Find Your Power Through Emotional Triggers with Susanne Moore: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation! JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire! Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Finding Founders. Today, we're pulling a timeless EO Fire episode from the archives, so the giveaway may not be active. And we'll be breaking down how to find your power through emotional triggers. To drop these value bombs, I have brought Suzanne Moore and the EO Fire Studios. Suzanne is an endlessly curious adventure seeker, nurse, and lawyer. She has two dazzling daughters who co-founded Neuroboot with her, a platform for helping others navigate emotions to suffer less and play more.

0:40And today, Far Nation, we'll talk about how many people have struggles handling emotional triggers and they're not even aware what's happening to them. We'll talk about rather than reacting to your triggers, you have to know your triggers will be beneficial for you because you'll have a better understanding of why you are feeling the way you do and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Susanna and our sponsors. The Product Boss, hosted by Jacqueline and Mina, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. The Product Boss helps you take your physical product sales and strategy to the next level to create your dream life with episodes like, Can I Have a Successful Product Business as a Side Hustle?

1:21Listen to The Product Boss wherever you get your podcasts. Suzanne, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something interesting about yourself that most people don't know. John, thank you so much for having me on the show. I'm really fired up to be here. I've listened to you for at least four years now. Oh, you're the best. Love the show. So something interesting most people don't know is that I run 100-mile trail races for charity. And a few years ago, which is actually when I started listening to your show, I ran for a charity called Culture City. And it was a race that the BBC called the world's most dangerous and toughest endurance race.

2:02It was about 157 mile stage race through the Amazon jungle in Brazil. So as you can imagine, it was miles and miles of training that your podcast got me through. Man, I love that. I mean, that's exactly why I created 2 ,600 episodes of Entrepreneurs on Fire. So people like you could be entertained and educated for how many, was it 157 miles? Exactly. Wow, that is amazing. I hope somebody's running a crazy race right now and they're like, yes, me too, that'd be so cool. And Fire Nation, we're talking about finding your power through emotional triggers. So let's just start diving right into this, Suzanne, by really getting into why emotional triggers are so gosh darn intense.

2:49Yes, so let me start off for a little context by saying, my daughter and I just launched an app called Neuroboot, which helps people build emotional muscle. And we did this because what we were finding is that so many people really struggle with handling emotional triggers. And I mean, we all have uncomfortable emotions at times, right? And most of us really are never taught what to do with those difficult feelings. So as a society, we kind of just run from them, right? We either numb it out with some sort of entertainment or we drink, we smoke, we, in my case, we work too much. Some people shop too much or eat too much.

3:29But what we found is that many people experiencing emotional triggers are actually not aware in that moment what is happening to them. So I like to describe it as a wave that passes over you, right? So you know, like when you're driving to work and you're already late and you have this big meeting and then someone has a wreck in front of you. Or you get home after a really long crazy day and your partner yells at you, right? So most people instantly get this really intense, uncomfortable feeling in their body and they react to that feeling much more so than the actual event. It's the feeling that's in their body that they react to.

4:08And more times than not, that reaction comes across as negative because it's typically fear or anger or anxiety that's directed outward, which feels really natural, but it can be really dangerous, right? Because a lot of times what that turns into are harsh words or violence or impulsive decisions that we regret later. And so we tend to either do that or some people, if they're worried about the consequences of expressing their emotions, they just bottle them up. And what we found is that bottled up fear often becomes anger, and anger turned inward often becomes depression. And the only reason I know any of this, because I'm not a mental health professional, I'm an RN, but I've done a lot of other things, and mental health directly is not one of them.

4:58But a few years ago, my then teenage daughter became really withdrawn and unmotivated. And for a couple of years, you know, I was the type A overachiever. So I tried everything under the sun to, you know, fix her from removing privileges to these raw, raw speeches to harsh words. And nothing worked. we were just often at these impasses and so I was really frustrated and angry because I interpreted that to mean that she was just being this lazy defiant teenager and so one day we had this kind of tough interaction and you know I just gave in I sat cross-legged across from her and I said I took her hands and I said I can tell you're in pain I don't know what it is and I don't know if you're comfortable telling me, but I want you to know that I'm here and I love you and we're going to get through this.

5:58And it was the first time in probably four years that she just melted. And, you know, I could just see her just soften and she gave me this really big hug and she never said a word, but her eyes were kind of shiny, you know, and I knew, I thought, okay, I got through to her in this moment, but I just got, I finally got through. You pierced that armor. Yeah. And so I really still just had no idea what I was dealing with or what was going on. And I was raised as someone who was taught to work really hard and ignore emotions and, you know, just be very stoic. So a few days later, she came to me with this sheet of paper on a clipboard.

