038 The Power of a Full-Body Wag - Changing Your State in Seconds

This is Dr. Torrey. Welcome to the Influence Every Day show, where we make every day better and we influence for good. Have you ever seen someone's desk where it's loaded with photos? Photos of family members, maybe of pets, maybe of people interacting with the pets or trips that they've taken? Maybe also there's other, like knickknacks and, and sort of things all around the thing and it looks really cluttered, right? You know, that lady at work or that guy at work, or maybe it's even you. What's really interesting to me is that actually there have been multiple studies in multiple different domains and everything from environmental psychology and human factors to well being, to even furniture manufacturers and pet therapy that talk about the benefits of these things. Now, there are downsides, but first let's go through some of the benefits. There is some association with an impact in stress reduction, an association with an improvement in emotional well being, specifically as it relates to pets. They call it the pet effect. There's an association with increased productivity and increased retention when this is allowed to occur, when people have photos of their loved ones on their desk. Now, in some circles that there may be a downside where it may look like it's less than professional. It's not as professional to have one's family and stuff like that. It may affect the professional image. Also, it could certainly lead to some potential distraction or even some emotional triggers if there was loss or somebody recently passed away or it's an anniversary and that photo is there. So depending on how one responds to the photos of people who they've lost or pets they've lost, right. There are certainly potential downsides. But when you look at the upside, when you look at stress reduction, productivity retention and emotional well being, when you look at the potential for conversation starters and social connection with other people at work, when these things are there, there's a lot of potential benefit from it. It. But recently, of course, recently the past several years, we've had an increase in virtual work, an increase in hybrid work, and an increase in what in many circles is called hoteling, where you don't necessarily own your desk, but you come in and you use the desk space. And this is particularly challenging these days as people start to convert from hybrid to full. Back in the office, there's this bridge time where the space is not your own. And that's certainly the case for a lot of people. But why am I bringing this up? I'm bringing this up because normally I wouldn't point people to their phone, but I'm telling you you have a device in your pocket or in your purse or on your person somewhere that you can use as almost like an alternative to this to reap the benefits of it, assuming it doesn't lead to more distraction. But let me explain how I've recommended people use this in times of high stress. So for a while I ran a care for the caregiver program where I took care of social workers, case managers, nurses, docs, essentially any healthcare professional who was undergoing a certain amount of stress or just needed some peer support. So the care for the caregiver programs that exist in multiple different entities, multiple different healthcare systems, that the care for the caregiver programs provide peer support to healthcare professionals. And so there was one person in particular who I didn't realize that this first person was going to lead off a chain of events, but there was a social worker in one of the entities that I worked in who approached me with some stressors that she was having. And so we talked through them. There was just the normal peer support type session. And so I always want to end on a good note. So I always ask about what excites you, what gets you in a great mood, what kind of things, what kind of small joys do you have? And so she mentioned her dog and she mentioned actually multiple dogs, but she mentioned one in particular. She mentioned some other things about trips she likes and hobbies she likes to do do and those sort of things. And as she was explaining all these, I just saw her light up when she talked about her dog. I asked her, what does he do when you first come in from work? What does he do? Does he have that full body wag, like shaking back and forth, so excited to see you, ears back, licking, licking his lips, wagging with the full body. Is that what's happening? She's yeah. Oh my God, it's so awesome. And she like just started telling me all about that and how he's so excited for 10 straight minutes. I was like, can you do me a favor? When you go home today, walk in with the video recording capture on your phone, your dog doing the full body wag and greeting you. And then what I want you to do is before you walk into your next meeting, before you log into a particular online meeting that you think might be stressful, just watch that video for a few seconds before you log in. Change your state before you log in. Because when you change your state, you change who shows up right now. There was one time I was actually giving a keynote address and it was online. It was in the midst of COVID I was doing this keynote address and, and I just received word that somebody very close to me had passed away. And it was like two minutes before I logged in. So I'm about to log into this keynote, I get a text that somebody passed away unexpectedly. Now first my heart sunk. I started thinking, oh my God, what am I going to do? I can't do this keynote. And then at the same time, like, well, what can I do? How can I support? They're a little far away. How am I going to do anything here? Like what? You know, so my head's spinning and I thought, you know what, I'm probably not going to be able to do anything of any kind of impact for at least hour and a half, two hours, you know, when things start to become clearer. What's, you know, where's the body going to go, what's the funeral process, who's going, who's where, you know, that sort of thing. And so as that was clicking in my head in these two minutes before I logged in, I realize, whoa, I can't enter this keynote in this state because if I do, it'll be all over my person, it'll be all over my body language, it'll be in my word choice, it'll affect how I present and it'll affect how I show up for the people in the audience. And so I had a choice. Either either show up and completely blow it because of my state or I could cancel, it's perfectly reasonable, I lost somebody close to me, or I could change my state. And so what I did was essentially similar advice to what I gave to that social worker where I quickly opened up YouTube and I opened up a particular late night TV show host who right before he does his monologue, he has this slight smirk. And it's enough to change my mood, it's enough to change my state. I'm in a better space when I see that. And I realized that I feel that way whenever I see it, whenever it starts, I'm already ready to laugh. So I just turned that on and I scrolled ahead to right before he does his monologue. And then I just logged off of YouTube and I went, logged into my keynote and delivered the keynote. The point here is that you can use video just like people have all those photos on their desk. And it leads to an impact in stress reduction and productivity retention and emotional well being. You can deliberately invoke that by pulling up photos of loved ones videos. Keep a small, a small library or even if it's only one like that social worker who had the dog, full body wag. That video, she uses that regularly. And what happened is she came back a few months later saying, you have no idea what this did for my work, what this did for my well being and what this did for my relationships. She's I look at him every time before I go into the meeting or before I have a call with my parents. And she had strained relationship or whatever. And so she would look at the dog before she did these things. She said, you have no idea what kind of impact that had. Not long after that, I was coaching somebody through like a lawsuit that they were going through a malpractice case and they were particularly stressed. I did the same thing, asked about what kind of stuff do you have, what kind of joys, small joys. What did tell me about your family, tell me about pets, travel, et cetera. And she too had a dog. And I told her the same advice, same thing. A few months later she said, the full body wag. Dah dah dah dah. Like same exact thing, same impact. You can do this for you, you can do this for your loved ones, you can do this for your friends, you can do this for your family. If your kids are in a bad mood and they have a. A pet of some sort and there's something funny, an old video, maybe it's an old video of them when they were little, right? I have this one video of my daughter where she's crying. My oldest daughter's holding my youngest daughter, she's crying. The youngest daughter's crying. As she's crying. No one could console her. So all I started doing was I started doing this, like making my lips a weird shape and making a weird noise. And she stopped crying immediately and then started doing that, trying to imitate me and fumbling and messing up and spitting and doing whatever. But it was really cute. And so we keep that video and we bring it up every once in a while. It immediately changes the state. So just like those photos on that lady's desk at work, you can do this with your phone. Pick a video that really means something to you and have it available. And before you log in, before you walk in, before you walk out, before you go into your home at the end of the evening, just change your state a bit before you get in there and it will change how you show up. So I hope you found this helpful. I'll see you in the next episode. This is only the end of today's show if you let it be. Who needs to hear what you just heard? 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