USE THIS 90-Second Trick To MASTER YOUR MIND & Emotions! | Dr. Joan Rosenberg & Lewis Howes

We have this idea that the purpose of speaking up is actually to get what we want. You know, I want the ice cream now. Whatever it is, it doesn't matter what it is. What dawned on me is that that's not the benefit of speaking up. The real purpose of speaking up is.

I think you gotta have a dream. The School of Greatness.

Really? Yeah.

Please welcome Lewis Howes. Why do people run away from their emotions? Why do they hide or why do they react? with their emotions so much as opposed to learn how to be curious about them and master them. Why do you think that is?

I would say two things right off the bat. One is their previous life, their early life experiences. So that it depends on the kind of experiences they had growing up and the kinds of things they learned by being in those situations. So if they experienced a family where feelings were shut down, If they experienced a home environment where it was explosive or rageful, or there was trauma or abuse or chaos, all those kinds of things lead people to start to behave in certain ways in response to what they're experiencing.

But I feel like that's 98% of the world. No one has the perfect childhood, right?

Exactly.

Or there might be little traumas that build up. Maybe it wasn't this explosive parents, but they neglected or they said a few comments that like stuck that were maybe looked as negative or neglecting or abandoning. And it wasn't even like that bad of a childhood, but it still connects with people and affects them, right?

Absolutely, absolutely. So that's kind of one piece of it. But the one piece that I actually talk about more than kind of our previous life experience is that the way we experience feeling is actually part of the reason I think people shut down on feeling.

-The way we experience it.

-The way we experience feeling.

-How do most people experience feelings?

-Most of us come to know what we experience through bodily sensation.

-Through how it feels.

-How it literally feels in our body.

-It'S vibrating, it's numbing, it's tight.

-It feels heavy. -So, think about disappointment or sadness and for many people, It's not everybody, but for many people, it's an experience kind of in the chest, right? And then this heaviness, and it's like, or an experience of helplessness that maybe it feels like a gut punch or something else. Anger, where it's like raging through, surging through your body, raging through your body, and you can't stop the sensation, right? Or embarrassment, where you might see the redness, I feel the heat. That what I came to understand is that it's not that we didn't want to feel the whole range of what we felt, It's that we didn't want to feel the bodily sensation that helped us know what we felt.

Why do we not want to feel the bodily sensation because it's painful?

And uncomfortable. And we can't be in charge of it.

We're not in control.

We're not in control. We're not in control that we feel it. We're not in control of what we're feeling. And not until it's in our conscious awareness. Not until we, it's like, oh wait, you know, I can feel the heat in my face. Oh, I'm embarrassed. Then that's the point at which I can go, oh, I can take a deep breath and calm this. So it's when it's in our conscious awareness that we can tamp it down or that's when we can regulate it.

So we don't want to feel the sensations in our body when we have the emotion of sadness or anger or disappointment or shame. It's that we don't want to feel the pain in the body.

Correct.

Why do we not want to feel the pain? Why do we resist that?

Because it's just uncomfortable or is it- Mostly, that's really mostly what I look at. I think it's uncomfortable, it's unsettling, it's unpleasant, it's un-something. Right. Right? It's not fun. It's not fun. So where the pleasurable emotions literally gets experienced in a great way in our body. So we move towards those and we.

Want to move away from the stuff that's uncomfortable.

Right.

Okay, so what do people usually do in that situation when they feel the pain?

Disconnect or distract. So, I mean, and that list is pretty endless.

Right, that's where addiction comes in, the numbing sensations, the distractions, all the things.

Absolutely, right. So, it might be screens, right? In any form, social media, TV, et cetera. It might be substance use. So, that might be food, it might be sex, it might be porn.

Workaholic, you know, being a workaholic.

Exactly. Anything to kind of change that?

Anything that avoids it. Avoids the feelings.

Correct.

But it's like we look for the positive feelings, but we avoid the painful feelings. But what are the painful feelings signaling to us? What is it telling us?

