The School of Greatness - 42 Dr. Guy Winch: The Science Behind Healing Emotional Injury

Episode Date: December 10, 2013

After 5 months of intensive study into emotional intelligence, I've not found a greater way to develop entrepreneurial and business mindset. This week on the School of Greatness I go in-depth with a leader in research into the effects of emotional damage. Our next guest is a licensed psychologist, speaker and author. He provides a definitive guide to preparing and healing from emotional injury. Please welcome the author of Emotional First Aid, Dr. Guy Winch.

This is episode number 42 with Dr. Guy Winch. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. What is up, greats? Thanks so much for tuning in today.

I'm super pumped about this episode because it's all about emotional first aid. Now, we go through life feeling many different types of pains. When we learn to walk, we scrape our knees all the time, we rub our elbows against things, we're getting cuts, bruises, sprains, broken bones, and we learn about different ways to treat these physical injuries. But what about the emotional injuries that we go through on a daily basis? The injuries of failure, rejection, guilt, loneliness, losing someone we love, or low self-esteem.

What are we doing to really treat those common emotional injuries? What are we doing? And Dr. Guy Winch has written this book called Emotional First Aid that's all about practical strategies for treating failure, rejection, guilt, and other everyday psychological injuries. And it's extremely interesting to me because it's all about understanding yourself, your thoughts, how your heart works, and everything else in between. But it's what we believe, what we think, how we feel, it's what's going to support us in achieving the greatness that we were designed and destined to create. And I'm very excited for you to jump on and listen to this episode. So please pay close attention.

Take out some notes and a pen. Take out a pen and paper and take some notes and make sure to stick around to the very end because this is very engaging and really interesting. With that, guys, make sure to dive into this with your whole heart and really take it one step at a time with what Guy is saying. And apply this to your life. Really apply this to your life as it's going to support you in achieving your dreams. So let's dive in with Dr. Guy Lynch. Thanks everyone again for tuning into the School of Greatness. I'm super pumped today for bringing a special guest on. His name is Dr. Guy Winch.

How's it going, Guy? Very well, and thank you very much for having me. Yeah, I'm excited about this. You actually reached out to me, and it was almost perfect timing when you reached out to me because you have a book that's out called Emotional First Aid, Practical Strategies for Treating Failure, Rejection, Guilt, and Other Everyday Psychological Injuries. And it's very fitting that you reached out to me and you have this book coming out because

I've been studying this for the last five months, this specific information about emotional first aid. Now, I didn't call it that, but I was just learning about how to really manage emotional intelligence. And emotional intelligence, I really feel like is emotional first aid, is really managing your emotions and understanding how to deal with each situation when it comes to you, the perception of each situation, how to deal with failure, how to deal with heartbreak. If someone screws you over, how are you going to respond and react? So when I saw the book, I said, this is what needs to be out there because this is what I've been studying for five months. So I'm very excited

to dive into this. And tell me a little bit about your background of why you felt like you wanted to get this information out there and what was the reason for it? Well, I'm a psychologist. I have a private practice. And both in my practice and in life in general, I kind of saw that people's attitudes towards things was, all right, we don't sweat the small stuff. Maybe you need to see a professional when it comes to the big stuff. And then you have the huge range, which is most of everything else, which is kind of in the middle. And that no one knew what to do with. You know, and it occurred to me, you know, we have, when it comes to a physical injury,

like a cut or a scrape or a cold or a sprain, we know exactly what to do. We know the difference between something that we can treat or something the doctor needs to treat. We're so sophisticated about how we go about it. But when it comes to these psychological kinds of injuries, we're literally in ignorance. We don't know anything. We're not aware of how we're injured, when we're injured, what we can do, what happens if we don't do anything, how things can get worse. It's such a discrepancy. And then I started looking at the research and realizing there's a lot of research that

can actually point to what people can do in a lot of these situations. It's just no one's bringing that research to people. And so that's why I decided to write that book, to bring that research to people in terms of this is what happens to you when these kinds of experiences occur. This is what you need to do to make sure they don't get worse. This is how to understand them. This is how to manage them. And exactly what you're talking about, emotional intelligence, about how to deal with our emotions and our psychology in the most basic aspects of day-to-day life. Now, why don't people treat their emotions or their feelings when these things

happen? Why do they stuff it into their heart or brush it to the side or act like it didn't happen? Whereas when we break a bone, we don't just sit there and let the bone hang out, we treat it. So what's the difference? Why do we do that? Well, psychology is a little bit a second-class citizen to physical health and always has been. You know, you bump into a friend, you can say very easily, oh, have you been? How's your health? If you ever say to someone, have you been? How's your psychological health? They'll be like, dude, what's wrong with you? Are you calling me crazy? What's going on? So there's just a way in which we think about it, that's fundamentally very, very different. You know, we, we have this

stoic idea of, you know, the way we should manage feelings is not have them, which is obviously something that's possible. But there's not a lot of sophistication about the fact that certain feelings impact us in fundamental ways that you know, and a lot of the times when people when I talk to this, when I talk to people about these kinds of things, they're stunned to find out that, oh, you mean the way that I feel is what everyone feels? And to me, that's so basic that, yes, we all have very common ways of responding emotionally. We don't even talk about them enough to let people know that how they're feeling is normative. to let people know that how they're feeling is normative. Now, would you say this is a global thing that we don't talk about or deal with our emotions or our feelings or psychological injuries? Or is this more of like an American thing?

