#80 Why You Need to Walk Through Uncomfortable Emotions and How They Lead to Clarity
- Francois Esterhuizen
- Sep 1
- 3 min read
Updated: Oct 28
The emotions you resist most often contain the insight you need.
Francois Esterhuizen explains how uncomfortable feelings are not obstacles but invitations, doorways to deeper clarity and lasting growth.
What if the feeling you are trying to avoid holds the key to the clarity you are seeking?
For many of us, the immediate response to uncomfortable emotions like pressure, fear, or frustration is to either suppress them or to analyse them. We try to think our way out of what we feel, believing that if we can just find the right logical reason for the feeling, it will disappear.
This intellectual approach keeps us safe, but it also keeps us stuck.
The three levels of introspection
True introspection happens on three distinct levels, and we often ignore two of them.
The Intellectual
This is the realm of our thinking, analysing, and planning mind. It is useful for making sense of things, but it is often the last to get the message when we feel stuck.
The Intuitive
This is the domain of emotion. It’s the raw data of our inner world that surfaces before our intellectual mind has a chance to label and categorise it.
The Instinctual
This is the language of the body. A tight chest, a knot in the stomach, sweaty palms—these are not random physical events. They are the first, most honest signals from our deepest self that something requires our attention.
The most common trap is to live entirely on the intellectual level. We experience an instinctual signal from the body, and our mind immediately jumps in to explain it away or find a way to make it stop.
The real work is not to silence the signal, but to follow it to its source.
Uncomfortable emotions are the doorway
Uncomfortable emotions are not problems to be solved; they are doorways to be walked through. The physical sensation is the handle on that door.
When you feel that tightness in your throat during a difficult conversation, the default reaction is to pull back, to get away from the feeling. But what happens if you do the opposite? What if you move towards the sensation, allowing yourself to feel it fully without judgment?
It's a process of sinking into the feeling. Treat it not as a solid wall, but as a passage. As you move deeper into the sensation of being trapped or squeezed, something remarkable happens. You move through it. On the other side of that intensity is often a release, a sense of lightness, and a profound insight that was inaccessible to your thinking mind.
This is where clarity lives. It is an embodied experience, not just an intellectual concept. You might discover that the conflict you were avoiding is not actually about you, or that the pressure you feel is linked to an old belief that you are "bad at" something. These are insights that no amount of overthinking can provide. They must be felt to be known.
Where to from here?
Taking responsibility for your inner world means taking responsibility for feeling what needs to be felt.
It requires shifting your focus from trying to control the external world to navigating your internal one.
The next time you feel that familiar knot in your stomach or tightness in your chest, see it as an invitation.
Your body is pointing you towards a place of potential growth. The choice is whether you will continue to avoid the door or if you will have the courage to turn the handle and walk through.
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Francois Esterhuizen is a clarity and leadership coach based in Stellenbosch, working online with South Africans worldwide. He helps individuals and leaders turn emotional resistance into clarity, momentum, and meaningful growth.
