August 28, 2024 • 20 mins
This episode of If I’m Honest with Julia Landauer dives into our first topic around the mental side of human performance: emotions and emotional intelligence. Historically, emotions were seen as a hindrance to success, and only recently are we shifting that ideology. Prompted by a David Brooks op-ed that explains how we actively need emotions to make good decisions, I dive into the benefits of properly processing and regulating emotions. I share Marc Brackett’s RULER Method of emotional processing, explain why I think it’s important to lean into negative emotions in order to drive change, and I share a potentially-controversial Instagram post from Dan Koe.
Articles Referenced: David Brooks Op-Ed: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/15/opinion/emotions-feelings-intelligence.html?searchResultPosition=1
Carroll Izard Research on Emotions: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2723854/ Dan Koe
Instagram Post: https://www.instagram.com/p/C-0J3_PP6SY/?igsh=NTc3dmV5azFuNTV0
Learn more about Julia Landauer at https://julialandauer.com/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everybody, and welcome back to another episode of If
I'm Honest. With Julia Landauer, I hope you're having a
nice day, that you've had a good two weeks. In
the first episode of this season, I talked about how
this season is going to focus on themes related to
human performance, and I wanted to lean into human performance
because I love learning about how the brain and body work.
(00:25):
I love pushing myself to excellence, and that was something
I really enjoyed challenging myself with when I was an
active race car driver from a teenager to in my
twenties and early thirties. It was just really cool to
build mental toughness, physical toughness, and really find out what
I'm capable of on that physical mental performance level. And
(00:48):
in general, I feel like I hadn't been paying as
much attention to human performance and learning about our bodies
and minds because I'm not a particularly active athlete. More
I stay in shape, I exercise, I like doing all
of that, but really trying to maximize my performance has
not been something that I'm focusing on. But as I've
(01:09):
grown up a little bit and as I get into
corporate and as I talk with friends, and family. It's
really clear that human performance and maximizing our potential and
physically and mentally is really important. And so that's why
I wanted to dig into that specifically with a focus
on the mental elements of human performance. And I want
(01:32):
to jump into the mental side because our minds are
so so powerful, both in a positive and a negative way.
If we think about visualization, you can visualize things and
really think about perfectly hitting your marks and doing everything right,
and then that becomes a really beneficial tool for practice
and preparation. But if you visualize doing negative things, that
(01:56):
can bite you in the butt. For example, as racers,
if we think about driving into the wall and crashing,
we are more likely to drive into the wall and crash.
So it's really powerful to see that our minds can
sway us in positive and negative directions. We can also
look at self talk right, how we have our internal
dialogue with ourselves. If that's negative nagging and bringing us down,
(02:21):
that's going to negatively impact our perspective on life, our
outlook on life. Whereas if we have positive self talk
and we encourage ourselves and we're gracious with ourselves, we're
more likely to see positive performance, and I think that
that's a really powerful thing to keep in mind and
a reason why our brains and our minds and our
mental abilities are so important to pay attention to so
(02:43):
that we can be in control and take responsibility of
how we're viewing the world and how we're viewing ourselves.
To kick it off, I want to talk about our
emotions and emotional intelligence. This topic has sprung up more
explicitly in my life over the last few weeks, and
I've taken notes and I've saved articles, and so that's
what made me want to jump into this, because emotional
(03:06):
regulation is something that I think far too few people
were raised with, but yet is so critical. And so
what I'm going to do is I'm going to share
some of the background that I've been thinking about with
emotional intelligence, well in a few articles that I've read.
I will link everything in the episode description, and I'll
give kind of my perspective and some of the research
(03:27):
that I've seen onto the reasons why emotional intelligence is
really important and why emotional intelligence can actually make us smarter. Historically,
being quote unquote emotional was unequivocally a bad thing when
talking about trying to be successful. Right, if you're at work,
you don't show emotion. You know, if you're you're trying
(03:49):
to climb the ladder, you know, don't show your weaknesses.
