High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 662: Mastering the ART of Emotions, Dr. Kerry Guest, Mental Health Specialist for the Arizona Diamondbacks

Episode Date: January 30, 2025

Welcome to High Performance Mindset, the podcast where we dive into mental strategies to help you be your best more often. Today, we have a truly special guest—someone who plays a pivotal role in helping elite athletes navigate the mental side of the game. Joining us is Kerry Guest, the Mental Health Specialist for the Arizona Diamondbacks, a leader in the field of sport psychology and mental well-being. Kerry’s work is all about helping athletes understand and master their emotions so they can perform at their best—both on and off the field. In a high-pressure sport like baseball, mental resilience can be the difference between good and great. And that’s where Kerry comes in, guiding players through the ART of emotions—a model built around Acknowledging, Regulating, and Tolerating emotions. In this conversation, we’ll dive deep into: ✅ Where emotions come from and why they matter ✅ The power of emotional awareness in high performance ✅ How athletes and leaders can buy into the process of understanding their emotions ✅ Practical strategies like “Say, See, and Do” to develop emotional mastery And of course, we’ll wrap up with Kerry’s best advice for all of you—high performers looking to level up your mindset. This is going to be a fascinating and insightful discussion, so let’s jump in! HIGH PERFORMANCE MINDSET SHOWNOTES FOR THIS EPISODE CONNECT WITH KERRY HERE  REQUEST A FREE MENTAL BREAKTHROUGH CALL WITH DR. CINDRA AND/OR HER TEAM TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE MENTALLY STRONG INSTITUTE Love the show? Rate and review the show for Cindra to mention you on the next episode.  

Welcome to the High Performance Mindset Podcast, the podcast where we dive into mental strategies to help you be at your best even more often. This is Dr. Cinder Kampoff, and thanks so much for joining me for Episode 662. Today, we have a truly special guest, someone who plays a pivotal role in helping elite athletes and leaders navigate the mental side of the game. Joining us today is Dr. Kerry Guest, the mental health specialist for the Arizona Diamondbacks. Kerry is a leader in the field of sports psychology and mental well-being, and his work is all about helping athletes and leaders understand and master their emotions so they can perform at their very best both on and off the

field. In a high pressure sport like baseball, mental resilience can really be the difference between being good and great. And that's where Kerry comes in, guiding players through the art of emotions. His model built around acknowledging, regulating, and tolerating emotions. In this conversation, Kerry and I dive deep into where emotions come from and why they matter. The power of emotional awareness in high performance. We talk about how athletes and leaders can buy into the process of understanding their emotions. And we provide practical strategies like his say, see, and do model to develop emotional mastery. And of course, we wrap up with Keri's best advice for all of you,

high performers looking to level up their mindset. This really is a fascinating and insightful discussion. I can't wait to hear what you think about it. So let's dive in and welcome Keri Guest to the podcast. Keri Guest, I'm so excited to have you on the High Performance Mindset today. Thank you so much for joining us. I can't wait to have an incredible conversation about emotions today. Thank you, Cendra. I'm excited.

I'm energized. And what a full circle moment it is from being a novice mental performance consultant in 2018 and tuning into your podcast to this moment. So let's get to it. Let's get to it. Let's get to it. So to start us off, tell us a little bit about what you're passionate about and what you're doing right now, Kerry. Yes, I am passionate about mental health as a performance issue and particularly our emotions being a central piece of that. You know, one of the things that has inspired my work is I had a supervisor early in my clinical experiences after I'd started with mental

performance asked me, well, what is psychology? And after babbling and stumbling through my definition, it came up with the study of behavior is the response the supervisor gave to me. And that really stuck with me. And as I did some research, you know, I think that there's nothing that directs our behavior, motivates our behavior, like our emotions, which also provides so much opportunity for our emotions as a central mechanism of change. The more aware I am of my emotions, the more that I can take ownership of how I exist in different components of my life. And that's what excites me about this emotion focused work and it being transformational for performers, both within their context of professional athletes or at the office and across their relationships and life outside of performance. Yeah, I love it. And, you know, I think there's some bias around emotions. Like people don't openly talk about typically how they feel.

