How To Master Your Emotions And Build MASSIVE Resilience | Ed Mylett

So, hey, guys, listen, we're all trying to get more productive. And the question is, how do you find a way to get an edge? I'm a big believer that if you're getting mentoring or you're in an environment that causes growth, a growth-based environment, that you're much more likely to grow and you're going to grow faster. And that's why I love growth day.

Growth Day is an app that my friend Brendan Bouchard has created that I'm a big fan of. Write this down, growthday.com forward slash ed. So if you want to be more productive, by the way, he's asked me, I post videos in there every single Monday that gets your day off to the right start. He's got about $5,000, $10,000 worth of courses that are in there that come with the app. Also, some of the top influencers in the world are all posting content in there on a regular basis, like having the Avengers of personal development and business in one app. And I'm honored that he asked me to be a part of it as well and contribute on a weekly basis, and I do.

So go over there and get signed up. You're going to get a free tuition-free voucher to go to an event with Brendan and myself and a bunch of other influencers as well. So you get a free event out of it also. So go to growthday.com forward slash ed. That's growthday.com forward slash ed.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to my weekend special. I hope you enjoy the show. Be sure to follow the Ed My Let Show on Apple and Spotify. Links are in the show notes. You'll never miss an episode that way. We're going to talk about extending grace and kindness to people, but actually doing it during difficult times, during stressful situations and why it matters that you do it.

And I'm going to tell you two stories from my life that both happened very recently that I thought, I have to teach this lesson today because it taught me one. And so the first one happened, I did a post about this a few weeks ago and it went pretty viral. So I'm driving down the road and I don't know if you ever had this happen, but just someone's messing with you next to you, right? And this person was trying to agitate me and they'd cut me off and then, you know, then they went around me and were behind me and kind of riding my bumper and then they were yelling, then they wanted to race me. And I'm like, come on, man.

I'm not that dude, I'm a grown man. I'm not going to erase you, right? But they were trying to agitate me and they didn't. I didn't get upset. I thought, what a huge win. Like I kept my emotions the way I wanted them. I stayed emotionally under control. I stayed poised when me maybe five years ago, certainly 10 or 15 years ago, you know how you'd be, you start yelling back at them, you get agitated, you get anxious, you get angry. And I was allowing outside stimulus to affect my internal emotions.

And so I thought, what a gigantic win. Like, this was awesome. I wasn't upset. I waved at him. I smiled. And you know what else I found out? When someone's trying to get under your skin, trying to get you negative, trying to get you angry, trying to get you distracted, right? Trying to get you to perform in a way that's not reflective of your real character, right?

When you don't give into that, man, it frustrates them. It was such a bonus for me to see this person getting more and more frustrated that I was living with equanimity. In my book, The Power of One More, I have a whole chapter on equanimity, which basically means, my version of it is peace under duress, finding peace in a stressful situation and circumstance, and being able to live in that state, a state of equanimity.

And I did. And I was very proud of myself because it's easy to do that when you're in a park or by a lake or on your boat or wherever, right, in a peaceful place, taking a walk with a dear friend, the simple things in life. But it's not so easy sometimes to do it when there's stress, when emotions get raised, when someone's intentionally trying to do harm to you. It was a better win than making a bunch of money by winning an award by how well this podcast does. I felt so great that I won because

Winning in life is an emotional game. The quality of your life is the quality of your emotions. You don't want a bunch of money. You want how you think a bunch of money is going to make you feel if that's what you want. You don't even necessarily want a relationship. You want how you think that relationship will make you feel. You want to be super fit and jacked.

you want how you think you will feel if you're super fit and jacked. So we're all trying to find as an emotion as a feeling. And what I find is you don't have to chase them. They're within you right now. And only it only happens when you surrender that emotion to the outside circumstance that you lose or to a person. You're going to have someone you may even right now who's antagonistic towards you or is hating on you or just they cut you off on the road or they're at work and you're competing with them for a job and they're trying to undercut you, whatever it might be, right?

Or is someone's rude to you in a restaurant, right? Or dismissive to you. It's very easy to allow what that outside stimulus does to infect your internal emotional thermostat level. And every time you stay in control of your emotions, you win. And that's a muscle you build. And I've found that it's pretty difficult now to get me to change my emotions based on your behavior. It's hard to get me to change my emotions based on the conditions around me.

Yet I lived probably 50 years of my life where the conditions dictated my emotions. The treatment somebody gave me dictated my emotions, right? The circumstances around me dictated my emotions. The results dictated my emotions. And so you're probably nodding with me right now that you have a tendency to do that. And every time you don't and you stay in control and you stay kind, you stay graceful, you stay in a state of equanimity.

and peace. What ends up happening is you win and you build a muscle that becomes stronger and stronger and stronger. And that's what resilience is. That's what it is. That's what building something great in your life is all about is doing it over and over and over again and developing the pattern

of building the emotions we want. Really, we learn these negative emotional patterns as children, don't we? When something doesn't go our way, we start screaming and crying, right? Or we fall down and, you know, we get really upset or someone does something to us at school and we come home very set. So we start these patterns very young in our life and we never undo them. And we all have what I call like an emotional home.

And what that means is that in your life, you know, no matter what the circumstances are, most people have a pattern of emotions they're going to get back. So for some people that pattern is, you know, they find every single day of their life, they find a way back to grace and peace and bliss and ecstasy and joy and passion.

