Ep #4: Anxiety + Responding to Emotions with Jeff Ammons

Emily
Welcome to Emotional Leadership,

The podcast for high achieving leaders because healthier emotional lives means stronger leadership, thriving teams, and much bigger results. Hello, I hope you’re having a fabulous day. I definitely am. I just finished typing up the podcast guide for this episode and it has got so much good stuff in it. Working on, it reminded me of how much I’ve learned over the last few years and just how much this knowledge has helped me love my life and my job so much more, and so much more easily. I get excited every time I get to share these concepts with you. In today’s episode, I’m going to talk to Jeff Ammons, a director of engineering at One Medical. We’re talking about anxiety like me. He spent years being curious about his brain, how to be better at using it well, and how to use that knowledge to be far more effective and happy at work.

Our conversation mentions a bunch of books and ideas and you can find the links to them in the show notes or the podcast guide. Before we dive in, I want to introduce you to the four ways we respond to feeling an emotion so you can listen for them during our conversation. And then we’ll talk about them in more depth at the end of the episode and I’ll teach you how to start intentionally choosing the one of these four responses that’s healthy and lets us reach our big goals without overwhelm, exhaustion and burnout. So the first of the four ways we can respond to a feeling, is that we can react to it. This is basically acting it out. What does it look like when someone is angry, joyous, gleeful, curious? Whatever it is you picture in your head, is probably what it looks like when we react to the emotion.

The second way we can respond to an emotion is that we can resist it. This is where we pour all of our energy into trying to shove it away from us and keep it at bay. The third way we can respond to an emotion is that we can avoid it. This means running away from it, or trying to distract ourselves. It might look like eating a pint of ice cream to try to quiet down whatever it is that’s happening in our body when we feel this emotion. The fourth way, and really the one healthy way out of these responses, is that we can allow the emotion. When we allow an emotion, we remember that every emotion is really only going to stay in our body for 90 seconds or so. They come from our thoughts and if we continue thinking that way, we’ll continue feeling that way. But sometimes thoughts just cross our brain and we don’t have to be invested in them. We can just notice that we happen to feel this way for a minute and let it go. And that’s really what the core of allowing emotions is about. So, have a fantastic time listening to my conversation with Jeff. I think you’re gonna really love it and we’ll see you on the other side and we’ll talk a little bit more about how to put those ideas into practice and how to learn to allow your emotions.

Begin Guest Segment

Emily
Welcome. I’m here with Jeff. Jeff, tell us a little bit about who you are.

Jeff
Sure. Um, short version, so professionally, quick background — I’ve been an engineer a long time ago. Spent some time as a product manager as well. I’ve done a fair amount of engineering management and a couple various entrepreneurial attempts. Most recently I’ve been working for the last couple of years at One Medical leading some of the teams building our internal electronic medical record system. Uh, and prior to that, I was managing a team at Slack, working on our enterprise product. Outside of work, the short version is I like learning things. So I invest quite a bit of my time into reading books, trying new hobbies. Uh, my latest one I’m trying to learn how to play the drums and draw better, which are things that I picked up in the last couple of years and I wouldn’t say I’ve figured them out yet, but it’s humbling to do something I’m not so good at.

Emily
I love it. What do you love about managing and leading?

Jeff
Since we don’t have hours here, I’ll give you the short version. I think I liked the challenge of it. Like engineering because I like thinking about systems and like trying to think if I make this change to the system it’s going to affect these other parts and so forth and try to construct an elegant system that’s you know better than it was yesterday. And I view management a lot the same way that you’re basically, it’s a system of human beings – and myself included – and it’s infinitely complex. Each individual is infinitely complex and you’ve got biology involved, you’ve got philosophy, you’ve got the history of society, you’ve got all these different components and they’re all coming together into this like really ugly mishmash that we have to try to sort through in order to try to accomplish something at the end of the day, together. And so given that I’m someone who’s constantly trying to learn new things, I like that my job challenges me in ways that I can never anticipate, which then forces me to go study something I never thought I’d have to study. And the great thing is that it feels like it’s building towards something that I care about.

Emily
Yes, I actually explained what I love very similarly, which is I love systems and systems are really fun to design in computer architecture, but people don’t sit still while we debug them. You can’t reboot them. They aren’t deterministic and they cannot give us accurate reads out of their state at all. Just makes it a much more interesting kind of system to navigate.

