How To Master Your Emotions And Build MASSIVE Resilience | Ed Mylett

How to Master Your Emotions and Build Massive Resilience! What’s the secret to staying calm, focused, and resilient in the face of life’s challenges? In this episode, I’m bringing together some of the most profound minds in personal growth and emotional mastery to answer that very question. This mashup features insights from Rod Carew, Dr. Susan David, JP Sears, and Thais Gibson—each offering transformative strategies to help you take control of your emotional life and become unshakable. Rod Carew, a baseball legend, shares how he maintained emotional stability throughout a long and demanding career. He explains how developing "the sixth tool"—mastering his mindset—enabled him to perform under pressure and stay positive no matter the outcome. His wisdom on small adjustments and staying mentally strong is a game-changer for anyone striving to overcome slumps in business or life. Dr. Susan David, author of Emotional Agility, explores how our emotions serve as signposts to the things we value most. She challenges the myth of "positive thinking" and reveals why it’s crucial to sit with difficult emotions to find deeper meaning and strength. Her groundbreaking strategies will teach you to embrace your emotions as tools for growth, not as barriers. JP Sears brings his signature blend of humor and vulnerability to tackle the dangers of emotional numbness. He dives into how masking our feelings with humor or avoidance keeps us disconnected from our true selves. His approach to reclaiming emotional authenticity is both raw and inspiring, showing how vulnerability can lead to a more joyful and purposeful life. Thais Gibson rounds out the conversation with actionable insights into how beliefs and emotions drive our actions. She highlights the link between core beliefs and patterns of behavior, offering strategies to reprogram limiting beliefs and regain control over your choices. Key Takeaways: - The Power of Emotional Control: Learn how to manage your emotions under pressure, as Rod Carew did, and turn small wins into unstoppable momentum. - Embrace All Emotions: Dr. Susan David explains why all emotions—even the uncomfortable ones—are essential teachers for living a meaningful life. - Reclaim Authenticity: JP Sears shares how accepting vulnerability helps you experience the full spectrum of life’s highs and lows. - Rewire Limiting Beliefs: Thais Gibson demonstrates how changing your core beliefs can transform your emotional and behavioral patterns. This episode is packed with wisdom to help you navigate life’s challenges with grace, strength, and resilience. Whether you’re striving for peak performance, deeper self-awareness, or emotional freedom, this mashup has the tools to get you there. Remember, true strength isn’t about avoiding emotions—it’s about mastering them. Thank you for watching this video—Please Share it and get the word out! What part of this video resonated with you the most? Comment below! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ed Mylett?

  So hey guys, listen, we're all trying to get more productive and the question is, how do you find a way to get an edge? I'm a big believer that if you're getting mentoring or you're in an environment that causes growth, a growth-based environment, that you're much more likely to grow and you're going to grow faster. And that's why I love Growth Day. Growth Day is an app that my friend Brendan Burchard has created that I'm a big fan of. Write this down, growthday.com/ed. So if you want to be more productive, by the way, he's asked me, I post videos in there every single Monday that gets your day off to the right start. He's got about $5,000, $10,000 worth of courses that are in there that come with the app. Also, some of the top influencers in the world are all posting content and they're on a regular basis, like having the Avengers of personal development and business in one app. And I'm honored that he asked me to be a part of it as well and contribute on a weekly basis, and I do.

• 0:45Ed Mylett?

  So go over there and get signed up. You're going to get a free, tuition-free voucher to go to an event with Brendan and myself and a bunch of other influencers as well. So you get a free event out of it also. So go to growthday.com/ed. That's growthday.com/ed. I hear so many small business owners say the exact same thing. They just never have enough time in the day. Well, I measure time differently. I've compressed, condensed, heck, I've bent time. My first day is 6:00 a.m. to noon. My second day starts at noon and goes till 6:00 p.m. And my third day, 6:00 p.m. to midnight. I now get 21 days a week. Stack that up over a month, over a year, over five years, and my life's completely different than it would have been otherwise. And if you want to win as an entrepreneur, you have to compress your time too.

• 1:30Ed Mylett?

  And you definitely can't afford to waste it waiting weeks on a big bank for capital. Your best bet's to work with my friends at Cardiff. They know how to compress time for entrepreneurs. They get your business approved in minutes and funded the very same day. They're America's favorite small business lender, and for good reason. Over 20 years in business, over $12 billion deployed to small business across America. Stop letting bank delays slow down your momentum. Head to cardiff.co/ed. That's cardiff.co/ed. Cardiff.co. Real growth, fast funding. Cardiff, borrow better.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  This is the Ed Mylett Show.

• 2:13Ed Mylett?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome to my weekend special. I hope you enjoy the show. Be sure to follow the Ed Mylett Show on Apple and Spotify. Links are in the show notes. You'll never miss an episode that way. We're gonna talk about extending grace and kindness to people, but actually doing it during difficult times, during stressful situations, and why it matters that you do it. And I'm gonna tell you two stories from my life that both happened very recently that I thought, I have to teach this lesson today because it taught me one. And so, the first one happened, I did a post about this a few weeks ago, and it went pretty viral. So, I'm driving down the road, and I don't know if you've ever had this happen, but just someone's messing with you next to you, right? And this person was trying to agitate me, and they'd cut me off, and then, you know, then they went around me and were behind

• 2:56Ed Mylett?

  me and kind of riding my bumper, and then they were yelling, then they wanted to race me, and I'm like, come on, man. Like, I'm not that dude. I'm a grown man. I'm not gonna race you, right? But they were trying to agitate me, and they didn't. I didn't get upset. I thought, what a huge win. Like, I kept my emotions the way I wanted them. I stayed emotionally under control. I stayed poised. When me, maybe five years ago, certainly 10 or 15 years ago, you know how you'd be. You start yelling back at them, you get agitated, you get anxious, you get angry, and I was allowing outside stimulus to affect my internal emotions. And so, I thought, what a gigantic win. Like, this was awesome. I wasn't upset. I waved at them. I smiled. And you know what else I found out? When someone's trying

• 3:39Ed Mylett?

  to get under your skin, trying to get you negative, trying to get you angry, trying to get you distracted, right? Trying to get you to perform in a way that's not reflective of your real character, right? When you don't give in to that, man, it frustrates them. It was such a bonus for me to see this person getting more and more frustrated that I was just, I was living with equanimity. In my book, The Power of One More, I have a whole chapter on equanimity, which basically means, my version of it is, peace under duress, finding peace in a stressful situation and circumstance, and being able to live in that state, a state of equanimity.

• 4:15Ed Mylett?

  And I did. And I was very proud of myself because it's easy to do that when you're at a park or by a lake or on your boat or wherever, right? In a peaceful place, taking a walk with a dear friend. The simple things in life. But it's not so easy sometimes to do it when there's stress, when emotions get raised, when someone's intentionally trying to do harm to you. It was a better win than making a bunch of money by winning an award, by how well this podcast does. I felt so great that I won because winning in life is an emotional game. Your quality of your life is the quality of your emotions. Right? You don't want a bunch of money. You want how you think a bunch of money is going to make you feel if that's what you want. You don't even necessarily want a relationship. You want how you think that relationship will make you feel.

• 4:59Ed Mylett?

  You want to be super fit and jacked. You want how you think you will feel if you're super fit and jacked. So we're all trying to find is an emotion is a feeling. And what I find is you don't have to chase them. They're within you right now. And only, it only happens when you surrender that emotion to the outside circumstance that you lose or to a person. You're going to have someone, you may even right now, who's antagonistic towards you or is hating on you. Or just they cut you off on the road or they're at work and you're competing with them for a job and they're trying to undercut you, whatever it might be, right? Or if someone's rude to you in a restaurant, right? Or dismissive to you. It's very easy to allow what that outside stimulus does

• 5:42Ed Mylett?

  to infect your internal emotional thermostat level. And every time you stay in control of your emotions, you win. And that's a muscle you build. And I've found that it's pretty difficult now to get me to change my emotions based on your behavior. It's hard to get me to change my emotions based on the conditions around me. Yet I lived probably 50 years of my life where the conditions dictated my emotions. The treatment somebody gave me dictated my emotions, right? The circumstances around me dictated my emotions. The results dictated my emotions. And so you're probably nodding with me right now that you have a tendency to do that. And every time you don't and you stay in control and you stay kind, you stay graceful, you stay in a state of equanimity. And peace.

• 6:28Ed Mylett?

  What ends up happening is you win and you build a muscle that becomes stronger and stronger and stronger. And that's what resilience is. That's what it is. That's what building something great in your life is all about. Is doing it over and over and over again and developing the pattern of building the emotions we want. Really, we learn these negative emotional patterns as children. Don't we? When something doesn't go our way, we start screaming and crying, right? Or we fall down and, you know, we get really upset. Or someone does something to us at school and we come home very sad. So we start these patterns very young in our life and we never undo them. And we all have what I call like an emotional home. And what that means is that in your life, you know, no matter what the circumstances are, most people have a pattern of emotions they're going to get back. So for some people, that pattern is,

• 7:12Ed Mylett?

  you know, they find every single day of their life, they find a way back to grace and peace and bliss and ecstasy and joy and passion. For other people though, no matter what the circumstances are, they find a way to get their anger, to get their anxiety, to get their worry, to get their fear. I remember, I'll tell you a quick story. Many, many years ago, I was blessed that I was doing very well financially, finally, in my life. And I was building my first dream home. And the contractor had messed something up that day. And I had appointment canceled and another client of mine changed their mind. And then I, the house was under construction. I walked in, I was mad at the contractor. I walked in there angry and stressed and, ah, you know. And I looked and there were a group of gentlemen who were working on my kitchen. They were all carpenters. They all happened to be from Mexico.

• 7:57Ed Mylett?

  And I watched them and I'm standing in my mansion, okay? That was being built. Angry and frustrated and frankly scared. Anger is usually, the other side of the coin is fear. Scared. All the emotions I didn't want, I'm experiencing in my body. That was my life experience at that moment. Who cared that I had money or a mansion or those things? Because it wasn't giving me those emotions then that I thought it was going to give me. And I was watching these men in my kitchen. And all of them, they had their mariachi music on. Most of these men were not making a lot of money, by the way. They had left their families in Mexico and most of them were working here to send money back home to their family. I later got to know many of them pretty well because they were there for a long time and I befriended most of them.

• 8:37Ed Mylett?