Don't show your vulnerabilities. And weaknesses and vulnerabilities were associated
with emotions. I think it was a particularly potent thing
to think about if you were a woman versus a man.
You know, women who were perceived as getting emotional and
being sad or being warm and fuzzy or expressing themselves
that way showed weakness in a way that wasn't as
(04:12):
attributed to men. And interestingly, I don't think that there
was the same discussion around men getting angry, which is
something that has been portrayed in media a lot in literature,
but anger, for whatever reason, is not attributed to being
a super negative emotion, particularly in the context of men
(04:32):
getting angry. But it's still bad if women get angry
at work and then loud and angry, and it's not good.
So anyway, I digressed a little bit, But in general,
the advice was to not let yourself get emotional, not
to show that quote unquote softer side of you, you know,
not to make big decisions when you get emotional, and
(04:52):
that reacting emotionally can maybe give you tunnel vision and
so you won't see the big picture, et cetera, et cetera.
In general, there was this commonly held belief that we
shouldn't let ourselves get emotional. Rather we should muster through it,
have a stiff upper lip, and keep it together. And
when I think about my upbringing, which was primarily in
the two thousands as a older kid, young teenager, even
(05:17):
things like going to therapy or people being really in
depth about their emotions with their friends, you know, not
all of that was discussed. And that was not that
long ago. It was like ten fifteen years ago, right,
So that was a commonly held belief. Now, as more
and more research is coming out and as we're experiencing
these bigger cultural shifts, we are acknowledging that dealing with
(05:40):
our emotions is extremely important. And it's extremely important for
a number of reasons. First, if we're able to handle
and go through our emotions, we're going to be more
likely to get to the root of a problem that's
causing those emotions, to be able to come with a
more reasonable solution. Dealing with our emotions also is likely
(06:01):
to reduce interpersonal violence, it's likely to curb outbursts, and
it's a key for helping us feel more in control
of our day to day lives, especially when so much
in the world is out of our control. Right, we
need to try to take back as much autonomy as
we can, and really working through our emotions is a
(06:21):
great way to do that. I recently read an op
ed by David Brooks where he essentially says that we
need emotions to make decisions and that the commonly accepted
research indicates that emotions actually can help us react to
and process our situations. Which this is a far departure
from the idea that you should totally squash any emotions
(06:43):
that you feel that so many of us live by
for so long, and so it's likely the case that
emotional intelligence actually leads to more rational thinking and better
decision making. I want to read an excerpt from this
David Brooks art which again I will link, that kind
of outlines how the different emotions can frame our minds
(07:06):
to look at a situation. He says, in other words,
emotions slant the mind in one direction or another depending
on circumstances. Indignation helps us focus on injustice all motivates
us to feel small in the presence of grandeur and
to be good to others. Euphoria puts us in a
(07:27):
risk taking frame of mind. Happiness makes people more creative,
more flexible in their thinking. Disgust primes us to reject
immoral behavior. Fear helps amplify our senses and focus attention.
Anxiety puts us in a pessimistic state of mind, less
likely to take chances. Sadness improves memory, helps us make
more accurate judgments, makes us clearer communicators, and more attentive
(07:51):
to fairness. When I read this and when I was
thinking about it as how it related to my life,
I definitively decided that we definitely need emotional self awareness,
and that is something that we need to really help
others find as well, because not only will it help
us on our own personal journeys, but it will help
(08:11):
others and those we love help us build better relationships.
It's definitely a big old ripple effect. And one of
the things I really like about this excerpt is that
it drives home the fact that our minds and our
emotions are so interconnected with the world around us. Right
our surroundings and our circumstances may lead us to feel
(08:31):
a certain emotion, and by embracing that emotion, we're more
likely to have a reaction and a thought process that's
best suited for that situation, and then we're more likely
to make a good decision. That is so cool. We
are all connected in this really abstract but also very
granular way, and that was just one of those kind
(08:53):
of out of body experiences to think about that we
really are one with nature and with what's around us. Now.
