This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - Emotional Fitness for Real Life with Dr. Emily Anhalt | 371

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

Friend, we obsess over steps, macros, and workout streaks… but when was the last time you checked in on your emotional fitness? In this episode, Nicole sits down with clinical psychologist, emotional fitness expert, and Coa co-founder Dr. Emily Anhalt to talk about what it actually looks like to “train your brain” — no toxic positivity, no “just meditate more,” and definitely no pretending everything’s fine when it’s very much not.  Emily breaks down her 7 traits of emotional fitness (think mindfulness, curiosity, boundaries, resilience, empathy, communication, and play) and how to build them like muscles over time — one emotional push-up at a time. We get into why empathy without boundaries will burn you all the way out, how to ask for feedback without spiraling into defensiveness, and why trusting your future self might be the most confidence-building thing you do this year.  If you’ve ever felt resentful because you said “yes” when every cell in your body wanted to say “no,” if you’re tired of carrying everyone else’s emotions like luggage, or if anxiety and uncertainty have been driving the bus lately, this one’s for you. Emotional fitness won’t stop life from throwing heavy shit your way — but it will make you strong enough to carry it, move it, and eventually put it down. We explore: What emotional fitness actually means (and how it’s different from “fixing yourself”) The 7 traits of emotional fitness — and why you don’t have to master all of them at once How to spot the cost of avoiding discomfort (hello, resentment and burnout)The “emotional push-up” exercise you can start doing today How to hold empathy and boundaries so caring for others doesn’t drain you dry The best advice Emily ever got for dealing with anxiety and uncertainty Why trusting your future self is a deeply confident way to live Because when you trust your future self, you stop living in panic about what might happen and start living with confidence in who you’re becoming — and that shifts everything.  Thank you to our sponsors! Get 20% off your first order at curehydration.com/WOMANSWORK with code WOMANSWORK — and if you get a post-purchase survey, mention you heard about Cure here to help support the show!  Sex is a skill. Beducated is where you learn it. Visit https://beducate.me/pd2550-womanswork and use code womanswork for 50% off the annual pass. Connect with Emily: Website: https://www.dremilyanhalt.com/ Book: https://a.co/d/couFOLN IG: https://www.instagram.com/dremilyanhalt/ X: https://x.com/dremilyanhalt LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dremilyanhalt/ Related Podcast Episodes Your Brain Is a Filthy Liar with Bizzie Gold | 361 How To Play: Shift Your Thinking, Inspire Connection & Spark Creativity with Cas Holman | 355 144 / Jay & Nicole Kalil on Partnership, With Guest Host Lynn Casaletto Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Taylor Swift, the end of an era. Streaming now only on Disney Plus. If this show adds something to your life, I'm asking for your help so it finds its way to the next woman who needs it. The three best ways to do that, rate, share, and support the sponsors. Friend, we live in a world where most of us know the importance of our physical fitness. Hell, you can hardly make it through a day without someone or something reminding. you. We plan our workouts, track steps, log miles, higher trainers, and spend way too much money on gear that promises to make us faster, stronger, or leaner. Or maybe that just happens in my

household. But when it comes to emotional fitness, most of us don't even think about it. Don't do anything about it until we're already anxious, stressed, or completely burnt out, which, as our guest today says, is kind of like waiting until you've had a heart attack to start cardio. I am Nicole Khalil, and on this episode of This Is Woman's Work, we're talking about flexing your feelings and how we can all train our brains to grow stronger, to be emotionally fit. Because the truth is, all of the stuff that we want to avoid, things like fear, hurt, exhaustion, worry, those things don't just disappear when we push them aside. They don't go away just because they're being ignored. They get stored in our bodies, which is both highly scary and completely fascinating.

