How to Master Your Emotions - Tips From Expert Stacy Kesten

Hello, my friends, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. This show is produced by the American Negotiation Institute and with over 5 million downloads and listeners in over 180 countries, listeners just like you have made this the number one negotiation podcast in the world. Hi, my name is Kwame Christian and I am the founder and CEO of the American Negotiation Institute. Here at A&I we believe that the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. And we are passionate about providing you with the best content that will help you to make your difficult conversations easier, both at work and at home. Lastly, I want to remind you that we offer consulting and conduct trainings both virtually and in person all around the world. Our focus is in three main areas. First, negotiation and conflict resolution. Second, leadership. And lastly, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Third, check the link in the description below to learn more about how we could work with you and your team. And now, without further ado, let's jump into the interview. I want to get a little bit deeper in mindfulness because I think that's been one of the buzzwords of the last three to five years. But I don't think many people really have a full understanding of what it is. So can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Yeah. So mindfulness, there's several definitions out there around mindfulness. The one that I really like is mindfulness is the practice of paying attention to our present moment experiences with an attitude of openness and curiosity and a willingness to experience what is. So it's really all about being with our life as it is. And I even like a shorter definition is kind of like making friends with our life in this moment.

That's fascinating. Okay. See, I've never heard a definition that thorough that includes curiosity and openness. The definitions I've heard just dealt with awareness and being present. So why are curiosity and openness important if you're going to be mindful?

So mindfulness, it is about awareness and being present, but it's also like, what is the quality of your attention when you're paying attention? So we can be aware and be resistant to what's happening, or we can be aware and be kind of like wishing that this moment was different, basically. And so the openness and the curiosity, I think brings us into the moment in a way that opens our minds and opens our ability to take in what's happening with non judgment. And that's a tall order. Non judgment. Instead of saying non judgment, I like to say openness and curiosity because we are going to get caught up in judgment about the moment from time to time, no matter who we are. But curiosity and openness are things that are a little more doable for a lot of people. I think I can be curious. I might not quite be able to be non judgmental, but at least I can try to be curious.

So this is blowing my mind because first of all, we have gotten really deep really fast, and this is really cool. And, you know, my background's psychology too. And even given that background, this is new to me. I think there's a really strong correlation between how you should be curious and open during conversation and curious and open in your own mind with regard to mindfulness. Because when you're curious and open in a conversation and being nonjudgmental, it allows you to absorb the entirety of what people are saying, the body language, what they're actually saying, what's the meaning behind the words? And I just never realized that you could do the same thing with yourself. That is fascinating.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. The question is, like, what's actually happening for me right now? Just that question can really spark an ability to kind of drop any resistance or any judgment and just check it out. And the same goes for conversation. Absolutely. Can I be curious about what this person is saying? Because curiosity can take the place of things like presumptions and judgments and stories and things like that. You can just slip curiosity in there and it can kind of take over a little bit.

I love this. Okay, so let's get practical with this. So let's say if you're in a negotiation or some other heated discussion, how can we stay mindful during those conversations?

So, yeah, I wanted to give everybody a little technique that I give to my clients quite a bit because I work with a lot of people who deal with conflict. And basically this is an acronym in mindfulness. We love acronyms, and it's called rain. And so this is a practice that we use to actually explore what is happening in our bodies in the moment of a difficult emotion. So first thing I want to say about it is that when we go into conflict, we're almost guaranteed there's going to be some kind of emotion that's going to come. And it's likely that if it's an uncomfortable conversation, which often conflict is, it's going to be a difficult emotion that arises. And so a lot of us have resistance to our difficult emotions. There might be shame, depending on how we were brought up. Maybe anger is not an acceptable emotion, or fear or any difficult emotion. We might want to just push it Away, we might want to pretend that it's not there. If we have a difficult emotion, we might have the thought of like, oh, why am I so emotional? I wish I wasn't. I wish this emotion would go away. And that actually causes more emotion. So when we have a difficult emotion and we have shame or resistance or guilt on top of the difficult emotion, it just creates a bigger emotion. And so you've heard that term, what you resist persists. If we're rejecting our difficult emotion, it's just going to come after us more and more. So with this practice, with this rain practice, it actually encourages us, rather than resisting, to get curious about what's happening for me, what's actually my experience right now, with hopefully bringing in a sense of that openness and nonjudgment for ourselves as we're having this difficult emotion. So rainn stands for. It's four letters. So it's four words. Recognize, allow, investigate, and non Identification. And I'll explain. So the R is for recognize. So basically you're having a conversation, someone says something that might trigger us a little bit, and we notice that we're feeling some emotion. So the R is for recognize. So what emotion is happening for me? So it could be anger, fear, frustration, sadness. It could be any one of those difficult emotions. And so just recognize, just giving it a label, just noticing this is what's happening for me. The A is for allow. So can I allow this emotion to be here in this moment? Is it possible for me to just let it be here without resisting, without trying to push it away, without giving myself a hard time for having the emotion? Can I just let it be here then? The I is for investigate. So this is the curiosity piece.

