Mastering Your Emotions: The Science of Flourishing with Ethan Kross

Welcome to the Flourishing Edge, the podcast where we share weekly tips on making flourishing your competitive edge. I'm Ashish Kothari, your host and each week we'll dive deep with flourishing experts, change makers and executives to share best practices that can help you unlock higher performance through science based interventions. Let's step together into the edge of what's possible and live, work and lead with more joy, health, love and meaning. Ethan, I am so excited to have you here on our Happiness Squad podcast. Thank you for taking the time from a really busy schedule to make yourself available for our listeners.

Ashish, it's an honor to be here. I'm so just delighted to be able to share what I know about the science of managing your emotions with you and everyone who's tuned in today.

Yeah, well, you know, oftentimes when people think about what we do at Happiness Squad, people say, oh, so do you just help people so I'll be happy forever? And I always say, no. Life has suffering. Most of our suffering is psychological and there is no escaping that. But there is a way to manage that, right? There's a way to reduce the intensity of the suffering. There's a way to reduce the pace of that time when we are kind of living into that drama. And that requires us to master our emotions, especially the ones that we actually don't like. We call them negative, right? There is no positive and negative. And that's where I have loved your work. I've done and read so much work on emotional mastery, from Brenny Brown's Atlas of the Heart to the ontological work, but nowhere have I found such a crisp and easy to access approach as you outlined in Shift. I'm just holding the book up here for everyone. And that's really what I want to dig into, Ethan, is some of the kind of core practices you highlight here. But before we go there, I just want to, you know, start with a little bit of the origin story. You write a little bit about that in the book, about what got you curious to really, after chatter, dive into emotions as a field and do the research and put this together around how we can learn to master and shift.

Well, you know, as really people in the world. I published In, I believe 2020, my first book, Chatter managing the voice in your head, which was really about what do you do when you get stuck in a negative thought loop, which I know you've never experienced this, but you know, most people have. I'm joking of course here. Of course sometimes we end up worrying and ruminating about things in Ways that just can be tremendously dysfunctional for our ability to live the life we want to live, whether it be performing well at work or having a good relationship or being healthy and happy. And a lot of my early research work focused on solving this puzzle of self reflection. How do you allow a person to use their mind to deal with a problem and then get through it as opposed to getting stuck in it? And the book was well received. Went on an extended book tour, and it was. I love talking to people about the science in ways that make it stick. And what would happen after several of those presentations that I was giving is I would inevitably have someone say something to the effect of, this is interesting, but I love this but. And you know what they say about that, right? Like, everything before the but doesn't count. Very frustrating. What came after the but was. But what about just dealing with angry outbursts? Or why do we experience shame if it doesn't feel good? Or like, let's get into anxiety, this anxiety epidemic. What should we do about that? And so what really became clear was that yes, of course people struggle with their inner voice. It turns into rumination. And helping them give them tools there is useful. But it was, though, people just didn't understand this fundamental part of the their lives that is their emotions, why they have them, and what to do with them when they find them running off track. And so SHIFT was an attempt to address those kinds of issues. So I got to step back and just really like synthesize the entire literature, scientific literature on emotion. What do we know about emotions? What are they? It's pretty amazing that most. Well, let me back up. All people start experiencing emotions before they are born, right? We experience emotions when we are in the womb. Anyone who's ever carried a baby knows this, right? You felt that kick or punch, right? Anyone who's ever been partner to someone who's experienced emotions know that unborn babies feel them because you hear the complaints from the carrier. And yet when I ask people, you know, I'll do a lot of like, workshops, hey, tell me, what is an emotion? Anyone want to define it for me? Blank stares. Yeah, people can't even define what it is. So that's what SHIFT is about. It's about what they are, why we have them, what they do for us. And then critically, when they're becoming a little bit too big, what can we do to rein them in and get back on track?

