How To Master Your Emotions And Build MASSIVE Resilience | Ed Mylett

25:29You will be one of one to five people in their entire life that made them feel this way. You're 32 years old. And how much that stood out from your dad. And if I said to you, who are the two or three people in your life, Scott, that have really believed in you? There's not 30. If you're lucky, there's two or three. For me, it's Mrs. Smith. Right. A couple of coaches I've had. And these are the people that I cherish in my life because they found something in me. If you're a person of faith, they found God in you. They found the gift in you. And so this is what great leaders do. They take the time, even if it's in brief, to say, well, I see this special in you.

26:05You're special because that makes me feel seen. Not you're awesome. You're incredible. Thanks for being here. Grateful for you. Nah, that's nothing. I see you. And let me tell you what I see. I see X, Y, and Z. And then they go, no, they will never leave you. They will be loyal forever. They will be talking about you on podcast 20 and 30 years later. Like I am with Mrs. Smith 45 years later. That's how deeply a leader can impact someone's life when they see the giftedness in them.

26:41Ed, next time, can you bring some passion and energy? Ed, the book is The Power of One More. And each of your chapters has this concept. One more identity. One more try. One more association. one more dream, one more question, one more goal, one more standard. Without question, my favorite chapter in the book is this idea of one more emotion. I don't wanna kinda congeal our time around this. I'm gonna read a passage from your book. People are a composite of a small handful of emotions they live with every day. These emotions create our emotional homes. Like any home, your emotional home may not be perfect, but it's comfortable.

27:28Riff on that. Well, we all have these three or four emotions. If you take a given week or month of your life, and I said to you, okay, there's a series of emotions you get no matter what the external is, right? So sometimes those emotions are joy, ecstasy, peace, passion, right? Comfort, or it could be anxiety, worry, fear, depression, anger, whatever it might be. But you have these three or four emotions you're going to get because our mind and our spirit it moves towards what it's most familiar with. So we create a home. Oftentimes, this emotional home was installed in us when we were defenseless as children.

28:03And we just carry it. So it's a different set of circumstances, a different set of results. But basically, we live in this home. And their emotions aren't negative or positive. You say, oh, fear, terrible emotion. Well, depends on the dosage of it. Fear can cause you to focus. Fear can cause you to prepare. So there's a healthy dose of it. I don't look at emotions as negative or positive. It's the abundance of it. But if you're living in anxiety, you live in fear, you live in worry, we all find a way to get those emotions no matter what in a given week. Things are great. Things are bad. If you're a warrior, you'll find a way to get you some worry.

28:35And even though it may not serve you, it's home for you. You're familiar. I'll give you an example, Scott. One of my emotional homes has been for years, even though I've worked on getting more peace, more bliss, more happiness, I've been intentional about getting these emotions. Human beings get what they want. We set a goal up, we're intentional about getting it, but do we really want the jet or the promotion or the money, or do we want how we think those things will make us feel? And so we keep having these goals about things and achievements and levels, but what we really want is how we think it'll make us feel.

29:08But what if we had those goals, but we also had intention about how those feelings are? So I want more peace. I want more passion. I want more joy. If we start to be intentional about the emotions, we can change them. I have this one that's been coming up up until about a year ago, and it's chaos. One of my emotional homes is chaos. And I would even brag, Scott, I function well under stress and chaos. I'm a warrior under stress and chaos, which was true. I'm familiar with it. I'm very functional in it. But I had to ask myself, do I like living in it? Is this something I want to have when I'm 60, 70?

29:45Did I really need it when I was 30? No, it's familiar so I get it. No matter how good things are going, Ed Milet finds a way to get a little chaos. Ed Milet finds a way to get a little worry because I like it. It's where I live. And the truth is it didn't serve me. Why? Why do I have chaos? I'm the son of an alcoholic. You grow up in an alcoholic household, there's chaos. Nothing stable. Who's coming home today? What's going to happen? Are we going to a restaurant? Is dad going to yell at somebody? Are we safe driving in the car? How are mom and dad getting along? Right. What happened at work?

30:17Chaos. And I became familiar with chaos and I carried it into my 40s and even probably truly, truly until I was about 50. So these emotional homes are where we live. And if we begin to become more intentional about the emotions we want, not the things and achievements we want, now we'll change our life. And what's crazy enough about it is when we get the emotions, the things become much easier to have also. Some of us are hooked on a false belief. Let me just finish with this, Scott. We think, I know I have it, but it's kind of part of my recipe to success and achievement. So this chaos thing, although it's really painful, it's one of the recipes to why I've produced such great results.

30:57Is that really true? Or have you done it in spite of it? And what I found out in my life is these emotions that don't serve me that I have regularly, I achieved in spite of them, not because of them. And so I take you through in the book strategies of how to create a new emotional home because our lives are our emotions. And if I could say one more little thing on that, it's not the events of our life that define us. It's the meaning we attach to the event. And that meaning creates an emotion. And if you're familiar with an emotion, you will start creating meanings to deliver that to you about everything that happens.

31:33Perfect example. You and I left right now. God forbid there was an accident out in front of my house. A family was killed in front of us. One of the worst possible things we could experience. Our emotion would be sadness, tragedy. My gosh, you know, pain. That same exact event Mother Teresa, if she were alive, witnessed. her belief system in her life was that the greatest honor of her life, Scott, was to be with someone when their soul leaves here and goes to heaven. Same exact event, different meaning. She'd get peace and joy from that situation. Believe it or not, it's true. You can look it up.

32:07That's an extreme example. So these emotions we have create meanings to events that don't serve us also. That's how important it is. I think it's the most profound chapter in the book because you talk about how we are our emotions. We are our emotions. And it stopped me in the book and I sat down and I talked about my emotional house and I wrote down what were my five or six emotions. Will you take us a step further, Ed, and maybe instruct those who are listening and watching how we can better declutter our emotions, how we can determine which ones should stay in our house and which ones serve us for what reasons.

32:46Take that a bit further, if you will. Yes. So I always ask myself, the things I want, why do I want them? What do I think they'll give me? This is the pathway to the emotions that my heart is seeking. So I want$10 million saved. Well, why? Because I think that'll make me feel safe. I'll never be broke again. And so now I know safety is an emotion that my heart is seeking. I've just made the conditions impossible to feel it. And so this is one of the ways we become really focused on the emotions that we want. The other thing in life is that I had this beautiful experience happen to me, brother, where I was very young.