For other people, though, no matter what the circumstances are, they find a way to get their anger, to get their anxiety, to get their worry, to get their fear. I remember, I'll tell you a quick story. Many, many years ago, I was blessed that I was doing very well financially, finally, in my life, and I was building my first dream home.

And the contractor had messed something up that day and I had appointment cancel and another client of mine changed their mind. And then I, the house was under construction. I walked in, I was mad at the contractor. I walked in there angry and stressed and you know, and I looked and there were a group of gentlemen who were working on my kitchen. They were all carpenters. They all happened to be from Mexico.

And I watched them, and I'm standing in my mansion, okay, that was being built. Angry and frustrated and frankly scared. Anger is usually the other side of the coin is fear. Scared. All the emotions I didn't want, I'm experiencing my body. That was my life experience at that moment. Who cared that I had money or a mansion or those things? Because it wasn't giving me those emotions then that I thought it was going to give me. And I was watching these men in my kitchen.

And all of them, they had their mariachi music on. Most of these men were not making a lot of money, by the way. They had left their families in Mexico, and most of them were working here to send money back home to their family. I later got to know many of them pretty well, because they were there for a long time, and I befriended most of them. But as I watched them,

they were singing and dancing and enjoying their time and laughing and cracking jokes with another, meanwhile doing work that they were great at that was meaningful, that was beautiful. And in that moment, if you said, who's winning the game of life, the guy with the mansion or the men who were building it for him?

And in that moment, they were winning the life game because they were doing work that mattered to them, that they were passionate about. They were laughing. They were joyous. They were in a blissful state. They had a state of equanimity and joy and passion and focus about what they were doing. And meanwhile, the rich guy with the mansion over there, he was in a state of anger and fear and frustration and worry and angst. So if the quality of our emotions are the quality of our life, I remember clearly in that moment watching these men, there were six of them,

in this kitchen that was being built thinking.

They're winning the game of life right now. I'm losing it. Yet the outside world would probably say the guy with the mansions winning. That's not winning. Winning is, are you in control of the emotions that you want? And somehow we get our emotional home. Do you ask yourself, what's your emotional home currently? Like over the last six months, what's the primary emotion you feel every day? Is it fear? Is it frustration? Is it anger? Is it worry? Is it depression? Is it frustration? Is it just sort of blah?

Or are you getting a whole bunch of peace and a whole bunch of bliss and a whole bunch of happiness and joy and ecstasy or not? Are you doing work that means something to you and you feel a sense of contribution from it and growth from it? Or do you not? And so for me, I had to evaluate that. And so between the ride in the car that I had that day and that man in the mansion, I've grown a lot. And so I improved today that you can do it because it's a pattern that you built. And then the other thing is,

For me, the pathway to feeling these emotions is my ability to extend grace and kindness to other human beings. We're in a world today where we're so divided and at each other's throats, it seems, and we all believe we're separate. There's separate people.

You're this, I'm that. You believe that. I believe this. You're from there. I'm from here. All these different things in life, the different religious conflicts that we have, the wars that we're in, but even just the day-to-day way we treat one another, there's not enough kindness. And so my call to you today, my plea to you today is to begin to live a life where even more, even if you're doing it, to extend more grace and kindness to people in your everyday life. And then the measure of it also is, can you do it when they don't extend it to you?

See that guy in the car that day wasn't extending me any of those things, but I extended grace and kindness back to him. See, it's easy to be kind and gentle and beautiful with people when they're doing that for you. But what happens when they're not? Because that tells us who you really are, doesn't it? It tells me who I really am. Can I extend kindness and grace to you when you're not behaving in a way that's worthy of it? When you're antagonistic towards me, you know,

I mean, a little bit of a business thing right now where there's some strife in one of my businesses and everyone's being so horrible to one another. And it's my ability to not reciprocate, not reduce myself to that level and extend them grace. I don't know what they're going through. I don't know what problems they have. Give them kindness and grace when really they're not even earning it right now.

but I'm worth giving it to them because it makes me feel better about me when I give somebody that grace. I'll give you an example, last story. Several weeks ago, I was out to dinner with my family. It was a pretty nice restaurant, not crazy nice, but pretty nice. And there was a family at the table right next to us. And right when we walked in, I could hear this family in the lobby.

And the kids were real rowdy. You can picture it. You've been somewhere like this, not just a little rowdy. I'm talking about like screaming and yelling and, you know, running around the table during the meal. It was a decent restaurant, right? It was distracting to other people in the restaurant. And I remember we sat next to them. You can imagine probably like, oh man, I just wanted to have a nice beautiful meal with my family. And now I'm going to deal with this all night. And I did deal with it. They were

these kids were misbehaving pretty heavy. And you know, there's that part of you when you look at the parents, you're like, discipline your kids. I start judging them. I would never let my kids act out like that. Have your kids sit down, tell them to be quiet, have them put the napkin on their lap. Like, you know, they're yelling at each other. This is a restaurant. There's decorum here. There's manners. And so I found myself not only tending towards frustration with the noise level and the kids, but also judging the parents.

judgment and frustration. And I'm not kidding you because I know I do this for a living. I went, are these the emotions I want to experience during this meal? Is this what I'm going to do at dinner? I get this two hour dinner too. So I'm going to choose to be judgmental, angry, frustrated and totally distracted with their table instead of present with these people that I love. Can I in this moment find a way to extend grace and kindness to that family?