Yeah, I love that. And you know, it's something which is quite present for me. So, you know, my mother she's in her early 80s, she's in India and she is away from us, and she and my dad are live in India. And she constantly lives in a place of anxiety because she's worried about as they get older and if there is only one of them left, how are things going to manage? And that process of running through the head, Right. So I think that's, you know, I would say chatter. Like, yes, she constantly runs through that cycle, even though it's not helpful, even when we have kind of thought about all the different ways. And I think that's where I was like, okay, I have a book for you. Because you can't stop your chatter, but you can consciously do something that can shift. Right? And that's where I loved the six different moves we're going to get into. But let's start with defining emotion, because I'm with you. I think most people have a very, I would say, you know, like, look at an elephant. They only have one part of the elephant that they think is emotion. So let's start with what is emotion and some of the origins of what, where it comes from and how people experience it.

So, you know, first of all, it's important to point out that this question of what an emotion is, if you yourself are struggling to define it, you're not alone. Scientists have been trying to very crisply define an emotion for decades, philosophers even more, and there are still debates about it, about precisely how to define emotion. What I have done is looking across lots of different definitions. What are the common threads? Here are the common threads. Emotions are responses to things that happen in the world or things that we imagine happening in the world in our minds that are meaningful to us. So when we're in situations that are meaningful, we experience this kind of emotional response. And you could think of this response as, in the best cases. It's almost like you register a situation that matters in some way and a software program gets loaded up to orient you to optimally deal with that situation. Rein in lots of different parts of your psychology and physiology. So there's a physiological component to emotions, right? If you've ever experienced anxiety and felt a little bit of tightness and maybe had to go to the bathroom, your stomach is hurting, you feel that physiological piece. Emotions constrain our thinking. So to stick with the anxiety reaction, they tend to zoom us in very narrowly on the problem. Like, let's think about. Let's devote our precious attention to the situation at hand, not be distracted. Emotions can also harness our outward displays, often see, not Always. But you can often see when people are experiencing an emotion, right? Like when someone's sad, you can often see that they're sad. Anxiety is a kind of tension. And so the idea is that there's this loosely coordinated response between thinking, physiological responding, and behavioral displays that coalesce to help you. How can an emotion help you? Let me give you a few examples to make it really concrete. Let's take and let's focus on the counterintuitive. How the heck can negative emotions help us? Because they feel awful. And I want to. A lot of people are motivated to never experience them. I like to point out, A, that's not possible to never experience negative emotions. B, it's not desirable because negative emotions in the right proportions are your friends. How so? Let's start with anger. We experience anger when we register some. Some something happens that violates your understanding of what is right and wrong, and you can do something to rectify the situation. So if I see my daughter do something that I think is not right, we've talked about it, like riding her bike without a helmet, I get angry. What does that anger do? It motivates me to approach the situation to make sure that I can rectify it. It also, my kids can see when I'm angry on my face. When does that do? That provides a powerful signal to them to immediately something's wrong. Right? So a little bit of anger can actually be quite adaptive. What makes anger and all other negative emotions maladaptive harmful is when they're activated either too intensely, so out of proportion with the situation. So my daughter doesn't wear a helmet, rather than confront her and sternly say, hey, we talked about this. This isn't right. You can't do this again. You're going to lose your iPad for a day because of this. Rather than do that, I'm screaming my head off, I'm breaking things and so forth. Or if the anger lasts too long, right. If you don't come down back to baseline. But I start seething over this and, you know, as I go to bed at night, rather than thinking sweet lullabies or, you know, to myself, I'm. I'm just going, I can't believe my daughter didn't listen to what I said again. She could have killed herself. I can't believe this. In a way that prevents me from going to sleep. And then I think about it the next day, and then I confront her again. And then she says, okay, we talked about this. I'm not going to do it. So that's how you see these kinds of reactions can, can go awry. So there are different software programs for every negative emotion like that. But that's what emotions are.

Yeah. That's such a great example. Right. Of an emotion like anger in particular. Like a lot of the kind of social injustice work, the shift happens and deeper underneath that is anger. But it's anger used in a productive way to mobilize, to drive change. Right. I mean we saw that in the Indian non line movement with the British, with Gandhi versus many of the revolutionaries. Right. I can, rather than kill and be violent, I'm going to choose nonviolence. But it is very clear in my nonviolent, I'm actually displaying strength and I'm able to mobilize, you know, a large group of people around that.

