Afford Anything - How to Not Let Your Feelings Hijack Your Decisions, with Mollie West Duffy

Episode Date: May 19, 2022

#381: Maybe you’re envious of your friend who bought Bitcoin in 2015 and held until it hit 7-figures. Maybe you’re anxious about rapidly rising home prices. Maybe you regret that you didn’t buy a rental property five years ago, because – at the time – you felt like prices had already risen so much (from 2012 to 2017) that you just couldn’t justify paying 2017’s pricetag. Our lives, finances and careers invoke many strong feelings. In today’s episode, Mollie West Duffy, the co-author of Big Feelings, shares strategies for not letting our feelings hijack our choices. Mollie and her co-author, Liz Fosslien, run an Instagram channel about emotional management with half a million followers. Fosslien is an economist and behavioral scientist whose work has been featured by The Economist, Freakonomics and NPR. Duffy is an organizational and leadership development expert who’s written for Harvard Business Review. They tackle relatable workplace issues like perfectionism, productivity guilt and Zoom fatigue, among much more. Enjoy! For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode381 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Real quick, before we start today's episode, there's a lot happening in the economy right now. Stock market tanking, crypto markets tanking, fears of a recession, runaway inflation. It's a scary time, but knowledge can get you through. So we've created a free guide to understanding inflation and recession, not predicting what's going to happen in the future, just understanding what's happening in the moment and what has happened historically. You can download this free guide at afford anything.com slash inflation. With that said, let's get today's show started. You can afford anything. You just can't afford everything. Every choice that you make is a trade-off against something else. And that doesn't just

apply to your money. That applies to any limited resource you need to manage, like your time, your focus, your energy, your attention, saying yes to anything. Results in trade-offs. And that opens up two questions. First, what do you value? What are your true priorities, not the priorities that society hands to you? What are yours? That's the first question and the second is how do you make wiser decisions based around the things that matter most? Answering those two questions is a lifetime practice and that's what this podcast is here to explore. My name is Paula Pan, I'm the host of the Afford Anything podcast and today, Molly West Duffy joins us to discuss how to make sure we are not hijacked by our emotions when we are

making critical decisions about our investments, our jobs, and our lives. Right now, you might see your investments tanking as the stock market declines, and it might be bringing up fear, anxiety, regret. You might be looking at other people, the choices that they've made, the jobs they've taken, the Bitcoin that they bought back in 2012, the rental properties they purchased three years ago, and you might be feeling envy, and then you look at current home prices, and you feel despair. These feelings arise as we invest, as we apply for jobs, as we buy rental properties, as we look at our retirement portfolios, lots of big feelings arise. How do we recognize them? And how do we not get carried away by them. That's what we are going to discuss today. Molly is the co-author

of a book called Big Feelings, which was just released a few weeks ago. She's written for Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, and many more. Her co-author, Liz Foslian, is an economist and a behavioral scientist who's been featured by The Economist, Freakonomics, NPR, and the New York times. The two of them together previously authored a book called No Hard Feelings, which was a major bestseller. And they run an Instagram channel with nearly half a million followers. Their channel uses illustrations to describe concepts from the world of behavioral science to illustrate how to handle things like productivity guilt and Zoom fatigue. In our upcoming conversation, we are going to discuss three common myths around uncertainty. We'll talk about how to recognize and prevent

burnout at work. We'll discuss how envy might be the key to figuring out what you want to do in your early retirement or in your second career. We'll talk about how to work through intrusive thoughts brought on by regret, such as regretting an investment that you might have made or that you didn't make that you missed out on. And we'll even tell you. We'll even talk about the six types of regret and how to handle each of those. Finally, we conclude with a discussion around post-traumatic growth. Here she is, Molly West Duffy. Hi, Molly. Hi. Thanks for having me. Thanks for taking the time to be here. Molly, you've written about seven big feelings. Before we jump into that discussion, my first question to you is, how is it that feelings impact

our decision-making and therefore permeate into the way that we handle our mom? our careers and our lives, even when we believe that we are being rational. So the research actually shows that emotions do affect pretty much everything that we do. So we can think of ourselves as rational beings and the way we make decisions, especially in relationship to work or financial matters, is being rational. But that's actually not true. And the research shows us that the emotions that we have do affect our decision making, whether that's the mood that we're in or the desires that we're feeling, all of those things

have emotions that are attached to them. And so our belief is that rather than pretending like they don't exist, how do we help harness emotions to help us make better decisions, whether that's work or home and live better lives? And that's true for both what we would typically consider as like positive emotions. So, you know, things like joy and excitement. And that's also true for negative emotions, things like anger, despair, sadness, envy, and I'd love to get into all of these. They really do affect our decision-making. And so when do we listen to them? When do we be aware of them and say, okay, I know that I'm feeling this, but I'm going to try to not have it affect my decision-making. But either way, having that awareness that we are listening to them,

whether or not we like it. There are some who would say, isn't it better to cast your emotions aside and be a completely rational actor, particularly when you're making choices about your career, your business, your investments, your finances. I would say in an ideal world, yes, of course, we would all like to do that when it comes to those financial career decisions. But the fact is that we can't do that. Like, that is what the research is saying is that we can never be completely rational or objective. And we can do is say, I recognize that I'm having an emotion about this. How do we can do it? How do I want to listen to it? Do I want to really rely on it or do I want to try to acknowledge that it's there and then say, let me come back and make this decision when I'm not feeling so much in the

throws of this emotion. But it's not something that's possible to do, which goes against a lot of what we've been taught about emotions. There was a school of thought that said we can be fully separate the left and the right brain. And the newer research on that says that that's not as possible as we once thought. Given that reality, what role does the recognition of emotion play in managing our daily lives? In managing our daily lives, one of the first things that we can do is start becoming what we call emotionally fluent. So we've heard a lot about emotional intelligence, which is the ability to recognize your own emotions, recognize emotions and others. And we think that that doesn't quite go far enough. That's a really good building block. but to actually be able to harness emotions in our daily lives in a way that can be helpful to us,

we need to recognize what is the emotion that we're feeling? And then what do we do about that? When do we communicate that emotion to others? When do we not? When do we use that emotion to make decisions? When do we not? So there's a lot of good research around people who are investing money and the effect of feeling, joy or frustration on the decisions that go around that.

when we're feeling joy and excitement, we tend to be overly optimistic about the decisions we're making. And that can be helpful, but sometimes that can be harmful in terms of we make rash decisions or we overly invest in things that we think are going to do well and don't end up doing well. Same thing. If we're feeling anger or frustration, we tend to be more negative about the decisions that we're making financially. And so maybe we're overly conservative. So what isn't right or wrong? It's just helpful to start to track your own patterns. So to be aware of what was the emotional state that I was in when I was making these decisions and how did that play out? It was either you or Liz, your co-author, who meticulously kept a spreadsheet for a week in which you documented every single activity.