One note I do have from this excerpt is that
Brooks doesn't really address anger and how anger slants our minds.
And we know that anger can be an aggressive and
destructive emotion, So if I had to surmise, I'd say
(09:16):
that anger overwhelms us and potentially makes us combative. And
so maybe there are certain emotions where we have to
preemptively know that we have to take a beat before reacting,
and that our gut reaction in that moment to that
situation with these emotions maybe is not what we should
act on. So I would be super interested to know
(09:38):
his follow up thoughts on how you deal with those
more aggressive emotions, but he didn't write about them, so
that's just my own perspective. So if we know that
emotional intelligence is important, I would hope that in the
future and in the years to come, we will continue
to integrate emotional education into our our schools, and into
(10:01):
our lives and in our media, because there's no doubt
that not enough people are getting this kind of education.
One it's an abstract topic that maybe people don't know about.
Two it's something that's only recently been accepted as important
as opposed to being like fluffy and potentially a weakness.
(10:24):
But since it is so important and it's important to
learn how to recognize and process emotions in a healthy way,
I did some more research as to some of the
methods that are used to help kids in particular process
their emotions. Because as we're developing, our hormones and emotions
are all over the place, and so learning how to
(10:46):
regulate emotions earlier and how to use them to our
advantage can be really beneficial for growing up. So one
of the people who is referenced in this op ed
was Mark Brackett, and he is a professor and director
of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. He's the author
of Permission to Feel and he's the co creator of
what's called the Ruler Method now Ruler spelled r ul
(11:10):
ER is an evidence based approach to social emotional learning.
It's been approved by the Collaborative for Academic Social and
Emotional Learning. It refers to five main emotional skills that
are needed to increase personal wellbeing, increase effective teaching and leadership,
help with academic achievement, and it's specifically geared towards the
(11:33):
classroom emotional climate. And RULER stands for Recognize, understand, label, express,
and regulate and so, just like there are the stages
of brief, there are these stages of dealing with emotions. Recognize,
Understand what it is that you are feeling. Understand how
the symptoms you're feeling in your mind and your body
(11:55):
are indicating what emotion you are feeling. Understand how it's
making you feel. Understand that it's an emotion. Understand that
it is something that is going to impact you that
has to be dealt with. Labeling the emotion as for
what it is can help make it feel like something
that's more tangible that you're able to latch onto and
(12:17):
work with. A very important step is to express that
emotion and to not bottle it up. We now know
that bottling up our emotions is a very very bad thing,
and so if we can express it, whether it's tears
when you're sad, or talking through something when you're anxious,
or smiling and laughing when you're happy, writing something down,
(12:38):
somehow find a healthy way to express your emotion that
hopefully does not cause harm to anybody else or yourself,
but express it so that you can then move on
to the last stage, which is to regulate the emotions.
The more knowledgeable we are about our emotions and about
how they make us feel and about how they make
our minds react, the more in control we're going to
(12:59):
be able to be to minimize any negative impact, maximize
positive impact, and use them as tools as opposed to
letting them take over us in a way where we
don't feel like we're in control anymore. So again, RULER
stands for recognize, understand, label, express, and regulate emotions, and
I think gets a very clear and tangible way to
(13:24):
share with people around you, especially little kids, how to
handle their emotions so that they're not scary and so
that we feel like we are working with our emotions
rather than letting them happen to us. I now want
to do a specific deep dive into the importance of
letting yourself feel the unhappy and uncomfortable emotions. I firmly
(13:50):
believe in letting yourself deeply feel your feelings because it
is so important for processing. But it's also important to
feel your feelings so that you can drive change. I
think that most of us are most motivated to make
an adjustment or to break a habit when we get
to the point of feeling uncomfortable or unhappy. Positive emotions
(14:13):
are really great to Positive emotions help give us momentum
and all of that, but more negative emotions really urge
us to reassess our situations and try and force us
to try to get to a place where we are
happier or more content or more positive. And so uncomfortable
emotions can be pivotal for our lives. And it was
(14:33):
interesting to think about this in all this context this
week as I also came across an Instagram post from
a guy named dan Coe. I don't know if that's
how you pronounce his last name, KOI, but I'll link
this full post in the description. But he was also
talking about the idea that it's okay to be really
unhappy because that's a motivating factor. And in this post
(14:56):
he titled it not for Everyone, because I do think
it is a more aggressive approach to take and it
will be really good for some people and maybe not
for others. But I want to read the parts that
really stood out to me as to why sitting in
your discomfort can be really beneficial for your long term progress.