Or what is this? I actually think America is pretty much ahead of the game comparatively to other cultures. In other words, I think that it is very much a global thing. I think there's a lot of catch up that we're playing in terms of psychology. I think that in America, we're probably ahead of the curve in terms of how we're talking about things. There's an openness to it. We have an openness about these things in general, which I think is greater than what

I encounter in many other places of the world where I visit and when I talk. It's a very different scenario there and where you from originally I was born in England originally I've been here I've been in New York 26 years okay I kind of feel that should qualify me as a New Yorker at this point exactly yeah so what drew you to this information? What personally drew you to understanding and uncovering how to treat psychological injuries? Well, one of the things, you know, when I started graduate school, which is now, you know, quite a time ago, but when I started, we were told, you know, there's this model in which you can be a psychologist, you can be a researcher, or you can be a practitioner. And you really can't do both, essentially. And it is true that

it's very difficult to do both. If you're a researcher, you're at the university, you're at some kind of institute, you're doing research. And if you're a practitioner, you're dealing with, you know, with clients and with patients, and they are very, very different things. But I always believe that, you know, a good practitioner has to be very knowledgeable about research and a good researcher has to be very much in communication with practitioners, except that dialogue is not a big, it's not a big thing. We don't have a lot of talks, you know, but I was always interested in keeping up on the research and bringing to my work, bringing to my patients, bringing to people in general what the current findings are,

and finding ways to distill them that we can actually use, that regular people can use. Because the way a lot of this research is done, it's not user-friendly. And this is part of why we're so behind. The research is not very user-friendly. The research says that, oh, if you look at rejection and you put people in this kind of scenario, then you can see that these three variables explain this much percentage of the variability in the other variable and in this language that you're looking at it and thinking, unless you're very sophisticated in terms of understanding the research, you're not going to get much out of it. And then you're dependent on science writers to come up with the cliff notes, with a three-line version of what was found.

But I am sophisticated in terms of research. So I go into these studies. I look at how they do them. I look at what they do. I look at what they find. And I look at a variety of different studies. And I come up with things. And I always have in my practice about, well, this actually is something we could use.

And then I'll suggest it to people that I'm working with. I'll see whether it works for them. I'll see how it works for them. I'll tweak it accordingly. And so I've always tried to work in such a way that I'm trying to apply current research findings to the work that I do, which I think is the model we should be using, except it's not many, I think, psychologists or therapists in general that have the time or the awareness to try and do that. Right, right. Now, what type of people do you work with in your practice? Are you working with high-performing executives or athletes or couples? What are the type of people you're normally working with? Well, my practice is split pretty much down the middle between individuals and couples and families.

And because I'm in New York City, the diversity is tremendous. And so I really will see people from every possible culture in all kinds of jobs. And usually they're successful people, they're high-performing people or they're families or they're couples who are having problems. I tend to call them like regular people with regular problems. It's kind of who I see, but problems that do require help. Okay, cool. So you talk about seven main psychological injuries. Is that correct?

Yes, that's what I call them. So is that what it's called, a psychological injury? That's what I'm calling them. You can call them experiences, situations. I'm calling them injuries because I'm trying to use that model of they require emotional first aid. Gotcha. Okay, cool. So let's talk about the first one, which is, I think, what everyone experiences almost all the time in some form, which is rejection, right? Right.

And I call rejections the emotional cuts and scrapes of daily life because they're extremely, extremely, extremely common. You know, you can't be in the world without experiencing it because, you know, we get we get, you know, our neighbors have their barbecues without us and our colleagues go to drinks after work and they don't invite us. our partners, we buff our sexual advances. And, you know, the new frontier for rejection of the past few years is social media, because a lot of people that I work with complain about and feel very hurt when they go and they like their friend's baby pictures. You know, the friend had a baby, they like their picture on Facebook, but they had a baby, they posted it, and no one liked their baby picture. They feel horrifically insulted and rejected. And so there's a whole new frontier there. And they tweeted the person's tweets, but they didn't get retweeted back. So, you know, there's so many frontiers in which we experience rejection. And the thing

that's interesting about rejection, the thing that was really interesting in terms of reading about it, is that there is a significant amount of quite sophisticated research when it comes to rejection. And the most impressive finding in that research is that when people were put in MRI, functional MRI machines, so that scientists could see, well, what actually happens in our brain? Why does rejection hurt so much? Oh, and by the way, this is the study they actually did with the functional MRI machines, which is slightly horrific. This is the study they actually did with the functional MRI machines, which is slightly horrific. They asked for people who recently experienced a very painful romantic breakup.

And then they had them bring in photographs of the person who rejected them. They had them lie in the functional MRI machine looking at the photograph of the person who broke their heart, thinking about the moment in which their heart was broken while the brain scan did its thing so horrible brutal and you know of course the first thing i looked up in that study was how much were they paid because that's not fun well they better have compensated them when they did so that was good but what they found what was interesting is that the same areas of the brain get activated when we experience rejection as get activated when we experience physical pain, literally the same areas. And there's no other emotion in which that happens. And indeed, when we look at that term, hurt feelings, it's the same term in almost every language around the globe, because it really,

really hurts. And even the small ones hurt and then when they went and they did the studies where they actually manipulated something and they had this situation where people were rejected in an artificial situation except they didn't know that it was artificial and then they went and tried to see if they could reason with them and say to them well you know the people who rejected you are actually people you you know like they said to them, well, you know, the people who rejected you are actually people, you know, like they said to them, they belong to the KKK. They're a group you despise. So now does it hurt that you were rejected? And people felt still that they had emotional pain. They even went as far as to say to them, you know what, those were just two research confederates rejecting you. It actually, it wasn't even real. And people still reported emotional pain because it's the

same thing that happens. If you fall down and you really hurt yourself, you can tell yourself you shouldn't have fallen down. It's not going to take the pain away. It just hurts. And that's what happens with rejection. It's just a fundamentally painful, painful thing. And for people – sorry. I was just going to say, so what's – how do we treat that then?

