Stop Surviving and Start Thriving Now | Susan David (Archived Episode)

If you’re in the middle of emotionally trying times, lost your job, death and grief over loved ones and failing relationships, we know emotional pain f*cking sucks! But what now? Sitting in these emotions forever isn’t practical or healthy. So, what are the options? Bottle it up, push those feelings aside, and push through! You’re hardcore, you’re badass, nothing is going take you out. Just don’t think about it, move on and get gritty. OR… Let the pain take over until you feel like a puddle of nothing. Everything feels hopeless, the pain is unbearable, and how could you ever smile again? Neither of these extremes are healthy ways to cope with your emotions, and as adults, if we’re honest, the majority of us suck at processing emotions. We get angry and take it out on the people closest to us. We go to work sad and hurt over a fight with our partner, now we can’t focus, productivity is low, and the quality of our work sucks. Susan David, Harvard medical school psychologist and author of the #1 WSJ bestseller, Emotional Agility, has some strategies we can all start implementing today to learn how to process our emotions in an effective and healthier way. Her core message is that “emotions are data, not directives.” We’re facing some really challenging times ahead and we’ve been fighting and hoping for better days since pre-Covid. This conversation answers how to deal with the difficult thoughts and use emotions as data instead of allowing them to direct a story of you starring as the victim. You can have every valid reason to fuse with painful emotions, it doesn’t mean they’re helpful in the moment. Create space, observe what you're feeling, and identify the signpost. [Original air date: 7-19-22] Check out Susan David’s book, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life: https://amzn.to/3aHKw25 Check out Susan David’s first Impact Theory Interview, Make Your Negative Thoughts Serve You: https://youtu.be/y8bwEgCcOXs SHOW NOTES: 0:00 | Introduction to Negative Thinking 4:06 | Unhealthy Ways We Face Emotions 13:30 | Identify Your Emotional Signposts 24:38 | Make Space for Emotional Confusion 39:15 | The Secret Weapon Against Tragedy 50:35 | Don’t Allow Emotions to Write Your Story 1:11:01 | Strategies to Avoid Emotional Fusion What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business: join me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business: see if you qualify here. https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox: sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/ If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. Join me live on myTwitch stream https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ. I'm live daily from 6:30 to 8:30 am PT athttps://cms.megaphone.fm/organizations/0482bfe8-8502-11ed-af5d-3bdc320068d7/podcasts/0a41f61a-9ddf-11ed-9eb7-dbb3a40775f5/episodes/8ac68366-8a85-11ef-bb65-abca3ffdcf54/www.twitch.tv/tombilyeuwww.twitch.tv/tombilyeu https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ LISTEN TO IMPACT THEORY AD FREE + BONUS EPISODES on APPLE PODCASTS:apple.co/impacttheory http://apple.co/impacttheory FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's talk about the moment your side hustle becomes a real business. Now, I see way too many founders stay stuck running their business like it's a hobby, and then they wonder why nothing ever feels real. It doesn't feel real because it's not. I've helped thousands of entrepreneurs build real businesses through Impact Theory University, and the first step in the path to building a legit business is registering it. And Taylor Brands will help you do just that in a few clicks. An LLC, a limited liability company, is an official business structure. It's inexpensive to form and very simple to maintain. It's how you open a business bank account. It's how customers know they're dealing with a real company. And Taylor Brands doesn't stop at the filing.

• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Taylor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. We are about to go into a potentially devastating economic period, and I think that it's really freaking a lot of people out. Knowing how stories, thoughts, emotions will determine the quality of our lives, what can we do to master our negative thinking?

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Well, I think one of the first things to say is I don't see thinking as either negative or positive. Our emotions and our thoughts have evolved to help us to adapt and to survive and to be effective in our lives. And so, we, yes, we experience some of our thoughts and our emotions as uncomfortable.

• 1:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Let me ask, why do negative emotions suck so much if they're useful? Because they're really miserable.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Charles Darwin was one of the first people to describe how our difficult emotions help us to communicate. They're helping us to communicate with ourselves and other people. And so, you know, when we are sitting in a place that feels tough, yes, it feels tough. But often what that tough feeling is about is saying, gee, something matters here. There's something that I need to pay attention to. There's something at stake. And so the difficult emotions feel really tough. But what they are pointing to, what they are signposting, is often something that we care about, something that we value in our lives and something that we want to move towards.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  And so, Tom, it's such a beautiful question that you ask in launching straight in, which is, how do we deal with difficult thoughts and emotions? For example, when we're facing into an economic crisis. And the traditional way that one might answer this question is just stay positive, just be resilient, uh, just keep a good attitude. And that sounds innocuous on the surface. It sounds like every single piece of motivation that we ever hear is this, just be positive. And so it probably sounds odd to say that just being positive can actually make one

• 3:21Speaker 01

  less resilient. It probably sounds odd to say just being positive can actually make one fragile. But actually, the research supports that. Because the research is very clearly pointing to the direction that when we just be positive in the face of difficult circumstances, then we are not living in the world as it is.

• 3:47Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you think this has to do with unprocessed emotions?

• 3:52Speaker 01

  I think that the narrative of just being positive has a number of contributors. Uh, the first is that we live in a world in which being happy is literally bound into the Declaration of Independence. Like, it, it, it, it feels like just being positive and just being happy is a birthright. And so you land up having this really tough experience, which is that the fragility of life holds hands with the beauty. You cannot go through life, you cannot go through business, uh, without experiencing

• 4:34Speaker 01

  heartbreak, without experiencing economic challenge, without, uh, finding yourself in a situation in which you are perhaps unhealthy or healthy. You know, the reality of life is that beauty and fragility hold hands with one another. And so when we live in a society that says you've just got to be happy, what we often find is that people then start beating themselves up when they feel anything less than happy. And so we're not developing the skills that help us to navigate the reality of the world as it is.

• 5:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Right, that's what I want to talk about. So I am, ever since COVID kicked off, I have really been worried about people at large, just like the general population being able to, at first I thought it was going to be purely economic, and then it became like this sort of looming health crisis, mental health crisis of being isolated and alone. Um, and now we're sort of back around to the economic crisis again. And when I think about people being able to navigate this well, and this idea of mastering your negative thoughts, you have a really unique voice in that. You're telling people to, you don't use the word lean in, but it's like that there is information to be taken from the negativity.

• 5:55Tom Bilyeu?

  And so as we go into what I think is going to be a difficult time, is part of your, what you would encourage people to do is to recognize, don't try to run from the pain or the difficulty. It's a signal of what's really happening. You need to be able to assess the world as it actually is. What I always tell people is you need an interpretation of what's happening that is both true and optimistic. Do you agree with both of those? Or do you think just true and optimism may be actually a red herring?

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Well, true, yes, because deny, you know, reality will always have its way. And so, you know, it, it, when we deal with difficult emotions, often what happens is people do one of two things in ways that are unhealthy. The first is we get stuck in our difficult emotions. We brood on them, we ruminate, we obsess, you know, you talk, you spoke about the looming economic crisis. And you can see how often what we can do is we can just dwell in and get stuck in these difficult emotions in a way that actually paralyzes us. So this is what's called brooding. The opposite, which looks so different on the surface, is saying something like, I'm

• 7:09Speaker 01

  just going to be positive, I'm just going to push through, I'm just going to get on with it. And it, it sounds the opposite. It sounds like actually what you're doing is you're just ignoring those difficult emotions. And in many ways you are. And what's really interesting is both brooding and what I've just described, which is bottling, both of those are unhealthy ways of dealing with our difficult emotions. So a really important part of-

• 7:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Can we define, and maybe this is where you're already going, but can we define unhealthy? Because I bottle like crazy. It is super effective in terms of getting things done.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:45Tom Bilyeu?

  But why, define unhealthy, I think that was-

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Okay, so if you are going for a job interview and your girlfriend broke up with you the night before, yes, by all means, put your difficult emotions aside and go in for the job interview and put on your best show. When I'm talking about unhealthy bottling, this is a strategy that is actually an avoidance strategy. It's basically a strategy that says, I'm having these difficult emotions, I'm having these difficult thoughts, but I'm not going to face into them, I'm not going to learn from them, I'm not going to connect with them. Instead, I'm just going to think positive and I'm just going to get on with it. And often what we do is we do this with really good intentions.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  The intention is that I've got a project that I've got to move forward with, or I've got an interview that I've got to do, I've got a relationship that I'm trying to be in. But the problem with bottling and the definitional aspect of what makes it unhealthy is that you're doing it in a consistent and persistent way and that you never go back to those difficult emotions to understand them.

• 8:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Why is going back, why does that matter?

• 9:00Speaker 01

  If you are unhappy in your job and you said to yourself, oh, at least I've got a job. At least I've got a job, at least, at least I've got a job, it's fine. What we find is that five years later, that person is still unhappy in their job,

• 9:17Speaker 01

  but they've now lost five years. They haven't used the signposts, the data that emotions are giving them to say, oh, you're unhappy in your job, why? Because I need greater levels of meaning or I need greater levels of learning. And so when we turn away from ourselves and when we turn away from these extraordinarily beautiful parts of ourselves, which are our emotions, basically waving at us and saying, see me and learn from me, then we are unable to adapt effectively. And so one of the most popular notions in our current world

• 10:01Speaker 01

  is that we've got to just grit. You know, we've just got to persistently grit through. But there is a world of difference between being stubborn versus being stupid. Okay, like if something is values aligned, if it has a chance of success, if it is something that.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  When you are looking through the light of day in a realistic way, you're like, yes, this thing is for me, then by all means grit. But when you're having difficulty emotions that are saying to you, actually, maybe this thing isn't going to work out. This thing might be a relationship, it could be a hope or a dream. At that point, keeping on gritting through has a real opportunity cost. And so when we ignore those difficulty emotions, we also turn ourselves away from the ability to adapt and to be effective in our lives.