  But as I watched them, they were singing and dancing and enjoying their time and laughing and cracking jokes with another. Meanwhile, doing work that they were great at, that was meaningful, that was beautiful. And in that moment, if you said, who's winning the game of life? The guy with the mansion? Or the men who were building it for him? And in that moment, they were winning the life game because they were doing work that mattered to them, that they were passionate about. They were laughing, they were joyous, they were in a blissful state. They had a state of equanimity and joy and passion and focus about what they were doing. And meanwhile, the rich guy with the mansion over there, he was in a state of anger and fear and frustration and worry and angst.

• 9:20Ed Mylett?

  So if the quality of our emotions are the quality of our life, I remember clearly in that moment, watching these men, there were six of them, in this kitchen that was being built, thinking, they're winning the game of life right now. I'm losing it. Yet the outside world would probably say, the guy with the mansion's winning. That's not winning. Winning is, are you in control of the emotions that you want? And somehow, we get our emotional home. You'd ask yourself, what's your emotional home currently? Like, over the last six months, what's the primary emotion you feel every day? Is it fear? Is it frustration? Is it anger? Is it worry? Is it depression? Is it frustration? Is it just sort of blah? Or are you getting a whole bunch of peace and a whole bunch of bliss and a whole bunch of happiness and joy and ecstasy?

• 10:06Ed Mylett?

  Or not? Are you doing work that means something to you and you feel a sense of contribution from it? And growth from it? Or do you not? And so for me, I had to evaluate that. And so, between the ride in the car that I had that day, and that man in the mansion, I've grown a lot. And so I'm proof today that you can do it because it's a pattern that you built. And then the other thing is, For me, the pathway to feeling these emotions is my ability to extend grace and kindness to other human beings. We're in a world today where we're so divided and at each other's throats it seems and, you know, we're all, we all believe we're separate. There's separate people. You're this, I'm that. You believe that, I believe this. You're from there, I'm from here.

• 10:51Ed Mylett?

  All these different things in life, the different religious conflicts that we have, the wars that we're in, but even just the day-to-day way we treat one another, there's not enough kindness. And so my, my call to you today, my plea to you today is to begin to live a life where even more, even if you're doing it, to extend more grace and kindness to people in your everyday life. And then the measure of it also is can you do it when they don't extend it to you? See, that guy in the car that day wasn't extending me any of those things, but I extended grace and kindness back to him. See, it's easy to be kind and, and gentle and, and beautiful with people when they're doing that for you. But what happens when they're not? Because that tells us who you really are, doesn't it? It tells me who I really am.

• 11:36Ed Mylett?

  Can I extend kindness and grace to you when you're not behaving in a way that's worthy of it? When you're antagonistic towards me? You know, I'm in a little bit of a business thing right now where there's some strife in one of my businesses and everyone's being so horrible to one another. And it's my ability to not reciprocate, not reduce myself to that level and extend them grace. I don't know what they're going through. I don't know what problems they have. Give them kindness and grace when really they're not even earning it right now. But I'm worth giving it to them because it makes me feel better about me when I give somebody that grace. I'll give you an example, last story. Several weeks ago, I was out to dinner with my family. It was a pretty nice restaurant, not crazy nice, but pretty nice.

• 12:21Ed Mylett?

  And there was a family at the table right next to us. And right when we walked in, I could hear this family in the lobby. And the kids were real rowdy. You can picture it, you've been somewhere like this, not just a little rowdy, I'm talking about like screaming and yelling and, you know, running around the table during the meal. It was a decent restaurant, right? It was distracting to other people in the restaurant. And I remember- We sat next to them. You can imagine probably like I was like, oh, man, I just wanted to have a nice, beautiful meal with my family. And now I'm gonna deal with this all, all night. And I did deal with it. They were, these kids were misbehaving pretty heavy. And you know, there's that part of you when you look at the parents, you're like, discipline your kids. I started judging them. I would never let my kids act out like that.

• 13:05Ed Mylett?

  Have your kids sit down. Tell them to be quiet. Have them put the napkin on their lap. Like, you know, they're yelling at each other. This is a restaurant. There's decorum here. There's manners. And so I found myself not only tending towards frustration with the noise level and the kids, but also judging the parents. Judgment and frustration. And I'm not kidding you because I know I do this for a living. I went, are these the emotions I want to experience during this meal? Is this what I'm gonna do at dinner? I get this two hour dinner too. So I'm gonna choose to be judgmental, angry, frustrated, and totally distracted with their table instead of present with these people that I love. Can I in this moment find a way to extend grace? And kindness to that family?

• 13:51Ed Mylett?

  And I did. I made this shift, which surprised my own family, frankly, I think. And I was totally present with my family. And laughing and blissful as this chaos was going on. Now that's a test for your emotional makeup, right? And so they ended up leaving about three quarters of the way through our meal. And I remember literally going, I could see other people in the restaurant like, ah, they're gone.

• 14:16Ed Mylett?

  And I had a lot of judgment that I could have had. Anyway, a few days later, something incredible happened. I was at the golf course. I was hitting some balls on the driving range. And the man next to me, I looked up and it was the server from two nights before at the restaurant. And he walks over and says, Mr. Milet, thank you for such a great experience. You made me feel so good about myself. I'm sorry for the noise level at that table over there. And I go, yeah, it was. And he says, yeah, they're, um, they're, they came back from the funeral of their grandmother.

• 14:47Ed Mylett?

  And I went, what? Yeah, they had just returned from the grandchildren's. Their grandmother passed away. And so they had come back from the funeral to have dinner. And the kids were pretty wound up. And the wife was very, very sad. It was her mom. And the son and the wife had met when they were young. So she was like, like, like his mother too. And I went, oh, wow. And I went, hmm. The old me, I would have judged that family. I would have spent my entire meal obsessed with their inability to parent their kids and the noise and how crazy it was. Yet I was so grateful. And by the way, I've made this mistake 100 times. So I'm just telling you the one time I've done it. I did extend grace to them and kindness because you never know what someone's going through. You never know what battle someone's fighting. You never know what burden they're carrying.

• 15:32Ed Mylett?

  You don't know what someone had just recently done to them. You don't know what they're acting out of. You don't know what pain they're acting out of or stress they're acting out of or loss in this case, they're acting out of. And so remember that when you go to judge, remember that when you go to react, that you don't know what that person's carrying. And your ability to be a superhuman has nothing to do with your ability to lift a bunch of weights or build muscles or make millions and millions of dollars. Superhuman is a person who treats other humans in a superhuman way, even when they don't appear to be worthy of it or deserve it. That's when you've done something superhuman in your life. So I wanted to challenge you today to really reflect on where can you be more kind?

• 16:15Ed Mylett?

  What would our world look like if everybody just took a moment and gave their other fellow human beings, their brothers and sisters, just a little bit more grace, a little bit more understanding, a little bit more kindness and went out of their way to express that to somebody? And what you're going to find is that when you give someone that gift, you're giving it to you because now your emotional home becomes equanimity. It becomes peaceful. It becomes blissful. So what I'm saying to you is the way I control my internal environment, ironically, is the way that I treat people in my external environment, not the external environment dictating it to me. I dictate it to the external environment. And so I just ask you, maybe the next time you walk by a stranger, just say a quick prayer for them.

• 17:00Ed Mylett?

  Peace be with you. I wish you well. I wish you wealth. I wish you health. Just quiet prayers for people, quiet thoughts, quiet kindness, quiet gift of grace. And I think our world will be a whole lot better, but your internal world will be better. This episode is sponsored by Ro. A lot of people assume GLP-1's cost a fortune, and that assumption keeps them from even looking into treatment. Ro helps people find a more affordable path to FDA-approved GLP-1 treatment. Ro wants to help people lose weight. That's why they have more affordable GLP-1 options, whether you're paying with insurance or cash. Ro's free insurance checker makes it easy to see if you're covered for GLP-1 injections. Just submit your insurance card and Ro handles the rest. No paperwork, no waiting on hold, no confusing phone calls.

• 17:44Ed Mylett?

  And if insurance doesn't cover treatment, there are still options. Ro offers the lowest-cost cash-pay FDA-approved GLP-1s, such as daily pills and multi-dose pens. I use products by Ro, and you should too. Go to ro.co/milet to see if you qualify. That's R-O dot C-O slash Milet to get started on Ro. For side effects of GLP-1 medications, including boxed warning, go to ro.co/safety. Ro dot C-O slash safety. So when I end up buying the island, we had to do all of our outdoor decorating, and I spent a fortune in the first half of the place. And I'm like, I don't want to do this anymore, but I want the best stuff. And that's where Wayfair came in. My wife wanted to get this new garden bed, and Wayfair was the place that offered the perfect solution. Wayfair also helps you create a home

• 18:29Ed Mylett?

  that stands up to real life with quality products, great value, and trusted reviews. Wayfair verified products are hand-vetted by product specialists that use a 10-point quality inspection system. Here's all I can tell you. The stuff has lasted over time. It looks great, and I get compliments on it. Shop thousands of products across every style and budget, whether you're trying to refresh your space for fall or transform your space for Halloween. Use filters, custom photos, and reviews to find the right fit for your home. More than 20 million verified 5-star reviews. 20 million. So transform your space with the pieces that hold up to real life. Join Wayfair Rewards today and get 5% back on every purchase. Head to wayfair.com or shop the Wayfair app for all things home. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com.

• 19:19Ed Mylett?

  Very short intermission here, folks. I'm glad you're enjoying the show so far. Don't forget to follow the show on Apple and Spotify. Links are in the show notes. Now on to our next guest.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome back to Franklin Covey's On Leadership Podcast series, the world's largest weekly podcast dedicated to the topic of leadership. I'm Scott Miller, host and interviewer each week. I do not say this about all the guests because it's not true. He is my favorite interviewer in our first 200-plus episodes, Ed Milat. Welcome back to On Leadership.

• 19:51Ed Mylett?

  Brother, that's a pretty big introduction right there to live up to. So, thank you so much.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  Whenever I interview someone, I always read their book. I do my best to read it cover to cover. I research them. I watch other interviews, listen to interviews that others have asked, to make sure that this one is unique. However, I watched the entire hour and 40-minute interview that Jamie Kern Lima, she wrote a book called Believe It, a fabulously successful entrepreneur in her own right, when she interviewed you. And she teed up a story that I think is so remarkable. I'm going to have you repeat it on this podcast. And it really was this idea about being seen. It's about how each of us, as leaders, as parents, as friends, as entrepreneurs, we have the power to help others believe in themselves and be seen. You shared a story I think about, maybe was it your first-grade teacher?

• 20:38Speaker 02

  Would you take a few moments and just recap the story? Because I've thought about it multiple times since I listened to your interview with Jamie Kern Lima. And I think it's worth repeating on our podcast.

• 20:50Ed Mylett?