And then on a scale of 1 to 10, your emotional, what was it, your level of joy or something when you were doing that activity? Tell us about that. Yeah, so that was Liz. Liz is an economist by background. And so this is very a Liz activity. This was in the context of understanding what parts of her work brought her the most satisfaction. And so this was her tracking, what was she doing at work? And the scale of one to ten, how was she feeling about that? And she realized that when she was in back-to-back meetings, those days were the worst. And she was consistently scoring really low. And on the days when she had free time to be, you know, be able to think and do deep work, her scores were higher. And so what that told her was,

okay, how can I design my day so that every day I have some ability to do deep work or I don't have back-to-back meetings. And, you know, I think this also plays into another thing we talk about in the book, which was a friend of a friend got promoted to leading a really big team, leading a team of like 200 people. And Liz felt a lot of envy of like, you know, I'm not leading a team of 200 people. This person is in the same stage of their career as I am. But because she had done this exercise, she remembered back and said, I hate being in back to back meetings. Being a manager of 200 people is all about being in back to back meetings. And so what is it actually that I'm envious of here? And it's more about the cachet or the recognition. And so she said, okay, instead of trying to apply for a job

where I'm going to be a manager of 200 people, how do I try to get what I need in terms of recognition? maybe I'm going to do some more public speaking events, that sort of thing. And that's a great example of how tracking your emotions at a micro level can help you gain deeper insight about yourself and what you really want. Yes, exactly. And so tracking that over time, she could both figure out the like day to day of how am I feeling in the day to day, but it's also helpful for bigger picture decisions that we're making to understand the emotional tenor of all of the moments that make up our days and then what makes meaning for us out of that. Right. Yeah, these are the pixels that make up the broader picture.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. You in your book describe seven big feelings, and they are uncertainty, comparison, anger, burnout, perfectionism, despair, and regret. I'd like to talk about all of those, but before we get into each feeling one by one, how did you choose these seven? So we knew we wanted to write about what we call big feelings or difficult emotions. And Liz and I had a long process of going back and forth and talking about which ones we felt were most salient both to us and to our readers in this moment. And which ones we felt like we could contribute to the conversation around. there's so many great books that have been written about things like grief, which definitely is a big emotion, but we felt that that was something that we weren't particularly experts in,

and there were great books that had already been written about those. So that's how we narrowed it down. But there's a mix of things that I think are heavier than others. So the chapter's about despair is a lot heavier. And we wanted to have that mix because I think depending on what you're going through, you know, you may not be going through despair, and that's totally fine, but you might be struggling with perfectionism, which is also a really big deal and can really make us feel bad day to day. So we wanted to have a mix of sort of like depth of emotions that we were covering. One of them, comparison, I never thought of as an emotion. Yes. And we tried to pick words that would immediately resonate. So comparison is really about envy, but we felt like that,

in the way that people talk and sort of the language that we use comparison might help people connect with it more than the word envy. That makes sense. There's a popular saying in the world of investing about fear and greed, but the problem with the construction of that statement is that no one ever sits down and thinks, I feel greedy. Right, right. Exactly. That's such a good example. So let's go through these one by one and let's start with uncertainty, which is something that probably all of us have felt, to some extent or another, throughout the pandemic and the ensuing aftermath. So with uncertainty, we have felt uncertainty at many points during our lives, and yet, you said in the last two years, there's been a period of radical uncertainty that is

much greater than I think many of us have experienced. And so we started this by thinking about, What are the emotions that we feel in moments of uncertainty? And there's two. One is anxiety and one is fear. And so anxiety is a word that we use when we feel like an uncertain outcome. A lot of different things could happen, whereas fear is about something really specific. So I'm afraid of giving a presentation because I'm afraid of public speaking. That's a very specific fear.

Anxiety is like 10 things could happen next week in the pandemic. I'm not sure what's going to happen and how it'll affect my life. And so anxiety can be a little bit more pernicious because our minds get caught in this cycle of what if this happens? What if this happens? What if this happens? I need to plan for all of these different things. And of course, we can never plan for all of these different things. And so that gets really exhausting. You mentioned three myths related to uncertainty. Can you cover those? Sure. So the first myth is that certainty is attainable. We feel like we should be able to reduce uncertainty to zero. That would be really nice. And yet that is never going to be possible. We thought previously that was more possible. And now we understand that there's a little bit of letting go of the control. The second is that anxiety accurately reflects risk. So there's often a mismatch between how stressed we feel about something and the likelihood that that will happen. You know, there's a lot of good research around. this that shows, you know, we'd rather be absolutely sure that something bad is going to happen

than deal with the uncertainty around it. So there was a study that showed people who had a 50% chance of receiving an electric shock were three times as stressed as people who had a 90% chance of getting the shock. Because it's like, if you just know pretty much that it's going to come, you're like, I can prepare for this. But if you don't know whether it's going to come, it's a lot more difficult. And then the third myth is that you just need to be more resilient. And this word resilience has popped up a lot. And we don't love that as a word. We think that there's a lot that people have been asked to deal with over the course of the pandemic that they shouldn't have been asked to deal with. And so we don't like using resilience as an excuse. What would be better than

the concept of resilience or what would be an alternative that you might suggest? You know, I think resilience can be helpful, but not when it's placed on you by someone else. So I as an individual I can strive for being resilient in my day-to-day life. But when we are being asked to be resilient for things that are beyond our control, I think that's the harmful piece. And so what should a person do if a person's feeling a lot of fear or anxiety or is in the grips of these negative emotions related to uncertainty? The first thing is to stop and sit with the uncertainty.

So a lot of us do something that psychologists call anxious fixing. which is where when we feel a lack of control and we feel discomfort with that, we try to do things. So we make a list and we say, okay, we're going to accomplish all these things. And then after getting all those things done, we still are sitting with the uncertainty of it. And so instead of making busyness the solution to your anxiety, stopping and sitting with it. And that may mean different things for different people. That might mean meditation. That might mean talking to a therapist or a friend about what you're feeling. There's an author, Sarah Wilson, who we love who writes something called the no bloody wonder letter to her anxiety, where she

journals about it and she says, you know, dear anxiety and acknowledges like, no wonder you're feeling anxious. I have all these things going on. So stopping can be helpful. Adopting the mantra, I am a person who is learning blank. You know, we feel like we need to know all the answers and have it all figured out and you can say to yourself, I'm a person who is learning to work from home with children during a global pandemic rather than, I can't do this. And it frames it as a learning journey for us. Right. Or more broadly, like I'm a person who's learning to not be so needy or to let go of my insecurities or to get more comfortable with taking on new risks in my life. Exactly. I'm a person who's learning how to be a manager of a remote team.

