365 - Emotional GPS: How Emotions Guide Us Through Business, Conflict, and Life with Doug Johnston

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Welcome to Listening with Leaders. You know, before we started recording, we were sitting here chatting and we could have probably chatted for 2 or 3 hours.

I'm sure we could have. It was a blast.

I know. So, I want to hear, I want to learn more about your background. I know you were in banking, CEO of a number of banks, you got into private equity, and then you got interested in emotions. And of course, that's kind of my bandwidth too, but it turns out we have a lot of common interests in sailing and a whole bunch of other stuff. So tell you what, let's do this. Let's start off with giving us your backstory so that we can know who you are and what you do, and then we can jump into emotions.

Well, thank you, Doug Noll. Uh, it feels like familiar territory here, and, and I love chatting with you before we went on the air. Um, my background, as you alluded, includes many years as a corporate executive in finance and banking and private equity, uh, as part of a due diligence team where we would, uh, travel around the US and Europe looking at complex situations and companies to buy. Eventually, I started getting hired by major law firms to help assist them with, uh, sorting out their complex, um, business disputes. So enter me 10 years ago as a sort of corporate researcher, researcher and expert witness. Uh, my daughter at that time was in 8th grade and she wanted, uh, allowance. And of course, but I decided to make her earn it. And so I would come to dinner, we would have father-daughter dinners every 2 weeks, and I would come to dinner with a prepared list of roughly 150, 200 questions. It could be about anything— geography, history, math, science, art, politics, you name it, entertainment. And if she got the answer to the question right, I would slide a $2 bill across the table. And she loved it. I mean, this was a College Bowl, we called it, and it became very popular with her because she could earn sort of an outsized allowance. So, and you can appreciate as a father of a teenager you don't always know what's going on in their life. This is a wonderful opportunity for just the two of us to get to know each other better. So 2 years into it, she had been out of— in sophomore year in high school, she had been out of school for a month with an accident followed by surgery. And she came to dinner with a very long face. She said, Dad, may I ask the questions tonight? I said, sure, sweetheart. She said, what do you know about depression? And Doug, I think I faked it. I thought, you know, I'm gonna act like this is an economic question. I said, well, it's a slowdown in business activity accompanied by a secular decline in interest rates, some long-drawn-out answer like that. And she looks at me, she says, no, no, Dad, not that kind of depression, emotional depression. And Doug, I knew nothing about it. I knew that somebody was sad. I, I had not experienced emotional depression in my family or among my friends. And I said, sweetheart, I, I got some work to do. And, um, So the next 2 weeks I dug in. I, I went to Barnes Noble bookstores, online, surrounded myself with articles, books, 2 laptops. I was digging into depression and, and, you know, there's a ton of help to be had from psychologists. I've spent many, many hours with good therapists in the chair. Um, so that was that, but my daughter needed help with seeing that there was a light at the end of the tunnel. And so as I started to read, I came across a few quotes from various writers. And when I found a quote that I thought was particularly helpful, I would jot it down. So the first quote that I came across was from a writer by the name of Rollo May. And Rollo May was one of the first— you may know him— he's one of the first self-help writers from the '50s, back before they even knew the term self-help. PhD and a bachelor's in divinity. He had survived depression, and his quote about depression, which I jotted on a Post-it note, was, "Depression is the inability to construct a future." Wow. And that really, that grabbed me. That had impact. That really got my attention. That was much more than somebody being sad. That explained to me how you could not want to get out of bed in the morning and the like. So I wrote that one down. A couple days later, I came across another quote from J.K. Rowling. I'm sure you know who she is, the author of the—

depression too.

She suffered terribly from depression as a younger woman before she became a writer, uh, and her quote about depression was this: Depression is that absence of being able to envision you will ever be cheerful again. It's the most unpleasant thing I've ever experienced. So I wrote that one down on a Post-it note, and then a few days after that, I came across another quote from a freelance writer. I doubt you would know her name. She's a very talented writer. She too had suffered from depression, recovered. Her name is Hayley Cornell, and her quote was, "Depression lies. It tells you you've always felt this way and you always will, but you haven't and you won't." Well, that also grabbed me. And so there I am sitting at my desk, surrounded by books and articles, and I thought, it's 10 in the morning, my daughter's in class, I'm going to just text them to her. And so I texted those 3 quotes tour across town. She probably should not have been looking at her cell phone, but she was. And, uh, 3 minutes later I get a text back, "I'm crying." And I was alarmed. I— my gosh, sweetheart, why are you crying? I texted back, "These people all suffered from depression and recovered from it. There's hope." And her quick response was, "That's why I'm crying. Thank you, Dad." So that was a, a wonderful father-daughter moment. It was defining in many respects. We were on to something, that the quotes of people who expressed how an emotion feels are often much more valuable than sort of dry clinical acronyms and syndromes and discussion. The point being, how it feels trumps how it looks.