That's right. It's a few. It's a signal, it's a motivating force. You know, anxiety is one that gets vilified quite a bit. We talk about the anxiety epidemic and look, I've experienced anxiety at times. Like, guess what? I'm not a fan. I don't like it when it's too big or too long. Me neither. But you neither. Right. Who does? Right. It doesn't feel good. It not feeling good, of course, is part of the reason why it's so incredibly useful. So let me give you a few examples of that. I do tons of talks in various contexts and when I reflect back on the presentations I've given that haven't been the most successful, they're the presentations where I felt no anxiety.

Yep.

Leading up to them. Because I felt no anxiety, I did nothing to prepare. And so when I showed up, I wasn't as crisp as when I did have some butterflies in my stomach a few days or weeks before and made sure to really make, you know, make sure that the presentation sparkled. That's an example of how a negative emotion can be like, anxiety can be really useful. Pain is a really good one to give an example here. Most people are highly motivated to avoid experiences of physical pain. Like I'm a perfect example. I am a giant baby when it comes to all things physically painful, medical, you name it. Like, oh my God, no way. A blood test, Forget it, I don't want to do it. It'd be great on the surface. Sometimes I thought like, oh, imagine you never experience any physical pain. Wouldn't life be great? Actually, we know exactly what life would look like if you could not experience physical pain. I write about this in Chatter. There are people who are born into the world every Year, due to a blip of genetics, are incapable of experiencing physical pain. It's a genetic mutation. And what happens to them is that they die early. They die early because their hand gets caught in the stove and there's no.

Stimulation and they don't realize it.

Yeah, right. To pull it back so they have tissue damage or they start scratching a mosquito bite and rather than stop when they break the skin, they just keep scratching it. So they get infections and you can imagine all the other ways that this could be problematic. And so the goal should not be eliminating negative emotions from our lives. It should be figuring out how to manage them more effectively to allow them to do what they are designed, what they have evolved to do. And that's where I think like we get, we get it wrong often from a cultural point of view when we emphasize instead like toxic positivity. Only try to be positive, not possible, not desirable.

Yeah. You know, it's at the heart of the Buddha's teachings. Right. Life has suffering, we can't avoid it. I'm speaking a little bit later today at an entrepreneur conference. And one of the things, you know, this is a very purpose driven entrepreneur. Right. Everybody is kind of highly, they have a bigger why that they're trying to make a change in the world. And everybody would say, I'm on my hero's journey. And literally I think I'm opening this by saying there is a part of the hero's journey that nobody talks about or actually they talk about it in a very positive light. Right. The hero's journey is you heard a call, you took the call, you're going to slay the dragons and then you go up. If you look at most startups, 95% of the fail, that tells me 95% of the chance the dragons win. Okay. And that journey, if you really look at any startup, is a journey where, you know, to talk about Elon Musk, you're going to chew glass and you're going to stare into the dark abyss for a long period of that time. So if you are not attuned to, I don't want suffering and I'm suffering and then something is wrong and I want to avoid it, you're not going to succeed. Because one of the things that drives success is perseverance, Being able to stick with it, being able to learn with it, being able to be with the discomfort, continuously learn pivot and make your way towards actually overcoming the obstacles and bringing something back. Right. And so I'm talking a little bit about this notion of accept that you're going to suffer, learn how to manage it, learn how to master your way through it. And obviously emotions are a big, big, big, big part of that.

I think emotions, I would take it a step further. They're not just a big part, they are the piece. Right. Because everything you've said resonates every entrepreneur that I've engaged with myself as an entrepreneur. Life is unpredictable. There's risk, there are stakes, there are other people that you can't control. And all of that will conspire at times to elicit stress, chatter, big negative emotions. And when you face those, there are a couple of choices you can make. Choice one is to hit exit and go a different path. And I respect that if that is your choice. But if in doing so you are giving up on an opportunity, another choice is to do nothing and just struggle through it. And, you know, for some they end up being quite successful in struggling through it. But it often comes at a cost, a cost to one's health and well being and relationships. And then there's a third category which is deciding to persevere through it, but arming yourself with tools to help insulate you against the extremity of the situational forces. And that for me, that's like, yes, please. That's the path I want to take. It's not a path that turns this quest that we're on into a magical journey filled with fairy tales and happiness. It still can be very challenging, and it has been for everyone I've spoken to and interacted with in these contexts. But it's a lot more manageable to bring it full circle. What both a pain point for me, but also a really powerful motivating opportunity is it pains me that we don't give people these tools systematically earlier on in life.

