THE ED MYLETT SHOW - How To Master Your Emotions And Build MASSIVE Resilience | Ed Mylett
Episode Date: November 23, 2024How to Master Your Emotions and Build Massive Resilience! What’s the secret to staying calm, focused, and resilient in the face of life’s challenges? In this episode, I’m bringing together some... of the most profound minds in personal growth and emotional mastery to answer that very question. This mashup features insights from Rod Carew, Dr. Susan David, JP Sears, and Thais Gibson—each offering transformative strategies to help you take control of your emotional life and become unshakable. Rod Carew, a baseball legend, shares how he maintained emotional stability throughout a long and demanding career. He explains how developing "the sixth tool"—mastering his mindset—enabled him to perform under pressure and stay positive no matter the outcome. His wisdom on small adjustments and staying mentally strong is a game-changer for anyone striving to overcome slumps in business or life. Dr. Susan David, author of Emotional Agility, explores how our emotions serve as signposts to the things we value most. She challenges the myth of "positive thinking" and reveals why it’s crucial to sit with difficult emotions to find deeper meaning and strength. Her groundbreaking strategies will teach you to embrace your emotions as tools for growth, not as barriers. JP Sears brings his signature blend of humor and vulnerability to tackle the dangers of emotional numbness. He dives into how masking our feelings with humor or avoidance keeps us disconnected from our true selves. His approach to reclaiming emotional authenticity is both raw and inspiring, showing how vulnerability can lead to a more joyful and purposeful life. Thais Gibson rounds out the conversation with actionable insights into how beliefs and emotions drive our actions. She highlights the link between core beliefs and patterns of behavior, offering strategies to reprogram limiting beliefs and regain control over your choices. Key Takeaways: - The Power of Emotional Control: Learn how to manage your emotions under pressure, as Rod Carew did, and turn small wins into unstoppable momentum. - Embrace All Emotions: Dr. Susan David explains why all emotions—even the uncomfortable ones—are essential teachers for living a meaningful life. - Reclaim Authenticity: JP Sears shares how accepting vulnerability helps you experience the full spectrum of life’s highs and lows. - Rewire Limiting Beliefs: Thais Gibson demonstrates how changing your core beliefs can transform your emotional and behavioral patterns. This episode is packed with wisdom to help you navigate life’s challenges with grace, strength, and resilience. Whether you’re striving for peak performance, deeper self-awareness, or emotional freedom, this mashup has the tools to get you there. Remember, true strength isn’t about avoiding emotions—it’s about mastering them. Thank you for watching this video—Please Share it and get the word out! What part of this video resonated with you the most? Comment below! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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["The Admirer Show Theme"] This is The Ad Mylet Show.
Hey everyone, welcome to my weekend special.
I hope you enjoy the show.
Be sure to follow the Ed Mylet Show on Apple and Spotify.
Links are in the show notes.
You'll never miss an episode that way.
We're going to talk about extending grace and kindness to people, but actually doing
it during difficult times, during stressful situations, and why it matters that you do
it.
I'm going to tell you two stories from my life that both happened very recently that
I thought, I have to teach this lesson today because it taught me one.
The first one happened, I did a post about this a few weeks ago and it went pretty viral.
I'm driving down the road and I don't know if you ever had this happen, but just someone's
messing with you next to you, right?
And this person was trying to agitate me and they'd cut me off and then, you know, then
they went around me and were behind me and kind of riding my bumper and then they were
yelling then they wanted to race me and I'm like, come on, man, like, I'm not that dude.
I'm a grown man.
I'm not going to race you, right?
But they were trying to agitate me.
And they didn't.
I didn't get upset.
I thought, what a huge win.
Like I kept my emotions the way I wanted them.
I stayed emotionally under control.
I stayed poised.
When me maybe five years ago, certainly 10 or 15 years ago, you know how you'd be, you
start yelling back at them, you get agitated, you get anxious, you get angry.
And I was allowing outside stimulus to affect my internal emotions.
And so I thought, what a gigantic win. Like this was awesome. I wasn't upset.
I waved it on my smiled. And you know what else I found out?
When someone's trying to get under your skin, trying to get you negative,
trying to get you angry, trying to get you distracted, right?
Trying to get you to perform in a way that's not reflective of your real character, right?
When you don't give into that, man, it frustrates them.
It was such a bonus for me to see this person getting more and more frustrated that I was
just, I was living with equanimity.
In my book, The Power of One More, I have a whole chapter on equanimity, which basically
means, my version of it is peace under duress,
finding peace in a stressful situation and circumstance and being able to live in that
state, a state of equanimity.
And I did.
And I was very proud of myself because it's easy to do that when you're at a park or by
a lake or on your boat or wherever, right?
In a peaceful place, taking a walk with a dear friend, the simple things in life.
But it's not so easy sometimes to do it
when there's stress, when emotions get raised,
when someone's intentionally trying to do harm to you.
It was a better win than making a bunch of money
by winning an award, by how well this podcast does.
I felt so great that I won because
winning in life is an emotional game.
Quality of your life is the quality of your emotions, right? You don't want a bunch of money. You want
how you think a bunch of money is gonna make you feel if that's what you want.
You don't even necessarily want a relationship. You want how you think that
relationship will make you feel. You want to be super fit and jacked. You want how
you think you will feel if you're super fit and jacked.
So we're all trying to find as an emotion as a feeling.
And what I find is you don't have to chase them.
They're within you right now.
And only it only happens when you surrender that emotion to the outside circumstance that you lose or to a person.
You're going to have someone you may even right now who's antagonistic towards you or is hating on you or just they cut you off on the road or they're at work and they're you're competing
with them for a job and they're trying to undercut you whatever it might be
right or if someone's rude to you in a restaurant right or dismissive to you
it's very easy to allow what that outside stimulus does to infect your
internal emotional thermostat level and every time you stay in control of your emotions you win and that's a muscle you build and I found that it's pretty
Difficult now to get me to change my emotions based on your behavior
It's hard to get me to change my emotions based on the conditions around me yet
I lived probably 50 years of my life where the conditions dictated my emotions, the treatment somebody
gave me dictated my emotions, right? The circumstances around me dictated my emotions. The results
dictated my emotions. And so you're probably nodding with me right now that you have a
tendency to do that and every time you don't and you stay in control and you stay kind,
you stay graceful, you stay in a state of equanimity and peace.
What ends up happening is you win
and you build a muscle that becomes stronger
and stronger and stronger, and that's what resilience is.
That's what it is.
That's what building something great in your life
is all about, is doing it over and over and over again
and developing the pattern
of building the emotions we want.
Really, we learn these negative emotional patterns
as children, don't we? When something doesn't go our way we start screaming
and crying, right? Or we fall down and you know we get really upset or someone does
something to us at school and we come home very sad. So we start these
patterns very young in our life and we never undo them and we all have what I
call like an emotional home and what that means is that in your life you know
no matter what the circumstances are most people have a pattern of emotions
They're gonna get back. So for some people that pattern is you know, they find every single day of their life
They find a way back to grace and peace and bliss and ecstasy and joy and passion
For other people though, no matter what the circumstances are
They find a way to get their anger to get their anxiety to get their get their fear. I remember, I'll tell you a quick story.
Many, many years ago, I was blessed that I was doing very well financially, finally, in my life,
and I was building my first dream home, and the contractor had messed something up that day, and
I had appointment cancel, and another client of mine changed their mind, and then the house was
under construction. I walked in, I was mad at the contractor. I walked in, they're angry and stressed and, you know, and I looked and there were a group
of gentlemen who were working on my kitchen. They were all carpenters. They all happened to be from
Mexico and I watched them and I'm standing in my mansion, okay, that was being built, angry and
frustrated and frankly scared. Ang anger is usually the other side
of the coin is fear scared all the emotions i didn't want i'm experiencing my body that was
my life experience at that moment who cared that i had money or a mansion or those things because
it wasn't giving me those emotions then that i thought it was going to give me and i was watching
these men in my kitchen and all of them they had their mariachi music on most of these men were
not making a lot of money by the way they had left their families in mexico and most of them they had their mariachi music on most of these men were not making a lot of money
By the way, they had left their families in Mexico and most of them were working here to send money back home to their family
I later got to know many of them pretty well because they were there for a long time and I befriended most of them
But as I watched them
They were singing and dancing and enjoying their time and laughing and cracking jokes with another
Meanwhile doing work that they were great at, that was meaningful, that was beautiful.
And in that moment, if you said, who's winning the game of life?
The guy with the mansion or the men who were building it for him?
And in that moment, they were winning the life game because they were doing work that
mattered to them, that they were passionate about.
They were laughing, they were joyous, they were in a blissful state, they had a
state of equanimity and joy and passion and focus about what they were doing. And meanwhile,
the rich guy with the mansion over there, he was in a state of anger and fear and frustration
and worry and angst. So if the quality of our emotions are the quality of our life,
I remember clearly in that moment watching these men, there were six of them,
in this kitchen that was being built thinking,
they're winning the game of life right now.
I'm losing it.
Yet the outside world would probably say,
the guy with the mansion's winning.
That's not winning.
Winning is, are you in control of the emotions
that you want?
And somehow we get our emotional home.
You'd ask yourself, what's your emotional home currently?
