The One You Feed - How to Create Emotional Agility with Susan David

Episode Date: September 30, 2022

Susan David is a psychologist on faculty at Harvard Medical School. She’s also the co-founder and co-director of The Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital and is CEO of Evidence-Based Psychology. Have you ever gotten hooked by a difficult emotion? In other words, have you ever felt compelled to act on a strong feeling without having any space to think about your action first? If so, you will find really helpful wisdom in this episode that you can take, apply today and live a more skillful, open-hearted life. In this episode, Eric and Susan David discuss her book, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life Registration for The Well Trained Mind Program is now open!  Learn the foundations of mindfulness and create a more fulfilling spiritual practice in Ginny’s live virtual program that starts on October 9.  Visit oneyoufeed.net/mindfulness to learn more! Susan David and I Discuss How to Create Emotional Agility and … Her book, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life How emotions are a guidance system and aren’t good or bad Learning  That emotions can help us adapt and thrive The thinking “unless I’m happy all the time, something is wrong” Emotional agility is when we connect with our values and move forward in action Emotional rigidity is when we believe the negative voice in our head and are reactive or on autopilot How we get “hooked” when we accept our thoughts as facts Strategies for getting “unhooked”  Recognizing our patterns and being curious and compassionate about how we’re reacting Understanding that tough emotions are part of life Shifting thing from “I am ____ ” to “I notice that I’m feeling_____” Choice points:  do I move towards or away from my values? Our values are quality of action Social contagion describes how we catch other peoples’ behaviors and emotions The power of keeping our values front of mind A meaningful life comes with discomfort How our difficult emotions are signposts for our values Premature cognitive commitment is when we decide before we think Susan David Links Susan’s Website Twitter Instagram Facebook By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you! If you enjoyed this conversation with Susan David, check out these other episodes: How to Handle Emotions with Hilary Jacobs Hendel How to Cope with Big Feelings with Liz FosslienSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In case you're just recently joining us or however long you've been a listener of the show, you may not realize that we have years and years of incredible episodes in our archives. We've had so many wonderful guests that we've decided to handpick one of our favorites that may be new to you, but if not, it's definitely worth another listen. We hope you enjoy this episode with Susan David. I love this quote from the Buddha, the mind hard to control, flighty, alighting where it wishes. One does well to tame. The disciplined mind brings happiness. Happiness can often feel like an elusive goal everyone seems to strive for and never quite achieves because we seek it outside of ourselves rather than going inward, which is something mindfulness teaches us to do.

And Ginny? Yes, Eric. This idea of taming the mind is why you named your program The Well-Trained Mind, right? Yep, and I'm excited to announce that it's open for enrollment now through October 8th in my live virtual six-week Introduction to Mindfulness program. Whether you're new to mindfulness and meditation or you're new to mindfulness and meditation or you're looking to strengthen your existing mindfulness practice, I'll teach you the foundations of mindfulness so that you can live with more ease, create a nourishing and fulfilling spiritual practice, discover how to be a friend to yourself, and strengthen your ability to live in a more grounded, connected, peaceful way. To learn more about the program, go to oneufeed.net slash mindfulness.

That's oneufeed.net slash mindfulness before October 8th. I hope to meet you there. When we connect with our emotions, our emotions actually help us to adapt and thrive, even the difficult ones. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that

hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, And does your dog truly love you?

We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Susan David, a psychologist on faculty at Harvard Medical School.

Susan's also the co-founder and co-director of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital and CEO of Evidence-Based Psychology. Her book is Emotional Agility, Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life. Hi, Susan. Welcome to the show. I'm so glad to be here. Your book is called Emotional Agility, Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life. And as you and I were talking beforehand, there are so many great things in here that I think are right up the alley of what listeners are looking for. So we'll get into the book in detail in a moment, but let's start like we always do. There's a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at

battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness, bravery, and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at her grandfather. She says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. So I think there are a number of interpretations for that in terms of the context of my work. But one of the things that I think is most critical is the way we view our

