Episode 1291 Mastering Emotional Regulation at Work with Eugene K. Choi

Most adults operate in survival mode far too often, limiting critical thinking, empathy, and leadership effectiveness. In this episode of Sharkpreneur, Seth Greene interviews Dr. Eugene K. Choi, Founder & CEO of Destiny Hacks, who explains how fight, flight, and freeze responses hijack the nervous system and impede decision-making, resilience, and executive presence. He also shares practical tools for emotional regulation, accessing higher-level brain functions, and creating more effective, empathetic leadership in high-pressure environments. Key Takeaways: → The brain operates in either survival mode or executive state, never both at once. → Chronic survival responses inhibit critical thinking and empathy. → Emotional pain can trigger survival responses as strongly as physical threats. → Awareness is the first step in shifting from a survival state to an executive state. → Regular practice in emotional regulation enhances leadership, problem-solving, and resilience. Dr. Eugene K. Choi is a Transformational Leadership Coach on a mission to transform leaders, businesses, and communities. He teaches executive leaders how to achieve and sustain peak performance in high-stress, high-stakes, and high-change environments. Dr. Eugene created a unique, science-backed process that teaches leaders to activate their executive brain, dramatically improving results and increasing clarity and focus in challenging, unpredictable situations. He has a background in clinical pharmacy, neuroscience, and business coaching, and has helped thousands of entrepreneurs and executives optimize their mindset, reduce toxic stress, and lead with greater impact. Dr. Eugene’s expertise in audience growth has resulted in over 8 million views on his online articles and over 23 million views on his short films. He has also worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs to help them scale their businesses to generate more revenue and impact. These experiences have been critical in helping clients produce tangible results in their businesses. Connect With Eugene: Website: https://destinyhacks.co/ https://eugenekchoi.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eugenekchoi/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eugenekchoi/

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Sharkpreneur Podcast with Kevin Harrington and Seth Green. Kevin Harrington is the inventor of the infomercial, one of the original sharks from the hit TV show Shark Tank, and has generated over $5 billion in TV and digital direct response sales. Seth Green is the world's first trusted authority on cutting-edge direct response marketing, a bestselling author, and the only three-time marketer of the year nominee. On the podcast, Kevin and Seth interview sharkpreneurs who share straight talk on what it takes to explode your business.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Forty-nine faces looked to him in triumph. Over the last 12 months, they had each taken turns and promoted his business for a week at a time, driving over $987,342 in revenue. What if you had a network of 50 centers of influence who promoted your business every week for a year? Grab your copy of the number one Amazon bestselling book, The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Business with a Podcast, at 33% off the Amazon price by going to ultimatenpodcastbook.com. Again, that website for 33% off the Amazon price is ultimatenpodcastbook.com. Welcome to the podcast. This is your co-host Seth Green. Today, I've got the good fortune to be joined by Dr. Eugene K. Choi, and we're going to talk about how to move from fight or flight into executive state.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  We're going to talk about emotional regulation, resilience, and authentic executive presence. He is a keynote speaker, executive coach, and neuroscience-based leadership expert with experience managing over 250-plus locations. Eugene, thanks so much for joining us.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me. Great to be here.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Our pleasure. Let's go back in time. You went from, I think, pharmacy and healthcare into neuroscience-based coaching. What was the turning point? How did you make that switch?