What do we – if we're getting rejected over and over and over, whether it be romantically or career wise, whatever it may be, what's something we can do or I can do to treat that for myself? Well, there are quite a few things. And just in general, in the book, you know, I divide every chapter into two parts. And in the first part, I explain all the different ways in which we get wounded by each of these things. And then in the second part, I suggest a variety of treatments that can address each of those wounds. So there's that there are a variety of things. But in general, the thing that with rejection, you know, we have several wounds to treat. One of them is that it's extremely emotionally painful. The second is that it really hurts our self esteem, you know, our feelings of self-worth, our confidence gets really,

really bruised when we sustain a rejection. And, you know, the bigger the rejection, the bigger that bruise or the bigger the wound. It also makes us feel very angry and aggressive. There's a lot of research pointing to the fact that rejections are at the core of a lot of teen violence, at the core of a lot of violence against women, that rejections really make us angry. And for some people can send them off the edge to aggression. And the fourth thing is that it really destabilizes our fundamental need to belong, to feel as though we belong. There's a holdover from our tribal days that we needed to feel that we were part of some kind of core group. So those are the wounds that we typically sustain. And we'll sustain them in

lesser or greater amount, depending on who we are, the circumstance, the extent of the rejection, and other kinds of variables. But one of the most important things with rejection is that it's one of those wounds, and there's a couple of ones like it, in which we sustain an initial damage, and then we go and create much more damage to ourselves by, for example, becoming extremely self-critical after we experience rejection. So, oh, yeah, so I got dumped. And so now I'm going to think of everything that's wrong with me. And now I'm not this enough and that enough and this isn't good and that isn't good. And I'll never find someone.

And we make a wound much, much worse. And it's interesting. You would never do that with a physical wound, right? You won't sprain your leg and decide, this is the best day for me to run a marathon. You know, you'd be aware that I have to rest that. I have to help that recover. You have a cold, it's challenging your immune system, let's rest. That will help my immune system.

But here, with rejection and with a couple of other ones, you know, we get wounded and then we savage ourselves to make the wound exponentially worse than it ever was by the initial trigger, whatever it was that happened. So if I'm rejected, should I rest then a little bit as opposed to beating myself up? So yeah, that's the first thing you want to be aware of is to stop the bleeding by not beating yourself up. Right. And it's amazing. People will really, I'll say this to people, to me it seems by not beating yourself up. Right. And it's amazing. People will really, I'll say this to people, to me it seems so very, very obvious.

Why would you want to make yourself feel worse? And people will literally argue with me. They'll say, well, because you know I deserve it. You know, yeah, because I call myself a loser and an idiot because I deserve it. And I'm like, not sure I understand that. Or yeah, it'll help me in the future because it'll lower my expectations. I'm like, I don't see how hurting your confidence and your self-esteem is actually going to help you in the future. It's only going to impede you in the future. So we have these really screwed up

ways of justifying why it's okay to really be incredibly self-critical and self-abusive, even sometimes verbally to ourselves, and none of them hold water. They're all rubbish. So the first thing to do is to really shut up that critical voice, to not allow yourself to take a painful situation and then stomp your self-esteem into a pulp when it's already hurting. You have to be aware that there's recovery that you need to do, not actually making the wound worse. And it's okay for yourself to recover. So don't beat yourself up that you are recovering or taking a break, you know, make sure you rest, right? As opposed to like, Oh, I'm not, I need to jump right back on this, or I need to do this right away. But you can really take a moment and breathe,

feel it, and then move on. Correct? Absolutely. And sometimes I'll have somebody sit here and somebody will say to me something like, well, yeah, I understand you're saying that it always hurts or that we're wired that way, but I'm a man. It shouldn't hurt. And I really am. No, no, no. Your brain is wired the same way as the brain of women in this study.

We didn't find a gender difference in that study. There was no gender difference. Men and women responded the same. Your brain is wired for it to hurt. Whether you're a man or not has nothing to do with it. You know, it's not an assault on your masculinity that your feelings were hurt. It's a most natural thing. So accept that, and then you won't have to find some kind of other screwed up reason for why your feelings are hurting. Just accept that that's how you're wired, except you have to do something about it. Interesting. I like that. Now, the're wired, except you have to do something about it.

Interesting. I like that. Now, the second one you talk about is loneliness. And I think this is a big one for a lot of people as well, because we're humans to connect and to commune and to relate to each other. We're not supposed to be isolated. So when we feel isolated or alone, which also comes from rejection, I'm assuming, is feeling alone, what's something we can do to overcome that injury? Well, again, the most important part or the first part that's most important is to understand the nature of the injury. It is a little complicated when it comes to loneliness. Again, I want to point uh two very important findings from studies about loneliness one of them which i found really shocking is that um it actually affects our uh immune systems uh very very fundamentally really yes in other words they did a study they looked

at college freshmen who went to get their flu shots and they gave them questionnaires they often give them questionnaires and they found that freshmen who reported being lonely had a poorer response to the flu shot, even after a few weeks of college, because loneliness depresses our immune system functioning. It doesn't just do that. It increases our stress to such a degree that chronic loneliness predisposes us and puts us at much, much higher risk for cardiovascular disease, for depression, for Alzheimer's disease, for a more rapid progression of Alzheimer's disease. And taken together, and this was quoted