And then translating your anxiety into specific fears. So as I mentioned before, it's a lot easier to deal with specific fears because they are specific and they don't encompass 100 different possibilities. So saying to yourself, okay, what specifically am I worried about here and writing that down? What do I imagine could happen? how exactly would each of those scenarios look and feel like, and then answering each of those specific questions rather than staying on the hamster wheel of anxiety. And then, you know, separating what you can control from what you can't. So separating the withins from the

beyonds and figuring out what is within my control and for the things that are beyond your control, thinking about how to let go of those things. For the things that are within your control, we spoke with someone who has worked with NASA on organizational change. And one of the things she shared was that even at NASA, teams refer to plans as plans from which we deviate. And so it's like they know that even planning for a mission to space, things are going to change. And that the benefit of planning is doing the thinking around what you will do when something happens. And there's value in that. But we also have to let us. ourselves off the hook for when things change. And this can be really powerful for making financial

decisions or meeting with teams and just saying, like, yes, I did plan. I made this investment. Now the world has changed. Stock market has changed. Or my team was planning to do this thing. Now the organization is headed in a different direction and saying, but that doesn't mean the plan wasn't helpful. The plan was helpful, but we knew that we were going to deviate from it. And that concept, the withins versus the beyonds, that reminds me of the notion of internal locus of control, things inside of your locus of control versus things that are in your circle of concern, but outside of that locus of control. Exactly. Yeah, I like that phrase a lot. And then, you know, lastly, I think it's helpful for all of us, and I think especially for your listeners,

to design your life based on your tolerance for uncertainty. When we think about this from a, you know, financial investment perspective, we talk about this all the time, right? Which is like, how much risk do you want to take on when you're thinking about saving for retirement or making investments. But we can also apply that to our broader life. So understanding your uncertainty tolerance, which is going to differ from maybe your partner's uncertainty tolerance or your teammates' uncertainty tolerance. And we have an assessment that people can take on our website to figure that out. So I'm someone who does want quite a bit of stability in my life. And so how do I choose the career path that I'm in to add some stability to that. My husband is a comedian, which is very much not a

stable career path, but he's okay with that. And so I have to remind myself, like, let me not apply my own uncertainty tolerance to him. He has a separate uncertainty tolerance, so he can handle this. Excellent. Let's move to talking about comparison, which is perhaps a more approachable word than envy. On the topic of envy, what's the distinction between envy and jealousy? Yes. So we often use those two words interchangeably, but they do mean a slightly different thing. So envy is the desiring or idolizing other people's achievements or things they have like their wealth. So if you see a friend who's advancing in her career and you wish that you could do,

jealousy is seeing what someone else has and wishing that you had it instead of them. So when a coworker gets a promotion and you're like, I should have gotten that instead of that person. Or jealousy, we can also think about when you want to protect what you have from others. So if your significant others flirting with someone else and you want to protect that. What are some of the myths and misconceptions that people have about the notion of comparison? Yeah. The first myth is that if you just get off social media, you will never feel comparison.

You will never feel envy or jealousy. And I wish that was true. getting rid of social media can definitely help, but unless you live totally off the grid, you are always going to be able to find someone who is doing better than you, whether that's in your work life or your financial life or your home life. And so we need to understand when it's helpful to evaluate yourself against others and when it's not, because you constantly will have the opportunity to do that. The second myth is, you know, when you finally blank, you'll stop comparing yourself to others and just be happy. So I'll be happy when blank happens. And then I'm, you know, then I won't feel this feeling. But that's actually, you know, not true. We measure ourselves against what researchers call comparison targets. And the thing is that these shift over time. So we might get promoted. And suddenly all of the people who are our peers are a lot more accomplished. And so then we're comparing ourselves against them and what

they have. And so it's this moving target. The third is that the less you compare yourself to others, the better. And this is sort of counterintuitive. And it feels like I shouldn't compare myself against other people. But it might be that you're just not comparing yourself to the right people and finding people who you can compare yourself against you. So they call this like upwards and downwards comparison. And upwards comparison, we're looking at people who have more than us or we think are doing better. Downwards comparison, if we're looking at people who are not as well off as us or are not where we are. And most of the time, we're doing upwards comparison, but it can be helpful to compare yourself to a broader group of people because some of that will also be downwards comparison

reminding yourself, you know, well, I am doing well in this particular area compared to these particular people. So it isn't comparison itself that is the problem. It's the way that you then process that comparison. Exactly. We, we, as humans are designed to compare ourselves to others. This is part of evolution. And we're not the only ones. You know, monkeys do this as well. When they study monkeys, monkeys are looking around at like the snacks that other people are given to decide if their snacks are good enough. So this is, this is deeply embedded within us. And so again, it's what we talked about at the beginning of this call, which is let's recognize that because this is so deeply embedded in us,

how do we learn from that? Emotions can sometimes be counterproductive, but sometimes they can lead us in the right direction. And so, you know, comparison can help us make better decisions and understand what we want. Let's talk about how that happens. When we find ourselves comparing ourselves to others, how can we process that in a positive way? So listening to your strongest comparison triggers. Oftentimes we get into like mental gymnastics of like, okay, yes, I want what this person has. as, but I'm not going to think about that because that's not helpful for me to think about. But that is helpful for you to think about that because that can help you decode what you want. So we tell the story about the author Gretchen Rubin, who wrote the book, Happiness Project, and she was a lawyer. She had a very successful career as a lawyer. She was clerking for a Supreme Court justice doing great.

And she was reading through her law school's alumni magazine. She looked past all the people who were, you know, doing well in their law career. and then she landed on a section where someone was talking about the fact that they transitioned becoming a full-time writer from being a lawyer. And she was like, oh, my God, I'm so envious of this person. And she realized that she wanted to do that. And so that helped her take the leap, this feeling of like being so overcome by envy. She was like, I got to do something about this. So yeah, and I'm curious, have you ever had something like this happen in your career? There are certainly times where I've felt a healthy sense of competition, where I've seen a podcast or an email newsletter that has grown faster than mine or that has more enthusiastic and engaged community members than mine.

And I feel that sense of envy that then triggers me to work harder. It creates this, what I would call it, a healthy competitive drive. And the competition's only happening inside of my own head. but it motivates me to not be complacent. Absolutely. Yeah. So psychologists distinguish between benign envy and malicious envy. And benign envy is exactly what you just said, which is when we admire someone and we try to emulate them.

This person has a really great newsletter. How can I change my newsletter to, you know, be something like that? Or how can I think about my podcast marketing in a different way? Malicious envy is when we dislike or begrudge the other person for having what we want. which is not what you're doing. But if you had said, you know, this other podcast hosts, I hate them, you know, how dare they, that would be more malicious envy.