Like over the last six months, what's the primary emotion you feel every day? Is it fear? Is
it frustration? Is it anger? Is it worry? Is it depression? Is it frustration? Is it
just sort of blah? Or are you getting a whole bunch of peace and a whole bunch of
bliss and a whole bunch of happiness and joy and ecstasy or not? Are you doing work that
means something to you and you feel a sense of contribution from it and growth
from it or do you not? And so for me I had to evaluate that and so between the
ride in the car that I had that day and that man in the mansion I've grown a lot
and so I'm proof today that you can do it because it's a pattern that you built and then the other thing is
For me the pathway to feeling these emotions is my ability to extend grace and kindness
to other human beings
We're in a world today where we're so divided and at each other's throats
It seems and you know, we're all we all believe we're separate if there's separate people
You're this I'm that that. You believe that.
I believe this. You're from there.
I'm from here.
All these different things in life, the different religious conflicts
that we have, the wars that we're in, but even just the day to day
way we treat one another, there's not enough kindness.
And so my my call to you today, my plea to you today
is to begin to live a life where even more, even if you're doing it, to extend more grace and kindness to people in
your everyday life. And then the measure of it also is can you do it when they
don't extend it to you? See that guy in the car that day wasn't extending me any
of those things but I extended grace and kindness back to him. See it's easy to be
kind and gentle and beautiful with people when they're doing that for you.
But what happens when they're not?
Because that tells us who you really are, doesn't it?
It tells me who I really am.
Can I extend kindness and grace to you when you're not behaving in a way that's worthy
of it?
When you're antagonistic towards me, you know, I'm in a little bit of a business thing right
now where there's some strife in one of my businesses and everyone's being so horrible to one another.
And it's my ability to not reciprocate, not reduce myself to that level and extend them
grace.
I don't know what they're going through.
I don't know what problems they have.
Give them kindness and grace when really they're not even earning it right now.
But I'm worth giving it to them because it makes me feel better about me
when I give somebody that grace.
I'll give you an example, last story.
Several weeks ago, I was out to dinner with my family.
It was a pretty nice restaurant,
not crazy nice, but pretty nice.
And there was a family at the table right next to us.
And right when we walked in,
I could hear this family in the lobby. And the table right next to us. And right when we walked in, I could hear this family
in the lobby.
And the kids were real rowdy.
You can picture it, you've been somewhere like this.
Not just a little rowdy, I'm talking about like screaming
and yelling and running around the table during the meal.
It was a decent restaurant, right?
It was distracting to other people in the restaurant.
I remember we sat next to them, you can imagine,
probably like I was like, oh man, I just wanted to have
a nice, beautiful meal with my family.
And now I'm going to deal with this all, all night. And I did deal with it.
They were, these kids were misbehaving pretty heavy. And you know,
there's that part of you, when you look at the parents, you're like,
discipline your kids. I start judging them.
I would never let my kids act out like that. Have your kids sit down,
tell them to be quiet.
Have them put the napkin on their like, you know, they're yelling at each other. This is a restaurant. There's decorum here.
There's manners and so I found myself not only
tending towards frustration with
the noise level and the kids but also judging the parents.
Judgment and frustration and I'm not kidding you because I know I do this for a living. I went, are these the emotions I want to experience during this meal?
Is that what I'm going to do at dinner?
I get this two hour dinner too.
So I'm going to choose to be judgmental, angry, frustrated, and totally distracted with their
table instead of present with these people that I love.
Can I in this moment find a way to extend grace and kindness
to that family?
And I did, I made this shift which surprised my own family frankly I think.
And I was wholly present with my family and laughing and blissful as this chaos was going
on.
Now that's a test for your emotional makeup, right? And so they ended up leaving about three quarters
of the way through our meal.
And I remember literally going,
I could see other people in the restaurant like,
they're gone.
And I had a lot of judgment that I could have had.
Anyway, a few days later, something incredible happened.
I was at the golf course
and I was hitting some balls on the driving range.
And the man next to me, I looked up and it was the server
from two nights before at the restaurant.
And he walks over and says, Mr. Maillet, thank you, it was such a great experience.
You made me feel so good about myself.
I'm sorry for the noise level at that table over there.
And I go, yeah, it was.
And he says, yeah, they came back from the funeral of their grandmother. And I went, what?
Yeah, they had just returned from the grandchildren's.
Their grandmother passed away.
And so they had come back from the funeral to have dinner.
And the kids were pretty wound up.
And the wife was very, very sad.
It was her mom.
And the son and the wife had met when they were young.
So she was like his mother too.
And I went, oh, wow. And I went, oh wow.
And I went, hmm.
The old me, I would have judged that family.
I would have spent my entire meal obsessed
with their inability to parent their kids
and the noise and how crazy it was.
Yet, I was so grateful,
and by the way, I've made this mistake a hundred times,
so I'm just telling you the one time I've done it,
I did extend grace to them and kindness, because you never know what someone's going through. You never know what battle
someone's fighting. You never know what burden they're carrying. You don't know what someone
had just recently done to them. You don't know what they're acting out of. You don't
know what pain they're acting out of or stress they're acting out of or loss in this case
they're acting out of.
And so remember that when you go to judge, remember that when you go to react, that you don't know what that person's carrying. And your
ability to be a superhuman has nothing to do with your ability to lift a bunch
of weights or build muscles or make millions and millions of dollars.
Superhuman is a person who treats other humans in a superhuman way, even when
they don't appear to be worthy of it or deserve it.
That's when you've done something superhuman in your life.
So I wanted to challenge you today to really reflect
on where can you be more kind?
What would our world look like if everybody just took
a moment and gave their other fellow human beings,
their brothers and sisters, just a little bit more grace,
a little bit more understanding, a little bit more kindness, and went out of their way to express
that to somebody. And what you're gonna find is that when you give someone that
gift you're giving it to you because now your emotional home becomes equanimity.
It becomes peaceful. It becomes blissful. So what I'm saying to you is the way I
control my internal environment, ironically, is the way that I treat people in my external environment. Not
the external environment dictating it to me. I dictate it to the external
environment. And so I just ask you, maybe the next time you walk by a stranger,
just say a quick prayer for them. Peace be with you. I wish you well. I wish you
wealth. I wish you health. quiet prayers for people quiet thoughts quiet kindness
Quiet gift of grace and I think our world will be a whole lot better, but your internal world will be better
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This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.
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Very short intermission here, folks. I'm glad you're enjoying the show so far.
Don't forget to follow the show on Apple and Spotify. Links are in the show notes.
Now on to our next guest.
Hello and welcome back to Franklin Covey's
On Leadership podcast series,
the world's largest weekly podcast
dedicated to the topic of leadership.
I'm Scott Miller, your host and interviewer each week.
I do not say this about all the guests
because it's not true.
He is my favorite interview
and our first 200 plus episodes, Ed Mylett.
Welcome back to On Leadership.
Brother, that's a pretty big introduction
right there to live up to, so thank you so much.
Whenever I interview someone, I always read their book.
I do my best to read it cover to cover.
I research them, I watch other interviews,
listen to interviews that others have asked
to make sure that this one is unique.
However, I watched the entire hour and 40 minute interview
that Jamie Kern Lima, she wrote a book called Believe It,
a fabulously successful entrepreneur in her own right
when she interviewed you.
And she teed up a story that I think is so remarkable.
I'm gonna have you repeat it on this podcast.
And it really was this idea about being seen.
It's about how each of us as leaders,
as parents, as friends, as entrepreneurs,
we have the power to help other believe in themselves
and be seen.
You shared a story I think about,
maybe was it your first grade teacher?
Would you take a few moments and just recap the story
because I've thought about it multiple times
since I listened to your interview with Jamie Kern-Lehmann.
I think it's worth repeating on our podcast.
It's a hard story for me, brother.
You're going right to it.
So yes, my first grade teacher was Mrs. Smith.
And you know, most things in leadership
are caught, not taught.
You catch it.
And I caught something this day from this beautiful soul.
Mrs. Smith knew that I came from a broken family,
and she knew that I was being teased at school.
I was Eddie's spaghetti.
I would get bullied at school.
She could see the stress on me every morning.
And I didn't know this in first grade,
but now as a grown man looking back, I know.
And she knew I had no self-esteem.
She knew that I didn't think I was very smart.
I didn't think I had any valuable.
I was invisible.
When you come from a family like that, brother, every morning you walk out of your home, you're
ashamed.
You know, why can't my, why don't my friends not want to come over?
Cause my dad's yelling all the time.
Why can't I come from whatever thought and was a normal family?
And so I would carry that every day in school.
And I was this little boy that was just sad and had no self belief whatsoever.
I felt completely invisible and worthless.
And she set up this scenario, bro,
where we had to take tests for the state.
And she set this all up.
I didn't know it.
And she had this other teacher come in the room,
was actually the vice principal come in the room and say,
Mrs. Smith, I need your smartest student.
I need the brightest person you have in here
because this student's gonna represent this whole class
as the leader and take these tests for us.
And I need you to pick them.
And I didn't know this, but she had set all that up.
And she goes, oh, well, that's little Eddie.
And I looked up and I went, me?
And she goes, and she kind of mouthed,
it's the lady.
And all of a sudden for the first time in my life, man,
someone saw me, someone told me I was special.
Someone said something great about me.
And that little boy got up at me
and I walked to the back of that class
and I think I was walking on clouds.