6:41And she said, I know you want to help and maybe this will help you help me. And it was a cheat sheet. and it had three columns on it. And the first column showed her behaviors, which were things like laying in bed all day or slamming her bedroom door or, you know, refusing to interact with the family. And then the middle column interpreted what that behavior meant, like, I'm feeling insecure or I'm stressed or I feel worthless. And then the third column said, here's what I need in that moment when I'm experiencing that feeling. And the crazy thing was, it was the simplest things ever. You know, it was things like, take my phone away and just really gently invite me to go on a walk.

7:25Or give me a cup of tea and just grab my hand and say, hey, you know, you're enough. You're going to do great. You're perfect. Or just tell me to call a friend. And I was so blown away because I, you know, all those years that we kind of struggled, I just thought there were complicated answers. And it really wasn't that complicated. And so we started using her cheat sheet. And it just completely changed. All the things I was frustrated with just melted away. And we have this incredibly close relationship now. But the neat thing is that out of that, we created this app. and the goal of the app is for someone to go in, log their mood and then the app actually notifies a supporter.

8:16So, you know, in our case, it notifies me when she's having some difficult emotions, but then it gives a quick, easy action step to help reset that feeling. And the whole concept behind that is that what we don't want to do is bottle up our triggers in that moment or react aggressively to them, right? Because if we bottle them up, they become these really heavy emotions that build up into these dark moods, which is what was going on with her. So she had just been bottling all sorts of things up and then it turned into three difficult years where she just was very unmotivated and really depressed a lot.

8:55So what we found is that if we can share our emotions with someone who cares in the moment when we're having them and take an action step, those two things together have this really incredible instant healing effect. And, you know, we, of course, I wanted her to go to therapy. I wanted her to start medications and she was really resistant to those things. But what we found is that even though therapy is great and medications are great, and I'm a big proponent of those things, you know, those sessions are usually a couple of weeks apart and they tell you to do all these really good things like journal and meditate and exercise and sleep well.

9:36But for her, the day-to-day accountability on all of those things was really tough. And so we built all of those things into the app and tried to make it really fun so that as you're doing those kinds of things, you're earning badges and you're gaining levels and you're growing as you do it. So that's kind of the app in a nutshell. Neura Boots in Fire Nation, That's N-E-U-R-A, Boots, B-O-O-T. So just out of curiosity, before we do proceeding, we do have a lot to cover, so we got to keep moving. But where did that name come from? I'm always fascinated with the root, core, origin of these names.

10:13I love that you asked that question. So I am very fascinated with the brain. And you have neurons in the brain, obviously, but then a lot of what makes our brain function the way it does are these connection pathways. And we can change those pathways, but when we do repetitive behavior, they become very kind of hardwired in. So it's like highways in your brain. And so when you consistently do something like meditation every day or journaling every day, or, you know, positive affirmations every day, you actually rewire that pathway. And then it It takes a new course and it really does over time change your thought patterns, which then changes your behaviors.

11:00And so the concept was that we're going to do a quick reset of the brain with these action steps and this reaching out to a supporter. And then over time, as you do these daily steps, you're going to really rewire your brain. So it's like a computer. You know, when you reboot the computer. That fixes everything. It just is like, hey, this is blinking. I'm going to reboot. And then you call up, you know, the tech support. They're like, have you tried rebooting your computer? I'm like, of course I did. Yes, yes. Love that name. Love the explanation. And Fire Nation, you know, as I've been listening to Suzanne break this down, I mean, why are emotional triggers so intense?

11:40Some of the things that I'm interpreting from what you're saying, Suzanne, is they're intense because number one, we don't necessarily know how to deal with them specifically in correct ways. number two is because we keep them bottled up and we don't really know how to release them. So can you kind of break this down for us specifically what the purpose of emotional triggers are and how we can use those same emotional triggers to actually find out who we are as people? Absolutely. And this is a part that's really exciting to me because it's a concept that I've never seen or read anywhere. But I'll start by saying this.

12:19You know, we're all familiar with physical pain. You know, when you're little, we're all taught don't put your hand on a hot stove. Well, fortunately, if you do put your hand on a hot stove, it hurts and then you back away, right? But if it didn't hurt, what would happen? We'd get burned really badly. Yeah, I mean, your hand would just shrivel up into a bunch of ash and you wouldn't have a hand anymore. So, physical pain keeps us alive. It keeps us safe. Emotional pain is a little more complicated, but it really has a similar purpose. And triggers actually occur when our strongest personality traits feel threatened.

12:58So physical pain keeps us alive. Emotional pain keeps us authentic to who we really are. And I know this is kind of a hard concept to wrap our brains around it first. But when I first started really fleshing this out and experimenting with different individuals on it, what I like to do is I start with having a person identify for me what they feel are their top three core personality traits. So I'd love to give you a list, but it's like 20 traits long, you know, so it's things like comfort, acceptance, attention, new challenges, control, autonomy, fun. Each person has these personality traits in different proportions.

