Cognitive Scientist on Stopping Procrastination, Stress & How Emotions Work | Charles Jones

I met an Indian guru, and when I met her, she was the most alive person I had ever met.

I'm driving a car and someone like bangs into me, and I'm just like feeling like maybe like turned into like Green Hulk, right? And it's like, what is that emotion? What does that actually mean?

I will never be at the mercy of my emotions. You know, it's like this little declaration this 7-year-old makes.

One of the things I remember when I first read your book was I sort of went into it being like, oh, I would just feel negative. And it's like, am I angry? Am I resentful? What's actually going on? And sort of you broke that down.

I walk in and she freaks out.

So one of the things that you mentioned in our pre-research and pre-work was you described yourself as a maverick, cognitive psychologist. So in the context of the work that you've been doing for the last 30 years with emotions, or more than 30 years, can you sort of expand on that and why you picked this topic and why you've been pulling this thread for so long?

I'm not sure I fully understand all the reasons why this topic fascinates me, but I can share with you that From an early age. In fact, I think I remember kind of a pivotal event when my father and I built a go-kart. I think I was 7 years old. I'm like home from school, going down the street. The wheel comes off, I crash, I get a gash on my leg. My leg is bleeding. I'm in shorts. I head home and I'm screaming for my mom. She's a stay-at-home mom. My dad's at work. And I walk in and she freaks out and becomes completely useless. So she's— I'm trying to console her while I'm trying to fix the fact that my leg is bleeding. And I remember that, that experience. And it's like, I will never be at the mercy of my emotions. It's like this little declaration this 7-year-old makes. It's like, I'm never going to be in a place where I'm incapacitated by my emotions. And so that led me along a path that resulted in my nickname in, I think, by 6th grade and then into junior high. was Spock from the original Star Trek. You know, so this Vulcan who has, you know, hyper-rational, has transcended his emotions, makes decisions based on fact and logic, you know, has no use for that. And at the same time, you know, interesting part of that series is the very emotional Captain Kirk often is the one that like saves the day and things like that. So, um, so I kind of made this, this kind of bargain with myself or whatever. It served me in many situations, but there are other situations in which, you know, like making friends and being social. And particularly when I get to a dating age, it's like, you know, none of the girls wanted to, to go out with the emotionless Vulcan kind of thing. Right. I began to see sort of a cost to this whole thing. And, um, I took this kind of mindset that somehow what it was to be enlightened would— was to have transcended your emotions and maybe your animal nature along with it, kind of, kind of a thing. And, um, so in high school, I, uh, went and studied Transcendental Meditation. And began my little Transcendental Meditation practice. I got to college. I started studying with a couple Tibetan lamas who also had this kind of, you know, were practicing a certain kind of mindfulness where they run everything through their conscious mind kind of thing. And this was my image of what it was to be an enlightened being, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary that I Just wasn't having as much fun in many ways as my, my peers. And, um, and then in 1984, I met a— had a number of experiences along the way, but probably one of the, one of the huge turning points for me is I met, um, an Indian guru, uh, a woman. And when I met her, she was the most alive person I had ever met. Every emotion in the book was running through her body. She wasn't getting caught up in any of them. They were, they were, uh, but she was completely animated and like just fully alive. And it redefined for me what I wanted. It's like, okay, that's the kind of enlightenment that I want. I want to be fully alive. And, um, And then that led me to, well, how do I relate to my emotions if I'm fully alive and, you know, and not get caught in them and, and not have all the, not become incapacitated like my mom did when I was 7 and things like that. And so that was, that was a huge, I think, turning point for, for me in terms of how to And led me down the road of a lot of study.

One point of clarification on that, because you mentioned something interesting, that you were in high school and you were like, I want to transcend my emotions, right? Looking back now, because I feel like I've probably done this and I've seen a lot of people do this, did that mean you were basically just suppressing and putting down your emotions and just putting them down and not really completely ignoring it? Or is that you're completely feeling them and letting them process or something else? Because I see people go down both these different paths and they're very separate, but they might call them the same thing.

I think it's a great question. So I certainly think during my high school period it was suppression. In fact, so in my household, my dad was very rational. And I remember if I came home from school and I was angry because some bullies had picked on me or something like that, And, you know, my dad was like, look, anger is irrational. Violence doesn't solve anything. And so implicit in what he's saying is, okay, like there's something wrong with your way of thinking if you're angry. And, and second, there's this link between, you know, it's almost synonymous between anger and violence. Right. So that's, that's some of the training that I'm getting in this. And I admire my dad. Like I was a very He's a scientist and an engineer. And I really admired him. I was one of those kids who would ask, you know, hey dad, why is the grass green? And he would say, oh, because it has chlorophyll in it. And take me a couple of minutes. Well, why is chlorophyll green? Well, because the structure of the cells refracts light in this way. And take me a few more minutes. Well, why does light refract in this way? And I could ask him these questions. I think it was, you know, I was probably like 11 or 12 before I asked the first question that he literally didn't already have the answer to. Very, very knowledgeable man. So I really admired him. So I was so good at suppressing my anger that if you would have asked me late high school, early college, if I got angry, I'd say, no, no, I never get angry. And of course, in retrospect, that wasn't true at all. And I had an event where I just Lost it, so to speak, and went off on someone. And afterwards it's like, wow, I can't believe, you know, like, how is it that I didn't know that I was that angry? It's like I'd become so good at suppressing it. So I certainly did that tact. And I think the other tact you mentioned, which is a very popular one right now, is sort of the mindfulness Tact of allow the anger to arise in the body, watch all the physiological manifestations, the somatic manifestations of it, just witness it until it subsides and dissipates of its own accord. I think from the perspective of stress management, that's a much better strategy because, And if you're suppressing the anger, your subconscious is trying to push the anger into your conscious awareness and your conscious awareness is trying to keep it out. And that somaticizes as tension in the body. You know, like that, I believe, is like the true cause of our stress. It's not the emotions, but it's the attempt to suppress the expression of those emotions through our physiology. So, So I think from that perspective, it's much better, but I think, and maybe we'll get to this at some point in the interview, if you believe, as I do, that the anger is a distress call from your subconscious, then simply watching it arise and fall is like, you know, if you're a parent, your child comes to you and like, daddy, daddy, daddy, I need your attention. And you just lovingly turn your attention toward the child and, and witness it and watch it, but you don't help the child out of its predicament.

Mm-hmm.

Right. So, um, so that ultimately I think becomes dissociative because you eventually disassociate from the psychological need that's generating the emotion that you're simply witnessing. The rise and fall of.

And I know you have sort of like 2 different views on emotion effectiveness and circumstantial. Could you contextualize those people within this context?

