low on the emotional labour, we can often “go harder” and it feels like we’ve done more “work.”
However this is an illusion. When we slow it down and move into details, there is a greater brain-body connection that we are trying to facilitate, and we usually find that we are opening up more options as a human.
Interestingly, we see something very similar in our work or projects.
As we increase the amount of emotional labour in the task (vulnerability, breaking through resistance, embracing the uncomfortable), we also tend to expand our future options in what we do. We are instantly increasing the scope of change that we can create.
When we focus on upfront reward and stimulus, it usually means we are doing something we’ve done many times before and it feels good to be busy.