emotions. So often we view and we live in a society that tells us that our emotions are good or bad. And unlike the parable where I think you've, you know think sometimes the interpretation could be that one should feed only the so-called good emotions and push aside the so-called bad emotions, really what I think about in the context of emotions is that we as human beings are big enough, expansive enough to actually hold the full range of our emotions. In other words, it is possible for those two wolves to coexist. And then we move into the space of saying, how do we stop ourselves from getting hooked or imprisoned by emotions that feel difficult to us. So really the context here or the headline is that our emotions fundamentally are actually helpful, that they are incredibly important guidance systems for our lives. And if we move away from trying to battle with them or decide that they're good or bad, and instead move into the space where we recognize that we are able to have all of them, then we can learn from, we can be guided by,

and we can move forward in ways that are values congruent. And so we are feeding the particular wolf in this case, which is the emotions that signal what's important to our lives. And we use that in ways that allow us to thrive. Yeah. And one of the themes of the book to me was this idea that emotions aren't good or bad. As you said, they're a guidance system. And that, however, we want to make sure that our emotions, we have, as you call it, emotional agility, so that our actions out into the world are what we want them to be. And so oftentimes, you know, if we could take this parable almost to be about how we behave less about what our emotions are.

Yeah, so absolutely. A fundamental idea in emotional agility is the idea that our emotions exist for a reason. And I'm not the first person who said this. Charles Darwin, many hundreds of years ago, described this idea that emotions are core signals, that when we connect with our emotions, our emotions actually help us to adapt and thrive, even the difficult ones. And so we are able, when we connect with our emotions, to understand more of other people's needs, but we can also understand more of our own needs. So really this idea that we have these emotions, these emotions have extreme and wonderful benefits to us, but we often get into situations in society where we have this narrative that there's good emotions and bad emotions, that there are negative emotions and positive emotions. And so what can happen is we can often feel that unless we feel positive and happy all the time, that there's something really

fundamentally wrong. And we can also move into a place where we start to then push aside or hustle with or develop unhealthy relationships with our emotions. And so a core part of my work is really about saying, how can we be healthy with our emotions and with our thinking and learn from those in ways that allow us to, in action, move forward so that we are values-connected and congruent. Because ultimately, how we deal with our inner worlds drives everything, every aspect of how we love, how we live, how we parent, and how we lead. Yeah, you say that emotional agility is about loosening up, calming down, and living with more intention. It's about choosing how you'll respond to your emotional warning system. So that's emotional agility. Talk to us about the opposite, rigidity. I'll start off by describing what I just think is one of the most profoundly beautiful ideas,

which is the idea of Viktor Frankl. Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi death camps, describes this incredibly powerful idea where between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space is our power to choose. And it's in that choice that lies our growth and freedom. So when we are being emotionally agile, there's space between stimulus and response. We are connecting with our values and who we want to be in that moment, and we are moving forward in action. When we, on the other hand, are emotionally rigid, often what we are doing is not having any space between stimulus and response. So what this might look like is being on autopilot. Someone says something and we defensively react in the same

way time and time again. Or always believing that voice in our head that tells us that we are worthless or we weren't cut out for this career or we're not creative or whatever other stories. Some of these stories were written on our mental chalkboards in grade three. And what's wrong is not having the story because these stories are actually normal. We all have thousands of ideas, thoughts, and stories and emotions every single day. What becomes emotionally rigid or emotionally inagile is where we automatically believe the story and where we automatically allow that story to drive our actions. So we feel that we are worthless and therefore we don't extend ourselves in a relationship. Or we are not creative and so we don't put our hand up for a particular job or project, even though in our hearts we truly want to do it. So emotionally

in agile people, or when we all react in ways that are emotionally in agile, what we are tending to do is not have the space between stimulus and response. We are on autopilot. We automatically believe the thought, the emotion, the story in a way that takes us away from being the person that we most want to be in the world. And often what this can also look like is even our day-to-day habits. So a habit might be a habit of waking up and feeling bad and then staying in bed. Or a habit might be that we, you know, want to be present and connected with our children, but we feel so stressed that we get stuck on our phones and we have dinner every night, but we are distracted with our phone rather than being present and connected.