33:22I won a contest to go to Hawaii and I'm running on the beach in the morning. It was before the sun was up and running towards me was this man. And God's just been so good to me. The man running towards me was bald. I could see him in the distance, sweaty, had like a hairy back. I'm like, oh, who's this guy? He's running towards me. and as he gets closer, I realize that it's Wayne Dyer, Dr. Wayne Dyer. Most of your audience would know who Wayne is. If you don't, they look him up, but he's one of the all-time great spiritual and thought leaders, personal development gurus of all time. He runs by me.

33:52It's so long ago, I got a Sony Walkman on, so does he, and I pull mine off. I'm listening to a cassette. I said, Dr. Dyer, you changed my life. And he turns back. He had a deep voice like me. He goes, well, I highly doubt that. I bet you changed your life. But how did I help you? And he walks towards me, Scott. And here I am, a young man. I end up sitting on the beach and watching the sun come up with Wayne Dyer for about an hour and a half. And at the end of that hour and a half, he said, Ed, I don't say this lightly. I think you're going to change the world. In fact, I know it. And I'm sure he had said that to other people.

34:24But to me, I was the only person he ever said that to. And he goes, and by the way, you're incredibly bright. Your ability to articulate your thoughts. He goes, I feel things, Ed, when you speak. I don't know what planet you're from, but it's not this planet. There's something when you speak. I feel something, and I'm right here with you. And I said, thank you. And he goes, and that's not why. Would you please do me a favor if you want to have happiness in your life? I said, tell me, please. He said, never attach your emotions or your happiness to your abilities or your achievements, because you'll be chasing them all your life.

34:55And when and if they fail, you'll be lost. He said, what if you attached your happiness and your emotions to your intentions? And it changed my life. And it was a gift to me at that time, because prior to that, just like you said with your dad, I thought love was when I achieved. If I had a home run, my dad said he loved me. If I got straight A's, I got affection from my family. So everything was attached to the external result I would produce. Then I'd let myself feel the emotion just for a little bit. Then I'd get back to my emotional home. sorry, I'm moving on your podcast here. He said, don't move.

35:28So he said, Ed, if you'll start to attach your bliss to your intentions, he said, Ed, you're going to change the world because you have such a good heart. You're such a good man because of the way you grew up. You care so deeply about people. It's special, Ed, and they feel things from you. Please, the rest of your life, attach your emotions to your intentions and you'll never be without the ones you want. And I've pretty much done that, brother. So I'll remind myself before a podcast like this, when I want some confidence and some strength in my emotions and some peace, I remind myself not of my ability to communicate or what I know, but my intention to serve people.

36:06When I close my eyes at night and I pray, I remind myself of my intent to make a difference, my intent to be a good man. And I feel that peace. And so I would remind everybody to get clear and intentional about the emotions you want, but to attach them to your intent, not your ability, not the external. And that was a life-changing, life-altering moment. What I didn't know is, of course, he was writing a book at that time called The Power of Intention, which is a book I would also recommend to people to read. Today's going to be special because the man that I have on the program, there is only one of in the world.

36:39Literally, he's one of a kind. And he is just one of my favorite people to listen to, to watch. I've gone to see him perform in person. He's a comedian. He's an entertainer. He's a life coach. He's an author. So JP Sears, thank you for being here, brother. Ed, thank you for having me on, brother. It is beyond an honor to be here. I'm a fan of yours. I have been since day one and I'm so grateful to now be a friend. So there's nowhere else I'd want to be. It's hard to interview you. I was prepping because I think you know this about you. It's hard to know when you're saying what you really think and when you're being funny sometimes.

37:20I have no idea. So speaking of that, let's start out there for a minute. Where's this style? So everybody has a style. I think that's usually an overused term. Sometimes it's just our authentic personality, but there's nobody like you and you're able to use humor, satire yet then the next second there's this deep lesson that I catch from you how did that start like did you start out as a life coach and then say I'm going to kind of hide this humorous side of me and then there was just this one day where you went I can't hide this anymore or that's a risk that you took in being that way for sure yeah you know my inner idiot had me hiding a great gift for many years because it was telling me it would be bad to let my gift out so yeah, I started off as a life coach.

38:11I had been doing life coaching, especially emotional healing coaching with people for 13 years before I put out my first comedy video. And during that time, I'd look at my natural sense of humor that had been very prolific in my personal life ever since I was a kid and still was. Yet, look at it and say, humor would be bad for business. I'd discredit you as a life coach, as a spiritual guy. You should be serious, JP. So I was doing meaningful work, yet excluding a lot of parts of me. I was giving people some authentic JP, but definitely not the whole pie of authenticity. And then five and a half years ago at this point, I started to betray that story, that it would be bad for business to let my humor out because I kept having these ideas come to me in flashes.

39:09And they were in the form of video ideas where I'm sharing my perspective through the language of comedy. Now, like anything poopy, I did my best to constipate those thoughts and ideas. I'd hold them down like, oh, I'm accidentally thinking of those exciting ideas. What's wrong with me? But eventually, like the itch became too great, I had to scratch it. So I made my first comedy video released in October 5th, 2014. And man, that woke something up inside of me. I mean, it woke up an expression of creativity that I had never known before. And it's like, it was my expression, you know, like Van Gogh has his paintings like that.

39:52Ooh, okay. Comedy on video and now stage, this is my expression. And on the inside, I just have to say this as well, what was happening on the inside was more important because it was me saying yes to a part of me that I judged to be defective enough that he would screw up my career. It's like I was on that first video. It was like an initiation where I was taking my inner child out of the basement where I locked him, reclaiming him and saying, not only do you have a place in my life, you are the gift in my life. And I think ever since then, my work doing conscious comedy is led by the five-year-old inner child in me in different ages.

40:41But it's like, dude, the more I'm just a kid sharing the truth as I know it, giving voice to what's not being said, the more things work out well for me. That's amazing. By the way, we're five minutes into this and I would already tell everybody, rewind and go back and watch that. Like that one phrase you use, brother, there about betraying that kind of BS story you tell yourself. And wow, it's funny that you say it the way you say it. everyone listening to that has that thing too, where there's this part of themselves they want to express, but there's this fear that if they do, it'll hurt other things they have.