in a few papers at the time when it came out, scientists concluded that chronic loneliness poses as great a risk for our long-term health and our longevity, how long we live as cigarette smoking. No way. As dangerous as cigarette smoking, lonely people live less longer, period. And so that's not something we think of when we think of loneliness. You know, cigarettes come with warnings on them from the Surgeon General on the pack of cigarettes. Loneliness does not come with any warning, and we don't think of it as something as urgent or as requiring intervention as somebody who's smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. with any warning and we don't think of it as something as urgent or as requiring intervention

as somebody who's smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, yet we should. The risks, certainly to health and even more so psychologically, are really profound. So that's one thing that I wanted to point out, that it's not a small thing, loneliness. It's very, very critical. But the other thing, and the more complicated and the more unfortunate, is that when people feel lonely, and you're absolutely right that it can stem from rejections or multiple rejections, but when people feel lonely, they tend to develop habits in which they literally, in an unconscious way, push away the very people that could alleviate their loneliness. that could alleviate their loneliness.

And it makes it a real trap that's hard to come out because lonely people tend to evaluate their existing friendships as less strong than they actually are, as less meaningful than they are. They evaluate their relationships and the people within them in the same way. And so they are much more likely to, you know, in other words, if the friend hasn't called them for two weeks, they will conclude that friend no longer cares about me. It won't cross their mind, literally, but wait, I haven't called them either. You know, I was doing the great illustration, I was doing a live

radio show a few weeks ago, in which they had callers leave questions on the show's Facebook page, which they then read to me. And we were talking about loneliness. And people left many, many messages on the Facebook page. And one of them they read to me was, the doctor doesn't understand that people like me can't find any outlets, that we have no options for being in touch with people who feel the way I do. And the said to the, and the host read it to me as if that's a relevant question. And I said, but this person left that on Facebook, on the page with their name, along with dozens of other comments of people who actually felt exactly like them, who he could actually reach out to and say, look, I saw you left a comment too, maybe we can talk. In other words, but that they were so blind to the fact that here you're just communing

with dozens of people who feel like you, who probably would be thrilled for you to reach out, absolutely blind to that option and actually using that platform to say that there is no option. So how does someone create the awareness then first that they are lonely and that's what they're dealing with

and then have a plan to you know a plan to like take action if they're already just if they're just like i don't want to do anything because i'm so lonely so i'm not going to reach out because no one cares and i don't want to get rejected anymore right and that's the tricky part but look awareness is not the problem with loneliness people know when they're lonely they know when they can feel it it's a very it's a very acute and very difficult kind of pain. They know it. What they have to do, and this is what I talk about in that chapter, they really do have to take a leap of faith. They really have to realize that their relationship muscles,

their empathy muscles, all those, their social skills, all those kinds of muscles, I call them, are atrophying because they're not using them enough. They might be married and living with a spouse, but feel very emotionally disconnected and feel very lonely. And they've lost the ability to empathize, to really think about those things. And they might have a bunch of friends, but they don't reach out to them. Or they're invited to parties and they feel like, you know what, I'm not going to know anyone, so why should I go? No one will want to talk to me. And then when they convince themselves themselves they should go they end up going with such low expectations that they just

stand by the hummus and the vegetable they put a scowl on their face and are surprised that indeed no one's coming to talk to them because the vibe they're putting out is so difficult and they don't realize that's the vibe they're putting out it's they take it as verification obviously and no one's interested in me and they're not looking at their part and they find and the more lonely we are the more stressful we find social situations quick quickly another study that people did is they they had people who were very lonely and bedridden and they offered them visits and they had three kinds of visits they had a volunteer a friendly volunteer whose job it was to come to hang out and chat for a couple of hours come they had the volunteer come with a different group and bring

a dog with them and the third group got just the dog and then they asked people who would you like to visit again and the overwhelming majority said we want the dog oh my gosh because the dog is less stressful the dog just sits there and you can cuddle with it and pet it and it'll lick you. You don't have to feel like, does the dog like me? What does the dog think? What do I need to say to the dog now? I forgot what to talk about. I don't have much to talk about.

Less stressful to talk to the dog. But that's what loneliness can do. It really atrophies our muscles. Now, when you have the flu and you're in bed for a week and you get up and your legs are wobbly, it's obvious to you that your legs are wobbly because you haven't used them in a while. But when you've been on the sidelines and you decide to go on a date and it doesn't go well, you don't think, oh, my dating skills are really rusty. You think, you see, I'm undesirable. And that's incorrect. Your dating skills are rusty. Your social skills are rusty. Or your empathy, your deep relations skills are rusty. You need

to practice them. You need to work them out and then they will get better and then you will get better, but you have to have that mindset. I love it. This stuff is amazing for me. I love this stuff. The next thing you talk about is loss and trauma, walking on broken bones. How do you deal with loss and trauma? Well, you know, that's one of those things that was very interesting because most of the most, many of the myths, I think, I'll call them myths, but many of the beliefs we have about loss and trauma are incorrect. And it's interesting that they're incorrect because we go about practicing the wrong thing, you know, the five stages of death, not so much those five

stages. And, you know, the one that I think is incorrect that we can really go wrong with is the assumption that, well, if you've sustained a loss or a trauma, you really have to talk about it. You have to get it out. You can't bottle it up. You have to get it out. Now, I'm in New York for many years, as I mentioned. I was here during 9-11, and as were all my patients. And so it was a time where one could see how people respond to trauma. And people came in and wanted to talk about what happened to them, what happened to the people who they know. And some people came in, and not few, and said, I don't want to talk about it. And a few of the people I worked with were injured. One of them was actually killed, but a few of the people who were injured and came in afterwards said,

you know, and they're coming in with these significant injuries, and they're saying, I do not want to talk about it. Now, current wisdom or classic wisdom will tell you, no, that's a bad thing if they don't want to talk about it, you know, it'll just fester. Well, actually, that turns out that's not true. It turns out that when we experience a loss or a trauma, if we feel that we need to talk about it, that we want to talk about it, we should. And we should talk about it and get support as often and as much as we should. But if we feel that we'd rather not talk about it, that we want to compartmentalize it, that we want to put it aside, that we want to just get on with life, then we should do that. And we should not be forced to talk about it.