He says, sometimes you need to become so disgusted with yourself,
(15:19):
your life, or your situation that you can't help but
make change. People tolerate things for too long and dig
themselves into an inescapable hole of problems and responsibilities. As
Malcolm X said, if you don't hate it, you will
eventually tolerate it. He goes on to say, nobody else
is going to do it for you. Most people don't
(15:41):
care if you change. He says, you're allowed to hate things.
And the last thing that he ends on that I
think is a really great way to look at it
is focus twenty percent on the experiences you never want
to live through again. Focus eighty percent on the potential
you want to fulfill in your life. To prevent yourself
from drowning and hate. Be harder on yourself, but in
(16:04):
a positive direction. I love that last line, be harder
on yourself, but in a positive direction. And what I
really love about that is that we don't want to
be hard on ourselves for the sake of being hard
on ourselves. That is a destructive way to go through life.
That is not going to lead to contentness and enjoy
(16:24):
and happiness. But it's an important step to be hard
on ourselves if we're working towards the future, and embracing
those negative emotions can really help drive change. So again,
to reiterate, I don't think that we want to be
so deep in our feelings without a north star goal
that we get to the point of self destruction. I
(16:46):
don't want us to be so harder on ourselves that
we don't enjoy the wonderful things in our lives. It's
not a binary of either being really hard on yourself
or being not so hard on yourself. But I think
it's a state of mind that we can become more
comfortable being in, even though it is uncomfortable, right. And
that's a theme that's gone through this podcast, the importance
(17:09):
of being comfortable being uncomfortable, because that's where growth is
and that's where it changes. And so to bring this
kind of being hard on yourself and being in difficult
emotions back to the larger emotional discussion, I do think
it's important to lead an emotional life with the positive
swings and the negative swings, because you can't have great
(17:32):
positivity without some negativity as well. I personally love living
with oscillating emotions, you know, high highs, low lows. It
sucks sometimes, but it's magical and amazing other parts of
the time. But I'm aware that plenty of people feel
more comfortable living on a more even keeled emotional spectrum,
(17:53):
not swinging too positively or too negatively. And I believe
that this can work a lot of the time, that
you can maintain a level of control over things and
not get too emotionally invested and not have to deal
with the negative emotions. But it's unavoidable that we're going
to have deeply negative emotions in our life. We are
going to have unexpected grief, we are going to have
(18:17):
unanticipated disappointment. We're going to have to experience things that
are out of our control that no matter how good
we are at staying even keeled, the negative is going
to creep up, and so I think letting go of
the reins of trying to stay in control and to
keep your emotions really orderly, because we won't be able
(18:37):
to avoid negativity and negative emotions. We should lean into
them and therefore also lean into the positive things. If
we can embrace all of our emotions and dissect them
and express them and figure out where they're coming from
and work through them, I think we're going to have
(18:57):
more complete and emotionally intelligent lives, which is good not
only for us, but for the people around us and
for the relationships we build and the way that we
live amongst others. And hopefully that contributes to people getting
along more, feeling more fulfilled in their lives, and feeling
(19:18):
more in control when there's so much that's not in
our control. In summary, being emotionally in tune with yourself
and working on emotional intelligence is important for our personal
well being, our relationships, and our decision making. And being
in tune with how our situations are influencing our emotions
(19:40):
and then making decisions off of that can actually lead
to better and more well rounded decisions. And embracing negative
emotions can help us drive meaningful change again. I will
be linking all of these sources in the description, and
I hope that they are beneficial to you. I hope
that they are useful, and I hope that you enjoyed
(20:01):
this episode. If you think it would be helpful for
someone in your life, I do hope that you'll share
it with them. I would love to hear your feedback.