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Checking it out. Can I notice where do I feel what I'm feeling in my body? So let's Say I'm using anger is my emotion. So maybe I'm feeling like a tightness in my throat, a clenching in my belly, I might feel some heat in my face. So just paying attention, just turning towards whatever it is that's happening and noticing it and sort of honoring it. I see you, I feel you to the emotion. And then the N stands for non identification. So we get a little bit of space. So the emotions here, it's happening, it's moving through our bodies. But since we have awareness of it, it's not controlling us, it's not making all of our decisions for us. We get to have agency over them, we get to see what's happening and we get to make a choice on how we want to respond rather than just unconsciously being emotional and trigger responding, knee jerk reaction type response. And so the point of this practice is that there's something about when we turn towards our emotions, when we pay attention towards our difficult emotions, something often can happen in our body where the emotions can sort of calm down a little bit. And even if they don't calm down, at least we have awareness about them. But it's kind of like a little child, when a little child gets upset, they just want to be acknowledged. They just want to say, here you say, oh, I see that you're sad, or I see that you're afraid. Our bodies, our nervous systems are kind of the same way. They just want to be, they just want us to recognize what's happening and pay attention to. And a lot of times it can allow our whole nervous system to calm down a bit.

That's fascinating. And the thing that immediately came to mind when I heard this technique was Harry Potter, because you remember in Harry Potter, Voldemort, one of the things that I felt gave him so much power is that people were afraid to say his name. How can you solve a problem if you're unwilling to acknowledge that there is a problem? And so I think it's the same way with our emotions. This is something I struggled with. My background is I'm a Caribbean American and Caribbean males are supposed to be very stoic. And my mom always tells me that she, after 25 years of marriage, she's never seen my dad cry, which is crazy, you know. And so for me, growing up, especially being a professional as an attorney and doing all these negotiations, there were some emotions that I simply was not willing to acknowledge. And, and I recognized that that really hampered my ability to connect with people. And so now understanding this technique, I think for me and listeners, I Think it'll be very helpful and give them the power to acknowledge and control themselves in ways they never had the ability to before.

Absolutely. Yeah. There's so much freedom and just accepting that we're an emotional being. We're just all humans, and we all experience the whole range of emotions, no matter who we are. And it's the same for me. I definitely had emotions that were off limits growing up. Anger was not an acceptable emotion in my household. So it took me a long time as an adult to be able to just actually say, I'm angry or there's anger here or whatever it is. But it is powerful to give yourself the freedom to just be human. Just say, yeah, there's emotion here. This is what happens.

And can you get into secondary emotions and primary emotions a little bit here?