And if they're stored, that means they can also be released, which means healing isn't just possible. It's something we can actually practice and achieve, like all those reps at the gym, but for our emotional muscles. Because life throws us heavy things. And I want to make sure that we're strong enough to carry the weight and also strong enough to let it go. Our guest today, Dr. Emily Anhalt has dedicated her career to showing us how we can do this. She's a clinical psychologist, keynote speaker, author, and co-founder of COA, the gym for mental health. For the past two decades, she's worked with executives, founders, and high performers while conducting extensive research with leading psychologists and entrepreneurs on how leaders can improve their emotional

fitness. She's collaborated with all the big companies, and her debut book, Flex Your Feelings, is available now. So Emily, welcome to the show. I'm super glad you're here to talk about this. And I want to start by asking, you talk about emotional fitness the way I think so many people talk about physical fitness. And like physical fitness, it can mean different things to different people. So I'd love to start with your definition. What do you mean when you talk about emotional fitness? So first of all, thank you so much for having me. I'm a huge fan of this podcast and it's an honor to be here. And I'm so excited to talk about emotional fitness with this community. And when I say emotional fitness, what I'm talking about is a proactive, ongoing practice to strengthen your mental and emotional

health. So just like physical fitness strengthens your physical health, emotional fitness will make you more emotionally strong and ready to face the inevitable difficulties that life will throw us. Okay. I love that. Proactive, ongoing practice. I think each of those three were is important in and of themselves because I'm going to hone in on the word practice, I think a lot of times we think of things as a destination, right? Like at some point in time, you can just be emotionally fit and then stop. But like physical fitness, that doesn't work. You can get super physically fit.

But if you stop, it all sort of goes away. So this is an ongoing practice. Yes? Absolutely. And you said it perfectly. You know, you wouldn't do one boot camp and then say, okay, good, I'm good. You know, you know that it's a lifelong pursuit. And that is the same with our emotional fitness. It is a daily practice. It is a moving target. And there's always more work to do. But the

work becomes more and more rewarding and generative as you do it. Yeah. I really would like there to be a boot camp that I'd only have to do once. But that's a topic for another day. So I know a lot of your work is research based. So in your research, And the subtitle of your book, my understanding is you discovered, uncovered seven traits for emotional fitness. Can you, and I know for sake of time, we won't be able to go through all seven, but could you either give us a quick overview of the seven or hone in on a couple and then tease the book so we can go read about the others? Tell us a little bit about those traits for emotional fitness. Absolutely. So my research was based on a desire to figure out what a more proactive approach to mental health actually looks like. So I did something called an interpretive phenomenological analysis, which is a fancy way of saying I interviewed 100 psychologists and 100 entrepreneurs. And I asked them the question, how would you know if you were sitting across the table from an emotionally healthy person?

What does that look like? What does that feel like? What do those people do? What do they not do? And out of this research came these seven traits of emotional fitness. These are the seven things that emotionally healthy people are working on all the time. Like you said, they don't have these traits and that's it. These are things that they are working on in an ongoing way.

So I'll briefly talk about all seven and then we can zone in on any of them that jump out at you. Perfect. So the first trait is mindfulness. And I define mindfulness as becoming more comfortable, being uncomfortable. And this trait is first because all of this work is a little uncomfortable, just like if you walked into the gym and you said, okay, I'm only going to work out until I feel any discomfort, you're probably not going to get faster or stronger.

The same is true with our emotional fitness. So we start with mindfulness. The second trait is curiosity, which I define as pursuing growth over defensiveness, really prioritizing continued learning. The third trait is self-awareness, understanding your own emotional struggles and strengths and triggers and biases. After that comes resilience, which I define as bouncing forward through setbacks and failures. And I say bouncing forward instead of bouncing back because you never really go back to being the

person you were before going through a hard thing. So that's not the goal of resilience. It's about learning and growing through the things that you experience. Next is empathy, which is understanding and allowing yourself to feel the emotions of others. Communication is the sixth trait, and that is all about putting words to your needs and expectations and boundaries. It's about knowing how to listen. And then finally, the seventh trait is playfulness, which I define as being a yes and person, knowing how to foster space to deepen connection, knowing how to move away from black and white thinking, and knowing how to remove constraints of life and enjoy the journey as much as the destination. Well, I think we could honestly end the episode right there and have

sheer brilliance. Every one of those, I'm nodding along and having aha and lightball moments. And I think there's an element of some of those I know I practice and a more proactive, ongoing basis than others, right? And I'd actually love to know what do you think of those traits is your big strength and which do you think is your big area of growth? Yeah. And I think with any one of them, I could find examples of where I do it. And I could also find examples of opportunities for growth. So I think I'm pretty practiced in the being uncomfortable. Like I am constantly uncomfortable. I think discomfort is an important part of growth. So take risks, things like that. Now there are opportunities for sure. The one that's my biggest opportunity,