41:16I remember when I started speaking, I was a one trick pony when I spoke, which was intensity. You know, a natural, easy emotion for me to get is intensity, or even maybe even a bordering on anger. And I was willing on stage to be vulnerable. Many of you might relate to this to express one of my emotions, almost like that was a safe emotion for me to express was anger. and a lot of you have that one or two emotions that you feel safe expressing, but there's all these other ones that are unsafe to express. And so on stage for me to be vulnerable or emotional or show my weaknesses or the things I fear, I would never go there as a speaker.

41:54And it was only when that itch finally got scratched that I became kind of my own self on stage. And then all of these other ideas and expressions started to come out of me when I started to betray that crappy story I was telling myself. So I love that about you. One thing about the other thing, JP, that I've heard you say, not a lot of people admit to, was that I got into coaching or personal development, self-help, whatever you want to be, thinking, I'm really going to teach this stuff to other people. Yeah. I can really help people. I'm a pretty good expressive person like you are. I'm like, I'm going to use my gift of expression and words and articulation to help people with all these things.

42:31But that was a lie. I really got into personal development to help heal and grow myself. And I've heard you say the same thing. I'm curious, do you even know what it was you were trying to heal or grow from that caused you to get into the space itself? Well, looking back, I do. But dude, in the moment, if you would have took a blood draw of 19 year old JP, you would have found very high arrogant levels. And, you know, I'm thinking like, dude, I'm gonna like work with people because I'm so strong and stable. And like, I just want to help the weak people. But I was constructing my sense of strength off of what I now call weakness.

43:14You know, at the time when I was 1920, I hadn't cried for eight years. And I thought that made me strong. I thought that meant I'm emotionally stable. But I'll never forget the very first workshop I took with a powerful mentor of mine, a guy named John McMullen runs an organization called Journeys of Wisdom. He's, to this day, he's 79 years young, one of the most playful people I know. But the afternoon of that first workshop, I cried for the first time in eight years. And it was, I was crying about stuff. It wasn't happening in that moment. It was stuff that happened 13 years before in my childhood, 14, 15 years before.

44:01All the emotions were still there. I was just numb to them. But the tears were coming out because this was a wise man. I was an ignorant man. So now looking back, I could realize one of the things I needed to reclaim was my emotions. I was so emotionally numb. And, you know, our late great friend Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, he died, I think, 1963. He's one of my favorite quotes of all time. He says, feelings are the language of the soul. And if that's half true, that meant I was dramatically disconnected from my soul. Life doesn't feel great. It doesn't feel fulfilling. It doesn't feel purposeful when you don't have your soul speaking to you through its language called emotions and feelings.

44:52And, you know, on top of that, I also had some more nuanced issues. I grew up being a rescuer. Let me sacrifice my needs, take care of mom and dad and my sister, make sure everybody's strong and stable because it feels like the world's falling apart around me. So let me just be Mr. Fix It. And not that any kid can, but I could have a sense of control that gave me the illusion of, oh, I'm fixing that. So it feels like I'm not going to die either. So man, and I want to give myself a little bit of credit. I've come a long way. And I have infinity yet to go with my healing and growth and connection to my emotional vulnerability and knowing who the hell I am as a person.

45:42I connect so much. And, um, I gotta tell you, uh, I think millions of people do this idea of numbness. You, you, you explained to me early on in my life too. I used to think, well, if I can't, if I don't feel this pain, then I'm actually probably not having it. Yeah. I think a lot of people express them. So I think, well, I've, you've got all these coping skills you built up. I remember I was at my, I'll tell you something personal. I was at my grandfather's funeral. I don't know what age I was. I was 15, 16 years old. And appropriately everybody in my family was crying at the funeral. And I remember going, why can't I cry?

46:23Like I loved him so much too. Right. But I can't, why can't I feel like they feel this isn't, this isn't good. This isn't healthy. I had learned all these skills like you did from coming from kind of dysfunctional family. I think you can share it a minute. Yours, I kind of found ways to not feel things. And so as I got older, I thought that meant I don't have any pain. Yeah. What I had done is masked it. Do you mind sharing a little bit? Like if you don't want to, it's OK. But why did you begin to build these skills of numbness? Was it a dysfunction in your family? Was it some particular event or what was it?

46:58You know, yes to all of that. I think in the most pervading pressure that caused me to cope in a way where I created psychological dissociation from my own emotions, and therefore I was numb, was like when I was younger, my parents would split apart. we're getting a divorce. Then a few months later, no, we're not anymore. A couple months later, now we're definitely getting a divorce. And they did that a lot. And like, at the time, I'm like, okay, just tell me what you're doing. I don't care. Like it didn't affect me. Yeah, looking at that, I can realize that was very influential. Having a child's world split apart.

47:47And how was your world split apart is a question we all have an answer to. For some people, it's trauma, it's abuse. For some people, it's family secrets, like mom drinks all the time, but we all act like she does. And for some of it's parents splitting apart. Other times, it's other hardships. Other times, we're bullied at school. You know, it's adversity we all have because we all need it. You can only be as strong as the adversity from which you overcame. Yet, this is my adversity. It feels like my world's splitting apart. And in order to feel like I'm keeping my world put together, I'm going to try to take care of mom and dad, keep them as happy as I can, which means my emotions don't have a place.

48:31Because I can't be unstable, because that'll make mom and dad care for me and give me their attention, but they need their attention on their own lives. So I appeared to be strong and stable and I thought I was. But man, numbness is temporary relief and long-term increased suffering. We just think, I know anytime we're in pain, like last night I threw my back out because I'm squatting with more weight relative to an old back injury that wasn't quite rehabbed, surprise. It's like, okay, I threw my back out, I racked the weight, I wish I could have felt numb, But I'm feeling the pain, and that's good.

49:16Because once we're numb for a while, we don't feel the pain, but also what else don't you feel? You know, like if you get anesthesia in the shoulder, you're not going to feel the surgeon's knife going in, but you're also not going to feel the Swedish massage. So when we're numb long enough, we don't actually, in my delusional opinion, And my experience is we don't have the feeling experience that we're alive. We can know we're alive. We can be in our head like, dude, like my IQ is high enough. I know I'm alive. Look, I have a pulse. That's cool. I know I'm alive. But that doesn't mean we feel alive.