Jeff
Absolutely. I actually like the buffer that it gives us as well. Like I can’t, it’s not deterministic in the sense where like if I have a bad week with some of my teams, you know, it’s not necessarily anyone’s fault or you anything that was within my control, which some days, this is extremely frustrating cause I just want to know what’s the button I can push that’s gonna make everything better. But in the long run and kind of zooming out a little bit, I can say, you know, okay I think I did the best job I could possibly do. I think I can still learn cause there’s absolutely no way to be perfect. But, I think there’s a bit of forgiveness knowing that the system is infinitely complex basically.

Emily
Yes. So our topic for today is anxiety. I love this. I think anxiety is one of the emotions that makes us most uncomfortable. Um, as people, I think there’s lots of other negative emotions that we don’t enjoy, but most people’s experience of anxiety, in particular,is just very, for me, it makes me feel like I want to crawl out of my skin. Yeah. Curious, what’s your experience with anxiety?

Jeff
So I’d actually clarify one thing. Uh, at least from my perspective, I actually don’t put anxiety in the same category as feelings. Uh, I think fear is a feeling which is basically has the same outputs as anxiety, but I think I have a different mental model for kind of how feelings, anxieties fit together. Um, it’s borrowed from a form of therapy called is very verbose but Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy, uh, ISTDP for short. Which I appreciate their specificity. It’s good of them. Uh, but it’s a little bit of a mouthful, but the model basically says that when you prompt someone, you’re going to see a response that’s going to be either a feeling anxiety or defense. And so in the therapy context might be like; ‘Great, this event occurred to you and then how does that make you feel?’ And when you ask for that feeling, the person’s going to say either, ‘Oh, I was angry.’ In which case they have ready access to their feelings. Or, they might exhibit anxiety and the defense. Quick version of kind of how I envision this as a pyramid. So we’ve got all these core emotions happening underneath, which would be fear, sadness, happiness, et cetera, that are just our limbic systems response to things happening in our environments, sort of um cause and effect. And then some of those we learn for various reasons oftentimes during childhood are uncomfortable to exhibit in our bodies or to be aware of. Or we just have never built the machinery to be aware of them because we have this limbic system crossing over into our conscious system, which actually in my belief, it’s something you have to develop, not something you’re not innately aware of necessarily.

Jeff
So either way, like let’s say I’m angry at my boss for having said something or criticize me in a meeting. I may have learned as a child, that being angry at a parent was super uncomfortable, which then generates this cognitive dissonance where I have this feeling coming up in my limbic system, and then this conscious awareness, or even not even conscious, it could be subconscious, resistance to that because it’s scary because I’ve learned that it’s frightening. So I get this cognitive dissonance, this pressure in my mind, which then is a great anxiety, my body. It’s a fear response basically. And there’s different levels of anxiety, we can get into that later. But what then we do to learn to handle anxiety typically is a defense. And I don’t love the term defense because we sort of think defensive, but really it’s a habitual response to something that gets rid of the anxiety.

Jeff
So there’s huge diversity in what these could be. It could be something like intellectualizing a problem, so thinking about it rather than being aware of the feeling in our body. It could be rumination, it could be denial. And there’s kind of various more healthy or less healthy responses. One defense could be drinking alcohol for example, heavily, uh, which is maybe a little bit less progressive as far as defenses. So that’s my quick mental model of how I behave and how I think other people around me behave, which I think helps me think about how anxiety fits into the picture. It’s a symptom of feelings that are being blocked somehow.

Emily
So the model that I teach listeners is the idea that when we have a feeling there’s four ways we can respond to it. We can react to it: that’s like anger and you throw plates or scream. You can resist it, and that’s like when you take the door and you try to hold it shut. There’s avoidance and that’s when you just do everything you can to never be near this concept. Um, and then there’s allowing the emotion, which is where you let it sit in your body and you don’t try to fight it and you just notice that whatever you thought that created this feeling, it was a thought that you had for a moment. It’ll kind of pass through on its own. That’s very much a mindfulness concept, I think for a lot of people.