And I did, I made this shift, which surprised my own family, frankly, I think. And I was totally present with my family and laughing and blissful as this chaos was going on. Now that's a test for your emotional makeup, right? And so they ended up leaving about three quarters of the way through our meal. And I remember literally going, I could see other people in the restaurant like, ah, they're gone. And I had a lot of judgment that I could have had.

Anyway, a few days later, something incredible happened. I was at the golf course, and I was hitting some balls on the driving range. And the man next to me, I looked up and it was the server from two nights before at the restaurant. And he walks over and says, Mr. Millet, thank you for such a great experience. She made me feel so good about myself. I'm sorry for the noise level at that table over there. And I go, yeah, it was. And he says, yeah, they came back from the funeral of their grandmother.

And I went, what? Yeah, they had just returned from the grandchildren. Their grandmother passed away. And so they had come back from the funeral to have dinner. And the kids were pretty wound up. And the wife was very, very sad. It was her mom and the son and the wife had met when they were young. So she was like his mother, too. And I went, oh, wow.

And I went, hmm, the old me, I would have judged that family. I would have spent my entire meal obsessed with their inability to parent their kids in the noise now crazy it was. Yet I was so grateful. And by the way, I've made this mistake a hundred times. I'm just telling you the one time I've done it. I did extend grace to them and kindness because you never know what someone's going through. You never know what battle someone's fighting. You never know what burden they're carrying.

You don't know what someone had just recently done to them. You don't know what they're acting out of. You don't know what pain they're acting out of or stress they're acting out of or loss in this case they're acting out of.

And so remember that when you go to judge, remember that when you go to react, that you don't know what that person's carrying. And your ability to be a superhuman has nothing to do with your ability to lift a bunch of weights or build muscles or make millions and millions of dollars. Superhuman is a person who treats other humans in a superhuman way.

even when they don't appear to be worthy of it or deserve it. That's when you've done something superhuman in your life. So I wanted to challenge you today to really reflect on where can you be more kind. What would our world look like if everybody just took a moment and gave their other fellow human beings, their brothers and sisters, just a little bit more grace, a little bit more understanding, a little bit more kindness,

and went out of their way to express that to somebody. And what you're gonna find is that when you give someone that gift, you're giving it to you because now your emotional home becomes equanimity. It becomes peaceful. It becomes blissful. So that I'm saying to you is the way I control my internal environment, ironically, is the way that I treat people in my external environment. Not the external environment dictating it to me. I dictate it to the external environment.

And so I just ask you, maybe the next time you walk by a stranger, just say a quick prayer for them. Peace be with you. I wish you well. I wish you wealth. I wish you health. Just quiet prayers for people, quiet thoughts, quiet kindness, quiet gift of grace. And I think our world will be a whole lot better, but your internal world will be better.

This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. You know, this month is all about gratitude, and along with everyone we're thankful for, there's another person we usually don't think enough, and that's ourselves. We just get lost in the shuffle, don't we, so many times. Sometimes it's hard to remind ourselves that we're trying our best to make sense of everything, and in this crazy world that is not always easy, and BetterHelp can help you with that.

Therapy can remind us to slow down and just take some stock of how things are going in our life, how far we've come. Maybe it's some trauma we need to work from our past. Maybe it's just getting clarity and focus on where we want to go. But therapy's helpful for, you know, all kinds of things, learning positive coping skills, setting boundaries. I think it just empowers you to be the best you. Better helps great because it's done entirely online. It's designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. All you got to do is fill out a brief questionnaire.

You get matched with a licensed therapist. If you don't click, you can switch it anytime you want. Let the gratitude flow with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash Ed Show today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash Ed Show. This show is sponsored by Delete Me. So listen, I've had my identity stolen multiple different times in some crazy situations, crazy situations.

So if you've ever had someone you know or you've been a victim of identity theft, been harassed, stalked, docked, listen, it is a really scary thing when someone is pretending to be you and it's not something that's very pleasant and you can't always control whether or not you're a target. But you can make it harder for threat actors to escalate threats by taking a proactive approach to the security of your personal information.

Let me just tell you something. As a public person, especially somebody who's, you know, their opinions are out there online. I'm hyper aware of safety and security. I wish I would have been sooner.

apply.

Hello and welcome back to Franklin Covey's On Leadership Podcast series, the world's largest weekly podcast dedicated to the topic of leadership. I'm Scott Miller, your host and interviewer each week. I do not say this by all the guests because it's not true. He is my favorite interview in our first 200 plus episodes. Ed, my lead. Welcome back to On Leadership.

Brother, that's a pretty big introduction right there to live up to, so thank you so much. Whenever I interview someone, I always read their book, I do my best to read it cover to cover, I research them, I watch other interviews, listen to interviews that others have asked to make sure that this one is unique. However, I watch the entire hour and 40 minute interview that Jamie Kern Lima, she wrote a book called Believe It, fabulously successful entrepreneur in her own right when she interviewed you.

And she teed up a story that I think is so remarkable. I'm going to have you repeated on this podcast. And it really was this idea about being seen. It's about how each of us as leaders, as parents, as friends, as entrepreneurs, we have the power to help other believe in themselves and be seen. You should have a story I think about maybe. Was it your first grade teacher?