Yes.

I've tried to think about it from the other side, like, why don't we teach people about these things? Like, why don't we start educating kids about this in elementary school and reinforcing it in middle and high school and college with required courses, not unlike required courses in mathematics and, and social studies and science. And I haven't really found a good answer to that question. That's the pain point. It's also the opportunity because we have an opportunity to share tools that we think can genuinely help people's lives. And so that's why I'm grateful to folks like yourself for podcasts and the work that you do, because I really do view what you do through that lens.

Yeah, no, thank you. So let's dig into the third way, right, which is not suffer through it, not press the exit button, but learn to masterfully navigate, master your emotions, learn to work through them skillfully. You outline three practices from what you call the inside out and three practices from the outside in in your book. And personally, I loved the first one in the inside out, which is sensory shifter. So let's get into that and share a little bit with our listeners around why tuning into your senses and learning to work with them is one of the most powerful moves that we can make in our path to emotional mastery.

So I love this shifter as well, you know, I should, I should, we should give everyone the disclaimer. If you're listening, I'm going to dig into specific kinds of. When I say shifters, I'm talking about tools that can function to either increase or decrease the volume on your emotions, shorten or lengthen how long they last, or even allow you to switch from one state to another altogether. We have lots of shifters and one mistake I find that a lot of people make is they think that success from a happiness and well being point of view is about implementing only one shifter. And we know that that's not true. Managing your emotions is a lot like physical fitness. I often refer to it as mental fitness. You would never think that just doing push ups would give you a well rounded, healthy physical physique. Same is true for mental fitness. There are different shifters you want to lay in or connect with. So when we're talking about sensory shifters, we're talking about sensation. Sensation is how we take in information about the world around us. And you could think of it almost like having satellite dishes mounted all over your body. Wherever we go, we're bringing in information so that we can navigate the world. So what do I mean by that? We're seeing, we're smelling, we're touching, we're hearing. Those are our senses. Now, one of the really important things about sensation is we need to know what's good or bad for us. We need to know whether we're gonna walk off a cliff or not, whether we're gonna eat something bad for us, or there are dangerous sounds, what have you. And so part of the way that sensation works is through emotion. The sensory system in our brains is tightly interwoven with our emotional system in the brain. What that means is that you can strategically harness your senses to relatively effortlessly shift your emotions. We all do this all the time, but we lose sight of it when we are struggling. How do we do this all the time? Well, if you are carrying one of these, like, cell phones around and you ever listen to music, you're engaging in a form of sensory regulation. So I tell this story in the book about how my daughter, one day before soccer was in a. A glum mood and it was really bumming me out. And I just serendipitously put my, you know, iPhone connected to the. The radio in the car. And one of my favorite songs came on the radio. Journeys Don't Stop Believing. And if you've ever heard Journeys Don't Stop Believing is. I've met a few people who don't experience happiness, but it's very few and I usually don't associate with them much longer. It's a great feel good song. And so within a few seconds, I find myself, like, getting into it and I'm bopping and I'm humming and singing, and then I the rear view mirror, and I find my previously gloomy, gloomy child doing this. She's nodding her head and beginning to hum along and all of a sudden we're both doing it and, you know, we get to the soccer field and she's full of energy. Music can shift us in seconds. I mean, it's. I encourage you all after listening to this podcast to just give this a shot. Think of a song that makes you feel good and put it on. See how quickly it pushes you in another direction. We know from research that virtually everyone acknowledges that music as an example of a sensory shifter has these emotion modulatory effects. So close to 100% of people, when asked, why do you listen to music? They say, I like the way it makes me feel. It's a subjective response. Yeah, feel. But if you look at what people do when they're struggling with their emotions, when they're trying to manage them across studies in our lab, we find between only 10 and 30% of people resort to this relatively effortless tool. Not only do a minority of people avail themselves of this tool, some people, when they do use it, they use it in a way that contradicts their goals. So what do I mean by that? Well, you're not feeling great, you want to feel better, you're anxious, you're sad. Rather than listen to Journeys Don't Stop Believing, you put on Chicago or Adele, right? You put on music that is leading you to a different. It's allowing you to dig deeper, dive deeper into your depressogenic state. If, as an example, now there are reasons why people do that that we understand. If your goal is to sit with the emotion because you're benefiting from it and there are cases in which being sad helps us reflect on our circumstances in useful ways. Then keep on listening to the sad music. It can potentiate that response. But if your goal is to shift out of it, you want to turn on on journey Music is one example of a sensory shifter. All of your senses can shift us. Think of like great art or, or, or smells. Nature, I mean nature is like a sensory bomb. You have beautiful things that you see. There are scents that are typically, not always, but they're typically arousing in a positive way.