• 11:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Emotions are really confusing, though. So here is, one, I think it's important to plant a flag on the following idea. There's pathology on both sides. So you can ignore your emotions and that becomes pathology. And you can give into your emotions constantly, and that's pathology.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:21Tom Bilyeu?

  And I've heard you say that our emotions are data, not directives. And so people need to be careful not to be in the grips of their emotion. We will definitely get into that. But, okay, so we've got that idea, that there's pathology on both sides. You have to be careful. Now, what's interesting is I think you and I may be on, I don't think either of us spill into pathology, but I think we're on different sides of the, if you were going to err, maybe too far on the like, it's okay to sit with your negative emotions and make friends with them. I would certainly err on the side of bottling them up, um, which I have found to be effective. But I am very cognizant of the fact that if you are not careful, that your emotions will go underground and you won't understand them. And I live in terror of not understanding my emotions. The problem is they're very confusing.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:05Tom Bilyeu?

  And so as you, when you said, when you look at it in the cold light of day and you're being realistic, it was, that's very close to what you just said. And I thought, but man, really knowing if you're being realistic is hard.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:19Tom Bilyeu?

  So how do you encourage people or teach people, maybe is a better word, to figure out what their emotions translate to into logic or words?

• 12:30Speaker 01

  So I just want to firstly circle back to the bottling and brooding. Because, you know, when I use the word unhealthy, I think it's useful to describe what I mean by that. When you are stuck in a difficulty emotion, what is owning you? The difficulty emotion is owning you. You're not in your life, you're not seeing your child, you aren't able to connect effectively in your relationship because you're so immersed in that difficult emotion. And so brooding on our difficult emotions is unsurprisingly associated with lower levels of mental health, of wellbeing, of

• 13:14Speaker 01

  a likelihood that if you feel depressed, that depression will continue. Um, and also a difficulty in actually problem solving in your life, because it's almost like if you imagine your difficulty emotions are a pile of books and you're holding those books so close to you with such tightness, you are unable to breathe and to connect and to let go. And so that is the impact of brooding, and that's why I say brooding is unhealthy. But let's look at the opposite, it looks so different. Just push through, just be positive, just ignore your difficulty emotions.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Uh, when we do this, we are holding the books so tightly away from us that our arms get tired, that we are unable to be with ourselves, that we are unable to see ourselves. And so consistent bottling of difficult emotions, pushing them aside, is associated with lower levels of problem solving, because you aren't facing into the reality. Lower levels of relationship effectiveness, because the person is not experiencing you as vulnerable and authentic. And as it turns out, lower levels of mental health and wellbeing.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  And so the question then really becomes, what is it that emotional health looks like? You know, what is healthy from an emotional perspective? And what we know is that we need to have two.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Aspects of emotional health that hold hands with one another. The first is going to our difficult emotions. Going to is not

• 15:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Meaning looking at them, assessing it.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Looking at them, not getting stuck in them because we own our emotions, they don't own us. So looking at them, trying to understand what the emotion is signposting. That is important to us. And let me give you an example of what I mean here. If you feel bored. You can be bored in a loving relationship. You can be bored in a busy, busy workplace. That boredom might be signaling that you need more learning and growth. And it's an opportunity for you to face toward your partner.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  And create greater levels of depth and connection to maybe have conversations that you haven't been having for years.

• 15:56Tom Bilyeu?

  How do you get people? So my, my fundamental question though is. You could be bored in a loving relationship because the other person is boring. You could be bored in the loving relationship because you've stopped having sex that's exciting for you. Like, how do you know which it is? Like this. Emotions feel a little bit like dream interpretation where it's like, it could be that, but it could be this.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Well, well, let me ask you this. So if you're feeling bored in a relationship. That boredom is often signposting something that we value. Okay, so.

• 16:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Don't you find that a lot of people are blind to it though? That they really can't figure out what like when I, so I think that I'm. Uh, good at this kind of thing. And when I think about how much time and attention it takes me to get to a conclusion, I'm like, yo, how does the. An average person that just, this isn't how they're wired for better or worse. Like, how do they get to the conclusion?

• 16:51Speaker 01

  I don't think that one needs to overly complicate. Like, I'm not talking about. Every morning, you know, sitting and journaling. I mean, by all means, if you want to sit and journal in the morning, I found journaling very helpful in difficult times in my life. But, but you know, what happens is.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  All of us at some point move into different spaces where we go onto autopilot. Where we're just going through our day.

• 17:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Is that where we're in the grips of an emotion? Like, we're just sort of, we're not looking at it, and so we're just riding along?

• 17:23Speaker 01

  We, we just, we, we're riding along, we've got our job, we haven't actually stopped to say, what is it that I value here? Am I living the life that I want? Am I doing something that is important to me? And it's extraordinary how often when you say to people, like, what are the things that you value? People say, I've got no idea. I've got no idea what I value. Um, yes, I'm earning a living. Yes, I'm an entrepreneur, starting this new business, but I've got no idea what I value. And when I'm talking about values here, what I'm talking about are things like learning, collaboration, fairness, connection, relationship.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  You know, there are these beautiful values that are so grounding to us as people. And when the world is changing around us, whether that world is changing because of COVID or because of an economic forecast, we can often feel flipped around by the world. And it is so crucial for us to have a relationship with ourselves, to have a relationship that is this relationship that is a seeing of the self. And so how do we get to that point? How do we get to that point? We often are getting to that point through our difficult emotions.

• 18:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep, so I'm gonna say that in my words, and then you tell me where we go with this.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Go, go, go.

• 18:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Your subconscious is kicking up to you. It's trying to communicate, but the subconscious does not speak in, uh, words. It speaks in feelings, emotions. If you damage the region of the brain that processes emotions, people can't make decisions.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:05Tom Bilyeu?

  You would think they would become coldly logical, but they do not. They become incapable of deciding. So we know emotions play an absolutely critical role. So you've got the subconscious trying to let you know that something is going on that you need to assess. Uh, my guess is that, well, this is how I deal with it. I slow down, I create literal silence.

• 19:29Tom Bilyeu?

  I try to still my mind.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:31Tom Bilyeu?

  That puts me in a calm and creative state as I put words on it.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:35Tom Bilyeu?

  That allow different regions of my brain to connect that otherwise might not connect. So that I can suddenly put words to that feeling of, oh, my God, this is about this thing.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Then I force myself to write it in a single sentence. And if I can't write it in a single sentence, I know I don't understand it yet. And I will journal and journal and journal and journal. Literally, I have journaled sometimes thirty thousand words, forty thousand words. That's the length of a book.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:58Tom Bilyeu?

  To try to like, figure out, what is this? Again, just trying to get so I can say it in a single sentence. So when I say it, my subconscious goes, yep, that's it.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:09Tom Bilyeu?

  And I'm like, okay, now I know what this is. Does that ring as a universal approach?

• 20:16Speaker 01

  It's so powerful. And actually, what you're describing then is that you are not someone who bottles their emotion.

• 20:24Tom Bilyeu?

  That's really interesting. So I'm the king of bottling, but.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  But you come back to it.

• 20:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  You come back to it. And this, this is, this is the cornerstone of emotional health.

• 20:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Luxury brands are not charging you more for better cashmere. You're paying for the storefront, the ad budget, the name on the tag. But Quince cuts all of that out. They work directly with ethical factories. They skip the middlemen and sell one hundred percent Mongolian cashmere, starting at just sixty bucks. Fifty to eighty percent less than similar brands. Now, I gave one of these as a gift last year. It was a big hit and gifting is really the test of a brand. You might tolerate a lot of stuff in your own closet that you would never give to somebody else. I've got their joggers and a couple of their tees as well. And I can tell you their whole line is high quality. Give the gift of quality this holiday season.

• 21:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty-five day returns. It's now also available in Canada and the UK. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, make sure you tell them that it was on Impact Theory. That's the best way. Way to support the show. I'll call you back. That's the most expensive sentence in business. You mean it when you say it, but by the time you remember, they've already found somebody else. That's why today's episode is brought to you by QUO, spelled Q U O. The business phone that's built so you never miss a call or a customer. QUO writes up your calls for you and one click turns any of them into a task with a name and a due date.

• 22:04Tom Bilyeu?

  The follow-up actually happens instead of living in your head. When you can't pick up at all, QUO's agent does. It answers questions, gets the details and texts them a link to book an appointment. By morning, you've got the summary and you can jump right in. It's also an official connector in Claude and Chat G P T. Ask who called while you were out and it's handled. QUO is the number one rated business phone on G two. It's trusted by over ninety thousand businesses. When money is on the line, always say hello with QUO. Try QUO for free plus get twenty percent off your first six months at quo.com slash impact. That's Q U O dot com slash impact.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  The cornerstone of emotional health is this recognition that we go through the day and not every emotion do we need to stop and inquire about, but when you've had a couple of weeks of feeling disquiet about a relationship or about a job or you're feeling sad or you're feeling burnt out, there's so many experiences that we have. Again, we live in a world that tells us to just be positive and push through. But when we do this, we paradoxically become less resilient because we are now not facing into the signal that this disquiet is bringing to us. And let me give you some examples of what I mean here.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  You know, I've already said like boredom might be signposting that you need more learning. And it might be that that learning is in your relationship. Or it might be that your learning is in your job or with your friendships.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Grief.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Grief. Many of us in these past couple of years have been through a process of grief. Whether that is grief of a parent, someone who's actually physically with us no longer, or grief of what was once, in my assumptions of what the world could have been.