  It's a hard story for me, brother. You're going right to it. So, yes, my first-grade teacher was Mrs. Smith. And, you know, most things in leadership are caught, not taught. You catch it. And I caught something this day from this beautiful soul. Mrs. Smith knew that I came from a broken family. And she knew that I was being teased at school. I was Eddie Spaghetti. I would get bullied at school. She could see the stress on me every morning. And I didn't know this in first grade, but now as a grown man, looking back, I know. And she knew I had no self-esteem. She knew that I didn't think I was very smart. I didn't think I had any valuable. I was invisible. When you come from a family like that, brother, every morning you walk out of your home, you're ashamed. You know, why can't my, why don't my friends not want to come over?

• 21:35Ed Mylett?

  Because my dad's yelling all the time. Why can't I come from what I ever thought was a normal family? And so I would carry that every day in school and I was this little boy that was just sad. And had no self belief whatsoever. I felt completely invisible and worthless. And she set up this scenario, bro, where we had to take tests for the state. And she set this all up. I didn't know it. And she had this other teacher come in the room, it was actually the vice principal come in the room and say, "Mrs. Smith, I need your smartest student. I need the brightest person you have in here because this student's gonna represent this whole class as the leader and take these tests for us. And um, I need you to pick them." And I didn't know this, but she had set all that up.

• 22:19Ed Mylett?

  And she goes, "Oh, well, that's little Eddie." And I looked up and I went, "Me?" And she goes, and she kinda mouthed, "It's little Eddie." And all of a sudden, for the first time in my life, man, someone saw me. Someone told me I was special. Someone said something great about me. And that little boy got up, me, and I walked to the back of that class and I think I was walking on clouds. And it changed my life because it was the first time ever that someone said, "I see you. You matter. You're special. You're important." What she was really saying is, "I love you. I care about you. I believe in you." And it changed my life. And to this day, I owe

• 23:04Ed Mylett?

  so much of my life to Mrs. Smith because so many people, man, are going through this world right now, not feeling seen, feeling invisible, feeling worthless, feeling like I'm just average or below average. Who cares? And, and she changed my life in that moment. I, I, I, I am almost incapable of telling that story without crying because my whole life, no one ever made me feel that way. And I remember that day, thinking, "I would love to make, sorry, I get choked up now. I would love to make other people feel the way she's making me feel right now." And it changed my life because after that day, I thought, well, maybe I'm not stupid. Maybe I do have value. And I didn't believe it all the time. But all of a sudden, I said, maybe.

• 23:47Ed Mylett?

  And it opened my life up to the possibility that maybe I could do something great in my life. Maybe I was special. Maybe, maybe I had value. Without that day and without Mrs. Smith, I am not talking to you right now for sure. And I think most people undervalue their ability to impact another human being's life. They don't understand that one decision, one gesture, one thought, one emotion can change another person's life. And Mrs. Smith definitely did that. And that's why I'm sitting here. She is one of those people in my life for sure, and probably the main person.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  Ed, your vulnerability is a gift you're giving to all of us. When I read this passage and heard the story on your interview with J M B Kern Lima, I thought about the first time my father told me he was proud of me. I was 32 years old. I was at the Minneapolis airport. I was boarding a plane from the funeral of his mother, my grandmother. And my father put his arm on my shoulder at like the, at the, as I was getting in a cab. And he said, "Son, I'm proud of you." I was 32. Unlike you, I did not come from a broken home. I came from a very stable, middle-class environment. But I think my father's, dad died when he was 10, didn't have a role model there. My parents, my mom's parents were alcoholics, and so they didn't know how to parent.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  But as I looked, as I listened to your story and I hear you talk about this, all of us as leaders, whether we're formal or informal leaders in companies, we also have the power to help people be seen, not artificially, but to validate in them their worth. You're a leader of a large company. You've hired and trained and on-boarded and terminated thousands of people in your career, many companies you own. Speak to the thousands of people who are listening and watching, millions, that are in fact leaders of people, whether they are parents or formal leaders. What are some things they can do today to make sure those in their purview feel seen?

• 25:40Ed Mylett?

  Seriously get to know their gifts. So each human being comes with them a set of giftedness that they know to be true about themselves. By the way, there's two or three or four of them. It could be their kindness, their intellect, their humor, their beauty, their resiliency. You know, their vision. There's all kinds of gifts, their patience. And these, if you end up pointing out those gifts to somebody in their life and you say, look, I see you. By the way, it's when they go, you're gonna do great. You're awesome, you're incredible. That's just, that's just floats by somebody. But if you say, you're gonna do incredible because, and then you tell me something about me that I know to be true. You know why Ed, you know why you're gonna be incredible here? Not because you're the smartest guy in the world, even though you're a bright guy. Because you love your family so much, man. You will fight for your family. You will do anything for your family.

• 26:24Ed Mylett?

  And I'll go, whoa, that is true about me. Or you know why you're gonna do very well here, Lisa? Because you care so deeply. You've got this heart to serve people. Your intentions are so good. That's why. So it's when you link what you'd like them to do to the gift they have that they already believe to be true about them. Now, you got it. Now you're leading. Now you're changing them. By the way, you will be on this many, I'm showing one hand up. You will be one of one to five people in their entire life that made them feel this way. You're 32 years old and how much that stood out from your dad. And if I said to you, who are the two or three people in your life, Scott, that have really believed in you? There's not 30. If you're lucky, there's two or three.

• 27:08Ed Mylett?

  For me, it's Mrs. Smith, right? A couple of coaches I've had. And these are the people that I cherish in my life because they found something in me. If you're a person of faith, they found God in you. They found the gift in you. And so this is what great leaders do. They take the time, even if it's in brief, to say, well, I see this special in you. You're special because that makes me feel seen. Not you're awesome, you're incredible, thanks for being here, grateful for you. Nah, that's nothing. I see you. And let me tell you what I see. I see X, Y, and Z. And then they go, now they really, they will never leave you. They will be loyal forever. They will be talking about you on podcasts 20 and 30 years later.

• 27:50Ed Mylett?

  Like I am with Mrs. Smith, 45 years later. That's how deeply a leader can impact someone's life when they see the giftedness in them.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  Ed, next time, can you bring some passion and energy? Ed, the book is The Power of One More. And each of your chapters has this concept, one more identity, one more try, one more association, one more dream, one more question, one more goal, one more standard. Without question, my favorite chapter in the book is this idea of one more emotion. And I want to kind of congeal our time around this. I'm gonna read a passage from your book. "People are a composite of a small handful of emotions they live with every day. These emotions create our emotional homes. Like any home, your emotional home may not be perfect, but it's comfortable."

• 28:49Speaker 02

  Riff on that.

• 28:51Ed Mylett?

  Well, we all have these three or four emotions. If you take a given week or month of your life, and I said to you, okay, there's a series of emotions you get no matter what the external is, right? So sometimes those emotions are joy, ecstasy, peace, passion, right? Comfort, or it could be anxiety, worry, fear, depression, anger, whatever it might be. But you have these three or four emotions you're gonna get, because our mind and our spirit moves towards what it's most familiar with. So we create a home. Oftentimes, this emotional home was installed in us when we were defenseless as children. And we just carry it. So it's a different set of circumstances, a different set of results, but basically, we live in this home. And their emotions aren't negative or positive. You'll say, "Oh, fear, terrible emotion." Well, depends on the dosage of it.

• 29:36Ed Mylett?

  Fear can cause you to focus. Fear can cause you to prepare. So there's a healthy dose of it. I don't look at emotions as negative or positive. It's the abundance of it. But if you're living in anxiety, you live in fear, you live in worry. We all find a way to get those emotions, no matter what, in a given week. Things are great, things are bad. If you're a warrior, you'll find a way to get you some worry. And even though it may not serve you, it's home for you. You're familiar. I'll give you an example, Scott. My, one of my emotional homes has been for years, even though I've worked on getting more peace, more bliss, more happiness, I've been intentional about getting these emotions. We're, we're, human beings get what they want. We set a goal up, we're intentional about getting it. But do we really want the jet, or the promotion, or the money? Or do we want how we think those things will make us feel?

• 30:22Ed Mylett?

  And so we keep having these goals about things and achievements and levels. But what we really want is how we think it'll make us feel. But what if we had those goals, but we also had intention about how those feelings are? So I want more peace, I want more passion, I want more joy. If we start to be intentional about the emotions, we can change them. I have this one that's been coming up, up until about a year ago, and it's chaos. One of my emotional homes is chaos. And I would even brag, Scott, I function well under stress and chaos. I'm a warrior under stress and chaos, which was true, I'm familiar with it, I'm very functional in it. But I had to ask myself, do I like living in it? Is this something I want to have when I'm sixty, seventy?

• 31:06Ed Mylett?

  Did I really need it when I was thirty? No, it's familiar, so I get it. No matter how good things are going, Ed Mylett finds a way to get a little chaos. Ed Mylett finds a way to get a little worry, because I like it, it's where I live. And the truth is, it didn't serve me. Why? Why do I have chaos? I'm the son of an alcoholic. You grow up in an alcoholic household, there's chaos, nothing's stable. Who's coming home today? What's gonna happen? Are we going to a restaurant, is dad gonna yell at somebody? Are we safe driving in the car? How are mom and dad getting along? Right, what happened at work? Chaos, and I became familiar with chaos, and I carried it into my forties. And even probably truly till I was about fifty. So these emotional homes are where we live.

• 31:50Ed Mylett?

  And if we begin to become more intentional about the emotions we want, not the things and achievements we want, now we'll change our life. And what's crazy enough about it is, when we get the emotions, the things become much easier to have also. Some of us are hooked on a false belief. Let me just finish with this, Scott. We think, I know I have it, but it's kind of part of my recipe to success and achievement. So this chaos thing, although it's really painful, it's one of the recipes to why I've produced such great results. Is that really true? Or have you done it in spite of it? And what I found out in my life is these emotions that don't serve me that I have regularly, I achieved in spite of them, not because of them.

• 32:31Ed Mylett?

  And so I take you through in the book, Strategies of How to Create a New Emotional Home, because our lives are our emotions. And I can say one more little thing on that. It's not the events of our life that define us. It's the meaning we attach to the event, and that meaning creates an emotion. And if you're familiar with an emotion, you will start creating meanings to deliver that to you about everything that happens. Perfect example, you and I left right now, God forbid there was an accident out in front of my house. A family was killed in front of us, one of the worst possible things we could experience. Our emotion would be sadness, tragedy, my gosh, you know, pain. That same exact event, Mother Teresa, if she were alive, witnessed.

• 33:14Ed Mylett?