Please feel free to leave a review or a comment
on my social media. As always, thank you so much
for letting me be honest with you, and I look
forward to seeing you in two weeks.
Hello everybody, and welcome back to another episode of If
I'm Honest. With Julia Landauer, I hope you're having a
nice day, that you've had a good two weeks. In
the first episode of this season, I talked about how
this season is going to focus on themes related to
human performance, and I wanted to lean into human performance
because I love learning about how the brain and body work.
(00:25):
I love pushing myself to excellence, and that was something
I really enjoyed challenging myself with when I was an
active race car driver from a teenager to in my
twenties and early thirties. It was just really cool to
build mental toughness, physical toughness, and really find out what
I'm capable of on that physical mental performance level. And
(00:48):
in general, I feel like I hadn't been paying as
much attention to human performance and learning about our bodies
and minds because I'm not a particularly active athlete. More
I stay in shape, I exercise, I like doing all
of that, but really trying to maximize my performance has
not been something that I'm focusing on. But as I've
(01:09):
grown up a little bit and as I get into
corporate and as I talk with friends, and family. It's
really clear that human performance and maximizing our potential and
physically and mentally is really important. And so that's why
I wanted to dig into that specifically with a focus
on the mental elements of human performance. And I want
(01:32):
to jump into the mental side because our minds are
so so powerful, both in a positive and a negative way.
If we think about visualization, you can visualize things and
really think about perfectly hitting your marks and doing everything right,
and then that becomes a really beneficial tool for practice
and preparation. But if you visualize doing negative things, that
(01:56):
can bite you in the butt. For example, as racers,
if we think about driving into the wall and crashing,
we are more likely to drive into the wall and crash.
So it's really powerful to see that our minds can
sway us in positive and negative directions. We can also
look at self talk right, how we have our internal
dialogue with ourselves. If that's negative nagging and bringing us down,
(02:21):
that's going to negatively impact our perspective on life, our
outlook on life. Whereas if we have positive self talk
and we encourage ourselves and we're gracious with ourselves, we're
more likely to see positive performance, and I think that
that's a really powerful thing to keep in mind and
a reason why our brains and our minds and our
mental abilities are so important to pay attention to so
(02:43):
that we can be in control and take responsibility of
how we're viewing the world and how we're viewing ourselves.
To kick it off, I want to talk about our
emotions and emotional intelligence. This topic has sprung up more
explicitly in my life over the last few weeks, and
I've taken notes and I've saved articles, and so that's
what made me want to jump into this, because emotional
(03:06):
regulation is something that I think far too few people
were raised with, but yet is so critical. And so
what I'm going to do is I'm going to share
some of the background that I've been thinking about with
emotional intelligence, well in a few articles that I've read.
I will link everything in the episode description, and I'll
give kind of my perspective and some of the research
(03:27):
that I've seen onto the reasons why emotional intelligence is
really important and why emotional intelligence can actually make us smarter. Historically,
being quote unquote emotional was unequivocally a bad thing when
talking about trying to be successful. Right, if you're at work,
you don't show emotion. You know, if you're you're trying
(03:49):
to climb the ladder, you know, don't show your weaknesses.
Don't show your vulnerabilities. And weaknesses and vulnerabilities were associated
with emotions. I think it was a particularly potent thing
to think about if you were a woman versus a man.
You know, women who were perceived as getting emotional and
being sad or being warm and fuzzy or expressing themselves
that way showed weakness in a way that wasn't as
(04:12):
attributed to men. And interestingly, I don't think that there
was the same discussion around men getting angry, which is
something that has been portrayed in media a lot in literature,
but anger, for whatever reason, is not attributed to being
a super negative emotion, particularly in the context of men
(04:32):
getting angry. But it's still bad if women get angry
at work and then loud and angry, and it's not good.