That's right.

And so we move from depression to anxiety to OCD to codependence. She didn't suffer from all these, but we were onto something, and it became fun to find great quotes and phrases and terms from people who experienced the depression, uh, a specific emotion. So over 9 years, uh, my daughter quickly recovered in a matter of months, but over 9 years, the list went from depression to 272 different emotional states as described by 8,000 quotes and phrases and terms from people who'd experienced them. Uh, so imagine last July, I finally got to the last word on my list, which was trauma. And you'll say in your heart, you'll probably say, that should have been first on your list. But it was, it was in a strange way the last on my list. And I realized, not unlike, uh, Forrest Gump in the movie, where he's running, running, running back and forth across the country, and he finally stops, he says, I've done what I need to do. So trauma was it. And finished the book, published it in December, January. And in mid-January, the book was just out. Friend of mine said, you should submit the manuscript to AI. And I said, no, no, I didn't use any AI in writing it. These are all human quotes. He said, no, no, you should write it and see what AI thinks of, of your book. Well, Doug, it's 130,000 words. I had it in electronic form. He said, check out Cloud AI and ChatGPT, and imagine me poised with my finger on send or don't send, and I thought, oh, I'll just go ahead and do it. I mean, I'm happy with the book. So I submitted the entire manuscript and I asked for critique, which was, you know, a dubious thing to do, but I did it. And within 3 minutes, both Claude AI and ChatGPT responded, this is the single most comprehensive reference on emotions in the English language. And my eyes almost popped out. I said, no, no, that, that couldn't be possible. This is— you're just being a cheerleader. And I said, no, give me the, the next 3. And, and the truth is, it is. So I've done something that I didn't really intend to do, but it was a pure joy. It became a passion to research emotions. And I, I think I've come away with all of that with some fantastic insights from some of the world's most capable people from all walks of life.

Wow. So I'm curious, did you ever come across a definition of emotion that you really liked?

What a wonderful question. And that's obviously one that you've researched yourself. Oh, yeah. It is. I'm going to say this with some humor. Definitions of emotion are almost rarer than hen's teeth, as my father used to say. Even the greats, the Carl Jungs and Sigmund Freuds of the world, were very reluctant to define emotions. And when you find a definition of emotion, write it down. It became an article of great importance to me over time to actually formulate my own definitions of emotion, which is One of the concluding appendices of the book was to do that. But if I may, with the benefit— and I love your feedback on this— I think it emerged over time that emotions are a system of navigation. Your emotional system has duty number one, which is to protect you. Touch a hot stove, you're going to quickly withdraw your hand. Hang around angry people, you're going to want to withdraw. Duty number one of your emotional nervous system is to protect you. Duty number two, after it's protected you, is to allow you to expand, to reach, to be curious, to be empathic or empathetic, to express enthusiasm or excitement. So I came to understand that emotions generally are a navigational system. And I think that's pretty helpful. I think that's quite true.

Let me give you the definition. I'm looking it up right here. I didn't make this up. This is from neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett.

Who I've come to know well.

I've never met her personally, but her work was extraordinary, has been extraordinarily influential on my thinking. I read, I first discovered her when I read one of her research papers published back in 2010, 2011 around lexithymia. In domestic violence.

Understood.

Because I come to this work as a peacemaker and I've come to realize that all conflict is emotional. All decision-making is emotional. I mean, everything we do is emotional. There's no such thing as rationality. That's a myth. And so anyways, Lisa's definition is, emotions are biologically based patterns of perception, experience, physiology, action, and communication. That are culturally created in our brains. So these are patterns that are culturally created. We're not born with emotions. We—

they're patterns defined by words. So I'm going to follow your quote from Lisa Feldman Barrett with another one. Um, she, as you probably know, is, uh, widely renowned in psychology and neuroscience. She is at this point a professor at Northeastern in Boston, but she is known to be one of the top— among the top 1% of all cited scientists in the world. So her work is unbelievable, well regarded, well respected. And here is her quote about the importance of words and language, which follows what you just said. So this is from, um, from Lisa herself.