And that is when we perceive scarcity, so when we perceive that there's not enough podcast listeners to go around, and that's not a helpful feeling for us. We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors. The holidays are right around the corner, and if you're hosting, you're going to need to get prepared, Maybe you need bedding, sheets, linens. Maybe you need servware and cookware.

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especially being a female, and many of us are socialized to not express anger to feel like that's not an appropriate emotion to feel. Now, as we talked about, we're still going to feel it, right? Because even if we, people are like, that's not appropriate. Well, our brains don't really care. We're still going to feel it. It's unfortunate because anger can be really helpful. So getting mad can spark creativity. It can motivate you to advocate for yourself. It can help you perform better in competitive circumstances. You know, it can also be harmful if we let it turn into deep things that simmer and we deal with them. But when we deal with them, productively, anger can be really helpful. One of the first myths about anger is that you should suppress your anger. And many people have been told as

children that, you know, stop being angry. And we learn that anger can be associated with things that, like, are irrational. And in many situations, anger can help us take action. It can even be a form of compassion. We can feel anger about some sort of injustice in the world, and then we can do something about it. We often think that we are reliable judges of who is angry, and that is also a myth. So this is where our stereotypes and biases often cloud our judgment. When we look at, for example, male faces, they are often perceived to express more anger, even though the male and the female subjects and the experiments are experiencing the same level of anger. There's racial stereotypes about anger. And then the third myth is that venting makes you feel better. And so it can feel cathartic

to yell and scream. And we often see in the media like punching a hole in the wall. But that can actually escalate our anger rather than help diminish it. And so lashing out is a harmful habit. So you can express your emotion, but lashing out and just, yelling and screaming or doing something called chronic venting, which is where you just rehash the same problem without trying to solve it, makes you feel worse. And it also makes the people listening to you feel worse. Chronic venting, it seems, might just drive the same narrative into your head further, like deep in the groove that that narrative holds in your head. Yes, exactly. And we've all been there, you know, of like something's really bothering us. And

It's like we keep talking about it, but some other strategies for dealing with it rather than just rehashing it, you know, that can feel good, but it's trying to identify the need behind the anger. And so asking yourself, what triggered my anger? What are the feelings that are underneath my anger? A big emotion that comes underneath anger is fear, you know, especially in like a workplace context. If we get angry, it's probably because we are afraid. that someone did something that's going to make us look bad or affect a project that we worked on or have some consequence that we're afraid of dealing with. And so anger is what comes out. For women, often anger is a sign that you care.

And so when we get angry about something, it's like we care deeply about something and that something has been violated. And so anger comes out. And then trying to deal with those underlying issues of fear or figure. out how to protect what we care about can be helpful. You use the phrase amygdala hijack in your book, which I really like to describe an emotional response that's immediate and overwhelming, a trigger that's so strong that even though you know better, your raw emotions just take over and you do something you regret. Yeah. And again, we have all been here. It feels like something that,

we can't control because in the moment, it is really difficult to control. So when you have an amygdala hijack, it's like this part of your brain has taken over all of the other parts of your brain and it's driving. It's in the control seat. And I think sometimes that's going to happen, right? We just need to recognize when that happens. But I think we can all practice and get better about recognizing when you're in that moment and taking time to calm down and let the other parts of your brain take back over. One of the things that we recommend is having a phrase or having an action plan for what to do when you do feel that angry. You might say something like, I'm having a really strong reaction right now.

I need to take a second. And then that lets you excuse yourself from the conversation, whether that's at work or home and go calm down. And then knowing for you what's going to help you calm down. deep breath, taking a walk, you know, doing something to calm the nervous system down, taking a drink of water. And the more that this happens and the more that we're aware of it, the more that we can recognize that trigger and be like, okay, I'm about to yell right now and I don't want to yell. So what do I need to say to excuse myself and go calm down?

One other thing, when you are on the receiving end of an amygdala hijack for someone else, one of the things that you can do to help them is to say something in reverse like I recognize that you're having a strong emotion right now can we pick this up in a few minutes or tomorrow or whenever it is and give them that space because they may not be in a space to be able to give that to themselves and then later on and we learned this actually from one of our readers in a workshop she said she worked for a boss who would constantly yell at her she knew that that it wasn't about her, but she was on the receiving end of this anger. So what she did was she said to him, when you yell at me, I shut down and I'm not able to be productive or even listen to what you're saying.

So I know that this anger is not about me, but we need to figure out a better way for you to communicate because I'm not listening when you're doing this. And so that was sort of like, what's in it for this boss was like, this person isn't even listening to me. they're shutting down. That's not what I want when I'm communicating. Let's move to a topic that I'm sure many people listening can relate to burnout. How do you know when you're burned out? And what distinguishes burnout from just kind of being tired or being over it? One of the most pernicious things about burnout is that it affects our ability to know that we are burned out. So it can feel really good when you are,

are about to hit burnout because you're busy and you're accomplishing things and you're, you know, you're making progress and you're running on adrenaline. And then eventually that adrenaline runs out and that's when you crash. But when you're on that adrenaline, it can feel great. We want to recognize it early because once burnout hits, it can take weeks or even months to overcome. So after experiencing burnout, after our first book came out, it took me months to recover. And I had to have Liz take on a lot of our speaking engagements, which, you know, she generously did, but it took a long time and I had to really redesign my life after that. So picking up these early signs are really important.

And some of them are things like basic activities like going to the grocery store feel overwhelming. So you know, you're so burnt out during the week. And then you're like on the weekend, okay, I need to do the life things that I need to do. But I don't have any time or energy left to do them. You start to cut out activities that you know are good for you, like exercise or alone time. you're saying yes to things even though you know you're at capacity. And this is one that I feel like people may recognize, which is like getting sick and being forced to take time off sounds kind of nice. You're like, oh, yeah, that would be really nice just to lay on my couch for a week. Like, that's a bad sign.