Biggest conceptual breakthrough for me came in 2002 when I met a man named Marshall Rosenberg, and your listeners may know him as the creator of nonviolent communication. And He said 2 things in the first, like, 40 minutes that I was in the workshop that really struck my attention. The first thing he said is that anytime you have a judgment of yourself or the world or someone else, it's a tragic expression of an unmet need. And so the way my mind works is, okay, let me, let me take that as a hypothesis and see if I can run some test cases against it. And can I disprove that?

Right.

That's the scientific method. You create a falsifiable hypothesis and you, you run test cases to see if you can disprove it. And then the second thing he said is that when you are experiencing a painful emotion, it's because you have an unmet need. And when you have a pleasurable emotion, it's Because a need is being met. Well, that went immediately as someone with a background in cognitive science and computer science. It's like, and the way he conceptualized needs was following Maslow, which are all needs for, like, we have a need for safety. We have a need for achievement. We have a need for belonging. We have a need for, they're all needs for. So let's take a simple one.

The need For safety.

Um, and what occurred to me is a couple of things. One is there's no way you can implement in a cognitive system a need for something. You can implement a need to something. So for example, you could implement a need to protect your assets. And what makes that implementable is then my brain can keep track of the things that I consider to be assets, the things that I need in my life to have a fulfilling life. And I can then have a repository of actions I can take to protect those assets. So that's operational, right? I can have a need to protect my assets. So I immediately started evolving, if you will, this set of hypotheses that Marshall Rosenberg had had. And, but I never seen this connection between emotions and needs. So I evolved needs to needs front 4 to needs 2, and then started linking emotions with specific needs. So the emotion associated with a need to protect assets is fear. Right. And then the other nuance that was super important is, you know, nature wouldn't reward the fulfillment of a need per se, or nor would it kick you when you're down and not fulfilling a need. Nature would use— nature uses pain and pleasure to indicate to the conscious mind and ask help from the conscious mind. When you're on track or not on track to fulfill a need. So then my theory evolved to, oh, so is it that I experience fear when my subconscious has the assessment I'm not on track to protect an asset? Well, that makes sense because that gives me time as a conscious mind to intervene in what's going on and hopefully get back on track to protect that asset. Likewise, if I'm feeling secure, it's a pleasurable feeling. It encourages me to kind of keep going because I am on track to protect that asset. And so then I began a decade-long research of linking emotions to the underlying psychological needs that you were or were not on track to When you're experiencing that emotion. And now at this point, I realize, hey, I'm beginning to have like a comprehensive theory of emotional causation that, where, you know, the state of the field at this point is largely that the researchers in the field are conflating the need with the emotion. Right. As if it's kind of one system and further conflating the emotion with the conscious and the mind's interpretation of what that emotion means. Okay. And that turns out to be extremely important because if you interpret an emotion as being caused by what's happening in the world, what I call the circumstantial view, And your emotions are caused by circumstances, all sorts of really bad things happen with any emotion, right? But if you interpret the emotion as an indication of whether or not you are on track to fulfill a need, what I call the effectiveness view, then All sorts of good things happen, right? So, so the, the summary here would be, there are no negative emotions. There are no distressing emotions. There are no bad emotions. However, any emotion interpreted through the circumstantial view becomes negative, toxic, et cetera. And that, that's a huge break.

One of the things I remember when I first read your book was I sort of went into it being like, oh, because I still remember this. I was like, I would just feel negative, right? And it's like, am I angry? Am I resentful? What's actually going on? And sort of you broke that down. So I think it might be worth it to run through a few of those with examples so that people can understand how these different emotions work. So I'll set up the first one for you, and then maybe we can go through the ones that you mentioned in the book. So let's say I'm driving a car and someone bangs into me and I'm just feeling like maybe turned into Green Hulk, right? And it's like, what is that emotion? What does that actually mean?

So there are multiple emotions I imagine could be arising in you at that moment. So if you're driving along and someone hits you, right, what might be up for you? Well, so the theory states, and one thing that's really, I think, important is, um, we're aware of our conscious mind. That's kind of by definition. And our conscious mind can process somewhere between 40 and 50 pieces of information per second. So let's call it 45 pieces of information per second, but our subconscious processes about 11 million pieces of information per second. So 250,000 times more. A recent book on the New York Times bestseller list, Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, goes into the implications of this for biases. But there's many more implications to this. You know, the singularity we call our conscious mind that can only process things in serial, one thing after another. It cannot multitask. And then our subconscious, which has this enormous bandwidth and capacity, and where each of these psychological needs— I think there's about 50 of them— are processing the implications of what's going on in parallel. So what might be happening for you? Well, you might be scared, right? You may not— your subconscious is like, hey, We may not be on track to protect ourselves and we're certainly not on track to protect our car, you know, if it's already been hit kind of, kind of a thing. There might be anxiety going on as well. Well, what if the car now starts to spin and there's further harm that, that could befall us here?

Right.

So it hasn't happened yet, but it's a, it's a what-if. It's a To slow this down, I guess the need behind fear. Fear tells you your subconscious has the assessment. You're not on track to protect one or more of your assets. Anxiety, you've identified a risk, a what-if that could occur in the future, and you're not on track to mitigate that risk. Right. You, you, you may also feel angry. You know, hey, that person had no right. to hit you. You know, they may have, uh, uh, you know, depending on the circumstances here, perhaps you had the right of way, but they went first and that's why they ended up hitting you. Right? So anger is not on track to assert your rights. You might also be experiencing rage. Rage is not the same as anger. There's, there's a lot of nuances here. Rage is, uh, has to do with defending your territory. And you may well believe that your car and some number of feet around your car is your territory. Like road rage, when someone cuts you off. Like, the reason we feel rage is because we consider that 3 feet in front of our car to be our territory and someone has just invaded it. We're not on track to defend it.

My thought going into this was like anger or rage would be like anger plus plus, right? How do you Like, what is the sort of contextual difference between anger and rage?

Well, let's, let's, let's expand even further. So, um, you know, many of the theories of emotion are, uh, resentment, anger, outrage, and rage are just the same basic emotion with a different intensity. And, and I say no, and it's, it's, it's easy once you begin to look at it from the perspective of these needs. It's easy to see that they're not, they're fundamentally different, um, uh, different needs that are at play. And interestingly, um, there's, there's quite a bit of research, um, by actually an autism researcher named Baron-Cohen, um, not Sasha, but actually Sasha's brother.

Um, his brother.