Really? Why is that? Because it can traumatize us when we're not traumatized. Because traumas come because of how our memories are laid down and the association to the emotional activation we have when we're thinking about that memory. And if you are not activated in that way, you're not getting flashbacks, you're not thinking about it, you are able to put it aside, then actually reliving it and getting extremely upset in the process. And as you know, when you're thinking about something, you get upset. But when there's somebody supportive, they're putting a hand on your shoulder, you get even more upset. So that situation will actually make the memory

now be laid down along with these very, very upsetting and dramatic associations that weren't necessarily there. It didn't have that emotional loading previously. And so again, just for those people whose wanted is not to talk about it, who just feel I just would rather not, then they should not and we should allow them to not Hmm, so we shouldn't force them and say you need to talk about it You need to talk about it and try to get it out of them, right? Correct if they unless they want to now they might feel like oh I'd want to talk about it But I don't want to trouble you that's a different story

But if they're like adamant I would rather not talk about it Then you should absolutely respect that and not suggest or force or cajole them into doing that. So how do you support someone then who's gone through a loss or trauma if they don't want to talk about it? Well, let's say you have a buddy who's been through a loss or you have a buddy who got divorced and they're feeling really crappy, but they don't want to talk about it. Go do what you would do with that buddy.

Shoot some hoops, go see a movie, you know, do whatever you would do. You know, if it's a, if it's a girlfriend and a bunch of women are going out, go out, you know, talk about life, talk about other things. Just being there in a regular friendship kind of way, if somebody doesn't want to talk about it is actually extremely supportive. Okay. Awesome. And you never have to bring it up then. Again, only at the point where they're telling you what rather not, do not bring it up. Gotcha.

You're not being inconsiderate. You're not being like a bad friend by following their direction. Gotcha. Okay. Awesome. The next one we talk about is one that I've been familiar with as a kid growing up, which is guilt.

And I used to feel guilty all the time. I've since allowed I used to feel guilty all the time. I've since allowed myself to not feel guilty because I realized that it wasn't really serving me in any way. Um, and just coming from a responsible place, if, uh, if I was feeling guilty and clear the space as opposed to just beating myself up. But I think a lot of people feel guilty and then they just beat themselves up over and over because they feel guilty. So what's that all about? What's the guilt all about? It's interesting with guilt, you know, because it's one of those psychological concepts that in small doses is great and in large doses is really bad. You know, in small doses it's great because the function of guilt is to

preserve our relationships. Guilt will let you know that something you've done or something you're thinking of doing might be harmful to another person. You know, action or inaction are in that category. And so it'll alert you that, oh, you know, don't forget to call your mother on Mother's Day and you'll be in a meeting, but it'll, you know, your snooze alarm will go off in your head 10 times reminding you during that meeting, but don't forget after the meeting to call, don't forget after the meeting to call, and then you'll call. Or you've done something bad, you'll feel guilty about it and you'll call the person and apologize and try and, you know, make up for it in some kind of way. So guilt in small doses, when that's all it does,

is great. It really helps us preserve our relationships. But when it's excessive, when it's unresolved, then that snooze alarm is not going off. It's not turning off. It's just going off in your head relentlessly. And then it's a real problem because then it's extremely distracting. It makes it very hard to focus and to concentrate on your tasks of daily life. It makes it very hard to enjoy life when you're flooded with guilt because when we feel guilty, we don't feel that we should. We don't allow ourselves to enjoy life.

And when we have an unresolved situation with another person, and let's say we've taken the step of apologizing, and they've said, okay, fine, but the tension kind of remains between us, and we're still feeling a little guilty. And what many of us do in that scenario is actually just try to avoid that person and distance ourselves from that person, and thereby make things even worse and more strained. And so guilt is very poisonous both to our individual kind of ways of thinking and often to our relationships as a result. So how does one get out of guilt? If you're feeling guilty all the time, how do you recognize

and then move on and not be guilty anymore? Two options. If it's about a person and they're around and available for it, then you need to resolve the issue with them. And that's how your guilt will ease. I'll say how in a moment. And if they're not around, then you find to find a way to find self-forgiveness, which is an entirely different process. So those are the two options. Now, in terms of the other person, what, you know, I found also in doing this research is that we tend to think of apologies as, okay, I did something bad.

I called a friend. Look, I'm really sorry. I'm sorry I did that. I'm sorry about it. I hope you forgive me. And the friend kind of feels like, well, they apologized. I guess I have to forgive them. But the friend doesn't really forgive us because our apologies often just suck.

We're not good at apologizing. We teach five-year-olds, well, go and say you're sorry, and the five-year-old kind of stomps into the room and goes, I'm sorry. And then we go, okay, fine, you're forgiven. And we're not much more sophisticated as adults than that five-year-old. We don't throw in all the necessary ingredients. And when you look at the research about apologies, there are six different ingredients an effective apology should have. And the other thing is that the only goal an effective apology should have, the only one, is to actually elicit authentic forgiveness from the other person. But we tend to forget that. We tend to think the goal of the apology is just to voice it.