  Her belief system in her life was that the greatest honor of her life, Scott, was to be with someone when their soul leaves here and goes to heaven. Same exact event, different meaning. She'd get peace and joy from that situation. Believe it or not, it's true, you can look it up. That's an extreme example. So, these emotions we have create meanings to events that don't serve us also. That's how important it is.

• 33:36Speaker 02

  I think it's the most profound chapter in the book, because you talk about how we are our emotions. We are our emotions. And it stopped me in the book, and I sat down and I talked about my emotional house. And I wrote down what were my, you know, five or six emotions. Will you take us a step further, Ed, and maybe instruct those who are listening and watching, how we can better declutter our emotions? How we can determine which ones should stay in our house, and which ones serve us for what reasons? Take that a bit further, if you will.

• 34:09Ed Mylett?

  Yes, so, I always ask myself, the things I want, why do I want them? What do I think they'll give me? This is the pathway to the emotions that my heart is seeking. So, I want the, I want $10 million saved. Well, why? Because I think that'll make me feel safe. I'll never be broke again. And so now I know safety is an emotion that I, my heart is seeking. I've just made the conditions impossible to feel it. And so this is one of the ways we become really focused on the emotions that we want. The other thing in life is that I had this beautiful experience happen to me, brother, where I was very young, I won a contest to go to Hawaii. And I'm running on the beach in the morning, it was before the sun was up. And running towards me was this man. And God's just been so good to me.

• 34:52Ed Mylett?

  The man running towards me was bald, I could see him in the distance, sweaty, had like a hairy back. I'm like, oh, who's this guy? He's running towards me. And as he gets closer, I realized that it's Wayne Dyer. Dr. Wayne Dyer. Most of your audience would know who Wayne is. If you don't, they look him up. But he's one of the all-time great spiritual and thought leaders, personal development gurus of all time. He runs by me, it's so long ago, I got a Sony Walkman on, so does he. And I pull mine off, I'm listening to a cassette. I said, "Dr. Dyer, you changed my life." And he turns back, he had a deep voice like me, he goes, "Well, I, I highly doubt that. I bet you changed your life, but how did I help you?" And he walks towards me, Scott, and here I am, a young man, I end up sitting on the beach and watching the sun come up with Wayne Dyer for about an hour and a half.

• 35:37Ed Mylett?

  And at the end of that hour and a half, he said, "Ed, I don't say this lightly, I think you're gonna change the world. In fact, I know it." And I'm sure he had said that to other people, but to me, I was the only person he ever said that to. And he goes, "And by the way, you're incredibly bright. Your ability to articulate your thoughts, I, he goes, "I feel things, Ed, when you speak. I don't know what planet you're from, but it's not this planet. There's something when you speak, I feel something, and I'm right here with you." And I said, "Thank you." And he goes, "And that's not why. Would you please do me a favor? If you want to have happiness in your life?" I said, "Tell me, please." He said, "Never attach your emotions or your happiness to your abilities or your achievements, because you'll be chasing them all your life, and when and if they fail, you'll be lost."

• 36:19Ed Mylett?

  He said, "What if you attached your happiness and your emotions to your intentions?"

• 36:26Ed Mylett?

  And it changed my life and was a gift to me at that time because prior to that, just like you said with your dad, I thought love was what I achieved. If I had a home run, my dad said he loved me. If I got straight A's, I got affection from my family. So everything was attached to the external result I would produce. Then I'd let myself feel the emotion just for a little bit. Then I'd get back to my emotional home. Sorry, I'm moving on your podcast here. He said, don't move. So he said, Ed, if you'll start to attach your bliss to your intentions. He said, Ed, you're going to change the world because you have such a good heart. You're such a good man. Because of the way you grew up, you care so deeply about people. It's special, Ed, and they feel things from you. Please, the rest of your life, attach your emotions to your intentions

• 37:10Ed Mylett?

  and you'll never be without the ones you want. And I've pretty much done that, brother. So I'll remind myself before a podcast like this, when I want some confidence and some strength in my emotions and some peace. I remind myself not of my ability to communicate or what I know, but my intention to serve people. When I close my eyes at night and I pray, I remind myself of my intent to make a difference, my intent to be a good man. And I feel that peace. And so I would remind everybody to get clear and intentional about the emotions you want, but to attach them to your intent, not your ability, not the external. And that was a life-changing, life-altering moment. What I didn't know is, of course, he was writing a book at that time called The Power of Intention, which is a book I would also recommend to people to read.

• 37:55Ed Mylett?

  Today's going to be special because the man that I have on the program, there is only one of in the world, like literally, he's one of a kind. And he is just one of my favorite people to listen to, to watch. I've gone to see him perform in person. He's a comedian, he's an entertainer, he's a life coach, he's an author. So JP Sears, thank you for being here, brother.

• 38:16JP Sears?

  Ed, thank you for having me on, brother. It is beyond an honor to be here. I'm a fan of yours, have been since day one, and I'm so grateful to now be a friend. So there's nowhere else I'd want to be.

• 38:30Ed Mylett?

  It's hard to interview you, I was prepping, because I think you know this about you. It's hard to know when you're saying what you really think and when you're being funny sometimes.

• 38:41JP Sears?

  I have no idea, so.

• 38:47Ed Mylett?

  So speaking of that, let's start out there for a minute. Where's this style? So everybody has a style, I think. That's usually an overused term. Sometimes it's just our authentic personality. But there's nobody like you and you're able to use humor satire, yet then the next second, there's this deep lesson that I catch from you. How did that start? Like, did you start out as a life coach and then say, "I'm gonna kind of hide this humorous side of me," and then there was just this one day where you went, "I can't hide this anymore," or that's a risk that you took in being that way, for sure.

• 39:22JP Sears?

  Yeah, you know, my inner idiot had me hiding a great gift for many years because it was telling me it would be bad to let my gift out. So, yeah, I started off as a life coach. I had been doing life coaching, especially emotional healing coaching with people for 13 years before I put out my first comedy video. And during that time, I'd look at my natural sense of humor that had been very prolific in my personal life ever since I was a kid and still was, yet look at it and say, "Humor would be bad for business. It discredit you as a life coach, as a spiritual guy. You should be serious, JP."

• 40:04JP Sears?

  So, I was doing meaningful work, yet excluding a lot of parts of me. I was giving people some authentic JP, but definitely not the whole pie of authenticity. And then, five, five and a half years ago at this point, I started to betray that story that it would be bad for business to let my humor out because I kept having these ideas come to me in flashes. And they were in the form of video ideas where I'm sharing my perspective through the language of comedy. Now, like, anything poopy, I did my best to constipate those thoughts and ideas.

• 40:45JP Sears?

  I'd hold them down, like, "Oh, I'm accidentally thinking of those exciting ideas. What's wrong with me?" But eventually, like, the itch became too great. I had to scratch it. So, I made my first comedy video, released on October 5, 2014. And, man, that woke something up inside of me. I mean, it woke up an expression of creativity that I had never known before. And it's like, it was my expression, you know, like Van Gogh has his paintings, like, "Ooh, okay, comedy on video and on stage. This is my expression." And on the inside, I just have to say this as well. What was happening on the inside was more important because it was me saying yes

• 41:30JP Sears?

  to a part of me that I judged to be defective enough that he would screw up my career. It's like I was on that first video, it was like an initiation where I was taking my inner child out of the basement where I locked him, reclaiming him and saying, not only do you have a place in my life, you are the gift in my life. And, and I think ever since then, my work doing conscious comedy is led by the five year old inner child in me at different ages, but it's like, dude, I, the more I'm just a kid, sharing the truth as I know it, giving voice to what's not being said, the, the more things work out well for me.

• 42:15Ed Mylett?

  That's a, by the way, we're five minutes into this and I would already tell everybody, rewind and go back and watch that. Like, that one phrase you use, brother, there about betraying that kind of BS story you tell yourself. And wow, I, it's funny that you say it the way you say it. Everyone listening to that has that thing too, where there's this part of themselves they want to express, but there's this fear that if they do, it'll hurt other things they have. I remember when I started speaking, I was a one trick pony when I spoke, which was intensity. You know, a natural, easy emotion for me to get is intensity, or even maybe even a bordering on anger. And I was willing on stage to be vulnerable, many of you might relate to this, to express one of my emotions, almost like that was a safe emotion for me to express was anger.

• 43:00Ed Mylett?

  And a lot of you have that one or two emotions that you feel safe expressing, but there's all these other ones that are unsafe to express. And so on stage for me to be vulnerable, or emotional, or, or show that my weaknesses or the things I fear, I would never go there as a speaker. And it was only when that itch finally got scratched, that I became kind of my own self on stage. And then all of these other ideas and expressions started to come out of me, when I started to betray that crappy story I was telling myself. So I, I love that about you. One thing about, the other thing JP, that I've heard you say, not a lot of people admit to, was that I got into coaching or personal, all myself help, whatever you want to be, thinking. I'm really gonna teach this stuff to other people.

• 43:43JP Sears?

  Yeah.

• 43:44Ed Mylett?

  I could really help people. I'm a pretty good expressive person like you are. I'm like, I'm gonna use my gift of expression and words and articulation to help people with all these things. But that was a lie. I really got into personal development to help heal and grow myself. And I've heard you say the same thing. I'm curious, do you even know what it was you were trying to heal or grow from that caused you to get into the space itself?

• 44:08JP Sears?

  Well, looking back, I do. But dude, in the moment, if you would have took a blood draw of nineteen year old JP, you would have found very high arrogant levels. And, you know, I'm thinking like, dude, I'm gonna like work with people because I'm so strong and stable and like, I just wanna help the the weak people. But I was constructing my sense of strength off of what I now call weakness. You know, at the time when I was nineteen, twenty, I hadn't cried for eight years. And I thought that made me strong. I thought that meant I'm emotionally stable. But I'll never forget the very first workshop I took with a powerful mentor of mine, a guy

• 44:53JP Sears?

  named John McMullin, runs an organization called Journeys of Wisdom. He's, to this day, he's seventy nine years young, one of the most playful people I I know. But the afternoon of that first workshop, I cried for the first time in eight years. And it was, I was crying about stuff. It wasn't happening in that moment. It was stuff that happened thirteen years before, in my childhood, fourteen, fifteen years before. All the emotions were still there. I was just numb to them. But the tears were coming out because this was a wise man. I was an ignorant man. So now, looking

• 45:33JP Sears?

  back, I could realize, one of the things I needed to reclaim was my emotions. I was so emotionally numb. And, you know, our late, great friend Carl Jung, this psychiatrist, he died, I think, nineteen sixty-three. He's one of my favorite quotes of all time. He says, "Feelings are the language of the soul." And if that's half true, that meant I was dramatically disconnected from my soul. Life doesn't feel great. It doesn't feel fulfilling. It doesn't feel purposeful when you don't have your soul speaking to you through its language called emotions and feelings.