Yes. About the ontogeny of emotional expression. And, um, a 1-year-old will exhibit rage if you cross its boundaries. If, if you invade its territory, if you prevent it from being able to move by just pinning its arms, uh, by its sides, the baby will erupt into rage. Okay. So, so rage is, you know, you're not attracted to defend your territory. By 2, you get anger and you get angry because now the child has the language, the linguistic distinction of a right. And you tell the child to do something and you're, you know, yesterday the child would just, you know, hey, uh, you tell me to jump, how high kind of thing. And, uh, and now it's like, no, I have a right to make my own decisions. No, right. It starts exerting the sense that it has certain rights. And, uh, much of, you know, for years after that, the child is constantly testing what rights does it have? What rights does it not have? You know, and that starts evolving into, oh, rights aren't written down anywhere. They're an ongoing conversation and negotiation that's taking place in society. There's social agreements about who has the right to do what to whom under what circumstances, right? They're constantly evolving. And so they start becoming negotiators of what their rights are. Okay. And so that's when you get anger. You get a little bit older and now the child can begin to take the perspective of other children. And in so doing, realize that that other child can take the perspective of them. And they start considering the other child's perspective and also the other child's needs in the decisions that they make and start to also believe, hey, you should be considering my needs when you're making decisions. And if I'm not eliciting the consideration my needs that I think I deserve in this situation, I'm not on track to elicit consideration from someone else, then I feel resentful. And then they get a little bit older and begin to have sort of a societal context and have a sense of justice. And it's like, no, that's wrong. We need to— I feel a need to see that wrong righted. And that's outrage. It often starts with protesting what we see as an injustice right now. The other question you asked is this difference between how people interpret what the emotions mean, specifically what's the cause of the emotion. And, um, you know, for, for this bit of research, um, I actually go much further back to kind of the early '80s. When I became a pretty deep student of Indian spirituality and pretty much read every scripture that had been translated into English, never actually learned Sanskrit. I just, that was, that was tough for me. I tried, but I was unsuccessful. And there's a gentleman named Vasagupta who stopped me in my tracks as I was reading him. And he's like, To believe that an emotion has its cause in the objective world is delusion. And that really caught my eye. Okay. So fast forward, I'm studying with Marshall Rosenberg. He and I eventually actually co-led some workshops together and stuff. But I'm, I'm really trying to understand What I'm seeing is this kind of bimodal response that people have to their emotions. You know, so what I got from Marshall is this idea that there was this linkage between emotions and needs, right? Then I refined the concept, Maslow's concept of needs, from needs for to needs to, and started arriving at these one-to-one relationships between a given painful emotion and what the underlying need is. Okay. Um, and, but in order, you know, the moment you shift to understanding that, that emotion is pointing to a need you're not on track to fulfill, you have shifted from the circumstantial view to the effectiveness view. Now, I had the good fortune of developing these ideas while I was consulting to 2 Fortune 500 companies, both of whom generously helped to sponsor my research at that point. And I did tests with thousands of employees. So these are, you know, these are high-functioning individuals, right? This isn't like people in therapy or something like that. These are Middle managers, executives, um, in very high-performing companies and businesses. And I found that most people interpret most of their emotions through the circumstantial view most of the time. Now, uh, there were some emotions where you'd actually, especially the higher you went up in the org chart, where you'd get, um, actually a majority of people interpreting their frustration as an example through the effectiveness lens, which makes sense because frustration arises when you're not on track to achieve a goal. When your subconscious has the assessment, you're not on track to achieve a goal. Can't imagine someone who'd be a high achiever who wouldn't intuitively know that was the case. And one of the comments I enjoyed the most from a participant in one of the classes I did there Is he said, he said, you know, it's interesting because when I'm frustrated, I see myself go through the same pattern. So the first thing is, you know, I ask a coworker to help me with something. They tell me they can't in the timeline that I was expecting. Immediately I feel frustrated. And my first tendency is to blame the coworker. You know, I'm frustrated because my coworker won't cooperate with me. And if anyone's nearby and I can talk to them and commiserate with them on this uncooperative coworker, I'll do it. But it gets old after like 45 seconds, a minute or two. And it's like, okay, what, what goal am I not on track to achieve? And how do I find another path toward the achievement of that goal? So I start out in the circumstantial view and then within a minute or two, I automatically shift myself to the effectiveness view. But now that you have shown me that that's what I'm doing, I can do it faster. And maybe over time I can skip that first step of kvetching and, you know, getting upset that, uh, uh, in that whole thing and just immediately go to, you know, how do I get back on track to achieve my goal and not waste that 45 seconds to 2 minutes? They were higher functioning than some of the other students who, who might spend days pissed off about these kinds of situations instead of— so I actually came up with a little aphorism and it's like, fix the need, not the blame.

So let's say this actually sets up the next question perfectly, which is, let's say I'm someone who's in a circumstantial view with maybe someone's banged my car or I have that coworker and I'm in stress and just brooding. I'm thinking about it for 3 days, procrastinating. And I want to like, okay, you've sold me on the concept. I want to implement the effectiveness view. I want to get to improved performance, well-being, innovation, being able to learn. How does that switch happen? How do I make that switch happen?

There's 2 dimensions of this, if you will. Okay. So I— and even after coming up with this theory, it's taken me some time to learn what the most effective way to teach it to people is, right? Because my own journey with it, it had lots of fits and starts, lots of detours, you know, other such things. But how do we streamline this for people? So first and foremost is to really get this fundamental distinction between the circumstantial view and the effectiveness view, right? And there, it's a paradigm. And by paradigm, I mean, Um, like, uh, you know, the little optical illusion or whatever, where you have a, uh, a vase and 2 faces, and you first look at it and you see the vase, and then some number of seconds pass and you see the 2 faces. You can't see the vase and the 2 faces at the same time. Well, the circumstantial view and the effectiveness view are like that. They're paradigms, right? So getting people to recognize that a given thought that they have was forged in the circumstantial view is a good first step. Okay. So if I'm blaming the other person, the situation, or my own shortcomings for my emotional pain, I'm in the circumstantial view. So that kind of mindfulness discipline to be observing my thoughts is a good place to start in order to actually shift to the effectiveness view. Simply, okay, what if I, what if I reframe this as, um, there's someplace in my, right in the present moment where I'm not being as effective as I would like. That helps, that helps to like take, kind of shift you out of the blame space and into that. But in practice, you really need to have what I call the decode for what that emotion means. Okay. Um, and, you know, so let's say your car situation, you think you might be angry. Okay. And then you start looking for a right that you have in this situation. It's like, well, you know, I have, have a right to ask this person to pay for my car or get their insurance company to pay for the damage to my car or something like that. Yeah, that's, that's there, but it's, that doesn't seem to be linked to the intensity of what I'm feeling. Right. So you also have to have some emotional literacy. You have to be able to distinguish between, say, anger and rage. Right. Um, and again, most people in our culture have very, very low emotional literacy because no one's ever taught them that being able to accurately name the emotion could be helpful to them in any way. Right. There's nothing, there's no reason to learn that, right? If you're going to do the whole little mindfulness thing, you don't need to really know what the name of the emotion is. But what's fascinating, and this really surprised me and it surprises me to this day, is my conscious mind might not know the name of the emotion that I'm experiencing, but my subconscious does. And if Let's say you're in this situation and you repeat to yourself, wow, I'm really angry. And there's no change in your affective state. You feel just as reactive as you did before. Then your guess is wrong. But if instead you say, well, maybe I'm enraged. Wow. 2 things happen when I did that. One is, I instantly feel more composed. I'm still enraged. In fact, I'm actually more in touch with just how enraged I am, but I'm composed. I'm not going to lose my— I'm, you know, I'm not going to become reactive in this situation. I'm not going to lose control of myself. So the reason we lose control of ourselves in, uh, you know, reactivity is because our subconscious, let's say your subconscious is sending feelings of rage up to your conscious mind. It's asking for your help, right? If you turn your attention to the underlying need, the underlying need is, oh great, I finally got your attention. I can stop screaming now. And just, you know, will you keep your attention on me until you've resolved my dilemma? If you ignore me, Dismiss me, distract yourself with something else, turn your attention to something else. You've abandoned me. What am I going to do? I need to take matters into my own hands. And that tends to be a very stereotypical response that is different than the one that you, the conscious mind, would have made if we could have had a conversation about it and come to agreement on how we're not only going to resolve my dilemma, But we're going to do it in such a way that's in harmony with your values, with the rest of our needs. Does that make sense?