Would you take a few moments and just recap this story because I've thought about it multiple times since I listened to your interview with Jamie Kurnley, but I think it's worth repeating on our podcast. It's a hard story for me, really, you're going right to it. So yes, my first great teacher was Mrs. Smith. And most things in leadership are caught not taught. You catch it.

And I caught something this day from this beautiful soul. Mrs. Smith knew that I came from a broken family. And she knew that I was being teased at school. I was Eddie Spaghetti. I would get bullied at school. She could see the stress on me every morning. And I didn't know this in first grade, but now I was a grown man looking back. I know. And she knew I had no self-esteem. She knew that I didn't think I was very smart. I didn't think I had any valuable. I was invisible.

When you come from a family like that, brother, every morning you walk out of your home, you're ashamed. Why don't my friends not want to come over because my dad's yelling all the time? Why can't I come from whatever I thought was a normal family? And so I would carry that every day in school when I was this little boy that was just sad.

and had no self-belief whatsoever. I felt completely invisible and worthless. And she set up this scenario, bro, where we had to take tests for the state. And she set this all up. I didn't know it. And she had this other teacher come in the room. It was actually the vice principal come in the room and say, Mr. Smith, I need your smartest student. I need the brightest person you have in here because this student's going to represent this whole class as the leader and take these tests for us.

And I need you to pick them. And I didn't know this, but she had set all that up. And she goes, oh, well, that's Little Eddy. And I looked up and I went, me? And she goes, and she kind of moused it. It's Little Eddy. And all of a sudden, for the first time in my life, man, someone saw me. Someone told me I was special.

someone said something great about me and that little boy got up me and I walked to the back of that class and I think I was walking on clouds and it changed my life because it was the first time ever that someone said I see you, you matter, you're special, you're important. What she was really saying is I love you, I care about you, I believe in you and it changed my life and to this day I owe so much of my life to Mrs. Smith because

So many people are going through this world right now, not feeling seen, feeling invisible, feeling worthless, feeling like I'm just average or below average. Who cares? And she changed my life in that moment. I am almost incapable of telling that story without crying because

My whole life, no one ever made me feel that way. And I remember that day thinking, I would love to think, sorry, I get choked up. No, I would love to make other people feel the way she's making me feel right now. And it changed my life because after that day, I thought, well, maybe I'm not stupid. Maybe I do have value. I didn't believe it all the time. But all of a sudden, I said, maybe.

and have opened my life up to the possibility that maybe I could do something great in my life, maybe I was special, maybe I had value. Without that day and without Mrs. Smith, I am not talking to you right now for sure. And I think most people undervalue their ability to impact another human being's life.

They don't understand that one decision, one gesture, one thought, one emotion can change another person's life. And Mrs. Smith definitely did that. And that's why I'm sitting here. She is one of those people in my life for sure and probably the main person.

Ed, your vulnerability is a gift you're given to all of us. When I read this passage and heard the story on your interview with Jamie Kern Lima, I thought about the first time my father told me he was proud of me. I was 32 years old. I was at the Minneapolis airport. I was boarding a plane from the funeral of his mother, my grandmother. My father put his arm on my shoulder as I was getting in a cab. And he said, son, I'm proud of you. I was 32.

Unlike you, I did not come from a broken home. I came from a very stable middle-class environment, but I think my father's dad died when he was 10 didn't have a role model there. My mom's parents were alcoholics, and so they didn't know how to parent.

But as I look, as I listen to your story and I hear you talk about this, all of us as leaders, whether we're formal or informal leaders and companies, we also have the power to help people be seen, not artificially, but to validate in them their worth.

You're a leader of a large company. You've hired and trained and onboarded and terminated thousands of people in your career. Many companies you own. Speak to the thousands of people who are listening and watching. Millions that are in fact leaders of people, whether they are parents or formal leaders. What are some things they can do today to make sure those in their purview feel seen?

seriously get to know their gifts. So each human being comes with them a set of giftedness that they know to be true about themselves by the way. There's two or three or four of them. It could be their kindness, their intellect, their humor, their beauty, their resiliency, you know, their vision. There's all kinds of gifts, their patience.

And these, if you end up pointing out those gifts to somebody in their life, and you say, look, I see you, by the way, it's one thing, go, you're gonna do great, you're awesome, you're incredible, that's just, that's just floats by somebody. But if you say, you're gonna do incredible because, and then you tell me something about me that I know to be true, you know why Ed, you know why you're gonna be incredible here? Not because you're the smartest guy in the world, even though you're a bright guy, because you love your family so much, man, you will fight for your family, you will do anything for your family, and I'll go, whoa.

That is true about me. Or you know why you're going to do very well here, Lisa? Because you care so deeply. You've got this heart to serve people. Your intentions are so good. That's why. So it's when you link what you'd like them to do to the gift they have that they already believe to be true about them. Now you got it. Now you're leading. Now you're changing them. By the way, you will be on this many. I'm showing one hand up. You will be one of one to five people in their entire life that made them feel this way.

You're 32 years old, and how much that stood out from your dad. And if I said to you, who were the two or three people in your life, Scott, that have really believed in you? There's not 30.