• 24:06Tom Bilyeu?

  I've got grief for that, for sure.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Okay. So there's grief. And

• 24:13Speaker 01

  the, the impulse when we feel grief is to just keep going, just keep going. But there is such beauty of, I recall periods in my own life when I've been in grief.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  There's such beauty. Grief is love. You know, grief is love. Grief is love, looking for a home. Grief is that person that you've lost saying, see me, remember me, connect with me.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  And there is something so profound and human and powerful and non hustling that's

• 24:54Speaker 01

  at stake in the turning towards that. Let me give you some other examples. Um, anger. You know, anger, we can, we can brood on our anger. Brooding, we get hooked on our Twitter feed. We get stuck inside being right. Bottling is, I'm just getting on with my life. But when we feel a sense of anger, often that anger might be signaling that

• 25:21Speaker 01

  fairness is important to us, or equity is important to us, or something that we see when we watch the news shows that a value that is important to us is being contravened.

• 25:30Tom Bilyeu?

  But it could also be pettiness and an ugly insecurity hiding inside of yourself.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  And this is why it is not about getting hooked on the difficulty motion, but rather recognizing that our emotions are data. That our emotions are data. They signpost things that we care about, but they are not directives. Just because I feel angry doesn't mean I need to have it out with everyone. Our emotions are data. They are not directives. And I'll give you, you know, yet another example that I think was so powerful during these past couple of years is people described how

• 26:10Speaker 01

  They felt really lonely. You know, you can be lonely in a crowd. You can be lonely in a house with a loved one. Because as we come to the kitchen, we turn away from that person. We're on our phones, they're on their phones. And loneliness signposts the need for intimacy and connection.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  So when we turn away from these parts of ourselves, we also turn away from the beauty and messiness of our humanness.

• 26:45Tom Bilyeu?

  I want to go back to the idea of problem solving. So as you're describing this, I'm like, man, people really have to understand though, what the root cause is. There's, there is something utterly fascinating to me about you. So when I look at the same problems that you look at.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:01Tom Bilyeu?

  You, there's like a light in your eyes. There's, you talk a lot about the beauty of the conflict and you know, the bittersweet nature, like before we started rolling, there's really something there for you that you love about like the, you know, that, that bittersweet nature of life. And so one of the notes that I took is, um, I'm, I wonder how you feel about the idea of risking real tragedy. Now, before you answer that, I want to bring you back to what made me start this. So I have a feeling, so you look at these things and, and to you, there's like a real beauty there. I look at them and think, most people are going to get eaten alive by that because it, and maybe this is just me and every theory is autobiographical, so I can help it reveal

• 27:46Tom Bilyeu?

  myself. That most people are driven by their insecurities. That's certainly true for me.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:53Tom Bilyeu?

  And they get lost. They don't understand the impulse. I have the very good fortune of recognizing when I'm being petty or insecure.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:04Tom Bilyeu?

  And I stopped running from that a long time ago, so I can look at it and just be like, oh, that's interesting. I'm, I'm insecure about that thing. That's petty, that's gross. I don't like that myself. I can adjust my behavior, my emotions are data, not directives. All of that makes all the sense in the world to me. But there's thirty seven reasons why somebody might feel lonely in a house with somebody they love. And finding out which one it is is really hard. And that process to me fills me with uh intensity is probably the right word. It might look like aggression to most people. Uh so how knowing, because my whole thing. You are so uniquely good at helping people um deal with the complexity of an emotional life.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you. I've I've spent my life in this.

• 28:53Tom Bilyeu?

  No, I mean, this is amazing. You're one of the, one of the only people I've ever heard talk about the, the sort of good and bad, that there's pathology on both sides, like all that stuff.

• 29:03Tom Bilyeu?

  But as people are, as we step into this difficult time.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:10Tom Bilyeu?

  We know that people need to create a space between the stimulus and the response. But my question is, how do they create that space? And knowing that as they really face their emotions and recognize that I'm bored at my job, or I'm bored in my relationship and I need to make a change. That when we take bold decisive action, we risk tragedy. Because you may lose your job or leave your job now as we go into a pandemic and your life gets worse.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  A core part of what I talk to is uh firstly, being compassionate with yourself. Because it's very easy to talk about emotions and we've got to go to emotions and we've got to learn from emotions and but but learning from emotions. And going to emotions, even though it is actually crucial to our well being. Uh it takes courage. It takes courage to face into a relationship that isn't working and that feels like it's not values connected. It takes courage to have a difficult conversation. Uh

• 30:25Speaker 01

  growth takes courage, learning takes courage, like this takes courage. And so a really crucial part of.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  My work is not about going to difficulty motions in a way that is

• 30:46Speaker 01

  clinical and hard and, and, and icy.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  It's actually rather about going to ourselves with love. And I say this, Tom, because I think that the world invites us into an unseeing of ourselves. The models that we have of success are that there's an A and there's a B. And that you, you, you just get from A and B. You know, you, you just do it. What we don't talk about is the messy middle. We don't talk about the confusion. We don't talk about the, um, that liminal space, the space of not knowing which my direction could be or should be.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  And so I think that when we fail to move into that liminal space and do so with compassion, what we do is

• 31:47Tom Bilyeu?

  Compassion for what, that you might screw it up and it might get worse?

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Compassion that it's hard to human, compassion that, compassion that you don't always have the answers, compassion. You know, there's this beautiful, uh, Greek philosopher, Heraklitus. Heraklitus describes this idea that I think is just so extraordinary and of course so true. Which is, he says, you can never step into the same river twice.

• 32:11Tom Bilyeu?

  What does he mean by that?

• 32:12Speaker 01

  What he means by that is that the world is always changing. And that we as human beings are always changing.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  And yet our models of success suggest that there is something known that is out there and it's only up to us to just step into it. And the models of success suggest that something that you wanted when you were twenty are things that you're gonna want when you're forty. Or when you're sixty. And they are false ways of humaning.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Because that way of humaning keeps us stuck. And so you then say, okay, well, if I change and if the river's changing, the river here being the environment, then how do I deal with the uncertainty? And we deal with the uncertainty by becoming more adept with emotions because with uncertainty is going to be confusion, is going to be doubt, is going to be complexity. And so I think, you know, really what you are getting to hear is so profoundly important, which is which of the thirty seven answers is the answer? And what I am saying is, instead of trying to just rush to the answer,

• 33:30Speaker 01

  there is power in slowing down, in slowing down into the liminal space. And, and Tom, an example of this is

• 33:41Speaker 01

  when we've, when we've moved into our future, when we move into an economy, when we move into a pandemic, when we move into whatever these experiences are, the impetus is always to have the answer. And sometimes, in fact, very frequently, if we just slow down, there is such beauty and creativity and growth that happens in the not knowing. And I know that you've experienced this. I know that like, it's not like when you're starting a new business that you suddenly wake up in the morning and you're just like, oh, this is what the business is. This is the business plan. This is the strategy. These are the answers.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  No, there is a space of confusion, of trying things out in your mind, of an unknowing. And so when we give ourselves permission to be in confusion, with my team, I have, I committed at the beginning of the year, I said to them,

• 34:46Speaker 01

  We are gonna treat the messy middle. The space between A and B. The space between the start and then the outcome. We're gonna treat the messy middle as a sacred, beautiful space. Not as, oh, there's something wrong with me. Not as, oh, I don't know which answer it is, but we are gonna treat this space as a sacred, beautiful space. And what I mean by that is when I'm working with my team and we're like, which direction are we gonna go in with this technology? How are we gonna build this thing we're trying to build? We've now moved into a languaging around the space where we as an individual and as a team, we say, huh,

• 35:30Speaker 01

  that's interesting. I think we're in the messy middle.

• 35:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Can I give people a mile marker to your superpower here?

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't know. Tell me.

• 35:39Tom Bilyeu?

  So, well, you don't, you're not compounding your problems. So what I like about, so for people that don't know, you have a book called Emotional Agility. Brilliant book. We covered it last time in our first interview together, which people should watch.

• 35:53Tom Bilyeu?

  And the idea of being able to move easily from one emotion to the next, that space that we were talking about, Viktor Frankl is somebody I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on, but that idea between stimulus and response, there is a space, but you have to create that space. You certainly should make that space bigger and give yourself the the time to react well. That seems to be where you shine, where you're so I heard a very interesting thing and it it allows me to predict the world more accurately. So whether it's literally true or just predictively true, it's nonetheless effective. And that is that the presence of estrogen makes sitting with an emotion easier than not having it, which makes my ability to predict my wife and why she's just okay.

• 36:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Like she doesn't want me to solve the problem. She just wants me to listen. But I'm like, this is so uncomfortable, even her feeling like that. We should talk about emotional contagions.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:46Tom Bilyeu?

  But me catching her emotion is so unpleasant that I'm like, yo, we have to solve this problem. Now, when I heard that for her, it's not that the problem is any less painful. It's that being in pain is not as problematic. And I was like, whoa, so that is

• 37:05Speaker 01

  That's so beautiful.

