The Fortitude Chronicle: A Weekly Digest of Athletic Determination

Monday Momentum

For the Relentless Mind

You Don't Have an Emotion Problem. You Have a Thinking Problem.

The most dangerous advice about emotions isn't the bad advice—it's the half-true advice.

"Express your feelings" sounds wise until you realize it's incomplete. The missing piece? How you engage with those feelings determines whether they become wisdom or poison.

Most people operate in extremes. They either bury their emotions hoping distance creates safety, or they swim in them, mistaking intensity for insight. Both approaches fail for the same reason: they avoid the actual work.

Suppressing feelings doesn't make you strong—it makes you brittle. Every unexpressed emotion becomes a tiny crack in your foundation. Stress accumulates. Resentment builds. Eventually, something breaks.

But the opposite extreme is equally destructive. When you ruminate endlessly, your brain treats repetitive emotional patterns like a feedback loop. You're not processing; you're rehearsing. Each replay strengthens the neural pathway until your thoughts become a prison of your own construction.

The real challenge isn't managing the feelings themselves—it's managing your relationship with them.

Healthy emotional processing looks like investigation, not indulgence. When something bothers you, the goal isn't to feel better immediately. It's to understand what your emotions are telling you about the situation and about yourself.

This requires asking different questions:

• What triggered this response?

• What need isn't being met?

• What pattern am I repeating?

• What would addressing this actually require?

These questions move you toward solutions rather than circles. They transform emotions from experiences you endure into information you can use.

Here's what nobody talks about: suppressing your feelings is the easy path. It requires no skill, no growth, no uncomfortable truths. You just... don't deal with it.

The hard part isn't feeling your emotions. It's looking honestly at what they reveal about who you've become and who you need to become.

Maybe your anger reveals how you've let people violate your boundaries. Maybe your anxiety shows you're avoiding necessary risks. Maybe your sadness points to values you've abandoned or relationships you've neglected.

This kind of self-examination demands something most people aren't willing to give: the courage to see yourself clearly and the commitment to change what you find.

The sweet spot between suppression and rumination is exploration with a purpose. You acknowledge the feeling, investigate its message, extract the lesson, then redirect your energy toward action.

Think of emotions like smoke detectors. When they go off, you don't ignore the alarm, but you also don't sit in the kitchen staring at the smoke. You find the fire and put it out.

The strongest people aren't those who never break—they're the ones willing to rebuild themselves when they do. That rebuilding happens one honest conversation with yourself at a time.

Two Quotes

1. “I have never found in my whole life that you could convince someone who doesn’t want to work hard to work hard.” ― Steve Jobs

2. “Leadership is not defined by the exercise of power but by the capacity to increase the sense of power among those led." - Mary Parker Follett

Four Posts

To Building Fortitude.

 Best Regards,

Colin Jonov, Founder & CEO Athletic Fortitude