Episode Transcript

Julia Landauer 0:04 Julia, hello everybody, and welcome back to another episode of if I'm honest with Julia Landauer, I hope you're having a nice day that you've had a good two weeks in the first episode of this season. I talked about how this season is going to focus on themes related to human performance, and I wanted to lean into human performance, because I love learning about how the brain and body work. I love pushing myself to excellence, and that was something I really enjoyed challenging myself with when I was an active race car driver from a teenager to in my 20s and early 30s, it was just really cool to build mental toughness, physical toughness and really find out what I'm capable of on that physical, mental performance level. And in general, I feel like I haven't been paying as much attention to human performance and learning about our bodies and minds, because I'm not a particularly active athlete anymore. I stay in shape, I exercise, I like doing all of that, but really trying to maximize my performance has not been something that I'm focusing on. But as I've grown up a little bit, and as I get into corporate and as I talk with friends and family, it's it's really clear that human performance and maximizing our potential and physically and mentally is really important, and so that's why I wanted to dig into that, specifically with a focus on the mental elements of human performance. And I want to jump into the mental side, because our minds are so, so powerful, both in a positive and a negative way. If we think about visualization, you can visualize things and really think about perfectly hitting your marks and doing everything right, and then that becomes a really beneficial tool for practice and preparation. But if you visualize doing negative things that can bite you in the butt, for example, as racers, if we think about driving into the wall and crashing, we are more likely to drive into the wall and crash. So it's really powerful to see that our minds can sway us in positive and negative directions. We can also look at self talk, right, how we have our internal dialog with ourselves. If that's negative nagging and bringing us down that's going to negatively impact our perspective on life, our outlook on life, whereas if we have positive self talk and we encourage ourselves and we're gracious with ourselves, we're more likely to see positive performance. And I think that that's a really powerful thing to keep in mind, and a reason why our brains and our minds and our mental abilities are so important to pay attention to, so that we can be in control and take responsibility of how we're viewing the world and how we're viewing ourselves. To kick it off, I want to talk about our emotions and emotional intelligence. This topic has sprung up more explicitly in my life over the last few weeks, and I've taken notes, and I've saved articles. And so that's what made me want to jump into this, because emotional regulation is something that I think far too few people were raised with, but yet is so critical. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to share some of the background that I've been thinking about with emotional intelligence, pull in a few articles that I've read, I will link everything in the episode description, and I'll give kind of my perspective and some of the research that I've seen onto the reasons why emotional intelligence is really important and why emotional intelligence can actually make us smarter. Historically, being quote, unquote, emotional was unequivocally a bad thing when talking about trying to be successful, right? If you're at work, you don't show emotion, you know, if you're you know, you're trying to climb the ladder, you know, don't show your weaknesses. Don't show your vulnerabilities. And weaknesses and vulnerabilities were associated with emotions. I think it was a particularly potent thing to think about if you were a woman versus a man. You know, women who were perceived as getting emotional and being sad or being warm and fuzzy or expressing themselves that way showed weakness in a way that wasn't as attributed to men. And interestingly, I don't think that there was the same discussion around men getting angry, which is something that has been portrayed in media a lot in literature, but anger, for whatever reason, is not attributed to being a super negative emotion, particularly in the context of men getting angry, but it's still bad if women get angry at work and then loud and angry, and it's not good. So anyway, I digress a little bit. But in general, the advice was to not let yourself get emotional, not to show that, quote, unquote, softer side of you, not to make big decisions when you get emotional. And that reacting emotionally can maybe give you tunnel vision, and so you won't see the big picture, etc, etc. So in general, there was this commonly held belief that we shouldn't let ourselves get emotional. Rather, we should muster through it, have a stiff upper lip and keep it together. And when I think about my upbringing, which was primarily in the 2000s as a older kid, young teenager, even things like going to therapy or people being really in depth about their emotions with their friends. You know, not all of that was discussed, and that was not that long ago. It was like 1015, years ago, right? So that was a commonly held belief. Now, as more and more research is coming out, and as we're experiencing these bigger cultural shifts, we are acknowledging that dealing with our emotions is extremely important, and it's extremely important for a number of reasons. First, if we're able to handle and go through our emotions, we're going to be more likely to get to the root of a problem that's causing those emotions to be able to come with a more reasonable solution. Dealing with our emotions also is likely to reduce interpersonal violence. It's likely to curb outbursts, and it's a key for helping us feel more in control of our day to day lives, especially when so much in the world is out of our control, right? We need to try to take back as much autonomy as we can, and really working through our emotions is a great way to do that. I recently read an op ed by David Brooks where he essentially says that we need emotions to