• 37:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, and it feels true. That certainly defines the difference between my wife and I. Um, and when I hear your advice and the way that you think through these problems, it seems like that is the real PowerPoint, that don't make your problem worse by trying to rapidly get out of it. Like, you need to be able to sit with it, assess it, and then make a decision.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  I want to circle back to something that we started talking through earlier, but there's a beautiful closure that happens here, which is, I said for effective emotion processing, we need two things. And I started with the go-to. Going to emotions, naming emotions, labeling, understanding the signposts that emotions are pointing us to, and also being compassionate. And we can talk more about that, because I know that's, it's a really important part of how to human, because it's, it's hard to human. It's hard to human nowadays.

• 38:02Tom Bilyeu?

  I've noticed.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Ah, I think we all have. It's, it's really hard. Like, it's hard to human. And so going to emotions is a crucial part of emotional effectiveness. But I said there were two things. The other part of it is going through emotions. Going through emotions is where you now say, okay, the value that this emotion is signposting, which is learning or connection or intimacy or change. The value that this emotion is signposting asks me, invites me to take action. In other words, I think that in a way, one of the things

• 38:45Speaker 01

  that you were pointing to, a subtext of what you were pointing to is like, gee, am I going to get stuck in the difficult emotion? Am I going to get stuck in it? But no, because when emotions signpost the things that we care about, what it's actually inviting us to do is to take a step towards that thing, to reach out with love, to, to, um, think about, okay, well, if I need more growth, what are ways, even in my current context, that I could get more growth in my life? And so there is an impetus not to circumvent through false problem solving, but rather move towards problem solving that is guided

• 39:26Speaker 01

  by your inner core. You know, I think of a gymnast. I think of a gymnast who has the strong inner core. And

• 39:37Speaker 01

  All of the moves change and the the audience claps and there's music and there's all of the stuff that's going on around the gymnast.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  And it is the inner core that allows the gymnast to land and to regain balance. And when the world is changing around us and even when we are changing inside of us, there is this inner core of these emotional capacities, this ability to say, hmm, what is this emotion signaling to me? What is this disquiet? Let me sit with it. Let me not judge the messy middle, but rather recognize that this is a space. Yes, it's confusing, but it's also a space of potential creativity and growth. So let me not rush out of it.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  Let me just be with it for a while, not be stuck in it, but be with it for a while. And as I start sense making from that, I'm then able to go through those emotions. And what do I mean by going through? I mean, taking steps that are values aligned, putting your hand up for the difficult project because now it feels growth oriented, going out to dinner with your loved one and asking a question or going to a place that feels extraordinary about your hopes and your dreams and maybe a place that you've turned away from through the complacency of the life that you've been living.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  And so it's the go to and it's the go through, but the go through is guided by a strong inner core of our values and a seeing of the self rather than an unseeing.

• 41:24Tom Bilyeu?

  You're probably paying two salespeople to do one salesperson's job. That's where today's sponsor Pipe Drive comes in. An intelligent AI powered sales CRM loved by growing sales teams. Pipe Drive just launched meeting intelligence built right into the CRM. Before every call, it pulls deal history and past conversations into One brief during the call, it records and takes notes after it. It drafts your CRM updates to review and approve. So there's less admin and more selling. Switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople and join the over 100,000 companies already using Pipe Drive.

• 42:07Tom Bilyeu?

  My link gets you an exclusive 30 days free instead of the usual 14 day trial. There's no credit card payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.com/impact to get started. Again, that's pipedrive.com/impact and you can be up and running in minutes.

• 42:27Tom Bilyeu?

  This is super powerful. So I want to talk about the idea of developing that strong core of values. So you talked earlier about people needing, most people don't even know what their values are. I think a lot might be hiding in values. When I think about my own life and how I've been able to navigate difficult things and still move forward.

• 42:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Let me run an idea by you. Yeah. Very curious to see what you think about this.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  I want to come back to journaling as well.

• 42:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Cause I think it's a really important part.

• 42:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Super powerful. So I have a feeling that people would be very well served to put values in place around the idea of regrets. And the reason that I have rules in my life and that I have values in my life is I want to say an abject failure on a world stage. If I screw this up, what story am I going to tell myself about myself? Because ultimately it doesn't matter what the world thinks about me. It matters what I think about me. If the whole world hates me, but I really believe in myself and believe I did the right thing and all that, I'm going to be fine. If the world loves me, but I think I'm a total failure, it's not going to matter.

• 43:31Tom Bilyeu?

  So when I think about putting rules in my life and coming up with a value system, my rules are based on my values, which is why I keep tying those two things.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:38Tom Bilyeu?

  So coming up with a value system and then putting rules in place. I do that because if I were to embarrass myself in some catastrophic way, if I were, I think about this a lot. If I were to make my, my wife's life worse. Very telling that I don't think about my own, but if I were to make my wife's life worse. I would have to know that I was at least pursuing the right values and that the suffering that I have brought upon others.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Is at least valiant and that I was attempting to do the right thing. It's interesting that word, I think, hits something. So.

• 44:16Tom Bilyeu?

  What do you think about that idea? The idea that like regrets are real. How you think about yourself matters a lot.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:24Tom Bilyeu?

  And that if you don't have your values in place, you won't ever risk tragedy. Because all you can see is that tragedy was bad. And I'm not going to put myself in that position. But if you have a value system that mandates you risk tragedy, then it becomes worth it.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  I love, I love the depth of this. I think that what you describe is so powerful. You mentioned a little bit earlier, social contagion. Social contagion is the very interesting psychological phenomenon where we get caught up in other people's emotions and behaviors. So you might be in a workplace where everyone's feeling stressed and busy. And or you read the news and everyone's stressed in the news and you start feeling those things. We also know we have behavioral contagion. Behavioral contagion is where we live in a particular environment and we start picking up without even realizing it on the behaviors of others.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  So we know in large scale epidemiological studies that if someone in your social network gets divorced, it significantly increases the likelihood that you will get divorced. Which is extraordinary. If you are on an airplane.

• 45:40Tom Bilyeu?

  This one freaks me out.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  We, we, and I say airplane and I know in the US we say airplane. But if you are on an airplane and someone sits next to you and you do not even know the person and you are trying to be healthy and that seat partner buys candy, seventy percent, it increases the likelihood by seventy percent that you will buy candy and sweet things too.

• 46:08Tom Bilyeu?

  That's insane.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  So I, you know, how do you protect against social contagion? How do you protect? And, and I'm using these as micro examples of something that is actually.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  Much more than a micro. It ultimately determines whether you are living the life that you want.

• 46:29Tom Bilyeu?

  This is so scary.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  It's so scary. It's so, the, the, it, it is, social contagion is so powerful. Uh, we saw it at the beginning of the pandemic. We saw how people were grabbing toilet paper. You know, this is catching behaviors from other people.

• 46:46Tom Bilyeu?

  And this is what I'm talking about in terms of the difficulty of assessing your emotions.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  And so, and this is where what you talk about, and I think what you're stringing is something much more powerful, actually, even than what I'm saying. And I'd love to move to it, which is the risk of tragedy. Because I think there's, there's a through line there that is really important. But what I want to, um, before we get there, say is that what can happen with social contagion is we get lulled into autopilot. Oh, someone else is driving this kind of car. I want to drive it. Someone else is wearing these clothes. Someone else doing this kind of job. Everyone's selling their stocks. Everyone, uh, we, we all get lulled into social contagion. And so we ask ourselves the most crucial question, which is how do we protect against it?

• 47:33Speaker 01

  How do we protect against it? And the strongest answer that we have from science is by knowing what your values are. So let me play out an example, which is if you in conversation with your gorgeous wife and she's upset about something and you find yourself getting immersed in her upset or in her anger as an example. But you know, front and center, that the relationship is so important to you and that clean communication and clarity of communication is a value that you want to hold to.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  We know that when people have taken a little bit of time to affirm and identify what their values are, they are more likely to be protected from social contagion. And I want to give you an example of how this plays out. Imagine you are someone who's grown up in a community in which no one in your community goes to college. Okay? So every single piece of.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Context that you've been in has said, we aren't college material. We don't go to college. We're not that type. That's not who we are. Okay? But imagine you have a passion and an interest. And so you study hard and you make your way to college and you finally get there. Okay? There is going to come a time in college and in life when we fail. When we have an exam and we do really badly, when things don't go according to plan.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  And at that point, when that student is in college and they take a test and they fail the test, there is a significant likelihood that they will drop out. And it's so interesting because we always think of biases as things that other people have about us. And yet what you start seeing is if you grow up in an X environment or a Y environment, you in times of stress start to turn the bias against yourself. Oh, they were right all along. Maybe I'm not cut out for this. Maybe there's no point in even trying. Oh, maybe I am unworthy. Okay?

• 50:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  And so we know that at that crucial juncture, and again, I give this just as an example, but it can play out in any context in life. At that crucial juncture, what we start to do is we start to turn biases against ourselves. Oh, they were right all along. Maybe I'm not college material.

• 50:21Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm obsessed with this idea.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Okay. It's so fascinating. Then you start saying, what is it that protects people from becoming self biased? From having a narrative that is not a narrative that they want to live into, but is a narrative that in times of stress starts to rear its head and to own them. What protects them? And we know that if we take that college student and we ask them to just on their first day of going into college, spend ten minutes, ten minutes, writing about, why are you studying this thing? Why is this course that you are on important for you and in your life? What is your purpose here?