And so that's why I'm really excited to have this conversation and to dive deeper into emotions and emotion-focused interventions with you today. Yeah. Let's just get started at the basic level and tell us where our emotions come from. Yes. You know, one thing that I love that you said is just the awareness of the role that emotions play for us. You know, one of the phrases that, you know, I grew up in the Midwest and a historically violent, poverty stricken environment. And you currently will hear unique to that context. You'll hear things like I'm not emotional or or, you know, emotions don't matter. You got to suck it up.

And, you know, those are things that you hear in those environments and in sport. When I position emotion-focused work, one thing that I love is that it's a universal language. Our emotions, we have a biological disposition to our emotions. This isn't just altruistic, like, hey, let's talk about our emotions. Let's know how we feel. There's a somatic connection to our day-to-day lives, to how we experience ourselves and how we experience the world, and in turn, how the world experiences us based on emotions and how the emotions manifest both cognitively and physiologically and so so much of my work is doing this education on this effective manifestation of like okay in a very basic sense can someone

understand their emotions and and this the the manifestations, the way that it plays out in their body, as far as sensations that they may feel, as far as thoughts that go along with those sensations, what triggers those set of emotions, reactions, where they come from, how you understand them and interact with them. So much of that work comes from our understanding of our own emotions and emotions in a broad sense. Absolutely. And I think what I appreciate what you said is like emotions don't matter. Or, you know, especially as performers or athletes, like we want to feel like emotionless, you know. But for us to be at our best consistently, we have to really understand our emotions and what leads to our best. So I appreciate this conversation.

How would you describe it like at a basic level? You know, why do we even experience emotions? Yes. You know, when I think about what happens in our body and our mind, we have this natural inclination, as I mentioned, for emotion. It is our human experience, our capacity for experience. And these emotions from an affective level, you know, I say that if you've ever had a conversation or a tough conversation that, for example, makes you cry, you know, some people see it as I heard this thing and it made me cry and I'm having a reaction. Others, they get really angry and they start crying and then they realize that they cry. And there's this reaction to, wait, when am I crying? And I think that speaks to just our hard wiring to, at a very young age, we had this disposition. We have these emotional experiences that go along with it just as automatic as it's

breathing. And our goal over time, what happens is we have these cultural impressions of those emotional experiences and we start to make meaning of those emotions. And then that's reinforced in context. It's also rooted in our identities, where we're from, who we interact with, what context we're learning those messages. For example, sport, the context of that sport, for example, a hyper masculine sport like football that I play, right? Like there's all of these exposures to where we start to engage in this meaning making that we're getting from family, from work, from sport. And these things are deeply rooted in that experience. And so our goal is to take more ownership of that experience.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think about I do quite a bit of work in football and it's so much fun. And one of the things I love about football is actually the emotions that come with football. And I think there's like this unique culture, this unique energy of the game that's very different than like baseball or even hockey or tennis, you know. And it's very highly emotional. So why would you describe that we should understand our emotions? You know, not only because I know you also, Kerry, do some work with, you know, in business and consulting. So, Kerry, tell us a bit about why emotions are really important for us to understand. Yes, our emotions are transformational, meaning they impact the way that I experience the world and the way the world experiences me.

So the more understanding I have of emotions, there's so many opportunities for some deep work across bettering my wellness and my mental health across different contexts of my life. And what I love about emotion-focused work is there's so many opportunities for practice. When we think about skill acquisition, we get better through practice and then we intensify that practice and we contextualize that practice and take it into certain settings, dynamics, things that are maybe a little bit more challenging for ourselves. Our emotions model the exact same way.

There's opportunities to practice in my day-to-day conversations with colleagues at work when they ask me, hey, Sindra, how are you feeling today? That's an opportunity to practice in my day-to-day conversations with colleagues at work when they ask me, hey, Sindra, how are you feeling today? That's an opportunity to practice. And the supervision that I have with someone that I oversee in my relationships with my children, with my spouse, with siblings, parents, there's so many opportunities embedded in our day-to-day to increase our emotional efficiency. And with that is the opportunity to enhance the way that we show up. I love it, Carrie. You know, when I think about every time I've interacted with you,