• 46:14JP Sears?

  And you know, on top of that, I all, you know, I also had some more nuanced issues. I grew up being a rescuer. Let me sacrifice my needs, take care of mom and dad, my sister, make sure everybody's strong and stable because it feels like the world's falling apart around me. So let me just be Mr. Fix It. And not that any kid can, but I could have a sense of control that gave me the illusion of, oh, I'm fixing that. So it feels like I'm not gonna die either. So man, I, in, and I want, I want to give myself a little bit of credit. I've come a long way and I have infinity yet to go with my healing and growth and

• 46:57JP Sears?

  connection to my emotional vulnerability and knowing who the hell I am as a person.

• 47:04Ed Mylett?

  I connect so much with you and, um, I gotta tell you, uh, I think millions of people do. This idea of numbness, you, you, you explained to me early on in my life, too. I used to think, well, if I can't, if I don't feel this pain, then I'm actually probably not having it.

• 47:23JP Sears?

  Yeah.

• 47:24Ed Mylett?

  I think a lot of people express them. So I think, well, I've, you've got all these coping skills you built up. I remember I was at my, tell you something personal, I was at my grandfather's funeral. I don't know what age I was. I was 15, 16 years old. And appropriately, everybody in my family was crying at the funeral. And I remember going, why can't I cry? Like, well, I loved him so much too, right? But I can't, why can't I feel like they feel? This isn't, this isn't good. This isn't healthy. I had learned all these skills like you did from coming from kind of dysfunctional family. I think you can share them in years. I kind of found ways to not feel things. And so as I got older, I thought that meant I don't have any pain.

• 48:07JP Sears?

  Yeah.

• 48:07Ed Mylett?

  Really what I had done is masked it. Do you mind sharing a little bit like, if you don't want to, it's okay. But why did you begin to build these skills of numbness? Was it dysfunction in your family? Was it some particular event? Or what was it?

• 48:20JP Sears?

  You know, uh, yes to all of that. I, I think in the The most pervading pressure that caused me to cope in a way where I created psychological dissociation from my own emotions and therefore I was numb was like my, when I was younger, my parents would split apart. We're getting a divorce. Then a few months later, no, we're not anymore. A couple of months later, now we're definitely getting a divorce. And they did that a lot. And like, at the time, I'm like, okay, just tell me what you're doing. I don't care. Like, it didn't affect me. Yet, looking at that, I can realize that was

• 49:02JP Sears?

  very influential. Having, having a child's world split apart. And we, how was your world split apart is a question we all have an answer to. For some people, it's trauma, it's abuse. For some people, it's family secrets. Like, mom drinks all the time, but we all act like she does. And for some of it's parents splitting apart. Other times, it's other hardships. Other times, we're bullied at school. You know, it's adversity we all have because we all need it. You can only be as strong as the adversity from which you overcame. Yet, this is my adversity. It feels like my world's splitting apart. And in order to feel like I'm keeping my world put together, I'm gonna try to take

• 49:45JP Sears?

  care of mom and dad, keep them as happy as I can, which means my emotions don't have a place. Because I can't be unstable, because that'll make mom and dad care for me and give me their attention. But they need their attention on their own lives. So I appeared to be strong and stable, and I thought I was. But man, is numbness is temporary relief and long-term increased suffering. You know, we just think, I know anytime we're in pain, like, last night, I threw my back out because I'm squatting with more weight relative to an old back injury that wasn't quite rehabbed. Surprise. It's like, okay, I threw my back

• 50:30JP Sears?

  out, I racked the weight. I wish I could have felt numb, but I'm feeling the pain. And that's good. Because, once we're numb for a while, we don't feel the pain, but also, what else don't you feel? You know, like, if you get anesthesia in the shoulder, you're not gonna feel the surgeon's knife going in, but you're also not gonna feel the Swedish massage. So, when we're numb long enough, we don't actually, in my delusional opinion, my experience is, we don't have the feeling experience that we're alive. We can know we're alive, we can be in our head like, dude, like, my IQ's high enough, I know I'm alive, look, I have a pulse, that's cool, I know I'm alive.

• 51:14JP Sears?

  But that doesn't mean we feel alive. Gosh. And, man, people will do crazy things to escape numbness, once they're psychologically dissociated from their emotions, I mean, some people will routinely overeat, just so they can then feel like, cool, I feel so much shame because I overate, and that's a secondary emotion that they feel, so they can feel something, but their core emotions are still numb, or they'll abuse themselves with drugs, alcohol, sugar, other times, it's like, always self-sabotaging themselves, just so they can feel the thrill of something, so they can feel something. But, man, when we give ourselves the gift of reclaiming our heart, like, I mean, you

• 51:56JP Sears?

  mentioned the V-word, vulnerability, that's so challenging to do, it's way easier said than done, but when we can get fierce with our vulnerability, because we realize we're freaking worth it, and we cannot just be angry at and JP, or numb JP, but we can be angry when it's appropriate, when it serves us, we can be the one that's crying the loudest at the funeral, because that's what's most appropriate, and, which means, we can be the one laughing the loudest at the comedy show, which means, we can also be the happiest, because when we're numb, we don't get any of that.

• 52:35Ed Mylett?

  Brother, you're, I gotta tell you, now y'all know, so you see this dude on YouTube or on Instagram, and I think oftentimes, they have no idea, because they see your normal brilliance. I happen to think as funny as JP is, as articulate as he is, you're now watching him in his giftedness zone. Oh, wow. And you, you know, it's just a fact and, and I, I gotta tell you like, you just said something so profound. I, I don't want to always restate things you say, but you know, the gift of giving yourself the willingness to feel pain and not be numb, you know, the other side of that is you do experience more joy in those moments. If you're one of these people, so you're like, why don't I enjoy the moments at a party where other people do, or seeing someone in my family do something, why doesn't it affect me like it does other

• 53:20Ed Mylett?

  people? This is, these are things you need to evaluate. Are you also doing that on the other side? So you know those pieces in your closet that you find yourself wearing like on repeat all the time? That sweater that kind of just goes with everything or these perfect pair of pants? Those are the pieces that make getting dressed easy and that's what Quince does best. Quince focuses on high quality wardrobe staples with premium materials like a hundred percent Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton. The styles are timeless, versatile and designed to become the dependable pieces you reach for every day. It's what I'm wearing right now. They give you the softness and quality you'd expect from a luxury brand without the price tag. Quince also makes premium pants, fitted tees and polos and breathable activewear, quality basics designed to work with your wardrobe and hold up to everyday

• 54:03Ed Mylett?

  wear. I love their cotton tees. I'm wearing one now and I get a ton of compliments when I wear them on the podcast and when I speak. So find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com/ed for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's Q U I N C E dot com slash ed. So you know, I've been trying to take my health and my morning routine to the next level and I used to do a whole bunch of different stuff, tons of different supplements, and then I found all in one in a drink with IM8. IM8 is the way to simplify your supplement routine finally, once and for all. 16 supplements replaced 90 ingredients across nine major organ systems in one drink.

• 54:47Ed Mylett?

  You can have all these supplements for $2.61 a day. I've changed my mornings. The whole IM8 routine has changed my mornings. I feel great and I bring energy to the entire day. Go to IM8health.com/Ed10 right now or click the link in the description and use code ED10 for a free welcome kit, five free travel sachets plus 10% off your order. That's code ED10 at IM8health.com/Ed10. Code ED10 at IM8health.com/Ed10. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. That was a great conversation. And if you want to hear the full interview, be sure to follow the Ed Mylett Show on Apple

• 55:32Ed Mylett?

  and Spotify. Links are in the show notes. Here's an excerpt I did with our next guest. I have to tell you, I don't know that I could have a more perfect person on my program today, given the times we find ourselves in. And this woman's remarkable. So first, I mean, the clinical part is that she's a trained psychologist at Harvard. She's written one of my favorite books of all time called Emotional Agility that we're going to talk a lot about today. But she's also a management thinker, a business thinker, a mental health expert. And she gave one of the great TED Talks that have ever been given in the history of TED Talks. And so I'm a huge fan and it's an honor to finally meet her and share some time because

• 56:12Ed Mylett?

  I think she can help some of you persevere and even be more productive during these really difficult times. So Susan David, thank you for being here today. Welcome.

• 56:23Speaker 04

  Thank you for having me and being open to my message.

• 56:26Ed Mylett?

  I love your message. As you know, we were talking off camera. So let's start out with something basic. Emotional agility. I read that book in a day and a half a while ago, and it's one of those books where most of my recollections have stayed very fresh. And so even preparing for this, it stayed with me because frankly, some of the things you said in that book made me rethink some of the things I teach. And I'm always open to growing and getting better. But why don't we start with a basis? What is emotional agility to begin with?

• 56:55Speaker 04

  Well, I'm gonna start with a very short definition and then I'll dirt it a little bit longer.

• 57:00Ed Mylett?

  Okay.

• 57:00Speaker 04

  The very short definition is that it's about being able to be healthy with yourself, with your psychology, your thoughts, your emotions, your stories, the stuff that's inside of you. And really emotional agility is the critical skills that help you to be a healthy human being. And why is this important? Because how we ultimately deal with our inner worlds is everything, drives everything. It drives how we love, how we live, how we parent, how we come to our relationships, how we build our businesses and even our health behaviors. So it's about being healthy, but if I have to break it down a little bit more, it's about skills that enable us to be curious and learning with our emotions

• 57:44Speaker 04

  and our difficult experiences, to be compassionate with ourselves and to also have the courage to do what's difficult when it's aligned with what matters to us.

• 57:54Ed Mylett?

  Yeah, I also, it's beautifully said, and since you wrote the book, you should be able to say that the best. But I have to say that one of the things, and we'll dive in this a little bit later, is, you know, the concept of being a little bit more agile and not rigid in your emotions, meaning to be able, be willing to embrace the ones that most people connotate as negative ones, that we don't always have to be chasing happiness. And I want to talk about that, but I picture this beautiful little five-year-old girl, when I think of you and where this was sort of born from. And I'd like you to share that story. Your father seems like such a special man and had really, there's multiple defining moments that you talk about him, but this idea that we all have one, I heard you say that we all have one shared experience in our lives that we share the most,

• 58:38Ed Mylett?

  which is death and our thoughts of death. And I talk about this, it's amazing that we're just meeting now because I talk about this so much that I believe that conversation to some extent is going on in our minds almost all the time, the contemplation of that event. So would you take them back to the five-year-old you? Because that leads to this incredible, someday this book and these breakthroughs. So would you share that?