Jeff
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Just to kind of merge the two models together there, I would categorize those first things as defenses and then the latter one actually being the ability, having the ability to tolerate and sit with a feeling along enough to as great data. Like I, this is probably an engineer in me, but I think that being aware that I’m angry for example, is extremely useful for me. And now impulsively acting that out and yelling something, or throwing something, Probably a lot less useful and there might be situations where it’s valuable, but being aware of the fact that something someone has said or done is makes me angry is then like this really useful data. I like to think about it like we’ve got this limbic system or this kind of primitive animal or, or lizard brain that has spent millions of years evolving to respond, um, in the case of mammals, oftentimes to more social interactions. And so the fact that I’m feeling angry when someone has said something, I might not realize that it crossed the line for me if I didn’t realize that I’m feeling something in my body that I, that I associate with anger. It might be like some rising warmth in my chest for example, or some energy that comes down my arms and then that cues me to think, ‘Oh, I’m, they just said something which I think is actually incorrect and about me and that actually makes me feel a little bit angry. Or they misinterpreted something I said.’ Which is then great data for me to say something and stand up for myself or clarify a point, et cetera.

Emily
Yeah. So how do you notice when you’re feeling anxious?

Jeff
I notice that I’m feeling anxious primarily because I’m, I feel a tightness in my chest. I sort of feel physical sensations also, depending on my level of anxiety I think one interesting part of the model from the ISTDP is there’s actually levels of anxiety depending on how aroused our bodies are by that anxiety. So, starts off in your skeletal muscles, so that would be something like uh, you know in your arms and your legs where you actually generally pretty functional. Like the anxiety response actually the fight or flight response. And during that response your brain is basically shutting off cause you’re shunting blood away from non non crucial emergency systems. And so your prefrontal cortex gets basically deprioritized as far as what’s going to keep you alive in an emergency situation. And because of that you start to lose higher functioning. Your prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain that’s a higher level and sort of human thinking abilities. Funny side note, I used to do flying trapeze and the funniest thing to watch is someone new, and this happened to me too and I first time I did it. But when someone new shows up to class, watch them go up for the first time because basically they’ll train you and I actually I highly recommend if you have it anywhere nearby, go do it, go do a flying trapeze class once. Basically what’ll happen is they’ll train you on the ground on a trapeze, it’s got a pad underneath it and they’ll show you what you’re going to do. There’ll be a simple move, and then you’ll walk up this 15 foot ladder, you’ll get it strapped in so you’re just safe and so forth, and you’ll jump off and there’ll be, somebody would be yelling at you from the ground, like knees up, let your hands go, et cetera. And for 98% of the people I watch, they have no idea that anyone is saying anything around them. They’re in completely tunnel vision on ‘don’t let go of the bar, don’t go to the bar,’ which is a very understandable response. And what’s happening there is their fight or flight response is going off. They have no idea of anything that’s going on around them. And so I would liken that to, you know, am I, ‘What level of anxiety am I experiencing?’ And at that point it’s gone beyond just the skeletal muscles. So back to my earlier point, it’s a skeletal muscles, then it goes into your smooth muscles. So that would be things like your heart, your lungs, your stomach. So if you start to get GI problems at work, that’s actually something I noticed anxiety related is my, my stomach will start to hurt or will start to get reflux. That’s actually a higher level of anxiety. Um, symptoms of, of stress in your skeletal muscles that lesser anxiety would be noticing yourself. Sighing a lot. Sighing is actually a way in which your body calms anxiety and what it’s doing is actually, it’s stressing your intercostals that the muscles between your ribs and then relaxing those and it gives you, gives you some stressors relief and you can actually force yourself to do this by taking deep breaths. So we got skeletal muscles, and then the smooth muscle, and then you get into cognitive perceptual disruption, which is actually where you start to get into the flying trapeze thing where you’re, you’re losing perception, you’re losing the ability to cognate clearly and I will notice that occasionally there’s a certain mode my brain goes into when I’m in a high anxiety situation. Let’s say I’m receiving feedback from somebody like very harshly critical feedback from somebody who was a peer. I have had this happen somewhat recently, where it turned out fine, but there was that first five minutes of this conversation where it’s someone, I don’t know super well giving me feedback on something I’ve done. My heart is racing and I’m noticing the gears in my brain are just not clicking quite as fast as they normally would. And that’s some effects of that anxiety. So to answer your question, where do I notice it? It’s going to depend on, I notice myself sighing heavily. I might notice my gut hurts a little bit or I’m getting some reflux. I might notice tension in my chest or I might notice that my head is getting a little foggy. I’m not thinking as clearly.

Emily
So let’s say you are in the middle of a conversation with a peer. They’re giving you some tough feedback and you notice yourself starting to sigh. What do you do in that moment? And I’m going to break that into two parts. What’s your end goal? What are you trying to accomplish? And then how do you go about it?