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There's even tactile kinds of, you know, sensations, right. Like you can feel things. Touch is another big one. Like what I call affectionate but not creepy touch. Very powerful tool, right. A hug, a caress if desired, if mutually desired can be a very powerful tool for shifting so or Ethan.

Even a self hug.

Don't underestimate your senses.

Or even a self hug if you're feeling really anxious or really feeling out of act. Just being able to hold your arm or being able to give yourself a hug. As Kristen Neff talks a lot about and self compassion, you can release oxytocin. You can create a different sense of warm and comfort.

Yeah, you just have to be careful. You have to just be careful with how you do it. I remember once I was. It was a very. I was on the road, I think it was around one of my last books release and I was tired. I was a little bit stressed and I found myself just rubbing my stomach and it felt so soothing. But then I thought to myself but I'm rubbing my stomach in front of other people. This is very strange. I should stop. So there's like a. Violating social norms even if I do this right. Feels nice. So. But you got to be careful. But yeah, there's even research which shows that during stressful tasks sometimes people will spontaneously like, like stroke their, their, their, their, their chin in a kind of an affectionate, tender way. There, there are touch receptors all over your body that are specifically tuned to encode affectionate embraces kind of petting kind of response. And when those resp. Those embraces are registered, two things happen. There's typically an automatic release of stress fighting chemicals that helps instantly Bring your negative mood down. And there's also a conscious reminder, particularly when it's someone else who's doing the touching, that there are people who care about us. And, you know, you do a lot of work in the organizational context. It's always, you know, there's always someone from HR in the audience when I talk about this. So I give a disclaimer that there are ways of doing this and what I would call kosher ways at work. For example, a fist pump. You know, a fist pump. Haven't seen someone go to HR yet because of that. And that's a communication. There's. There is a tactile connection that occurs when you do that with someone else. And also has the advantage of, I think, conveying less germs than the formal handshake. So. So anyway, so these are senses. Look, these sensory shifters are not going to solve the biggest problems in your life, personal, professional. But what they can do is shift you momentarily into a different emotional space that opens you up to be more receptive to other kinds of tools. And it's this idea of layering different shifters on one another that I think is really important for you all to remember when you leave this podcast. Because what we see in our research and what others see as well is when people are struggling to manage their emotions, they don't typically do one thing on average. We found during these large scale studies we ran during COVID to see how people were managing their anxiety. In general, people did use between three and four different tools to manage a particular, particular stressors. They might listen to music, but they might activate their shifter shifting advisors. The people in their life who are skilled at both empathically connecting to them to listen and learn to what they're going through, but also skilled at helping them reframe their circumstances. Right. They might do both of those things and maybe go for a walk in nature as well. And so just being mindful of the fact that this is really the gateway to shifting. It's not the end in and of itself.

Yeah. So we dug deep into sensory. Ethan, maybe give an overview of the other five and let's choose one that you think you know would be a good one to get into. I have a personal favorite in addition to sensory, but I want, I want you to, from your research, say what's, what's another one that is a typical go to for people that can have an impact.