So the clinical definition of burnout comes from a researcher named Christina Maslock. And she created this, it's called the Maslock burnout inventory in the 1980s. And it was first used in a healthcare setting. to help doctors and nurses. So she distinguishes between three different dimensions of burnout. The first is exhaustion, which is when you feel constantly depleted. And this is the one that when we say burnout, most people are experiencing or when we when we think about this, it's like, yeah, that's burnout to me. But there's two others. So the second is called cynicism when you feel detached from your job and the people around you. And then the third is ineffectiveness, which is that you feel you're never able to do a good enough job. Maybe you are doing a good enough job, but you feel like you are not

doing a good enough job. And so all three of these is actually the clinical definition of burnout. If you're feeling all three of these things, you are burnt out. Now, way we interpret this is like, if you're feeling extremely exhausted, you're probably burnt out in the way that we use that word. But it's helpful to get really specific about this because the answer or the solve for these three things is really different. If you're feeling ineffective, that's going to be a different set of things you need to do versus if you're feeling exhausted. And so what should you do if you're feeling ineffective versus feeling exhausted? So if you're feeling exhausted and overextended, a couple things. One is to learn to draw and respect to your own lines. One of my former colleagues gave me

the advice once you said, Molly, no one else at this organization is going to draw your lines for you. you have to draw them yourself, which is like, oh, it's so true. And as adults, we feel like we just want a parent or a spouse or a boss to draw our lines for us. And that's unfortunately not going to happen because you're the only one seeing everything on your plate. So it's your job to make that clear and to make those boundaries clear and asking yourself, if I say yes, what do I gain? If I do this, what will I not be able to do instead? And if I say, no, what's the worst thing that would happen? And so behind, we like to say behind every no is a deeper yes. And usually that yes is to yourself. I'm saying no to this because I'm saying yes to taking care of myself. And then it's really about

making sure that you are checking in with yourself and doing that on a repeated basis. So burnout is something that can sneak up on us. We might do a really good job in January of saying no to things. And then in February things start to creep back in. And so sort of like getting your cars oil changed where you have to have really honest meetings with yourself on like a monthly or a quarterly basis. I try to do this on a weekly basis where I look at my calendar and I say, what are the days that are going to be pretty awful to get through because of how my schedule has turned out? And what do I need to cancel or push back or say no to and being really strict with myself? Because I know that if I don't do that, I will start to inch into burnout.

out. And then if you're feeling ineffective, so thinking about why your effort doesn't feel worth it. So that might be something like, I'm working on a ton of long-term projects, but none of them I'm seeing any, you know, immediate progress with. And so I'm feeling really ineffective. So saying to yourself, how can I chunk those things out? Or what are three things that if I finish them this month, I would feel effective and focusing on those things. Does part of that come from focusing on effort rather than results? Yes, that's a great point. Yeah.

So thinking about effort and thinking about how can I be clear with myself about the effort that I'm making. So maybe it's saying I'll feel effective if I put in four hours of time on this project this week. Right. Which again goes back to staying inside of your locus of control. Yes, exactly. And then the third one, you know, if you're feeling disengaged, this has become a lot more common during the pandemic, where, you know, we don't feel connected to our colleagues as much as we used to. And so trying to figure out, well, how can I build in moments of connection?

We recommend to people to reach out to people if they're working remotely or hybrid and saying, hey, I haven't seen you in a while. I'd love to catch up even if that's just a 15-minute virtual coffee. Nine times out of 10, that person will say, oh, my God, I've thank you for reaching out. I've been meaning to do that or I love to do that. and it's just, you know, making the time to initiate and thinking about ways to reconnect with meaning in terms of the connection to what you do. So reconnecting with the purpose behind your work, oftentimes we don't feel as connected with that when we're not in the office, but trying to connect

with other people who you're serving within the organization or customers, clients, that sort of thing. You mentioned at the beginning of this that one of the signs of burnout is when you don't have energy to do even the most basic things, like go to the grocery store, how can a person start taking steps to pull themselves out of that abyss when coming up with the energy to do the most minor tasks feels daunting? I do really think that it starts with saying no and drawing boundaries and knowing that it's not going to be an overnight shift. So if I say no to a couple of things, probably there's going to be a long tale of like wrapping some of those things down or you know getting some of that time back it's not going to happen overnight but once you do get that time back making sure that you are first filling it

with time to recharge so in the book we talk about this as garbage time and this comes from brenne brown who is an author who we love when she was writing her most recent book she had her husband take her kids to get them out of the house for three days so she could focus on writing. She had missed a lot of her writing deadlines. And then when he came back, he was like, how did the writing go? And she said, well, I watched 36 episodes of Law and Order. He was like, well, that's not why I left. But then, on the Thursday of that week, after the weekend, she was really productive. And like, the writing just flowed out from her. And what she realized was she needed that time, that decompression time, to then be able to be productive. Oftentimes, I think we say to ourselves, okay, so I'm not able to do the things

that I need to on the weekend, like go grocery shopping and I need to, you know, force myself to do those things. Well, maybe what you need on the weekend is some garbage time. And that will help recalibrate your system, allow yourself to decompress. And then the following weekend, you can get some of those things on your to do list on. Let's move to the next big emotion, perfectionism. And I imagine perfectionism has probably a close tie with burnout. There's some overlapping Venn diagram circles there. Also, perfectionism is similar to comparison, not something I ever thought of as an emotion per se, rather as an attribute. So this is again us using a term that we felt like people would be able to connect with. So feeling perfectionism is something I think we've all, you know, we're like,

oh, yes, I have felt that. So that's a good. So that's a good. We're like, oh, yes, I have felt that. So that's a the reason that we decided to use that word. The emotion behind it is often fear. So fear of not doing well enough or of feeling like we're not measuring or that we're going to get fired if we don't do this. That's the deeper emotion. And yes, there absolutely is overlap between burnout and perfectionism. Perfectionism is constantly feeling like I'm not good enough. I could be doing more. do more to try to fill that gap, and then we can inch into burnout as well. So fear is the emotion behind both perfectionism and uncertainty, or one of the emotions? Yes.

One of the emotions, yeah. Uncertainty, we've got both anxiety and fear. Right. And perfectionism, we've got fear. One of the myths is that we feel like perfectionism always presents itself in this, like, oh, you're somebody who likes to color code your folders. and we don't identify with it if we're like, well, that's not me. Like, I'm not necessarily like type A, you know, really detail-oriented person.

But perfectionism is can also be like you're unable to shut off. So you can't step away from a project and you continue to work on it. There's no end to what good looks like. It can mean that you're a people pleaser. So you want to get validation from those around you. And then, you know, it feels like you need a. permission slip to see yourself as worthy. So it's like, well, once I get promoted, I will feel worthy. Or once I've saved this amount of money for retirement, I'll feel like I'm doing a good

enough job. But until then, you feel like shi about yourself. And that's not healthy. How can you tell if you're being a perfectionist, given that it doesn't always look like what we imagine. It doesn't look like the color-coded folders, file folders. How do you know if you're being a perfectionist versus you simply have a high standard that you hold yourself to? This can be context specific. So you might feel pressure to present perfectly in a social situation, but not feel that way in a job, or you might have job-based perfectionism and not your house is a mess, and that's fine. So it can be really hard to identify. I think one of the big signs is you never feel good about what you've done. And there's not something where it's like, yes, I can point to this

end goal or this milestone and like then after you hit that, you feel good. It's a big sign. What should a person do if they realize that they're struggling with perfectionism? Sometimes I think we feel that perfectionism serves us or helps us get things done. And that is one of the most destructive aspects of perfectionism. It's similar to burnout in that like in the feeling of it, it actually prevents us from dealing with it. So perfectionism, when we're feeling it, it prevents us from being kind to ourselves. So we fear that if we relax, we're going to become complacent and indulgent. So, you know, people feel like, well, if I, if I don't do this, I'm going to turn into a couch potato or I'm going to get fired. And I have to do this. So cutting yourself some

slack and it's starting to understand what it feels like to be a good enough manager or to do a good enough job and to recognize that there's the consequences of that are not going to cost you. Also, you know, digging into your perfectionist self narratives that you give yourself. So thinking about like, who would I be without the labels or the roles or saying, how would a friend describe me? and trying to internalize that a little bit to the labels that you give yourself. I'm guessing that, you know, a friend would not say the same thing. You know, you might say, I'm lazy. I don't think a friend would say that you're lazy.