Jeff
I’ll give you my theoretical, uh, which is I will say not exactly what I’m going to do in every situation because I may or may not be this functional in every situation. But my goal would be to be as aware of anything that’s happening in my body feeling wise as possible because it will inform the conversation while also maintaining enough cognition that I can think and remember it.

Jeff
Because one of the effects of kind of having your prefrontal cortex go offline is that you, you become disorganized, you become distractable, you can’t remember things as well. And so if someone’s giving me hard feedback, I want to be in a calm enough state that I can retain those memories and I can learn from that feedback.

Emily
I know for me in that moment, I tend to answer questions very, very literally, which often creates a defensive or an even almost argumentative dynamic by accident.

Jeff
Interesting.

Emily
I’m so laser-focused on what the person said. I’m missing the context of the point I’m trying to get across or what they’re really trying to ask.

Jeff
Yeah, totally. You asked kind of what what it is that I do in those situations. Well if I’m sighing I’m actually, the anxiety is still in my skeletal muscles, which means I’m actually doing okay.

Jeff
It hasn’t progressed for it. So I will watch though for that to switch over from something I’m able to deal with into the smooth muscle interruptions or possibly the cognitive perceptual interruptions. Some things I do though, so imagine you’re, and this is I used to perform and one of the tricks they tell you is when you’re feeling really anxious about to go on stage, you can tense your muscles, especially your leg muscles cause they’re big muscles and will actually burn off some adrenaline. And by burning off adrenaline you’re going to lower your body’s stress response a little bit. Another thing is you can force yourself to sigh, just take deep breaths. You can also ask for some time if you’re in a hard conversation and you’re noticing that this the one that I referenced that happened to me recently, I actually said that and I said like, ‘Hey, like just so you know, my heart’s going really fast right now. Like give me a little bit of space because I might not be at my best.’ And just saying that kind of at least for me created this a little bit of vulnerability where the situation was now that more about two humans interacting and became a little bit less contentious.

Emily
Yeah. And when you’re noticing you’re reaching that point where it feels much more fight or flight, it feels like maybe your prefrontal cortex isn’t as effective as you’d usually want it to be. How do you handle that?

Jeff
Really depends on the situation. Um, who I’m with, how long we have. What the context is. Uh, the unfortunate thing is once I’ve gotten in that position, it’s really hard for me to get out. Uh, I’m not sure biochemically exactly what’s happening. I, I think I remember reading somewhere that the adrenaline’s half-life is only a couple of minutes, but a couple of minutes can be a very long time when you’re in it, especially if you’re still dumping adrenaline out of your adrenals into your body because you’re still in this situation.

Jeff
So let’s say I’m having a conflict with a peer over something that’s not time-sensitive. Let’s say it’s in a one-on-one. And a one on one situation, I can say like, ‘Hey, like can we pause? Like I want to give you my full attention and right now I’m noticing that I’m a little hazy and that’s not, we’re not going to get as much done as we’d like, so let’s, let’s reschedule.’ Or maybe maybe I might even say like, Hey, let’s change our context. If we go for a walk for walking around that I’m actually burning off energy probably. And also just moving from sitting to walking is going to give us 30 seconds, 60 seconds of kind of downtime. I might change the subject temporarily if it’s in a meeting though, it’s going to be a little bit more challenging. So I can’t completely change the context most likely, even if I’m leading the meeting cause it, well, I check my assumption there.

Jeff
I would assume that it’s going to be weird for everybody else. However, I would say as humans we’re really good at reading other people’s emotions. So if, especially if someone in the room, like the manager or the leader in the room is experiencing something, people are already aware of it and so making allowances for it is not going to be as weird as it might seem in my head. So let’s see. I’m trying to think of some good cues. One might be just being quiet for a little bit, recognizing that if there’s other things happening in the meeting that I’m a little worked up and it’s okay to let that go by. I was in a promotion committee meeting where I was advocating for someone on my team to get promoted and I noticed I was feeling angry at the time and the danger there are one of the dangers there that I worry about anyways is that that anger flips over into a defense.