you know, and I say, how are you doing? And you use words like phenomenal, or, you know, you're even grateful for the hard things. And I can even tell that just the way that you're responding to that. So I'm curious, how have you learned to show up in that way with the emotions that you really want to experience more often? Yes. What a phenomenal question, Sandra. And phenomenal because this is a great example of everyday practice that is kind of dangling right in front of us. I'll share a framework that I use as well. And within this, one of the things that I work with individuals, teams, organizations is, can we answer better questions using our emotions? Like, for example, we often hear like,

how are you? My goal is to acknowledge how I actually am. Can I have some transparency as a leader, as a colleague, to let my colleagues know what's going on for me internally? Because the better that I can do that, the better that they might understand me and be able to support what my needs are. So beyond these very generic examples of, I'm good, I'm great. How are you? You know, I try to check in with myself in the morning and ask myself, Hey, how am I? If someone asks me, how am I? Do I have a more nuanced, accurate answer for that? So that I can, again, not just impact my own understanding of myself, but I may put that out in the world so that the world may be able to better support and respond to how I

might show up, right? So if I'm frustrated, can I articulate like, hey, you know, I had a flat tire, I'm a little frustrated, and I'm excited to be here today. And I'm encouraged to be here today, as an example. And so part of that framework, part of my goal is to help individuals know themselves better than they knew themselves before in order to solve their problems. And the more that I can articulate my emotions, the more that I can describe my emotional experiences, the better that I can be resourcefully responsive and give others the opportunity to be resourceful to myself. Yeah. And I think about how it's our language, how we work to understand our experiences, like when we label these emotions, you know, like I heard you just say, like, I got a flat tire, but I'm excited to be here.

You know, it's like even the way that the language that we use that does shape how we experience the world. And I appreciate what you said about how it's the world, how the world sees us too, and interacts with us. Yes. For example, it's why, you know, I'll say this phrase and I'm sure it's something that I've heard over my years of being involved in the field of psychology, but what we suppress oppresses us. That's why I have such a reaction when I hear things like I'm not emotional. Well, there's a reason why there's so many studies where you can, we associate someone's facial expression with the emotion that they're experiencing. So before we even say a word, our bodies have some hints and

manifestations of our emotional experiences. So, you know, if I can articulate that to someone, you know, it makes the implicit explicit. And again, it kind of lets them know some of the signs that they may already be putting, picking up on. It gives them the opportunity to resourcefully respond to that as well. Yeah. Amazing. So you have a model called the ART of emotions. I'd love for you to share more about, and maybe first just tell us, high level, your model of the art of emotions and why it's, why would be important for us to, you know, be able to use this model in our own lives? Yes. I, throughout my doctorate studies, getting a PhD in counseling psychology,

I came across this article by Davis and colleagues in 2014 on process experiential emotion-focused therapy. And at that time, I was making this transition from I was doing work with athletes that felt very transactional, where they would come with me with these fires, and I'd use some of these CBT solution-oriented resolutions, and I'd give it to them in the office, and I'd feel great about it, and they'd leave kind of neutral, and then a week later, they'd bring me the same problem. And I kind of got disenchanted of, okay, I feel like I'm missing the mark here on, as I mentioned, some of this transformational work, things that they actually feel equipped

to resourcefully respond to their environment beyond just a skill unique to one problem. And doing this emotion-focused work and reading that article, I started to kind of combine my experiences of these orientations and set out a framework that emerged from this and what I've shared, the art of emotion. And ART stands for acknowledge, regulate, and transformation. You know, the first goal of that is I'll often sit across from someone. And in this acknowledgement phase, and this is a curriculum that I use in one-on-one situations to where, you know, I'm meeting with someone and we've established we're going to meet for four sessions. Or it could be something where I've done a year year long curriculum on this three-phase art of emotion and as that as we get to that first acknowledgement phase it's we often know these very broad emotions these things that we can name in early childhood i

feel mad sad happy glad and i love the emotion focus wheel for this, but can we start to add more nuance and color to our descriptions? Do I feel happy or do I feel elated, surprised, eager? Do I feel mad or do I feel insecure, indifferent, overlooked, rejected, right? What's the nuance of emotion that I actually feel and how might my understanding of that nuance empower me to advocate for myself and articulate that to someone else. So once I have this acknowledgement, can I move to this second phase, which has two components to it, which is regulate and tolerate, right?