And then replacing what we call avoidance goals with approach goals. So avoidance goals are preventing a negative. I don't want to get fired. Approach goals are achieving a positive. I want to get promoted in the next couple of years. and wanting to get promoted in the next couple of years, that can be a healthy goal. Many of us want that. It only becomes a problem when we're like, okay, once I reach that goal, nothing changes and I still don't feel good about myself. We definitely want to stop having avoidance goals.

So avoiding failure can be motivating, but it comes with a lot of stress and pressure and thinking instead about, okay, how do I turn this into an approach goal? And I really like the example that you gave in your book about the avoidance versus approach goal because you talked about how an avoidance goal could be wanting to avoid another person perceiving you in a certain way. Like, I don't want them to see me as weak or needy or messy or sloppy or lazy. That's an avoidance goal versus an approach goal is I want to be honest and vulnerable about who I am. Yes, it's reframing it versus what the other person's perception is. I don't want this person to think about me to. How do I want to?

What's my personal need here? And what can I do about that? Right. And also what do they want? Mm-hmm. And how can I meet that? Yeah. We'll return to the show in just a moment.

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From November 25th to December 2nd, your donation will be doubled. That means every dollar goes twice as far to help build a future where no one's seeking help is left behind. Donate today at camh.ca.ca. We've talked about five of the seven emotions so far. Uncertainty, comparison, anger, burnout, and perfectionism. there are two more remaining despair and regret. These are arguably the heaviest. Let's discuss despair. What is despair and how does it differ from depression? Despair wasn't actually clinically defined with a set of criteria until 2020. So it is newly defined and researchers now point to seven indicators of it. So it is feeling hopeless, having low self-esteem, feeling unloved, worrying frequently, loneliness, helplessness, and feeling sorry for oneself. So there is overlap between that and feeling major depression or generalized anxiety disorder. The three that are on

that list that do not overlap are loneliness, helplessness, and feeling sorry for oneself. So I think despair does involve feeling depressed and anxious, but either. you pile on feeling hopeless, lonely, and loved, sorry for yourself, and that pushes you into the intensity of despair. What characterizes despair? What does despair feel like? So despair feels like being deeply in a dark hole, not seeing any way out of that, isolating yourself from others. That's where the loneliness and the feeling sorry for oneself come in and feeling like there's nothing that you can do to help yourself, that helplessness aspect of it, not seeing any way out of it. And, you know, I think, again, depression can feel like this, but it is about the intensity of that.

Depression is a really broad term. And, you know, people can use the word depression when they're feeling like a little bit moody one day. And I think despair is a more intense version of depression. If you can relate to that description and you find yourself in a pit of despair, what are some things you can do to work through it? I also just want to bring up the caveat here that before I go into what to do about it, which is that for some people when they experience despair, myself included, that includes having suicidal thoughts. And that if you are feeling that to please reach out to someone for support. There is the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, and the phone number for that is 800-273-8255, and you can always make that phone call. It can also be

very helpful to reach out to a friend or a relative who you trust, even if you don't want to talk about it, just having someone present, whether that's in person or on the phone, can keep you from harming yourself. I think that's really important. before we talk about the rest of this. Thank you. So when we think about despair, the first thing to do is to think about just getting through the now. So despair can make time feel endless.

Getting through a day feels sometimes impossible. And so chunking time, instead of taking it day by day, let's take it hour by hour, trying to think about bringing in small moments of indulgence, whether that's watching TV or, you know, ice cream Sundays, hot showers, the piece of your brain that experiences pleasure hasn't been totally shut off when we experience despair. We may feel like it is, but it's still there somewhere.

And so finding ways to bring small moments of pleasure into your life can be the first place to start with that. And then setting yourself really small daily intention. So when you're feeling despair, there's so much that you wish we're going better. and it feels like in free fall where, you know, every day can be worse than the next. And these small acts can serve as a really important function. They put you back in the driver's seat. So when I was in the middle of feeling despair, I had one day where I went to the drugstore. And I tended to brush that aside.

And I was like, that's what I did today. I went to the drugstore, like compared to what I used to be able to do in a day, you know, go to work, take care of myself, take care of my family. that's nothing, you know, who am I kidding? But over the course of weeks and months, these actions start to add up. And then reaching out to people who get it. So part, again, one of the pernicious aspects of I talked with other emotions is that when we're in the middle of these big feelings, they can cloud our judgment and it can feel like I want to continue to isolate myself because that's what I need. I don't want to be around other people. But it can be really helpful to talk to

people, specifically people who get it or who have gone through things like this before. So that might mean an online support group or that might mean a friend or a family member who has experienced this emotion before or knows someone who has. And you get to decide whether or not the other person gets it. So you may have friends or family who are well-meaning and think that they understand, but you get to decide if they actually understand. So trying to bring ourselves out of isolation. a bit. Let's move to the last one, regret. And regret, I imagine, would apply to events, both big and small, major decisions, life-changing decisions that you made 15 years ago, and also the way that you talked to somebody or the way that you treated somebody last weekend. Yeah,

it encompasses a lot of different types of regret, small and large, as you mentioned. And I think the first key piece of dealing with regret is allowing yourself to grieve the choice that you didn't make or the thing that you didn't say and sitting with it. So this is just like all big feelings. Like sit with that heartache for a little while. People feel, you know, when they lose something that they can never recover time, their youth, the chance to say, I love you or I'm sorry before someone leaves this world. You know, there's not going to be a way to feel good about that. And that's okay. So sitting with that and getting to acceptance. with it. I think, you know, we can talk more specifically. There's things to do about, you know,

different varieties of regret. A lot of it is saying, you know, what options do I have now? So moving into the moment and some of those options might be going back and saying something that you wish that you would have said or saying, okay, I didn't make that choice and this is where I'm at in my career or in my financial life. But what can I do about it? now. It can be helpful in some instances to look back and try to dissect the regret and say, you know, why did I make that decision in the moment? What kept me from acting sooner? What can I learn from that? That really depends on what's going on because in some cases, there was nothing that you could have done differently. And so there isn't a lot to learn or in some cases,

what you knew then isn't what you knew now. And so not beating yourself up over. In other cases, if there's like a pattern of you making the same types of decisions that lead to regret, it can be helpful to reflect on them. How do you dissect that, reflect on that without succumbing to self-flagellation? Yeah, so I think a big piece of this is recognizing that you were in that moment trying to do the best thing for yourself in most instances. In some cases, there's some self-sabotage going on, which is sort of a different question. But in most instances, you didn't have the information that you needed or you were dealing with a bigger emotion like anger or something and you were acting on that emotion. And so cutting yourself a little bit of slack and then not ruminating in that.