So some of these are habits that become expressed in our day-to-day lives and that fundamentally are inagile because they are not reflections of who we most want to be in the world. That idea, the Viktor Frankl quote and phrase has been one of the most fundamental ideas in my life. I originally encountered it in Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which I think is a brilliant book in so many ways. And, you know, obviously Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning and his other work is so powerful. But that very idea unlocked something in me years and years ago that has always made sense to me and is just so powerful. I think what it does is it moves us away from the idea of, because I had a thought, the thought is fact and I need to act on it.

Yeah. fact and I need to act on it. It's so powerful because what it does is it brings into our hearts and our lives a sense of autonomy and ownership that is just fundamental to our ability to thrive. Yep, exactly. So let's talk about one of the things that happens to us, you referenced it briefly, about getting hooked, you know, which you say getting yourself hooked begins when you accept thoughts as facts. So let's talk about some of the most common hooks, and maybe some ways to to work with those. So yeah, absolutely. So the hooks that we might have that relate to our emotions, it might be a hook like, you know, I am sad and therefore that sadness, while that sadness might be a truly expressed experience and felt experience for the

moment, the sadness becomes fact. And I'll describe why I think it's a hook is because often what we do when we label our emotions with language like I am, you know, I am sad, I am angry. What it does is it implies that we all, you know, the 100% of us is that one emotion. You know, I am sad, I am angry, there's no space for anything else. And so often what we do when we identify ourselves in full with an emotion, there isn't the capacity to pause and to breathe in other experiences. And so we can often get hooked by an emotion because we are not our emotion. Our emotion is a data source that is valuable, but a data source that nonetheless is there for us to understand and evaluate and learn from, we don't necessarily need to believe it. We can often get

hooked into our thoughts. A thought might be, I'm not good enough, or even, you know, my boss is an idiot. It might be something that you truly experience as fact, and yet it might actually stop you from bringing yourself in ways that are open-hearted, learning-oriented, and growth-oriented to your career or to your job. So we can often get hooked into our emotions, our thoughts, and then often what we do is we weave our thoughts and our emotions into stories. And our stories are really important, powerful ways that we make sense of our world, but often these stories can hold us back. So a story might be something like, you know, I recently was working with a United Nations ambassador and his singular focus and singular job was to bring vaccinations to children in a particular country

in Africa. And this person described how as part of his job and as part of his purpose, he needed to negotiate with a specific politician who was in office. And he described how this politician made him so angry and so upset. And he said, you know, this politician treats me like my father used to treat me. And so I've started to just avoid his calls. Now, what's in Agile and what's the hook here is that what this demands is that you've either got a new politician in office, which is unlikely, or it demands that you have a new childhood in which your father didn't speak to you like that, which again is unlikely. And so what's happening in this kind of situation is the person is getting hooked into a story where the story starts to prison and create a structure that hinders the ability to be values-oriented or to be expansive, to be curious,

to be compassionate, to say, well, who do I want to be in this situation? And so we often get hooked. And in my book, I outline a number of ways that we tend to get hooked. We get stuck in the busyness of our mind and what we think is wrong. We often get hooked on stories that really have outgrown the usefulness or purposefulness in our lives. We get stuck when we move from one situation to another and we recognize that the thing that might have served us when we were a child or in one job no longer serves us. So there are different contexts and different ways in which we can start expressing these hooks. Hey, y'all.

I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart Series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back

into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. So a little bit of past, present and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast,

our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does tom cruise really do

his own stunts his stuntman reveals the answer and you never know who's going to drop by mr brian cranson is with us how are you hello my friend wayne knight about jurassic park wayne knight welcome to really no really sir bless you all hello newman and you never know when howie mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really? No, really. Yeah, really. No, really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really? No, really. And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. you get your podcasts. What are some useful ways for us to get unhooked? And maybe that's different depending on whether it's a thought or an emotion, but what are some of the steps that