If you're lucky, there's two or three. For me, it's Mrs. Smith, right? A couple coaches I've had. And these are the people that I cherish in my life, because they found something in me. If you're a person of faith, they found God in you. They found the gift in you. And so this is what great leaders do. They take the time, even if it's in brief, to say, well, I see this special in you. You're special because that makes me feel seen. Not you're awesome. You're incredible. Thanks for being here. Grateful for you. Nah, that's nothing.

I see you, and let me tell you what I see. I see X, Y, and Z. And then they go, now they really, they will never leave you. They will be loyal forever. They will be talking about you on podcast 20 and 30 years later. Like I am with Mrs. Smith 45 years later. That's how deeply a leader can impact someone's life when they see the giftedness in them. And next time, can you bring some passion and energy?

And the book is the power of one more, and each of your chapters has this concept, one more identity, one more try, one more association, one more dream, one more question, one more goal, one more standard. Without question, my favorite chapter in the book is this idea of one more emotion.

I don't want to kind of congeal our time around this. I'm going to read a passage from your book. People are a composite of a small handful of emotions they live with every day. These emotions create our emotional homes. Like any home, your emotional home may not be perfect, but it's comfortable riff on that.

Well, we all have these three or four emotions. If you take a given week or month of your life and I said, okay, there's a series of emotions you get no matter what the external is, right? So sometimes those emotions are joy, ecstasy, peace, passion, right, comfort, or it could be anxiety, worry, fear, depression, anger, whatever it might be, but you have these three or four emotions you're going to get because our mind and our spirit moves towards what it's most familiar with. So we create a home.

Often times, this emotional home was installed in us when we were defenseless as children. And we just carry it. So it's a different set of circumstances, a different set of results, but basically we live in this home. And emotions aren't negative or positive. You say, oh, fear, terrible emotion. Well, depends on the dosage of it. Fear can cause you to focus. Fear can cause you to prepare.

So there's a healthy dose of it. I don't look at emotions as negative or positive. It's the abundance of it. But if you're living in anxiety, you live in fear, you live in worrying, we all find a way to get those emotions. No matter what in a given week, things are great, things are bad. If you're a warrior, you'll find a way to get you some worrying.

And even though it may not serve you, it's home for you. You're familiar. I'll give you an example, Scott. One of my emotional homes has been for years. Even though I've worked on getting more peace, more bliss, more happiness, I've been intentional about getting these emotions. Human beings get what they want. We set a goal up, we're intentional about getting it both. Do we really want the jet or the promotion or the money? Or do we want how we think those things will make us feel? And so we keep having these goals about things and achievements and levels

But what we really want is how we think it'll make us feel. But what if we had those goals, but we also had intention about how those feelings are. So I want more peace. I want more passion. I want more joy. If we start to be intentional about the emotions, we can change them. I have this one that's been coming up up until about a year ago, and it's chaos.

One of my emotional homes is chaos. And I would even brag, Scott. I function well under stress and chaos. I'm a warrior under stress and chaos, which was true. I'm familiar with it. I'm very functional in it. But I had to ask myself, do I like living in it? Is this something I want to have when I'm 60, 70? Did I really need it when I was 30? No, it's familiar, so I get it. No matter how good things are going, Ed Mylet finds a way to get a little chaos. Ed Mylet finds a way to get a little worry.

Because I like it. It's where I live. And the truth is, it didn't serve me. Why? Why do I have chaos? I'm the son of an alcoholic. You grew up in an alcoholic household. There's chaos. Nothing stable. Who's coming home today? What's going to happen? Are we going to a restaurant? Is dad going to yell at somebody? Are we safe driving in the car? How are mom and dad getting along? Right? What happened at work? Chaos. And I became familiar with chaos.

And I carried it into my 40s, and even probably truly until I was about 50. So these emotional homes are where we live. And if we begin to become more intentional about the emotions we want, not the things and achievements we want, now we'll change our life. And what's crazy enough about it is when we get the emotions, the things become much easier to have also.

Some of us are hooked on a false belief. Let me just finish with this Scott. We think, I know I have it, but it's kind of part of my recipe to success and achievement. So this chaos thing, although it's really painful, it's one of the recipes to why I've produced such great results. Is that really true?

or have you done it in spite of it? And what I found out in my life is these emotions that don't serve me that I have regularly, I achieved in spite of them, not because of them. And so I take you through in the book strategies of how to create a new emotional home because our lives are our emotions.

And like I say, one more little thing on that. It's not the events of our life that define us. It's the meaning we attach to the event and that meaning creates an emotion. And if you're familiar with an emotion, you will start creating meanings to deliver that to you about everything that happens.

Perfect example. You and I left right now. God forbid there was an accident out in front of my house. A family was killed in front of us. One of the worst possible things we could experience. Our emotion would be sadness, tragedy. My gosh, you know, pain. That same exact event, Mother Teresa, if she were alive, witnessed.

Her belief system in her life was that the greatest honor of her life, Scott, was to be with someone when their soul leaves here and goes to heaven. Same exact event, different meaning. She'd get peace and joy from that situation. Believe it or not, it's true. You look it up. That's an extreme example. So these emotions we have create meanings to events that don't serve us also. That's how important it is.

I think it's the most profound chapter in the book, because you talk about how we are our emotions. We are our emotions. And it stopped me in the book, and I sat down and I talked about my emotional house, and I wrote down what were my five or six emotions. Will you take us a step further, Ed, and maybe instruct those who are listening and watching how we can better

declutter our emotions, how we can determine which one should stay in our house and which one service for what reasons. Take that a bit further, if you will. Yes, so I always ask myself, the things I want, why do I want them? What do I think they'll give me? This is the pathway to the emotions that my heart is seeking. So I want the, I want $10 million safe. Well, why? Because I think that'll make me feel safe. I'll never be broke again.

