Don't run from emotions. Listen to them. and learn.

​For most of my life, I've had emotions showing up wanting to teach me something.

Something about me.

And for most of my life, when those emotions showed up, I shooed them away. Or assaulted them. Or ran from them.

What I rarely did, however, was ask them: what would you like to teach me?

Eduardo Bericat says, "As human beings we can only experience life emotionally."

Robert Green says, "If you can't listen to where your emotions came from, they can't teach you anything."

And Brene Brown says, "Without accurate language, we struggle to get the help we need, we don't always regulate or manage our emotions and experiences in a way that allows us to move through them productively."

I think you get the picture. We are emotional creatures. And if we don't have a good understanding of what our emotions are trying to tell us about ourselves, if we can't identify them the way we can identify the difference between Apple and Android, we'll always struggle to live out the most authentic versions of who we are.

For me personally, if I started to rank in order the emotions that have tried to teach me the most, and in turn the emotions I've one way or another ignored the most, vulnerability would rank number one.

Oh, I hear you FEAR, I know you think you should be top dog, but I'm afraid vulnerability has you beat on this one.

Brene Brown defines vulnerability as "the emotion we experience during times of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure."

Let's start with this: I now know - thank you Ms. Brown - that most of my life I've felt vulnerable. And then let's go here: most of my life I had no idea I was feeling vulnerable.

Most of my life, I would have identified the emotion I now know as vulnerability as a powerful feeling signaling it's time for me to run, to break off serious relationships, to collect casual relationships, to drink, to drink some more, to crack endless jokes, to chase career milestones.

Most of my life, this emotion, VULNERABILITY, that was showing up trying to tell me that I was about to experience emotional exposure, and that that was okay, felt like a heart-racing, gut-wrenching warning that someone was about to discover my emotional secrets.

They were about to gain access to my forever-secured emotional scars.

This morning, before writing this article, I felt vulnerable. In fact, I still feel it now.

But I am not running. I'm not fighting. I'm not stuck, frozen in my chair. I am listening to my foe turned friend, vulnerability. I am listening to her ask, you are standing on the ledge of emotional exposure, are you sure you want to leap?

Many days, because I stop and listen to the emotion, and try to entertain what he is trying to ask me, I DO take the leap. And I have discovered it is not a leap into a dark pit - surely not near the dark pit hiding from the emotion was - but rather it lands me in this beautiful place of authenticity.

I had a friend recently tell me, I'm not often happy, but I'm almost always authentic. And I'll take authentic over happy.

That struck me at first. It sounded depressing. Until I realized just how often happy in my life looked like drunkenness, how often it looked like a fabricated joke to hide from real unhappiness, how often it looked like a relationship that lacked any relation.

As I've listened to vulnerability, as I've embraced the emotion's message, I've come to learn that running from emotional exposure is rarely, if ever, the path to happiness. That leap and that pit is rarely joy.

But vulnerability, if we will embrace the messenger, and accept the possibility that comes with being fully known, I will tell you that you may not always be happy with the world, but more than ever you will come to be happy with yourself.

And if you're someone who has spent a life shooting the emotional messenger, that kind of happiness is a gift.

Before you shoot, listen.

And learn.