So like I’m not in control and aware of the anger I’m actually going, it can get hijacked by anxiety, then I’m going to act impulsively and impulsively might be saying something obnoxious. And so instead what I tried to do that as recognizing that I was angry, I was feeling the sensations in my body and I just said, ‘Hey, I’m feeling a little angry right now. You know, can I just express an opinion right now?’ And the opinion I needed to express was that I didn’t feel like this person was being fairly evaluated for a couple of different reasons. And after I said that the meeting continued, it was okay. I though was a little worried about it. So I checked in with my boss afterwards and this is a pro move on his part because I basically said, ‘Hey, I felt like I was maybe a little, that was a little weird that I expressed that I was feeling angry’ and his response was, ‘Look, you’re however you’re feeling is totally warranted at work.’

And I thought you expressed yourself very well. And that was a very good moment for him from my perspective where I was like, wow, this is somebody I want to work for. So I continued to strive to reward people for expressing emotions at work and especially when they do it in a healthy way.

Emily
Why is that something you want to reward? Why is your manager saying that make them someone you want to work for?

Jeff
I find it valuable one cause like I personally find a lot of value in feeling emotions and feeling comfortable. I think, you know, there’s been a lot of research on the value of psychological safety and workplaces. I have this theory that humans respond really well to hearing how other people’s emotions go and we actually intuitively adjust our behavior. So if I’m in a meeting and someone says, either in the meeting or maybe after the meeting and a feedback session like, ‘Hey, when you said this thing, I felt a little attacked, would it be possible to work things a little bit differently?’

I am, you know, very unlikely to be like absolutely not. You just need to deal with it. I’m probably going to be like, Oh, this person’s important to me. I really valued that. They’ve expressed this emotion of being frustrated with me. Uh, I’m happy to change my behavior. And so the failure mode then, if people aren’t expressing that is that they’re silently frustrated or they’re silently anxious. And as we talked about earlier about anxiety is like if you’re going to potentially end up in the situation where your thoughts are, you’re, you’re inattentive, you’re disorganized, you’re impulsive, you’re hyperactive and you’re not functioning well. And if we’re leading, you know, knowledge workers or programmers, especially, the ability to construct complex thoughts is key. If, if someone’s feeling uncomfortable in a meeting, the likelihood that they’re going to go right back to the desk and jump into code is almost zero.

They’re likely going to have some hangover from that anxiety. And so kind of given my model before, if suppressed feelings lead to anxiety, lead to defenses, you’re not going to get optimal team behavior. You’re also likely not going to ever gel and like norm as a team because you’re not getting that opportunity to face to face. Like adjust your interface to their interface cause they’re not saying where, where that misalignment’s happening. So you’re basically, you know, sending pings off into the ether and not getting any response back. You don’t know if that’s because the server’s gone away or because your networking is faulty or what, you don’t know what’s going on there.

Emily
Right. So what are your tips for listeners for using anxiety to be an even better manager and even better leader?

Jeff
Yeah, so advice for me, anxiety, understanding that that triangle model of the feelings, anxieties, and defense. You can spot anxiety and know there’s a feeling. And unless you’re like, again, if I’m seeing anxiety symptoms, I’m either experiencing fear or anxiety. They’re kind of similar. But unless I’m like in the woods and there’s a mountain lion, it’s probably not actual legitimate fear. It’s probably social fear or, or anxiety that, and typically I’d say 99% of the time it’s just kind of straight up anxiety for me, and it’s because there’s an emotion. For me, it’s oftentimes anger, and this is not rational thinking. That’s, that’s actually one challenge I had in my, my life is as a rational thinker, I would oftentimes say, or notice I’m, ‘Hey, I’m feeling anxious. Oh, I’m feeling kind of angry actually.’ Oh. But I don’t really have a good reason to be angry, so I shouldn’t be angry. And what, that’s actually a defense that I’ve developed that’s sort of minimizing of a feeling.

This actually blocks my ability to feel the feeling. So try not to do that. Um, also this stuff’s taken me years to try to get better at. And so like, you know, having better mental models I think helps address it. But having someone who’s skilled and can kind of work through it with you is also probably much more helpful. Um, okay. So from noticing anxiety, I’m noticing a feeling I will sometimes have to call myself down. Like I might have to withdraw, go meditate and be like, what’s the feeling? What’s coming up here? I will try to actually sort of dredge up whatever feeling it is that, you know, might sit on my meditation cushion or my couch and just try to feel it in my body. If I do start to notice like, Oh, there’s some anger there. Like what’s I feel like, what was the anger about?