And so now I know safety is an emotion that my heart is seeking. I've just made the conditions impossible to feel it.

And so this is one of the ways we become really focused on the emotions that we want. The other thing in life is that I had this beautiful experience happen to me, brother, where I was very young. I want a contest to go to Hawaii. And I'm running on the beach in the morning. It was before the sun was up. And running towards me was this man. And God has just been so good to me. The man running towards me was bald. I could see him on the distance, sweaty, had like a hairy back. I'm like, oh, who's this guy? He's running towards me. And as he gets closer, I realize that it's Wayne Dyer.

Dr. Wayne Dyer most of your audience would know who Wayne is if you don't they look him up But he's one of the all-time great spiritual and thought leaders personal development gurus of all time He runs by me. It's so long ago. I got a Sony Walkman on so does he and I pull mine off him listen to a cassette I said dr. Dyer you changed my life And he turns back he had a deep voice like me. He goes well. I I highly doubt that

I bet you changed your life. But how did I help you? And he walks towards me, Scott, and here I am a young man. I end up sitting on the beach and watching the sun come up with Wayne Dyer for about an hour and a half. And at the end of that hour and a half, he said, Ed, I don't say this lightly. I think you're going to change the world. In fact, I know it.

And I'm sure he had said that to other people, but to me, I was the only person he ever said that to. And he goes, and by the way, you're incredibly bright, your ability to articulate your thoughts. He goes, I feel things that when you speak, I don't know what planet you're from, but it's not this planet. There's something when you speak, I feel something and I'm right here with you. And I said, thank you. And he goes, and that's not why.

Would you please do me a favor if you want to have happiness in your life? I said, tell me please. He said, never attach your emotions or your happiness to your abilities or your achievements because you'll be chasing them all your life. And when and if they fail, you'll be lost. He said, what if you attached your happiness and your emotions to your intentions?

and it changed my life, and it was a gift to me at that time, because prior to that, just like you said with your dad, I thought love was when I achieved. If I had a home run, my dad said he loved me. If I got straight A's, I got affection for my family. So everything was attached to the external result I would produce, then I'd let myself feel the emotion just for a little bit, then I'd get back to my emotional home. Sorry, I'm moving on your podcast here, you said don't move.

He said, Ed, if you'll start to attach your bliss to your intentions. He said, Ed, you're going to change the world because you have such a good heart. You're such a good man. Because of the way you grew up, you care so deeply about people. It's special, Ed, and they feel things from you. Please, the rest of your life, attach your emotions to your intentions, and you'll never be without the ones you want.

and I've pretty much done that, brother. So I'll remind myself before a podcast like this, when I want some confidence and some strength in my emotion and some peace, I remind myself not of my ability to communicate or what I know, but my intention to serve people. When I close my eyes at night and I pray, I remind myself of my intent to make a difference, my intent to be a good man.

and I feel that peace. And so I would remind everybody to get clear and intentional about the emotions you want, but to attach them to your intent, not your ability, not the external. And that was a life-changing life-altering moment. What I didn't know is of course he was writing a book at that time called The Tower of Intention, which is a book I would also recommend to people to read. Today's gonna be special because the man that I have on the program, there is only one of in the world, like literally he's one of a kind.

And he is just one of my favorite people to listen to, to watch. I've gone to see him perform in person. He's a comedian. He's an entertainer. He's a life coach. He's an author. So JP Sears, thank you for being here, brother.

Ed, thank you for having me. I'm brother. It is beyond an honor to be here. I'm a fan of yours. I've been since day one and I'm so grateful to now be a friend. So yeah, there's nowhere else I'd want to be. It's hard to interview you. I was prepping because I think you know this about you. It's hard to know when you're saying what you really fake and when you're being funny sometimes. I have no idea. So it's not you either.

So speaking of that, let's start out there for a minute. Where's this style? So everybody has a style. I think that's usually an overuse term. Sometimes it's just our authentic personality. But there's nobody like you. And you're able to use humor, satire, yet then the next second, there's this deep lesson that I catch from you.

How did that start like did you start out as a life coach and then say I'm going to kind of hide this humor aside of me and then there was just this one day when I can't hide this anymore or that's a risk that you took in being that way for sure.

Yeah, you know, my inner idiot had me hiding a great gift for many years because it was telling me it would be bad to let my gift out. So yeah, I started off as a life coach. I had been doing life coaching, especially emotional healing coaching with people for 13 years before I put out my first comedy video. And during that time, I'd look at my natural sense of humor that had

been very prolific in my personal life ever since I was a kid and still was, yet look at it and say humor would be bad for business and discredit you as a life coach, as a spiritual guy, you should be serious JP. So I was doing meaningful work yet excluding a lot of parts of man is giving people

Some authentic JP but definitely not the whole pie of authenticity and then five five and a half years ago at this point. I started to betray that story that it would be bad for business to let my humor out because I kept having these ideas come to me and flashes and they were in the form of video ideas where I'm sharing my perspective through the language of comedy now like.

anything poopy, I did my best to constipate those thoughts and ideas. I'd hold them down. Like, oh, that's, I'm accidentally thinking of those exciting ideas. What's wrong with me? I mean, but eventually, like the itch became too great. I had to scratch it. So I made my first comedy video, released in October, 15 and man, that woke something up inside of me.