Uh, pardon me, I'm, I'm looking for the She, um, yeah, I mean, for those, for those that don't know Lisa Feldman Barrett, she is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Northeastern University. She's written, she's written a lot, obviously published many, many studies and journal articles, most of which, other than people like Doug Noll, would never want to read. But she also has a book called The Secret— she actually has two books out, but her first book, The Secret Life of The Brain, or How Emotions Are Created, The Secret Life of the Brain. And that book is a distillation of all of her work up until about 2018, I think, when that book came out. And for those people who really want to dive into her constructed theory of emotion, which is sort of her seminal theory of what emotions are, um, it's really her seminal theory. Very, very, yeah, very accessible and very powerful.

I found the quote.

Okay, good.

Thank you for giving me the break to find it. Here it is. The more finely grained your vocabulary, that's right, the more precisely your brain can construct emotion.

That's right. Emotion.

And that follows a really similar theme that I've tracked, Doug, across 12 different scientific disciplines. And if I may, I want to repeat a couple more quotes because they're darn important. So even if you go to theoretical physics, Roll the clock back to the '50s to Niels Bohr, who worked alongside Einstein. Niels Bohr also won a Nobel Prize. But here is his quote about the importance of language. What is it that we human beings ultimately depend upon? We depend upon our words. We are suspended in language. Another quote from Charles Kettering. You might know him from the Sloan Kettering Clinic, which is a cancer clinic., but his professional career was as an engineer. Uh, he was head of engineering for GM. He held 186 patents. Uh, his quote about words: "A problem well stated is a problem half solved." I just love that. Um, Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics—

that's right—

quote is, "Language etches the grooves through which your thoughts must flow." And my favorite, and, and Perhaps, Doug, even yours is from Dan Siegel, the clinical psychiatrist from UCLA. 5 words to cast in stone: name it to tame it. If you can put words to your problem, you were halfway to solving it.

Well, that's it. And I mean, this is all based on the 2007 seminal brain scanning study out of Matthew Lieberman's lab at UCLA, where he showed that he was— in that, in that study, they put their subjects in under fMRI brain scanning technology and showed them distressed faces and then had them name the emotions. And what they observed is that when emotions were named, the centers of the brain associated with negative emotions were inhibited, while the prefrontal regions of the brain associated with emotional self-regulation were activated. In other words, when you name what someone feels, physiologically it literally calms the human brain, and every human brain on the planet is hardwired for this. This is what changed me as a peacemaker, because I learned that naming emotions was the single most powerful way to calm an angry room in literally 90 seconds. And then I acid-tested this in maximum security prisons for 10 years here in California and in Connecticut, training murderers how to be peacemakers. And the very skill— first The first skill we taught them was naming emotions to stop prison riots and violence and rapes and everything else.

What a story.

Thank you for that.

Putting words to emotions.

Well, I want, that's right. But I wanna, I wanna, I got, I got really interested in this stuff because I said, well, how did we, I started looking at the evolution of language and I was shocked. First of all, language as we know it did not exist 30,000 years ago. And it only— it only became possible because of two genetic mutations that occurred 230,000 years ago. If those mutations had occurred, hominids would have never developed language. Of course, language is symbolic. It's a symbolic representation. So the question I always ask everybody: hominids have been on the planet for over 2 million years. How did we communicate when we didn't have language? We communicated through emotion, facial expression, body language, grunts. We formed clans and families in small, very small societies for millions of years. And how do we communicate?

So emotions became the Rosetta Stone of human behavior.

That's right. The common thread. That's right. And we have the innate ability to read each other's emotions. Actually, it's affect. We have the ability to read each other's emotions and affect naturally, efficiently, quickly, and accurately. And yet when you talk to people about this, they go, "I don't know how to read emotions." It's because our culture for 3,000 years has said that emotions are evil, emotions make you weak, emotions make you vulnerable, emotions are sinful, emotions are irrational, right? All wrong.

All wrong.

All wrong. Western philosophy and Western theology, all wrong. I mean, Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, he was the guy who constructed the Catholic theology back in the 5th century. He was a Neoplatonist, and true Christian theology is not about the Bible, it's about Neoplatonism, which is very interesting. It is. But one of the things that he was talking about was how the only way you can get to heaven is through reason. And oh, by the way, women can't reason. I mean, don't get me started on that.

