Why You Can't Have What You Never Felt

We can only desire the things that lie inside our emotional experience.

Let's say there is a field of 1000 positive emotions you could desire. You are in the middle of that field. But you only experienced 7 out of them before. You discovered them by accident or someone showed you (triggered them in you) or someone else had them and you took that person as an example. Then you are blind to the 993 other emotions, just because you never had them before.

If something is not attached to an emotional experience we are already familiar with, we cannot see it as desirable.

Let me give you an example. If a person has been overweight and feeling bad physically for years, they don't even know how it feels to be lean and have energy. So they don't desire it because it is outside your emotional range of familiarity.

It is a loop that traps us, in which we relive our emotional waves again and again and we don't even notice, because it becomes normal, it is "how we always feel".

And that loop doesn't want you to peek over it's horizon. It's a mechanism for safety. One that fails us in a lot of ways in the modern age.

Hence, if you wish you could achieve new goals, get a positive emotional outcome attached to them. Either find a new emotion to attach to it or use one you already have. But more about that at the end of the article.

~ There are more emotions available to use than we know. ~

For example, a person who has been on stage successfully enough times, knows the positive feelings it can give you, the pride, the acknowledgement, the feeling seen, the freedom to express. So they want to do it again. But on the other hand, a person who has never been on stage doesn't even have that positive reference and asks themselves why the hell they should even want to get up there.

~ You are blind to emotional experiences you never had yourself. ~

You can only understand an emotional experience if you have lived it yourself. But if you haven't, you won't feel it, not matter how well someone describes it.

That's why, even when we set new goals, they are often still inside our own emotional experience. They are still limited to what we have been feeling so far. They still live inside our emotional life. If we really want to grow, we need to start setting goals outside of that realm, to get new experiences and uncover new emotions. One way to set a goal that will give you a new positive emotion, is to set one where you know you will get discomfort first.

So next time you set a goal or a dream, ask yourself "What is the positive emotional experience I already had, that I can attach to it?" And if there is none, go find a new one for yourself. Ask people who already have that emotion and try to replicate what they did, or go expand your own emotional range by figuring out new emotions by yourself.