If I were some kind of gorilla, what would that anger do? Like what would it come out and do it? And by kind of releasing that energy, oftentimes my dissipates it more quickly. Not say I’m immediately better and I’m, my anxiety is gone. It’s the anxiety will decrease some. And so one trick I will use is to say, ‘Where am I adding anxiety wise? Okay, I’m at like a seven out of 10 that’s pretty high.’ I’ll go try to take some time or I’ll do some breathing or I’ll do the thing I mentioned about clenching my muscles and then relaxing them and I’ll say, okay, where am I at? Okay, I’m down to five out of 10. Okay, that’s better. That’s great. And in doing so by actually just drawing attention to our bodies, we oftentimes can reduce some of that anxiety build up. Um, I’m curious like what do you find works well for anxiety?

Emily
Breathing is the big one for me. Anxiety for me feels like I’m clenching my chest really tight in words. You know when you’re just on that edge of cold where you’re about to start shivering and you don’t realize you’re cold, you just realize you’re, you realize later that you’re clenching all of your chest muscles. That’s what anxiety feels like for me.

Jeff
Yeah. I have got a similar tension in my chest. It feels, it feels kind of like I’m caving forward like my shoulders are hunching, which is interesting to me. One of the things I will do is actually just visualize like, okay, what if I were a wild animal? Like what would it look like? And oftentimes it’s much more broad shouldered upright and you’ll notice that’s the opposite of a feeling of anxiety. And so just doing that quick visualization, I’ll be like, Oh yeah, I am okay.

Emily
I actually do something really similar, which is I stop and I change my posture and my chair and I open my chest and they’ll put my arms on the armrest and really keep my shoulders open and my chest upright, and that helps a ton. I also find, okay, I will say I tried for years to meditate with the like picture of the leaves floating down the stream and let your thoughts go, thoughts go away from you. I just couldn’t do it. I get excited about something I was thinking and then I’d remember and then I’d beat myself up. Like I could kind of get it. In the last maybe year, I feel like I finally settled into a much different version of the same idea, which is just telling myself nothing’s gone wrong here. Like, Oh, this is what anxiety feels like. That’s interesting. It came from a thought in my head, it’ll be here for 90 seconds.

And then just I stop investing extra energy into that, that resisting.

Jeff
Yeah. Yeah.

Emily
And it does. It just blows through the way I think it will.

Jeff
Yeah. I mean that’s actually another really interesting point. I think this kind of ties into something you said earlier about thoughts generating emotions is another way that we generate anxiety in ourselves is by not having a third party come in. But actually having this therapy refers to is like the punitive super ego but it kind of the more reasonable way to say it as like these voices that we have learned from various figures in our past that we’re then voicing and so that could be, ‘Hey like you did a shitty job there,’ and be like someone at some point said something similar to you and you’ve interned that but now we are taking on the role of punishing ourselves essentially, which generates a lot of anxiety. There’s actually a great book, it’s called “A Positive Intelligence” that talks a lot about this. He’s kind of goes through like what are the categories of ways in which we judge ourselves? What are some things you can do to interrupt that? And I read this with like an all male book group, some like probably six or seven years ago and I was expecting that when you come back and be like, what the hell is this weird shit cause there’s not a touchy feely group. It was a bunch of entrepreneurs and they came back and are like, wow, this book was pretty amazing.

Emily
It sounded just like the voice in my head.

Jeff
Yeah. So yeah, I think that’s an interesting thing to try to recognize. Like if I can spot that happening and me generating anxiety myself by, by self criticizing or self attacking, um, I can often I’m stop that. Um, I’m just aware that I’m feeling angry and then I can go do something about that and then doing something about it. I’m essentially establishing a new defense, a new habit. But that habit is something that I’ve chosen. I’ve created this, this gap. One analogy I like for this is, you know, as we grow up, we’re basically, we’re, if we’re artists, you’ve got this palette of colors and we learned from our parents or close family members or a childhood what colors we have available.

And so if all you ever learn is a set of five defenses, you’ve got five colors to choose from, and you can paint certain things really well with those five colors, but you’re going to be limited. And so by creating this space, by creating a little bit more of a, an awareness of what’s going on internally, I might realize, ‘Oh, I’m angry.’ Rather than immediately going to use the red, I might say, ‘Okay, I’m angry.’ What’s available to me is choices that I could make in this situation? What might so-and-so do in this situation? Or there’s lots of different ways to develop this skill and I would say I’m very much still developing it. It’s, you know, as I, as you break one earlier habit in this chain, you’re suddenly confronted with this new and unknown world where you’re like, ‘Okay, I’m aware, I’m angry.’ Oh, what do I do with that new and novel information? Well, the first couple times I tried something new with that, I definitely screwed it up a few times. But I’ve learned from those times and now I think my palette of colors a little bit wider than it was say 10 years ago.