So anyway, I digressed a little bit, But in general,
the advice was to not let yourself get emotional, not
to show that quote unquote softer side of you, you know,
not to make big decisions when you get emotional, and
(04:52):
that reacting emotionally can maybe give you tunnel vision and
so you won't see the big picture, et cetera, et cetera.
In general, there was this commonly held belief that we
shouldn't let ourselves get emotional. Rather we should muster through it,
have a stiff upper lip, and keep it together. And
when I think about my upbringing, which was primarily in
the two thousands as a older kid, young teenager, even
(05:17):
things like going to therapy or people being really in
depth about their emotions with their friends, you know, not
all of that was discussed. And that was not that
long ago. It was like ten fifteen years ago, right,
So that was a commonly held belief. Now, as more
and more research is coming out and as we're experiencing
these bigger cultural shifts, we are acknowledging that dealing with
(05:40):
our emotions is extremely important. And it's extremely important for
a number of reasons. First, if we're able to handle
and go through our emotions, we're going to be more
likely to get to the root of a problem that's
causing those emotions, to be able to come with a
more reasonable solution. Dealing with our emotions also is likely
(06:01):
to reduce interpersonal violence, it's likely to curb outbursts, and
it's a key for helping us feel more in control
of our day to day lives, especially when so much
in the world is out of our control. Right, we
need to try to take back as much autonomy as
we can, and really working through our emotions is a
(06:21):
great way to do that. I recently read an op
ed by David Brooks where he essentially says that we
need emotions to make decisions and that the commonly accepted
research indicates that emotions actually can help us react to
and process our situations. Which this is a far departure
from the idea that you should totally squash any emotions
(06:43):
that you feel that so many of us live by
for so long, and so it's likely the case that
emotional intelligence actually leads to more rational thinking and better
decision making. I want to read an excerpt from this
David Brooks art which again I will link, that kind
of outlines how the different emotions can frame our minds
(07:06):
to look at a situation. He says, in other words,
emotions slant the mind in one direction or another depending
on circumstances. Indignation helps us focus on injustice all motivates
us to feel small in the presence of grandeur and
to be good to others. Euphoria puts us in a
(07:27):
risk taking frame of mind. Happiness makes people more creative,
more flexible in their thinking. Disgust primes us to reject
immoral behavior. Fear helps amplify our senses and focus attention.
Anxiety puts us in a pessimistic state of mind, less
likely to take chances. Sadness improves memory, helps us make
more accurate judgments, makes us clearer communicators, and more attentive
(07:51):
to fairness. When I read this and when I was
thinking about it as how it related to my life,
I definitively decided that we definitely need emotional self awareness,
and that is something that we need to really help
others find as well, because not only will it help
us on our own personal journeys, but it will help
(08:11):
others and those we love help us build better relationships.
It's definitely a big old ripple effect. And one of
the things I really like about this excerpt is that
it drives home the fact that our minds and our
emotions are so interconnected with the world around us. Right
our surroundings and our circumstances may lead us to feel
(08:31):
a certain emotion, and by embracing that emotion, we're more
likely to have a reaction and a thought process that's
best suited for that situation, and then we're more likely
to make a good decision. That is so cool. We
are all connected in this really abstract but also very
granular way, and that was just one of those kind
(08:53):
of out of body experiences to think about that we
really are one with nature and with what's around us. Now.
One note I do have from this excerpt is that
Brooks doesn't really address anger and how anger slants our minds.
And we know that anger can be an aggressive and
destructive emotion, So if I had to surmise, I'd say
(09:16):
that anger overwhelms us and potentially makes us combative. And
so maybe there are certain emotions where we have to
preemptively know that we have to take a beat before reacting,
and that our gut reaction in that moment to that
situation with these emotions maybe is not what we should
act on. So I would be super interested to know
(09:38):
his follow up thoughts on how you deal with those
more aggressive emotions, but he didn't write about them, so
that's just my own perspective. So if we know that
emotional intelligence is important, I would hope that in the
future and in the years to come, we will continue
to integrate emotional education into our our schools, and into
(10:01):
our lives and in our media, because there's no doubt
that not enough people are getting this kind of education.