Regulate will be, okay, now I'm experiencing this very intense emotion. Let's say anxiety. Can I regulate that? What do I need to see? What do I Let's say anxiety. Can I regulate that? What do I need to see? What do I need to say? What do I need to do in order to help me resourcefully respond to that anxiety in real time? The second part of that phase is maybe there is a situation where I can't leave that environment or I can't manipulate the environment. And the most resourceful thing to do is to tolerate it.

So for example, I'll often give conditions, maybe I'm an athlete and I'm with a coach who, this is the environment that the coach has created. This is the culture that it's created. Or sudden change in sport. I think about football, right? There's an interception, there's a fumble. I have these emotional experiences that come with that. A life example that I like to share, parenting, right? Maybe my family is important to me and I have this emotional experience that I have these very intense emotions that I experienced with my parents. Can I tolerate those intense emotions through this acknowledgement, through this understanding, using my insight to better respond to my problems. And then this last phase,

transformation. I see this as somewhat of a penultimate process. Now can I hold multiple truths at the same time? Can I start to have this transformational experience where I understand that I can be confident and anxious, that I can be masculine and gentle, feminine and assertive, that I start to have whatever it is unique to the problem that I'm facing. I'm starting to understand these multiple truths and how they coexist and interact with one another in this very transformational way, not just unique to the problem that I'm having, but across context of my life. Wow.

Very powerful as I'm just thinking about how this relates to my own life. And would you say the T stands for tolerate and transformational or is like, is the tolerate part of regulate? That is a great question. It is a nuance, right? I see regulate and tolerate as what stands under that R. You know, I consider the transformation its own standalone phase only because it's somewhat of this active and maintenance transformation, whereas tolerance is another form of regulating. Yeah, that's true. Hi, this is Cinder Campoff, and thanks for listening to the High Performance Mindset. Did you know that the ideas we share in the show are things we actually specialize in implementing? If you want to become mentally stronger, lead your team more effectively, and get to your

goals quicker, visit freementalbreakthroughcall.com to sign up for your free mental breakthrough call with one of our certified coaches. Again, that's freementalbreakthroughcall.com to sign up for your free mental breakthrough call with one of our certified coaches. Again, that's freementalbreakthroughcall.com to sign up for your free call. Talk to you soon. So let's dive in a little bit deeper to each of these. Acknowledge, regulate, and then transformation. And there was something that you said under acknowledge that I want to just hone in on a little bit more to help people

really understand how they could acknowledge their emotions. And you said, say, see, and do. How, say, just maybe unpack that for us a little bit more. How can, you know, say, see, and do helps us acknowledge? Or, you know, I'll start with the, the see part with acknowledge, because I think the say and do relate to the regulating phase of that. With C, you know, one thing that I like to, that I've learned over my experience doing emotion-focused work is that acknowledgement of emotion comes in different phases. So that acknowledgement is, can I understand the connections between the somatic experiences

that I'm having and how that connects to the emotion that I can name, right? That naming it is also a phase of it. So for example, I get these butterflies in my stomach. That's a somatic piece. Like, can I acknowledge, whoa, okay, hold up. My palms are sweating. I have these butterflies in my stomach. That helps me move toward naming the emotion. Is that nerves for me? Is that related to excitement? What's going on for me internally? Another phase that's indebted within this acknowledgement, this first big phase, is articulating it to someone else, right? Because acknowledge can be an internal process. Articulating is, I see that as more as an external process. Now that I have this acknowledgement and I can name it, can I articulate that to someone

else so that they have a shared understanding of my emotional experience? I can tell you what's tricky about that syndrome is when we consider culture. You know, I've had individuals where they focus more on the acknowledgement because they tell me, hey, there's some risks that come with articulating my emotions externally to individuals based on culture. Right. And so we say, OK, maybe we maybe we navigate this articulation phase a little different and we focus on just our internal acknowledgement and how that's going to help us manage our emotions. Maybe I do feel empowered enough to articulate those emotions, but I think those are some of the components that go behind that first phase of, can I add more nuance and color to my understanding that better describe my lived experience? Yeah. And I'm thinking not only about me, but a lot of the clients that I work with, Carrie, and how it can be. And I'm thinking about some leaders that I've talked to this week in our one-on-one coaching. It's really easy to get stuck or hijacked by our emotions, you know, where then we don't necessarily regulate or tolerate because we are stuck and have a hard time acknowledging. So how do you think acknowledging helps get unstuck and get, you know, I'm thinking about, I really like Susan David's work on