people could start practicing now, you know, when they recognize like, yep, here I am, I'm hooked, I know I am. That's the first step, recognizing it. But then once you recognize it, what next? So one of the things that I think is critical is often people say, gee, I get hooked, but I don't really realize that I'm getting hooked. I'm suddenly defensive, or I suddenly have an argument with my spouse, and I storm out of the room because I'm feeling really upset, and it comes off guard. But one of the things I think if we really show up to that is we'll start to recognize that actually a lot of our behaviors are very patterned. And so this defensiveness that seems like it's a spur of the moment defensiveness is actually something that very often we've seen in other contexts in our lives,

or that's actually very patterned. And so when we start to recognize that this is what's going on, that we have this way of being or have a way of reacting to a particular person that's patterned, then we've got a clue that, gee, this is a sign that I'm hooked and it's not an out of the blue thing. Actually, it's somewhat predictable. So there are a couple of things that are just really, really fundamental. The first is what you allude to, and it's this idea of showing up. And what I mean by showing up is not a passive resignation. It's not a, oh my goodness, this is what happened to me. It's horrible. It's awful, but there's nothing I can do. It's not a passive resignation. Rather, what it is, is it's being, but there's nothing I can do. It's not a passive resignation.

Rather what it is is it's being able to say, you know, this is what's going on for me or this is what the hook is, but to do so in a way that is curious and compassionate. So when we hooked but we say, I wonder why I'm reacting in this way, or I wonder why it is that I always give into the story, then we adopting a stance of curiosity. And while the curiosity isn't going to solve the problem, what you're starting to do in scientific terms is you're starting to take what is called a meta view. The meta view is where you move from this feeling of being immersed and stuck, and I don't know what to do, and this is

awful, into curiosity. I wonder what's going on for me. Gee, isn't that interesting that I react in that way? So curiosity is really important. The other aspect of this is compassion, because we live in a world that would have us believe that we are in a never-ending Ironman or Ironwoman competition, where we need to always be hard on ourselves. And the idea that when we are compassionate, that somehow it's being weak or lazy or letting ourselves off the hook is often what's seen as being attached to the idea of compassion. But if we recognize that we hooked in ways that are maybe not excusable, you know, we might have done something wrong and recognize that we've done something wrong, but we also recognize that we're doing the best we can, or we did the best

we can with who we are, with what we've got, with the resources that we've been given in life. And we approach this orientation of being hooked with a sense of compassion and kindness to ourselves, that we're part of humanity, we're part of the suffering and the imperfection that is bound up with humanity. What we then do is we move away from the space of trying to focus on perfection. And we instead move into the space of an openness to how can I bring myself in ways that are different to the situation. So a really, really important aspect of being able to unhook is not just about, gee, I've got to be positive or I've got to move forward. It's actually about being curious and being compassionate with the self.

Another thing that I would say to that is that often when we are hooked, especially when we hooked in context of anxiety or depression or difficult experiences or discomfort, and I talk about this in my TED Talk, The Gift and Power of Emotional Courage, we often want to do away with those difficult emotions. So we want to push them aside. And again, we live in a society that tells us we should be happy all the time. And so what we can start to do is we can start to try to push aside our sadness and just be happy or push aside our anger. But what we know from the research is that that doesn't work.

When we push aside these difficult emotions, what psychologists call amplification starts to come up. You know, we push aside sadness, and then we ask people not to think of that sad thought. And as it would happen in a minute, in one minute, people will on average think of that difficult thought around 40 times. In one minute, people will, on average, think of that difficult thought around 40 times. So a really important part of showing up and of unhooking is to approach our emotions with a greater sense of willingness. an expansiveness, a recognition that we don't get to live a meaningful life or build a career or raise a family without stress and discomfort, and that tough emotions are part of our contract with life. And so if we can move away from the idea of these are good and bad emotions,

and instead start to just embrace the full range of our emotions, then that's fundamental. But I know that you asked for some practical tips. And I think one practical tip is really moving away from this idea of saying, I am sad, I am angry, and instead noticing the emotion for what it is. I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad. I'm noticing that I'm feeling angry. I'm noticing the urge to stay in bed. I'm noticing the urge to leave the room. What do you start doing when you start to notice your thoughts, your feelings, your stories for what they are? They're thoughts, feelings, stories. They're not facts, thoughts, feelings, and stories. What you start to be able to do there is create critical space between the stimulus and the response. Right. You said so many things there