49:57And man, people will do crazy things to escape numbness. Once they're psychologically dissociated from their emotions, I mean, some people will routinely overeat just so they can then feel like, cool, I feel so much shame because I overate. And that's a secondary emotion that they feel so they can feel something, but their core emotions are still numb or they'll abuse themselves with drugs, alcohol, sugar. Other times it's like always self-sabotaging themselves just so they can feel the thrill of something so they can feel something. But man, when we give ourselves the gift of reclaiming our heart, like you mentioned the the V word vulnerability, that's so challenging to do.

50:40It's way easier said than done. But when we can get fierce with our vulnerability, because we realize we're freaking worth it and we can not just be angry at and JP or numb JP, but we can be angry when it's appropriate. When it serves us, we can be the one that's crying the loudest at the funeral because that's what's most appropriate. which means we can be the one laughing the loudest at the comedy show which means we can also be the happiest because when we're numb we don't get any of that brother you're i gotta tell you now y 'all know so you see this dude on youtube or on instagram and i think oftentimes they have no idea because they see your normal brilliance i happen to think as funny as jp is as articulate as he is, you're now watching him in his giftedness zone.

51:34And you know, it's just a fact. And I got to tell you, like, you just said something so profound. I don't want to always restate things you say, but, you know, the gift of giving yourself the willingness to feel pain and not be numb. You know, the other side of that is you do experience more joy in those moments. If you're one of these people, you're like, why don't I enjoy the moments at a party where other people do or seeing someone in my family do something? Why doesn't it affect me like it does other people? These are things you need to evaluate. Are you also doing that on the other side?

52:50We'll see you next time.

53:03That was a great conversation. And if you want to hear the full interview, be sure to follow the Ed Milet show on Apple and Spotify. Links are in the show notes. Here's an excerpt I did with our next guest. I have to tell you, I don't know that I could have a more perfect person on my program today, given the times we find ourselves in. And this woman's remarkable. So first, I mean, the clinical part is that she's a trained psychologist at Harvard. She's written one of my favorite books of all time called Emotional Agility that we're going to talk a lot about today. But she's also a management thinker, a business thinker, a mental health expert.

53:40And she gave one of the great TED Talks that I've ever been given in the history of TED Talks. And so I'm a huge fan and it's an honor to finally meet her and share some time because I think she can help some of you persevere and even be more productive during these really difficult times. So Susan David, thank you for being here today. Welcome. Thank you for having me and being open to my message. I love your message. As you know, we were talking off camera. So let's start out with something basic. Emotional agility. I read that book in a day and a half, a while ago. And it's one of those books where most of my recollections have stayed very fresh.

54:15And so even preparing for this, it stayed with me because frankly, some of the things you said in that book made me rethink some of the things I teach. And I'm always open to growing and getting better. But why don't we start with a basis, what is emotional agility to begin with? Well, I'm gonna start with a very short definition and then I'll do it a little bit longer. Okay. The very short definition is that it's about being able to be healthy with yourself, with your psychology, your thoughts, your emotions, your stories, the stuff that's inside of you. And really emotional agility is the critical skills that help you to be a healthy human being.

54:53And why is this important? because how we ultimately deal with our inner worlds is everything, drives everything. It drives how we love, how we live, how we parent, how we come to our relationships, how we build our businesses and even our health behaviors. So it's about being healthy. But if I have to break it down a little bit more, it's about skills that enable us to be curious and learning with our emotions and our difficult experiences, to be compassionate with ourselves and to also have the courage to do what's difficult when it's aligned with what matters to us. Yeah. I also, it's beautifully said, and since you wrote the book, you should be able to say that the best, but I have to say that one of the things, and we'll dive into this a little bit later is, you know, the concept of being a little bit more agile and not rigid in your emotions, meaning to be able to be willing to embrace the ones that most people connotate as negative ones.

55:49that we don't always have to be chasing happiness. And I want to talk about that. But I picture this beautiful little five-year-old girl when I think of you and where this was sort of born from. And I'd like you to share that story. Your father seems like such a special man and had really, there's multiple defining moments that you talk about him. But this idea that we all have one, I heard you say that we all have one shared experience in our lives that we share the most, which is death and our thoughts of death. And I talk about this. It's amazing that we're just meeting now because I talk about this so much that I believe that conversation to some extent is going on in our minds almost all the time, the contemplation of that event.

56:27So would you take them back to the five-year-old you? Because that leads to this incredible, someday this book and these breakthroughs. So would you share that? This journey, this journey. So yes, I, as you can hear by my accent, I am not American or Australian. I grew up as a white South African in apartheid South Africa. And it was very much a country, a community that was committed to denial, you know, to not seeing the other. And as you'll see in my work, in my TED talk, this idea of seeing the self, seeing the other plays a really important part. So I recall when I was around five years old, when you are five, you start becoming aware of your own mortality.

57:09and I recall night after night finding my way into my parents' bed in between the two of them and I would say to my father, I'm worried that, you know, one of you isn't going to be here in the morning. I'm worried that something's going to happen and this is very normal. People as five-year-olds, they start becoming aware that, you know, that there is an end at some point. Wow. And so I'm lying between my parents and I'm saying to my father, promise me you'll never die. Promise me you'll never die. And my father, you know, could have done what so many of us with beautiful intentions do with our kids, which is to say, don't worry about it.

57:49Everything will be OK. I'll be around. My father didn't. He comforted me with soft pats and kisses, but he never lied. He didn't try to build some false buffer, some forced positivity between me and reality. What he said to me is, Susie, we all die and it's normal to be scared. And one of the things that you'll find is the capacity to, even in the face of fear, be courageous. so now Ed I want to fast forward 10 years when I'm having these conversations I don't know that 10 years later when I'm 15 my father will actually be diagnosed with terminal cancer and I recall my mother it was a Friday and I recall my mother coming and saying to me go say goodbye to dad we knew that that was his last day and I go into this room where my father's lying and his eyes are closed but I know that he knows that I'm there because I have always felt seen with him and I kiss him goodbye I tell him I love him and I then go off to school because my mother has with good intentions said to me you want to keep things as normal and routinized as possible and then this is where it kind of segues into I think what so many people's experiences which is I go off to school and my father dies and the months go and the seasons go and I'm this little 15 year old not dropping a grade trying to put on a brave face people ask me how I'm doing and I say to them like I'm okay I'm okay but you know it in truth we were struggling my mother had lost the love of her life she was raising three children we had financial difficulties and I started to spiral down fast and so then the last little strand of this which which then breaks into my career is I was spiraling and I was not doing well psychologically and one day we had this English teacher who handed out these blank notebooks to the class and she said write tell the truth write like no one's reading and it was such a remarkable experience because I felt like for the first time I was actually, instead of doing this forced positivity, the master of being okay, but inside I'm crumbling, actually I felt invited to show up to the authenticity of my experience.