• 1:47Speaker 02

  Oh, man. Yeah, so, long story short, I was a pharmacist. I practiced for three years out in New York City, out on the East Coast, got burnt out. I did filmmaking full-time for a little bit, out on the West Coast. So, the filmmaking taught me marketing without realizing I was learning about marketing. We created multiple pieces that generated millions of views. The biggest project I worked on got 23 million views on it. So, it taught me a lot about, like, how do you take something, and you create something for people that they value and they want to share it. So, that taught me a lot. Combine that, I eventually went back into pharmacy for a little bit, and then got into business coaching, where I got mentored by a CEO of, you know, an 88-figure business. So, that taught me a lot about business, and my healthcare background came full circle because I learned about neuroscience.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  So the neuroscience behind, wait, hold on, how do you perform at an extra high level? How do you access this higher function that we all have access to that most people don't even know about? Where you can access higher levels of critical thinking, problem solving, and become a better leader? And for me, it was also become a better parent, a better partner. So I took my filmmaking skills, I started sharing what I learned about the brain, because it turns out for a more, basically, a majority of our adult lives, we're not accessing these higher functions of our brain for many different reasons. And I just started sharing it. And I used, leveraged my skill sets from that point on, and I've been speaking about it ever since. It's the brain science behind, yeah, how do you tap into your talents? How do you tap into your gifts? Yeah.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Well, that is incredible. I'm sure the longer version of that journey could probably fill the book somewhere.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I've been working on it, yeah.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Awesome. So you've talked about having outward success, but still waking up anxious. What did that teach you? Talk a little bit about that journey and that, and how that affected your process in terms of performance and fulfillment.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, when I went back to pharmacy, because we ran out of money after I tried this first attempt, that quote unquote, pursuing your passions, you know, with the filmmaking stuff. I ended up getting promoted. I was a supervisor for LA County, six major hospitals, over 200-plus clinics I was managing. And it was the golden handcuffs, on paper, right? The six-figure, multiple six-figure salary, all that kind of stuff. And I realized, just like, I just felt so trapped and it sucked. And that's kind of what led me down this path of discovering, wait, hold on, how does our brain actually work? Why is it that I, even though I have the money, the healthy family, all that, why am I experiencing stress on a daily basis? And that's kind of where I went down that rabbit hole, and that's where the science came in.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  What? When did you first realize that a lot of leadership problems are actually nervous system problems?

• 4:08Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. So when I started learning about the brain, that's when I realized this is infiltrating everything. Any sort of leadership problem that you're seeing, guaranteed behind the scene, there's some sort of nervous system regulation issue happening. Because what happens is, for a majority of our adult lives, if your nervous system's not regulated, your brain can't be empathetic. Your brain's ability to have critical thinking is literally turned off, right? So this is where a lot of, you know, whether it's a scandal, or a challenge, a negotiation that's not going well, there's some sort of fight or flight thing that's happening in that moment.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Awesome. And then what does that look, what does fight or flight leadership look like in real life? How do we know that we're in this problem?

• 4:48Speaker 02

  So I have to break this down real quick, if that's okay.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, please.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  So basically, your brain, your whole nervous system operates in one of two states at any given moment. It's only one or the other. It can't be in both at the same time. It's what I call a survival state or an executive state. Survival state is when your brain, it's meant for life threatening situations. So imagine a tiger's in front of you, ready to eat you. Your nervous system is in a mode where you have to react without thinking. So key word, without thinking, because if you start thinking in a life threatening situation, you might get killed by a wild animal and die. So your brain can't think in the survival state. Your executive state is where a lot of your brain's higher functions come from. Your critical thinking skills, your ability to connect with somebody, have empathy. This is important for salespeople, right? Leaders who want to connect with their audience, your empathy is extremely important. Your creativity comes from here, your intuit, the list goes on and on. Your executive function, your ability to make good decisions. However, the research is showing that we're in a state

• 5:36Speaker 02

  of survival for about 70% of our adult life, some research suggests. So majority of our adult life, you're in survival state. So the question is, why are you in survival state? It's not because we're running away from saber toothed tigers every living day, every second of our day. It's because of emotional survival. So the research shows that emotional pain can be just as painful as physical pain. So your brain can't help but react to your stress, to your anger, to your frustration, to your depression, as if it's going to kill you. So boom, your higher functions are cut off. And now you're in a reactive mode where you're reacting without thinking. So we want to be able to identify, what does this actually look like in daily life? If you can develop the skill of just simply paying attention, what does this actually look like every day? What does a survival state actually look like? Guaranteed,