• 51:07Speaker 01

  We know that that ten minutes literally protects the person three years down the track from dropping out. So now let's get it's let's get generalized. You going into a difficult relationship, into a a business where you believe in it, where it's purpose connected, but where anything could change, where the world is uncertain. This is why having this core, being the gymnast with your values is so crucial. Because when you know what your values are, when you know why you're doing this thing, we are more likely to be able to stay the course.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  And we are more likely to be able to, in your words, risk tragedy. And what I want to say is

• 51:58Speaker 01

  we may be risking tragedy.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  But the true tragedy, the true tragedy is when we don't know what our values are. And when we are

• 52:14Speaker 01

  literally risking our lives. And what I mean here is we are risking our lives in an autopilot.

• 52:23Tom Bilyeu?

  The tragedy of never living.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  The tragedy of not living.

• 52:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, my God. So to your point about humaning is hard. Uh, yes, it is extraordinarily difficult. Emotions are signposts to a value system that you've never taken the time to write down, that you've been developing since you were a little kid, often shaped wildly by trauma as a kid.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:45Tom Bilyeu?

  When your brain was still like half baked, like, oh, my God, all of this stuff, creating this, it's feeding your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind does not have the uh, effect of speaking to you in words, as we were talking about earlier. So now you get these feelings, something doesn't feel right, you feel off. But you also feel a tremendous sense of fear when you look at

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:08Tom Bilyeu?

  what change might bring, the unknown, the liminal space, which that whole idea is fairly new, the the, at least the word liminal. But now I have like completely fallen in love. With like that in between moment where everything is uncertain.

• 53:19Tom Bilyeu?

  It's beautiful. It's so beautiful and horrendous and yes.

• 53:20Tom Bilyeu?

  It's horrendous. It is terrible and terrifying. And this is where most people get stuck and this is why people don't make progress in their life. And so when I ask, how do we master our negative emotions? It's exactly this, like you have to get into that messy middle. You have to define your values. You have to take the time to journal. You said you wanted to get back to that. You've got to take the time to write this stuff down, get clarity of your own ideas. And some of this isn't even getting clarity. It's creating clarity. There's no clarity to be had. That you're just getting. Yes.

• 53:50Tom Bilyeu?

  That already exists. Right, exactly. Like you have to take the time to say, Yes. Here's my best like go at what I think I should value. Over time, you will see whether they work or not. But so that idea you were saying about um that you become self biased Yeah. In moments of stress, based on something that you learned a long time ago. This is why I am utterly convinced that zip code based poverty has everything to do about mindset and very little to do with actual money. Because they say you go from a t-shirt to t-shirt in three generations. Meaning if you start broke, you can get wealthy, but you'll be back to broke. Uh, because what ends up happening is the ideas, the even the the pain that that person had to like.

• 54:33Tom Bilyeu?

  When I think about my own obsession with success. It's because I felt like I lacked as a kid, right? I wanted for things and I wasn't able to get them. And so I was like, I'll never feel like this again. And so you overcompensate and you just go ham. Now, if I had a kid and raised them and they never wanted for anything, the odds of them having the fire in their belly that I have is virtually zero. And so them doing all the suffering and everything that I've done to get what I've gotten, it's just not gonna happen. So you take somebody that grows up in the inner cities. I actually, so impact theory exists because someone looked me in the eye when I was trying to get them to believe in their own future. And they said, well, my mom told me that the world doesn't want people who look like me to succeed. And I was like, what the fuck?

• 55:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that is that it's bias. Yeah.

• 55:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Like even if that were true, like to think like that. And so you're from South Africa. Nelson Mandela is arguably the most influential person in my life, though I've never met the man, but reading his book, Long Walk to Freedom. And he said, he got in a plane where the pilot was black and he was like freaked out and he was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, black people can't fly a plane. And he was like, oh, my God, like, how could I, as a black man, think that?

• 55:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:38Tom Bilyeu?

  He was like, whoa, like, that these ideas could get implanted that deep into my mind. And so when I think, like, telling your kid that the world doesn't want someone who looks like you to succeed, you you walk out just, well, why even try? And now your behaviors are, I'm not going to try. And so if you don't take the time, to your point about college, write this shit down. That even if the world wants me to fail, I will never stop trying. I will always pursue that which I love. Whatever that's gonna manifest as a value, you've gotta have it. Because if you don't, in times of stress, you will slide back to, oh, well, the world doesn't want me to succeed anyway, therefore I shouldn't even try.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, my God, so I didn't even, there's so many things to unpack there. The first is, I would say that one of the most disempowering ways that we can be in the world, probably the most disempowering way, is to feel that we are completely victims to the system and the circumstance. Okay?

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Because then there's no point in trying. Then the the bias holds me, the story holds me.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  Another of the most disempowering ways we can be in the world is to think that

• 56:54Speaker 01

  everything rests on my thoughts and my emotions. Because what that denies is the reality of context.

• 57:03Tom Bilyeu?

  There's pathology on both sides.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  You know, it's it's it's the bothness and and I, you know, sometimes I talk out against this forced positivity, not sometimes, I always talk out against forced positivity. Because it's cruel and it's unkind and it's ineffective and it, we do it ourselves and we do it to others and there is no research that supports the idea that forced positivity is associated with when forced positivity is denial, is associated with greater outcomes. But so often people say things to me like, so are you Anti-happiness, you know, are you, are you anti-happiness? And I'm like, no, I'm not anti-happiness.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  In fact, I, I wrote a ninety chapter, I edited a ninety chapter handbook called The Oxford Handbook of Happiness. I am genuinely and curiously and, and um purposefully interested in true human happiness. And one of the most fascinating chapters of this book was a chapter about how, where you live and your access to public transport, how it impacts on your wellbeing. And of course it does, because if you are needing to commute two hours to work and two hours from work every single day,

• 58:22Speaker 01

  it is impacting on your relationships and your capacity to be there for your family and your children and so on. And so there is a gain this bothness. It is not about, I am a victim of the system

• 58:40Speaker 01

  because that traps me.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  It is also not about, I am a complete victim of my own mental state and mindset because that denies

• 58:56Speaker 01

  the truth.

• 58:57Tom Bilyeu?

  That some shit is hard.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  That some shit is hard, that some shit is hard. And I wanted to come back, Tom, because you spoke about Nelson Mandela. Nelson Mandela described how, in order to live through his purpose,

• 59:16Speaker 01

  he needed to be able to sit down with his oppressors, is what he described.

• 59:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Facts.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  And he's learning actually about his anger. You know, not running away from anger, but actually going towards your anger, knowing that your anger is signposting that you care about equity and fairness. And then what demands that you sit down with your oppressor is because you care about equity and fairness and therefore you are.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  Being values guided towards having that conversation. And so the point that I make here, when I'm talking about emotions or data, not directives, is that when you think about emotions as data and you say like, oh, well, I'm sad, or, oh, well, I'm grieving, oh, well, I'm angry. Those emotions are signposting things that you care about. But the not directives part is just as important. Just because I feel sad doesn't mean that I get to stay in bed all day. Because actually, what is the sadness signposting? The sadness is maybe signposting that I

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  care about outcomes, that I care about life, that I care about people. And so the sadness is, is signposting that this thing that is outside of me right now matters. And so this part of emotions are data, not directives. We are,

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  we are learning from our emotions so that we can step into the wisdom of our values. And that's why emotions are data, not directives. I'm learning from emotions, but we own our emotions, they don't own us.

• 1:01:23Tom Bilyeu?

  We can own our emotions. I think most people are owned by their emotions.

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  Own our emotions.

• 1:01:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Going back to Nelson Mandela, I would be owned by my anger if I were locked up for twenty seven years.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:35Tom Bilyeu?

  I can't fathom. He is a human of a higher class than I. It's unbelievable. I really want to pretend that I would be that amazing. I would not. And the fact that he was, and here's what I love from Long Walk to Freedom, is he said that the oppressor gives up their humanity to oppress somebody else. And so it doesn't make sense for me to come out and just turn the tables of oppression. You have to find, and I can never remember if he said this or if I just implied it, but you have to come up with a third way, because you can either remain oppressed, become the oppressor, or find this third way of unity. And the fact that he was able to do that is really, really incredible.

• 1:02:17Tom Bilyeu?

  And it brings me back to Viktor Frankl and this idea of, so Viktor Frankl, for those that don't know, and I can't imagine you've watched my content, you don't know who Viktor Frankl is, but Viktor Frankl was in Auschwitz, he was actually in multiple Nazi death camps. And he said that if you could establish meaning and purpose, that you could navigate the, I mean, the most gruesome situation I can possibly imagine. And he said, if you didn't have that, then you died. And he said, you could predict within 72 hours, who was gonna die when? Because you would see them give up on their purpose. And then it was like, why am I doing this? And then they would just die.

• 1:02:56Tom Bilyeu?

  That's crazy to me.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:58Tom Bilyeu?

  And goes to show that there is a relationship you have to have with your emotions. Because if Nelson Mandela had been consumed by his anger, as I would have been, then you have no Nelson Mandela, nobody knows him, he's just somebody that burns out very quickly. And if you are just overwhelmed by your suffering and don't assign it, because it's not really there, but you don't assign it meaning and purpose, then again, you will burn out and that's that.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so can I, can I play out Nelson Mandela and Viktor Frankl via emotional agility?

• 1:03:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, please.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's very much about the tapping into the wisdom of our emotions so we can move towards our values. So Viktor Frankl, actually, I want to start before Viktor Frankl. Can I talk about Primo Levi if we're talking about?

