Media Hub: Discover Emotional Wisdom with Kim Korte

Kim Korte was born with a curious mind. However, she didn’t always use that gift to its fullest potential. After suffering through significant life events, she realized developing her curiosity muscle would help in her healing. 

Further, as a business consultant, she loves repeatable processes and procedures. I’m known for simplifying the complex. She would tell clients that, ultimately, she was so lazy that she wanted to find the most efficient and simplistic way to enhance their business systems. 

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She did the same with her emotions and thus was born the premise behind Yucky Yummy Savory Sweet: Understanding the Flavors of Emotions. Here, she poses the question: What if instead of relying on comfort emotions (like comfort food) to get us through the day, we became 5-star Michelin Chefs of our experiences?

The concept came to her after reading the book How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett.

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“That was my real discovery into how the brain works, the whole idea of a brain being predictive and that we are always kind of like living just a few milliseconds in the past,” she explains. “We don't realize how much our past plays in our present and that how our present is really just a titch behind. Our brain predicts how to respond to incoming sensory signals and prioritizes what’s important based on our past experiences, emotional state, and our focus.”

Korte says we’re really operating on data. “How that data gets filtered by the brain is what can make a difference in our relationships and in our emotions, and how we experience the world.”

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Her unique approach to emotional awareness and emotional intelligence offers an innovative way to create a connection to our emotions by using something familiar to us, like food. She explores how we experience our emotions from a combination of senses, including what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are like ingredients in a recipe.

 

Just like the developed palate of a chef can distinguish the different flavors in food––we can increase our ability to capture the “flavors” of our emotions by enhancing our awareness of the sense of how we feel inside our bodies.

 

“We have perceptions we have from what we see, what we hear, what we touch, what we taste, what we smell, even how we feel inside of our bodies, and these are the ingredients from which emotions are launched,” she says. 

It boils down to the communication between our bodies, emotions, and brains. “Our emotions are driving the majority of our thoughts and behaviors, but with more awareness, we can determine how the brain is going to use the ingredients to form a perception, which results in an emotion.”

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Thus, the idea of an Emotion Chef. The more adept we become at using the ingredients to create the “flavors” that we want, the more we are able to respond to life rather than react. 

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“We feel our emotions in our bodies, this is how they are communicated to us. Studies have shown that most people experience the same emotion in a similar location in the body. For instance, we often feel anger in our stomachs or sadness in our hearts.” says Korte. “But many people aren’t comfortable with how they feel inside their bodies, and they shut down.” 

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But the same signal the body receives that tells us we are angry or sad, also tells us other important information, such as when to eat, or what is causing a headache, or when it’s time to hit the restroom. Sometimes, these can be misinterpreted.

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“The body’s internal sensory system, called interoception, is always trying to communicate with us, but it's an all-in-one system,” she adds, And so our ability to understand those feelings and to be able to distinguish them is what gives us a higher awareness of who we are, what we want, what we don't want. It also helps us tell the difference we're mad versus hungry,” explains Korte.

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Increased awareness helps us widen our focus and perceive more of what is going on in any given situation that we might be overlooking that plays a role in our emotional responses. It is like adding more ingredients to a recipe.  

An example Korte gave is when we feel anger. Perhaps it’s because our focus is placed on one incident versus looking at the whole picture. The key is to step back and assess the whole rather than lock in on one aspect. 

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“It takes the practice of being aware. So it's just like a chef who learns how to taste their food and notice all the flavors in that dish. If they were to notice only the salt, that's all they would capture because they've only paid attention to the salty flavors,” she explains. “But when they are experienced in noticing all the subtleties, it becomes secondhand to them, right? It's a skill that can be developed. When we progress and are more comfortable with this internal communication, then we begin to progress as a chef  –  and thus the Emotion Chef progression.”

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Korte, who is a Sensory Perception and Emotion Management Strategist, says she hopes that readers of Yucky Yummy Savory Sweet recognize that our brain can get it wrong. In the book, she gives an example of a man who is a wine connoisseur and arrives at a party late. He walks into the room, sees an expensive bottle of wine, and proceeds to pour a glass. He delights over how lovely the wine is. The group who have gathered in the room erupts with laughter. He’s been had. The host poured a cheap wine into the expensive wine bottle. The man pauses, takes another sip, and realizes he’s been tricked. 

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“The wine didn't change; his brain predicted poorly based on his expectations,” Korte adds. “So when we understand that our brain is predictive, it can get those predictions wrong. The idea presented in the book is to try and reduce prediction error.”

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She also wants us to remember that our immune system, our emotions, sensory systems, our thought processes, and our physical health are interwoven. “So it’s critical to understand that how well we take care of our bodies impacts our emotional health and our future disease state. 

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Most of all, Korte emphasizes that awareness is the crux of everything. “Let’s just imagine that you could only see the bottom corner of a movie that you were watching in the theater. Would you ever know the true story? No. And so the concepts in Yucky Yummy Savory Sweet are to provide the skills to help us look at the full screen and take in more of what's going on around you to see a bigger picture.”

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We aren’t born with built-in emotional responses for every life event. However, we are born to feel emotions, and the emotions we feel are up to us; that is the premise of Korte’s message. Increased emotional awareness is associated with a better ability to manage stress, increased emotion regulation, and improved health and overall wellbeing

If you’re ready to set aside mediocre, habitual emotional responses to life’s challenges, Yucky Yummy Savory Sweet will offer you a new approach to achieving peace, presence, and contentment in your life.  Find out more at kimkorte.com