I mean, it woke up an expression of creativity that I had never known before. And it's like, it was my expression. You know, like Van Gogh has his paintings like, okay, comedy on video and now stage. This is my expression.

And on the inside, I just have to say this as well. What was happening on the inside was more important because it was me saying yes to a part of me that I judged to be defective enough that he would screw up my career. It's like I was on that first video. It was like an initiation where I was taking my inner child out of the basement where I locked and reclaiming them and say, not only do you have a place in my life,

you are the gift in my life. And I think ever since then, my work doing conscious comedy is led by the five-year-old inner child in me at different ages, but it's like, dude, the more I'm just a kid, sharing the truth as I know it, giving voice to what's not being said, the more things work out well for me.

That's a, by the way, we're five minutes into this and I would already tell everybody rewind and go back and watch that. Like that one phrase you use, brother, they're about betraying that kind of BS story you tell yourself. And wow, I, it's funny that you say it the way you say it. Um, everyone listening to that has that thing too, where there's this part of themselves, they want to express, but there's this fear that if they do, it'll hurt other things they have. I remember when I started speaking, I was a one trick pony when I spoke, which was intensity.

You know, a natural, easy emotion for me to get is intensity or even maybe even bordering on anger. And I was willing on stage to be vulnerable. Many of you might relate to this to express one of my emotions, almost like that was a safe emotion for me to express was anger.

And a lot of you have that one or two emotions that you feel safe expressing, but there's all these other ones that are unsafe to express. And so on stage for me to be vulnerable or emotional or show my weaknesses or the things I fear, I would never go there as a speaker. And it was only when that itch finally got scratched.

that I became kind of my own self on stage. And then all of these other ideas and expressions started to come out of me when I started to betray that crappy story, I was telling myself. So I, I love that about you. One thing about the other thing, JP, that I've heard you say, not a lot of people admit to was that I got into coaching or personal to all my self help, whatever you want to be thinking.

I'm really going to teach this stuff to other people. Yeah. That would really help people. I'm a pretty good expressive person like you are. I'm like, I'm going to use my gift of expression and words and articulation to help people with all these things. But that was a lie. I really got into personal involvement to help heal and grow myself. And I've heard you say the same thing. I'm curious, do you even know what it was you were trying to heal or grow from that caused you to get into the space itself?

Well, looking back, I do. But, dude, in the moment, if you would have took a blood draw of 19-year-old JP, you would have found very high arrogant levels. And, you know, I'm thinking, like, I'm going to, like, work with people because I'm so strong and stable. And, like, I just want to help the weak people. But I was

Constructing my sense of strength off of what I now call weakness, you know, at the time when I was 19-20, I hadn't cried for eight years.

And I thought that made me strong. I thought that meant I'm emotionally stable. But I'll never forget the very first workshop I took with a powerful mentor of mine, a guy named John McMullen runs an organization called Journey to Wisdom. He's, to this day, he's 79 years young, one of the most playful people I know.

But the afternoon of that first workshop, I cried for the first time in eight years. And I was crying about stuff that wasn't happening in that moment. It was stuff that happened 13 years before in my childhood, 14, 15 years before. All the emotions were still there. I was just numb to them. But the tears were coming out because this was a wise man.

I was an ignorant man. So now looking back, I could realize one of the things I needed to reclaim was my emotions. I was so emotionally numb. And you know, our late great friend Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, he died, I think 1963. He's one of my favorite quotes of all time. He says, feelings are the language of the soul.

And if that's half true, that meant I was dramatically disconnected from my soul. Life doesn't feel great. It doesn't feel fulfilling. It doesn't feel purposeful when you don't have your soul speaking to you through its language called emotions and feelings.

And you know, on top of that, I also had some more nuanced issues. I grew up being a rescuer. Let me sacrifice my needs, take care of mom and dad, my sister, make sure everybody's strong and stable because it feels like the world's falling apart around me. So let me just be Mr. Fix-It and not that any kid can, but I could have a sense of control that gave me the illusion of, oh, I'm fixing that. So it feels like I'm not going to die either. So, man,

And I want to give myself a little bit of credit. I've come a long way. And I have infinity yet to go with my healing and growth and connection to my emotional vulnerability and knowing who the hell I am as a person. I connect so much.

I gotta tell you, I think millions of people do. This idea of numbness, you explained me early on in my life too. I used to think, well, if I can't, if I don't feel this pain, then I'm actually probably not having it. I think a lot of people express them. So I think, well, you've got all these coping skills you built up for you. I remember I was at my personal, I was at my grandfather's funeral.

I don't know what age I was, I was 15, 16 years old. And appropriately, everybody in my family was crying at the field. And I remember going, why can't I cry? I loved him so much too, right? Why can't I feel like they feel this isn't good, this isn't healthy. I had learned all these skills like you did from coming from kind of dysfunctional family. I think you can share it a minute years. I kind of found ways to not feel things.