• 1:03:54Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't even know who that is, so I can't wait.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  So Primo, Primo Levi also survived the Nazi death camps. And he described how, when he was on, when the, the death camps were liberated. And he boarded a train back to his hometown in Italy.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  And he had just been through this indescribable experience in the death camps.

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  And he described how he was on the train and it came into the station where his hometown. And there were people waiting at the station because now everyone had been released from the death camps. And so the townspeople had come to meet everyone who were on the train. And Levi described how he and his fellow prisoners were absolutely emaciated.

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  And how the townspeople stood at the station and then as everyone started to get off the train, the townspeople turned away.

• 1:05:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Did you say they were so horrified?

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  They were so horrified. They turned away because they were unable to see. They were unable to metabolize what it was that they were seeing in front of them and they turned away. And Levi described how in many ways that experience of being unseen was even more traumatic

• 1:05:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Whoa.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  than his experience in the death camps. And I want to

• 1:05:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Are you shocked by that? I'm shocked by that.

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  Because

• 1:05:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Did he write a book? I'm gonna need to read this.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  Because he was describing how

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  how, and I think this is the thread of my work. The thread of my work is the seeing versus the unseeing of the self. The seeing versus the unseeing of others.

• 1:06:06Tom Bilyeu?

  But, but like, let's really put this in context. This man was in a prison camp where he's watching people get tortured and die right in front of him.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  To his home.

• 1:06:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh huh.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  He came back to his home with this expectation that he was now gonna be amongst his people.

• 1:06:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  And they turned their back on him.

• 1:06:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Did they? Or were they just weak?

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  What whatever it was, he described that this experience was so profoundly painful to him.

• 1:06:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Wow.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  Because it was, it was a turning the back, it was the turning of the back. And I think so much of my work on emotional agility, you know, people often say to me like, what is emotional agility? Like, give us the psychological definition. And I'm like, well, you know, the psychological definition is emotional agility is the ability to be with all of our difficult emotions, thoughts and stories in ways that are curious. You know, what is it telling me in ways that are compassionate and in ways that are courageous? So we can keep taking values connected steps in our lives. That's the nerd definition, that's the academic definition. But what is the truth of my work?

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  The truth of my work is that emotional agility is about the seeing versus the unseeing of the self. When we turn our back on our difficult emotions, on our difficult stories, on our difficult values, we are unseeing ourselves. And there is a cost to unseeing. And at the same time, just because I feel sad today, doesn't mean that my sadness is all encompassing. Because if I'm, I'm more than my sadness. I'm also my values, my intentions, my relationships, my wisdom. I believe that every single one of us inside of us has profound centeredness

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  and breathing and wisdom and clarity. And when we get defined by our difficult emotion, by the sadness or by the anger, we are unseeing the other parts of ourselves. We are unseeing our capacity and our humanity and our potential. And so there is another unseeing that is happening there. And so now, if we, if we can go back to Viktor Frankl. Viktor Frankl describes this, I think it is one of the most profoundly powerful ideas in human history. Between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space is our power to choose. And it's in that choice that lies our growth and our freedom.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  So let me try to tie together what we have been talking about, which is.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  When we are hooked, when we are fused, when we are stuck in a difficult thought, the thought might be, I'm not good enough. Stuck in a difficult emotion, an emotion of stress or disappointment or anger, or stuck in a story. The story might have been written on our mental chalkboards when we were five years old. Stories about who we are, what kind of love and life we deserve. When we are stuck in those stories,

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  they literally have become a prison. So we've taken, actually, at the beginning, I said, oh, these thoughts, these emotions, these stories are normal. Charles Darwin described how they've evolved to help us to communicate with ourselves and others. So there is nothing, there is nothing good or bad in having a feeling of being sad or angry or stressed. There is, there's nothing inherently good or bad about it.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  But what happens is when we start treating that thought emotional story as fact, when it literally creates a prison. I feel unhappy now I'm going to leave the room when my spouse is starting in on the finances. I have the story that I'm not good enough, so I'm not putting my hand up for that job. What you've now done is you've now taken a normal thought emotional story that is there to help you to make sense of the world, and you're starting to treat it as fact, and it's starting to become data and directives as opposed to data not directives. Okay, so in psychological terms, we call this fusion.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  Fusion is where we have a normal thought emotional story and we start over identifying with it. There's no space for breathing, for love, for humanity, for connection. It starts to own us. So what is emotional agility? Emotional agility, and we can talk about some very practical strategies, but emotional agility is the ability first to say,

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  It is hard to human and these thoughts, emotions and stories have evolved

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  to help me to make sense of the world in all of us. We, we, we constantly are assessing and adjudicating and trying to make sense of the world and ourselves in it. And so what we are doing is we are firstly saying these experiences that I'm having are normal.

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  Okay, so we're showing up to our difficult emotions. And we are generating a level of acceptance towards them.

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  And here's the paradox is acceptance is the prerequisite to change.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  I'll say that again, acceptance is a prerequisite to change. It sounds weird. By acceptance, I don't mean passive resignation. I don't mean, oh, well, you know, I'm accepting that I have no money and it just is what it is. And there's nothing I can do about it. Acceptance is about facing into the truth of your experience and the truth of your difficult situation.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  Doesn't mean you passively resigned to it. It just means you're seeing it. Okay, so that's the first thing we want to be able to do. This is in emotional agility, I call this showing up, showing up to our difficult emotions with a level of um realness and gentleness and, and softness. But you're still showing up.

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  Then, how do we start creating the space?

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  Once you've shown up, we want to start using our emotions in the ways that they were intended, which is as data. So can I give some practical strategies as to, yeah, as to how that, how that, so here's some examples.

• 1:13:00Speaker 01

  Firstly, practical strategy number one is is words matter. Words matter. So very often, when we

• 1:13:12Speaker 01

  try to think about our emotions, we use very big umbrella terms to describe what we're feeling. Okay, I'm stressed. I'm stressed is the most common one I hear. But Tom, there's a world of difference between stress and disappointment. Or

• 1:13:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Why would people lump? Is it, I, to me, this just all goes back to people do not know how to interpret their own feelings.

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  Well, why do people lump it? Because people have grown up in households in which uh emotions are maybe seen as bad when you angry go to your room. And so people haven't learnt the skills. I mean, I think it's one of the greatest tragedies that when you are struggling with mathematics and you're a child, you can go on to Khan Academy and as wonderful as Khan Academy is and find any lesson you want about algebra or pre calculus or whatever it is. But if you are a child who's feeling unseen by their parents or who's being bullied at school, the capacity to use

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  the knowledge that we have in the technology that we have to bring you the ability to develop those social and emotional skills does not exist. And I think it's one of the greatest um opportunities in scaled technology for good that exists in the world right now.

• 1:14:35Tom Bilyeu?

  One of the opportunities was the opportunity?

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  Well, I think the opportunity is that there is a, an absolute world that exists of um scaled education. When it comes to mathematics and English and algebra and learning and you know, masterclass chef and all of these things.

• 1:15:00Speaker 01

  And yet, the skills that children need and the skills that we need.

• 1:15:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Meaning emotional agility?

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  Emotional skills.

• 1:15:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Because without that, they can't use the knowledge.

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, i- if we look, if we look at children dropping out of school, if we look at children's lifelong well-being, if we look at the, their relationships that they're going to be able to create and sustain through their world. If we look at the fact that they're not going to just have one pandemic in their life, but likely more.

• 1:15:29Tom Bilyeu?

  You bite your tongue.

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  We.

• 1:15:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Don't even say it.

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  We are growing up in a world of increased uncertainty. The World Economic Forum describes emotional agility as the skills of the future.

• 1:15:48Speaker 01

  Because we need the ability to deal with

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  the world that is presented to us, the world as it is. And so I think, yes, I think one of the most remarkable opportunities is the scaled development of social emotional learning in, in children, in education and beyond.

• 1:16:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that doesn't sound easy.

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  Well, it doesn't sound easy, but if we're talking practical strategies, you know, why, you, you said to me, like, why is it that people struggle with these skills? Why is it is because these skills have become feminized? These skills have become associated with being soft and fluffy and irrational and um, as, as being like intangible. And yet, they are not. We have, we have bodies of knowledge about these skills being practical. And let me give you some examples of, you know, wh- what I mean here.

• 1:16:58Speaker 01

  So I was saying, often we use these very big labels to describe what we're feeling. I'm stressed is the most common one.

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  But there is a world of difference between stress and disappointment, or stress and feeling unsupported, or stress and knowing you're in the wrong job or the wrong career.

• 1:17:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Have you seen the color tests where they show you, it kind of looks like a colorblind test. It's like a bunch of slight variations of color. And when there's, I forget, it's like a, an Amazonian tribe or something, where they are so used to all the different colors of green, that they actually have different names for them.

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:17:42Tom Bilyeu?

  And if you, they like can find the dot of a certain name, like with ninety-eight percent, you know, accuracy or whatever. If you're not from there, then you find it with like fifteen percent accuracy. It's crazy.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  Love that.

• 1:17:56Tom Bilyeu?

  I went through it myself. I was like, what? There's a difference in those two colors?

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  Take this with emotions. Take this with emotions. Stress is not the same as all of these other things. So we've got to develop language for it. We've got to develop language for it. If you think that you are stressed, your body and your psychology doesn't know what to do with that stress. But as soon as you start saying, oh, my stress is unsupported, there's literally this readiness potential in our brains that starts saying, oh, I'm feeling stressed because I'm unsupported. How do I get support? So this is called emotion granularity. It's exactly what you're describing. It's these different colors. This is called emotion granularity. Emotion granularity is, and I don't want to overuse this word.