emotional agility, and she talks about like getting unstuck from our emotions. You know, why do you think acknowledging really helps you do that? It gives us perspective, and that perspective happens in multiple phases. You know, one of the ways that I like to conceptualize it is it can give us perspective and hindsight, meaning I reflect on an experience and I say, hey, what happened here? What did I notice about my body? What was going on with my body related to the emotions that I think I was feeling? Or can it give me some hindsight understanding of what the emotions that I was feeling in that moment? Another phase of that is, or another component, is insight in real time. Ooh, what's going on? I noticed like, for me, Cinder, I'll tell you,

when I get agitated, my eyes get big, right? I give people a sharp look. I can almost feel these facial sensations. And so the more insight I have in real time, I start to have this understanding of, okay, how do my emotions manifest in real time? It can also happen in foresight. You know, hey, Sindra, when I leave this conversation, we've sat down and we're about to have this difficult conversation. I would like to leave this conversation feeling heard and feeling content with where we land, right? Like I can frame my emotional experience that I would like to have

in foresight of an interaction. And so this acknowledgement is so empowering because it gives me kind of these three understandings of both in hindsight and real-time insight and in foresight and anticipation of where I might want to move my emotions or how my emotions are impacting my behavior. Super helpful. You know, in our field, sometimes it's described that energy and excitement and anxiety feel the same in your body, right? Like where you get like a heart rate, maybe your palms feel sweaty, but it's really our interpretation of that, like our body's response that makes it anxiety or energy, you know, do you agree with that? I do. You know, I have a lot of conversation with our athletes about normalizing our emotional

experiences. That's why it can be empowering to better understand emotions, because if I can understand, for example, that anxiety might have synonymous manifestations as excitement, then I can make room for me being both confident and anxious, right? It's not distressful to me that there's some anxiety that is really excitement to play or that it's nerves that match the situation that I'm in, right? It makes sense that I have some nerves headed into a big game, headed into a big meeting, headed into a presentation where I'm about to speak in front of stakeholders or thousands of people, right? Like there's some contextual stress there that is appropriate. And so the more understanding I have with emotions and some of its manifestation

and how it manifests for me uniquely and universally, I can draw these kind of stronger connections and conclusions to help myself navigate, as you just said, those coexisting emotions. You were saying something about having multiple truths, right? Like you can feel confident and anxious at the same time. Whereas I think that might kind of blow people's minds, just this idea that you can feel two emotions simultaneously. Tell us a bit about that and why that's really important to be able to articulate and understand. Yes. I think about making room for multiple truths. Again, it's this empowering understanding of how our emotions exist. And sometimes that can be distrustful

itself. For example, I've worked with individuals who have strong spiritual ties, and there's this reluctance to say, hey, I don't know that I can be trusting in my faith and anxious. And those two things can't exist at once. If I make room for this trust, there is no room for this anxiety. And as we talk about attention and intentional capacity, one, I always like to acknowledge and affirm the truth of that statement for that individual, because my goal is to help them with the meaning making process of their emotions, not to necessarily diagnose their emotional experiences. But within that, I try to provide this psychoeducation of just like our attention. We talk about like we can't multitask. You often hear this. We don't multitask. We don't focus on two things at once. We make these very subtle, quick, agile shifts from one thing to the next. And our emotions in my conceptualization work very similarly. that my body has some anxious symptoms, some anxious signs that I'm observing. My hands are sweaty. There's some thoughts, some spontaneous.