make decisions, and that the commonly accepted research indicates that emotions actually can help us react to and process our situations, which this is a far departure from the idea that you should totally squash any emotions that you feel that so many of us live by for so long, and so it's likely the case that emotional intelligence actually leads to more rational thinking and better decision making. I want to read an excerpt from this David Brooks article, which, again, I will link that kind of outlines how the different emotions can frame our minds to look at a situation. He says, In other words, emotions slant the mind in one direction or another, depending on circumstances. Indignation helps us focus on injustice. Awe motivates us to feel small in the presence of grandeur and to be good to others. Euphoria puts us in a risk taking frame of mind. Happiness makes people more creative, more flexible in their thinking. Disgust primes us to reject immoral behavior. Fear helps amplify our senses and focus attention. Anxiety puts us in a pessimistic state of mind, less likely to take chances. Sadness improves memory, helps us make more accurate judgments, makes us clearer communicators and more attentive to fairness. When I read this and when I was thinking about it as how it related to my life, I definitively decided that we definitely need emotional self awareness, and that is something that we need to really help others find as well, because not only will it help us on our own personal journeys, but it will help others and those we love help us build better relationships. It's definitely a big old ripple effect, and one of the things I really like about this excerpt is that it drives home the fact that our minds and our emotions are so interconnected with the world around us, right our surroundings and our circumstances may lead us to feel a certain emotion, and by embracing that emotion, we're more likely to have a reaction and a thought process that's best suited for that situation, and then we're more likely to make a good decision. That is so cool. We are all connected in this really abstract but also very granular way. And that was just one of those kind of out of body experiences to think about that we really are one with nature and with what's around us. Now, one note I do have from this excerpt is that Brooks doesn't really address anger and how anger slants our minds, and we know that anger can be an aggressive and destructive emotion. So if I had to surmise, I'd say that anger overwhelms us and potentially makes us combative. And so maybe there are certain emotions where we have to preemptively know that we have to take a beat before reacting, and that our gut reaction in that moment to that situation with these emotions maybe is not what we should act on. So I would be super interested to know his follow up thoughts on like, how you deal with those more aggressive emotions, but he didn't write about them. So that's just my my own perspective.

So if we know that emotional intelligence is important, I would hope that in the future and in the years to come, we will continue to integrate emotional education into our. Schools and into our lives and in our media, because there's no doubt that not enough people are getting this kind of education. One, it's an abstract topic that maybe people don't know about. Two, it's something that's only recently been accepted as important, as opposed to being like fluffy and potentially a weakness. But since it is so important and it's important to learn how to recognize and process emotions in a healthy way, I did some more research as to some of the methods that are used to help kids, in particular, process their emotions, because as we're developing, our hormones and emotions are all over the place, and so learning how to regulate emotions earlier and how to use them to our advantage can be really beneficial for growing up. So one of the people who was referenced in this Op Ed was Marc Brackett, and he is a professor and director of the Yale Center for emotional intelligence. He's the author of permission to feel and he's the Co-creator of what's called the RULER Method. Now ruler, spelled R, U, L, E, R, is an evidence based approach to social emotional learning. It's been approved by the Collaborative for Academic social and emotional learning. It refers to five main emotional skills that are needed to increase personal well being, increase effective teaching and leadership, help with academic achievement, and it's specifically geared towards the classroom emotional climate. And ruler stands for recognize, understand, label, express and regulate, and so just like there are the stages of grief, there are these stages of dealing with emotions, recognize, understand what it is that you are feeling, understand how the symptoms you're feeling in your mind and your body are indicating what emotion you are feeling. Understand how it's making you feel, understand that it's an emotion. Understand that it is something that is going to impact you that has to be dealt with. Labeling the emotion as for what it is can help make it feel like something that's more tangible, that you're able to latch onto and work with. A very important step is to express that emotion and to not bottle it up. We now know that bottling up our emotions is a very, very bad thing, and so if we can express it, whether it's tears when you're sad or talking through something when you're anxious or smiling and laughing when you're happy, writing something down, somehow find a healthy way to express your emotion that hopefully does not cause harm to anybody else or yourself, but express it so that you can then move on to the last stage, which is to regulate the emotion. The more knowledgeable we are about our emotions and about how they make us feel and about how they make our minds react, the more in control we're going to be able to be to minimize any negative impact, maximize positive impact, and use them as tools, as opposed to letting them take over us in a way where we don't feel like we're in control anymore. So again, ruler stands for recognize, understand, label, express and regulate emotions, and I think it's a very clear and tangible way to to share with people around you, especially little