• 58:58Speaker 04

  This journey, this journey. So yes, I, as you can hear by my accent, I am not American or Australian. I grew up as a white South African in apartheid South Africa. And it was very much a country, a community that was committed to denial. You know, to not seeing the other. And as you'll see in my work, in my TED Talk, this idea of seeing the self, seeing the other plays a really important part. So I recall when I was around five years old, when you are five, you start becoming aware of your own mortality. And I recall night after night, finding my way into my parents' bed in between the two of them. And I would say to my father,

• 59:43Speaker 04

  I'm worried that, you know, one of you isn't going to be here in the morning. I'm worried that something's going to happen. And this is very normal. People as five-year-olds, they start becoming aware that, you know, that there is an end at some point.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 59:58Speaker 04

  And so I'm lying between my parents and I'm saying to my father, promise me you'll never die, promise me you'll never die. And my father, you know, could have done what so many of us with beautiful intentions do with our kids, which is to say, don't worry about it. Everything will be okay. I'll be around. My father didn't. He comforted me with soft pets and kisses, but he never lied. He didn't try to build some false buffer, some forced positivity between the end reality. What he said to me is, um, Susie, we all die. And it's normal to be scared.

• 1:00:36Speaker 04

  And one of the things that you'll find is the capacity to, even in the face of fear, be courageous. So now, Ed, I want to fast forward ten years when I'm having these conversations. I don't know that ten years later, when I'm fifteen, my father will actually be diagnosed with terminal cancer. And I recall my mother, it was a Friday, and I recall my mother coming and saying to me, go say goodbye to dad. We knew that that was his last day. And I go into this room where my father's lying and his eyes are closed. But I know that he knows that I'm there because I have always felt seen with him.

• 1:01:20Speaker 04

  And I kiss him goodbye, I tell him I love him and I then go off to school because my mother has with good intentions said to me, you want to keep things as normal and routinized as possible. And then this is where it kind of segues into, I think, what so many people's experiences, which is I go off to school and my father dies and the the months go and the seasons go and I'm this little fifteen year old, not dropping a grade, trying to put on a brave face. People ask me how I'm doing and I say to them like, I'm okay, I'm okay. But you know, Ed, in truth, we were struggling. My mother had lost the love of her life. She was raising three children. We had financial difficulties. And I started

• 1:02:04Speaker 04

  to spiral down fast. And so then the last little strand of this, which which then breaks into my career is I was spiraling and I was not doing well psychologically. And one day we had this English teacher who handed out these blank notebooks to the class. And she said, write, tell the truth, write like no one's reading. And it was such a remarkable experience because I felt like for the first time I was actually, instead of doing this forced positivity, the master of being okay, but inside I'm crumbling, actually, I felt invited to show up to the authenticity of my experience. And this was revolutionary for me, in a way that actually shaped my entire career. I started to become aware of

• 1:02:49Speaker 04

  and interested in what are the narratives that we have in society about positivity, positive emotions, negative emotions, that sound good on the surface, but that are actually devastating to our capacity to be healthy with ourselves and also healthy human beings in the world, so that we can deal with others' pain and the reality of a fragile and beautiful world.

• 1:03:16Ed Mylett?

  My gosh. So the just even the concept of that an emotion is positive or negative, I gotta be honest with you, I've repeated that sentence thousands of times, kind of unconsciously. And I think I think when you wrote the book, obviously, it made an impact on me, but probably little did you know that it may be required reading during a pandemic like this. And one thing you said there, I just want to say to the parents that More and more people that I know that have five and six and seven year olds have been telling me that their children have been telling them that they're concerned about death and that maybe they even go through a bout of unhappiness at that age for no explained reason. And I'm wondering, now that you've said that, I sort of have a deeper understanding. But I want to ask you,

• 1:03:56Ed Mylett?

  these times we find ourselves in, there's racial reckoning and unrest happening and social justice going on, there's COVID, there's all this noise about the election, unemployment stressing, anxiety, there's not a whole lot of positive things on social media, certainly not in traditional media. And I'd like you to talk about, you know, I want people to consider this thought, because I think it's so powerful, that there are two types of emotions, I guess you would say, but how should someone deal with, think of, emotions that aren't happiness, that aren't success, that aren't bliss, that are, that are, that are fear, anxiety, worry, maybe even depression?

• 1:04:38Ed Mylett?

  How would you, what would you say to people who are experiencing a lot of those emotions? And maybe avoiding them, thinking they're negative?

• 1:04:47Speaker 04

  So yeah, and let's explore these narratives more, because I think they're so powerful. But what I would say is two things. Number one, emotions are teachers. Okay? Even your most difficult emotions are teachers. And what I mean by this is, if you're feeling bored at work, and you can be as busy as anything, but still bored, same old, same old, that emotion of boredom might be a signpost that you value more learning and growth, and that you don't have enough of it. If you have a difficult emotion of loneliness, that loneliness might be signposting to you that even in a very busy household, because we all at home more than

• 1:05:28Speaker 04

  ever, that you value intimacy and connection, and that you need more of it. So the most difficult emotions signpost the things that we care about. And when we push aside these difficult emotions, not only does it not work, not only does pushing aside difficult emotions actually contribute to lower levels of well-being, high levels of depression and anxiety, and lower chance of success in the things that you're trying to do. But pushing aside these difficult emotions stops us from navigating the world as it is, which is a world in which you might be feeling bored or lonely. And so it's stopping you from learning.

• 1:06:12Speaker 04

  So the two things that I would say is our emotions are teachers. And that's very different from a world that would have us believe that if we just think positive, that we're going to manifest everything that we think.

• 1:06:26Ed Mylett?

  Don't you think? Yeah, go ahead. Sorry. Go ahead.

• 1:06:29Speaker 04

  No, no. And then the second thing that I would say is emotions are teachers. Um, but it's really important to also recognize that emotions are data. So they contain some of the things that we care about, but they're not directives. Just because I feel bad with, you know, my colleague in this business that I'm trying to grow, doesn't mean I need to have it out with them. Um, just because I am feeling really frustrated with, you know, my partner, my spouse, doesn't mean that I then need to leave the room. So our emotions are data, not directives.

• 1:07:06Ed Mylett?

  Wow. I, I, I want you to hear this. This is like, for me, this could be a life breakthrough for a couple of million people right now. But I think this positive negative thing, and again, it's just occurring to me as I was rethinking your work, that I think we think happy people are successful people, meaning they should have high self-esteem. And I think we've actually attached in our lives that if I feel more anxiety, fear or worry, that somehow I am less than these people who are experiencing these other emotions. Don't you think so?

• 1:07:36Speaker 04

  So this is exactly the issue that we are facing, which is we have this narrative that conflates happiness and success. And what happens is that when people feel normal, these are normal human experiences. They are normal to the extent that Charles Darwin wrote about emotions, including difficult emotions, as being core to our ability to adapt and thrive in the world. That when you experience difficult emotions, they help you to communicate with others, but they also help you to communicate with yourself in terms of how you should shift things, whether there's a dissidence between you and your values, whether you're feeling distant from what matters to you. And so what has happened is this.

• 1:08:21Speaker 04

  I think just remarkably sad um and and and challenging experience that we have with emotions that I think is actually contributing to the extraordinary statistics that we have around depression and anxiety, which is that when people experience normal emotions, they are now seen as good or bad, positive or negative. So what do we then do? We then try to push them aside. We say things like, I'm unhappy in my job, but at least I've got a job, so I should just get on with it. Um, I, you know, need to put on a brave face. There's this narrative of what I call the tyranny of positivity,

• 1:09:04Speaker 04

  where even people who are dying of cancer are told to just be positive, which takes them away from their experience. And Ed, what you spoke about earlier, how do we possibly have conversations around racial justice? And showing up to the pain of other people? If we have a narrative that that pain is somehow weak. What that then does is it creates a complete divide where only if you are being positive, then are you allowed in my inner circle. And if you're being negative, then you're toxic and and, you know, I'm gonna cut you off.

• 1:09:47Speaker 04

  And so there's this very, very difficult. I actually don't believe that we are going to be able to heal society effectively. And I know that sounds like a very, you know, wide ranging proclamation. But I think that social healing comes about through our um ability to be with difficult emotions more, our own difficult emotions and others, because internal pain always comes out.

• 1:10:15Ed Mylett?

  I so I it's amazing. That's an amazing statement. I mean, I hope that's an amazing statement because I must say to you, I think people also conflate what toxicity is. So people that experience a broad range of emotions aren't necessarily toxic. Toxic is someone who's intentionally. Out to hurt you intentionally antagonistic towards you. That's somebody perhaps you want to remove from your life, but not somebody who experiences a broad range of emotions. In fact, they're more interesting people. And I think we attack, don't you think so? I mean, if everyone just, hey, everything's great, happy. I mean, I like the contradiction. I actually often say, I love, my best friends aren't all very wealthy people by any means, but they're all pretty complex people. I love people that have a complexity of emotions, a complexity of personality.

• 1:11:00Ed Mylett?

  And I think we suppress our personality. I think we attach our self-esteem to having positive emotions. And when we have negative ones, we think are, we think we're less than people that we see celebrating all the time. But I wanted to ask you something specific was, and your work's helped me so much. And so I have a program I did a long time ago, Blissful Dissatisfaction. It basically says something similar. You just say a lot better than I do to what you were just describing. But I think there's one other reason we, we, and I want you to help people with this. I think the other reason we avoid these emotions that have been labeled as negative is that when we experience an emotion, typically it triggers a behavior in us. And oftentimes, because we have this false belief, this emotion we're experiencing

• 1:11:42Ed Mylett?

  somehow reduces our self-esteem, it typically triggers a negative pattern of behavior from us. And then we suppress the emotion even more. And so is there something someone can do that, that, that the unraveling doesn't start to happen? What I call the stacking, where the emotion triggers a behavior that we then want to avoid. Is there something someone can do strategically?

• 1:12:03Speaker 04

  Yes, yes. So there are so many powerful strategies. These are things that people can learn. And you know, what you spoke to earlier, which is so often when people are struggling, they'll say, I just want this to go away. I want this difficulty emotion to go away because somehow there's this idea that difficulty emotions point to the fact that we're not successful. And one of the things that I think about so much is, you know, if you think about the only people who never experienced disappointment, the frustration that comes with failure, the only people who never have their hearts broken, they are dead. They are dead. So. Thinking that you wanna live life in a way that is just happy, that is a dead person's goal.