I think a lot of women will relate with this, is communication. The way you defined it specifically, putting words to your needs. I have a tendency to be more self-sacrificing. And so I often don't put my wants and needs out there and then get resentful and, you know, the whole pattern. But I mean, got any one of them, I could talk about how important they are and ways that I think I've moved the needle and also where I could see huge opportunity. Absolutely. And, you know, it's funny you bring up the needs aspect of that in the book, the chapter I talk the most about that in is actually empathy because a lot of people will say, well, Emily, I have the opposite problem. It's not that I don't have enough empathy. I have too much empathy. I'm always sacrificing

myself for other people. And so a big part of that chapter is about how empathy and boundaries are not mutually exclusive. They're actually very dependent on each other. And the more you learn to communicate and uphold your boundaries, the more empathetic you can be without it draining you. And the more it's a sustainable practice instead of one that takes more than you have to give. So I appreciate you putting words to that. Yeah. Well, and I think the draining you part, as you were talking, just like, you know, hit me right away because that is usually the biggest way that I can tell that I'm no longer practicing both empathy and boundaries. And probably part of the reason I know I've built some walls up because it's really hard

and feels really heavy to have empathy, to put yourself in another person's shoes. I mean, God, there's so much that feels heavy in the world today. empathy without boundaries can be really, I don't know, dangerous is the right word, but that's what it feels like. Yeah, I really agree with that. Empathy is not an endless well, and we have to take care of ourselves in order to show up for other people. Yeah. I will also say the ones that I love that, like, had me smile was resilience in your definition to bounce forward. And playfulness, so many of us as adults, myself for sure, are taking things far too soon.

seriously. We've forgotten how to how to play. I like the yes and approach. Okay, I could dive into any one of these. Where do you find people either have the most work to do or feel like it's the biggest challenge or have like an emotional block toward? Where would you direct us to go? You know, one of the most interesting things I've found is I've been actually implementing this work with my patients and clients and in myself is that it's really not a one-size-fits-all program. And there isn't one trait that most people struggle with or that most people do well with. But what does seem to be true is that they are all very interconnected such that when you work on any of them, the others will naturally improve. Of course, the better your communication is the more you are going

to be able to play. And the more playful you are, the easier it is to empathize with other people, et cetera, et cetera. But when people ask where to start, I do tend to direct them to that first trait, mindfulness, because every single thing that you want in life lives on the other side of some kind of discomfort. And even those of us who are comfortable with certain types of discomfort tend to be uncomfortable with some other type of discomfort. And as we learn to lean toward those areas of discomfort instead of away from them, all of these new options open to us in life. So that's one of the first things I'll have people do is take a second to think, what is one thing that seems to make me a little more uncomfortable than it makes other people?

It might be saying no, having boundaries. It might be being vulnerable in relationships. It might be having difficult conversations with people. And once you know what tends to make you a little more uncomfortable, then the next step is to think, all right, what do I tend to do to avoid this discomfort. So if it's uncomfortable for me to say no, what do I do? Well, I say yes, even when I want to say no. And then the next step is to think, what is the cost of that? In what ways are you actually causing yourself more discomfort by avoiding that original source of discomfort? So when you say yes, when you want to say no, you're going to grow resentful. You're going to feel overwhelmed. You're going to be upset that people don't seem to see what you need, even though you had told them that you had space