• 6:20Speaker 02

  that already is gonna do wonders for you. So what does this actually look like? Brain can only do one of three things when it's trying to survive. Fight, flight, or freeze. We mentioned those terms. It's very obvious what it looks like when you're in an actual life threatening situation. You might pick up a weapon to fight from the threat. You might run for your life and flight, right? Or you might play dead and freeze. However, what does this look like when it's emotional survival? Because we're in a state of survival for majority of our adult lives. So the moment you feel stress, anxiety, frustration, all these feelings that feel uncomfortable, your brain will still fight, flight, freeze from it. But it looks totally different. So what does a fight response look like? A fight response, the more obvious one is, you know, if you get into an argument, someone says something hurtful, now you're fighting back. Your brain literally thinks that loved one

• 7:04Speaker 02

  or that person you care about is a threat, and you are actually attacking them in fight mode. Usually, it's a verbal attack, hopefully not a physical attack. Unfortunately, that does happen as well. So that's what a fight mode looks like. But you need to be also aware of what does, what does a subtle fight response look like? So a lot of us carry whatever it is, shame, sadness, some negative perspective of ourselves, whatever it is. So we often fight to prove ourselves, do we not? So some people overwork. People who are overworking to prove themselves, it always leads to burnout, always leads to a lack of fulfillment. Because whenever you're trying to prove yourself and fight to prove yourself, guess what's happening? You already carry a not-so-great opinion about yourself. So you think this thing I change on the outside will feel better, make me feel better on the inside.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  The fight to prove yourself, the fight to be right. People who always need to be right, you ever meet that type of person? There's usually some sort of ego thing going on there. So there's a lot of subtleties there, right? I had a friend of mine, oh, sorry, a client of mine, and also a friend. He used to, when we're going into the fight for life, he realized, oh, my God, I spent my whole life in a fight mode. And I was just like, for what? To prove to people that I'm better than my older brother. And his older brother was an NFL football player. So he was sharing how my whole life, I've been finding to try to prove I'm better than him because he remembered a memory when he was in high school. His football coach said to him, you're never going to be as good as your brother. Don't even bother trying.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  So when we have hurtful experiences like that, we tend to go into fight mode. But the thing is, you're not accessing these higher functions. And this is why, if you ever had that feeling of like you're in a hamster wheel, I can't get my head above water, I'm not solving things, guaranteed you're in some sort of fight mode, and just working harder doesn't necessarily mean it'll always produce the results you're looking for, because you can't work smarter. Because you can't think. So when we're in a fight mode, we're just working harder. We're not working smarter. Flight mode looks like when you're avoiding, right? So procrastination is a classic response. I'm avoiding this thing because I'm afraid of whatever. What if I do this now? It doesn't work. What if I did this now? I look stupid. So therefore, I will avoid and flee from the task at hand as a flight response. The more subtle ones, there's so many different ones of this, but I'm just summarizing it.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  One of the more subtle ones to look out for that's most common is people who are numbing themselves. Some people, there's no judgment around this, which by the way, is also a fight response. If you judge someone's character, it's because you have an insecurity about yourself. You feel the need to put someone else down in an effort to make yourself feel better about yourself. That's a fight response. So no judgment around this. A subtle flight response is when we numb ourselves. We all do it. It looks like we intentionally distract ourselves without even realizing that's what we're doing. Some people will, you know, overindulge in things like alcohol, food, drugs, sex, to the point of addiction in some people. That's a flight response. A freeze response is when your nervous system freezes. It doesn't want to make a decision. If you ever see a kid get caught in a lie and they freeze up, that's a freeze response. Their brain's going quick. If you play dead, because that's what freeze response is.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  If you play dead, maybe this person will leave you alone. We do it as adults do, which is kind of funny, but the irony is clearly your guilt is showing the moment you're kind of freezing up. A more subtle freeze response is when you hear traumatic news. Tragic, tragic event that happened, something with your family, or God forbid, knock on wood, right? Your nervous system freezes up. You're not wanting to make a decision. When you feel overwhelmed with all the things going on in your life, you freeze up. The big aha moment I had about the freeze response is, whoa, this means there's no such thing as laziness. If you really think about it, guaranteed the person that someone might judge as a lazy person and not being quote unquote productive, there's probably something going on with their nervous system. Probably a chronic freeze response for whatever reason, whatever's happened in their life, or even if it's been genetically passed down as well.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  So when we get better at seeing this in our everyday life, oh, there's my flight response. There's my fright response. There's my fright. Guaranteed, that alone is transformative.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  What is one practical tool someone can use when they feel themselves starting to get reactive?