And it changed my life because it was the first
time ever that someone said I see you, you matter, you're special, you're important. What she was
really saying is I love you, I care about you, I believe in you and it changed my life and to this
day I owe so much of my life to Mrs. Smith because so many people, man,
are going through this world right now,
not feeling seen, feeling invisible, feeling worthless,
feeling like I'm just average or below average,
who cares?
And she changed my life in that moment.
I am almost incapable of telling that story without crying
because my whole life no one ever made me feel that way.
And I remember that day thinking I would love to make, because my whole life no one ever made me feel that way.
And I remember that day thinking, I would love to make, sorry I get choked up now,
I would love to make other people feel
the way she's making me feel right now.
And it changed my life because after that day I thought,
well maybe I'm not stupid, maybe I do have value.
I didn't believe it all the time,
but all of a sudden I said maybe,
and it opened my life up to the
possibility that maybe I could do something great in my life, maybe I was
special, maybe I had value. Without that day and without Mrs. Smith I
am not talking to you right now for sure and I think most people undervalue
their ability to impact another human being's life. They don't understand that
one decision, one gesture, one thought, one emotion
can change another person's life.
And Mrs. Smith definitely did that.
And that's why I'm sitting here.
She is one of those people in my life for sure,
and probably the main person.
Ed, your vulnerability is a gift you're giving to all of us.
When I read this passage and heard the story
on your interview with J and B Kern Lima,
I thought about the first time my father told me
he was proud of me.
I was 32 years old.
I was at the Minneapolis airport.
I was boarding a plane from the funeral of his mother,
my grandmother.
My father put his arm on my shoulder
as I was getting in a cab.
And he said, son, I'm proud of you.
I was 32.
Unlike you, I did not come from a broken home.
I came from a very stable middle class environment.
But I think my father's dad died when he was 10,
didn't have a role model there.
My mom's parents were alcoholics,
and so they didn't know how to parent.
But as I listened to your story,
and I hear you talk about this,
all of us as leaders, whether we're formal
or informal leaders in companies,
we also have the power to help people be seen.
Not artificially, but to validate in them their worth.
You're a leader of a large company,
you've hired and trained and onboarded and terminated
thousands of people in your career, many companies you own.
Speak to the thousands of people who are listening
and watching, millions,
that are in fact leaders of people,
whether they are parents or formal leaders.
What are some things they can do today
to make sure those in their purview feel seen?
Seriously get to know their gifts.
So each human being comes with them a set of giftedness
that they know to be true about themselves, by the way.
There's two or three or four of them it could be their kindness their intellect their humor
their beauty their resiliency you know their vision there's all kinds of gifts their patience
and these if you end up pointing out those gifts to somebody in their life and you say look I see
you by the way it's when they go you're gonna do great you're awesome you're incredible that's just
that just floats by somebody but if you say you're gonna do incredible
because and then you tell me something about me that I know to be true you know why Ed
you know why you're gonna be incredible here that cuz you're the smartest guy in the world
even though you're a bright guy because you love your family so much man you will fight
for your family you will do anything for your family and I'll go whoa that is true about
me or you know why you're gonna do very well here Lisa because you care so deeply you've got this heart to serve people
your intentions are so good that's why so it's when you link what you'd like them to
do to the gift they have that they already believe to be true about them.
Now you got it now you're leading now you. And by the way, you will be on this
many. I'm showing one hand up. You will be one of one to five people in their entire
life that made them feel this way. You're 32 years old and how much that stood out from
your dad. And if I said to you, who are the two or three people in your life, Scott, that
have really believed in you? There's not 30. If you're lucky, there's two or three. For
me, it's Mrs. Smith, right?
A couple coaches I've had.
And these are the people that I cherish in my life
because they found something in me.
If you're a person of faith, they found God in you.
They found the gift in you.
And so this is what great leaders do.
They take the time, even if it's in brief,
to say, well, I see this special in you.
You're special because that makes me feel seen. you're awesome you're incredible thanks for being here grateful
for you that's nothing I see you and let me tell you what I see I see X Y & Z and then
they go now they really they will never leave you they will be loyal forever they will be
talking about you on podcasts
20 and 30 years later, like I am with Mrs. Smith.
45 years later.
That's how deeply a leader can impact someone's life
when they see the giftedness in them.
Ed, next time can you bring some passion and energy?
Ed, the book is The Power of One More,
and each of your chapters has this concept,
one more identity, one more try,
one more association, one more dream,
one more question, one more goal, one more standard.
Without question, my favorite chapter in the book
is this idea of one more emotion.
I don't wanna kind of congeal our time around this.
I'm gonna read a passage from your book.
People are a composite of a small handful of emotions
they live with every day.
These emotions create our emotional homes.
Like any home, your emotional home may not be perfect,
but it's comfortable. Riff on that.
Well we all have these three or four emotions. If you take a given week or month of your
life and I said to you, okay, there's a series of emotions you get no matter what the external
is, right? So sometimes those emotions are joy, ecstasy, peace, passion, right? Comfort,
or it could be anxiety, worry, fear, depression, anger, whatever it might be.
But you have these three or four emotions you're going to get because our mind and our spirit
moves towards what it's most familiar with. So we create a home. Oftentimes this emotional home
was installed in us when we were defenseless as children and we just carry it. So it's a different
set of circumstances, a different set of results,
but basically we live in this home
and their emotions aren't negative or positive.
You'll say, oh, fear, terrible emotion.
Well, depends on the dosage of it.
Fear can cause you to focus.
Fear can cause you to prepare.
So there's a healthy dose of it.
I don't look at emotions as negative or positive.
It's the abundance of it.
But if you're living in anxiety,
you live in fear, you live in worry, we all find
a way to get those emotions no matter what in a given week. Things are great, things
are bad. If you're a warrior, you'll find a way to get you some worry. And even though
it may not serve you, it's home for you. You're familiar. I'll give you an example, Scott.
One of my emotional homes has been for years, even though I've worked on getting more peace,
more bliss, more happiness, I've been intentional about getting these emotions.
Human beings get what they want.
We set a goal up, we're intentional about getting it, but do we really want the jet
or the promotion or the money or do we want how we think those things will make us feel?
And so we keep having these goals about things and achievements and levels, but what we really
want is how we think it'll
make us feel. But what if we had those goals, but we also had intention about how those
feelings are. So I want more peace. I want more passion. I want more joy. If we start
to be intentional about the emotions, we can change them. I have this one that's been coming
up up until about a year ago, and it's chaos. One of my emotional homes is chaos
and I would even brag Scott I function well under stress and chaos. I'm a warrior under stress and
chaos which was true I'm familiar with it I'm very functional in it but I had to ask myself
do I like living in it? Is this something I want to have when I'm 60, 70? Did I really need it when
I was 30? No, it's familiar
so I get it. No matter how good things are going, Ed Mylett finds a way to get a little chaos.
Ed Mylett finds a way to get a little worry because I like it. It's where I live and the truth is it
didn't serve me. Why? Why do I have chaos? I'm the son of an alcoholic. You grow up in an alcoholic
household, there's chaos.
Nothing's stable.
Who's coming home today?
What's going to happen?
Are we going to a restaurant?
Is dad going to yell at somebody?
Are we safe driving in the car?
How are mom and dad getting along?
What happened at work?
Chaos.
And I became familiar with chaos and I carried it into my 40s and even probably truly until
I was about 50.
So these emotional homes are where we live.
And if we begin to become more intentional
about the emotions we want,
not the things and achievements we want,
now we'll change our life.
And what's crazy enough about it is,
when we get the emotions,
the things become much easier to have also.
Some of us are hooked on a false belief.
Let me just finish with this, Scott.
We think, I know I have it, but it's kind of part of my recipe to success and achievement. So this chaos
thing although it's really painful it's one of the recipes to why I've produced such great
results. Is that really true? Or have you done it in spite of it? And what I found out
in my life is these emotions that don't serve me that I have regularly, I achieved in spite of them,
not because of them. And so I took you take you through in the book strategies of how to create
a new emotional home because our lives are our emotions. And if I could say one more little thing
on that, it's not the events of our life that define us, it's the meaning we attach to the event
and that meaning creates an emotion.
And if you're familiar with an emotion, you will start creating meanings to deliver that
to you about everything that happens.
Perfect example, you and I left right now, God forbid there was an accident out in front
of my house.
A family was killed in front of us.
One of the worst possible things we could experience.
Our emotion would be sadness, tragedy, my gosh, you know, pain.
That same exact event Mother Teresa, if she were alive, witnessed.
Her belief system in her life was that the greatest honor of her life, Scott,
was to be with someone when their soul leaves here and goes to heaven.
Same exact event, different meaning.
She'd get peace and joy from that situation.
Believe it or not, it's true.
You can look it up.
That's an extreme example.
So these emotions we have create meanings to events
that don't serve us also.
That's how important it is.
I think it's the most profound chapter in the book
because you talk about how we are our emotions.
We are our emotions.
And it stopped me in the book and I sat down
and I talked about my emotional house.
And I wrote down what were my five or six emotions.
Will you take us a step further, Ed,
and maybe instruct those who are listening and watching
how we can better declutter our emotions,
how we can determine which ones should stay in our house
and which ones serve us for what reasons.
Take that a bit further if you will.
Yes, so I always ask myself, the things I want,
why do I want them?