As others have spoken, they're really information. And the way I look at that, all of our feelings, pleasant or unpleasant, is that it's information for us. particularly the unpleasant ones, but it would be true for pleasant as well, is that we can make use of those feelings. Once we have awareness of them, we can make use of those feelings to make decisions, to express ourselves, or to take action. And so part of it is also understanding that our feelings can be there for a purpose, and to help us evolve and to help us grow, and they can be used for specific things.

Right. I believe Susan David said that these feelings and emotions are data, not direction.

Right.

Right.

It's not something we should be reacting to with direction. We should be having, this is data, it's information, how do we respond based on this information?

Correct.

Right?

Yep.

Not how do I quickly react or quickly numb the feeling, but what's missing inside of me that's having this feeling.

Right.

And how can we process this in a healthy way?

Right? Right.

So it just seems like so many people in the world, including myself for many years, were making decisions based on avoiding pain and numbing the pain and not wanting to face the pain. What happens when we face it?

I think we become more whole, W-H-O-L-E. more whole authentic human beings. And as a result, again, you talk a lot about becoming our best selves, right? So then we are more authentic, we're more genuine, and more of us is available for relationship, or more of us is available for pursuing whatever it is that we want to pursue in life. So that think of when we allow ourselves to experience the fullness, the full range of what we experience, then all of us is available for anything we want to put it towards in life. Whether it's self-exploration, whether it's building relationship, or whether it's I've got this big dream and goal and I'm going to use it in the pursuit of that. Right.

How many people in the world, what's the percentage you think are not whole in terms of they're not able to face their emotions in a healthy way? How many people do you think are struggling with this a lot percentage wise. What do you think? 50% 80%.

I probably. I'd probably be inclined at least to put it at 70 or 80.

Of the world is not willing to face.

It's hot. It's high.

It's high.

Yeah.

We wouldn't see the level of addiction if that weren't true in any form.

Right.

And we wouldn't see the level of checking out. We wouldn't see the level of violence.

Right.

Because why would you need to be angry and react and cause war and fight and hit people?

There's no reason for it.

You wouldn't need to scream.

No.

If you were whole.

Yes.

Right?

Yeah.

Because you could manage the conflict in a more peaceful way.

Exactly. Exactly.

And not a reactive way. Now based on this pain hurts me, let me react.

And let me splash it all over you.

Right.

Or dump it all over you. Let me disown it. And more people disown their experience or check out from their experience. And as a result, then that's where the hurt occurs for others.

What do you mean disown, like not.

Take responsibility or-- Not recognize it and not take responsibility. Right, right. So let's say I'm really angry about something. No, I'm disappointed about something. But the only way I allow it to come through me is through anger.

Right. That's what a lot of people do.

Yes.

Typically, I mean the way I grew up, I felt like as a man growing up, you weren't able to express without it. I mean it was either anger or don't say anything. There wasn't an ability to be sad or vulnerable or tap into a different element of an emotion. It was like be angry, mad or stoic and don't say anything. That was kind of what I felt like I was allowed to express, which created more anger inside of me because I couldn't express Arrange.

Right, and for me, that's also another way to disconnect and distract. That you allow just a default, instead of having the whole range of what you're experiencing and expressing that whole range. So if you were disappointed and it became anger, now you're using a default feeling. And that's the only way it's showing up to someone else. And that's disowning what you're experiencing.

So you think, again, this is just your, opinion, 70% plus might be disconnected in the world from their emotions, right?

So now you're inviting me into a guess. So let's go with that. Yes, you're guessing.

Yes, you're guessing. But based on your experience of the people you work with and what you see happening in the world, and I think that's a good guess. I'd probably say the same thing. How easy is it for people to get to a place of wholeness? Is it really challenging? Should it take years? or is it possible for them to get whole and master their emotions faster?

I don't think it takes years. I think the deeper, if you want to move to a much deeper understanding of yourself, then that might be a journey that takes years. But if you want to be able to manage your emotional state and have greater access to the whole range of what you feel and then be able to use it in everyday experiences, that's something that can actually, I would say happen more quickly than people would realize.

Really?

Yeah.

Because you've worked with thousands of people in this.

Right.

How fast can it be? What's like the...