Emily
That’s the idea of range is one of my favorite ones for people. I coach people I lead. There’s generally nothing wrong with what you’re doing right now. It’s just not getting you what you want. So you need to develop a couple other options and you need to develop a sense of which one to use when and you need to develop the ability to put in that wedge in that pause and choose which one.

Jeff
Yeah.

Emily
And eventually you’ll switch which one’s habitual, but you’ll have to, practice.

Jeff
Yeah, totally. And part of I said earlier, I don’t like the word defenses because it implies something negative. And in reality it’s just what’s our habitual response, you know, if my habitual response becomes problematic, becomes no longer suited to the situation in which I’m using it in, you know, something that maybe worked in childhood with my set of parents that doesn’t work in the workplace is now, needs to be readdressed needs to be reconsidered. Assuming I want to get something different out of life that I’m getting currently.

Emily
Yes. In my head, I have this analogy, we have all these slots for equipment and we have different pieces, different default thoughts is what I call those equipped into them right now. And some of those default thoughts get us exactly the outcome we want, and some don’t, and we get to choose when we want to replace it. It just takes work to replace it. And so we have to be willing to make the investment to retrain our brain.

Jeff
Yeah, totally. And I would kind of back to the point of anxiety. I would say anxiety because it’s, it shuts down our, our cognitive abilities, sometimes. Dealing with anxiety and learning how to regulate and recognize anxiety in yourself means you can open up more options for yourself. If you can prevent going into that cognitive perceptual disruption or the smooth muscle anxiety, you can avoid getting stuck with habitual behaviors because when you have more cognitive ability, you have more ability to choose different paths than you would have otherwise.

Emily
Exactly. Oh, thank you so much. This was so much fun.

Jeff
Yeah, absolutely. I love talking about this stuff. Thanks for all the thoughtful questions.

End Guest Segment

Emily
Thanks again to Jeff. That was so much fun. There’s actually even more to the conversation than I could fit in today’s episode. So watch out for a bonus episode with our tips on how to approach your employees’ emotions. And now look every episode, I’ve got a new tool to teach you so you can keep expanding your emotional health. I chose anxiety for this week’s emotion because I think it’s so relevant to the tool. We’re going to learn — Allowing Emotions. This practice is so, so, so important because allowing our emotions is the fundamental tool that lets us stop running away from them and start working with them. It’s also the fundamental tool in the process of choosing new thoughts so we can experience different emotions and results than the ones we’re creating right now. And we’re going to talk so much more about that over the next few episodes. I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, there are four ways we can respond to experiencing an emotion. The first thing we can do is react to an emotion. Reacting means we act out. Toddlers basically always choose this option. You know what I mean? You can always tell exactly what they’re feeling because they’re doing it full out in every moment. Adults react more rarely, but we still do it sometimes and one of the reasons I love using anger as an example for this tool is that it is one of the emotions we sometimes see adults react to most frequently. When you throw a plate at the wall that’s reacting. When you put your face next to someone else’s and scream at them, that’s reacting. I want you to quickly list to yourself one to two emotions that you tend to react to.

The second way we can respond to an emotion is to resist it. When we’re resisting an emotion, we try to shove it away from us. The problem is it takes a huge amount of our energy just to continuously push it away. Think about trying to hold a beach ball underwater. It only works for as long as you’re paying really close attention, right? And then when you get distracted and look away, the ball shoots up into the air and causes a much bigger mess than if you just let it float along on the surface of the water. When we spend a lot of time thinking about how anger is a bad emotion and we shouldn’t have to feel it and we wouldn’t have to feel it if only our boss would just do the right thing. We’re resisting anger. Now I want you to think about two to three emotions you tend to resist.

The third way we can respond to an emotion is to avoid it. This is different from resisting. Resisting we’re actively pushing away avoiding. It means we’re distracting ourselves, so when we resist, we put all of our energy into the emotion. Even though we want it to go away, we’re still funneling all of our energy straight into it, right? When we’re avoiding it, we’re trying to funnel our energy into anything but this emotion, but we’re still letting it define us, right? It means we’re distracting ourselves from the emotion trying to ignore it. Folks who feel angry at work often start to check out of their job overall. When we avoid anger, we drop the ball on projects that we feel angry about. We’re opting to work on things that are less emotionally charged or we finish half a box of thin mints because the chocolate and cookies are a great distraction from the other feelings in our body that are really unwelcome. So what are two to three emotions you tend to avoid?