for something when you didn't. And so you can see there's actually a big price to pay for avoiding this discomfort. And then finally, the last step is what is one small step you could take toward that discomfort? So the next time someone asks you something and you want to say no, but the temptation is to say yes, maybe you say, let me think about that. And that gives you just a little bit of time and space to sit with your discomfort and decide whether you really want to say yes to that request. I love all of that. And I'll also add in the asking yourself what it's costing you, one thing that has helped me, too, is to consider how it's impacting me or what it's costing me and others because you gave the example, like resentment. Well, me being resentful costs me, but it also costs the people

in my life, the people I'm feeling resentful toward. It impacts my relationships. And I, again, have a little bit of a tendency. I think like many women, we've been. and socialize to be others focused. It's reason enough that it's costing us something. And thinking about it holistically can also just help push you toward what you ultimately wants and need to be doing for yourself anyway. Thoughts on that? Oh, it's so true.

I think one of the best ways we can take care of our relationships is to be really clear about what we have to offer. You know, there's often this sort of idea in our relationships, romantic, business, whatever they might be, where we have this agreement of I'll take care of you if you take care of me. But I have found that a healthier approach is I'll take care of me for you if you'll take care of you for me. Oh. So good. And when we switch to that mindset, we are reclaiming our agency for our own behavior and our own needs, et cetera. but we are also maintaining connection. We are also saying, look, this is in service of you and in service of us. We will continue to support each other, but ultimately, it's my job to show up for myself first. Yeah. I am 100% taking that and bringing it to a conversation with my husband.

We made the agreement early in our relationship when things started getting more serious. It's like, I'm going to take care of you and you're going to take care of me. That's the agreement. And it will always work if both of us are doing our job. But I like your, to me, that's like the 2.0 definition. And it was like a punch in the gut. So that is definitely being talked about in our next family. We do, we call them family forecasting meetings, but where we get together and we talk about the important things, including our relationship. So you just gave me an agenda item. So thank you. You also just named such a great emotional

fitness practice, which is that kind of proactive approach to relationships. Let's not wait until shit hits the fan to work on things. things. Let's have a weekly or monthly meeting where we talk about what's working and what could be a little bit better. How could we stop, start, or continue any particular dynamic or practice to help us strengthen the relationship before things get problematic? I don't know who else needs to hear this, but drinking coffee doesn't count as hydration. I learned this the hard way the other morning when I stood up too fast and briefly visited another dimension. So if you too want to decrease the intake and increase your water, cure makes it actually enjoyable. Their hydration packs are

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And let's make winter heat a thing. In your book, you talk about an emotional push-up. How do we do that? What is that? Let's do it together right now, actually, if you're up for it and anyone who's listening can do this with us. Absolutely. So an emotional pushup is any small emotional exertion that puts you just a little outside of your comfort zone so you can grow. So if you think about physical pushups, you know, if you only do a couple, you're not going to get stronger. But when you do them every day, not only over time do you get better at doing pushups, but you also get stronger and can do other things more easily like carry groceries or pick up your kid. And then you're also investing in your long term health. You're going to be less likely to get sick down the road because you are prepping your body. to fight off disease and to have that strength. So an emotional pushup is similar, where you're putting yourself a little outside of your comfort zone, there will be immediate benefits in that your current situations and relationships will get stronger, but there will also be long-term

benefits you're going to be less likely to have depression, anxiety, burnout down the line when you are dealing with these things in the moment. So again, it's not a one-size-fits-all thing because what makes me a little uncomfortable might not make you uncomfortable at all. So the idea is to think about in your life, what are little things I can do each day that help me tolerate discomfort a little better over time. So an emotional pushup might be saying no when you want to say yes, even though you don't really have the space. It might be putting your phone away at 8 p.m. And just being still with yourself, anything that is just a little tough apologizing for a mistake, that could be an emotional pushup. So the one that I like to have people practice is around the

idea of feedback. Because asking for feedback tends to feel. pretty uncomfortable for a lot of people. But feedback is one of the most powerful tools we have to boost our self-awareness, our curiosity, our communication, almost every trait benefits from seeing ourselves through someone else's eyes. So what I would have us do, and maybe you and I can even do this in this moment, if you're up for it, is I would have everyone pull out their phone or an email or whatever might be and send a text message or an email to someone in your life who you interact with regularly and whose perspective you respect. And you're going to send them a message in your own words that says something like,