So the beauty of, and we were talking briefly before, but one of the things I've recognized is the way that I've approached some of this material around feelings is that once you have the knowledge, once you have the concept or the idea or the awareness, you can actually experiment with it right away. And what I have found, especially with this idea of experiencing feeling as opposed to disconnecting from it, even in the earliest experimentation of it. So let's say I've been somebody that's like, I've checked out for a long time, and then I go, All right, I'm going to just try this. I'm going to be curious about it and just try it. And I do. What starts to end up happening is that there's a natural organic lift up and a greater sense of you being more true to yourself.

Really?

Because you're owning the whole range of what your real experience is, as opposed to dismissing it or trying to disconnect from it.

Why are people so afraid to express their emotions though?

Why is it?

Is it the fear of what other people are gonna say about them? Is it embarrassment? Is it shame?

No, I bring it back down. I talk about one's difficulty with eight unpleasant feelings in the book. Okay. So the focus of this body of work is centered on our difficulty experiencing and expressing eight unpleasant feelings.

Okay.

So the feelings are sadness, shame, helplessness, anger, vulnerability, embarrassment, disappointment, and frustration. So their feelings are feeling states. Some of them are kind of combined with thinking a little bit. So what I found is that As much as our thinking can get in the way and cause us to pull back from lots of things that are important to us, I actually found that our difficulty experiencing and expressing these feelings actually was more of an obstacle and more of a roadblock.

Okay.

So for me, these eight became really central. And again, most people will go, well, anxiety is not there, fear is not there. They're not there for, to me, important reasons. The reason that I chose these eight, and again, it was over time, there was five and there were seven, and eventually I landed on eight. And the reason I, for these, is because they're the most common everyday spontaneous reactions to things not turning out the way we want or the way we believe they need to be turning out. And so it's the everydayness of these feelings. On any given day, any given week, any given month, you're going to move through a variety of these feelings. So it's the everyday-ness of them.

Okay.

Right. So if I get to your question then about what makes it so hard for people to express themselves or speak up, for me, it goes back to these eight feelings. It's not about how somebody's going to respond, not directly. But if you stop and think about it, difficulty speaking up is not a speaking problem.

What is it?

It's a difficulty with unpleasant feeling problem.

So people lack the ability to speak up to who?

To whomever.

About what?

Exactly. Exactly. It doesn't matter who, it doesn't matter what. It can be as simple as an exchange at a retail store, It could.

Be feeling uncomfortable about like, oh, this is, you know, I bought this thing, but I need to return it, but I feel uncomfortable returning it.

Right.

Or it could be.

At a restaurant or something.

Exactly. Could be a close friend that just flaked on you.

Tell them how you feel about, you know, the situation. I feel disappointed. I feel let down or whatever it might be.

Right.

And the same is true for an intimate partner or a boss. It doesn't matter who.

And what happens when we don't speak up about how we feel?

I think the effect is actually profound. I don't think, so a couple of different things here, Louis. This is massive for me. So if you'll let me wander around this way a little bit.

Go for it.

So again, the first thing is to understand is that difficulty speaking up actually is not a speaking problem. It's a difficulty with unpleasant feeling problem. So the reason I won't speak up first is because I'm not willing to handle my own unpleasant feelings.

Because you know that there will be an unpleasant feeling with speaking up.

Right, it's not.

You don't want to deal with it.

Right, so let's say I'm disappointed and I don't want to have to tell you that some exchange occurred between us where I'm disappointed. I don't like the experience of myself, I don't do it. But in order to speak to you about it, which is actually going to remove the obstacle between us, Because if I don't speak, now there's a distance.

There's a barrier.

Right. So I've got to, in order if I want that barrier to go and I want us to remain close, I've got to deal with it. So think then that in order to have a conversation, not only do I have to deal with the discomfort of my own emotional discomfort, I have to deal with the discomfort of your emotional discomfort.

I might upset you or frustrate you or let you down or whatever.

You might get me angry in response, whatever it is. Now I've got to deal with your eight unpleasant feelings simultaneously with my eight unpleasant feelings. And as a result, it's like I'm gonna back off. So the reason we don't speak up is because we don't want to deal with the unpleasant feelings that are involved no matter what.

With ourselves and with others.