• 1:18:43Speaker 01

  It gets overused, but emotion granularity is a superpower. Children as young as two and three years old, who are more able to accurately label their emotions, have higher levels of well-being, high levels of delayed gratification, literally in longitudinal studies. If, if, if you are a sixteen-year-old and the principal, and, and someone says like, I've got this great idea. Let's let the air out of the principal's car tires. Okay? The child who's able to say, oh, I want pure acceptance and I'm excited on the one hand, but actually what's going on for me is I've got a sense of disquiet. This feels wrong. That child is going to be. Equipped.

• 1:19:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:25Speaker 01

  In so many ways. So let me come back, come back to this practical strategy, which is when you find yourself using a broad brush stroke label, ask yourself, what are two other options? I know that sounds very basic, but.

• 1:19:39Tom Bilyeu?

  I thought this was really brilliant.

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  It's really important. I was working with an executive who described everything as angry. You know, he would say, I'm angry. I'm angry, my team's angry. You know, everyone's, th- this was his language.

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  And I started saying to him, what else could you be feeling other than angry? What are two other options? And he started saying, well, actually, maybe I'm scared. You know, maybe what I'm calling angry is actually scared and maybe my team's not angry. Maybe my team is actually mistrusting. Now, you can see if you go into a conversation with your team where you angry and they are angry. There's no space. There's no Viktor Frankl, anything. You know, you're angry and they're angry. There's fusion.

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  But if you go into a conversation where you are scared because it's your first role in this organization and where your team is looking for opportunities to build trust. It's a very different conversation.

• 1:20:54Tom Bilyeu?

  How important is it, do you think, to find the root cause of your emotion? So not just have the word to describe your emotion, but to actually understand, ooh, this is, you know, me being afraid because X Y Z reason.

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  I think that root cause is really helpful. So long as getting stuck in what is the root cause doesn't get us stuck. You know, this is, this is a.

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  Sometimes, sometimes we can get too stuck in our heads and not enough living our lives, you know, emotional.

• 1:21:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you think that comes from root cause analysis, though?

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  I think sometimes, I think sometimes, so I, I think sometimes

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  the labeling of this difficulty emotion, so it might be, you know, so say the root cause might be the person saying, well,

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  I'm scared and whether it's like, I'm scared that I'm gonna fail or I'm scared that I'm gonna lose my job or I'm scared about something else, like, it's not as, I mean, it's, it can be helpful, but I don't think it needs to derail us from the recognition that I'm scared. And what is this scaredness pointing to? What is the data? The fear is pointing me to the fact that I actually kind of care about this role.

• 1:22:24Speaker 01

  And so you can start seeing the beauty here because if I care about this role, then how do I have a real conversation with my team? And so you move on the one hand from I'm angry, my team's angry, into I'm actually fearful because I care about the role. So how do I have a real conversation that builds trust? And there's such, it's extraordinary, it's beautiful. And a couple of, a couple of um, months, I, I was working with this, this executive, it, it was in a kind of consulting type context. And a couple of months later, I went out with this guy and some of his colleagues

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  and his wife was there and they were talking about this particular strategy, about this tool. And his wife said, this completely changed the relationship. Because he would come home from work and he would say,

• 1:23:24Speaker 01

  You seem angry. And she would be like, no, I'm not angry. I feel unsupported. Well, I'm not angry. I'm just tired. So emotion granularity is really important. And so a very, very important strategy is recognizing that words matter.

• 1:23:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Really fast, put a button on why that ended up changing her life. Why was emotional granularity? Because the usability of this, I think, is something people really need to get.

• 1:23:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, if you are completely going to assumptions based on your lack of emotional sophistication.

• 1:24:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 1:24:03Speaker 01

  Okay, so you are going to the assumption that you are angry, your team's angry, and your wife is angry.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  Then automatically, your way that you are moving through the world is a way that is aggressive and a way that is likely

• 1:24:27Speaker 01

  disconnected from being able to build capacity.

• 1:24:30Tom Bilyeu?

  You also, to your point about unseeing, you're not actually seeing what's really going on with them.

• 1:24:35Speaker 01

  You're not seeing.

• 1:24:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Which then makes that person feel unseen. And to your earlier point, which I'm still flabbergasted by, but that our concentration camp survivor, whose name I forget.

• 1:24:43Speaker 01

  Prima Levi.

• 1:24:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Prima Levi.

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  Levi, Levi.

• 1:24:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Prima Levi.

• 1:24:47Speaker 01

  Prima Levi.

• 1:24:48Tom Bilyeu?

  He was more traumatized by having his hometown turn his back on him and not see him and what he'd been through and where he was at. So yeah, I can see how getting back to the emotional granularity, being able to actually understand the nuance. And quite frankly, just communicating, because if she wasn't saying, no, I'm not angry. I'm actually feeling unsupported. Like, they just need to communicate, but they have to have a shared lexicon.

• 1:25:16Speaker 01

  So what else is underneath that? Yeah. And I suppose actually getting back to Levi, it's really about.

• 1:25:24Speaker 01

  When I say that my work is about seeing, it's about seeing others and it's also about seeing the self. And so emotion granularity allows you to see the self better. I've got some other practical strategies that can help to create a space. I don't know how we're doing for time. The, the, another, so the first thing we're doing is we're showing up to our difficulty emotions. So we're no longer fused, but then there's a bit of breathing, there's a bit of space. The next thing that we're doing is we're recognizing that it's really difficult to read the instructions when you're stuck inside the bottle. Okay, you know, to the point that you were making earlier with Nelson Mandela, it's like when you immersed in your emotion, you are unable to get perspective.

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  So you can't read the instructions when you're stuck inside the bottle. So how do we start getting out of the bottle? In other words, moving out of the trap of the thought, the emotion, the story and rather being able to notice it rather than be it. And that's the distinction here.

• 1:26:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Can we play with that idea for a second? Cause I think a lot of people get really lost there. Okay, so you're having an emotion, it's based on something happening in the real world. And this is the thing about being a human that I think is very difficult. When people speak in bumper stickers, immediately distrust them because life is so much more complicated than that. So you're having this emotion, you've fused with the emotion because even though you know the tactics and you've listened to this interview and you know how it's supposed to feel, but you're like, I'm for real in the middle of some shit here. Like this is real, there's really a problem, this is really bad, I'm going through something very difficult. I mean, to your, your own history, my dad is actually dying. This isn't make believe, this is not me, like, um, you know, building this up bigger than it really is.

• 1:27:13Tom Bilyeu?

  My dad is actually dying, I am going to lose the person who most saw me in this world and this is fucking brutal.

• 1:27:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:20Tom Bilyeu?

  And how do people create space in that moment? Like, cause I know you really see what they're going through, but like see him right now. How, they're, they're in the thick of something that is for real, they're not making it up. But getting fused is still a bad idea. So how do they create space when they have every reason in the world to be fused with that emotion?

• 1:27:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, when I came in, you, well.

• 1:27:50Speaker 01

  Well, we can have every reason in the world to be fused with an emotion like someone dying. Um, my father can be dying of cancer, I can be a fifteen year old, he can be forty two, and I can know that he is dying and I have a reason to be fused with that emotion.

• 1:28:14Speaker 01

  And still being fused with the, this is just unfair, can actually take me out of being able to see and be with him.

• 1:28:28Speaker 01

  So, we can have every reason in the world, it still doesn't mean that that's hopeful to us.

• 1:28:37Speaker 01

  And

• 1:28:40Speaker 01

  the way, this is the nuance that becomes really important, sometimes on social media, you know, I will try to make this distinction because it's like

• 1:28:52Speaker 01

  we have our emotions, we can honor those emotions, we can see those emotions, we can be compassionate with those emotions, we can do all of those things, and it doesn't mean that we need to be owned by them. And it doesn't mean that they need to direct us. So, how do we, how do we be with that?

• 1:29:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you ever feel like you're lying to yourself when you're in the grips of a really negative emotion? And you're like, but there's still beauty to be found, there's still joy to be had, laughter should still be a thing. Do you ever have a voice in your head that's like, no, no, no. If you're focusing on anything other than the tragedy of this moment, you're lying to yourself.

• 1:29:38Speaker 01

  I, are you asking that of me specifically?

• 1:29:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, yeah, I do get that. I know better than to believe it.

• 1:29:43Speaker 01

  I, I, um.

• 1:29:49Speaker 01

  We should come back to the journaling because I have long.

• 1:29:56Speaker 01

  It's it's been decades. Since I tried to hustle with whether I could or couldn't feel a particular thing. If I'm feeling sad, I'm feeling sad. I'll try label it, I'll try understand it, I'll try do all those things, I'll try understand the values. But I'm not gonna try force my way into a different way of seeing.

• 1:30:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Then how do you avoid getting fused?

• 1:30:23Speaker 01

  I think a really, I think a really important part of it is firstly. Interestingly, when you try hustle with your emotion, you're more likely to become fused. Because when you're feeling, if you're feeling sad and you're saying to yourself like, I shouldn't be. Or I shouldn't feel this and like this feels wrong, you you're actually. Starting to do in psychology, like we have these, we we describe these um type A emotions and type B emotions. Type A emotions, I'm getting, I'm getting kind of clinical here, but type A emotions are. The emotion you're experiencing, you're feeling sad, you're feeling angry, you're feeling upset. That's your genuine experience of the emotion.