hey, I'm working on my emotional fitness and today is all about asking for feedback. Would you be willing to share one thing I'm doing well in this relationship and one thing I could do 10% better? And I love this phrasing of 10% better because it's a low lift. You know, we're not asking people to tell us our greatest flaws. It's just a chance to say, how could I show up just a little better for you? and then wait and see what comes back. And when you get a response, which you almost definitely will, you just take a second to sit with it and see how it makes you feel.

Does the positive feedback actually make you more uncomfortable than the negative feedback? Does it resonate with you? Is it a surprise at all? And make this a regular practice. So every month I send a text like this to someone in my life. And I have just learned so much about myself over time by doing this. So what do you think?

I love it. Again, the ongoing part of it wouldn't have been something so that you're doing this on a regular basis and including different people, I think is a really important thing that bears repeating. I will also say you had said curiosity as one of the seven traits and you defined it as growth over defensiveness or that was part of the definition. And as we put opportunity for feedback out into the world, there are lots of things that could happen, but one of them could be wanting to defend. Right. And so. you'd said sit with it. But what do you do? What is your advice? If that defensiveness, if you're like, well, here are all the ways that I have done that or, you know, like people know how to press our buttons sometimes, especially those closest to us. So if we're feeling defensive from the feedback, any advice? For sure, we're all defensive and we need our defenses. They keep us safe. The problem is that sometimes our defenses stand in the way of us being able to grow. And so if you were to get a response back and you notice your body tense up.

or you notice yourself think, well, that's not true at all, or that was totally taken out of context, or they don't know what they're talking about. The best thing you can do is just sit with it for a moment. Let that jerk reaction of defensiveness take time to settle. And then just ask yourself the question, what am I feeling about this right now? What would it mean if it were true? What would it mean if it weren't true? Because when someone gives us feedback, it is also going to have remnants of their own experience in it. When someone tells you something you should change, there's something about them that they're putting into that also. So it's not like we should just blindly accept and follow feedback all the time. But when we give ourselves a chance to sit with it and say,

all right, well, they're saying that I'm this particular way. That doesn't feel true. But if that were true, what would that mean? And sometimes what comes up with that is, all right, if that were true, it would mean that they aren't feeling like they're getting what they need from me right now. And that idea is so painful that I'm focusing on the content instead of the overall important meaning here. So just sit with it for a second and see what happens when that initial feeling goes down. Yeah. I can tell you what would be most likely going on for me would be this desire to be right over the desire to like truly listen. And, you know, so I think there is sometimes a thing that we default to.

and you said it, feedback gives us insight into the person giving the feedback as well as the person getting it. So there's lots to do there. So I'm going to ask you to re-say what we should say in the text and then give everybody a minute to hit pause so they can send their text. But tell us again what we should be writing. Okay, great. Before I do that, I also wanted to answer your question that one of the best tools for curiosity and moving past your defensiveness is asking questions. So if you were to get something back that doesn't resonate or feels upsetting. Instead of telling them that they're wrong, you can say, can you help me understand this better? Can you tell me more about that? What was that like for you? Can you give me some examples? What could be different the next time?

Questions are a really powerful way to learn more without necessarily having to admit anything in any particular direction. And I'm grinning because what the actual fuck is not a question, right? So just because it has a question mark, doesn't mean it's a question. So use Emily's not maybe the one you think you want to ask. It's loaded with meeting. That's amazing. Okay, so here's the message. Again, put in your own words, but you would say something like, hi, I'm working on my emotional fitness and today's push-up is all about asking for feedback. Your perspective is one that I really respect. And I'm curious if you would be up for sharing with me, what is one thing that I'm doing well in our relationship as a manager, a sister, a parent, a friend, whatever might be? And what's

one thing that I could do 10% better. Okay, perfect. Everybody hit pause, go send you text. So, Emily, I want to talk a little bit about the inevitable, and maybe it's not inevitable, but I feel like it is feeling of anxiousness or uncertainty or worry that pops up in situations like this, where we just sent that text or we're doing an emotional pushup. I know from doing my preparation that you had a single best piece of advice you received on how. how to deal with anxiety and uncertainty. So I wanted to know what that is. Oh, sure.