that are so important. I think that curiosity, as you mentioned, is so important and that the kindness and the self-compassion is critical to being able to be curious. There's nothing that tends to shut down curiosity or observation faster than judgment. And so being able to suspend that judgment by being kind is one of the things I think that allows us to be curious. We have to be kind to ourselves in order to be curious. I often think that idea of balancing accountability and kindness to ourselves. How do we be, how do we sort of stand true for this is what I believe, this is how I want to act, this is the person I want to be. And also then be kind with ourselves when we don't live up to that. And being able to balance those two things, I think is so important.

And your framework sort of gets to that. So if we look at your framework, you talk about showing up, that's kind of what you just talked about, which is recognizing what's happening, being curious and kind. Then you talk about stepping out and you say that that's the detaching from and observing your thoughts and feelings to see that that's what they are, thoughts and emotions. From there, you go into walking your why. So let's talk about walking your why. So this is critical. And to what you were saying earlier about compassion, the idea that when you really are compassionate, what you're doing is you are fundamentally creating a safe psychological space for yourself.

And when we feel safe with ourselves, it doesn't mean we do everything right. It doesn't mean that we never disappoint ourselves. But when we create a psychological space for ourselves in which we see ourselves and we are kind to ourselves and we love ourselves regardless of our imperfections, what we know from the research is when people do that, they actually tend to be more honest with themselves, less lazy, more motivated, because they know that they are going to be in a context where even if they disappoint themselves, that they will still like themselves. And so that's the beautiful context in which curiosity and experimentation and open-heartedness come to the fore. And what that then allows us to do is to start bringing in our core values. We're starting to say, who do I want to be in this situation? And the way that I think of values is values often have a very cheesy connotation.

It's often seen as being very abstract or the kinds of things that businesses put on their walls and tell us all to believe in. But the way that I think of values is that they are qualities of action. So values are not these abstract ideas. They're qualities of action. Every day we get hundreds and hundreds of choice points. A choice point is a decision. Do I move in the direction of my values or do I move away from my values? So in an organizational context, the choice point might be, do I contribute to this meeting even though I feel scared, or do I just shut

myself down once again? And that's your choice point. Your choice point when it comes to health or exercise might be, do I move towards the fruit or do I move towards the muffin? And the choice point might be that towards the fruit is towards my values and the muffin is away from my values. So we get these really, really important choice points every single day. And what is just so fundamental, I think, especially in a world where there's so much social comparison that goes on. We are inundated with our Twitter feeds and with Instagram and with comparing ourselves to others. And so what starts to happen is all of us as human beings start to become subject to what psychologists call social contagion. Social contagion is the idea that we all, often without even realizing it, catch other people's emotions and other people's behaviors.

partner, your seatmate, even if you do not know the person, buys candy, your likelihood of buying candy increases by 70%. Large-scale epidemiological studies show that if someone in our social network gets divorced or puts on weight, even if we do not even know the person, there might even be two or three degrees of separation from us, we are more likely to get divorced or put on weight. Now, listeners might say, how does that work? But we've all had that experience of getting in an elevator and someone takes out their cell phone and we take out our cell phone, or we go out to dinner and one person orders dessert and now we order dessert. So what starts to happen is we start to, in really profound, powerful, and frightening ways, catch, and I use that word purposefully because it is social contagion, we catch other people's behaviors and we catch other people's emotions.

and we catch other people's emotions. And this, of course, is particularly salient when we are spending time with a particular group of friends all the time or in a situation with colleagues all the time where everyone's cynical, we become cynical and so on. And so we start to set ourselves, what is it that actually protects me from social contagion? And what we know is that the most powerful way that we can be in the world when it comes to our own psychological health and well-being, but also when it comes to our behavior and our careers and our parenting, the most powerful way we can be in the world is where we have a straight line of sight to our values. Regardless of what everyone else is doing,

what is it that is important to me? In work, it might be learning and growth, or it might be at home learning and growth because our values tend to be values across these situations. So let me give you an example of what this looks like. If you are clear that growth and learning are fundamental to who you are as a person and their core, core, core values, you can start to apply these values even when you feel uncomfortable. So you might say, well, I was invited to a social event and I would love to go, but actually I feel a little bit anxious to go to that social event. When you bring your values front of mind and you say, I feel anxious and my value is learning and growth.