With others. And that's true for, let's go the positive route. I want to tell you how much I like you or admire you or want to be close to you.

Right?

Or I love you. That's going to involve vulnerability. And it might be disappointment because you might look back at me and go, I'm not feeling the same thing.

Right.

So it's- you-'ll be let down if you don't get the response. So putting yourself out there in the positive ways, emotionally, expression, you still might get let down. You might have an unpleasant feeling.

That's right.

So the uncomfortable expression or the positive expression still could respond with eight unpleasant feelings.

Right.

So in order then to be able to to speak comfortably, you have to be willing to accept that the experience of unpleasant feelings may be part of that journey.

I feel like people should use this as an experiment and say, okay, what are the things that I haven't been saying lately to the people closest in my life or to, you know, acquaintances maybe, and allow myself to say the things in maybe the, you know, not as pleasant conversations and also the pleasant conversations. and see how it feels. See what opens up in the space of the response. And how can I manage the feelings pleasant and unpleasant afterwards? But most people are afraid to say, I care about you, I love you, or here's how you mean to me because they're not sure what they're going to receive in response. And you let me down. I was disappointed when you flaked on me. Can we create an agreement moving forward or something like that?

Right.

Some people just don't speak up at all is what you're saying.

Exactly, exactly. But here's again a couple interesting things about this. First, my caveat around speaking up is that it needs to be positive, kind and well-intentioned.

Conscious.

Conscious. But the two most important, kind.

Positive, kind and well-intentioned.

And well-intentioned.

I love your saying this, Jim. Positive.

So, if I'm going to encourage you to go speak up or you want people to kind of experiment with it, then it's not about-- this is how.

You made me gay.

Exactly.

Exactly. So, it's not about that.

I love that you said this because I was telling you beforehand off camera that I've been doing this therapy and coaching almost every two weeks for the last almost two years now. It's been almost two years. With my girlfriend Martha, when I started the relationship, I said, Listen, I've always wanted to start therapy in a relationship. After a few months of us dating, I said, I'd always wanted to try it together, not because there's a problem, but because I want to make it great. I want to make sure we're on the same page. We have agreements. And I told her early on, I go, There is no reason I will ever get upset at you for anything. Based on, we have our agreements and things like that, but there's no reason you can live your life fully I will not get upset at you. I will not like expecting things from you. I'm not going to get upset at you because we have a certain standard of our agreements. And I said, the only reason I will get upset, there's only one thing, I've told this story many times, there's only one thing that makes me upset, is if you come at me with an attack and you don't do it from a conscious point of view. If I let you down, you can talk about anything you want. You can come to me with anything. but it has to be a conscious conversation. Come from a loving, kind place. You said positive, kind, and well-intentioned. Know that I'm not intentionally trying to hurt you. Know that my intention in this relationship is good. If I do something stupid, then you can let me know from a positive, kind, and well-intentioned way, and I'm going to receive it. But if you come at me with anger, resentment, expectation, aggression, I'm gonna be defensive. I'm gonna say, what are you doing right now? You're not being conscious in this moment. I can't receive your information. So I will never come at you in that way. Don't come at me that way. And that's why doing therapy together, I think, allows us to keep a peaceful environment of growth. So I'm so glad you said this, because it's not speaking, let me tell you how I really feel, and just, unload on you my emotions. You can't create a bond.

No.

Or a bridge in that way.

Exactly. Right.

People are just going to be on the defense.

Right.

It breaks the safety.

But why are so many people, why is it so many people struggle at speaking up in a conscious way the way you talk about positive time and well-intentioned, why do they react or scream or say mean things to the other person?

Well, again, that's going to get into lots of other dynamics. But think of it as, First thing, it's uncomfortable in me. So I'm gonna make you feel it as opposed to me feel it.

Yeah, you made me feel this way.

So now I'm gonna make you feel this way. Right, right. And it's this sense that you made me, which is also an incorrect way.

Of thinking about it.

It's a victim mentality. Exactly, exactly. So then I'm just gonna be aggressive in response, or I'm going to attack you so that you feel what I'm experiencing, as opposed to me telling you, because somehow the telling doesn't get through. So now I'm going to amp it up. I'm going to escalate.