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  Type B emotions are when you start having emotions about your emotions. Oh, I'm unhappy that I'm unhappy. I shouldn't be so unhappy, I'm not allowed to be unhappy, I'm anxious that I'm feeling anxious. You know, stress is meant to kill you, now I'm stressed that I'm stressed. And so what you start doing is you start actually. But as soon as you start hustling with whether you should or shouldn't feel an emotion, you actually create more fusion.

• 1:31:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Stick with type A though, so I'm not, I'm not having.

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  So I'm feeling this difficult emotion.

• 1:31:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I don't feel bad about it, but I am, I am lost in it. I don't even realize anymore that there's an option to feel any other way. That even if I make a joke, I feel so inauthentic because I feel like I should just be wallowing. Not even that I feel like I should be wallowing, that the only truth is yes.

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  The truth for me is that I'm doing this.

• 1:31:55Tom Bilyeu?

  And so laughing feels like a lie.

• 1:31:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think this is where, uh, I think this is also where self compassion becomes really important. This is, you know, self self compassion, it like, it sounds like so kind of, oh, you know, self compassion, we all talk about, you know, it's like roll the eyes, but. But it's, but.

• 1:32:14Speaker 01

  In a culture, again, that promotes the idea that we should always know the answer, even though when we are lying at night,

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  just us, in the stillness of our relationship with silence,

• 1:32:36Speaker 01

  we know we don't have the answer.

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  And there is a compassion

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  that is invited at that moment because compassion speaks to the truth that it is hard to human, that we don't know all the answers, that all human beings suffer, that there is fragility and beauty in life. And so when I'm in those moments of feeling stuck sometimes in grief,

• 1:33:19Speaker 01

  there is something really profound in being compassionate with that. And what do I really mean here? What I mean is firstly acknowledging, you know, for everyone who's listening right now, acknowledging that you are doing just the acknowledgement, just, just the simple acknowledgement, that you are doing the best you can with who you are, with the resources that you have been given in life. Just that acknowledgement starts to create a level of gentleness and a level of breathing and a level of space.

• 1:33:58Speaker 01

  When doctors are going to give bad news to patients.

• 1:34:05Speaker 01

  We ask them to, and I'll do this for, for people who can see me on, on YouTube, but if you can't see me, I'm putting my hands across my chest, um, almost as if I'm hugging myself. We ask doctors to do this when they're going to give bad news to a patient's family. Why? Because we are tactile human beings. And so often we live the world in a way that feels like it's just between our heads. But when we hug ourselves, when we hold ourselves, we are actually grounding ourselves. We are reminding ourselves of, of our human, like, there's, there's something about it.

• 1:34:46Tom Bilyeu?

  That shifts their...

• 1:34:48Speaker 01

  It, it shifts something so, um, so visceral. If you're doing a gazillion Zoom calls every day and, you know, people will often say to me, how do we prepare leaders for connecting with their teams when they're doing a million Zoom calls? And I'm like, preparing for connection happens when you connect with yourself. And we connect with ourselves when we actually, you know, remind ourselves that we are human. And for, for everyone that's listening, I...

• 1:35:20Speaker 01

  If you're going through, through a difficult period now, or when you will in the future,

• 1:35:29Speaker 01

  or even if you, you have, there's something beautiful in recognizing that, you know, inside the 50-year-old you,

• 1:35:41Speaker 01

  or the 40-year-old, or the 30-year-old, there is actually a five-year-old child. Like, there is a five-year-old inside every single one of us. A five-year-old. And that five-year-old is like gently tugging on your sleeve, trying to get your attention.

• 1:36:05Speaker 01

  And that five-year-old is saying, see me, love me, connect with me.

• 1:36:15Speaker 01

  And often even when we immerse in our difficult experience...

• 1:36:23Speaker 01

  That five-year-old is telling us what it needs. The five-year-old is saying, you know, wh-what is your five-year-old saying it needs of you? Is it saying it needs more creativity, more spontaneity, more connection, more love? Does it need to be seen? Does it need more growth? Does it need more learning? There is a five-year-old inside of every single one of us. And when we're stuck in something difficult, reminding ourselves that there is a five-year-old, immediately starts to connect us with this, uh, it's psychologically, I'm, I'm trying to kind of bring in these psychological terms. Psychologically, it's called continuity of the self.

• 1:37:07Speaker 01

  Because when we're stuck, when we're hooked, when we're immersed, when we're fused, these are all synonyms for the same thing. Um, when there is no space, all we're doing is we are seeing a singular version of our truth, which is our truth right now.

• 1:37:24Speaker 01

  When we connect with a five-year-old inside of us, we are starting to connect with uh, a, a different part of ourselves, an earlier version of ourselves. And so we're starting to widen our perspective naturally. You know, we're moving beyond the, this is the me, this is the fifty-year-old me, this is the angry me, into the, this is the five-year-old hurt me, who's needing to be seen. And then there is also a plus twenty year, plus twenty-year version of the self. You know, the seventy-year-old, or if you're thirty, the fifty-year-old.

• 1:38:04Speaker 01

  And that version of you is also saying, see me and love me and do things that are connected with me. Now, why am I saying this, like, why am I saying this as a strategy? I'm saying it as a strategy because what happens when we are hooked is we start to become very, um, focused in a very rigid way on one version of our current truth.

• 1:38:34Speaker 01

  And astronauts describe this, I recently had the joy of presenting to NASA. And it was the, it was the one opportunity where I was like, you know, the overview effect. But, but we have all heard of the overview effect. The overview effect is this effect where astronauts describe when they go into space, how they look back and they see the earth that is now just a pinprick. It's, it's like this tiny pinprick. And astronauts describe how seeing the earth as a pinprick reminds them both of their significance and their insignificance all at once. And it broadens their perspective.

• 1:39:18Speaker 01

  And so the reason I give this as a way of starting to move out of difficulty emotions through a compassionate channel, which is your younger self and your older self, is because it starts to broaden your perspective. I'm not just me now, the 50 year old angry me. I'm also the unseen me who's five and who needs love. And I'm also the 70 year old me who cares about how this relationship worked out. And that is one of the ways that we start creating space between stimulus and response. But, but we can't end this conversation without one more thing.

• 1:40:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's hear it.

• 1:40:04Speaker 01

  Okay, so I am, I am sad, I am angry, I am frustrated. When we say I am, you can hear that it again is fusion because it sounds as if you, all of you is angry. There's no space for anything else. There's no space for love or, or seeing or connection. So a really powerful, when we come full circle to those difficult thoughts, emotions and stories that we started off with is.

• 1:40:36Speaker 01

  Noticing your thoughts, your emotions and your stories for what they are. They're thoughts, they're emotions, they're stories. They are not fact, they're not directives. So let me play out what this looks like. When you say, I am sad, and we all do this every day. We say, I'm sad, I'm angry. Like, what else would you say? But it's almost as if the sad is a cloud in the sky. Okay, I am sad, I am the cloud, I'm defined by the cloud, the cloud is all of me.

• 1:41:09Speaker 01

  And there's no space for anything else then. There's no space for your child, or your colleague, or your dreams.

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  Instead, what we can do is we can notice our thoughts, our emotions and our stories for what they are. They are thoughts, emotions, stories. I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad, not I am sad, I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad. I am not good enough. I'm noticing that this is my I'm not good enough story.

• 1:41:48Speaker 01

  I have the urge to leave the room. I'm noticing that this is my urge to turn my back on this difficult conversation with my spouse. I'm noticing the urge. What you're starting to do here is you're starting to notice these things not as

• 1:42:06Speaker 01

  who we are, but as parts of who we are, which everyone will identify with. Everyone knows that you can simultaneously be a loved one and a parent and a child and a CEO all at the time. We can all have multiple identities. We can also experience multiple emotions and multiple experiences.

• 1:42:26Tom Bilyeu?

  It's a big part of mindfulness meditation.

• 1:42:28Speaker 01

  It's very recognize, note the thought, the emotion. And you're starting to observe it. And what you're starting to do here, it's starting to get you out of the bottle. So you can start reading the instructions of your values. What you're starting to do here is you're starting to move from I am the cloud, I am sad, into I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad. Because here's the truth, the truth is we are not the cloud. The truth is that we are the sky. We are the sky.

• 1:43:07Speaker 01

  We are beautiful and messy and capacious and able and beautiful and human enough to experience all of our difficult thoughts, emotions and stories and still choose how we want to move forward in our lives. We are not the cloud, we are the sky.

• 1:43:31Tom Bilyeu?

  I love it. Where can people follow you?

• 1:43:33Speaker 01

  My TED Talk is The Gift and Power of Emotional Courage. Um, my book is Emotional Agility. And I've also got a quiz on my website, which a couple of hundred thousand people have taken now. And it gives you a free 10-page report that connects with these different aspects of emotional agility, susandavid.com/learn. And then, of course, on social, I try to post, um, thoughtfully and intentionally. And I'd love to hear anyone's comments about this episode.

• 1:44:07Tom Bilyeu?

  I love it. All right, everybody, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care, peace. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break. And that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop, eight ounces of water, and you're done. You're getting 75 plus ingredients, vitamins and minerals, pre and probiotics, nutrient

• 1:44:50Tom Bilyeu?

  dense superfoods, everything that used to require six, seven different supplements, and perfect planning now happens in one drink that takes about 30 seconds to make. Right now, AG1 is giving you $87 worth of free gifts with your first subscription. You get a welcome kit, travel packs, vitamin D3 plus K2, and flavor samples. Click the link in the show notes or visit drinkag1.com/impact to claim this offer.