What do I think they'll give me?
This is the pathway to the emotions
that my heart is seeking.
So I want the, I want $10 million saved.
Well, why?
Because I think that'll make me feel safe.
I'll never be broke again.
And so now I know safety is an emotion that
my heart is seeking. I've just made the conditions impossible to feel it. And so this is one
of the ways we become really focused on the emotions that we want. The other thing in
life is that I had this beautiful experience happen to me brother where I was very young.
I won a contest to go to Hawaii and I'm running on the beach in the morning. It was before
the sun was up and running towards me was this man and God's just been to go to Hawaii. And I'm running on the beach in the morning, it was before the sun was up.
And running towards me was this man.
And God's just been so good to me.
The man running towards me was bald,
I could see him in the distance, sweaty,
had like a hairy back.
I'm like, oh, who's this guy?
He's running towards me.
And as he gets closer, I realized that it's Wayne Dyer,
Dr. Wayne Dyer.
Most of your audience would know who Wayne is.
If you don't, they look him up.
But he's one of the all time great spiritual and thought leaders, personal development
gurus of all time. He runs by me. It's so long ago. I got a Sony Walkman on, so does
he. And I pull mine off. I'm listening to a cassette. I said, Dr. Dyer, you changed
my life. And he turns back. He had a deep voice like me. He goes, well, I highly doubt
that. I bet you changed your life but
how did I help you and he walks towards me Scott and here I am a young man I end up sitting
on the beach and watching the Sun come up with Wayne Dyer for about an hour and a half
and at the end of that hour and a half he said Ed I don't say this lightly I think
you're gonna change the world in fact I know it and I'm sure he had said that to other
people but to me I was the only person he ever said that to and he goes and by the way
you're incredibly bright your ability to articulate your thoughts.
I, he goes, I feel things that when you speak, I don't know what planet you're from, but
it's not this planet.
There's something when you speak, I feel something and I'm right here with you.
And I said, thank you.
And he goes, and that's not why would you please do me a favor?
If you want to have happiness in your life.
I said, tell me please.
He said, never attach your emotions or your happiness to your abilities or your achievements
because you'll be chasing them all your life and when and if they fail, you'll be lost.
He said, what if you attached your happiness and your emotions to your intentions?
And it changed my life and was a gift to me at that time because prior to
that just like you said with your dad, I thought love was what I achieved. If I had a home
run my dad said he loved me. If I got straight A's I got affection from my family. So everything
was attached to the external result I would produce. Then I'd let myself feel the emotion
just for a little bit. Then I'd get back to my emotional home. Sorry, I'm moving on your podcast here. He said, don't move. So he said, Ed, if you'll start to attach your bliss to your
intentions, he said, Ed, you're going to change the world because you have such a good heart.
You're such a good man because of the way you grew up. You care so deeply about people. It's special
Ed and they feel things from you. Please the rest of your life, attach your emotions to your intentions, and you'll never be without the
ones you want. And I've pretty much done that brother. So I'll
remind myself before a podcast like this, when I want some
confidence and some strength in my emotions and some peace, I
remind myself not of my ability to communicate or what I know,
but my intention to serve people. When I close my eyes at night and I pray, I remind myself of my intent to make a
difference, my intent to be a good man.
And I feel that peace.
And so I would remind everybody to get clear and intentional about the emotions
you want, but to attach them to your intent, not your ability, not the external.
And that was a life changing life altering moment.
What I did in knows, of course, he was writing a book
at that time called The Power of Intention,
which is a book I would also recommend to people to read.
Today's gonna be special,
because the man that I have on the program,
there is only one of in the world.
Like, literally, he's one of a kind.
And he is just one of my favorite people to listen to,
to watch.
I've gone to see him perform in person.
He's a comedian.
He's an entertainer.
He's a life coach.
He's an author.
So JP Sears, thank you for being here, brother.
Ed, thank you for having me on, brother.
It is beyond an honor to be here.
I'm a fan of yours.
I have been since day one and I'm so grateful to now be a friend.
So there's nowhere else I'd wanna be.
It's hard to interview you, I was prepping,
because I think you know this about you.
It's hard to know when you're saying what you really think
and when you're being funny sometimes.
Yeah, I have no idea.
So, that's up to you.
I don't know either.
Speaking of that, let's start out there for a minute.
Where's this style?
So everybody has a style.
I think that's usually an overused term.
Sometimes it's just our authentic personality.
But there's nobody like you and you're able to use humor, satire, yet then the next second
there's this deep lesson that I catch from you. How
did that start? Like did you start out as a life coach and then say I'm gonna
kind of hide this humorous side of me and then there was just this one day
where you went I can't hide this anymore or that's a risk that you took in being
that way for sure. Yeah you know my inner idiot had me hiding a great gift for
many years because it was telling me it would be
bad to let my gift out.
So yeah, I started off as a life coach.
I had been doing life coaching, especially emotional healing coaching with people for
13 years before I put out my first comedy video.
And during that time, I'd look at my natural sense of humor that had been very prolific in my personal life
ever since I was a kid and still was. Yet, look at it and say humor would be bad for business.
I discredit you as a life coach, as a spiritual guy. You should be serious, JP. So I was doing
meaningful work, yet excluding a lot of parts of me.
I was giving people some authentic JP, but definitely not the whole pie of authenticity.
And then five and a half years ago at this point, I started to betray that story, that
it would be bad for business to let my humor out because I kept having these ideas come
to me in flashes and they were in the form of video ideas where I'm sharing my perspective
through the language of comedy. Now, like anything poopy, I did my best to constipate those thoughts
and ideas. I'd hold them down like, oh, that's, I'm accidentally thinking of those exciting ideas. What's wrong with me? But eventually like the itch became too great.
I had to scratch it. So I made my first comedy video released in October 5th, 2014. And man,
that woke something up inside of me. I mean, it woke up an expression of creativity that
I had never known before. And it's like, it was my expression.
Like Van Gogh has his paintings,
like ooh, okay, comedy on video and now stage.
This is my expression.
And on the inside, I just have to say this as well,
what was happening on the inside was more important
because it was me saying yes to a part of me that
I judged to be defective enough that he would screw up my career. It's like I was on that first video,
it was like an initiation where I was taking my inner child out of the basement where I locked him,
reclaiming him and saying not only do you have a place in my life,
you are the gift in my life.
And I think ever since then,
my work doing conscious comedy
is led by the five-year-old inner child in me
in different ages, but it's like,
dude, the more I'm just a kid,
sharing the truth as I know it,
giving voice to what's not being said,
the more things work out well for me.
By the way, we're five minutes into this
and I would already tell everybody rewind
and go back and watch that.
Like that one phrase you used, brother,
they're about betraying that kind of BS story
you tell yourself.
And wow, it's funny that you say it the way you say it.
Everyone listening to that has that thing too, where there's this part of themselves they want
to express, but there's this fear that if they do it'll hurt other things they have.
I remember when I started speaking, I was a one-trick pony when I spoke, which was intensity.
You know, a natural easy emotion for me to get is intensity or even maybe even bordering
on anger. And I was willing on stage to be vulnerable. Many of you might relate to this
to express one of my emotions, almost like that was a safe emotion for me to express
was anger. And a lot of you have that one or two emotions that you feel safe expressing,
but there's all these other ones that are unsafe to express and so on stage for me to be vulnerable or emotional or
Show that my weaknesses or the things I fear I would never go there as a speaker
And it was only when that itch finally got scratched
That I became kind of my own self on stage and then all of these other ideas and expressions started to come out of me
When I started to betray that crappy story, I was telling myself
So I I love that about you one thing about the other thing JP that I've heard you say,
not a lot of people admit to, was that I got into coaching or personal development, self-help,
whatever you want to be, thinking I'm really going to teach this stuff to other people.
Yeah.
I could really help people. I'm a pretty good expressive person like you are. I'm like,
I'm going to use my gift of expression and words and articulation to
help people with all these things. But that was a lie.
I really got into personal involvement to help heal and grow myself.
And I've heard you say the same thing. I'm curious.
Do you even know what it was you were trying to heal or grow from that caused
you to get into the space itself?
Well, looking back, I do.
But dude, in the moment, if you would have took a blood draw of 19 year old JP,
you would have found very high arrogant levels. And you know,
I'm thinking like, dude,
I'm going to like work with people because I'm so strong and stable and like,
I just want to help the weak people. But I was
constructing my sense of strength off of what I now call weakness. You know, at the time when
I was 19, 20, I hadn't cried for eight years. And I thought that made me strong. I thought that meant
I'm emotionally stable. But I'll never forget the very first
workshop I took with a powerful mentor of mine, a guy named John McMullen, runs an organization
called Journeys of Wisdom. He's to this day, he's 79 years young, one of the most playful
people I know. But the afternoon of that first workshop, I cried for the first time in eight years.
And it was, I was crying about stuff.
It wasn't happening in that moment.
It was stuff that happened 13 years before in my childhood, 14, 15 years before.
All the emotions were still there.
I was just numb to them.
But the tears were coming out because this was a wise man.
I was an ignorant man.
So now looking back, I could realize
one of the things I needed to reclaim was my emotions.
I was so emotionally numb.