1:00:18And this was revolutionary for me in a way that actually shaped my entire career. I started to become aware of and interested in what are the narratives that we have in society about positivity, positive emotions, negative emotions that sound good on the surface, but that are actually devastating to our capacity to be healthy with ourselves and also healthy human beings in the world so that we can deal with others' pain and the reality of a fragile and beautiful world. My gosh. So just even the concept of that an emotion is positive or negative, I've got to be honest with you, I've repeated that sentence thousands of times, kind of unconsciously.

1:01:02And I think when you wrote the book, obviously it made an impact on me, but probably little did you know that it may be required reading during a pandemic like this. And one thing you said there, I just want to say to the parents that more and more people that I know that have five and six and seven-year-olds have been telling me that their children have been telling them that they're concerned about death and that maybe they even go through a bout of unhappiness at that age for no explained reason. And I'm wondering now that you've said that, I sort of have a deeper understanding. But I want to ask you, these times we find ourselves in, there's racial reckoning and unrest happening and social justice going on.

1:01:40There's COVID. There's all this noise about the election, unemployment, stress, anxiety. There's not a whole lot of positive things on social media, certainly not in traditional media. And I'd like you to talk about, you know, I want people to consider this thought because I think it's so powerful that there are two types of emotions, I guess you would say, but how should someone deal with, think of emotions that aren't happiness, that aren't success, that aren't bliss, that are fear, anxiety, worry, maybe even depression. How would you, what would you say to people who are experiencing a lot of those emotions and maybe avoiding them, thinking they're negative.

1:02:23So yeah, and let's explore these narratives more because I think they're so powerful. But what I would say is two things. Number one emotions are teachers. okay even your most difficult emotions are teachers and what I mean by this is if you're feeling bored at work and you can be as busy as anything but still bored same old same old that emotion of boredom might be a signpost that you value more learning and growth and that you don't have enough of it if you have a difficult emotion of loneliness that loneliness might be signposting to you that even in a very busy household, because we all at home more than ever, that you value intimacy and connection and that you need more of it.

1:03:11So the most difficult emotions signpost the things that we care about. And when we push aside these difficulty motions, not only does it not work, not only does pushing aside difficulty motions actually contribute to lower levels of well-being, high levels of depression and anxiety, and lower chance of success than the things that you're trying to do. But pushing aside these difficult emotions stops us from navigating the world as it is, which is a world in which you might be feeling bored or lonely. And so it's stopping you from learning. So the two things that I would say is our emotions are teachers.

1:03:52And that's very different from a world that would have us believe that if we just think positive that we're going to manifest everything that we think. Don't you think? Oh, go ahead. Sorry. Go ahead. No, no. And then the second thing that I would say is emotions are teachers, but it's really important to also recognize that emotions are data. So they contain signposts of the things that we care about, but they're not directives. Just because I feel bad with, you know, my colleague in this business that I'm trying to grow doesn't mean I need to have it out with them. Just because I am feeling really frustrated with you know my partner, my spouse doesn't mean that I then need to leave the room.

1:04:39So our emotions are data not directives. Wow, I want you to hear this. This is like for me this could be a life breakthrough for a couple million people right now but I think this positive negative thing And again, it's just occurring to me as I was rethinking your work that I think we think happy people are successful people, meaning they should have high self-esteem. And I think we've actually attached in our lives that if I feel more anxiety, fear, or worry, that somehow I am less than these people who are experiencing these other emotions. Don't you think so? So this is exactly the issue that we are facing, which is we have this narrative that conflates happiness and success.

1:05:20And what happens is that when people feel normal, these are normal human experiences, they are normal to the extent that Charles Darwin wrote about emotions, including difficulty motions, as being core to our ability to adapt and thrive in the world. that when you experience difficulty motions, they help you to communicate with others, but they also help you to communicate with yourself in terms of how you should shift things, whether there's a dissonance between you and your values, whether you're feeling distant from what matters to you. And so what has happened is this, I think, just remarkably sad and a challenging experience that we have with emotions that I think is actually contributing to the extraordinary statistics that we have around depression and anxiety, which is that when people experience normal emotions, they are now seen as good or bad, positive or negative.

1:06:23So what do we then do? We then try to push them aside. We say things like, I'm unhappy in my job but at least I've got a job so I should just get on with it I you know need to put on a brave face there's this narrative of what I call the tyranny of positivity where even people who are dying of cancer are told to just be positive which takes them away from their experience and it what you spoke about earlier how do we possibly have conversations around racial justice and showing up to the pain of other people if we have a narrative that that pain is somehow weak what that then does is it creates a complete divide where only if you are being positive then are you allowed in my inner circle and if you're being negative then you're toxic and and you know I'm going to cut you off and so there's this very very difficult I actually don't believe that we are going to be able to heal society effectively.

1:07:31And I know that sounds like a very, you know, wide ranging proclamation, but I think that social healing comes about through our ability to be with difficult emotions more, our own difficult emotions and others, because internal pain always comes out. Right. So it's amazing. That's an amazing statement. I mean, And I hope that's an amazing statement because I must say to you, I think people also conflate what toxicity is. So people that experience a broad range of emotions aren't necessarily toxic. Toxic is someone who's intentionally out to hurt you, intentionally antagonistic towards you. That's somebody perhaps you want to remove from your life, but not somebody who experiences a broad range of emotions.

1:08:16In fact, they're more interesting people. And I think we attack. Don't you think so? I mean, if everyone says, hey, everything's great, happy. I mean, I like the contradiction. I actually often say I love my best friends aren't all very wealthy people by any means, but they're all pretty complex people. I love people that have a complexity of emotions, a complexity of personality. And I think we suppress our personality. I think we attach our self-esteem to having positive emotions. And when we have negative ones, we think are, we think we're less than people that we see celebrating all the time.