So then, you know, reflecting on that and then moving to what I said, what options do I have now? You know, what are the things that I can do to reframe the situation to get closure? What are the actions that I can take? You mentioned there are different varieties of regret. What are those different varieties? So we categorize them into six different buckets. And sometimes regrets can cross buckets. So you might have a couple of these.

The first is hindsight regret. And that is you made the best decision that you could then, but you know more now. So hindsight is 2020. there's alternate self-regrets, which is regret that comes from wanting to live a different life, feeling like, oh, you know, I've lost time and I could have been this other person. Rushing in regrets, you made a decision that you weren't sure about at the time or you weren't ready to make and you rushed in to make that decision. On the other hand, there's dragging out regrets, which is where you waffled for a long time,

even though you sort of knew what you didn't do and you didn't make the decision in time. And then there's ignoring your instincts regret. So you had a gut feeling in the moment that you weren't making the right decision, but you acquiesced to other people's needs. And then the last is self-sabotage regret. You made a decision that you knew wasn't good for you, but you self-sabotaged. Usually we do this to try to protect ourselves from feeling another emotion,

like rejection, loneliness, vulnerability. And the thought of being rejected is so bad. that we self-sabotage in the moment. We've discussed some very heavy topics. To close out, can you tell us about how dealing with this can lead to post-traumatic growth? Post-traumatic growth is something that psychologists call when we endure a period of great struggle, we've gone through a lot of big emotions. We can emerge with a deeper appreciation for the good things in life and sometimes even a newfound sense of self or sense of

meaning. Now, no one wants to go through big feelings. A lot of times we say, well, I would rather have not had to go through that than to have emerged with a greater sense of meaning. And we totally get that. We feel the same way. But this is a silver lining after all that you've had to go through. There can be a little bit of an upside. So post-traumatic growth, PTG is what they call it, affects people in terms of you can have a greater appreciation for life, you can feel closer to your loved ones, you can gain confidence in your ability to handle challenges, you can experience a deeper sense of peace, and you can see more possibilities for themselves. So, you know, in other words, our hardest moments can often change us for the better. Well, thank you for spending

this time with us. Where can people find you if they'd like to know more about you and your work? Thank you. We are on Twitter and Instagram at Liz and Molly. And our website is liz and molly.com. Thank you, Molly. What are the key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Here are seven. We're going to go through each of the big feelings and recap what we talked about.

Number one. Uncertainty is a fact of life, but it often triggers both anxiety, which is general unease because of an uncertain outcome, and also fear, which is the belief that some specific negative outcome will happen. So anxiety is general. Fear is specific. Anxiety accurately reflects risk. So there's often a mismatch between how stressed we feel about something and the likelihood that that will happen. You know, there's a lot of good research around this that shows, you know, we'd rather be absolutely sure that something bad is going to happen than deal with the uncertainty around it. So there was a study that showed people who had a 50%

chance of receiving an electric shock were three times as stressed as people who had a 90% chance of getting the shock. Often, people erroneously believe that certainty is attainable. They believe they're more in control than they are. People erroneously believe that their level of anxiety about a situation accurately reflects the risk of that situation, but oftentimes your anxiety about a problem can be much greater than the actual size of the problem. And also, people often erroneously think,

well, I just need to be more resilient. If only I were a more gritty, resilient person. But that, if only I were, type of thinking might make it worse. Because that's just another thing to beat yourself up about. Instead, a reframe of, I'm a learning to blank, can be constructive. learning to stop and sit with the anxiety,

to not use it as a trigger to instantly jump into action mode, but rather to just sit down with it and feel it for 90 seconds. That can be helpful. Adopting a growth mindset in which we see uncertain territory as an opportunity to learn something new can be a way to work through some of the negative emotions that we're feeling. To make a plan from which you'll deviate and to stay inside of your internal locus of control.

these are all tools at our disposal to deal with uncertainty. And certainly, if you are making a career change or you're investing or you're buying a rental property, you're going to be grappling with a ton of uncertainty. So all of these are tools that can help you emotionally process the realities of what it means to buy that first rental property or to make that midlife career change or to take that early retirement or to put more money into the stock. market than you ever even imagined having and then to watch it plummet during the next downturn. These are all tools that can help shoulder that. So that's key takeaway number one, both misconceptions around and tactics to deal with,

the feeling of uncertainty. Key takeaway number two. Comparison. It's natural. It's instinctual to compare ourselves to others. and it's a myth to think, number one, that you can stop it or that the less you compare yourself to others, the better, because the reality is comparison is deeply embedded into what it is to be human and benign comparison where you use comparison as a source of inspiration and motivation rather than as a source of resentment can be motivating. We measure ourselves against what researchers call comparison targets. And the thing is that these shift over time.

So we might get promoted. And suddenly all of the people who are our peers are a lot more accomplished. And so then we're comparing ourselves against them and what they have. And so it's this moving target. The key is to make sure the envy does not become malicious, to listen to your strongest triggers, and to use them as guideposts to figure out what you actually value. Molly told the story of a previous guest on this podcast, Gretchen Rubin,

who was a very successful lawyer, and she noticed that she was envious of someone who went to her same law school, who later became a full-time author. And when she noticed that envy, she used it as a guidepost to realize she needed to make a career change, leave the law profession, and pursue her long-bearable. dream of becoming an author. And of course, now she is a very successful New York Times best-selling

author. She's been a previous guest on this podcast. She has a fantastic community, many wonderful books. She's created a lot of value in this world and improved the lives of millions of her fans. And it all started with an exercise in benign envy. Self-aware comparison. And so that is key takeaway number two. Harness comparison into something productive. Key takeaway number three. It's okay to be angry. It's a myth that you should suppress your anger because it can be useful and motivating. It's also a myth that we're reliable judges of who is angry and that venting your anger can make you feel better.