We are progressing, even though slowly. I want to add a couple of things to what you just said about misperceptions. So one of the findings of my book over almost 10 years was that there are 3 common misperceptions in American society and we'll extend it to the world. The average person and Doug, you know, and I both know there's no average person. Everybody's unique. But collectively, we can say the average behavior—

within our bell curve, right?

Yeah. Let's say the 3 basic misperceptions, the fundamental mistakes that people make are the average person thinks they're basically only 2 dozen emotions, full stop. When I've documented that they're in, in the low hundreds at a minimum, right? And probably more than that. And, and we're not— these aren't high-tech emotions.

Let me just add right there that, and emotions vary from culture to culture. There are emotions in the Finnish language, for example, that have no— that don't exist in English. And when you look at all the Asian cultures, thousands of Asian cultures, they have thousands of words describing emotion that not exist even across Asian culture or Western culture. So, and it turns out that there can be an infinite number of emotions.

No surprise. So the, uh, I'll move on to number 2 on the list of the misperceptions. The average person tends to think that emotions are rare and episodic and that we are typically normally rational. And what do I mean by that? You may say Last Tuesday, my boss was annoyed. This morning, I was really happy when I won the scratcher lotto. At noon today, my child called me and was very curious about whether I was going to take him to the NBA playoffs. But these are generally deemed to be rare and sporadic events. The reality is that we are constantly emoting all day, every day, and even in our sleep. What do I mean by that? Let's say that it's a Saturday afternoon. You're alone at home. You're bored. You're lonely. We'll start there. You grab the TV remote. You're curious. You click it on. You see a rerun. You go, well, that's boring. You turn it to another station. I've seen that. You're still bored. You set down the remote. You say, hmm, what's in the kitchen? Now you're curious. You walk into the kitchen. You see the refrigerator. You go, aha. 'That goodie I left in there last night.' You're interested. You open the door to the refrigerator. There's your goodie. You're excited. Your cell phone goes off. You're annoyed. It's a telemarketer. You have to figure out how to dismiss that guy. You hang up. You finish your goodie, your satisfaction. You're back to bored. You call your friend Charlie and you say, 'Charlie, let's go to the gym.' We are constantly morphing from one emotion to the next. It is how we navigate life.

That's right. And as Damasio points out, and actually his early studies were back in the '90s, you cannot make a decision without having emotion.

Bingo. So that's the exact— thank you for that. That's exactly where I was going. So the third, and we're in agreement on this, that the third misperception, common misperception is that emotions are inferior to reason.

You can't have reason without emotion.

You can't have reason without emotion.

And so—

So stupid. Emotion gets a bad rap. You say, well, Charlie, he's emotional, or my girlfriend, she gets emotional, and it gets a bad backhanded rap. But all the Nobel and Honda Prize-winning level scientists— Antonio Damasio, who you just mentioned, the Honda winner— all of them, Jonathan Haidt, Robert— Daniel Kahneman, I beg your pardon— all of them say the same thing: emotions are foundational to reason. —You cannot make a rational decision without the value ascribed first by the—

I'm gonna take it even farther. Good. And I'm gonna say there's no such thing as rationality. I have yet to see anybody define rationality that makes sense. If you want the pure definition of rationality, you would go back to von Neumann and Morgenstern's game theory book published in 1944, where they define rational choice theory. Rational choice theory basically sets up 3 basic, or 6 basic theorems that if you follow, if a rational person is somebody who follows, has to do with transitivity and consistency. Within 5 years, that theory was proven to be completely wrong, and yet It persists in business schools today where everybody is looking at the idea that human beings exist to maximize utility, which is absolutely false. And we know from Kahneman and Tversky's work, Damasio's work, Herbert Simon's work, that that's just all utterly false. And yet we still hear people talk about, "I'm a rationalist." Bullshit. If anything, you have the capacity for a small amount of deliberative thinking. What Kahneman called System 2 thinking. You— and that capacity is very limited because it's constrained by metabolism. This is what Lisa Feldman Barrett talks about, right? The brain is a metabolic miser, and we only reserve deliberative thinking for those moments that our, our System 1 thinking, our automatic instinctive decision-making processes, which we habituate to handle most of our problems, isn't up to the task. There is no such thing as rationality. We have the ability to engage in deliberate thinking, but only very rarely.