And our late great friend, Carl Jung,
this Swiss psychiatrist, died. I think 1963
He's one of my favorite quotes of all time. He says
Feelings are the language of the soul
And if that's half true that meant I was dramatically disconnected from my soul
Life doesn't feel great. It doesn't feel fulfilling It doesn't feel purposeful when you don't have your soul speaking to you through its
language called emotions and feelings.
And you know, on top of that, I also had some more nuanced issues.
I grew up being a rescuer.
Let me sacrifice my needs, take care of mom and dad, my sister, make sure everybody's
strong and stable because it feels like the world's falling apart around me. So let me just be Mr. Fixed. And not that any kid can,
but I could have a sense of control that gave me the illusion of I am fixing that. So it
feels like I'm not going to die either. So man, and I want to give myself a little bit of credit. I've come a long way and I have
infinity yet to go with my
healing and growth and connection to my emotional vulnerability and knowing
Who the hell I am as a person I connect so much
and I
Got to tell you I think millions of people do this idea of
numbness you explained me early on in my life too I used to think well if I can't if I don't
feel this pain then I'm actually probably not having it yeah I think a lot of people
express them so I think well I've you've got all these coping skills you built up I remember
I was at my tell you something personal I was at my, tell you something personal,
I was at my grandfather's funeral.
I don't know what age I was.
I was 15, 16 years old.
And appropriately, everybody in my family
was crying at the funeral.
And I remember going, why can't I cry?
I loved him so much too, right?
But why can't I feel like they feel this isn't good, this isn't healthy?
I had learned all these skills like you did from coming from kind of dysfunctional family,
I think you can share them in yours.
I kind of found ways to not feel things and so as I got older, I thought that meant I
don't have any pain.
Yeah.
What I had done is masked it. Do you mind sharing a little bit like, if you don't have any pain. Yeah. What I did is mask it.
Do you mind sharing a little bit like if you don't want to, it's okay.
Why did you begin to build these skills of numbness?
Is it dysfunction in your family?
Was it some particular event or what was it?
You know, yes to all of that. I think in the most pervading pressure that caused me to cope in a way where I created
psychological dissociation from my own emotions and therefore I was numb was like when I was
younger my parents would split apart, we're getting a divorce.
Then a few months later, no, we're not anymore.
A couple months later, no, we're definitely getting a divorce then a few months later. Yeah. No, we're not anymore a couple months later I would now we're definitely getting a divorce and they did that a lot and
Like at the time I'm like, okay, just tell me what you're doing. I don't care
Like it didn't affect me yet looking at that. I can realize that was very influential
Having having a child's world split apart
What I mean, we how was your world split apart.
How is your world split apart is a question
we all have an answer to.
For some people it's trauma, it's abuse.
For some people it's family secrets,
like mom drinks all the time but we all act like she doesn't.
For some of it's parents splitting apart.
Other times it's other hardships,
other times we're bullied at school. You know,
it's adversity we all have because we all need it. You can only be as strong as the adversity
from which you overcame, yet this is my adversity. It feels like my world's splitting apart.
And in order to feel like I'm keeping my world put together, I'm going to try to take care of mom and dad, keep them as happy as I can,
which means my emotions don't have a place because I can't be unstable because that'll
make mom and dad care for me and give me their attention, but they need their attention on
their own lives. So I appeared to be strong and stable and I thought I was. But man, numbness is temporary relief
and long-term increased suffering.
We just think, I know anytime we're in pain,
like last night I threw my back out
because I'm squatting with more weight
relative to an old back injury
that wasn't quite rehabbed, surprise.
It was like, okay, I threw my back out,
I racked the weight, I wish I could've felt numb,
but I'm feeling the pain, and that's good.
Because once we're numb for a while,
we don't feel the pain, but also what else don't you feel?
You know, like if you get anesthesia in the shoulder, you're not going to feel the surgeon's
knife going in, but you're also not going to feel the Swedish massage.
So when we're numb long enough, we don't actually, in my delusional opinion, my experience is
we don't have the feeling experience that we're alive.
We can know we're alive. We can be in our head like, dude, like my IQ is high enough. I know I'm alive. We can know we're alive.
We can be in our head like,
dude, like my IQ is high enough.
I know I'm alive.
Look, I have a pulse.
That's cool.
I know I'm alive.
But that doesn't mean we feel alive.
And man, people will do crazy things to escape numbness.
Once they're psychologically dissociated
from their emotions,
I mean, some people will routinely overeat just so they can then feel like,
Cool, I feel so much shame because I overate.
And that's a secondary emotion that they feel so they can feel something, but their core emotions are still numb or they'll abuse themselves with drugs, alcohol, sugar.
Other times it's like always self-sabotaging themselves just so they can feel the thrill
of something so they can feel something.
But man, when we give ourselves the gift of reclaiming our heart, like you mentioned the
V word, vulnerability, that's so challenging to do.
It's way easier said than done.
But when we can get fierce with our vulnerability because we realize we're freaking worth it.
And we can not just be angry at an JP or numb JP,
but we can be angry when it's appropriate,
when it serves us.
We can be the one that's crying the loudest at the funeral
because that's what's most appropriate.
And which means we can be the one laughing the loudest
at the comedy show, which means we can also be the happiest because when we're numb, we
don't get any of that.
Brother, I got to tell you, now you all know. So you see this dude on YouTube or on Instagram,
and I think oftentimes they have no idea because they see your normal brilliance. I happen to think as funny as JP is, as articulate as he is, you're now watching him in his gifted
disc zone.
No, it's just a fact.
And I got to tell you, like, you just said something so profound, I don't want to always
restate things you say, but you know, the gift of giving yourself the willingness to
feel pain and not be numb, you know, the other side of that is you do experience more joy in those moments. If you're one
of these people, so you're like, why don't I enjoy the moments at a party where
other people do? Or seeing someone in my family do something, why doesn't it affect
me like it does other people? This is, these are things you need to
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What does the future hold for business?
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You're probably going to get 10 different answers.
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netsuite.com slash my let. That was a great conversation and if you want to hear the full interview, be sure to follow
the Ed Mylett Show on Apple and Spotify.
Links are in the show notes.
Here's an excerpt I did with our next guest.
I have to tell you, I don't know that I could have a more perfect person on my program today
given the times we find ourselves in and this woman's remarkable. So first I
mean the clinical part is that she's a trained psychologist at Harvard.
She's written one of my favorite books of all time called
Emotional Agility that we're going to talk a lot about today
but she's also a management thinker, a business thinker, a mental health expert
and she gave one of the great TED Talks that have ever
been given in the history of TED Talks and so I'm a huge fan and it's an
honor to finally meet her and share some time because I think she can help some
of you persevere and even be more productive during these really difficult
times. So Susan David, thank you for being here today. Welcome. Thank you for having
me and being open to my message. I love your message.
As you know, we were talking off camera.
So let's start out with something basic.
Emotional agility.
I read that book in a day and a half, a while ago,
and it's one of those books where most of my recollections
have stayed very fresh.
And so even preparing for this, it stayed with me
because frankly, some of the things you said in that book
made me rethink some of the things I teach and I'm always open to growing and getting
better but why don't we start with a basis what is emotional agility to begin
with? Well I'm gonna start with a very short definition and then I'll do it a
little bit longer. Okay. The very short definition is that it's about being able
to be healthy with yourself, with your psychology, your thoughts, your emotions,
your stories, the stuff that's inside of you.
And really emotional agility is the critical skills
that help you to be a healthy human being.
And why is this important?
Because how we ultimately deal with our inner worlds
is everything, drives everything.
It drives how we love, how we live, how we parent,
how we come to our relationships,
how we build our businesses and even our health behaviors.
So it's about being healthy,
but if I have to break it down a little bit more,
it's about skills that enable us to be curious and learning
with our emotions and our difficult experiences,
to be compassionate
with ourselves and also have the courage to do what's difficult when it's aligned
with what matters to us. Yeah I also, that's beautifully said and since you
wrote the book, you should be able to say that the best but I have to say that one
of the things and we'll dive in this a little bit later is you know the concept
of being a little bit more agile and not rigid in your emotions, meaning to be able to be willing
to embrace the ones that most people connotate as negative ones. That we don't
always have to be chasing happiness and I want to talk about that but I picture
this beautiful little five-year-old girl when I think of you and where this was
sort of born from and I'd like you to share that story. Your father seems like
such a special man and had really there's multiple defining moments that you talk about him but
this idea that we all have one I heard you say that we all have one shared experience in our
lives that we share the most which is death and our thoughts of death and I talk about this.
It's amazing that we're just meeting now because I talk about this so much that I believe that
conversation to some extent is going on in our minds almost all the time, the
contemplation of that event. So would you take them back to the five-year-old you
because that leads to this incredible someday, this book and these breakthroughs.
So would you share that? This journey, this journey. So yes, I as you can hear by my
accent, I am not American or Australian. I grew up as a white South African
in apartheid South Africa. And it was very much a country, a community that was committed to denial,
you know, to not seeing the other. And as you'll see in my work in my TED talk, this
idea of seeing the self, seeing the other plays a really important part. So I recall when I was around five years old, when you are five,
you start becoming aware of your own mortality.
And I recall night after night,
finding my way into my parents bed in between the two of them.
And I would say to my father, I'm worried that, you know,
one of you isn't going to be here in the morning. I'm worried that something's gonna happen. And this is very normal.
People as five year olds, they start becoming aware
that there is an end at some point.