Sometimes chronic venting, which is when you rehash the same problems without trying to understand or solve them, can make things worse. It can deepen that groove. and lashing out might run the risk of doing lasting damage to your relationships or creating harmful habits for your own health. Instead, you can identify what triggers your anger. Is it feeling like you aren't being heard? Is it being interrupted? Is it when someone does something that affects you and they do that without your permission

or without disclosing it? What are the things that make you angry? Identify those triggers and then start communicating. it in ways that are measured. Here's what happened. Here's the effect it had on me. Here's how it made me feel. And then identify the needs behind that anger.

What are the feelings underneath it? What do you need in order to be okay? What steps can you take towards that? When you have an amygdala hijack, it's like this part of your brain is taken over all of the other parts of your brain and it's driving. It's in the control seat. Sometimes that's going to happen, right? We just need to recognize when that happens.

But I think we can all practice and get better about recognizing when you're in that moment and taking time to calm down and let the other parts of your brain take back over. One of the things that we recommend is having a phrase or having an action plan for what to do when you do feel that angry. You might say something like, I'm having a really strong reaction right now. I need to take a second. And then that lets you excuse yourself from the conversation, whether that's at work or home and go calm down. And then knowing for you what's going to help you calm down, deep breath, taking a walk, doing something to calm the nervous system down, taking a drink of water. And the more that this happens and the more that we're aware of it, the more that we can recognize that trigger and be like, okay, I'm about to yell right now. And I don't want to yell.

So what do I need to say to excuse myself and go call? calm down. And so that's key takeaway number three. Channel your anger strategically. Listen to it and pinpoint the needs underneath it. Key takeaway number four, burnout. Burnout is not obvious. It's pernicious. It can drain your energy, which can then create an additional obstacle for solving that burnout. And there are three dimensions of burnout, exhaustion, cynicism, and ineffectiveness. So the clinical definition of burnout comes from a researcher named Christina Maslock. She distinguishes between three different dimensions of burnout. The first is exhaustion, which is when you feel constantly depleted. And this is the one that when we say burnout, most people are experiencing or when we think about this, it's like, yeah, that's burnout to me. But there's two others. So the second is called cynicism when you feel detached from your job and the people around you. And then the third is ineffectiveness, which is that you feel you're never able to do a good enough job. Maybe you are doing a good enough job, but you feel like you are not doing a good enough job.

And so all three of these is actually the clinical definition of burnout. If you're feeling all three of these things, you are burnt out. Now, way we interpret this is like if you're feeling extremely exhausted, you're probably burnt out in the way that we use that word. But it's helpful to get really specific about this because the answer or the solve for these three things is really different. You may feel constantly depleted, you may feel detached from your job,

you may feel like you're never able to do a good enough job. And so if you are feeling burnout, start dialing it back. Say no. Because as Molly says, behind every no is a deeper yes. Learn to draw boundaries, learn to trust your gut,

be comfortable living at 80%, swap, being reactive with being proactive, set reasonable expectations, communicate your needs. These are all ways that you can grapple with burnout. And once you let your brain relax, once you repair that health of your brain, your subconscious mind will be able to come up

with more creative ideas and do better work and overall express a more optimal you. So that's key takeaway number four. Be proactive about addressing burnout because the longer you let it fester, the more it drains your energy, thereby harming your ability to address it. Key takeaway number five, face up to your perfectionism. Perfectionism is an unrealistic drive to be flawless, combined with intense negative self-talk. It is self-flagellation and shame and guilt and self-hate combined with,

this deep-rooted sense of unworthiness and needing to prove yourself. And it causes you to catastrophize minor mistakes, to spiral about your regrets, and to constantly feel like you could be doing more. It causes you to never feel good about what you've done, or to become a people-pleaser, or to keep thinking that you need to achieve the next milestone or goal in order to be seen as worthy. We're replacing what we call avoidance goals with approach goals.

Avoidance goals are preventing a negative. I don't want to get fired. Approach goals are achieving a positive. I want to get promoted in the next couple of years. And wanting to get promoted in the next couple of years, that can be a healthy goal. Many of us want that. It only becomes a problem when we're like, okay, once I reach that goal, nothing changes and I still don't feel good about myself.

And it doesn't necessarily present in every arena of your life. life, you might be a perfectionist in some arenas, but not all. If you are facing perfectionism, first, let go of the idea that it serves you. It does not. Your success is despite your perfectionism, not because of it. Second, explore where you learned that you weren't good enough, and untangle yourself from these perfectionist self-narratives, and replace your avoidance goals with approach goals. instead of trying to avoid the things you fear, because perfectionism is ultimately about fear, instead approach the things you want

and recognize when good enough is good enough. So that's key takeaway number five around how to grapple with perfectionism. Key takeaway number six, I'll start with a quote by Sartra, Life begins on the other side of despair. Now before we talk about despair, as Molly said, if you're experiencing suicidal thoughts,

please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. Despair, as Molly talked about, became clinically defined in 2020, and seven indicators of it are feeling hopeless, having low self-esteem, feeling unloved, worrying frequently, loneliness, helplessness, and feeling sorry for yourself. despair feels like being deeply in a dark hole, not seeing any way out of that, isolating yourself from others. That's where the loneliness and the feeling sorry for oneself come in and feeling like there's nothing that you can do to help yourself, that helplessness aspect of it, not seeing any way out of it. And people will often erroneously say, oh, just focus on something else and you'll be fine. or your life is too good for you to be feeling despair, but that's not how it works. And so if you find yourself in despair, go moment by moment, one hour at a time, set small daily intentions, one thing that you can do that day that would be a small win, reach out to

people who get it, be honest, be vulnerable, resist the temptation to pull. put any type of polish or veneer or gloss over the authentic reality of how deep the pit is, and conversely distance yourself from those who don't get it, but avoid the temptation to isolate. That's key takeaway number six, how to deal with despair. And key takeaway number seven, how to deal with regret. There are many different varieties of regret. Molly talks about six different varieties, but regret is something that we all need to work, through. And it starts with the grieving process. It starts with grieving what wasn't.

You were in that moment trying to do the best thing for yourself in most instances. And once you've allowed yourself to grieve, you can reframe, I missed my chance to what can I do today? Be in the now. What action can I take from this point forward? And you can reframe, I made a mistake to, I learned. And now I know what not to do. or now I know what to do next. Let yourself grieve and then come back to the present moment and take action in the present to improve your future. Those are seven key takeaways from this conversation with Molly West Duffy.

Molly's book is called Big Feelings and you can get it anywhere books are sold. And as a reminder, we have a free guide on inflation and recession to very scary topics. You can download that guide for free at Afford Anything.com. slash inflation. That's afford anything.com slash inflation. We also have a course on rental property investing. You can learn more about it at afford anything.com slash VIP list. Thank you so much for tuning in.

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