So this is a personal story of mine where I was given incredible advice for dealing with anxiety and uncertainty. And this was way back many, many years ago when I was young. My mom was in the hospital. And it was looking pretty bad. It didn't look like she was going to make it.

And she was in a coma for 30 days. And every night the doctors told us she wasn't going to make it. And every morning, she was just barely hanging on. So I was on this roller coaster of anxiety and anticipatory grief. And there was just so much uncertainty and I was really having trouble dealing with it. But luckily for me, a family friend came to keep me company one day in the hospital. His name is Bill.

And Bill is an oncologist. So he works with a lot of death and loss and families going through really hard things. And I was sitting with Bill and saying, Bill, I don't know what I'm going to do if my mom dies. How am I going to handle it emotionally? How am I going to handle it logistically? What do I do in the situation? And he saw me starting to spin. And he put his hand on my shoulder and he looked him in the eyes and he said, Emily, the version of you that will handle that terrible thing if and when it happens will be born into existence in that moment. And that version of you will have more life experience and more context and more ability to handle that hard thing

than you do now. It makes sense that you don't know what you would do when your mom dies because the version of you that will figure it out doesn't exist yet. You have to trust your future self to handle future problems. And this advice, trust your future self to handle future problems has carried me through so much in life. Anytime I'm facing any kind of uncertainty about something that I have no control over, I will remind myself, you know what, future me is a badass. She will figure it out. All I need to do is focus on what's true right now and what's in my control right now. So I hope that your listeners might remember to trust their future selves as well. I freaking love everything about that. I define confidence as firm and bold trust and

and I have been trying to really figure out how to articulate the difference between trust and knowing. I think a lot of times people think of confidence and they relate it to certainty. And that's not typically what it looks like. It's trusting without knowing. And I often say when I'm going through hard times, the only thing that's missing from me or from the situation is the benefit of hindsight. But I like this so much better. Trust your future. self to handle future problems. I mean, what? I can't think of a better definition of confidence in practice than that. So thank you for that, Jim. Okay. I have one last question and it's, I'm going to have a hard time articulating it. And it's pretty personal, meaning that I don't know

that anybody listening will have this problem or want to ask this question. But I find so often that people use physical things to help develop mental strength, like triathletes or people who run marathons or, you know, when you think of mindset gurus or people who are really focused on mental toughness, things like that, more often than not, there is a direct connection to physical strength. And I struggle with that. I'm not saying that they aren't connected, and I love how you use physical fitness as a correlation to emotional fitness. It makes sense to my brain. But I struggle because to me, they're not as directly connected. I understand that running a marathon or being a triathlet would involve incredible mental strength. And I have no interest in doing either of those two things. And I think life throws us enough hard

shit. And there are enough ways to become emotionally and mentally strong without having to. And I've had this conversation with a few of my closest friends and I'm being really curious about it because it just doesn't resonate with me, though it does seem to for so many other people. I'm curious your thoughts. How connected or not connected is emotional health and mental toughness and physical health. Like, is my question making any sense at all? It really is. It absolutely is. And, you know, there's no doubt in my mind that the mind-body connection is real. We store our emotions in our body. Sometimes physical movement is a great way to feel through things. There are all kinds of connections. But I think you're pointing to something really important,

which is I think the reason why this connection is made so often and people are doing triathlons to to build strength is that ultimately all it is is it's making you uncomfortable and you're doing it anyway and it is very quantifiable. So you can tell yourself, okay, once I have gone this many miles, I've done it. I've conquered this type of discomfort. And that's really powerful. That is the mindfulness trait in action. But I think the reason that's pointed to over and over and over again is that physical health and strength is a much less stigmatized type of discomfort. I think it is a lot easier to say, oh, you should go work out than it is to say, you should go have 10 really hard conversations. You know, that would be much less quantifiable and it would be much