It's almost that because you have that awareness, like you said, it can stop screaming. And I'm also curious how this relates to, I think it's Dr. John Sarno's work and sort of like the book Body Keeps the Score, where if you don't give it the awareness, that's when it maybe gets stored in the body or creates a pain that just stops you because That's the only way that emotion is going to make sure that you're aware of it.

So I think there's, um, there's at least 2, 2 questions there. I'm not sure where you want to go. If you want to go to The Body Keeps the Score, we could talk about the implications of this for trauma.

Yeah, let's go to Body Keeps the Score. I think, I think that makes sense.

Well, I think I cover them both in kind of the same thing. So, so let's say you've got this subconscious need and it's not on track to fulfill itself and it needs help from the conscious mind. It doesn't, it does not know how to resolve its dilemma on its own. So it generates that painful emotion, that distress call, that request to the conscious mind. Well, what are the options of the conscious mind? So one we talked about earlier is you're just going to suppress it. You know, go away. I don't want to hear from you right now. Right. Either see no value in hearing from you right now.

Okay.

Or I, um, I would be incapacitated and overwhelmed by your intensity if I listened to you right now. Right. Okay. So that creates stress. The way the subconscious needs communicate to the conscious mind is through your embodiment. Like, how do you know you're frustrated? You know, well, like there's just this almost stereotypical kind of, um, expression of that in, in the body, along with often a release of hormones that prepare the body for actions you might need to take. So that was probably easier to see with anger, right? So the body begins to prepare itself potentially to assert its right using some force. Okay. And so if you simply suppress The anger. Well, that need to assert rights is just going to scream louder and try even harder to push through the muscles that you're tensing to keep it from expressing itself somatically. And it's going to keep pumping those hormones into your bloodstream. So now you've got stress. If bad things, say, happen, From that emotion getting through and you respond, reacting badly, or you interpreting the anger through the circumstantial view. And if you interpret your anger through circumstantial view, that person did something wrong. I need to intimidate them into doing the right thing, or I need to punish them for doing the wrong thing. Right. It is, it is, that's, that's ugly behavior. Right. Just quick contrast. If it's through the effectiveness lens, oh, I'm not on track to assert a right of mine. I'm in touch with my rights. How do I assert this right while respecting the rights of the other person? Anger becomes a force for mutual respect, something Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King intuitively knew and actually discussed in their writings, right, about being intensely angry men. And how do we, how do we assert our rights without violating the rights of other people or respecting the rights of other people? All right. So, so, so to go back to it, if the organism says, look, I, you're overwhelming me. And the asset that I most need to protect in this moment is the ability of my very narrow bandwidth, 45 pieces of information per second, conscious mind. from continuing to be able to function in this situation, then I'm going to push you out of my conscious awareness, ideally once and for all.

Mm-hmm.

Okay. And so 2 types of things happen there. One is there's a loss of empathic connection between the conscious mind and that underlying need. So it's like that need is being pushed offline. And so now your need to assert your rights is out there somewhere spinning and trying to encourage you to assert your rights, but you don't hear it. So the behavioral pattern tends to be, you become a person that starts losing their rights, right? You become a doormat, like, you know, uh, and, and other, other such things. Not, not a good situation.

Right.

Um, the second thing is your, your, your need to protect assets heard you, heard your conscious mind. And it's like, okay, if anger arises, I'm going to do whatever I can to extinguish the anger before it floods and overwhelms the conscious mind. And that willingness to do Everything, which, um, if people are familiar with Internal Family Systems theory, IFS, would be called like a firefighter. That part will do anything to prevent you from being overwhelmed, including a ton of things that aren't good for you, like addictions, certain kinds of distractions, addictive behaviors, substances, self-harm, suicide even. Okay. Um, and then you have this other need, uh, then, uh, so that's the need behind fear, this need behind anxiety to mitigate risks. How do we begin to manage ourselves such that anger never arises in the first place? Well, let me take these things I think of as rights and, well, no, those aren't rights of mine. You know, become the doormat. Let me avoid situations that might be confronting or where I might be called upon to assert my rights, right? And your life, your world gets smaller, your life gets significantly smaller. So these protective mechanisms, whether they're ones that shoot up in the moment when you feel angry or proactively making sure your need to assert rights is never activated, Those protective mechanisms in combination with this loss of empathic connection to your need to assert rights, that's trauma.

That's where sort of like my body keeps scores, like gets stored in the body.

Well, it gets stored in the body because part of this mitigate risk is to proactively tense the muscles through which the emotion would express itself. So one, one symptom that a lot of people— and by the way, like trauma isn't just like going to war, being raped, childhood sexual abuse. There's all sorts of small t traumas that everyone has in their life. Everyone has a certain amount of trauma where they're dissociated from certain needs of theirs and these protective mechanisms are in place. You know, the The resolution, if you will, to it, and if you look at all the sort of trauma healing modalities through this lens, I think they make a lot more sense, is you've, you've got to dismantle those defense mechanisms, those protective behaviors, those holding patterns. Okay. Including the places that you proactively tense in, in In your embodiment. Um, and you need to empathically reconnect to the underlying need or what something like IFS would call an exile and bring it back into the fold where if the event, the, the event isn't the trauma, right? It's what you do inside of yourself in response to the event or This, the series of events, um, that aspect of you, that need may, you know, I'm 61 years old, but if I pushed that offline when I was 7, then when I bring it back online, it still behaves as if it's 7. It's going to take some time for it to catch up and learn some strategies and on, on, on how to fulfill itself. So, um, an example of this is a lot of people grind their teeth at night. Well, you know, if, if right now, you know, your listeners just put their attention, try yawning a little bit. If they find any little bit of tension in their jaw, it's, it's likely there because they have one of these protectors, which is Protecting the conscious mind from being overwhelmed or taxed by feelings of frustration.