I'm curious now about your other favorite so you could tell me. Let's see if I hit on it as I move along okay, so let's. Let me just give an overview and then maybe we could drop in and detail one or two more. We talked about sensation. That's one category of tools that you possess. You carry this to wherever you are. That's why I call it an inside out tool. It's within you. Another inside out tool is our attention. And you could think of attention as your emotional spotlight, if you will. What you are focusing on dictates what you are thinking about and processing. So we possess the capacity to be strategic in how we deploy our attention. We could focus on the things that are bugging us, or we could turn away from them. And if we're really successful at turning away from them, we can become engaged in something else that occupies our attention. Typically, our emotions subside. Now, the point about attention that is relevant is most people here that the key to harnessing your attention effectively when it comes to emotion regulation is to never avoid the things that are bothering you. Because avoidance may feel good in the short term, but the moment you stop avoiding the problem will return in all its glory and even be worse. And so a lot of people just say you should immediately dive into the problem. It turns out this is not correct. What we have learned is that sometimes avoidance can be helpful. In particular, being able to go back and forth between a problem. So you get really aggravated about something, but then rather than try to work through it in that moment, you take some time away, you focus on something else, and then you come back to it a few hours or days later, depending on the needs of the situation. And what people often find is when they come back to the problem, they often have more perspective. First of all, they're not as agitated as they were initially. And that allows them then to engage with the problem more constructive. So that's really being about approaching and avoiding being flexible in those ways. Sometimes avoidance can backfire. There's no question about it. There's also no question that chronically avoiding things going away and never turning back to the problem, that tends to not work out very well for people. But being flexible, really, really useful. So that's attention. The third kind of inside out shifter is what we call perspective shifting here. The idea is that sometimes you got to stare a problem right in the face. And fortunately, we have this unique capacity as human beings to change the way we think about a problem, to transform it, to reframe it. A lot of us know this intuitively, but nonetheless struggle to do so. I share the story and an anecdote in the book about a good Friend of mine who was experiencing a problem at work that was really activating for him. And we were driving back from Detroit one night after dinner and his wife says to him, why don't you just think differently about it? Just reframe it. And he turns to her and says, yeah, easier bleeping said than done, right? Which I think captures what so many of us experience. We know we should focus on the bright side. We know we should minimize what we're magnifying, but we just can't do it. So what we've learned is how to help people do that when they want to. That is how do you help people reframe something? And a key is to get some distance from your problem. That is to take a step back and effectively view your problem from a 30,000 foot point of view. Almost like you're weighing in on someone else's problems. This can be very helpful for giving you a dose of objectivity that allows you to move forward effectively. And the cool thing here is that there are lots of ways that you could get distance from your problems. One of my favorite tools is something we call distant self talk. Using your own name in you to silently coach yourself through a problem. So just the other day I was getting upset about something and I said to Ethan, what are you doing? Is this being productive? You are wasting time right now. Thinking about this right now is not going to change the situation one bit. You might as well just focus on some other stuff and come back to this three days later, right? So what am I doing there? I'm essentially talking to myself like I would you or my friend. Like I'm really good at giving advice to others. Sometimes I'm not so good at doing it to myself. And what we're doing here is we're leveraging the structure of language to shift our perspective immediately. Most of the time we use the word you or our own name, or a name is when we think about and refer to other people. So the link between the word you and addressing someone else is super strong. When I use that word to refer to myself, Ethan, what are you doing? It's turning on the perspective taking machinery in my mind. It's getting me to relate to myself like I would someone else. And that can be a very powerful perspective shifting tool. So there are lots and lots of different perspective shifting tools like that that are, I think of them as like little psychological jujitsu moves. And I talk about a lot of them in the book. So I won't get, I won't get into them. Here, because I want to make sure we get to the rest of the stuff, but that rounds out the inside out. Shifters.

Yeah. This perspective one, you know, we use so much. When I am working with teams that are stuck in a mood of resentment or, you know, there's a lot of conflict and I just can't see the other's point of view. We'll often do an exercise which is literally a somatic shift right. Between working with somebody. I'm like, tell me your story with all of the emotion that's present. Don't. Don't be nice. Right. Because if it's really a hard conflict, you're not using polite words. I'm like, yell it out. Tell me what it is. Yeah. Now that you've got it out from your point of view, I want you to actually physically shift and go to the other chair. Now from that chair, I want you to tell me the story from the other. And again, not from a place of, oh, you know, maybe it is right or wrong. I'm like, no, I want you to feel. Get into their shoes. And I want you to yell at the same level of intensity that you were yelling or, like, felt about why they strongly believe in it. And I'm like, if you can't come up with something, think about it. Right? There's always, like, where. What is it that they're. That they think you're not getting? And, you know, most of the time when people actually shift and take on that perspective, they're like, something.