And so I'm lying between my parents
and I'm saying to my father,
promise me you'll never die, promise me you'll never die.
And my father could have done what so many of us
with beautiful intentions do with our kids, which is to say, don't worry, promise me you'll never die, promise me you'll never die. And my father, you know, could have done what so many of us
with beautiful intentions do with our kids,
which is to say, don't worry about it,
everything will be okay, I'll be around.
My father didn't, he comforted me with soft pets and kisses,
but he never lied.
He didn't try to build some false buffer,
some forced positivity between me and reality.
What he said to me is, um, Susie, we all die and it's normal to be scared.
And one of the things that you'll find is the capacity to even in the face of fear,
be courageous.
So now I, Ed,, I wanna fast forward 10 years
when I'm having these conversations.
I don't know that 10 years later when I'm 15,
my father will actually be diagnosed with terminal cancer.
And I recall my mother, it was a Friday,
and I recall my mother coming in saying to me,
go say goodbye to dad.
We knew that that was his last day.
And I go into this room where my father's lying
and his eyes are closed.
But I know that he knows that I'm there
because I have always felt seen with him.
And I kiss him goodbye, I tell him I love him
and I then go off to school because my mother has,
with good intentions said to me,
you wanna keep things as normal and routinized as possible.
And then this is where it kind of segues into,
I think what so many people's experiences,
which is I go off to school and my father dies
and the months go and the seasons go
and I'm this little 15 year old,
not dropping a grade, trying to put on a brave face.
People ask me how I'm doing, and I say to them like,
I'm okay, I'm okay.
But you know, Ed, in truth, we were struggling.
My mother had lost the love of her life.
She was raising three children.
We had financial difficulties,
and I started to spiral down fast.
And so then the last little strand of this,
which then breaks into my career,
is I was spiraling and I was not doing well psychologically.
And one day we had this English teacher
who handed out these blank notebooks to the class.
And she said, write, tell the truth,
write like no one's reading.
And it was such a remarkable experience
because I felt like for the first time I was actually,
instead of doing this forced positivity,
the master of being okay, but inside I'm crumbling,
actually I felt invited to show up
to the authenticity of my experience.
And this was revolutionary for me
in a way that actually shaped my entire career.
I started to become aware of and interested in what are the so that we can deal with others pain and the reality of
a fragile and beautiful world. My gosh so that just even the concept of that an
emotion is positive or negative I gotta be honest with you I've repeated that
sentence thousands of times kind of unconsciously and I think I think when you wrote the book, obviously it made an impact on me,
but probably little did you know that it may be required reading during a pandemic like this.
And one thing you said there, I just want to say to the parents that more and more people that I
know that have five and six and seven-year-olds have been telling me that their children have
been telling them that they're concerned about death and that maybe they even go through a bout of unhappiness at that age for no
explained reason and I'm wondering now that you've said that, I sort of have a deeper understanding
but I want to ask you, these times we find ourselves in there's racial reckoning and unrest
happening and social justice going on, there's COVID, there's all this noise about the election,
unemployment, stress, anxiety, there's not a whole lot of positive things on social media,
certainly not in traditional media, and I'd like you to talk about, you know, I want people to
consider this thought because I think it's so powerful, that there are two types of emotions, I guess you would say, but how should someone deal with, think of
emotions that aren't happiness, that aren't success,
that aren't bliss, that are fear, anxiety, worry,
maybe even depression.
How would you, what would you say to people
who are experiencing a lot of those emotions
and maybe avoiding them, thinking they're negative.
So yeah, and let's explore these narratives more because I think they're so powerful. But what I would say is two things. Number one, emotions are teachers, okay? Even your most difficult emotions
are teachers. And what I mean by this is if you're feeling bored at work and you can be as busy as anything, but still bored, same old, same old,
that emotion of boredom might be a signpost that you value more learning and
growth and that you don't have enough of it.
If you have a difficult emotion of loneliness,
that loneliness might be signposting to you that even in a very busy
household, because we all at home more than ever,
that you value intimacy and connection and that you need more of it. So the most difficulty motions
signpost the things that we care about. And when we push aside these difficulty motions,
not only does it not work, not only does
pushing aside difficulty motions actually contribute to lower levels of
well-being, higher levels of depression and anxiety and lower chance of success
than the things that you're trying to do, but pushing aside these difficulty
motions stops us from navigating the world as it is, which is a world in which you might be feeling
bored or lonely and so it's stopping you from learning. So the two things that I would say is
our emotions are teachers and that's very different from a world that would have us believe
that if we just think positive that we're going to manifest everything that we think.
that we're gonna manifest everything that we think. And then the second thing-
Yeah, oh, go ahead, I'm sorry.
Go ahead. No, no.
And then the second thing that I would say is,
emotions are teachers,
but it's really important to also recognize
that emotions are data,
so they contain some of the things that we care about,
but they're not directives.
Just because I feel bad with my colleague in this business that I'm trying to grow, doesn't mean I need to have it out with them.
Just because I am feeling really frustrated with, you know, my partner, my spouse, doesn't mean that I then need to leave the room.
So our emotions are data, not directives.
then you need to leave the room. So our emotions are data, not directives.
Wow, I want you to hear this. This is like for me, this could be a life breakthrough for a couple million people right now. But I think this
positive negative thing, and again, it's just occurring to me as I was
rethinking your work that I think we think happy people are successful
people, meaning they should have high self-esteem
and I think we've actually attached in our lives that if I feel more anxiety fear or worry that
somehow I am less than these people who are experiencing these other emotions don't you think
so? So this is exactly the issue that we are facing which is we have this narrative that conflates
happiness and success and what happens is that when people feel normal, these are normal
human experiences, they are normal to the extent that Charles Darwin wrote about emotions, including
difficulty emotions, as being core to our ability to adapt and thrive in the world. That when you
experience difficulty emotions, they help you to communicate with others, but they also help you to communicate with yourself
in terms of how you should shift things, whether there's a dissonance between you
and your values, whether you're feeling distant from what matters to you. And so
what has happened is this, I think, just remarkably sad and challenging experience that we have with emotions that I think is
actually contributing to the extraordinary statistics that we have around depression
and anxiety, which is that when people experience normal emotions, they are now seen as good
or bad, positive or negative. So what do we
then do? We then try to push them aside. We say things like, I'm unhappy in my job, but
at least I've got a job, so I should just get on with it. I, you know, need to put on
a brave face. There's this narrative of what I call the tyranny of positivity, where even people who are dying of cancer are
told to just be positive, which takes them away from their experience. And Ed,
what you spoke about earlier, how do we possibly have conversations around
racial justice and showing up to the pain of other people
if we have a narrative that that pain is somehow weak.
What that then does is it creates a complete divide
where only if you are being positive,
then are you allowed in my inner circle
and if you're being negative, then you toxic
and I'm gonna cut you off. And so there and if you're being negative, then you toxic and you know, I'm going to cut you off.
And so there's this very, very difficult,
I actually don't believe that we are going to be able
to heal society effectively.
And I know that sounds like a very, you know,
wide ranging proclamation,
but I think that social healing comes about through our
ability to be with difficulty
emotions more our own difficulty emotions and others because
internal pain always comes out.
Right.
So it's amazing.
That's an amazing statement.
I hope that's an amazing state because I must say to you,
I think people also conflate what toxicity is.
So people that experience a broad range of emotions
aren't necessarily toxic.
Toxic is someone who's intentionally out to hurt you,
intentionally antagonistic towards you.
That's somebody perhaps you wanna remove from your life,
but not somebody who experiences a broad range of emotions.
In fact, they're more interesting people.
And I think we attack, don't you think so?
I mean, if everyone says, hey, everything's great, happy.
I mean, I like the contradiction. I actually often say I love my best friends aren't all very wealthy
people by any means but they're all pretty complex people I love people that have a complexity of
emotions a complexity of personality and I think we suppress our personality I think we attach our
self-esteem to having positive emotions and when we have negative ones we think we think we attach our self-esteem to having positive emotions and when we have negative ones, we think
are, we think we're less than people that we see celebrating all the time but I wanted to ask you
something specific was and your works helped me so much. It's, I have a program I did a long time ago,
Blissful Dissatisfaction. It basically says something similar, you just say a lot better than I do
to what you were just describing but I think there's one other other reason we, and I want you to help people with this.
I think the other reason we avoid these emotions
that have been labeled as negative
is that when we experience an emotion,
typically it triggers a behavior in us.
And oftentimes, because we have this false belief,
this emotion we're experiencing
somehow reduces our self-esteem.
It typically triggers a negative pattern
of behavior from us.
And then we suppress the emotion even more.
And so is there something someone can do
that the unraveling doesn't start to happen?
What I call the stacking,
where the emotion triggers a behavior
that we then want to avoid.
Is there something someone can do strategically?
Yes, yes.
So there are so many powerful strategies.
These are things that people can learn. And you
know, what you spoke to earlier, which is so often, when people
are struggling, they'll say, I just want this to go away, because
I want this difficulty motion to go away, because somehow there's
this idea that difficulty motions point to the fact that
we're not successful. And one of the things that I think about so
much is, you know, if I think about so much is,
if you think about the only people
who never experienced disappointment,
the frustration that comes with failure,
the only people who never have their hearts broken,
they are dead, they are dead.
