Success is in your grasp, but your positive emotions are about to get the better of you. If you are gripping on too tight, imagine floating like a butterfly.
Overview of the "Get A Grip" Metaphor
NOTE: The introduction is the same for each of the four intensities of the Get A Grip Metaphor. If you have already read it, you may want to click to skip.
Your head is in your hands. Your eyes are staring off into space. You’re turning your energy inward. And you’re telling yourself to get a grip.
We often say this phrase when we’re trying to get control of our emotions, when we’re about to be overwhelmed, often in a negative way. But what does that metaphor actually look like to you? Because if you want to transform the emotion, then you want to focus on the imagery that that phrase brings up.
Yes. You also want to focus on your body language. If you’re slouched over, you want to get yourself to sit up straighter. If your hands are on your head, you want to bring them down to your lap and focus on your breathing. And if your eyes are staring out but you’re not really seeing anything, possibly because your head is just spinning with thoughts – often negative thoughts or fear thoughts – then you want to give yourself something positive to focus on.
But within all of that, the one thing you can focus on is your metaphor. When you’re telling yourself to get a grip, what does that imagery bring up for you?
Hello, my name is Karen, and this series grows out of my book, Emotion Commotion, and The EAT Program™. In these videos, I help you Locate, Describe & Transform™ the emotions that interfere with you making your best decisions.
Your emotions present as images and metaphors, so each week I explore new imagery, always looking at it from four levels of emotional intensity: extreme, high, medium, and low.
Your imagery might look very different from what I choose, but you can still walk through the process, as I do, to transform your own emotions. This week we’re working with the metaphor, get a grip.
Four Emotion Intensities with Four "Get A Grip" Metaphor Images
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The extreme intensity video I’ve chosen is a person with fists clenched and punching a human shaped dummy bag.
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For high intensity, I’ve chosen a mechanical grip that grabs onto massive rocks at a construction site.
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For medium intensity, I’ve chosen somebody who’s climbing a rope and using their hands to grip, to climb.
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And for low intensity, I’ve chosen butterflies who are gripping to flowers.
Gripping On Too Tight: Low Intensity Emotions
For the low intensity video, I’ve chosen butterflies who are gripping on to flowers or leaves. This is interesting because butterflies are gentle for us, but those butterflies might be hanging on for dear life, for all I know.
My focus here is when we’re dealing with positive emotions. You’re telling yourself to get a grip, you don’t want to get too excited, because that amount of emotion is going to make it difficult for you to succeed.
It speaks, for example, to an athlete who has to have just the right touch to be able to make that shot, not hang on too tightly, not grip too tightly, because then they’re going to be losing control.
Gripping On Too Tight: Transformation Example
If the butterfly imagery speaks to you, notice the butterflies are also flapping their wings as a way of maintaining their balance.
As you tell yourself to get a grip, as in get a grip on your emotions, stay calm under pressure:
- Imagine your hands actually relaxing.
- Breathe in and out.
- Release the pent up emotions
If you’re adventurous with your imagery, you might even imagine giving yourself wings like the butterfly, and allowing those wings to help you take flight.
Get A Grip: Closing
We’ve just explored the Get A Grip metaphor through four intensities, from four different angles:
- The extreme intensity video focused on an extreme amount of anger or rage, a negative emotion that wanted to act out toward others.
- The high intensity emotions focused on overthinking – the stress of overthinking – and needing to find clarity, and getting a grip on all of the thoughts.
- The medium intensity emotion was about getting a grip on the positive emotions, and not letting them take over, where you end up failing at something that you were really primed to succeed at.
- And the Low Intensity Emotion video focused on a gentle grasp and balance to be able to take flight.
I respectfully acknowledge that this video was recorded on the traditional territory of Mi’kmaq people.
For more information on transforming negative emotions with the Locate, Describe & Transform™ process, check out theEATprogram.com.