1:08:46But I wanted to ask you something specific was, and your work's helped me so much. I have a program I did a long time ago, Blissful Dissatisfaction. It basically says something similar. You just say a lot better than I do to what you were just describing. But I think there's one other reason we, and I want you to help people with this. I think the other reason we avoid these emotions that have been labeled as negative is that when we experience an emotion, typically it triggers a behavior in us. And oftentimes because we have this false belief, this emotion we're experiencing, somehow reduces our self-esteem.

1:09:20It typically triggers a negative pattern of behavior from us. And then we suppress the emotion even more. And so is there something someone can do that the unraveling doesn't start to happen? What I call the stacking, where the emotion triggers a behavior that we then want to avoid. Is there something someone can do strategically? Yes. Yes. So there are so many powerful strategies. These are things that people can learn. And, you know, what you spoke to earlier, which is so often when people are struggling, they'll say, I just want this to go away. I want this difficulty motion to go away because somehow there's this idea that difficulty motions point to the fact that we're not successful.

1:10:00And one of the things that I think about so much is, you know, if you think about the only people who never experienced disappointment, the frustration that comes with failure, the only people who never have their hearts broken. They are dead. They are dead. So thinking that you want to live life in a way that is just happy, that is a dead person's goal. We don't get to have a meaningful career or leave the world a better place or raise a family without stress and discomfort. You know, discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life. So to your question then, how do you start to capture this practically?

1:10:43The first thing that I would say is that often when people have difficult emotions, they start to engage in, as I mentioned, these type one emotions and type two emotions. The type one emotion is, I feel sad, I'm feeling stressed, I'm feeling angry, I'm feeling lonely, that's type one. Type two is when you start layering a judgment about whether you should or shouldn't have the emotion. I'm unhappy that I'm unhappy. You know, I'm so stressed about the fact that I'm stressed because I'm worried that being so stressed is gonna cause me to die prematurely or whatever it is. So a very important first part of emotional agility is, is quite simply, and it is actually a fairly simple choice, which is to end the struggle with your difficult emotions by dropping the rope.

1:11:33And what I mean by this is to move away from the space where you second guess or basically gaslight yourself as to whether you should or shouldn't be allowed to feel something and just notice that this is what you're feeling. And especially to try to notice that feeling with compassion. It's tough to be able to run a business or grow a business in a pandemic. I'm feeling anxious in the shadow of illness and death. It's normal to be anxious. So if you can adapt a level of compassion with yourself, that can be really powerful. And compassion is often thought of as being, oh, it's letting yourself off the hook.

1:12:18It's being weak. It's being lazy. But Ed, we've all been in restaurants and I look forward to the day when I can go into a restaurant again but we've all been in restaurants and i'll describe this and i and i can talk to more practical strategies as well but we've all been in a restaurant where we've seen a very beautiful interaction and that is you see a little toddler running away and exploring the restaurant and the toddler turns around looks sees the parent or the caregiver there giggles and runs more so in other words what they do is they keep turning back making sure that their parents are there and then they go and they explore more and explore more and explore more now what is it that is going on here one of the most beautiful psychologists john balby described how what the what parents are really doing in the situation is they are providing what is called a secure base for the child it's it's the fact that the child knows that if there is trouble they can come running back and they will be looked after.

1:13:25It's that that then allows them to explore, take risks, learn and grow. Now take the same idea and apply it to yourself. When you are kind to yourself, when you have your own back, when you know that even if things don't go well, you will still love yourself and hold yourself because there is a five-year-old in you that needs love and nurturance. When you do that what do you do you are basically creating a context in which you are able to take risks to put your hand up for a new opportunity and so it's that that's where this myth of self compassion which is self compassion is about being weak and lazy is so wrong people who are self compassionate are actually more likely to take risks, more likely to explore and grow and learn because they know if something goes wrong, they will be there for themselves.

1:14:26So that's one. Those are some strategies I can help with other very practical strategies if you like. So you let me know. So good. I'm just, have your own back. I've never heard anybody say that before. That's powerful. Just that in and of itself. I have to share with you. I want to tell my audiences too. We booked this interview quite a while ago. And so I was refreshing myself on your work during an interesting time for me. And I just want to share this with you because it helped me and I want to validate what you're saying. And then I'll ask you another question, but I just want to share this.

1:14:59So my dad's been sick for a very long time. He's had cancer and his health has deteriorated pretty substantially recently and some scary moments. About that same time, I had somebody that I care about very much let me down. Almost a form of, by the way, no one in my family, if everyone's watching this, but a friend of mine, kind of a form of betrayal and sort of reveal part of them that I was just shocked existed. And it was very hard on me. Normally, what I would do as an achiever, right, was be, I'm going to power through this. You know, I'm going to be better on the other side. I'm going to be stronger, especially men.

1:15:38I think oftentimes are wired to have to do this. And, um, I was actually prepping for this during that, even though it was a little bit ago. And I said, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to sit with these emotions and experience them. I have not done that in a long time. I even cried, um, which I very rarely cry. And, uh, I want to cry more now. I've actually cried. I actually She cried in front of a group too. And you know what I found on the other side of it was an unbelievable piece about things, an unbelievable comfort about everything will be okay. I learned some things about myself.

1:16:13And ironically, the strength that I wanted to find that I thought if I just kind of shoved this stuff to the side, I found through letting myself sit with these emotions and not feel less than because I had them. And I don't, people know my work. I'm not a mamzy, pamzy, foofy dude at all. I'm telling you that that made a huge difference for me. And I want you to address the part that did. Go ahead. I can see you want to jump in on that. No, no, no. It's beautiful. Continue and I'll add. Well, what I was careful of, and I want you to talk about this in your reply was, I didn't say I am. Yes. During it.

1:16:49I'd like you to talk about that and anything else that occurred to you when I was saying that. Yes. So firstly, you know, really what you are doing is the equivalent of what that teacher did, you know, write, tell the truth, write like no one's reading. And the false narrative that we have is that we will be stronger and better through positivity. But actually, we become stronger and better through going through and sitting and learning from the difficult emotion. we generate a sense of insight about ourselves, a sense of resilience, a sense of what you need to do in the situation. And I'll describe what this means, you know, from a practical perspective.