So thinking that you wanna live life
in a way that is just happy,
that is a dead person's goal.
We don't get to have a meaningful career
or leave the world a better place
or raise a family without stress and discomfort.
Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.
So to your question then,
how do you start to capture this practically?
The first thing that I would say is that often when people have difficulty emotions, they
start to engage in, as I mentioned, these type one emotions and type two emotions.
The type one emotion is, I feel sad, I'm feeling stressed, I'm feeling angry, I'm feeling lonely.
That's type one.
Type two is when you start layering a judgment about whether you should
or shouldn't have the emotion. I'm unhappy that I'm unhappy, you know, I'm so stressed about the
fact that I'm stressed because I'm worried that being so stressed is going to cause me to die
prematurely or whatever it is. So a very important first part of emotional agility is quite simply, and it is actually
a fairly simple choice, which is to end the struggle with your difficulty motions by dropping
the rope.
And what I mean by this is to move away from the space where you second guess or basically
guess like yourself as to whether you should or shouldn't
be allowed to feel something
and just notice that this is what you're feeling
and especially to try to notice that feeling with compassion.
It's tough to be able to run a business
or grow a business in a pandemic.
I'm feeling anxious in the shadow of illness and death. It's normal to be anxious.
So if you can adapt a level of compassion with yourself, that can be really powerful.
And compassion is often thought of as being, oh, it's letting yourself off the hook. It's being
weak. It's being lazy. But, but it, you know, we've all been in restaurants,
and I look forward to the day
when I can go into a restaurant again.
But we've all been in restaurants,
and I'll describe this,
and I can talk to more practical strategies as well,
but we've all been in a restaurant
where we've seen a very beautiful interaction,
and that is you see a little toddler running away
and exploring the restaurant.
And the toddler turns around, looks,
sees the parent or the caregiver there,
giggles and runs more.
So in other words, what they do is they keep turning back,
making sure that their parents are there,
and then they go and they explore more
and explore more and explore more.
Now, what is it that is going on here?
Um, one of the most beautiful psychologists, John Bowlby described her,
what the,
what parents are really doing in the situation is they are providing what is
called a secure base for the child. It's,
it's the fact that the child knows that if there is trouble,
they can come running back and they will be looked
after. It's that that then allows them to explore, take risks, learn and grow. Now take
the same idea and apply it to yourself. When you are kind to yourself, when you have your
own back, when you know that even if things don't go well, you will still love yourself and hold yourself because there is a
five year old in you that needs love and nurturance. When you
do that, what do you do? You are basically creating a context in
which you are able to take risks, to put your hand up for a new
opportunity.
And so it's that, that's where this myth of self compassion, which is self compassion is about being weak and lazy is so wrong.
People who are self compassionate are actually more likely to
take risks, more likely to explore and grow and learn
because they know if something goes wrong,
they will be there for themselves. So that's one, those are some strategies I can help with other
very practical strategies if you like, so you let me know. So good, I'm just, I have your own back.
I've never heard anybody say that before. That's powerful, just that in and of itself. I have to
share with you, I want to tell my audiences too, we booked this interview quite a while ago and so I was
refreshing myself on your work during an interesting time for me and I just want to share this with you
because it helped me and I want to validate what you're saying and then I'll ask you another
question but I just want to share this. So my dad's been sick for a very long time, he's had cancer
and his health
has deteriorated pretty substantially recently and some scary moments. About
that same time, I had somebody that I care about very much let me down. Almost
a form of, by the way no one in my family if everyone's watching this so, but a
friend of mine, kind of a form of betrayal and sort of reveal part of them that I was just shocked
existed and it was very hard on me. Normally what I would do as an achiever, right, was be I'm gonna
power through this, you know, I'm gonna be better on the other side, I'm gonna be stronger, especially
men I think oftentimes are wired to have to do this and I was actually prepping for this during that,
even though it was a little bit ago and I said, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna sit with
these emotions and experience them. I have not done that in a long time. I even cried,
which I very rarely cry and I want to cry more now. I've actually cried, I actually cried in
front of a group too and you know what I found on the other side of it
was an unbelievable piece about things.
An unbelievable comfort about everything will be okay.
I learned some things about myself and ironically,
the strength that I wanted to find that I thought
if I just kind of shoved this stuff to the side,
I found through letting myself sit with these emotions
and not feel
less than because I had them. And I don't, people know my work. I'm not a mamsy-pamsy
foofy dude at all. I'm telling you that that made a huge difference for me. And I want
you to address the part that did. Go ahead. I can see you want to jump in on that.
No, no, no. It's beautiful. Continue and I'll add.
Well what I was careful of, and I want you to talk about this in your reply was I didn't say I am. Yes. During it. I'd like you to talk
about that and anything else that occurred to you when I was saying that.
Yes. So firstly you know really what you are doing is the equivalent of what that
teacher did you know write tell the, write like no one's reading. And the false narrative that we have is that we will be stronger
and better through positivity.
But actually, we become stronger and better through going through
and sitting and learning from the difficulty motion.
We generate a sense of insight about ourselves,
a sense of resilience,
a sense of what you need to do in the situation.
And I'll describe what this means
from a practical perspective.
The first is what you point to, which is I am.
So when often we feel a difficult experience,
like we will use language that basically says, I am, okay?
I am sad, I am angry, I am stressed.
But think about what you are doing in your language.
What you are basically doing is saying, I am, all of me,
100% of me is defined by the emotion.
But you aren't your emotion. You are a person who has emotions,
but you aren't your emotion. You also contain your wisdom, your values, your insight, your
intention, your breathing, your groundedness, your love. There's so much that is beyond that single defining I am.
So what I would say to listeners is if you're feeling that you are having a difficult emotion,
it can be really powerful to create space between you and the emotion.
Because of course, when you say something like, I am sad,
it's almost like the sadness is a cloud in the sky and you have become the cloud,
you know, you have become the sad cloud. But you are not the cloud.
You are the sky. You are, as every human being is capacious and,
and beautiful and complex
and able enough to experience all of their emotions.
The sadness is one cloud in the sky,
but there's other parts that we can bring.
So what is a way that we can do this?
The first is instead of saying, I am sad, I am angry,
see if you can just label your thought, your emotion,
your feeling, your story for what it is.
And here's an example.
I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad.
I'm noticing that this is my, I'm not good enough story.
I'm noticing the thought that I'm being undermined.
When you notice your thoughts, your feelings,
your stories for what they are,
they are thoughts, feelings, and stories.
As I've mentioned earlier, data, not directives.
What you do is you open critical linguistic space,
but actually emotional psychological space
so that other parts of you can come forward.
And Ed, you know, I'm sure you've
brought up at some point in your podcast, but I think it's beautiful to, I think one
of the most powerful ideas in human history is this idea that was first spoken to in this
very particular way by Viktor Frankl, between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space is our power to choose. And in that choice lies
our growth and our freedom. When we are hooked by a difficult
thought, emotion and story, then there's no space between stimulus
and response. I am sad, I'm going to have it out with this
person. I am angry. I feel betrayed. I'm going to, you
know, just ignore them now. But when you start using this, like I'm noticing that this is what I'm
feeling, what it does is it helps you to create that space between stimulus and response so that
you can bring other parts of yourself into the space. And ultimately, instead of acting out of your emotions,
you are moving into your values
and being able to bring the best of who you are forward
in the situation.
So that's a practical example.
I can give so many, but let me know if that's helpful.
It's so helpful.
Couple of things occur to me.
One, everyone listening to this,
I think would love to wake up with your voice in their ear every morning. It's so, I know everyone's agreeing with me right now.
It's so soothing and pleasing and it's easy to feel at peace and happy listening to you.
Today is a special day for me, like it's a surreal day because not only is the man to my left a
Major League Baseball Hall of Famer, he's got 3,000 hits. He had 388 one year. He's one of
the all-time greats in Major League Baseball, but he's been one of the all-time
most influential people in my life. As a young man, he became a mentor to me. I
haven't seen him in decades and now he's in my living room on my show. Everybody,
this is Hall of Famer Rod Carew. Rod, thank you for being here, brother.
Thanks for having me. Baseball is a different sport and people that aren't
fans of every sport,
maybe this nuance isn't obvious to you,
but like football, they're gonna play 16, 18 games now.
There's a game on a Sunday.
We all work towards that Sunday.
There's an event, we have it, then there's a playoffs.
Most sports are that way.
Baseball is a grind.
You're playing 162 games in a very short window of time.
And there's a grind.
You have to maintain an emotional level of control throughout a season.
And most people, a lot of big league players even struggle with that.
How did you maintain emotional control through slumps, through ups and downs, through a full
season and then through a career as long as yours as well?
Well, you know, to me, it wasn't a job.
To me, it was just a little boys game,
like Campanella said.
Little boys, baseball's a game little boys play.
I never can tell you that I've gone through a slump
where it has kind of knocked me off my heels
and pushed me back.
Cause I remember I was, the longest streak I think I had
as a hitter, I was 0 for 17.
That was your longest slump?
Yeah, the longest.
Four games?
So.
I hate you.
So the 18th time,
I dropped a bunt down for a base hit.
Made an adjustment.
I hit a high chopper, didn't leave the infield for a base hit.
I dropped another bunt down for a base hit and I had another high chopper for a base
hit.
Now one of those balls left the infield.