Yeah, that's a very.

I mean, right.

Yeah, it's. Well, it's so. It's so easy, you know, especially when you take what we're talking about to an interpersonal context. There are lots of biases that become activated that structure our thinking in ways that often, I would argue, counterproductively, magnify the. The distance between people, the space, enhancing resentment. For example, when we're dealing with. You know, I often joke with people, it's okay to. It's okay to disagree with me on stuff. It's okay to even get mad with me with stuff. Like, you know, there's a person living in the home that we're recording, this studio that I'm recording this with you, who I live with, she's called my wife. I love her deeply. We fight all the time. She disagrees with me quite a bit more than I'd like. And she's right. Usually pisses me off. Right. But it's okay. In any close relationship, you're going to have this kind of discord now when you get outside of someone who you have committed to with your life, sometimes our biases to kind of protect ourselves can get in the way because we start if we're in a conflict now where we're starting to get into self protective mode. So let's zoom in on all the negative facets of the interaction.

Right.

And when we do that, we forget about all the positive side and the complexity that might characterize the situation. And what your exercise I think does is by forcing people to like literally switch chairs and talk about it from the other angle is it makes, it forces people to counteract that bias, which is a very powerful tool that we know is useful. So I'm glad you do that. And it's definitely consistent, it's synchronous in many ways with what I talked about, with the language. And doing that for yourself.

Yeah, just perspective shifting, right? Yeah. Even being able to go to the balcony, it's massive.

It's huge. It's one of the most powerful tools we possess. So let's just round this out.

Yes.

So those are inside out tools. There are also outside in tools. These are tools that exist in the world around you. We've already mentioned one, your relationships. Other people can be remarkable emotion shifters, but they can shift you for better or worse, which sometimes we take for granted. I often do an exercise with folks to help them find their emotion advisors. What makes a good emotion advisor? It's someone who does two things for you. They are skilled at listening, learning and empathizing with you in step one of a conversation. But then after they've established those empathic connections like you really feel that they care and they've learned about your situation, now they start working with you to help you reframe your circumstances and come up with a plan for how to behave. That's a really skilled emotion advisor. A lot of people get this wrong. They think that the best way to support someone else is just to be there for them and let them vent it out. We know from lots of research that venting emotions is. It strengthens the bonds between people. It's good to know that someone's willing to just listen to you non judgmentally. But if all you do is vent, you typically leave those conversations and the problem is just as active as when you start. It's even more active because you've just spent all this time.

Absolutely.

Just find your emotion advisors. Then we can shift to talking about our spaces, our physical spaces. We've alluded to that too. The world around us, our physical, we're embedded in physical spaces and they us with tools. Nature is a great tool for helping us shift our perspectives and calming our emotions down. We often form attachments to places that positive attachments like our homes, our favorite coffee shops. And when we activate those attachments by visiting those places, that fills us with positive feelings. It's a lot like the attachments we form to other people when we're growing up. If you have a supportive family, your mom and dad and your siblings become support people you attach to securely. They're an emotional resource for you. Their mere presence provides you with emotional shifting support. Same is true of places right. Seeking out the right place at the right time can help folks. You can also, at a more micro level, design your space to have shifters within it. So if I look to my right, I have all these picture frames of my family. We know from research that glancing at images of our loved ones and facilitate the speed at which we recover emotionally from issues that we're struggling with. So I have pictures all over the place. I have plants around me too. Looking at a plant has a restorative quality. The orderliness of our spaces can also make a difference. When we're overcome with emotion, we often feel like we don't have control. That doesn't feel good. We like control as human beings. Research shows that creating order around you, organizing your spaces can help you regain a sense of control. We call this process compensatory control. You're compensating for the lack of control in your mind by creating order and exerting control around you. And then the last shifter is a cultural shifter that has to do with the culture of the organizations that we belong to. And I think we often lose sight that culture can be just so powerful. What culture does is it. It shapes the way we think and feel about things. It shapes our beliefs. Culture also gives us tools for managing things. And I think it's always really instructive to think about what are the cultural institutions that you belong to at work, in your personal lives, at home, if you're observant, in your religious lives, like what are the beliefs they are giving you? Is this a. Is it a culture that is leading you to be cutthroat and move fast and get out of the way? Because here I come roaring. And if so, like, maybe that works for you emotionally, but maybe it doesn't. Is this an organization that is maybe coupling a very aggressive, hyper achievement focused cultural orientation with tools to buffer you as you go along that path? Right. You know, in professional sports, the Demands are really high for getting the most out of their players. Right. Like, this is an achievement focused discipline. There's one real goal, it's to win. But they're also really skillful, many teams providing their players with all sorts of resources to make sure that they can traverse that challenging path successfully. So, you know, are the organizations that you belong to, are they doing that? What kinds of. And how do those goals connect with your own? So those are the different layers. Maybe pause there.

