Take Radical Ownership Of Your Emotions | Dr. Susan David

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation show.

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0:49Social contagion is where we basically pick up on other people's values or other people's emotions. And so, you know, there's some very beautiful epidemiological studies that, for instance, show that if someone in your social network gets divorced, as an example, even if you do not know the person, you are more likely to get divorced. OK, because this like divorce is almost like behaviorally normalized for you and you start to adopt it as something that's your own. It's like OK to do some other examples. imagine you get on an airplane and you are you know kind of vaguely trying to be healthy but it's not really connected at a deep level with you and your seat partner buys candy you are 70 percent more likely to buy candy okay and this might sound like oh well you know who cares it's just like a one-off thing but if you think about it what starts to happen is we can start to absorb the way other people live.

1:54Our next door neighbor drives a particular car. We want that car. We want that promotion. Like social media, like there's all of this thing that starts to create a context in which our behaviors aren't actually our behaviors. They are actually the behaviors of others. You know, oh, that person on social media has got that beautiful pair of jeans. I've never considered that I might want that pair of jeans, but now I've got to have them. So we start to absorb other people's behaviors. And we saw this very clearly in the pandemic. It's like one person is loading their shopping cart with like more toilet paper than they would ever use in their lives.

2:31And now everyone's doing it. So this is social contagion. This is because there's emotions in the world and there's behaviors in the world. And we are humans and we are social species and we start picking them up. I had this experience with this individual executive a couple of years ago. He worked for the United Nations. He was really involved in food security. Like he was bringing food to people who would otherwise not get it. And I had this conversation with this individual and he said to me that in order to do his job effectively, he needed to work with a particular government official in this country.

3:08and he could not stand this guy, okay? He was like, I cannot stand him. And so what was he doing? He's like, and I'm just avoiding his calls because I just can't deal. We had this conversation and the reason that that is rigid is because he would say to me, this man talks to me like my father used to talk to me and there is no ways I'm putting up with it. And the reason that it's rigid is because it either asks for a new childhood or for a new government official. Right, right, right, right. Okay? Neither of which are likely. Neither of which are likely. Maybe in 80 years or something. Correct, correct.

3:47This example, again, of data, not directives. Is it serving you to get what you want? Is it, like, I may be right, but is my response serving me? Is it bringing me closer to being the person, the loved one, to having the relationship, the life that I most want to have? Absolutely. Sometimes people can experience an emotion and that emotion turns into a feeling. In other words, we ascribe some kind of interpretation to it. And we know that say someone is feeling a little bit negative, not super negative, but a little bit negative. We know that that emotion actually impacts on their thinking and their decision making.

4:31When you are trying to do very creative work, if you're feeling more joyous, you are more likely to think big picture, creative, have lots of amazing ideas. Because again, when you're feeling more joyous, you have a perceptual widening. Therefore, you are able to kind of bring things into being that maybe didn't previously exist. and when you're in a more neutral to negative mood, you've got a perceptual narrowing. So imagine you're trying to write a book. This is why we say when you're trying to write a book, do the creative work when you're in one frame of mind and do the more editorial work when you're in another frame of mind.

5:13Because when you're in a neutral to negative mood, you are actually more likely to find errors. You are more likely to do better editing work. This is this example in the workplace where people say, oh, you know, you've just got to, people have got to be positive all the time, which is ridiculous and which creates a lack of psychological safety. But more than that, when you're pitching something to a client, being connected and generative is going to create more of an expansive receptiveness. But when you and your team are trying to figure out what could go wrong here, actually a neutral to negative mood actually supports you.

5:48When you look at how this plays out in organizations, a lot of leaders will say things like, you're on the bus, so you're off the us you know you with me or you against me and so what's bound up in that idea is that if you say something that is difficult or if you highlight that something might not be working out there's something wrong with you you know there's something wrong with you and so what happens people see a potential error that might happen and they push it aside they don't say anything because they don't want to be seen as negative so actually when you think about organizations and you think about like innovation innovation holds hands with failure collaboration holds hands with conflict and so So you don't actually get to have an organization that is agile without emotional agility, without an openness to all of these difficult emotions.

6:31So when you recognize that someone is saying, hey, I'm concerned about the strategy, what is that emotion signposting? The emotion might be signposting, not that the person's negative, but that the person actually cares about the outcome. They care about the client. They care about the customer. And so when you're a leader and you create the space for the lack of judgment about good or bad emotions, you move into a different way of being. That's cool. So there's some ways that we do this. The first is this area called emotion granularity. And it's this idea that very often when we're stuck in a difficult emotion, we use big labels to describe what we're feeling.

7:12We say, I'm stressed. Okay, I'm stressed is the most common one. We use these like big, broad brushstrokes. but there is a world of difference between stress and disappointed or stress and feeling unsupported stress and that knowing knowing feeling of i'm in the wrong job the wrong career this relationship isn't working out when you label something just as stress your body and your psychology doesn't actually know what to do with it because it feels immobilizing there's like such an enveloping that happens. And one of the ways you start stepping into your power is you want to start creating space between you and the emotion.

7:51You know, Viktor Frankl, between Stamines and Response, there is a space. How do you start creating the space? So you're not fused, you're stepping into. So one of the most profound ways we can do this is developing skills of emotion granularity. So emotion granularity is basically that instead of having this broad brushstroke, I feel stressed, starting to ask yourself, what are two other options? Like, I'm calling this thing stress, but what else is it? And when we start saying, oh, it's not stress, actually it's unsupported, what that already literally just in naming this thing, it starts to activate our understanding of the cause of the emotion, what we need to do in response to the emotion, and what scientists call the readiness potential in our brains, the part of our brains that starts to mobilize us for action, starts to get activated.

8:48And so emotional reality is really powerful. And I remember a couple of years ago, I was working with an executive and his big word was anger. He would say, I'm angry, I'm angry, I'm angry, I'm angry. And I sort of said, I'm like, what are two other things? What else could you be experiencing? And he started to say, actually, maybe I'm not angry. Maybe I'm fearful. okay i'm in a new role things are changing i think i'm fearful so you can see if you feel anger i'm angry and my team's angry the conversation is a very different one than i'm scared and my team is looking for opportunities to build trust you can see that the tone the experience of it is different and a couple of months later i was having a dinner with him and a group of his colleagues and his wife was there.

9:37And she said this particular strategy completely changed their relationship.

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10:47Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.

11:00Thank you.