You can hear me.

Right, right. But that's a whole other story that we can go to as well. But that's part of it. I don't want to experience it, so I'm going to make you experience it instead.

And what happens when someone does that?

Well, the bond breaks, right? And so there's no safety, and now if you're doing it to me, I'm going to withdraw because it doesn't feel safe.

Right.

I'm gonna disconnect. I'm gonna put a wall, guard up. I'm not gonna talk to you.

Right.

Or I'm gonna go back at you and be aggressive, whatever it might be. But there's no intimacy then.

Correct.

You lose the bond.

You lose the bond. And for me, it's not only talking about what is being said, it's also talking about how it's delivered. And most people in relationship don't do those two things. They do one, and they get lost on the detail. But they don't do the second, which is to talk about how it was delivered, like if you're rolling your eyes.

Body language, yeah. Energy, tone.

All that, but sometimes that's where the real infraction is.

So it's not necessarily what you say, it's how you say it.

Think of it as both.

You gotta be conscious in how you say it. You can't say, you,'re a horrible person, in a loving way, right? You can't say, you,'re just such a bad person. I really hate you. You know, it's smiling.

It doesn't work.

Yeah, you have to be, you know, What is the best way to speak up to an intimate partner or someone intimate in your life, a friend or an intimate partner? What's the best way to speak up if you feel hurt, let down, disappointed in what someone did or didn't do?

Well, the first thing is to, for me, it's actually I talk about it in the book and I call it a preemptive bid.

Okay.

So what I want people to do, or I want to encourage people to do, is to think about whatever the obstacle is to talking. So let's say I think you're going to laugh at me. And so the first thing I do is to say, you, know what, Louis? I really want to talk to you about something. My biggest concern is that if I bring it up to you, you're going to laugh at me. Well, if I say that to you, the pull typically for the listener is to go, No, I won't.

Yeah, yeah. I'll listen to you.

Yeah, yeah, let me hear it. So now I have your attention.

So it's kind of sharing the concern or fear up front with the person.

Right, right. So why? Because I want to break down the obstacle to the conversation. Yeah, right. Then again, speaking up does not give you license to be malicious. So it's coming from a kind and well-intentioned place. So the reason I'm coming to you is because I you know what? I feel like I'm being a little bit distant from you. And that's not what I want. I want us to be close. So I actually want to talk to you about X. And when I've seen people face to face, I used to hold up a pillow. So if I can borrow the book for a moment, what I used to do, so I think of this as the pillow, and we've got something to deal with, and I want to talk to you about my disappointment or whatever it is. I would do this. It's like there's no connection if the obstacle is there. If I haven't talked to you, it's just obstacle. But the moment I say, All right, I want to talk to you about this thing that's getting in the way, which is my disappointment or my concern you're going to laugh at me or whatever, now the obstacle is removed and we can be close again. So it's super important to be able to speak up in Relationship because it allows the bonds of intimacy and the depth of that connection to grow.

A lot of people don't create the preemptive bid first. They just unload.

Correct.

And they don't do it from a positive kind or well intentioned way.

Right.

They do it from a frustrated, hurt, malicious way. Right?

Yeah.

I don't want to feel one of these eight unpleasant feelings. I'm gonna dump it on you. I'm not going to be conscious in the way I communicate. I just don't like what happened, so here you go, take it.

Right, you hurt me, I'm going to hurt you back.

Yeah. Right.

And that doesn't do anything good.

No, no, there's nothing good that comes out of it.

There's nothing good.

No.

So, and here's the other thing for me around speaking up. Again, there's a variety of great things that happen. I actually think that our capacity to speak with ease in life, to say what we want to say, who we want to say it to, all that kind of stuff, timing, again with the caveat of being kind and well-intentioned.

That.