And then once we voiced it, we're done. And not that it actually has to do a job, and that we have to voice it in such a way that it does that job, and if it didn't do that job, we didn't voice it well enough. And so I'll just give one example of a classic ingredient that we omit from apologies, which is a vital one, and that's an empathy statement. It's not sufficient to say, oh, I'm sorry, like you're five years old. You actually have to let the other person know that you get the impact of whatever that was, the action, the inaction, whatever it was, on them from their point of view. That requires an empathy statement. So it's not sufficient to say, I'm sorry I missed your party. You have to say, I'm sorry I didn't come to your party. I know you were expecting me. You

must have been thinking and wondering where I was. I'm sure some people asked you where I was. That might have ruined the party for you. And I know how much work you put into it. And I'm so sorry that in any way I might have ruined the party that you, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know, the empathy statement is a very, very important ingredient. And there are others. I go into them in the book and give case examples of how what happens when they're omitted and

how to, you know, reinsert them and what those ingredients are. But that's the key to it. We have to make sure that our apologies actually do the job for which they were intended and not just think of them as the five-year-old. I'll say the words, I'm sorry, and then I'm done. Yeah. I mean, clearing the space definitely with someone else is a way to let go of the guilt.

And I know I've, I talk about it as being a leader and coming from responsibility and ownership of a situation and be able to clear the space responsibly to break that guilt, I guess. So. And you know what, but you're absolutely right because what people will find and what I'm sure you've found is that it's the kind of, it's exactly the kind of exercise that feels intimidating before you do it and feels very empowering once you've done it because you do feel like a leader you do feel like you've owned something you do walk taller for taking that responsibility for owning up for you know for really you know doing that i think

that people feel empowered afterwards yeah it doesn't feel good thinking about it you get really nervous and afraid probably of hurting someone. But when you complete it and they, you know, whether they accept the apology or not or the forgiveness or not, at least you've done your part and you've really come from a place of love and care and understanding, hopefully is the goal. And then you can let go of the guilt yourself when you come from that responsible place. So that's really cool. Now, let's talk about rumination. What is rumination exactly? Rumination means brooding or stewing. It's when we just can't get that thing out of our head and we keep thinking about it. The boss yelled at us in a meeting in front of all our colleagues,

and we were so embarrassed and insulted, and it felt so terrible. And we go back to our desk and we can't stop thinking about it. And we, you know, go and talk about to this colleague and then we talk to that colleague and then we go home and we tell our friends and then we thinking about it the next day and we keep envisioning it and we keep playing various scenarios out in our head. We cannot let it go. So that's ruminating. Ruminating is what cows do when they chew. They're just going to reprocess the same thing. That's where that word comes from. And so just like chewing over the same thing over and over and over again. And the problem with it is that it's not an adaptive form of self-reflection. Because when you're actually trying to figure things out or to understand things or to figure out what kind of actions

you might need to take in various scenarios, well, that's adaptive. And again, once you've figured it out, then you usually feel a little less compelled to think about it because you kind of figured it out. You figured out, oh, you know what? I disagreed with the boss just a few minutes before they started yelling at me, and maybe that's what triggered them, and so I stepped on their toes. They stepped on my toes.

That's what that was about. And once you figure that out, it doesn't feel great, but you can let it go. And when we're ruminating or brooding, we're not letting it go. And the problem with it is that we're not aware that we're doing something that's extremely damaging. Because when we brood like that, when we ruminate like that, it sets us up. First of all, we're releasing all these stress hormones into our bodies. And by doing that, we're literally putting ourselves at risk for cardiovascular disease. People who ruminate as a habit at a much higher risk for cardiovascular disease than those who don't. And it's a habit we can break. And secondly, we're really impairing our ability to problem solve because we're so used to stewing and going around and around in this emotional

hamster wheel and so not used to actually just trying to make decisions figure things out you know getting action items that we get into that habit of passivity and it impairs our problem solving in one study they looked at women who found a lump in their breast and they found that women who had a tendency to ruminate waited, on average, two months longer to make an appointment with their doctor after finding a lump in their breast than women who did not. Two months, which is a crucial amount of time, but that habit of ruminating got them so used to just stewing and not doing that that's what was happening when something really important

and threatening came along. Wow. So how do we break that habit then? Well, as you would break most habits. and threatening came along. Wow. So how do we break that habit then? Well, as you would break most habits. In other words, you have to have the attitude of this is a habit I have to break. You can't just wish not to think about it because it's notorious in psychology that you tell yourself I'm not going to think about, you know, what is it, a pink elephant? That's all you're going to have in your mind is pink elephants.

It does not work just to not think about it. So I go through quite a few various techniques in the book. The simpler one, the one simple one that I will suggest to people is distraction. You have to distract yourself, but you have to do it with something that's compelling enough to literally take your thought away. You can't distract yourself by just staring at a wall. You have to do some kind of puzzle, some kind of memory task. You can go for a run because that will actually be distracting. You can try and remember the order of songs in a playlist. You can remember the order of books on a shelf or try and come up with all the state capitals.

Really, even a few minutes, two, three minutes of trying to do a task like that, that does require concentration, will get your mind off that loop that you're in. However, like when you, like people who've quit smoking, you have to do it each time you get the craving. Each time that thought occurs, you catch it as soon as you can, and you use the distraction as soon as you can. And in time, the urge will be less compelling, it will appear less frequently, and you won't be ruminating about it. But you have to be, it's habit change, it requires discipline. Perfect. And the next thing you talk about is failure. And everyone can experience, or has experienced this, just like rejection. They're probably almost one and the same, I would think. You get rejected just about as many times as you fail.