13:45And that's what makes us really unique as individuals. So for me, when I look at a list of these 20 traits, the ones that stood out for me, especially when I started doing this a few years ago, were control, the need to be right, and new challenges. And those three personality traits are extremely helpful in my position as an executive. But what I found is that they're also really problematic in relationships, right? Because if your need to be right is a stronger personality trait than your need to be loved, it can actually cause some hurdles at home. But once you understand that, it actually really changes the way you handle conflict.

14:26So for me, I would be in an argument and I would feel this wave of anger coming over me. And then for the first time ever, I could stop and recognize that I didn't feel it necessarily because the other person was wrong. I felt it because I have this strong need to be right. And in that moment, I was then able to control that and think, wait a minute, if I feel this feeling because of my strong need to be right, is it really worth it to destroy the relationship simply to prove my point? And once I realized that the anger feeling would actually completely subside, And then I could be much more calm and rational about handling the situation.

15:11I didn't have that reactive process going on inside of me anymore. So Fire Nation, I hope that you're really able to put yourself in Suzanne's position here and say, like, how are these situations applicable to me? How could I use what Suzanne was able to identify and use in her life and my life for these emotional triggers and to find out their purpose and to help us find out through them who we really are? And there's so much power there and there's just so much opportunity for learning that, man, I just really, really hope for our initiative, taking that chance to put yourself in her shoes, so to speak, to learn through that process.

15:51And we have a lot of great stuff coming up. We're going to talk about proactively benefiting from our triggers, why self-confidence literally can explode when we do this, and so much more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. We all want the same things for our business. More leads, faster sales, and better insights so we can serve our customers at the highest level. One thing we all don't want, to waste time and money trying to figure these things out. So what's the solution? A CRM that's easy to set up and customize sounds too good to be true, right? But this CRM exists and it's called HubSpot.

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17:36The app enables you to manage all your communication channels in one dashboard and to automate up to 80 % of recurring questions using AI. As proof, here's an example. Ad Hoc Atelier, Tidio's customer from Italy, has decreased response time from three hours to just one minute, thanks to Tidio. Increase customer satisfaction and sales with personalized shopping experiences today. Visit tidio.com slash fire and get an exclusive 20 % discount just for entrepreneurs on fire podcast listeners. That's T-I-D-I-O dot com slash fire. Tidio.com slash fire. Suzanne, we're back. And before the break, we were talking about being proactive and proactively benefiting from our triggers instead of just reacting to them all the time, like always being in reactive mode.

18:25Like let's shift that into proactive mode and being proactive. How do we do this? Yeah. So one of the items that we'll be adding soon to our website, which is just www.neuroboot.com is a link to actually download this triggers method that we're talking about. So it's this quick and easy process and it has the acronym STEADY. And literally in less than three minutes, you can learn how to recognize and navigate your own triggers. And it becomes such a fun process, right? Because I actually came to a point where I started looking forward to situations where I felt triggered because I wanted to practice the steps in the STEADY method.

19:02Because it's such a neat feeling for that wave of frustration or anger to melt away. And then you feel your power coming back and you're able to just really handle any situation with a lot of, you know, poise and calm. So a fun example of this, after we developed this very early on, I was driving in the car one day with my 12-year-old and my grown daughter calls me and she's crying and hysterical because she had this really rough day at work. And she's telling me I feel like a failure and I feel worthless and she's just beside herself. And I pull over and I say, okay, I hear you. And I hear the pain in your voice.

19:42And we're going to walk through this. And so I remind her what her three core personality traits are when she did this method. And when I say that, you know, obviously we have way more than three personality traits, but these are the three that most resonate with you. And for her, those are the need to be appreciated, the need to be valued, and fun. And so we walk through the steps of our triggers method. And again, it's a really short process. And so part of it is I walk her through really feeling the emotion that's in her body and identifying, you know, the physical sensation. Is it in your stomach?

20:22Is it in your head? What do you actually feel? And then really going into that feeling and appreciating it because understanding it the way, the fact that it's very similar to physical pain, we need to acknowledge it and then recognize that it's there because there's some core value to her that feels threatened. And we have to address that in order for that feeling to go away. And after we walked through it, I mean, within three minutes, her voice just completely changed over the phone. I mean, you could literally even though she's over the phone, you could almost see her shoulders relax and her head come up just from the tone of her voice.

20:58And you could just tell that whole emotional storm was gone. And she recognized that really all that was going on was that she made a mistake at work. But that feeling, that making of the mistake created in her a feeling of feeling really threatened for her needs to be appreciated and valued. And that then resulted in all this fear and panic. So once she acknowledged it and released all the emotion, then she immediately came up with a plan for, okay, here's what I'm going to do when I get to work tomorrow morning. I'm going to tell my boss and I have this plan. And in going through that plan, now her need to be appreciated and to be valued is intact, right?