• 1:12:48Speaker 04

  We don't get to have a meaningful career, or leave the world a better place, or raise a family without stress and discomfort. You know, discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life. So, so to your question then, how do you start to capture this practically? The first thing that I would say is that often when people have difficulty emotions, they start to engage in, as I mentioned, these type one emotions and type two emotions. The type one emotion is, I feel sad, I'm feeling stressed, I'm feeling angry, I'm feeling lonely, that's type one. Type two is when you start layering a judgment about whether you should or shouldn't have the emotion.

• 1:13:31Speaker 04

  I'm unhappy that I'm unhappy, you know, I'm so stressed about the fact that I'm stressed because I'm worried that being so stressed is gonna cause me to die prematurely, or whatever it is. So, a very important first part of emotional agility is, is quite simply, and it is actually a fairly simple um choice, which is to, to end the struggle with your difficulty emotions by dropping the rope. And what I mean by this is, is to move away from the space where you second guess, or basically gaslight yourself as to whether you should or shouldn't be allowed to feel something, and just notice that this is what you're feeling, and especially

• 1:14:15Speaker 04

  to try to notice that feeling with compassion. It's tough to be able to run a business or grow a business in a pandemic. Um, I'm feeling anxious in the shadow of illness and death, it's normal to be anxious. So if you can adapt a level of compassion with yourself, that can be really powerful. Um, and compassion is often thought of as being, oh, it's letting yourself off the hook, it's being weak, it's being lazy, but, but Ed, you know, we've all been in restaurants, and I look forward to the day when I can go into a restaurant again. But we've all been in restaurants, and I'll describe this, and I, and I can talk to more practical strategies as well, but we've all been in a restaurant where

• 1:14:59Speaker 04

  We've seen a very beautiful interaction and that is you see a little toddler running away and exploring the restaurant and the toddler turns around, looks, sees the parent or the caregiver there, giggles and runs more. So in other words, what they do is they keep turning back, making sure that their parents are there and then they go and they explore more and explore more and explore more. Now, what is it that is going on here? Um, one of the most beautiful psychologists, John Bowlby, described how what the, what parents are really doing in the situation is they are providing what is called a secure base for the child. It's, it's the fact that the child knows that

• 1:15:43Speaker 04

  if there is trouble, they can come running back and they will be looked after. It's that that then allows them to explore, take risks, learn and grow. Now, take the same idea and apply it to yourself. When you are kind to yourself, when you have your own back, when you know that even if things don't go well, you will still love yourself and hold yourself because there is a five-year-old in you that needs love and nurturance. When you do that, what do you do? You are basically creating a context in which you are able

• 1:16:23Speaker 04

  to take risks, to put your hand up for a new opportunity. And so it's that, that's where this myth of self-compassion, which is self-compassion is about being weak and lazy, is so wrong. People who are self-compassionate are actually more likely to take risks, more likely to explore and grow and learn because they know if something goes wrong, they will be there for themselves. So that's one. Those are some strategies. I can help with other very practical strategies if you like. So you let me know.

• 1:16:57Ed Mylett?

  So good. I'm just, um.

• 1:17:00Ed Mylett?

  Have your own back. I've never heard anybody say that before. That's powerful, just that in and of itself. I have to share with you, I want to tell my audiences too. We booked this interview quite a while ago, and so I was refreshing myself on your work during an interesting time for me. And I just want to share this with you because it helped me. And I want to validate what you're saying, and then I'll ask you another question, but I just want to share this. So my dad's been sick for a very long time. He's had cancer and and his health has deteriorated pretty substantially recently, and some scary moments. About that same time, I had somebody that I care about very much let me down. Almost a form of, by the way, no one in my family, if everyone's watching this, so.

• 1:17:41Ed Mylett?

  But a friend of mine, kind of a form of betrayal and sort of reveal part of them that I was just shocked existed. And it's very hard on me. Normally, what I would do as an achiever, right, was be, I'm going to power through this. You know, I'm going to be better on the other side. I'm going to be stronger, especially men, I think oftentimes are wired to have to do this.

• 1:18:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:18:05Ed Mylett?

  And I was actually prepping for this during that, even though it was a little bit ago. And I said, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to sit with these emotions and experience them. I have not done that in a long time. I even cried, which I very rarely cry, and I want to cry more now. I've actually cried, I actually cried in front of a group too. And you know what I found on the other side of it was an unbelievable peace about things. An unbelievable comfort about everything will be okay. I learned some things about myself, and ironically, the strength that I wanted to find, that I thought if I just kind of shoved this stuff to the side, I found through letting myself sit with these emotions and not feel less than because I had them.

• 1:18:49Ed Mylett?

  And I don't, people know my work. I'm not a mamzy, pamzy, foofy dude at all. I'm telling you that that made a huge difference for me. And I want you to address the part that did, go ahead, I can see you want to jump in on that.

• 1:19:00Speaker 04

  No, no, no, it's beautiful. Continue, and I'll add.

• 1:19:04Ed Mylett?

  Well, what I was careful of, and I want you to talk about this in your reply, was I didn't say, "I am."

• 1:19:12Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:19:12Ed Mylett?

  During it. I'd like you to talk about that and anything else that occurred to you when I was saying that.

• 1:19:16Speaker 04

  Yes. So firstly, you know, really what you are doing is the equivalent of what that teacher did, you know, write to tell the truth, write like no one's reading. And the the false narrative that we have is that we will be stronger and better through positivity. But actually, we become stronger and better through going through and sitting and learning from the difficulty emotion. We generate a sense of insight about ourselves, a sense of resilience, a sense of what you need to do in the situation. And I'll describe what this means, you know, from a practical perspective. The first is what you point to, which is I am. So when

• 1:20:01Speaker 04

  often we feel a difficult experience, like we will use language that basically says, I am, okay, I am sad, I am angry, I am stressed. But think about what you are doing in your language. What you are basically doing is saying, I am all of me, 100% of me is defined by the emotion. But you aren't your emotion. You are a person who has emotions, but you aren't your emotion. You also contain your wisdom, your values, your insight, your intention, your breathing, your groundedness, your your your love. There's there's so much that is

• 1:20:46Speaker 04

  beyond that single defining I am. So what I would say to listeners is, if you're feeling that you are having a difficult emotion, it can be really powerful to create space between you and the emotion. Because of course, when you say something like, I am sad, it's almost like the sadness is a cloud in the sky, and you have become the cloud, you know, you have become the sad cloud. But you are not the cloud, you are the sky. You are, as every human being is capacious and and beautiful and complex and able enough to experience all of their emotions.

• 1:21:31Speaker 04

  You know, the sadness is one cloud in the sky, but there's other parts that we can bring. So what is a way that we can do this? The first is, instead of saying, I am sad, I am angry, see if you can just label your thought, your emotion, your feeling, your story for what it is. And here's an example. I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad. I'm noticing that this is my, I'm not good enough story. I'm noticing the thought that I'm being undermined. When you notice your thoughts, your feelings, your stories for what they are, they are thoughts, feelings and stories. As I've mentioned earlier, data, not directives.

• 1:22:15Speaker 04

  What you do is you open critical linguistic space, but actually emotional psychological space. So that other parts of you can come forward. And Ed, you know, I'm sure you've, you've brought up at some point in your podcast, but I think it's beautiful to. I think one of the most powerful ideas in human history is this idea that was first spoken to in this very particular way by Viktor Frankl. Between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space is our power to choose. And in that choice lies our growth and our freedom. When we are hooked by a difficult thought, emotion and story, then there's no space between stimulus and response.

• 1:23:01Speaker 04

  I am sad, I'm going to have it out with this person. I am angry, I feel betrayed, I'm going to, you know, just ignore them now.

• 1:23:09Speaker 04

  But when you start using this, like I'm noticing that this is what I'm feeling, what it does is it helps you to create that space between stimulus and response, so that you can bring other parts of yourself into the space. And ultimately, instead of, instead of acting out of your emotions, you are moving into your values and being able to bring the best of who you are forward in the situation. So that's a practical example. I can give so many, but let me know if that's helpful.

• 1:23:41Ed Mylett?

  It's so helpful. Couple of things occur to me. One, everyone listening to this, I think, would love to wake up with your voice in their ear every morning. It's so, I know everyone's agreeing with me right now. It's so soothing and pleasing and it's easy to feel at peace and happy listening to you. Today is a special day for me. Like, it's a surreal day because not only is the man to my left a Major League Baseball Hall of Famer, he's got 3,000 hits. He had 388 one year. He's one of the all-time greats in Major League Baseball, but he's been one of the all-time most influential people in my life as a young man. He became a mentor to me. I haven't seen him in decades and now he's in my living room on my show. Everybody, this is Hall of Famer Rod Carew. Rod, thank you for being here, brother.

• 1:24:23Rod Carew?

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:24:24Ed Mylett?

  Baseball's a different sport and people that aren't fans of every sport, maybe this nuance isn't, you know, obvious to you. But like football, they're gonna play 16, 18 games now. There's a game on a Sunday. We all work towards that Sunday. There's an event, we have it, then there's the playoffs. Most sports are that way. Baseball is a grind. You're playing 162 games in a very short window of time. And there's a grind. There's a, you have to maintain an emotional level of control throughout a season. And most people, a lot of big league players even struggle with that. How did you maintain emotional control through slumps, through ups and downs, through a full season and then through a career as long as yours as well?

• 1:25:04Rod Carew?

  Well, you know, to me, it wasn't a job. To me, it was just a little, a little boy's game, like Campanello said. Little boys, baseball is a game little boys play. I never can tell you that I've gone through a slump where it has kind of knocked me off my, my heels and pushed me back. Cause I remember I was, the longest streak I think I had as a hitter, I was 0 for 17.

• 1:25:33Ed Mylett?

  That was your longest slump?

• 1:25:35Rod Carew?

  Yeah, the longest.

• 1:25:36Ed Mylett?

  Four games?

• 1:25:39Ed Mylett?

  I hate you.

• 1:25:42Rod Carew?

  So the 18th time I dropped a bunt down for a base hit.

• 1:25:49Ed Mylett?

  Made an adjustment.

• 1:25:50Rod Carew?

  I hit a high chopper, didn't leave the infield for a base hit. I dropped another bunt down for a base hit and I had another high chopper for a base hit. Not one of those balls left the infield. But while I was going through this 0 for 17, I was hitting line drives and they were going right at somebody.

• 1:26:12Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:13Rod Carew?

  And.

• 1:26:14Ed Mylett?

  Great lesson.

• 1:26:15Rod Carew?

  So guy says, how do you do that? I says, well, you know, I worked on my bunting, so if I'm not getting hits swinging the bat, I'm going to the next dimension.

• 1:26:26Ed Mylett?

  I love that. I think there's a lesson there, Rod, and I always go back to like, okay, how's this apply to other things? And that it's true in business. We're always trying to hit these big home runs and when you feel like things are slipping, just get some base hits, get a sale, get an account, get some momentum, get in early, make extra phone calls, do the extra email, just lay the bunt down.