Every day you're failing at something if you really look at it. And in my opinion, the only way to succeed is to fail over and over and over again until you succeed. So I feel like failure is actually a good thing in order to get the results you want eventually. But it can obviously be a bad thing if you focus on it too much and if you allow it to emotionally hurt you. So you talk about it as the emotional, how emotional chest colds become psychological pneumonias is failure, correct? Right. And look, I could not agree with you more. Failure is an incredibly, incredibly useful tool.

It has within it the keys to future success. You just have to be able to find them. And most people, or many people, don't look for the keys to success in their failure. They do one of the things I mentioned earlier, is they just go and they beat themselves up and feel inadequate and feel that their abilities are not up to the task and that this is beyond them and feel demoralized and sabotage their motivation and their confidence. And then lo and behold, they're not going to succeed the next time because, you know, you just did a whole hatchet job on yourself.

Why would you? But if you actually think about it, here's the deal. We tend to make, we have the same blind spots. You know, we tend to have them over and over again. And I don't know if you watch much reality television. I will sometimes watch a couple of competition shows because to me, it's a fascinating, when I was writing this, I was watching competition shows, it was a fascinating study about how people deal with failure, right? So you know, every week, you have the bottom three, and they get the feedback about, oh, you know, your time management wasn't adequate, or

specifically, this one show called face off, which is about people applying, you know, special effects makeup. And, and, you know, so this one has, one has you know the time management wasn't adequate because you keep biting off more than you can chew and then you see the next week episodes come along and they are planning what they can do and they say and they say to the camera i was you know chewed out for not having time management so this week i have to be careful about that and then you see them five minutes later hmm this might be a little too ambitious but i I'm going to go for it. And you're like, then did you not figure out that that would be the problem? That's your blind spot? That you keep thinking it's ambitious and you want to go for it? And that is your blind spot? But no, they haven't figured it out. And that's what happens with failure. We have our blind spots.

And instead of looking back on the failure and figuring out what do I need to do differently here? Where was I not succeeding? You know, people talk about, for example, diet and they, you know, people say, you know, it's funny because I start all these diets and I'm always great for two weeks. And then I fail after that. And I'm like, okay, since you know that, what is it you put in place after that second week to make sure it doesn't happen? And they look at me like I'm asking some kind of funny question. Well, you know where your weak spot is. You know where it's going to happen.

How can you not plan ahead for it? You actually have the answer of where you're going to struggle and you ignore it. And that's the problem with failure. We don't look at it as holding the map for future success. We look at it as some kind of indictment of our abilities or our luck or our fortune or our destiny. And it's none of those things. It's just here are the answers. Just look for them, find them and apply them in future situations.

So true. I love this. And the last one kind of goes in tune with failure and that's low self-esteem. Because when we fail, then we beat up our self-esteem and then we don't have the confidence. We don't believe in ourselves. And in my opinion, belief is one of the most powerful things that we can have in order to be successful. If we, you know, the simple saying, I think it was Disney. Walt Disney has said, if you can dream it, you can achieve it. Or if you can believe it, you can achieve it. Something like that. And really, it's the foundation for getting what you want is believing in yourself or believing that something will happen. If you don't believe it first, then it's going to be pretty tricky to convince yourself that it will happen.

So tell me about low self-esteem. Well, it's interesting because I completely agree again. You're absolutely right. You have to believe in yourself to make it happen. And I'm one of those people. And I actually have a lot of evidence on my side after doing this kind of work for over 20 years that if you believe it, if you believe in yourself and you want won't be able to join the NBA regardless. But there are few things like that. Very few things like that. Most things, if you want it enough and you believe in yourself enough, you can achieve them. So that belief is incredibly important. Now, the thing about low self-esteem, like I said earlier, is the minute it's low, we tend to then bash ourselves and be self-critical and look at all our faults and make it even lower, which is just a ridiculous

thing because we know from studies that people with higher self-esteem are more resilient when they experience failure and rejection and stress and anxiety literally stress for example people with higher self-esteem in the same stressful situation their blood pressure will go up less and it will come down quicker. It's literally higher self-esteem. I'm using the word higher, not high, just higher, you know, because self-esteem is a fluctuating thing. It's like hair. We have our good hair days. We have our bad hair days. I don't know the mysteries of the universe to know why one day is a good hair day and a bad hair day, but we wake up one day and we're feeling good about ourselves. We wake up one day and we're not. So our self-esteem

up one day and we're feeling good about ourselves wake up one day and we're not so our self-esteem fluctuates the higher it is the more resilient we are emotionally and psychologically so it's important that it remain high now one of the things i'll just mention in terms of the studies that's interesting is that one of the most common techniques people use to increase their self-esteem is positive affirmations positive Positive affirmations are a huge industry because, you know, they're these books and they're the refrigerator magnets and they're the calendars and they're the, and now they're at the bottom of some annoying emails. And, you know, and the thing about them is that when we look at the research about, you know, positive affirmations for people who don't know what they are, there's these generic statements like um i'm worthy of of a great

success every day i'm going to get better and better i'm attractive and will find great love whatever it is and so those are the generic statements but when we do research on positive affirmations and and much research has been done it's a very interesting thing that we find and we find it extremely consistently and that is that positive affirmations are extremely effective in increasing the self-esteem of one specific group. And that group is people who have high self-esteem. People who have low self-esteem not only are not helped by positive affirmations, they can actually make them feel worse rather than better.