Okay.

So it's not that frustration causes us to clench our jaws. Our attempt to suppress awareness of our frustration is what causes us to tense our jaws.

That's fascinating. And so, so that goes back to that sort of like where you were talking about how do we go to the positive, it starts with that awareness.

Yes. There's, um, 5, uh, affective clues that tell you that you are either in the circumstantial view with regard to a present emotion, or you have been in the habit of being in the circumstantial view in the past to a given emotion. And those are stress, Right. Which you really notice is like holding a pattern of tension in the body. You know, like, um, there's this, a lot of confusion in the literature that anxiety is stress. That's not the case. You can be anxious and not stressed. You can be stressed, but not anxious. They're not the same thing. They're, they're, they're distinct, but a very common, uh, um, you know, people will say they're stressed is they're Their shoulders, the space between their shoulders are tight and up. Well, that's what you do when you're trying to suppress awareness of some low-level anxiety. And an even really common pattern for people at work is, okay, you've committed to yourself that you're going to get X, Y, and Z done by 5 o'clock so you can leave the office and go watch your kid play soccer or whatever it is, right? And your subconscious starts to alert you to the fact that it does not think you're on track to achieve your goal on time. Hey, I don't want to hear from you. I need to give all my conscious attention to achieving the goal.

Right.

Right. Do you see how crazy that is? Like, you know, it's, it's, it's an arrogance. It's thinking that the conscious mind somehow knows better than the subconscious. Right. So, so you push that down and then your, your need to mitigate risk. Hey, well, what if we don't finish the project on 5 o'clock. What if we don't do it? I need an answer from your conscious mind. So your frustration level and your anxiety level both go up. And so you start clenching your jaws and pushing up and tightening between your shoulder blades. And people start to have pain in the back of, back of their neck. Very, very common thing. And the alternative is for them, if they were paying attention, And they, they realize that the key to high performance isn't to increase your tolerance for stress, but to decrease your tolerance for stress. Then it's like, oh, okay. I'm frustrated and I'm anxious. Why am I frustrated? Oh, I'm not on track to achieve this goal by 5 o'clock. Why am I anxious? What am I going to do if I don't achieve the goal? Right? Is that going to cascade into not seeing my kid's soccer game? And it's like, okay, it's— I, I really wanted to get this done by 5 o'clock, but the truth is, if I don't, I could come in early to work tomorrow.

Mm-hmm.

So I'm going to change my goal, change the due date on it to tomorrow morning at 9. Ah, and Now nothing's going to get in the way of me going to see my kid play soccer. Okay. But if you don't do that, then you are blinding yourself to the need behind your frustration and your anxiety. And because your needs reflect your values, the intensity of your emotions is a reflection of what you value. You might end up behaving different than your values. And staying till 6 o'clock to finish the project and miss your kid's soccer game. Right? So tension and stress is the first sign that you're not in the optimal effective state to meet your needs in harmony with your values. The second would be reactivity, and stress can cascade into reactivity because if you're suppressing awareness of the emotion, then try as that That need might to scream at you. It doesn't get heard. It has to take matters into its own hands and behaves reactively. The next is, so we've got stress, we have reactivity. The next symptom that you're stuck in the circumstantial view is negativity, right? Whenever we have a negative judgment about the world, other people, ourselves. Uh, you know, this could be cynicism. This could be—

Gossiping.

Exactly. You know, that kind of stuff. And it can be self-directed as well as, you know, I'm a loser or whatever it is. Then, you know, you're in the circumstantial view of, of, of an emotion. Um, the next and the most heartbreaking is brooding rumination. When you are, you just can't stop thinking about something. You have intrusive thoughts. They're repetitive. You go round and round in circles. You make no progress. And when people are in this state of brooding rumination, and it occurs because you're convinced that the source of your emotion is because of circumstances, and you don't know how to change those circumstances. So you are just stuck. And so your subconscious keeps generating the emotion to tell you you're not attractive to fill that need. But because you believe that, that pain is being caused by what's happening in the world and you can't change what's happening in the world, there's, there's no place to go. And so that's when people reach for substances. High dopamine activities to distract themselves, self-harm. In fact, by some estimates, 70% of behavioral health issues are either caused by or exasperated by brooding rumination. So really, really damaging. And then last but not least is procrastination. People think they procrastinate because they are That when they're procrastinating, they're avoiding the task or decision they need to make or whatever it is. But actually what they're really avoiding is the emotions that arise when they turn their attention to that task. You know, oh, I don't want to do that because it's going to be boring and I can't hold space for my boredom and don't know how to resolve it. Or I'm resentful that I, um, you know, that I have to do this when You know, it was my team member's mistake that led to this extra work or, you know, whatever it is. So, you know, if we're willing to feel those emotions, understand what needs of ours were not on track to fulfill, and then use our conscious mind to get ourselves back on track, then there's no more procrastination. And ideally, if we do that at the moment we've committed, to the task rather than commit to the task and then realize later that we have these emotions we don't want to have to deal with, then we'll probably say yes to fewer things. But the things we say yes to, we'll have taken the time to realize that we can do those in harmony with our values.

Yeah. So let's say we've sort of understood these views, we're in these views and we've cultivated that awareness, right? What's that next step to get to that positive state?