Yeah, I love it. You know, I spent a lot of time with organizations. You know, there is so many companies. I think at any point of time, 30 to 50% of the companies are doing some kind of a culture change program. They don't like the culture. And the culture change program come in the form of manifestos and memos. Right. And I always say culture is built in micro moments that's not built in large. You know, this massive, hey, we have this new culture, new values. No, it's how people interact. And it's those little interactions that people don't think about that if we are able to manifest, you can shift. You can create different emotional states. Right. I love Kim Cameron's work on positive energizers and really just even taking a set of people into being able to create that into your workplaces, you know.

And the thing about culture, just to riff a second longer on it, is that culture is not static. It is living and breathing and constantly evolving. And we all play a role in that culture. We are all part of that culture and therefore have the opportunity to impact it. I think it's often easy for folks to think about culture as this kind of giant force that we are just a pawn within it. We can't do anything. But how you show up, how you interact with other people as you're describing, that can shift our culture. So culture is another one of those really interesting topics. It's like emotion. We all know what it. We all have a sense of what it is and recognize its importance, but ask people to define it and watch the variety of responses you get.

So, Ethan, just keeping an eye on time and I know you have to get to an appointment. You know, one last question for you. I mean, these are. I mean, the book Shift. I highly recommend to the listeners to get a copy of it. It's one of the most practical, both easy to read, scientifically grounded, but very practical. You can go apply things right away and start your journey of emotional mastery. So my last question to you, Ethan, is if somebody is listening, what's a one Two, three, punch. As you said, it's never about one, it's about a combination. What have you found to be a good combination of? Let's just take two to three moves. If you're working with, let's say anxiety, right. Anxiety seems to be so present in the world right now. And if somebody is anxious, what would you recommend other set of shifters to play with?

Well, I'll tell you what I use. I will often use music. I'll use some breathing exercises in the moment. Those give me quick initial shifts. I will try to take some time away from the problem, come back to it after I cool down. We know all emotions fade with time. And I'll perspective shift. I'll think about how I'm going to feel about this three weeks from now. I'll also think about other experiences I've managed successfully. I'll give myself advice in the third person like I did, like I modeled before. And I'll activate my advisory board. If it's intense, get their support. So I will do actually all of those. And it's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 tools I just used. The beauty of those tools is because I'm aware of them, I know how they work. It's really easy to use those tools in succession, sometimes even at the same time. And they really make the difference. They don't make it all go away, but they turn the volume down to allow me to re engage and to not have it disrupt me leading the life I want to live, which I'm highly motivated to maintain.

Yeah. Well, Ethan, thank you. I appreciate you spending the time with us. This has been a game changer for me. I recommend it to every client that I work with in organizations. It's at the heart of high performance companies. And individuals stuck in anxiety in any of these negative emotions can't be at their best. So thank you for being here. Thank you for the powerful work you're doing. I'm grateful for you.

I'm grateful to you too for the work that you do and for having me on. So it was a real pleasure and I hope we get a chance to do it again.

Absolutely. Cheers, Ethan.

Take care.

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