To be able to speak with ease is actually the super glue to confidence. That if we don't speak, if we feel confident in a variety of different ways and we can experience our feelings fine, but we don't have that additional layer of speaking with ease in any situation we need to, then I don't think that it actually, we feel that kind of unwavering experience in ourselves. So what I found is that we have this idea that the purpose of speaking up is actually to get what we want. Or in this case, it might be to stop something, setting a boundary, setting a limit, whatever it might be. or it's to literally get something. I want the ice cream now, whatever it is. It doesn't matter what it is. And then what dawned on me is that that's the benefit of speaking up. Getting what we want is the benefit of speaking up. The real purpose of speaking up is to grow us. And I think that when we find that we have our voice, that's when we start to feel that real deep strength. Yeah, confidence and strength within us.

Okay, there's two things I want to discuss here. One, the first one is the ability to speak up and practicing it and owning it and being able to sit with the feelings and be comfortable with the uncomfortable feelings. It's like learning how to master sitting with sadness, sitting with vulnerability, anger, helplessness, all these different things, shame, and not let it consume us, but feel it and let it flow. Move through.

Move through us, right?

Yes. And be okay with it. Okay, I have an uncomfortable conversation today. That's how I'm feeling, but I'm alive, I'm okay, everything's good now. We actually came together stronger now. Okay, cool, I can move through it, I feel okay. And practicing that on a consistent basis. So that's one thing I want to talk about, and then the second thing I want to talk about is Is it possible to just not let things affect us and not need to speak up because we are so okay with ourselves and know that people are people and people do what they do and say what they say and they're in their own stuff and their traumas and okay, I'm not gonna take it personally. I'll process it and I don't need to speak up. Maybe I can, maybe I don't need to and I'm gonna be okay because I'm living an intentional life. It's kind of the two things, practicing, being comfortable with the uncomfortable feelings and practicing speaking up consistently and moving through it. And then also saying, do I even need to play this game? Not game, but do I need to play in that space? Or, I don't like what happened right there, but I'm okay. I'm safe. I'm here for myself. Life is good.

That one has some complexity to it. The second one is the first one is obvious because we're going to get practice. And then practice, the more practice we engage in in that way, really the healthier it would become. But with the second one, it's like, well, I don't need to do it. I actually feel okay. I'm not taking it personally, that kind of an idea. To a degree, I would say that works. And that that's probably fine. But there's another element of that where I've seen people respond that way, where that's their way out. Yeah, that's their way. -Exactly. That's their way to not deal.

-Like, I'm fine, everything's okay, but it's actually you haven't processed.

-Exactly. Right. So to use your words, one is it's a spiritual bypass. The second is it actually doesn't allow yourself to grow or the other person to grow.

-Mm, that's true, because then maybe they just keep disappointing or they're not being their word and you just let it go every time.

Right, right. And you're being affected and it's damaging the relationship. So now you're pulling away because the person's continuing to do what they're doing.

They're out of integrity or they're disappointing you or whatever it is.

So now, right, so now you don't get the growth, the other person doesn't get the possible growth and the relationship doesn't get to grow. So for me, it becomes really important for people to kind of really check themselves and go, Do I need to say something? And most people will back off because they don't want to deal with the discomfort. So they do the spiritual bypass rather than going, you, know what? It's important to me. And once again, to understand the purpose of speaking is not necessarily to get it to be totally right. It's to grow yourself.

Yeah, it's to try to get what you want, I guess, the end result, but it's more to grow yourself and hopefully grow the other person and create a deeper relationship.

Right.

How often are you speaking up in your life?

In my life?

Yes.

Once I realized this, it changed how I behaved. So, yeah, it did. It did. And in both directions.

Oh man.

I will tell you that I'm, you know, if I look back five years, 10 years, whatever it might be, I'm a very different person now in terms of my willingness to lean into the discomfort and to go there because I know how much better it gets. And again, I'm coming at her from a kind and well-intentioned place. So there's no effort to hurt. It's I want to make whatever's going on better. Have I had situations not work out? Yep. Then I have to deal with my disappointment.

It doesn't feel good.

It doesn't feel good, but then again, same thing. For me, again, part of it has to do with what mantras we live by. So one of mine is that I'm going to learn from every life experience. That's part of the intention. Or I'm going to see how far I can stretch. also part of it. So it's like, okay, then this is part of it. And so then for me, it's like, how can I grow from this experience? So again, to your earlier point, it's living in a conscious way. And the other side of it is making sure that people know I care about them. So I've become much more expressive about love and much more intentional about about making sure I convey my care, my deep care, my love, whatever it might be.