So each of these symptoms, if you will, that you're in the circumstantial view and that you are— I call this state in which you are stressed, reactive, negative, brooding, or procrastinating. If you're exhibiting any of those symptoms, you're in a state I call emotional victimhood, right? You're living as if You are a victim of your own emotions, right? And so if you want to shift over to a state I call emotional responsibility, then the symptom tells you what you need to do. So if you're stressed, scan for tension in your body and release that tension. And that when you do, you'll go from this state where You're stressed and you're kind of in your head. Like when people are stressed, they're kind of in their head because they, they aren't— their consciousness, their awareness is not evenly distributed through their body. They take the time to scan for tension and release it. Then they drop back into their body and they have this real sense of being grounded in their body, but also grounded in their values. Because they're now back, you know, willing to be aware of their emotions. If, if they're reactive, if this fight, flight, freeze, or appease response starts to emerge in them, then to shift to a state from being reactive to being composed, the trick is to name, correctly name the emotions that you're experiencing in that moment. that are connected to, to your, your reactivity. There's a neuroscientist named Lieberman who did this like fascinating study with an fMRI, which, where he showed that the moment you accurately label the emotion that you're experiencing, your entire nervous system calms down, right? You enter this state of composure and Um, you know, so if you, the example, go back to, you know, you just got hit by a car, you know, I'm feeling angry or my subconscious is angry. That didn't do anything for me. I'm feeling enraged. Ah, yes. I'm feeling enraged. I'm now composed and enraged. Right. So don't conflate these painful emotions with being reactive. You know, so if you're experiencing any form of negativity, you've got a judgment about yourself. the world or the other person, you're in this kind of like looking for someone to blame for the fact that you're in emotional pain, then you need to do the decode. You need to, you know, assuming you've accurately labeled the emotion or emotions that are present, then now you need to identify and get in touch with the underlying need that your subconscious thinks you're not on track to achieve. And when you do, You'll shift from this negative state to this problem-solving state, really. Right. Okay. It's like, okay, I need to own the fact that I'm frustrated. It's, I set the goal. I have the assessment. I'm not on track to achieve the goal. What am I going to do about it? Right. And as soon as you've done that, you're no longer in this negative state. You're in an accountable state, right? You're accountable. For your emotional state and whatnot. And if you're in a state of brooding rumination, you've got to do that step. And then you've got to work the subconscious programming behind the need, what I call the NAS, right? So if I feel this way, let's go back to your anger example. If I'm angry, Then it's because my subconscious has the assessment. I'm not on track to assert a right of mine. What right do I think I have in this situation that isn't being honored, that I'm not asserting? Okay. Once I can articulate what right my subconscious thinks I have, then I can consciously examine it and decide whether or not I really, I still believe I have that right. And when When I lead people through this process, they often decide they don't have that right. I had a woman come to me after a leadership development workshop at her company that I led using this material. And she said, can I ask you a personal question, a question about my personal life? I'm like, sure. My husband wants to divorce me. I'm like, why? He says I'm angry with him all the time. Well, is that true? Yeah, pretty much. Why are you angry with him? And she launches into all this stuff about what he does and doesn't do. And I'm like, wait, wait, wait, stop, stop, stop, stop. You just went through my course. You're in the circumstantial view. Like, how do you, how do you, you know, let's have you move to the, um, uh, effectiveness view. What right do you think that Isn't being honored here in these situations where you become angry. And so she starts to think about it. I can kind of see the wheels turning in her head. I'm playing the little Jeopardy music in my own mind, you know, as she's going through this. And then I see the light bulb go off. And then instantly after the light bulb, her cheeks flush with embarrassment. I'm like, so what'd you find? And she answered literally this way, which I really appreciate. She said, well, my subconscious believes that I have a right to expect my husband to anticipate my needs and provide them to me. And this is the most important part before I have to ask. And so, so I smile and I said, does your husband agree that you have that right? Rights are social agreements. And she's like, oh no, he does not agree. And then she just offered immediately on her own. She says, I know where I got this programming. My mom believed she had this right with my dad, and my dad agreed she had the right. They played this game, but I'm never going to get my husband to play this game. I said, so what are you going to do? She said, I'm going to drop my belief that I have this right. And I said, well, Just dropping a subconscious belief is very hard. Like you can look at the research by Albert Bandura and other stuff about, you know, um, what subconscious beliefs are, their causal association. So what if you replaced it? What, what right do you have? Oh, well, I have a right to ask him for what I want. Great. Why don't you try that? Didn't hear anything. 2 months later, I get this email, subject line, thank you. And she goes on to explain, it's like, my husband has rescinded the request to get a divorce. And she said, for 2 weeks afterwards, multiple times a day, I'd find myself angry. I'd look at why I was angry. I'd realize, and then I'd tell my subconscious, we don't have this right. We do have the right to ask him. I'd ask him. Sometimes he said yes. Sometimes he'd say no. And then a couple of weeks ago, I realized I hadn't had a single instance of flare-up of this anger. I think my subconscious has gotten the message. And today he told me he didn't want a divorce anymore. I'm like, that's great. Right? So this small adjustment to her subconscious programming has led to this much better life for her. So you can, you can change the need. It's your need. You can change the need. The second is you can change the assessment about whether or not you're on track. To fulfill the need. If I, um, the other day I was driving along, uh, the highway, I was on my way to an appointment. I did not want to be late and I hit an unexpected traffic jam and instantly I feel frustrated. It's like, oh no, I'm frustrated. Well, you know, I'm not perfect with this whole effectiveness view thing, but I'm pretty good at this point. I've been practicing it for years now. Um, So I immediately went to, you know, it's not the traffic that's causing me to be frustrated, but, you know, hey, I'm no longer on track to achieve my goal of getting to my appointment on time. Is that true? So I pull out my phone, I type in my GPS, and even with the traffic jam, I'm going to get there a couple of minutes early. Ah, okay. I'm no longer frustrated. I've changed the assessment right now. Notice in both of these examples, Nothing's changed in the external world. This is all changes inside me.

One thing that you said that was interesting early on is that as a culture, we have less emotional literacy. I'm even thinking of how much of communication has gone from, let's say, sending long-form text to an emoji, which maybe is like a red-faced emoji with that person cursing in front of it. How do we cultivate that emotional literacy as a society? And I'm also curious, what is the implementation of this within teams and organizations to see emotions as important in culture?