When you realize— thank you for that— when you realize that emotions are fundamental, not inferior, suddenly there's a subtle shift in your life because you're not disparaging emotions. You come to understand that they're tools, that they are tools to allow you to navigate life, and you can embrace them. If you can make friends with your emotion, you will be a happier person.

I'm going to go even further than that. I'm going to tell you, I'm going to tell people, and this is what I teach, once you recognize that we are emotional beings, not rational beings, it becomes liberating. Because when you walk into a business meeting and you see all this chaos going on, all this upset, all this craziness, they're not being irrational, they're being normal. And once you start watching it, you'll see the same patterns over and over and over again. And eventually nothing is new. I can walk in as a peacemaker and mediator, I can walk into any human conflict and I'll see exactly the same patterns over and over again. We look at, I'm studying what's going on over in Pakistan, you know, with the US and the Iranians and everybody else. Classic, absolutely classic patterns. And of course the negotiators are all grossly ignorant of all of this stuff and they're grossly poor negotiators and they have no idea how to mediate. So of course they're blowing it. I've written a bunch of articles on this on my Substack platform. But what's gonna come outta this is what I'm calling a stumble bumble agreement, which will be totally worthless. But I predicted this a month ago and now it's just unfolding exactly as I saw it because it is so predictable.

What you just said, Doug, about walking into a room and understanding that emotions are fundamental is life-changing. That's right. They're not inferior. They're at the base of everything. And if you understand that they have to be there, you can embrace them and not be afraid of them.

And here's the thing that's even more cool. Because of the stigma around emotions and empathy, now I'm calling it nervous system leadership. Oh my. So what we're engaging in, what we're engaging in when I start talking to leaders, I'm saying, look, forget empathy, Forget emotions. All we're doing is engaging in nervous system leadership. And in order to do that, you have to recognize that you're not leading people, you're leading nervous systems. And you have a nervous system of your own. Number 1, learn how to self-regulate your own nervous system. Number 2, how to recognize dysregulated nervous systems on your teams. And 3, regulate them through the simple process of affect labeling. You feel, name the emotion. Wow.

What you're describing is in some ways a Chief Emotions Officer.

Yeah? Or the CEO should be responsible for this because we know there's this thing called emotional contagion. If the CEO walks into the building pissed off, within 20 minutes the whole building becomes dysregulated, almost instantly.

Oh my gosh. Almost instantly. The emotions are contagious, no doubt about it.

That's right. So, these days, yeah, I'm talking about, okay, let's not worry about empathy or any of these soft skills or all this stuff that has all this pejorative stuff around it. Let's talk about nervous system leadership and what that means and how you engage in it and why you engage in it.

This is cutting edge. This really is.

That's why I wanted to have you on the show.

Yeah, well, what a joy to experience a fellow traveler who's dug into it. But the average person has not really caught a wave of where science is. And all the scientific leaders are, it's virtually unanimous. Everything that we're talking about. Exactly. Now there's a reason No doubt about it.

There's a reason for that. And that is, the reason is called emotional invalidation. When we were children, you'll remember, we were both little boys running around, we fall down, we skin our knees, what are we told?

Sure, get up, dust yourself off, get back on your horse and ride.

Rub dirt in it, be a big boy, big boys don't cry. Girls are told the same thing. Yeah. Our parents told us that emotions are bad, emotions make us weak. And there's no— I mean, it's totally understandable why a CEO today would be adverse to emotional experience, because that CEO was trained as a child to look at emotions as being bad and evil.

And yet, and yet, when you bury an emotion, you bury it alive. It will come back in other uglier ways if you don't address it.

Every single murderer I worked with Grew up in a family of incredible emotional dysfunction, violent dysfunction. Murderers are not born, they're bred, and they're bred in their family environments. Every single murderer I met told a horrific— I'll just share one with you just because, give you an example. So we were working in the largest, most violent women's prison in the world. That's where we started back 2010. One of our young women, 22 years old, she told this story: At 3 years old, I was raped by my uncle. At 8 years old, my mother addicted me to heroin. At 12 years old, she started prostituting me. I killed my first john. At 16 years old, I killed my second john, addicted to heroin. Now I'm serving a life sentence without possibility of parole here in prison. It's the safest place I've ever lived. I never want to leave.

Safest place I've ever lived. Oh my.

And that is a common story.