Did you not communicate those things in the past?

When I was much younger, I would say I was not so great about it. It was really an evolution. And I was probably better at describing the caring feelings I had or expressing those. And then over time, and also working with the work that I was doing, It was like, I got to get better at this.

Interesting.

And the other part was really finding that when I combined the two of being kind and well-intentioned, then I could typically speak the things I would have typically found much harder to speak.

So.

It became much easier.

So when did this start to really shift for you when you started to implement this speaking up strategy? more frequently? Was this five years ago, 10 years ago, two years ago?

No, no. Wow, that's a good question. So part of it was professional, which to me is a little bit funny because in my role as a psychologist, I'm often saying to people things that they don't want to hear. So I had to learn how to deliver that message early. And this work in its earliest form started probably 25 years ago or a little bit more. And I would say that evolution was probably a much softer start 25-30 years ago. But as time went on, I would say easily 15-20 years.

Okay, cool. How long did it take for you to kind of feel okay with these consistent, uncomfortable conversations? until you felt like, I can speak up almost automatically now without having to wait for weeks to think about what I'm going to say or how I'm going to say it.

That's been a number of years. That's probably been 10 to 15 years. Really?

Yeah.

Okay. And what is available for people on the other side? Like, what was available for you after you started implementing this?

You know what? I think I actually, the benefits are profound. What ends up happening is you become more congruent. And that to me is where the magic of emotional strength and confidence is. So if we talk about congruence, I usually include about eight things here, but the first four are, I would say, singularly the most important. And that's that our thoughts, our feelings, our words and our actions. match. So the first benefit or set of benefits is that you again, you have an experience of yourself as having that kind of internal strength and confidence.

So you become more confident when you're congruent.

Right. Right.

And what are the other four? Oh, we got a spot here now.

Yeah, no, I am on the spot. One, two of them have to do with that we own our past history, that our attitudes and beliefs and our values, so that's, I kind of putting attitudes and beliefs together and our values, is the sixth one, our past history, and then the last one is our vision of what we want for the future, that all of those align. And what's really interesting here, Louis, is that if they don't align, Oftentimes we feel anxious. And then part of it is going, okay, I'm anxious, then what's out of alignment?

One of these four things are out of alignment.

Well, no, or one of the eight. I'm not telling the truth about my past. I'm not owning what's true for me for the future that I want for the future. Or I'm feeling something and not saying it. or I'm believing something and it's, and, but I'm acting out of integrity with my belief. Right. Right.

Or I'm saying my value is this.

But I'm not being that value. Right. Right. So, interesting.

So that you can, if I'm saying I want this in the future, I want to be healthy, but I'm eating bad food every day, so I'm out of alignment.

Right.

And then I start to feel anxious. Right. Or overwhelmed or stressed. Something's off. Something's off. Because you're not a whole person in congruence with thoughts, feelings, words, actions, matching, attitudes and beliefs, values, past history and vision of the future. What is past history? How can you be in alignment with past history? Is it just addressing and facing the past history and dealing with it as opposed to distancing yourself.

And acting like the past history I didn't have?

What happens when we don't face the past?

Again, we start showing up in ways that are not very effective with other people. We don't show up in ways that are necessarily good for us. So again, I might be drinking a bunch. I might be using food. I might be using sex. It doesn't matter what it is, but I start checking out. That's what happens. When I don't deal with my past, then I check out in some ways. Again, the past isn't everything. But it does contribute.

Yes.

So we just have to acknowledge that it contributes in some way to who we are in the present. But it doesn't have to be the thing that actually defines our future.

How does someone develop a set of beliefs and values that will support their life? What if they don't know what their values are? How do they create them?

An easy starting place is to look at people that you admire.

And say, what do I admire about this person? What type of life do they have that I respect and like? And then pull some of those values.

How did they get there? Go read stories. Go read biographies.

Learn all their mistakes and don't do that.

Exactly, but not only learn their mistakes and don't do it, but learn what they had to go through on the journey to get to where they evolved. So a first place is to look outside to see people who are doing what you want to do and being the ways that you think you want to be. And then it's looking inside and basically asking the question is, who do I want to, who do I want to be? Who do I want to become? How do I want to show up?