1:17:32The first is what you point to, which is I am. So when often we feel a difficult experience, like we will use language that basically says I am, okay? I am sad, I am angry, I am stressed. but think about what you are doing in your language what you are basically doing is saying i am all of me 100 of me is defined by the emotion but you aren't your emotion you are a person who has emotions but you aren't your emotion you also contain your wisdom your values your insight, your intention, your breathing, your groundedness, your love. There's so much that is beyond that single defining I am. So what I would say to listeners is if you're feeling that you are having a difficult emotion, it can be really powerful to create space between you and the emotion because of course when you say something like I am sad it's almost like the sadness is a cloud in the sky and you have become the cloud you know you have become the sad cloud but you are not the cloud you are the sky you are as every human being is capacious and and beautiful and complex and able enough to experience all of their emotions.

1:19:07You know, the sadness is one cloud in the sky, but there's other parts that we can bring. So what is a way that we can do this? The first is instead of saying, I am sad, I am angry, see if you can just label your thought, your emotion, your feeling, your story for what it is. And here's an example. I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad. I'm noticing that this is my I'm not good enough story I'm noticing the thought that I'm being undermined when you notice your thoughts your feelings your stories for what they are they are thoughts feelings and stories as I've mentioned earlier data not directives what you do is you open critical linguistic space but actually emotional psychological space so that other parts of you can come forward and Ed you know I'm sure you've you've brought up at some point in your podcast but I think it's beautiful to I think one of the most powerful ideas in human history is this idea that was first spoken to in this very particular way by Viktor Frankl between stimulus and response there is a space and in that space is our power to choose and in that choice lies our growth and our freedom when we are hooked by a difficult thought emotion and story then there's no space between stimulus and response i am sad i'm gonna have it out with this person i am angry i feel betrayed i'm gonna you know just ignore them now but when you start using this like i'm noticing that this is what i'm feeling what it does is it helps you to create that space between stimulus and response so that you can bring other parts of yourself into the space.

1:20:58And ultimately, instead of acting out of your emotions, you are moving into your values and being able to bring the best of who you are forward in the situation. So that's a practical example. I can give so many, but let me know if that's helpful. It's so helpful. A couple things occur to me. One, everyone listening to this, I think would love to wake up with your voice in their ear every morning. It's so, I know everyone's agreeing with me right now. It's so soothing and pleasing and it's easy to feel at peace and happy listening to you. Today is a special day for me. Like it's a surreal day because not only is the man to my left a Major League Baseball Hall of Famer.

1:21:39He's got 3000 hits. He had 388 one year. He's one of the all-time greats in Major League Baseball, but he's been one of the all-time most influential people in my life as a young man. He He became a mentor to me. I haven't seen him in decades, and now he's in my living room on my show. Everybody, this is Hall of Famer Rod Carew. Rod, thank you for being here, brother. Thanks for having me. Baseball's a different sport, and people that aren't fans of every sport, maybe this nuance isn't obvious to you, but like football, they're going to play 16, 18 games now. There's a game on a Sunday. We all work towards that Sunday.

1:22:13There's an event. We have it. Then there's a playoffs. Most sports are that way. Baseball is a grind. You're playing 162 games in a very short window of time, and there's a grind. You have to maintain an emotional level of control throughout a season. And most people, a lot of big league players even struggle with that. How did you maintain emotional control through slumps, through ups and downs, through a full season, and then through a career as long as yours as well? Well, you know, to me, it wasn't a job. To me, it was just a little boys game, like Campanella said. Little boys, baseball is a game little boys play.

1:22:53I never can tell you that I've gone through a slump where it has kind of knocked me off my heels and pushed me back. Because I remember I was 0, the longest streak I think I had as a hitter, I was 0 for 17. That was your longest slump? Yeah, the longest. Four games? I hate you so the 18th time I dropped a bunt down for a base hit made an adjustment I hit a high chopper didn't leave the infield for a base hit I dropped another bunt down for a base hit and I had another high chopper for a base hit not one of those balls left the infield but while I was going through this 0 for 17 i was hitting line drives and they were going right at somebody yeah and great lesson guy says how do you do that this is well you know i i work on my bunting so if i'm not getting hit swinging the bat i'm going to the next dimension i love that i think there's a lesson there rod and i always go back to like okay how does this apply to other things and that it's true in business we're always trying to hit these big home runs and if you feel like things are slipping just get some base hits get a sale get an account get some momentum get in early make extra phone calls do the extra email just lay the bunt down yeah get some momentum going because sometimes the slump you're in in business you're hitting line drives it's just not the time right it's just timing it's just things aren't it's not always you're doing something wrong maybe it's just bad timing right now keep making adjustments etc and you know the The difference about me and other players is I had the sixth tool.

1:24:40Which was? You know, they always say you have the five tools. The sixth tool was this. Your mind. I never let my mind get me in trouble. I stayed positive all the way. I knew, yeah, I'm going to make outs. You know, this is a game that three out of ten and you're successful. Yeah. You know, so I'm not going to worry about days that I don't get a hit. You know, like some guys, all of a sudden it's panic. You're right. You know, they panic. What am I doing wrong? Do you see something? No, you're just hitting the ball good, but you're hitting it right at somebody. Do you think the mental part of your game was the separator for you?

1:25:24Oh, yes, definitely. And I tell kids that today. I says, this is the most important tool. you can do everything else but if you can't control what's going on up here things are going to be tough one million percent by the way those of you listening audio he's pointing at his head and he's talking about how important the mental part of the game is maintaining emotional control not stacking worries and thoughts that get bigger than they need to be it's amazing to me i work with a lot of athletes on their mental game and people will ask me you know what are you really working with them when you're if it's a ufc fighter or a boxer or a golfer and i'll tell them often the main thing we work on is their confidence and people say to me there's no way confidence at that level of play yes confidence at that level of play is even fragile for many athletes as well that's true is that not true you're in dugouts with guys all the time oh geez yeah yeah and i listen to them talk it says hey dude he's pointing at his point to my head you know yeah 100 the mental side of the game.