• 10:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, so when you notice, number one is just the awareness, right? If you get better at paying attention to what's actually happening, where you judge yourself less and you're just noticing it's a fight, flight, or freeze response, for whatever reason, right? Your brain got programmed to do it. The first thing that I always teach is, there's a phrase called "name it to tame it." If you name the feeling, you can tame the feeling. So the reason for this is UCLA did this study, where they had people with brain scans tied to their heads. They would show people's faces, photos of people's faces in survival emotions. So anger, frustration, whatever doesn't feel comfortable. The moment they showed the photo, guess what happened? The part of their brain, their survival brain, lit up in the scans. For the jargon geeks, it's your amygdala, right? That's a part of your brain.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  So that lit up, and they're like, "Oh, okay, your brain reacts before even thinking, because it's always looking out for threats," right? So that part of the brain lit up, and then the researcher would ask the participant, "Hey, can you tell me what emotion this person's feeling in this photo that you're looking at?" The moment they name the feeling, guess what happened? Survival brain turned off, executive brain turned on. Because one basic reason for that is, in order for you to label something, it requires you to think about it. You cannot think when you're in survival state, you can only react. So when you're turning on that part of your brain, you're also turning on these other functions of your brain. Your critical thinking skills, your emotional regulation centers come from your executive brain.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  So when you just name your feeling, "I'm feeling frustrated, I'm feeling sad, I'm feeling angry," even if you're doing it in your own head, because sometimes you might sound weird if you're doing it out loud in public, often. So just doing it in your own head helps you calm down that survival brain and turn on your executive brain. And it's important, the way you phrase it too. There's a difference between "I am sad" and "I feel sad." I learned this from a good clinical psychologist friend of mine. When you're saying "I am" something, you're presuming it's your identity. "I am sadness, I am frustration." But when you just change it to "feel," "I feel sad, I feel frustrated," you're acknowledging it's a temporary thing, because feelings are temporary. Because the truth is, sometimes we're sad, sometimes we're happy. Feelings are temporary.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  So that's one great tip amongst many, but that's an easy one to do anytime, anywhere.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  You've helped so many people. What is your biggest challenge now?

• 13:07Speaker 02

  So my biggest challenge in my current life is I'm continuing to just take this deeper. And how do I continue to communicate something that might feel complicated for people? And explain it in a simple way enough that's actually valuable for people? So that's something I'm always looking to do because behind the scenes, the work I'm doing, it's it can go off to the deep end, so to speak, right? Like I've done 10 day meditation retreats where you're meditating 10 hours a day in silence with no technology, no books, nothing to really tap into. How do you actually tap into this higher level of performance, mental performance? So that's been the biggest challenge for me is just like, how do I continue to share this in a way that's easily relatable and it's easy to understand and more importantly, easy to implement? That's been the mission for me ever since I started.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Awesome. Well, your passion is obvious. What do you like best about what you're doing?

• 13:54Speaker 02

  It's been transformative. I mean, my life's a whole 180. You know, I was the working professional thinking like, okay, this is what my life's going to have to be for the next 30, 40 years until I retire and then maybe I'll do what I want. But yeah, I mean, the things I can't complain. We've our family's been blessed, but yeah, that's, that's the best thing is being able to share this work for me.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  Well, congratulations on all that. For our folks who are watching and listening, where is the best place for them to go if they want to learn more?

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you can find me as Eugene K. Choi on social media if you want, whether it's LinkedIn or Instagram. If you want to learn how to take some of this work deeper, I do, I did launch a little membership community where it's a monthly membership. That's at neurohacking school.com. We do once a month live calls where there's Q and A where you can ask questions in addition to recorded modules, over 30 lessons on taking this work deeper to learn more about yourself and how to tap into your executive state.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Awesome. Well, this is Ben and Seth Green with Eugene K. Choi. Check out Eugene K. Choi. Check out the Neuroscience Academy. Eugene, thanks again for joining us.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Thanks, everybody for watching or listening. We'll talk to you or see you next time.

• 15:02Speaker 03

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