So I'm keeping this value front of mind and I'm going to say yes, because this is something that's important to me. Or in a work situation, I want to shut myself down and not put my hand up for something, but learning and growth are important. So I choose to say yes, even if it feels uncomfortable. And in my TED talk, I use this phrase, I say, discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life. And what I mean by that is that sometimes our emotions and our thoughts and our stories are going to say, no, shut down, turn away, close off. And yet, if we can keep front of mind the two or three things that are fundamental to who we want to be in the world, we can often choose to move forward even in the context of discomfort. Thank you. Hey, y'all.

I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be.

It's a little bit of past, present and future all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse

to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus,

does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts his stuntman reveals the answer and you never know who's going to drop by mr brian cranson is with us how are you hello my friend wayne knight about jurassic park wayne knight welcome to really no really sir bless you all hello newman and you never know when howie mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really? No, really. Yeah, really. No, really.

Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really? No, Really? And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We've had a couple of the founders of acceptance and commitment therapy on, and that's one of the things that shines so through in that particular modality is this choosing to live by your values, even when you're uncomfortable, you know, that these emotions, these emotions don't have to go away for us to live by our values. And we, that's where we often get, we get caught up. Oh, well, if I just didn't feel so anxious, I would do it. Where it's kind of the reverse. I'm going to do it even though I feel anxious. Because sometimes those thoughts and emotions don't go away and we have to act

sort of almost in spite of them sometimes. But you're right, that keeping our values is the foremost thing that we look at is such a key idea. And I love the idea of choice points. I think that life is just filled with them. That's what life is, is all these choice points. And we don't have to get them all right, but if we get enough of them right, that leads to a good life. Yeah, it's a critical way of being able to recognize that, you know, we don't learn how to ride a bicycle by studying a manual. We learn how to ride a bicycle by getting on it and moving forward. And the same applies, you know, to all aspects of our lives when it comes to our values. We move in the direction of our values when we move in the direction of our values.

And, you know, to what you mentioned earlier, this idea that we can do that even in spite of difficult emotions and experiences, but that's not the same as trying to push them aside or pretend that they don't exist. It's actually about a capaciousness and an openness to them, a breathing into them, an acceptance that is just so fundamental. And also, I think, you know, a really important part of this is recognizing that our values are often contained in our difficulty motions. What I mean by this is that often, you know, when we experience a difficulty emotion, these difficulty emotions don't just come out of nowhere. You know, we tend not to get upset about something if it doesn't matter to us. We tend not to get angry about something if it doesn't matter to us. So often beneath our most difficult emotions are signposts to the things that we care about.

When I'm working with people sometimes, you know, they might say or realize over time that depression for them might be a fundamental value, which is I want to be more in the world. I've never, you know, met someone with social anxiety who isn't at some level concerned about how do I better connect. I've never met someone with social anxiety who isn't at some level concerned about how do I better connect. I've never met someone in the workplace bored or frustrated with their job who isn't at some level concerned about how do I better grow and how do I better use my talents and skills. I've never met a guilty parent who isn't at some level concerned about how do I connect better or how do I be more present with my children? So often beneath our

most difficult emotions are actually signposts to our values. And when people say, well, what are my values? How do I work this out? Often the source is to say, what is the emotion telling me? What is the function of the emotion? In my book, I call this, you know, what the funk? What is the function of the emotion? What is the emotion trying to signal to me about what's important here? Yeah, indeed. That's so powerful. Let's talk for a minute about something that you write about in the book. And I love the idea of this, which is that part of our rigidity comes from something called premature cognitive commitment. Can you explain what that is? Because I think that is such a big thing. Yes. So this is really the idea that very often we decide before we've actually slowed down and thought about.