So 2 very different questions. I'll answer them in the order you asked them. I think there's 3 general approaches to developing emotional literacy. Okay. So one is being able to better recognize the, uh, um, to have the interoceptive facility, you know, having, being more in touch with what's happening in your body so that you're quicker to wake up that something's going on and to recognize that the pattern of what's happening in your body represents a given emotion. So that's one. The challenge with that is, or I'll go to the second one, which can reinforce the first one. The second is to remember this little distinction that your subconscious knows what emotion it's generating, even if you consciously don't recognize what it is. So You realize you're upset. You can just trial and error. I feel angry. No, I feel enraged. No, I feel afraid. Oh, wow. Wow. I don't like to admit that I feel afraid. I was raised as a male in this culture and anxiety and fear aren't things I'm supposed to feel. Wow. I'm afraid. Or, you know, Uh, wow. I feel really resentful. Well, I feel a little bit more composed, but that's not quite it. Wow. I feel hurt. Boom. Wow. Yeah. I feel hurt. I feel a little resentful, but I mostly feel hurt. Right. So, um, I think it's this idea of, uh, you know, naming the emotion and watching this shift. And so once you've done that, it's like, oh, this pattern of what's happening in my body, that's, that's hurt. That's hurt. Okay. The third one is to get really familiar with the needs. So for some people that I've worked with, particularly senior executives, if I go in and I talk to them and I'm kind of segueing to your second Right. If I go in and talk to them about emotions and why they should learn their emotions, and I start with emotions, they start glazing over. They, they like, look, I, the last thing I want is to be more emotional. Right. And people are saying, I don't want to be emotional. What they're really saying is I don't want to be in the circumstantial view. People are emotional when they're in circumstantial view. My mom at 7 was in the circumstantial view. They're not in the effectiveness view. So I, so I start with, um, okay, would you like to get better at achieving goals, mitigating risks, protecting assets, uh, asserting rights and eliciting consideration? It's like, duh. And I'm like, okay, what if, what if you had an assistant that knows well before you do when you're not on track to achieve a goal? Would you want them to interrupt you in whatever you're doing? Definitely, right away. Okay, well, that assistance called for us. It's called frustration. Okay, do you want to right? Do you want to know when there's a risk present that isn't being mitigated? Yeah, then you should pay exquisite attention to your anxiety, and if it's a. If you're having a team meeting to make a decision, if you notice anyone in the audience who's a little bit anxious, maybe you should probe a little bit, ask them what they're worried about, or if they see a worst-case scenario. So if I start with needs, what I'm calling psychological needs, which they would call life skills, or they would call workplace competencies, that's where I start with executives, with teams. Because in fact, business is this great environment in which to teach this stuff because performance rules the day. You show a corporation how to improve their bottom line, they're not dogmatic. They'll adopt what you're teaching them. I've had great success teaching leadership development programs in corporate environments. And if I can get an entire team, an intact team to go through the training, that's my favorite because Once everyone has this framework and shared language, then they can hold each other accountable. You know, Sachit, you made me angry. And you just look at me and said, no, I didn't, Charles. What, what, what right of yours isn't being honored in this situation? I think I have a right to weigh in on this decision, given it's going to impact my department. I agree with you. Let's, let's talk about that.

And how do you sort of like, let's say like you had to implement this now in a world of remote work where no one's maybe met in person, everything's like a lot of stuff is asynchronous happening over Zoom. How would you do that?

So what you, you lose some somatic awareness, right? You lose some of the felt empathy that you have when you're with someone in person. Sure, their facial expressions and stuff can help, but you're not getting as broad as your body's in the same room. You're literally— many people have a form of empathy where they can really feel into the field of the other person and have a good sense of what they're feeling. So that's kind of off the table with Zoom. And I think you have to rely then more on having conversations about About needs, but also paying attention to the language that people are using, you know? Um, and over time it becomes, it's very easy to tell whether someone is speaking, someone is thinking and speaking downstream from having interpreted an emotion through the circumstantial, right? Like when, when you're in a meeting and someone says something to you and they're in this judgmental frame of mind, You feel it, it kind of cuts, it has an edginess to it, right? Um, so that you get that, you get tone of voice, you, you get those clues. So it's not ideal. If I can, if I can work with a team in person, um, I, I will, but I've had very good success, you know, doing it over Zoom as well.

One of the things I'm thinking, like, let's say like you're working in an organization or a founder of a company. And we don't have enough time to dive deep fully, so for people who want to learn more, get the book right here. I'm curious, this seems actually like if you do this right, it becomes a competitive advantage in a sense. Do you have stories maybe of people who've done that, who've gone to the work and it's changed how they are either as a founder or as an executive running or approaching running a company?

So absolutely, I'd say I think it's a huge competitive advantage, particularly if you're in an industry where you can have a— like if you're in the technology industry, it's a hugely competitive advantage because if you miss a technological innovation or you are leapfrogged by a competitor, you're effectively out of business. So I can't take credit for this, but there are many famous examples in business of people that were already firmly in the effectiveness view around a given emotion that outperformed their competitors. And probably my favorite in this is Andy Grove when he was COO of Intel. He would bring the executive team together for meetings and he would cultivate anxiety. Um, he, and he wrote a book on this called Only the Paranoid Survive. And essentially he would get his team together and he would say, okay, here's what we're planning to do. Given you're all out there, you see the world through a different lens than, than, than I do. I just want you to sit for a moment and Are there any even whispers of anxiety arising in you? And, um, in one of these meetings, someone raised their hand and anxiety, when it whispers in words, it's, it's usually what if, right? Well, what if a competitor of ours— at this point they were in the memory chip business. Um, we're spending an inordinate amount on R&D. You know, continuing to do these things. If someone came out with a memory chip at a fraction of the price that we charge, how would we continue our business? And that what-if led to a series of long conversations that the executive team had. And eventually they came up with the idea of, well, we, we need, you know, we would not be able to compete no matter what we did now. We need to be in another business. And that's what led them into the CPU business. And it took them something like $8 billion and close to 8 years to actually develop, to have CPUs ready to go when the Japanese flooded the market suddenly with memory chips at a fraction of the price of Intel's. Okay. So I call my My company, the Institute for Adaptive Mastery, because when you're living in this state of emotional responsibility, when you're in the effectiveness view, you are not only performing at your best, but you're also the most adaptive because any breakdown that you encounter calls on you to examine and update your subconscious program, including your assumptions about, about the world. And the world is changing extremely fast. So yes, great question.

Yeah. And I think when you're talking about the world is changing, it's changing especially fast right now. I know we could keep going on for this forever, but with respect to time, I'll ask you the 5 questions we always end with, and then we'll drive this to a close. I'll modify them a bit actually too. For you, when you think of this the study and the research you've done into emotions over the last 30, 40 years, what books or people have been the most impactful in your study and why? What 2 to 3 books or people?

Well, certainly this Indian guru that I met in '84 redefined to me what I wanted to embody as a human being. I want to be fully alive, feeling all of my emotions. And in order to do that and excel, then I've got to be interpreting them through the effectiveness view. So definitely a lot of credit there. Marshall Rosenberg for influencing, you know, this idea that emotions had somehow indicator lights about your needs, right? He and I may differ about the conception of needs and stuff, but absolutely, you know, that was hugely influential. I think Michael Tomasello, and specifically the book The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, influenced me. Um, such that, uh, let's see, I could go even further back to, um, when I was in college and I read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins and this idea that if you really want to understand evolution, you not only have to understand Darwin and variation and selection, but have to understand it from the point of view of the gene that's getting passed down from generation to generation. And he said, He had an intuition that there must be some parallel, something parallel to a gene that drives cultural evolution, which he called a meme. That's where our word meme comes from. And I believe that these, um, these NAS, the subconscious programming for the needs, assumptions, and, um, needs assessment and strategies, those are the building blocks. Those are the memes. Of cultural evolution. Right. So I think he, he was influential. Um, I was also influenced not so much with regard to the overall theory, but in terms of how to look at language and the evolution of cultural discourses from a gentleman named Fernando Flores, who's Probably best known as the founder of ontological coaching. And I had the good fortune to study and actually work for Fernando in the late '80s. And that kind of orientation and understand— and I think as part of that, to understand that, for example, rights aren't written in stone someplace, that the rights are a conversation, that ideals are a conversation. that many of these pieces of our subconscious programming are culturally constructed. I think that was, um, uh, that was super helpful. So did I get to 5?

