*Spoiler Alert: I’m about to reveal one of the deep lessons from Pixar’s new film. Even if you read this though, you should definitely still go see the movie.*
Have you seen Inside Out yet? It’s Pixar’s new movie about a young girl named Riley dealing with the painful and complicated emotions of moving to a new city from the home that she grew up in and loved, and it’s wonderful. Riley’s five basic emotions - joy, sadness, anger, disgust, and fear - show up as the main characters in the movie, and the primary plot revolves around Joy and the other emotions coming to understand Sadness’s value, because at first they think she just messes everything up. In fact, so does Sadness in the beginning. At one point she says, “I always make everything worse.” (And yes, I wrote down that quote in the theater because I knew I’d be writing this post.) Over the course of the film though, Joy and Sadness and Riley all come to appreciate sadness and learn that sadness opens the door to connection with others. Here’s a picture from the film when we first start to learn this. You can see Sadness hugging and comforting Bing Bong, Riley’s old imaginary friend, when he was feeling down.
This moment foreshadows a scene at the end of the movie when Riley, after having started falling into a depression and almost running away, breaks down with her family and admits that she misses their old home. She cries, signaling the return of her emotions, her connection with herself, and, as you can see, her connection with her family.
The connection between this deep lesson and the Emerge App is so exciting. We’ve just launched the app. It currently comes with three coaching “sessions” (and we’ll continue to update it with more). The first, called Be Your Full Potential, is where you discover your vision for who you want to be and where you want to go. The second is called Feeling Small. In it you explore your feelings of being small, inadequate, or vulnerable, and your reactions to them. Through the session you get inside these feelings and see them from multiple perspectives. By the end of the session, the app will have begun to guide you to experience the openness, connection, and empathy which are the hidden gifts of these “negative” feelings. And it gives you practices to take this recognition deeper and to bring it into your daily life.
It’s cool to see these kinds of insights into the value of even our painful emotions being welcomed and celebrated amongst so many adults and children. Check out the app and the movie, and let us know what you’re learning in the comments below.