So we will often, you know, jump to conclusions. And these, you know, these conclusions are conclusions about, you know, we do it with the news, we do it with politics, but we also often jump to conclusions about ourselves. And, you know, some of these conclusions have foundational elements in our childhood or in prior relationships or experiences. of who am I, what am I good at, gee, I don't dance, or I'm not creative, or I no longer do X, or whatever it is. I mean, the list is as long as many as the diversity of people on the planet. And yet, there's nothing wrong with these. There's nothing wrong with these stories. Again, I think this is what's really important here. Stories help us to make sense of our world. When I'm lying in bed one morning and my son comes and jumps on the bed, the story is, oh, this is where I am and this is my son and I am in Boston, Massachusetts and I'm

no longer in South Africa. And we have a narrative that gets woven together. And this is really, really critical to us as human beings, because the narrative helps us to hold what is important and to have that front and center. This is my son on the bed. And it also helps us to move away from or ignore all of the sensory information that is unimportant. I can ignore the washing machine that might be going on in the background, or I can ignore the book that I read the night before that might be a bit unsettling because I've got the story that is really important. And so stories, there's nothing wrong with a story. Even if the story is a so-called negative story, even if it's a so-called bad story, there's nothing wrong. They help us to make sense of the world. Where the story starts to become problematic is not about the content of the story. Rather, it's about whether the story

serves us or doesn't. Does it take us away? Are we believing in it and acting in it in a way that takes us away from our values or not? That's the fundamental litmus. Is this story something that I'm attaching to so strongly and so quickly that it's hindering my ability to thrive? Or is it a story that I've got that I'm able to hold, but I recognize that I'm more than my story? And just to give you an example of what I mean by this, if listeners say, well, I'm a parent. Yes, I'm a parent, but I'm also more than a parent. I'm a worker or I'm a father or a sister or a brother. We all recognize that, that we are someone who has multiple identities. And at any one point in time, we might be acting out a particular identity.

We might be being a parent, but we also recognize that we're more than that single identity, and in the same way, if we take that idea, we can apply it to our stories. I'm more than a single story. Yes, I might be the story of someone who's not creative or someone who's unlovable, but I'm also other stories. And so if we can start recognizing that there are other stories there or that there's stories that we can start moving into in ways that are, again, connected with our values, or we can start creating other narratives, that becomes really powerful. So, you know, really importantly, there's nothing wrong with any one story. It's when the story becomes a prison and a poor reflection of who we want to be in the world.

That's when our behaviors need to change and our attachment to the story needs to start being pride loose a little bit. Right. And you talk in that context, use the words habitual, inflexible response to ideas. And I think that's so much of what it is, is it's recognizing that stories are stories and it's back to that stimulus and response. It's about being able to step into that space and not always react the exact same way. Like, you know, the image of being hooked is a really good one. Like, you know, if you're hooked on a line, right, every time that line yanks, you get yanked too. And I think that's what's so useful in that concept of premature cognitive commitment,

recognizing when we're taking shortcuts, and particularly when those shortcuts stand in the way of us being the person we want to be. Yeah, and we can also, to that end, we can also help our human need for shortcuts to work for us. So we can start, for instance, to name our story. We can say, gee, you know, that's my, I'm never good enough story, or that's my poor me story, or that's my, I'm just not going to get what I need in this job story. And being able to sometimes even apply habitual shortcuts is important when we're doing it intentionally and when it is something that is values congruent. Right, exactly.

Well, we are at the end of our time here, but Susan, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. I found your book really helpful. Your TED Talk is wonderful. And these ideas, I think you've done a really great job of synthesizing a lot of ideas that I've seen in other places, but really into useful form. You're a great communicator at that. We're going to continue the conversation, you and I, by talking about the difference between bottling our emotions and brooding, the difference between bottlers and brooders. And then we're also going to talk about how, for some of us, these negative emotions actually are helpful. We're going to talk more specifically about instances of negative emotions and how they might help us think more clearly about the world. So that'll be in the post-show conversation.

Listeners, you can get access by becoming a member going to oneufeed.net slash support. So thank you so much, Susan, for coming on. Thank you for inviting me. It's been a pleasure. Okay, bye. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support.

The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and

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