21:41She has a plan for handling that and still meeting those needs of hers. and so the funniest thing about that is that my 12 year old's in the car and she hears this whole exchange and she says what is this I need this tell me tell me more about this this method and so I said okay give me an example of something that triggers you and she said when you tell me to go clean my room sometimes even though you say it nicely I go in my room and I just get into a corner and I cry and I cry and I cry. And then eventually I go clean my room. And I was absolutely stunned because she is this really tough type A kid who's really self-driven.

22:20And I've like never seen her cry. I didn't even know she was capable of crying. I had no idea. And so, you know, we talked through it and I had her go through the 20 traits, you know, which ones of these, you know, apply to you. And we found out her most dominant trait was autonomy. And suddenly it all made sense. Because when I tell her, hey, go clean your room, she is so triggered because she's like, I already know I need to clean my room and I was going to do it. I was going to do it tomorrow, but now you've told me and you've really made me feel great. I resonate with that. If my parents are listening to this right now, they're like, man, that sounds like John.

22:58That's so funny. And so once we talked through it, I said, hey, autonomy is a wonderful trait. I mean, if you want to be a leader, you have to have autonomy. And so that's awesome. And so now it's become such a joke with us because now if I tell her to do something, she feels that rush of that feeling. And then she gets this funny look on her face and then she'll just start laughing. She's like, OK, I know that feeling. I know that it just means my sense of autonomy is being triggered and I can just let it go now. I mean, yeah, I do need to go clean my room. And so she just gets on with it. But it's been such a neat way to really prevent and dissolve conflict in the house because we have such a much better understanding now of why we all feel the way we do.

23:43One thing that really jumps out to me is why this would really cause an explosion of self-confidence. Like when you really identify like why you're feeling a certain way, why you're being triggered in a certain manner, what's causing X, what's the reason for why? I mean, this just like, it's just like this innate desire as humans to understand the process. And when we understand the process, our self-confidence, it's going to naturally grow. So can you really break down why specifically that happened, Suzanne? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I think for her, just to use her as an example, you know, when she would go into a room and cry, then she'd feel guilty about it.

24:24So I think a lot of times when we have these uncomfortable emotions, we don't know what to do with them and they make us feel like we're bad people. We feel guilty, you know, we feel shame. We just don't really know how to handle it or what to do. So once you can identify that that feeling that you have is because one of you one of the things that makes you who you are is feeling threatened and you now have the power to make sure that you maintain your authenticity. It really makes you feel so much stronger about who you are. You know, if you can, going back to the example of my older daughter, you know, she realized I have a need to be appreciated and a need to be valued.

25:10And the way I explain it to a lot of people is whatever your core personality traits are, those are also the gifts that you bring to the world. It's who you are. So if you have, you know, if your core personality traits are control and new challenges and a need to be right, you're probably going to be a great CEO. If you're like my daughter who has a need to be appreciated and to be valued and to be, you know, to do something that's fun, you know, you are probably the kind of person that makes sure all your friends feel that way too. You're the person that's sending out care packages and remembering everyone's birthday and taking care of people.

25:54And I think when someone realizes what really makes up who they are and how they're wired, there's a lot of power and confidence that comes from that. And it really makes them want to further develop their gifts and share those with the world. So, Suzanne, you've been sharing a lot with the Fire Nation world for the last 25 minutes now. So, I really kind of want you to take a step back. give us like the big roundup takeaway that you wanna make sure that we really understand and how we can potentially apply this to help foster some incredible intimacy in our family and our relationships and our lives.

26:33And then of course, give us a great call to action about how we can become part of the NeuroBoot family and then we'll say goodbye. I love it. So what I really want to leave everyone with is that I believe far too many people are walking around with their heads down and their shoulders slumped because of feelings that they think come from other people or situations. But they really don't. Feelings come from inside us and they come from the way we interpret things. And then from that story, our mind tells us about a situation. And once we have the tools to navigate that, we have total control over it.

27:11You know, there's this, there's a great book that goes into this a little bit called The Brain Mechanic by Spencer Lord, and it's just, you know, how you interpret the things that happen in your life. But Neuroboot is designed to tap into triggers in the moment and really stop them in their tracks. So we want to handle that trigger right then and there and prevent it from turning into these heavy blankets of guilt and shame and depression that, you know, people down. So the app is going to help people track their moods, share their moods with their supporters, and take action steps. And it's that sharing with each other that really builds intimacy and really helps growth because, you know, just like my daughter and I, you know, what before was a fight over cleaning her room is now just a really fun thing that we laugh about and share together and that's what I really want people to gain from this.