But while I was going through this 0 for 17,
I was hitting line drives and they were going right at somebody.
Yeah.
And so the guy says, how do you do that?
I says, well, you know, I worked on my bunning.
So if I'm not getting hits swinging the bat,
I'm going to the next dimension.
I love that. I think there's a lesson there, Rod. And I always go back to like, OK, I'm going to the next dimension. I love that.
I think there's a lesson there Rod,
and I always go back to like,
okay, how's the supply to other things?
And that it's true in business.
We're always trying to hit these big home runs
and if you feel like things are slipping,
just get some base hits, get a sale, get an account,
get some momentum, get in early, make extra phone calls,
do the extra email, just lay the bunk down.
Get some momentum going,
because sometimes the slump you're in in business,
you're hitting line drives, it's just not the time.
It's just timing, it's just things are,
it's not always you're doing something wrong.
Maybe it's just bad timing right now.
Keep making adjustments, et cetera.
And you know, the difference about me and other players
is I had the six tool.
Which was?
You know, they always say you have the five tools.
The sixth tool was this.
Your mind.
I never let my mind get me in trouble.
I stayed positive all the way.
I knew, yeah, I'm gonna make outs.
You know, this is a game that three out of 10
and you're successful.
Yeah. You know, so I a game that three out of ten and you're successful. Yeah.
You know, so I'm not going to worry about days that I don't get a hit.
You know, like some guys, all of a sudden it's panic.
You're right.
You know, they panic.
What am I doing wrong?
Do you see something?
No, you're just hitting the ball good, but you're hitting it right at somebody.
You think the mental part of your game
was the separator for this?
Oh yes, definitely.
And I tell kids that today.
I says, this is the most important tool.
You can do everything else,
but if you can't control what's going on up here,
things are gonna be tough.
One million percent.
By the way, those of you who are listening to audio,
he's pointing at his head,
and he's talking about how important the mental
part of the game is, maintaining emotional control, not stacking worries
and thoughts that get bigger than they need to be. It's amazing to me, I work
with a lot of athletes on their mental game and people will ask me, you know,
what are you really working with them when you're, if it's a UFC fighter or a
boxer or a golfer and I'll tell them often, the main thing we work on is their
confidence and people say to me, there's no way confidence at that level of play
yes confidence at that level of play is even fragile for many athletes as well
that's true is that not true you're in dugouts with guys all the time oh geez
yeah yeah and I listen to them talk this is hey dude
pointing to my head, you know?
Yep, 100% the mental side of the game.
I want to ask you about the hardest part, I think, probably of your life, and I could be wrong,
but speaking about mental toughness, which is,
so guys, this man goes through this heart transplant,
he ends up getting the heart from a child he was kind to, it's just bananas.
If he's on the second hole, he's gone.
He reverts back to the guardian angels of Michelle,
and at the time when Michelle was struggling with leukemia,
it became another national story.
This was not some secret thing.
This was something that I was following
that people all across the world,
you were getting letters and mail
and all these other things.
I have to think that during that time,
your mental emotional control was tested the most then. This is not a major league baseball game, this is your little girl
struggling and dying and I'm sure in a great deal of pain and I don't want to
be too personal about it but there are people right now listening to this that
are going through their form of tragedy, a business failure, a divorce, an illness
in their family. I just lost my dad recently. What was that time like for you
and what were the lessons and takeaways
that you took from it?
It was easy for me because she brought me into her fold.
She knew I didn't talk to the press much.
And she knew that it's gonna be stretching the limit
for me to be talking to a radio person or
a writer or somebody about what she's she's going through. But when I was
checking her into Children's Hospital in Orange County, all these kids were, there
were like ten kids out in the hallway kicking soccer balls, they have their poles,
and they're kicking soccer balls,
and some of them were whiffled bats and all this stuff.
And she just walks up to me and she taps me on my shoulder
and she says, daddy, you've got to start talking
to the press, see all these kids,
maybe we can save some of their lives.
So she came to me and told me, and I says,
okay honey, I promise you that from today on
until the day I die, I will give my full efforts
towards helping kids.
And she says, you promise me? I says, I promise you.
My gosh.
You know, because I never spoke to the press that much.
I kind of stayed away from them. And when she asked me to do that, I says, I will. I
promise you I will. You know, and for all the time she spent in the hospital, I remember that first day when she found out
that she had leukemia, when the doctor told her.
And she says, well, what do we do?
Doctor said, oh, try and clean it up and make you better.
She says, okay, let's go.
Didn't cry, nothing.
Not for the time that she was in the hospital. She did not cry one single
day. Not one single day. You know? And the week that she died, I went down to the chapel
and I asked God to take her.
You did.
I said, Father, please take her. She's suffering.
And I don't want her to suffer anymore.
So would you take her and put her in your garden?
And he gave her another week with her.
And then we found a four out of five cord blood
that we were going to use to instead of the marrow she could couldn't
find any anyone with a marrow to save her life and when she was walking in that
room she said dad I know that I'm not coming out of there alive she said come
on says God's gonna be with you she Dad, I'm not coming out of there alive,
and I know that God's gonna be with me,
so I'm not gonna worry.
Here's a 19-year-old kid talking to me like that,
to her dad, and I'm like, you're gonna be okay,
you're gonna be okay.
But she knew, when she went in that room,
she knew she was gonna die.
Wow.
You know?
Just like you knew you weren't when you had your heart attack.
What an amazing story.
You just honored her so well with your life because you've done, guys, if you just do
a simple Google search, you'll see all the tireless thousands of hours Rod's put into
doing things for children
and how you've honored her, you know, little one-on-one things, things at the
stadium like you were talking about. The thing you were doing the night before
your heart attack. Yeah. Was an extension of the promise that you made to her in
the hospital. And you know it's funny I remember driving down the 5 freeway. I
had gone to Washington and spoke in front of Congress
about raising funds for NIH.
And then I got a call, my agent called me and he says,
guess what, they just passed a $50 million bill
for the kids.
That's crazy.
And I opened my sunroof and I says,
honey, thanks so much, we did it again.
You know, and that's the way it was.
And even today, some nights, you know,
I'm sitting at home and I don't have anything to do.
I get in my car, I go for a drive and says,
Pish, how you doing?
I used to call her Pish. How you doing? I used to call her Pish.
How you doing?
I says, I'm hanging in there and I talk to her.
You know, yeah, I do it many nights.
You know, and it makes me feel good.
You know, and I'm sure she's saying,
I'm proud of you, Dad, I'm proud of you.
I'm sure she is.
Keep doing what you're doing. We're doing it right now. Yeah, I'm proud of you dad, I'm proud of you. I'm sure she is. Keep doing what you're doing.
We're doing it right now. Yeah.
I'm proud of you.
Well, thank you. Thank you so much.
You changed my life.
You know, and I... I'm just... I just thank you.
I was just telling this lady that off camera that her works really made a profound impact on me,
even in the last few days of my life.
Her name is Thais Gibson.
Today's conversation will be different than most anyone we've ever had on the show before.
So Thais, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much, Ed, for having me.
I'm really grateful to be here with you.
Yeah.
Basic question.
You cover it in the book.
By the way, thank you for this.
It's just, I love real work that really makes a difference and really changes people.
How do our emotions affect our actions?
I know that's a general question, but it's actually part of the book as well.
And I don't think most people step back and look at that, that not only the state you're
in, but the emotional state you're in and how it's impacting the actually.
I know that's a broad question compared to the very specific place we just went, but
I think when we get really granular like we just did,
it's time to kind of go to concept for a second as well
to understand why that matters.
So how do emotions affect behavior?
Amazing question.
So a neuroscientist named Antonio DiMazio,
I believe it was in 2008,
actually discovered conclusively that every single action
we take or decision we make is based on our emotional
state. So some people are very quick to rationalize or justify through logic. They're like, I'm
a logical thinker. I only make logical decisions. But the reality is at the tipping point, you're
making an emotionally based decision. And then you're just quick to then rationalize
it through logic. And so we are not in control of how we feel. Then we are not in control
of the decisions that we're making.
And I would make a really strong argument
that when we go back to this topic of core fears,
I often give people this acronym of BTEA,
which is our belief patterns.
We'll create patterns of thought,
which then will create emotions,
and then actions will follow.
So if I, for example, let's pretend I have this core wound,
I'm not good enough, well, I might start thinking thoughts, like I have this core wound, I'm not good enough, I might start thinking thoughts.
Like I'm not interesting enough, I'm not smart enough,
I'm not pretty enough, whatever it is, fill in the blanks enough.
And then what will happen is how will I feel or emote according to that?
Will I feel insecure or afraid or sad?
And then we all go into our actions or coping mechanisms, right?
We're not even in charge.
When somebody is feeling that way, what do they do?
Do they go to their fridge and eat a whole bunch of junk food?
Do they withdraw from the world and go into their shell?
Do they become really big and tell everybody how amazing they are
to try to overcompensate, but it feel arrogant?
So really, if we're not being able to reprogram
and identify these core beliefs or these old
fears or wounds, then we're going to have havoc raked on our thought patterns throughout
the day.
Our emotional state, we're not in charge of, and then our actions, we're not even charge
of either.
And when we go and change and recondition these old stories or belief patterns, everything
else will follow how we think, how we feel about ourselves, and even our actions and behaviors will become healthier.