• 1:26:44Rod Carew?

  Yep.

• 1:26:44Ed Mylett?

  Get some momentum going because sometimes the slump you're in in business, you're hitting line drives. It's just not the time.

• 1:26:48Rod Carew?

  Right.

• 1:26:49Ed Mylett?

  It's just timing. It's just things aren't, it's not always you're doing something wrong. Maybe it's just bad timing right now. Keep making adjustments, et cetera.

• 1:26:56Rod Carew?

  And you know, the difference about me and other players is I had the six tool.

• 1:27:04Ed Mylett?

  Which was?

• 1:27:05Rod Carew?

  You know, they always say you have the five tools. The six tool was this.

• 1:27:10Ed Mylett?

  Your mind.

• 1:27:12Rod Carew?

  I never let my mind get me in trouble. I stayed positive all the way. I knew, yeah, I'm going to make outs. You know, this is a game that three out of 10 and you're successful.

• 1:27:26Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:27Rod Carew?

  You know, so I'm not going to worry about days that I don't get a hit. You know, like some guys, all of a sudden it's panic.

• 1:27:35Ed Mylett?

  You're right.

• 1:27:36Rod Carew?

  You know, they panic. What am I doing wrong? You see, do you see something? No, you're just hitting the ball good, but you're hitting it right at somebody, so...

• 1:27:46Ed Mylett?

  You think the mental part of your game was the separator?

• 1:27:48Rod Carew?

  Oh, yes, definitely. And I tell kids that today. I says, "This is the most important tool." You can do everything else, but if you can't control what's going on up here, things are gonna be tough.

• 1:28:03Ed Mylett?

  1 million percent. By the way, those of you listening on audio, he's pointing at his head. And he's talking about how important the mental part of the game is, maintaining emotional control, not stacking worries and thoughts that get bigger than they need to be. It's amazing to me, I work with a lot of athletes on their mental game, and people will ask me, "What are you really working with them when you're... If it's a UFC fighter, or a boxer, or a golfer?" And I'll tell them often, "The main thing we work on is their confidence." And people say to me, "There's no way, confidence at that level of play..." Yes, confidence at that level of play is even fragile for many athletes as well.

• 1:28:36Rod Carew?

  That's true.

• 1:28:37Ed Mylett?

  Is that not true? You're in dugouts with guys all the time.

• 1:28:39Rod Carew?

  Oh, jeez. Yeah, and I listen to them talk. I says, "Hey, dude."

• 1:28:45Ed Mylett?

  He's pointing at his head.

• 1:28:46Rod Carew?

  I just point to my head, you know?

• 1:28:48Ed Mylett?

  Yep, 100% the mental side of the game. I wanna ask you about the hardest part, I think, probably of your life, and I could be wrong, but speaking about mental toughness, which is... So guys, this man goes through this heart transplant. He ends up getting the heart from a child he was kind to. It's just bananas. If he's on the second hole, he's gone. He reverts back to the guardian angels of Michelle. And at the time when Michelle was struggling with leukemia, it became another national story. This was not some secret thing. This was something that I was following, that people all across the world, you were getting letters and mail and all these other things. I have to think that during that time, your mental, emotional control was tested the most then. This is not a Major League Baseball game.

• 1:29:29Ed Mylett?

  This is your little girl, struggling and dying, and I'm sure in a great deal of pain. And I don't wanna be too personal about it, but there are people right now listening to this that are going through their form of tragedy. A business failure, a divorce, an illness in their family. I just lost my dad recently. What was that time like for you? And what were the lessons and takeaways that you took from it?

• 1:29:51Rod Carew?

  It was easy for me because she brought me into her fold. You know, she knew I didn't talk to the press much. And she knew that... It's gonna be stretching the limit for me to be talking to a radio person or a writer or somebody about what she's she's going through. But when I was checking her into Chilwell's Hospital in Orange County, all these kids were, there were like ten kids out in the hallway kicking soccer balls. They have their poles and they're kicking soccer balls and some of them were wiffle bats and all this stuff.

• 1:30:34Rod Carew?

  And she just walks up to me and she taps me on my shoulder and she says, Daddy, you've got to start talking to the press. See all these kids? Maybe we can save some of their lives. So she she came to me and told me. And I says, okay, honey, I promise you that from today on until the day I die, I will give my full efforts towards helping kids. And she says, you promise me? I says, I promise you. My gosh. You know, because I never spoke to the press that much. You know, I I kind of stayed away from them.

• 1:31:15Rod Carew?

  And when she asked me to do that, I says, I will. I promise you I will, you know. And for all the time she spent in the hospital, I remember that first day when she found out that she had leukemia, when the doctor told her. And she says, well, what do we do? Doctor said, oh, try and clean it up and make you better. She says, okay, let's go. Didn't cry, nothing. Not for the time that she was in the hospital. She did not cry one single day. Not one single day, you know. And the the week that she died,

• 1:31:58Rod Carew?

  I went down to the chapel and I asked God to take her. He did. I says, Father, please take her. She's suffering. And I don't want her to suffer anymore. So would you take her and put her in your in your garden? You know, and he gave us another week with her. And then we found a four out of five cord blood that we were gonna use to, instead of the marrow. She couldn't couldn't find anyone with a marrow to save her life.

• 1:32:33Rod Carew?

  And when she was walking in that room, she said, Dad, I know that I'm not coming out of there alive. She said, Come on, says, God's gonna be with you. She says, Dad, I'm not coming out of there alive, and I know that God's gonna be with me. So I'm not gonna worry. Here's a nineteen-year-old kid talking to me like that, to her dad. And I'm like, You're gonna be okay, you're gonna be okay. But she knew, when she went in that room, she knew she was gonna die. You know?

• 1:33:08Ed Mylett?

  Just like you knew you weren't.

• 1:33:10Rod Carew?

  Yes.

• 1:33:10Ed Mylett?

  When you had your heart attack.

• 1:33:11Rod Carew?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:12Ed Mylett?

  What an amazing story. I, uh, you just honored her so well with your life because you've done, guys, if you just do a simple Google search, you'll see all the tireless thousands of hours Raj put into doing things for children and how you've honored her. You know, little one-on-one things, things at the stadium, like you were talking about. The thing you were doing the night before your heart attack.

• 1:33:34Rod Carew?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:35Ed Mylett?

  Was an extension of the promise that you made to her in the hospital.

• 1:33:39Rod Carew?

  And you know, it's funny, I remember driving down the five freeway. I had gone to Washington and spoke in front of Congress about raising funds for NIH. You know, and then got a call, my agent called me and he says, Guess what? They just passed a fifty million dollar bill for the kids.

• 1:34:05Ed Mylett?

  That's crazy.

• 1:34:06Rod Carew?

  And I opened my sunroof, I says, Honey, thanks so much, we did it again. You know, and that's the way it was. And even today, some nights, you know, I'm sitting at home and I don't have anything to do. I get in my car, go for a drive and says, Pish, how you doing? I used to call her Pish. How you doing? I says, I'm hanging in there and I talked to her.

• 1:34:31Ed Mylett?

  You really?

• 1:34:32Rod Carew?

  You know, yeah, I do it many nights, you know, and.

• 1:34:38Rod Carew?

  It makes me feel good.

• 1:34:40Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:41Rod Carew?

  You know, and, and I'm sure she's saying, I'm proud of you, Dad. I'm proud of you.

• 1:34:46Ed Mylett?

  I'm sure she is.

• 1:34:46Rod Carew?

  Keep doing what you're, what you're doing.

• 1:34:48Ed Mylett?

  We're doing it right now.

• 1:34:49Rod Carew?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:50Ed Mylett?

  I'm proud of you.

• 1:34:51Rod Carew?

  Well, thank you. Thank you so much.

• 1:34:53Ed Mylett?

  You changed my life, you know, and I, I, uh, I'm just, I, I just thank you. I was just telling this lady that off camera that her work's really made a profound impact on me, even in the last few days of my life. Her name is Thais Gibson. Today's conversation will be different than most anyone we've ever had on the show before. So Thais, welcome to the show.

• 1:35:13Thais Gibson?

  Thank you so much, Ed, for having me. I'm really grateful to be here with you.

• 1:35:16Ed Mylett?

  Yeah. Basic question, you cover it in the book. By the way, thank you for this. It's just,

• 1:35:20Thais Gibson?

  Thank you.

• 1:35:20Ed Mylett?

  I love real work that really makes a difference and really changes people. How do, um, our emotions affect our actions? I know that's a general question, but it's actually part of the book as well. And I don't think most people step back and look at that. That not only the state you're in, but the emotional state you're in and how it's impacting the action. And I know that's a broad question compared to the very specific place we just went. But I think when we get really granular, like we just did, it's time to kind of go to concept for a second as well to understand why that matters. So how do emotions affect behavior?

• 1:35:56Thais Gibson?

  Amazing question. So a neuroscientist named Antonio Damasio, I believe it was in 2008, actually discovered conclusively that every single action we take or decision we make is based on our emotional state. So some people are very quick to rationalize or justify through logic. They're like, I'm a logical thinker. I only make logical decisions. But the reality is at the tipping point, you're making an emotionally based decision. And then you're just quick to then rationalize it through logic. And so if we are not in control of how we feel, then we are not in control of the decisions that we're making. And I would make a really strong argument that we, that when we go back to this topic of core fears, I often give people this acronym of BTEA, which is our belief patterns.

• 1:36:37Thais Gibson?

  We'll create patterns of thought, which then will create emotions and then actions will follow. So, so if I, for example, let's pretend have this core wound, I'm not good enough. Well, that may, I might start thinking thoughts, like I'm not interesting enough. I'm not smart enough. I'm not pretty enough, whatever it is, fill in the blanks enough. And then what will happen is how will I feel or emote according to that? Well, I'll feel insecure or afraid or sad. And then we all go into our actions or coping mechanisms. Right? We're not even in charge. When somebody's feeling that way, what do they do? Do they go to their fridge and eat a whole bunch of junk food? Do they withdraw from the world and go into their shell? Do they become really big and tell everybody how amazing they are to try to overcompensate? But it feels arrogant.

• 1:37:21Thais Gibson?

  So really, if we're not being able to reprogram and identify these core beliefs or these old fears or wounds, then we're gonna have havoc wreaked on our thought patterns throughout the day. Our emotional state, we're not in charge of. And then our actions, we're not even in charge of either. And when we go and change and recondition these old stories or belief patterns, everything else will follow how we think, how we feel about ourselves. And even our actions and behaviors will become healthier.