Oh my, makes sense now as you explained it. It makes good sense. Um, so there is a, a psychologist who you may have encountered. She has a very humorous line. Her name is Harriet Lerner.

Oh yes, I've got her book and I've interviewed her. Uh-huh. Have you?

Well, you, you would know her quote. Pardon me for repeating it. Emotions are like children, she says. You don't want, you don't want them driving the car, but you can't stuff them in the trunk either.

That's right.

But when you understand that they are tools, that's right. And that you don't have to be a victim, you can be a victor when you use them. That's right. As tools to navigate your life, there's a subtle but very powerful shift that happens.

Well, and the way I pitch it is I say, imagine never having a fight or argument with anyone ever spiral out of control again. Ever. Never. You, you, you, fights and arguments are done in your life once you learn how to master these skills. And mastering these skills takes about as long as it takes to learn how to ride a bicycle. And it doesn't matter where you're coming from.

But this is so exciting. Thank you.

I have trained, I have trained murderers in prison to do this. And I'll tell you, just the statistic, I love the quote here in California, We've had over 800 of our incarcerated students who graduated from Prison Peace as fully certified mediators who've been released on parole. They were lifers. Not one of them has reoffended. Having gone through this training, having gone through our training, they got released and they're doing great. None of them have reoffended. Not one. 800 lifers, people who killed somebody.

What a boost. What a boost.

I mean, the point is, the point, not so much about the program and what we taught, but the power of emotion, mastering emotion, what it does to people.

So then it comes down to, uh, the, to go back to sort of the cultural bias over the past decades is, am I wrong to feel this way? 3,000 years.

3,000. Am I wrong to feel this way?

No, you're wrong if you even speak about it. Well, we're changing that. The issue is have the vocabulary, put words to your emotions and find out how much happier life goes. That's right. That's really it.

That's it. That's exactly correct. Yeah. When you learn these skills and you start mastering how to name emotions and you start learning how to regulate your own nervous system and regulate the nervous system of the people that you lead, everything changes.

Here is an example. If I may, from, from the book, right? So I'm not a psychologist, you know that, but it's not hard to understand what it might be like to be a psychologist, a therapist, with a patient opposite you. And you're the therapist, and your obvious question is, what's bothering you? And let's say that it's a patient who's having trouble putting words to his emotions, and he— alexithymia— says, well, doctor, I, I just feel I feel anxious all the time. I feel anxious all the time. Well, that— the doctor knows what anxiety is, and the anxiety is treated in a certain way. What if the real problem isn't anxiety? What if the real problem is addiction, but, but the patient is reluctant to say it, or doesn't— is afraid to say it, or doesn't know how to say it? Um, what my book has done is to— for every single emotion, there are between 20 and 40, depending upon the emotion, uh, quotes or phrases from people who've experienced that emotion. So the patient can scan down the list and say, that's the, that's the way I feel right there. And in, in that environment, the patient isn't called upon to create words, right? You can simply read it and identify it. Well, then the doctor has something to work with, the patient is able to converse, they have a common thread to build on.

That's right. You know, Brené Brown reports a really famous study in her book, Atlas of the Heart. 7,000 people, asked them to name as many emotions as they could. 95% could only name 4 emotions: happy, sad, glad, and pissed off. Wow. That was it. Wow. Totally alexithymic. Her early studies showed that people who are engaged in domestic violence, whether it's 90% men, 10% women, our domestic violence offenders, every single one of them, alexithymic, inability to name your emotions, no granularity. And that's what got her going in this direction.

Wow, she's done a lot of great work and I love her book.

Well, it's the influence to me is when I walk into a high-level conflict, whether it's a family business conflict or a partnership dispute or an investor-founder dispute, you know, these really big money, highly emotional situations. What I'm looking at is I'm looking at alexithymia. Nobody's able to express their emotions. And when people are, are alexithymic, they can no longer think, they have no empathy, they have low cognitive ability because their brain's on fire. And so what we have to do is do what you just talked about, which is reduce that alexithymia athemic tendency by naming their emotions. Or if they're in a clinical setting, I love it, go through the list of quotes and descriptions and have people say, this is what I feel.

This is what I feel. All right, so the average person, again, the mores are changing, but the average person is sort of, don't talk about it, or only talk about it privately, if then, with your therapist. That's right. But the shift is to find the words to articulate it, and suddenly there's a release. Suddenly you're going, This is what Lieberman showed.

Yeah.