What are your favorite ways for avoiding each of those emotions? These are the three responses that aren’t particularly healthy. So what is that fourth response that’s actually useful and healthy? It’s called allowing an emotion. So, in order to understand it a little better, let’s actually step back and talk about what is an emotion. The way I like to define it, is an emotion is just the way our body is currently arranging the muscles and the chemicals that are part of it, right now. This may make a ton of sense when I say it, it may make no sense whatsoever. So let’s try it out. Summon into your body the feeling of anger. We’re going to do this by thinking about something that makes you really angry. Notice how you probably started to tense up, right? The muscles in your chest and your back got really tight. Maybe you made a face, maybe you hunch your shoulders in and down, or maybe you got really big and kind of out in the face of the world over this thing, right? And you could probably start to feel your heart pick up a little bit and your breathing shifted. That’s your body arranging the muscles and chemicals that make it up in the feeling of anger. Now I want you to imagine the person you love most in the world and just bask in that love for them for a moment.

There’s a really different feeling in your body, right? So, what I want you to remember is that all feelings are just vibrations in your body. They’re just arrangements of muscles and chemicals. The other thing I want you to remember is that they are all totally harmless. Did you notice how you could feel love in your body for a few seconds and you were totally safe and fine? And how you could feel anger in your body, for a few seconds, and you were actually still totally safe and fine. You probably didn’t enjoy it as much as feeling love, but there wasn’t actually anything going wrong. So want you to remember that there’s never anything wrong with any emotion. Every emotion is harmless. It’s just what? An arrangement of muscles and chemicals in our body. So last week we practiced awareness of our emotions by writing down a list once a day of all the emotions we’d noticed feeling in the previous 24 hours. This week, I want you to practice allowing your emotions.

There are three steps. First, I want you to pull out your phone right now. You’re going to notice a theme and how we do these exercises when you’re to pull out your phone right now and set up alarms for two different times of day, everyday. So choose two times a day and set up an alarm that goes off every day at that time for each of those two times. Go ahead and pause the episode and do that right now. If you’re like me, you will have the best intentions of doing it later and then forget. So we’re just going to cut that issue off at the head. Back Great. Now that you’ve got alarms scheduled at two times during each day, you are probably wondering what you were going to do when the alarm goes off. That is a very reasonable question. When the alarm goes off, you’re going to ask yourself what emotion you’re feeling, right then. We’re taking the skill of awareness and bringing it into the moment. Let’s give it a try right now. What emotion are you feeling in this exact moment right now, listening to the podcast?

Was that easy to name? Hard? How did you decide what emotion you were feeling? Hopefully you checked in with your body, right? What your muscles and chemicals were indicating, and now for the last step. Now that you know what emotion you’re feeling, you’re going to allow it. Now when your alarm goes off, you’re going to ask yourself what emotion you’re feeling, and then you’re going to pause quietly for 45 seconds and notice how this emotion shows up in each part of your body. What’s tense? What’s relaxed? What’s happening in your fingers? What’s happening in your hips? What’s happening in your toes? What your posture is like? What your breathing and heart rate, or like if you like, you can use the words. This is followed by the name of the emotion. So this is fear. This is joy. This is anger. This is excitement. There’s several great ways to allow an emotion when you’re having trouble just sitting with it, describing it to emotion, the now feeling exercise and more.

I don’t have time to share them all with you on this episode, so I put them together for you in a PDF. It’s linked from the show notes or you can get it in your email really easily right now from your phone. Just text the word allowing, right? A,L ,L , O, W, I,N , G to 4422. It’ll text you back and ask for your email address. You type that in and then we’ll send that PDF to your email right away.

Have an amazing week. Make sure that you’re taking the time to be aware of the emotions that you’re feeling throughout the day. Checking in with yourself and asking what’s happening in your body. And I can’t wait to see you next week.

If you loved this episode and want to dive deeper into improving your own emotional health so you can feel better and have bigger results at work, you have to join me for a one on one call. We’ll talk about where you are, where you want to be, and create a solid plan to get from here to there. Just visit go.exceptional.vision/call – See you there!