I guess I. With mindfulness, I really see the value in doing that. With mindfulness, we usually tell people when you're doing this kind of a practice that you don't necessarily have to get it exactly right. So maybe there's anger, and maybe actually behind the anger is fear. Sometimes that's what happens is like, so when you. If I'm saying I'm feeling anger and that's what it feels like, it's anger. And then really after you pay attention for a minute, you see, actually the anger might melt away. And actually what's underneath it is fear. So that can be true sometimes. And sometimes it's just anger. It's possible that it's just anger. I don't have a whole lot to say about that other than just that when we pay attention to the initial emotion, sometimes the initial emotion will just naturally melt away and what's actually underneath it might present itself, and then we can pay attention to that and see what happens there. I would discourage people when it comes to mindfulness from getting too caught up in, like, psychoanalyzing and like, so what can happen with emotions? It's like, oh, this is anger. And this reminds me of when I was little and my mom said this thing and I got angry. And oh, yeah, my mom. I'm so mad at her. And we don't want to get too much into self psychoanalyzing because the practice of mindfulness is to pay attention to what's actually happening right now. There's absolutely space for that in therapy and things like that. But when it comes to mindfulness, because we are all very cognitive people, so we tend to get up in our heads a lot with thoughts and with trying to analyze what's happening. And that's totally normal because that's what we do as humans, we think. But I would just encourage people to keep coming back to like, what are the sensations in my body? What's actually happening for me right now, if that makes sense.

Yeah, that does make sense. And the reason why I asked is because. And this is something especially for males, like I said before, there are certain emotions that are okay for males to show. Anger is one of them. There are, because just in our society, anger is often associated with strength. And so if they are sad or they're feeling vulnerable, oftentimes it will manifest itself with anger. And sometimes that disconnect between the secondary emotion and the primary emotion prevents them from really understanding the root cause of what's at issue.

Ah, I love that. That makes a lot of sense. I often forget that how men and women are different. So. So, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Of course, for men, anger would be a more acceptable, difficult emotion and fear and something that might appear more vulnerable wouldn't. So, yeah, that's a great point.

I've been a man for a while, I know how we work. Very cool. Yeah, this has been really great. So we definitely need to have you back on because there are so many different avenues we could go on, but each of them would probably take another 30 minutes.

Yeah, absolutely.

But before you go, I want to have you answer our most popular question. What can our listeners do today, in your opinion, to be more persuasive?

So just this practice by itself. I don't know how many people are familiar with the concept of mirror neurons, but basically with mirror neurons, the idea is that when we put something out there, other people mirror back to us what we're putting out there. So when we are calm and collected and when we're speaking about the facts and we're not emotionally hijacked, we basically will be heard more easily. And the reason for that is twofold. One is that what we're saying will be more clear, it will make more sense, it will be about the facts. So we're actually going to be able to communicate what we're thinking and feeling without being hijacked by emotions. And on the other end, the person that you're speaking with won't be hijacked as much because they're not going to be receiving that. And if so, if your amygdala is hijacked, they're going to actually experience the same kind of hijacking in their amygdala because we reflect at each other. And so when their amygdala is hijacked. They're not going to be able to hear you as well or respond as well. They're going to have that tunnel vision. They're going to be in fear. And so communication just can happen as well. So you want to be more persuasive. Not being emotional is a much stronger approach, and you're going to be able to be heard better. So there's strength and calmness and evenness, and you'll be able to be more convincing that way.

I love this, because what's so interesting about this is the goal is to just make it in a very clear, I don't know, almost simplistic way. We don't want to be emotional in these conversations, but the key to not being emotional is to acknowledge our emotions, and that calms us down.

That is so cool. So I was just going to say not being emotional is actually like, that's a really tall order. Like, we're all going to have emotions. The question is, like, how do we respond to our emotions and then manage them and then be able to move into communication from there.

Exactly. What's cool about bringing the mirror neurons into this discussion is that it puts science behind the importance of leading through your behavior. And when it comes to negotiation, just by the fact that you are listening to a podcast on it or reading books on it, you're naturally going to be better than most people, because most people don't invest that type of time into improving this skill and handling themselves in difficult conversations. And so the impetus is going to be on you to demonstrate to them how they should hold themselves in the conversation. And so the fact that we have mirror neurons, that's the thing that explains why that works, because they are looking at you and there is that psychological connection, and they're saying, okay, this is how I should act. Let me calm down.

Absolutely. You see how quickly in conflict, how quickly when one person gets escalated, the other person does, and up and up and up and up it can go. So, yeah, if even just one person can hold the ground, it can be really helpful.

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