I'm not bound by this anymore. No. I can put it to words.

It's okay. That's right. And in fact, that's exactly the name of his study, Putting Feelings into Words. Yeah. Perfect. Exactly right.

I'm going to go over Brené Brown's quote. I'm going to read it. Language is our portal to meaning-making. Having access to the right words can open up entire universes. It's beautiful. It's simple. She's got 6 New York Times bestsellers to support the accuracy and validity of the idea. Uh, if you'd asked me 10 years ago when I started this project if I had any idea that it would lead here, I would say of course no. And yet it had to lead here. I mean, because this is the answer, right? And, and all the top, uh, the science—

the science— you said this earlier, the science is unanimous on this.

It really is. I mean, there aren't really any outliers anywhere that dispute this at all.

What's amazing to me is how many business people reject this even though the science is absolutely, I mean, unequivocally supports these ideas.

All right, I'm gonna surprise you with this. So science, yes, but let's extend it a tiny bit to literature. I'm gonna give you a quote from William Shakespeare 400 years ago out of Hamlet. Suit the action to the word and the word to the action. That's exactly, Doug, what we're talking about. That's right. All right, George Braque, the, the artist, uh, who was one of the, the great, um, uh, alongside Picasso, he is a co-founder of Cubism. You probably know him. Uh, George Braque: to define the thing is to substitute the definition for the thing itself. Precision of words is liberating. That's right, it's liberating. It'll change your life. It'll change your life.

And this comes from— difficult to master—

comes from the arts and the sciences, all disciplines. So this isn't just somebody in a, in a clinical setting that, that came up with an idea. This covers linguistics, it covers psychotraumatology, it covers literature, it covers anthropology, philosophy. They're all in agreement. Well, it's because now we need the average person to get that.

Yes. And, and the, and the— I think the lesson is The essence of human nature is to be emotional, not rational.

So simple. And it's a joy. There's a great word, joy. It's a joy to get that. So no, you're not wrong to feel a certain way. And here is an insight. You may have encountered this many times in your career. I came up with a few of my own quotes for the book. Why? Because I would jot down things and, and see, gee, nobody's ever said that. One of them is, if you can laugh in an emotion, it doesn't control you. Humor is greatly liberating. I mean, there's nothing like a good laugh.

So, so you get frustrated, you get angry, laugh at it. Name it. I'm really angry and frustrated. Oh, come on, really?

That's it. That's it. Name it and laugh. 'Oh me, I went and got frustrated again,' right? There we go. At that point, you're looking at yourself. You're not in the emotion. You're looking at the emotion from 2 feet away from yourself and you're saying, 'Wait a minute, I'm getting carried away again,' and suddenly you're not bound by it. That's right. This is liberation. That's right. Yeah.

Okay, I got one more question. We've gone way over. I love this conversation. So I don't know. Oh me, you and me both. Now, so Doug, What's one thing about yourself we would never know about unless you told us, revealed it to us?

When I was 10 years old, my mom was, um, an enormously accomplished person. She was a champion athlete. She was, uh, an exhibited artist. She was a writer. She could do— she was a socialite. She could do anything. And I turned to her, and I, I love my mom, of course, and I said, Mom, how do you do— how do you do all these things? And all of them well. And she looks at me with motherly advice. She points a finger and she says, it takes a big ego to succeed in this world. All right. Well, that was my mom speaking. It was gospel. I mean, she— look, look. All right. So move the clock forward 40 years and I'm researching this book and I, late at night with my little trusty dog at my feet and I'm coming across quotes and I come across a quote from Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology. And, you know, his insights are just epic, as you well know. And his quote was, "A man spends the first half of his life building up an ego and the second half of his life understanding how important it is to dismantle it." Right. Doug Noll, I cried when I read that because I realized how fundamentally I had misunderstood what ego was. And I I realized how I'd subjected so many people to that unnecessarily. I wanted to go apologize to them. So that was the word. I had a massive misunderstanding of ego, and I so apologize to the people during my career who I inflicted that on. Right. Yeah.

Well, and you're a better human being now because of it. I mean, yeah, much. Our journeys were very similar, but here we are later in life. And we're serving. And just by doing this conversation, I'm hopeful that those who listen will be served by it and be motivated to check out your work, check out my work, and go through the transformations that we've been able to go through. That's my hope. Thank you. Thank you.

Couldn't agree more.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great You know, if you have a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com. Follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.