When I talk about this biological disposition, we know that we have this biological disposition for a certain category of thoughts that may be seen as negative, right? And those are the things that are shifting between this trust that I have and this value that I have. Would that be a trust in my performance, a trust in God, a trust in my preparation? And that what we're really experiencing in this understanding of the transformational phase is these subtle quick shifts between these moments where maybe that is second to second. Maybe that's minute to minute. Maybe that's hour to hour. But the more that I can make room for that, I can articulate

why something could be distressful and how I plan to resourcefully respond to that. Absolutely. And I think about my emotions and sometimes it's so quick, right? Like one second, I feel guilt. One second, I feel gratitude. And I noticed that so many of those emotions are connected to my thoughts. You know, what am I paying attention to? Again, how am I making sense of the situation or what's the story that I'm telling myself? Yes. Yeah. And those stories play such a big role, again, on how we experience the world. You know, that to me is why it's imperative that I have this understanding of my emotions, because it'll help me understand where I make misattributions to the world. For example, you can experience something emotionally very different from what was said.

Right. I like to give the example someone shared with me one time. They said, oh, Carrie's a picky eater. And I had such this strong emotional response to it. And I was like, yeah, well, the audacity. Why would they say that? And, you know, I talked about in hindsight, I was doing some reflecting and I realized for me that I had an emotional response to the meaning behind what a picky eater meant to me. It was this person's inflexible. They're difficult. They're not fun. Right.

And this emotional awareness helped me process. Oh, what I that those emotions that I didn't understand. Why was my face so scowled? Why did I feel so tense? It was because I was having these emotional experiences of rejection, of feeling dismissed, overlooked for all these other positive qualities that come with that. And so the better that I can understand my emotions, again, it gives me just this very empowering ability to make meaning of my experiences. Yeah, that's a great example. It makes me think of a

similar time where about food, I was going to the grocery store last year and I was checking out and someone, the person helping me check out said, are you feeding an army? And I had such an emotional response to that. And I remember like two days later, I was telling my friends about it. And they were just laughing about like, why would I really even care that someone said to me, are you trying to feed an army? And I think it was like then I took it into my interpretation was, oh, I'm buying too much or I eat too much or I don't know, just all these like stories that we tell ourselves from just these really small things that we might hear someone say to us, you know, at the grocery store or, you know, they have no intention behind it. Like the person who just said to you, you're a picky eater, right? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I love that so much, Cinder.

Thank you for sharing that example because I think it just brings me, one of the things that I say are outcomes related to this emotion-focused work that I have so much appreciation for. One I've shared a lot on, and that is insight, right? We often look at like, we think about outcomes. We don't often think about that knowing myself better

than I knew myself before in order to solve my problem is a suitable insight sometimes the things that I'm supposed to walk away with is just knowing myself better than I knew myself right I'm not sure what to do with information yet but I have this understanding you know number two is a behavior or skill you know that goes back to modeling somewhat of what we talked about with regulation. Like, okay, I understand. Maybe I'm working with someone. Hey, tell me how to better respond to this.

Someone said that I was buying food for an army. And like, this is how I respond. Someone said I was a picky eater. What can I do in those moments? Do I take a break? Do I walk away? But you know, I think the thing that I've found in the work syndrome that I love

about emotions is this third outcome. And that's an experience. What you experience with your friends is sometimes it's just validated. It's cathartic to hear yourself. It's healing to name those emotions and to understand, whoa, this is what was happening for me. This was this deep emotional experience that I had. And this is how it impacted me. When we can do that for ourselves independently and when we empower ourselves, whether it be through therapy, whether it be through a trusted friend or colleague, whether it be through a mentor or partner, can I find the space where I can have this catharticism

of just having my emotions expressed and validated, that can be its own outcome that is so healing. I appreciate you said that, just like knowing yourself better is the outcome and really being able to understand what was triggering for me in that moment or for you in that moment and be able to really understand yourself. What is our emotions? Really, where are they coming from? I'd love to ask you a little bit more questions about regulate. As people are listening, they might say, all right, well, how do I actually regulate my emotions?

And do you have a strategy or a tool or a go-to kind of way of describing why or how we could do that? Yeah, I think the tool is that framework. You know, I look at the see, say, do. That's something that comes from a lot of the performance oriented work that I've done. And I think it's asking myself unique to the emotion that I'm experiencing, what do I see that's going to help me regulate this emotion? What can I say either to myself or to someone else that's going to help me resourcefully respond to this emotion that I'm experiencing? Or what can I do?