1:26:26I want to ask you about the hardest part, I think probably of your life, and I could be wrong, but speaking about mental toughness, which is, so guys, this man goes through this heart transplant. He ends up getting the heart from a child he was kind to. It's just bananas. If he's on the second hole, he's gone. He reverts back to the guardian angels of Michelle. And at the time when Michelle was struggling with leukemia, it became another national story. This was not some secret thing. This was something that I was following that people all across the world you were getting letters and mail and all these other things I have to think that during that time your mental emotional control was tested the most that it's this is not a major league baseball game this is your little girl struggling and dying and and I'm sure in a great deal of pain and I don't want to be too personal about it but there are people right now listening to this that are going through their form of tragedy a business failure a divorce an illness and their family.

1:27:20I just lost my dad recently. What was that time like for you and what were the lessons and takeaways that you took from it? It was easy for me because she brought me into her fold. You know, she knew I didn't talk to the press much and she knew that it's going to be stretching the limit for me to be talking to a radio person or a writer or somebody about what she's going through. But when I was checking her into Children's Hospital in Orange County, all these kids were, there were like 10 kids out in the hallway kicking soccer balls. They have their poles and they're kicking soccer balls. And some of them were wiffle bats and all this stuff.

1:28:10And she just walks up to me and she taps me on my shoulder and she says, Daddy, you've got to start talking to the press see all these kids maybe we can save some of their lives so she came to me and told me and I says okay honey I promise you that from today on until the day I die I will give my full efforts towards helping kids and she says you promise me I says, I promise you. My gosh. You know, because I never spoke to the president. You know, I kind of stayed away from him. And when she asked me to do that, I says, I will. I promise you I will. You know, and for all the time she spent in the hospital, I remember that first day when she found out that she had leukemia, when the doctor told her.

1:29:08And she says, well, what do we do? doctor said oh try and clean it up and make you better she says okay let's go didn't cry nothing not for the time that she was in the hospital she did not cry one single day not one single day you know and the the week that she died i went down to the chapel and i asked god to take her. You did. I says, Father, please take her. She's suffering and I don't want her to suffer anymore. So would you take her and put her in your garden? You know, and he gave us another week with her. And then we found a four out of five cord blood that we were going to use to, instead of the marrow.

1:30:03She couldn't find anyone with a marrow to save her life. And when she was walking in that room, she said, Dad, I know that I'm not coming out of there alive. She said, come on. She said, God's going to be with you. She said, Dad, I'm not coming out of there alive, and I know that God's going to be with me, so I'm not going to worry. Here's a 19-year-old kid talking to me like that, to her dad. And I'm like, you're going to be okay. You're going to be okay. But she knew. When she went in that room, she knew she was going to die. Wow. You know? Just like you knew you weren't when you had your heart attack.

1:30:47Yeah. What an amazing story. You just honored her so well with your life because you've done, guys, if you just do a simple Google search, you'll see all the tireless thousands of hours Raj put into doing things for children and how you've honored her, you know, little one-on-one things, things at the stadium, like you were talking about. The thing you were doing the night before your heart attack was an extension of the promise that you made to her in the hospital. And you know, it's funny. I remember driving down the five freeway. I had gone to Washington and spoke in front of congress about raising funds for the nih you know and then i got a call my my agent called me and he says guess what they just passed a 50 million dollar bill for the kids that's crazy and i opened my sunroof i says honey thanks so much we did it again you know and um that's the way it was and even today some nights you know i'm i'm sitting at home and i don't don't have anything to do i get in my car i go for a drive and says pish how you doing i used to call her pish how you doing i says i'm hanging in there and i talked to her you really you know yeah i i do it many nights you know and um it makes me feel good yeah you know and and i'm sure she's saying I'm proud of you, dad.

1:32:21I'm proud of you. I'm sure she's doing what you're, what you're doing. We're doing it right now. Yeah. I'm proud of you. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. You changed my life. You know, and I, I, uh, I'm just, I, I just thank you. I was just telling this lady that off camera, that her works really made a profound impact on me, even in the last few days of my life. Her name is Thais Gibson. Today's conversation will be different than most anyone we've ever had on the show before. So Thais, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Ed, for having me. I'm really grateful to be here with you. Yeah.

1:32:52Basic question. You cover it in the book. By the way, thank you for this. It's just, I love real work that really makes a difference and really changes people. How do our emotions affect our actions? I know that's a general question, but it's actually part of the book as well. And I don't think most people step back and look at that, that not only the state you're in, but the emotional state you're in and how it's impacting the action. I know that's a broad question compared to the very specific place we just went. But I think when we get really granular, like we just did, it's time to kind of go to concept for a second as well to understand why that matters.

1:33:29So how do emotions affect behavior? Amazing question. So a neuroscientist named Antonio Damasio, I believe it was in 2008, actually discovered conclusively that every single action we take or decision we make is based on our emotional state. So some people are very quick to rationalize or justify through logic. They're like, I'm a logical thinker. I only make logical decisions. But the reality is at the tipping point, you're making an emotionally based decision. And then you're just quick to then rationalize it through logic. And so if we are not in control of how we feel, then we are not in control of the decisions that we're making.

1:34:03And I would make a really strong argument that when we go back to this topic of core fears, I often give people this acronym of BTEA, which is our belief patterns will create patterns of thought, which is then we'll create emotions and then actions will follow. So, so if I, for example, let's pretend I have this core wound, I'm not good enough. Well, that may, I might start thinking thoughts. Like I'm not interesting enough. I'm not smart enough. I'm not pretty enough, whatever it is, fill in the blanks enough. And then what will happen is how will I feel or emote according to that? Will I feel insecure or afraid or sad?

1:34:38And then we all go into our actions or coping mechanisms, right? We're not even in charge when somebody is feeling that way. What do they do? Do they go to their fridge and eat a whole bunch of junk food? Do they withdraw from the world and go into their shell? Do they become really big and tell everybody how amazing they are to try to overcompensate, but it feels arrogant. So really, if we're not being able to reprogram and identify these core beliefs or these old fears or wounds, then we're going to have havoc wreaked on our thought patterns throughout the day. Our emotional state, we're not in charge of.

1:35:12And then our actions, we're not even in charge of either. And when we go and change and recondition these old stories or belief patterns, everything else will follow how we think, how we feel about ourselves, and even our actions and behaviors will become healthier. This is the Ed Mylon Show.