less, you know, sort of there isn't a playbook for that in the same way. You know, you can get a book about how to run a triathlon. And the reason I wrote my book is that I wanted there to be a playbook for how you can work on your mental and emotional health in that same kind of step-by-step way without feeling like you have to go run a marathon to do it. So I can think of all kinds of things that would similarly put someone in a place of discomfort that if they worked through it anyway, they would come out the other side stronger that are not physical health. Does that make sense to you that idea? It makes so much sense. And I think maybe you're helping me uncover a little bit where my rub is. And it's not that I don't see the mind-body connection or that I don't believe in

the importance of movement and that our body does store things and there is a physical element of this. I think where I got stuck or where I often get stuck is that it seems to be the quick first advice. And sometimes I feel like my emotional health or mental toughness is called into question because I don't do those things and I don't want to do those things as opposed to I think I feel defensive about it or it's like, no, I have taken all these risks. I've gotten uncomfortable in all these ways. Life has thrown me all these curve balls and I've faced all these challenges just like so many of us. And my choice to face those a little bit more head off. on has helped me build or practice my emotional health. And I don't want that to be discounted

because, I mean, I work out and I go to strength training and I hate every minute of it, but I do it because I know it's the right thing to do. But it just sort of feels like, you know, there's mental health, there's physical health, there's emotional health, And our world is so, as you said, it's so easy, so much easier to drive everything towards physical health. That's acceptable. And there is also the elements of it makes us look better. Whereas the others, people aren't led to practice them as much. And when you do, it feels harder and maybe more. I don't know. Now I'm going on a tangent. But yeah, I think you're helping me get a little deeper into what is my beef here, because I have beef for sure. No, I appreciate. I think you're pushing against this idea that health of any kind is one size fits all. And it's just not. Some people's version of running a marathon is going to therapy for the first time and going to that week after week instead of strapping on running shoes. You know, and I really want people to understand that you can start anywhere. Anything that you think to yourself, all right, this is something that I know would be good for me and I normally avoid it. But today I'm going to try not to avoid it. That's the work. And that can look like so many things and people should have so much pride in themselves and compassion for themselves if they are taking any step in that direction. So I so feel what you're saying and want everyone to know that whatever suggestion is put out there, if that's not the one for you, that's okay.

And there are other ways that you can build this strength over time. Thank you for saying all of that and for creating a safe space where I could kind of explore some of those things. So Emily, thank you. Thank you so much for first writing this books. So I'm going to make sure our listeners, first, go order, flex your feelings, wherever it is that you buy books, but let's keep our local bookstores in business. And then second, you can go to Emilyanhalt.com. We'll put it in show notes as well as all the links to where you can find and follow her on social media. And of course, if you're looking for a great speaker for your organization or upcoming event, absolutely reach out to Emily if you're looking for your team or your

people to become more emotionally fit. Emily, thank you. Thank you so much for having me and for flexing your feels with me today. And I'm really grateful. It was absolutely my pleasure. Thank you for again being here to do it. All right, friend, here's the thing about emotional fitness. It is not, nor can it ever be about eliminating the things that cause us pain, fear, or overwhelm. It's about building the strength to face them, to deal with them and not shove them in dark corners and ignore them until they find their way to wreak havoc in our lives and in our bodies because they will. That's what unprocessed feelings do. They wait. They fester and they show up at the absolute worst times, as if there's ever a good time. So let's stop treating our mental and emotional health

like an afterthought. Let's flex our feelings, practice our emotional pushups and train ourselves for the reality of life, not the fantasy of perfection. And the same goes for physical health too, by the way, because perfection isn't on the table for any of us, and because life will keep throwing heavy shit our way. We need to keep flexing our emotional muscles so that we're strong enough to carry, to move, to play, or dance, or whatever it is that you need to do with it so that you can live with and through it. And that work, strengthening our emotional muscles, rewriting the rules of what it means to be strong. All of that is woman's work. Thank you.