One it's an abstract topic that maybe people don't know about.
Two it's something that's only recently been accepted as important
as opposed to being like fluffy and potentially a weakness.
(10:24):
But since it is so important and it's important to
learn how to recognize and process emotions in a healthy way,
I did some more research as to some of the
methods that are used to help kids in particular process
their emotions. Because as we're developing, our hormones and emotions
are all over the place, and so learning how to
(10:46):
regulate emotions earlier and how to use them to our
advantage can be really beneficial for growing up. So one
of the people who is referenced in this op ed
was Mark Brackett, and he is a professor and director
of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. He's the author
of Permission to Feel and he's the co creator of
what's called the Ruler Method now Ruler spelled r ul
(11:10):
ER is an evidence based approach to social emotional learning.
It's been approved by the Collaborative for Academic Social and
Emotional Learning. It refers to five main emotional skills that
are needed to increase personal wellbeing, increase effective teaching and leadership,
help with academic achievement, and it's specifically geared towards the
(11:33):
classroom emotional climate. And RULER stands for Recognize, understand, label, express,
and regulate and so, just like there are the stages
of brief, there are these stages of dealing with emotions. Recognize,
Understand what it is that you are feeling. Understand how
the symptoms you're feeling in your mind and your body
(11:55):
are indicating what emotion you are feeling. Understand how it's
making you feel. Understand that it's an emotion. Understand that
it is something that is going to impact you that
has to be dealt with. Labeling the emotion as for
what it is can help make it feel like something
that's more tangible that you're able to latch onto and
(12:17):
work with. A very important step is to express that
emotion and to not bottle it up. We now know
that bottling up our emotions is a very very bad thing,
and so if we can express it, whether it's tears
when you're sad, or talking through something when you're anxious,
or smiling and laughing when you're happy, writing something down,
(12:38):
somehow find a healthy way to express your emotion that
hopefully does not cause harm to anybody else or yourself,
but express it so that you can then move on
to the last stage, which is to regulate the emotions.
The more knowledgeable we are about our emotions and about
how they make us feel and about how they make
our minds react, the more in control we're going to
(12:59):
be able to be to minimize any negative impact, maximize
positive impact, and use them as tools as opposed to
letting them take over us in a way where we
don't feel like we're in control anymore. So again, RULER
stands for recognize, understand, label, express, and regulate emotions, and
I think gets a very clear and tangible way to
(13:24):
share with people around you, especially little kids, how to
handle their emotions so that they're not scary and so
that we feel like we are working with our emotions
rather than letting them happen to us. I now want
to do a specific deep dive into the importance of
letting yourself feel the unhappy and uncomfortable emotions. I firmly
(13:50):
believe in letting yourself deeply feel your feelings because it
is so important for processing. But it's also important to
feel your feelings so that you can drive change. I
think that most of us are most motivated to make
an adjustment or to break a habit when we get
to the point of feeling uncomfortable or unhappy. Positive emotions
(14:13):
are really great to Positive emotions help give us momentum
and all of that, but more negative emotions really urge
us to reassess our situations and try and force us
to try to get to a place where we are
happier or more content or more positive. And so uncomfortable
emotions can be pivotal for our lives. And it was
(14:33):
interesting to think about this in all this context this
week as I also came across an Instagram post from
a guy named dan Coe. I don't know if that's
how you pronounce his last name, KOI, but I'll link
this full post in the description. But he was also
talking about the idea that it's okay to be really
unhappy because that's a motivating factor. And in this post
(14:56):
he titled it not for Everyone, because I do think
it is a more aggressive approach to take and it
will be really good for some people and maybe not
for others. But I want to read the parts that
really stood out to me as to why sitting in
your discomfort can be really beneficial for your long term progress.