kids, how to handle their emotions, so that they're not scary and so that we feel like we are working with our emotions rather than letting them happen to us. I now want to do a specific, deep dive into the importance of letting yourself feel the unhappy and uncomfortable emotions. I firmly believe in letting yourself deeply feel your feelings, because it is so important for processing, but it's also important to feel your feelings so that you can drive change. I think that most of us are most motivated to make an adjustment or to break a habit when we get to the point of feeling uncomfortable or unhappy. You know, positive emotions are really great too. Positive emotions help give us momentum and all of that, but more negative emotions really urge us to reassess our situations and try and force us to try to get to a place where we are happier or more content or more positive. And so uncomfortable emotions can be pivotal for our lives, and it was interesting to think about this in all this context this week, as I also came across an Instagram post from a guy named Dan Koe. I don't know if that's how you pronounce his last name, K, o, e, but I'll link this full post in the description. But he was also talking about the idea that it's okay to be really unhappy, because that's a motivating factor. And in this post, he titled it not for everyone, because I do think it is a, A more aggressive approach to take, and it will be really good for some people and maybe not for others. But I want to read the parts that really stood out to me as to why sitting in your discomfort can be really beneficial for your long term progress. He says sometimes you need to become so disgusted with yourself, your life or your situation that you can't help but make change. People tolerate things for too long and dig themselves into an inescapable hole of problems and responsibilities. As Malcolm X said, If you don't hate it, you will eventually tolerate it. He goes on to say, nobody else is going to do it for you. Most people don't care if you change. He says you're allowed to hate things. And the last thing that he ends on, that I think is a really great way to look at it, is focus 20% on the experiences you never want to live through again. Focus 80% on the potential you want to fulfill in your life to prevent yourself from drowning in hate, be harder on yourself but in a positive direction. I love that last line, be harder on yourself but in a positive direction. And what I really love about that is that we don't want to be hard on ourselves for the sake of being hard on hard on ourselves. That is a destructive way to go through life, that is not going to lead to contentness and joy and happiness, but it's an important step to be hard on ourselves if we're working towards the future and embracing those negative emotions can really help drive change. So again, to reiterate, I don't think that we want to be so deep in our feelings without a North Star goal that we get to the point of self destruction. I don't want us to be so hard on ourselves that we don't enjoy the wonderful things in our life. It's not a binary of either being really hard on yourself or being not so hard on yourself, but I think it's a state of mind that we can become more comfortable being in even though it is uncomfortable, right? And that's a theme that's gone through this podcast, the importance of being comfortable being uncomfortable, because that's where growth is, and that's where changes. And so to bring this kind of being hard on yourself and being in difficult emotions. Back to the larger emotional discussion. I do think it's important to lead an emotional life with the positive swings and the negative swings, because you can't have great positivity without some negativity as well. I personally love living with oscillating emotions. You know, high highs, low lows. It sucks sometimes, but it's magical and amazing other parts of the time. But I'm aware that plenty of people feel more comfortable living on a more even keeled emotional spectrum, not swinging too positively or too negatively, and I believe that this can work a lot of the time, that you can maintain a level of control over things and not get too emotionally invested and not have to deal with negative emotions. But it's unavoidable that we're going to have deeply negative emotions in our life. We are going to have unexpected grief. We are going to have unanticipated disappointment. We're going to have to experience things that are out of our control, that no matter how good we are at staying even keeled, the negative is going to creep up. And so I think letting go of the reins of trying to stay in control and to keep your emotions really orderly, because we won't be able to avoid negativity and negative emotions, we should lean into them and therefore also lean into the positive things. If we can embrace all of our emotions and dissect them and express them and figure out where they're coming from and work through them, I think we're going to have more complete and emotionally intelligent lives, which is good, not only for us, but for the people around us, and for the relationships we build and the way that we live amongst others, and hopefully that contributes to people getting along more, feeling more fulfilled in their lives, and feeling more in control when there's so much that's not in our control.

In summary, being emotionally in tune with yourself and working on emotional intelligence is important for our personal well being relationships, and our decision making and being in tune with how our situations are influencing our emotions, and then making decisions off of that can actually lead to better and more well rounded decisions, and embracing negative emotions can help us drive meaningful change. Again, I will be linking all of these sources in the description, and I hope that they are beneficial to you. I hope that they are useful. And I hope that you enjoyed this episode. If you think it would be helpful for someone in your life, I do hope that you'll share it with them. I would love to hear your feedback. Please feel free to leave a review or comment on my social media, as always. Thank you so much for letting me be honest with you, and I look forward to seeing you in two weeks.