And that is because um you know persuasion theory tells us that when a statement falls outside the boundaries of our belief system too far outside we will reject it unconsciously we can't accept it it's too far outside the boundaries of our belief system and when you're feeling really unattractive and unloved and very demoralized about your chance of finding great love, sitting there and telling yourself, I'm attractive and I'm going to find great love, falls too far outside the boundaries of your belief system. Your unconscious mind will reject it and will remind you why. Because you feel unattractive. Because you've been unloved. Because you haven't found success in finding your great love. So they can actually do much

more damage to the very people who need them than not. Wow. That's positive affirmation. So if I have high self-esteem and I'm giving myself positive affirmations every single day, then that's good for me and it's going to increase my self-esteem and my confidence and my belief in whatever I want to achieve. But if I have low self-esteem or low confidence and I'm trying to do positive affirmations, then it's actually hurting me even more.

Right, and guess who are the people who use them most? It's the people with low self-esteem. The people with high self-esteem don't usually use them that much. And so that's the irony. That's amazing. So what can someone with low self-esteem do then as opposed to positive affirmations? Well, a different kind of affirmation that is useful is called a self-affirmation. That is one that you generate by yourself because it's validating

an aspect of yourself you know to be true, you know is valuable. And so since you know it's valuable and you know it's true, it falls within the boundaries of your belief system. So it's in the domain of romance. You can make a list of qualities you have. You might be loyal. You might be a good listener. You might be emotionally available. You might be supportive.

You might be a great cook. You might be a great social planner. You can make a list of many, many attributes that you know you have, that you know are valuable, and then you can affirm those. Choose one of them. Write a brief essay, one or two paragraphs about it, and that will actually make you feel better. If you write the essay, you actually have to do the writing, because that's how we absorb these kinds of psychological messages. But do that. That will remind you of what you're actually bringing to the table, what you actually do have to offer. It will land in the correct place, because you know it to be true. It will affirm

aspects of yourself you know are valuable. And that's much better for your self-esteem than the generic positive affirmations that are probably not how you're feeling in that way. So almost write a love letter to yourself about what you do love about yourself, right? I would write, I wouldn't call it a love letter. I would write, I would call it an essay because it's not, oh, you're so wonderful. It's, I am a very supportive person. And when my, you know, and when I'm in a relationship, I'm very supportive. And in my past relationships, I was able to support my significant other when they did such and such and such. And in my future relationships, I'll be able to support them on their endeavors and when they need emotional

support and on their creative. And, you know, in other words, you really write about why that's an important thing. This is very interesting. interesting i love this uh well i want to wrap up with the final question that i ask all my guests and again i'm fascinated with emotional intelligence and this is all right in line with that so what is your definition of greatness, Dr. Winch? My definition of greatness is someone who really learns that their psychology, their emotions are tools they can use, the same as any other tool, to get as far as they want to in life. And they learn to use them as tools that serve them, rather than impediments. And so greatness is actually using the power of psychology, using the power of emotions to advance your own needs, agendas, and happiness.

I love it. Dr. Winch, where can we get the book and where can we find you online? I'm online at guywinch.com. That's G-U-Y-W-I-N-C-H.com. On Twitter at guywinch.com that's g-u-y-w-i-n-c-h.com on twitter at guy winch and the book should be it's in hardcover it's an e-book and it's an audio book you should be able to find it in any online bookstore in brick and mortar bookstores as well it really should be widely available there are links specific links to all kinds of booksellers on my website if people care to visit. It's on the landing page. But even if it's an independent bookstore, you can ask them. They'll order it for you if they don't have it.

Awesome. Dr. Winch, I appreciate it. Make sure everyone to go check out the book, Emotional First Aid, and go to guywinch.com. Love this information. I'm going to keep diving into it and look at it. I know you write for a lot of different magazines and websites, so I'm going to be diving into a lot of your content because this is fascinating to me about understanding the human mind, human potential, emotional intelligence. So I really appreciate your work with this and your research and uncovering this for people like me and my listeners to tap into it. So thank you so much for your dedication to this work. And thank you so much for having me to this work. And thank you so much for having me on the show.

It's been a real pleasure talking with you. Thanks so much. And there you have it. Thanks so much, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did like it, if you got something out of it, I want to hear about it. I want to hear what's been holding you back from some of these common psychological injuries.

What's the thing that you've been holding back with the most? Go on over to lewishouse.com or schoolofgreatness.com to check out the show notes and leave a comment over there with your thoughts. Also, if you know someone who has been suffering with rejection, guilt, loneliness, or any of these other psychological injuries, please go ahead and share this with them. Send them an email with the link from the podcast, or share it on Twitter and Facebook with your friends. I would love a quick shout out there. And if you haven't yet, make sure to subscribe to this podcast. Go on over to iTunes, Stitcher, or SoundCloud and subscribe as we've got

some huge guests coming on in the next few weeks, and you are not going to want to miss out on these guests. They are big, and they are amazing. So make sure to subscribe, and also go check out my newsletter at lewishouse.com as I'm sending out weekly tips, goodies, and all my episodes each and every week, and you're not going to want to miss out on the long term of what we've got coming out on the School of Greatness. So with that, guys, thanks so much for all you do. I appreciate your feedback. I appreciate your support.

It means the world to me, and it's the reason why I continue to put out this podcast for you. So without you, this podcast would not be possible, and I acknowledge you for that. It means the world to me. So you guys know what time it is. It's time to step up, go out there and do something great. Outro Music