Yes.

And then you practice that.

And then you, your words and actions match your values.

Exactly.

Match the vision you have for your future self.

Right.

What's the best way to address the past history? What if someone's gone through a crazy past history and they had a lot of different challenges at home and relationships and abuse or abandonment or just bullying, how does someone face that amount of pain or trauma?

I call that whole area as disguised grief.

Okay. Can you explain more?

I'm going to give you a couple of ways to think about disguised grief. One has to do with the words we use.

Okay.

So if I'm saying to you I'm bitter, I'm angry, I have this long-standing anger, I'm resentful, I hold grudges, I am pessimistic, cynical, sarcastic, again this hurt, any words that jealousy, Jealous, envious, all those kinds of things. For me, everything underneath that is grief.

Grief of what?

Well, again, I'm going to take you to the second layer of it. Grief of something I'm missing, grief of something I'm expecting, grief of something I'm wanting. And when I'm talking about grief, I'm putting at least four of those eight feelings into the mix. So for me, again, I don't know that people necessarily talk about grief and kind of break it down. But when I think about grief, I think about sadness, helplessness, anger and disappointment as comprising, at the minimum, comprising grief. And they can be singular responses. So I might be sad about something, well, then I'm grieving. I might be angry about something. Well, then to a degree, there's grief.

Right.

So you can think about them individually, or you can think about them collectively. And the easy way to remember them is that instead of being sad, I'm shad.

Shad.

Right. Sad, helpless, anger, or disappointment.

Okay.

So underneath all those what I call grief signal words is grief.

And what is grief?

Again, think of it as again the emotional response to some situation or... That.

You'Re lacking or upset about or missing or jealous of or frustrated that you don't have or something so how do we eliminate grief? So how do we process it?

We don't eliminate it. So if you'll allow me, again, one step over, the other way to think about grief, and this is to your point about our life experiences, is that almost all of us have been through experiences where we got something that we didn't deserve. So think about that as kind of the bad stuff. So it's chaos, it's abuse, bullying, whatever it is. Or we deserve something we didn't get. So that's the good stuff. The praise was missing, the support was missing, people not showing up for events, meets, performances, whatever it is, or great job on the progress you're making, right? So let that down. That's all missing. It's grieving over what never was. So think about facts and circumstances of your early life. And think about it also from the standpoint of missed opportunities.

This could have happened.

But it didn't. That wasn't my life experience. Also grief over what is not now. So you might not be exactly where you want to be. So there's grief about that. And then there's grief about what may never be.

It's a lot of grief.

It's a lot of grief. But that really takes us to our life experiences. And to me, there really is a way to work through all that.

How do we do that?

The most important thing, I can kind of one sentence to remember here, is that you want to be able to make sense of the impact and meaning that the experience the difficult life experience or experiences had for you. And the key here is across time.

Yeah.

So again, the question is, who did I become because I went through this?

Yep. Why do a lot of people not think that way? Instead, they hold on to the grudge. of what happened to them, as opposed to saying, what's the meaning and impact that this had on my life over time?

I think in some ways they think, well, one, they may not want to do the work around it, because to make sense of it, you have to go back to the pain of it. So I'll just act like it didn't happen and I'll put it away. It's in the past, it's nothing, except you're still becoming reactive, highly reactive, because You didn't deal with whatever is going on from the past. So that would be one reason. And why else do people avoid? I think people actually don't understand that there's a roadmap out. There really is.

What is the roadmap?

Well, the first is to recognize, one is to go, okay, I have this set of stories or this set of life experiences. that shaped me. And in the book, I talk about, I kind of give people a process to walk through, let me pick just one.

Not all of them, yeah.

Not all of them, let me pick just one. So I go, all right, I'm going to start with whatever the experience was, how I got yelled at about something, and how that affected me, that I picked out this one incident, right? So the first is to recognize that you've got the grief. The second is to pick out something that to reflect on. The third then is to do what I call kind of a deeper inquiry or to inquire more deeply. And what that involves is that this to me is really the.