For example, as I mentioned, walking away, taking space, taking perspective for myself. Just like some of our sport routines, I may have a package of things, right? I might use that see, say, do independently. This is the one thing I do when I experience this emotion. This is the one thing that I say. This is the one thing that do when I experience this emotion. This is the one thing that I say. This is the one thing that I do. It might be an entire package. Hey, I need to set myself. Hey, Carrie, take perspective, breathe. That's my do say you're calm. You know, you're triggered and you're under control. Make a space for that going and do a, I'm recognizing I had this response when you said

this, I need a second, right? Like it's going to be that package of regulating can be a combination of any one of those things, either independently or in combination. I love it. You know, as I think about just the work on emotions and, you know, maybe there might be some bias around that. And I'd love to hear, and I'd love for you to share, you know, you work in professional baseball, you know, and you've worked with a lot, you know, I think about your work with IMG, and you spend a lot of time with just various different types of athletes. So how do you get men to buy in to understanding their emotions? What a challenge it can be, right?

And there's a very different experience I can tell you that I have in walking to a football locker room and talking about emotions versus courtside on a basketball court or in the locker room with baseball players, right? It's a very different experience, as I mentioned, rooted in the context and some of their demographic backgrounds and cultural backgrounds is related to what emotions mean to that individual. But zooming out and looking at it, Sindra, one of the things that I don't take for granted

is the way that I uniquely show up in this space. I'm a former college athlete, and I'm six foot one. I have this muscular frame and I'm coming in as someone that the athletes at times can see as like a peer silhouette of themselves. And I'm talking about the significance of emotions, that this isn't just altruistic, but it has a potential to enhance the way that they show up in their wellness and their performance and their mental health. And my physical presence definitely buffers some of that stigma, some of that cultural stigma. Right. Because they say, oh, you know, and this is both something that I've observed in observation and in feedback. And I like to share that and position that because I think it produces some unique challenges based on who we are as individuals, right?

Like someone that has a different presence than myself may experience some different challenges at the group level going in and doing emotion-focused work. How would I counterbalance that or what are some of the ways that I would support someone in doing this work as I have with other supervisees and mentees. For me, I think it's really understanding the science of emotion. As I mentioned, emotions are central motivators of behavior and therefore are a central potential mechanism for change. So can I really move individuals to understanding beyond this altruistic, hey, let's talk about our emotions, let's journal, which journaling, not to undermine that, that can be a very empowering, liberating practice as well.

But can I have them see the connection between the somatic experience of emotions and how those things truly have an impact for me in real time and how I experience the world and how the world experiences me, that the more I can and how I experience the world and how the world experiences me, that the more I can kind of lean on the science and this kind of universal experience, recognizing some of the variance in culture and language, the more that I can leverage that, I think it gives me the potential for people to see, as I've observed, not just in the professional sport and collegiate sport environment, but also in the workplace. Yeah, I appreciate you just sharing that and sharing your perspective. And, you know,

I think as practitioners, we do bring ourselves to the situation and, you know, that does impact our work. And sometimes people might think, well, you know, my gender or my background doesn't really matter, but it does, you know, to how people perceive me. So thanks just for sharing that and sharing your perspective. What have I not asked you about emotions that is really important? Great question. I would say that, you know, one of the things that I'm reflective of is how ongoing the emotion-focused work is, that it can be challenging as well. You know, when I think about what are the challenges of doing this work, I think they mirror therapy in many ways, even in the performance context. I often like to think of it as like, oftentimes we have these knives in us, you know, as an example that I give.

And there's these knives that we've learned to go throughout our day-to-day and operate with and they're normal to us. And emotion-focused work makes me aware of those knives that are in my body. And maybe it's a small knife and it's in my arm. Maybe it's a big knife and it's in my leg. And what happens,

the more awareness I have of my emotions, I can look and I see those knots. I'll go, uh-oh, like, whoa, what's that? And if you've ever been in pain, you realize when you start paying attention to the pain, somehow the pain gets worse, you know? And that is emotion-focused work in an analogy. There is a process of acknowledging whoa there's something there that has there's pain there you know there's something that i see and based on where that in the analogy where that knife can be that pain can feel substantial uh and then once i have that awareness i have to pull that out and that hurts you know and there's some risk to pulling that out there's some risk to articulate in my emotions, to express in my emotions. There's some challenge to that. And then when I pull it out, that's when the healing starts to happen, right? I still have to go through this other phase of knowing, okay,'s the question, I'm almost just reminded of the statement that like, well, what's the resolution? When is this? I think a motion focused work is a way to orient.