He says, sometimes you need to become so disgusted with yourself,
(15:19):
your life, or your situation that you can't help but
make change. People tolerate things for too long and dig
themselves into an inescapable hole of problems and responsibilities. As
Malcolm X said, if you don't hate it, you will
eventually tolerate it. He goes on to say, nobody else
is going to do it for you. Most people don't
(15:41):
care if you change. He says, you're allowed to hate things.
And the last thing that he ends on that I
think is a really great way to look at it
is focus twenty percent on the experiences you never want
to live through again. Focus eighty percent on the potential
you want to fulfill in your life. To prevent yourself
from drowning and hate. Be harder on yourself, but in
(16:04):
a positive direction. I love that last line, be harder
on yourself, but in a positive direction. And what I
really love about that is that we don't want to
be hard on ourselves for the sake of being hard
on ourselves. That is a destructive way to go through life.
That is not going to lead to contentness and enjoy
(16:24):
and happiness. But it's an important step to be hard
on ourselves if we're working towards the future, and embracing
those negative emotions can really help drive change. So again,
to reiterate, I don't think that we want to be
so deep in our feelings without a north star goal
that we get to the point of self destruction. I
(16:46):
don't want us to be so harder on ourselves that
we don't enjoy the wonderful things in our lives. It's
not a binary of either being really hard on yourself
or being not so hard on yourself. But I think
it's a state of mind that we can become more
comfortable being in, even though it is uncomfortable, right. And
that's a theme that's gone through this podcast, the importance
(17:09):
of being comfortable being uncomfortable, because that's where growth is
and that's where it changes. And so to bring this
kind of being hard on yourself and being in difficult
emotions back to the larger emotional discussion, I do think
it's important to lead an emotional life with the positive
swings and the negative swings, because you can't have great
(17:32):
positivity without some negativity as well. I personally love living
with oscillating emotions, you know, high highs, low lows. It
sucks sometimes, but it's magical and amazing other parts of
the time. But I'm aware that plenty of people feel
more comfortable living on a more even keeled emotional spectrum,
(17:53):
not swinging too positively or too negatively. And I believe
that this can work a lot of the time, that
you can maintain a level of control over things and
not get too emotionally invested and not have to deal
with the negative emotions. But it's unavoidable that we're going
to have deeply negative emotions in our life. We are
going to have unexpected grief, we are going to have
(18:17):
unanticipated disappointment. We're going to have to experience things that
are out of our control that no matter how good
we are at staying even keeled, the negative is going
to creep up, and so I think letting go of
the reins of trying to stay in control and to
keep your emotions really orderly, because we won't be able
(18:37):
to avoid negativity and negative emotions. We should lean into
them and therefore also lean into the positive things. If
we can embrace all of our emotions and dissect them
and express them and figure out where they're coming from
and work through them, I think we're going to have
(18:57):
more complete and emotionally intelligent lives, which is good not
only for us, but for the people around us and
for the relationships we build and the way that we
live amongst others. And hopefully that contributes to people getting
along more, feeling more fulfilled in their lives, and feeling
(19:18):
more in control when there's so much that's not in
our control. In summary, being emotionally in tune with yourself
and working on emotional intelligence is important for our personal
well being, our relationships, and our decision making. And being
in tune with how our situations are influencing our emotions
(19:40):
and then making decisions off of that can actually lead
to better and more well rounded decisions. And embracing negative
emotions can help us drive meaningful change again. I will
be linking all of these sources in the description, and
I hope that they are beneficial to you. I hope
that they are useful, and I hope that you enjoyed
(20:01):
this episode. If you think it would be helpful for
someone in your life, I do hope that you'll share
it with them. I would love to hear your feedback.
Please feel free to leave a review or a comment
on my social media. As always, thank you so much
for letting me be honest with you, and I look
forward to seeing you in two weeks.
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