Um, you got to enough and it gives me a lot of like books to like sort of like follow up and read on. Um, when you're thinking of this sort of like intersection of like consciousness and creation, um, I'm curious, like for you, like what does it mean to be a conscious creator?

So I believe that these 50-ish psychological needs were selected because if a tribe, you know, hunter-gatherer tribe lacked any one of these needs, they would not survive or thrive. Okay. So I think human beings at their best are in touch with all of these needs and therefore are allowing and feeling into and decoding all of their emotions. Okay. I think that is the best state from which to identify the need for innovation or solutions. And come up with ideas for those innovations and solutions. You know, there's a lot of techniques for how to use kind of your conscious mind, you know, to brainstorm and to do this and that. But many of the greatest discoveries and ideas in history, the people that report on them, it didn't occur during a session like that. It occurred, uh, to their subconscious first and then kind of bubbled up in a dream or when they were in an altered state of consciousness, or when they were just taking a walk with their dog or whatever it is. So I think if you want to be a conscious creator, part of what you need to do is become skillful in facilitating the dialogue between your conscious mind and, and your subconscious. So. Okay. You've formulated the problem clearly. Maybe it's time to go for a walk and see what arises and give yourself time. You know, if you know you have to come up with something creative by a certain date, you know, start early to get your subconscious kind of chewing on it so that it has time to chew on it. And then make sure you have regular intervals in your life where you're not proactively thinking, where your mind is pretty much empty and that your subconscious can actually get your attention with, with the ideas that it has, whether it delivers those ideas as words or images or metaphors or whatever it might be.

It's funny because I think it relates to that sort of like idea of like the best ideas coming In the shower or when you're on a walk. This leads perfectly into our last question. One of the things you said when we did our research was, I'm trying to start a revolution in the way we interpret our emotions. So I'm curious, when you look at the next 2 to 5 or 5 to 10 years, what are you most excited about as it relates to this work and how can people get involved and help?

Oh, thank you for that question. Yeah. Um, so I have a, I have a high school friend actually who has been, um, watching the evolution of these ideas. And, um, um, he and I were speaking yesterday and he's like, he's like, uh, you know, Charles, I don't know why you call yourself a psychologist. What you're doing isn't psychology. And I'm like, oh, well, I, what name would you give it? He said, I don't know, but Was— is psychology ever going to be taught in elementary school? I don't think so, but your stuff's going to be taught in elementary school. You know, like, you know, the, the, you know, kindergarten or first grade and a kid gets angry. Um, the teacher is going to start having a conversation with the class about rights, and that conversation is going to be as valuable, if not more valuable, for that individual's development and our society. So, um, You know, my, my vision is that this awareness of needs, of these psychological needs and the effectiveness view begins to imbue how we educate our children, how we educate adults, how we look to improve performance, how the implications for, you know, Therapy, you know, just a quick one. Cognitive behavioral therapy is probably the leading technique, and it focuses on the cognitive distortions. Everyone needs cognitive distortions is downstream from having misinterpreted a painful emotion through the circumstantial view. You just return to the emotion, reinterpret the effectiveness view, and you're done, right? The cognitive distortion, right? So huge implications for therapy, huge implications for trauma healing. How I see it rolling out, where this is catching fire, is, you know, first and foremost, it's been catching fire with coaches. So coaches are already in this. They're not in the therapist mindset of diagnose and, you know, prescribe this kind of pathological orientation. They're in this, hey, you're good. How do I take you from good to great? And, um, and use this in context of their coaching. I've now trained a number of coaches in emotional responsibility, and they all consistently tell me that at least 50% of what they do with their clients, which are ranging from C-suite executives of Fortune 500 companies down to individual entrepreneurs and stuff like that, that it's some combination of helping the person shift from the circumstantial view to the effectiveness view. But then once they're in the effectiveness view, skills training to get better at fulfilling that need. Okay. You're frustrated a lot. Well, let's, you know, have you understand that's about achieving goals. How do you get better achieving goals? Is that SMART goals, KPIs, any number of other methodologies, kinds of things?

OKRs.

Um, you know, work with them to, to, to get more skillful at that. Oh, you never feel frustrated? Well, then you're probably not setting ambitious enough goals. How do, how do we kind of set the thermostat right so that you, you, you're actually frustrated frequently, but you never stay frustrated for very long because you get back on track? So really working with those underlying— develop those underlying skills. So that's a place I'm very excited about. The other place I'm very excited about is getting into a client system, you know, into a company and training a team in emotional responsibility. Many of— most of those people also participate in other teams. As soon as they've been working on a team that becomes emotionally responsible, they can't stand it when other people that they work with are falling into this emotional victimhood thing. One of the things you'll hear from executives, especially in larger corporations, is, you know, how do I get my people to stop being victims and take responsibility and step up and be proactive? Well, emotional responsibility just hits that one, you know, dead on. So those are probably the 2 places. And then I think as we've seen with some other innovations, you know, things move from, from business and organizations to Second, you know, to colleges and universities and MBA programs, and then into high schools and, you know, flows, flows down into K through 12. And I think that's where we're going to need to get to, to shift our society as a whole from defaulting to the circumstantial view to living in the effectiveness view. And when we do, Our, uh, our emotional wellbeing will go way up. 70% of behavioral health issues are going to go away right away. We're going to be more engaged in our lives, uh, uh, more, you know, emotionally healthy and our performance and ability to adapt is going to go up. And that is just nothing but good for the individual and for society.

Yeah, I can't wait to see this in K-12 schools. So if you're someone who's listening who can help with that, the book is Emotional Intelligence. Charles, where else can people find you or reach you?

So they can find my book, Emotional Intelligence for Stress-Free Leadership, on Amazon. And if you go to adaptivemastery.com, adaptivemastery.com, that's my website. And you can also reach out to me, cj@adaptivemastery.com. And I'm super, super interested in finding, you know, coaches that want to learn this as a coaching modality, organizations that want to bring this in to change their culture, and people who are well situated in fields like K through 12 who want to bring this to their audience, for which I don't have the life experience and the influence and the credibility, would love to partner with you on how to do that. We already have a gentleman that is actually bringing this to elementary schools in context of restorative justice and using emotional responsibility. So very open in collaborating. I see this You know, like, I really want this to be a movement.

That's amazing. And hopefully this is the start of that. Um, Charles, thank you so much for diving deep and doing this.

Oh, thank you so much.