Right. It's going to be continuous understanding and process that's going to come with new triggers, new challenges. And you're going to use this framework not just in supporting other individuals, but in supporting ourselves in the long run. And can you give us some examples of knives and what that analogy of knives really represents to you? I think that's really powerful. Yeah. You know, I can connect it back to the example that I gave about, hey, you're a picky eater. Let's say that can be a knife in my side of I'm difficult in my, throughout my, let's say I learned at a very early age of my childhood that I'm difficult or I'm someone that people have a hard time taking care of,

or I'm not as easy as someone else, right? That there's these meanings that I've made of my experience, whether I made those meanings or they were told to me, right? I think those knives represent those wounds, these small wounds or these big wounds I think those knives represent those wounds. These small wounds are these big wounds that I have based on those experiences. And they're so multifaceted. And, you know, some of them I accidentally stepped on. Some of them, someone put them there. Some of them, I may have delivered them to myself on accident or, you know, through a certain

experience that I had. And so, you know, those knives, the more that I can understand, well, what is that? What is that about for me? Why did that have such an impact? Why is this so challenging? You know, what's the difficulty here rooted in that emotional experience, that biological wiring that I spoke to? And the more understanding that I can have for that, you know, I can start to do the work of processing. Okay. What is it that that really meant for me? And, and how can, you know, how does that impact how I show up and how can I regulate and resourcefully respond to that particular emotional experience? And, you know, the last thing I'd say to that, that's why knowing myself better than I knew myself before is the way to solve my problem. Because even just

that insight will give me some awareness in real time of, uh-oh, this trip, this wire for me. And now I can get support in what do I need to do based on this understanding of myself. Absolutely. Well, Kerry, first of all, thank you for listening to the podcast since 2018. I appreciate you listening. And, you know, one of the reasons I do a couple reasons I do this podcast, obviously, is to give back and share, you know, powerful tools. But I also do it to connect with people and to keep learning. And, you know, what's amazing about this conversation is I learned a lot.

I learned your art of emotions framework that I think is incredible. And I could even use that when I'm helping the people I work with, if it's teams or individuals or athletes, right? As I'm listening to you, I'm thinking about a lot of the people I work with who regulating emotions can be really difficult, especially during performance or in leadership. So I appreciate you sharing that and just the nuances of that. I appreciate what you said about, you know, emotions are a universal experience and a human experience. And at the end, when you're saying know yourself better than you knew yourself before and how that

can just be one of the outcomes of emotion- focused interventions and work. I appreciate what you said about having multiple truths and that you can feel confident and anxious at the same time. And then say, see, do is one way to work with your emotions. So thank you so much for just dropping some knowledge bombs on the podcast today and helping everyone who's listening to better understand their emotions. Thank you, Sandra. You know, just so you know, I feel incredibly grateful, excited to listen back and to have this memory with you as well and energized to continue this conversation and to have an appreciation for platforms like this and the work that you do and share. Thank you, Keri. Well, how can people reach out to you? Because I know there will be people who will say, I want to learn more about what Keri does, or I want to connect with Keri about emotions. So how can people reach out to you, follow along? Yes. LinkedIn is a phenomenal resource.

K-E-R-Y, guest, G-U-E-S-T on LinkedIn, as well as Instagram. Instagram, I put out a lot of short stories on emotions. That handle is K-G underscore Uplifts, U-P-L-I-F-T-S. And those are two great ways to stay connected and follow along this journey of understanding emotion. Well, thank you, Kerry. I so appreciate you being here today and gifting us with your knowledge and your presence. Thank you. What a pleasure. Way to go for finishing another episode of the High Performance Mindset. I'm giving you a virtual fist pump. Holy cow, did that go by way too fast for anyone else?

If you want more, remember to subscribe. And you can head over to Dr. Sindra for show notes. And to join my exclusive community for high performers, where you get access to videos about mindset each week. So again, you can head over to Dr. Sindra. That's D-R-C-I-N-D-R-A dot com. See you next week.