And so, as I got older, I thought that meant I don't have any pain. But really, what I did is masked it. Do you mind sharing a little bit like, if you don't want to, it's okay, but why did you begin to build these skills of numbness? Was it dysfunction in your family? Was it some particular event or what was it? Yes, to all of that. I think in the

the most pervading pressure that caused me to cope in a way where I created psychological dissociation from my own emotions, and therefore I was numb, was like when I was younger, my parents would split apart, we're getting a divorce, then a few months later, yeah, no, we're not anymore, a couple months later, ah, now we're definitely getting a divorce, and they did that a lot.

Like at the time, I'm like, okay, just tell me what you're doing. I don't care. Like it didn't affect me. Yeah, looking at that, I can realize that was very influential. Having a child's world split apart.

I mean, how is your world split apart is a question we all have an answer to. For some people, it's trauma, it's abuse. For some people, it's family secrets. Like mom drinks all the time, but we all act like she does. And for some of it's parents flitting apart, other times it's

other hardships, other times we're bullied at school. It's adversity we all have because we all need it. You can only be as strong as the adversity from which you overcame, yet this is my adversity. It feels like my world's splitting apart. And in order to feel like I'm keeping my world put together, I'm gonna try to take care of mom and dad, keep them as happy as I can, which means my emotions don't have a place.

Because I can't be unstable because that'll make mom and dad care for me and give me their attention, but they need their attention on their own lives. So I appeared to be strong and stable, and I thought I was. But man, numbness is temporary relief and long-term increased suffering.

You know, we just think, I know anytime we're in pain, like last night I threw my back out because I'm squatting with more weight relative to an old back injury that wasn't quite rehabbed, surprise. It's like, okay, I threw my back out, I racked the weight, I wish I could have felt numb, but I'm feeling the pain and that's good.

Because once we're numb for a while, we don't feel the pain, but also what else don't you feel? Like if you get anesthesia in the shoulder, you're not going to feel the surgeon's knife going in. But you're also not going to feel the Swedish massage.

So when we're numb long enough, we don't actually, in my delusional opinion, my experience is we don't have the feeling experience that we're alive. We can know we're alive. We can be in our head like, dude, like my IQ is high enough. I know I'm alive. Look, I have a pulse. That's cool. I know I'm alive. But that doesn't mean we feel alive.

And man, people will do crazy things to escape numbness. Once they're psychologically dissociated from their emotions, I mean, some people will routinely overeat just so they can then feel like, cool, I feel so much shame because I overeat. And that's a secondary emotion that they feel so they can feel something, but their core emotions are still mild, or they'll abuse themselves with drugs, alcohol, sugar. Other times it's like,

always self-sabotaging themselves just so they can feel the thrill of something, so they can feel something. But man, when we give ourselves the gift of reclaiming our heart like me, you mentioned the V word vulnerability, that's so challenging to do. It's way easier said than done, but when we can get fierce with our vulnerability, because we realize we're freaking worth it, and we cannot just be angry at in JP,

or non-JP, but we can be angry when it's appropriate, when it serves us. We can be the one that's crying the loudest at the funeral, because that's what's most appropriate, which means we can be the one laughing the loudest at the comedy show, which means we can also be the happiest.

Because when we're numb, we don't get any of that. Now y'all know. So you see this dude on YouTube or on Instagram, and I think oftentimes they have no idea because they see your normal brilliance. I happen to think as funny as JP is as articulism is, you're now watching him and is gifted this zone.

And you know it's just a fact and I gotta tell you like we just said something so profound I don't want to always restate things you say but you know the gift of giving yourself the willingness to feel pain and not be numb you know the other side of that is you do experience more joy in those moments if you're one of these people you're like why don't I enjoy

the moments at a party where other people do or seeing someone in my family do something. Why doesn't it affect me like it does other people? These are things you need to evaluate. Are you also doing that on the other side?

This message is sponsored by Greenlight and I'm really glad that it is. You know, as kids get older, I've experienced that things about parenting can get easier and some things can get harder if you don't lay a great foundation. And I know one of the things I am grateful for is that when my kids were young, we started to teach them the principles about money and budgeting and the value of a dollar, the value of hard work as well. And that's very much lost in the world, but thanks to Greenlight, it's back.

Greenlight can help. Greenlight's a debit card and a money app made for families where parents can send money to their kids. Keep an eye on their kids spending like I do with my daughter at college. With the Greenlight app, kids learn how to save, invest, and spend money wisely thanks to the games they teach in the app. It's got money skills in it. It's fun. It's really accessible. Millions of parents and kids are learning about money on Greenlight. It's the easy, convenient way for parents to raise financially smart kids and families to navigate life together.

sign up for green light today at greenlight.com slash Ed. That's greenlight.com slash Ed to try green light today. Greenlight.com slash Ed. What does the future hold for business? Well, let me tell you right now, you can ask nine experts. You're probably going to get 10 different answers.

bull market bear market rates are going to get cut they're going to cut it five times six times inflation is going to go up or down who the heck knows you don't really have a crystal ball and that's why i love net suite because you can get some measure of control and the most important areas possible in your business so if somebody can get a crystal ball together that would be great but until then over thirty eight thousand businesses of future proof their business with net suite by oracle

The number one cloud ERP bringing accounting, financial management, inventory HR into one fluid platform. Easy to use. We've been using them now for over a decade. NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and sees on your biggest opportunities.

Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com slash My Let. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash My Let. Netsuite.com slash My Let. That was a great conversation, and if you want to hear the full interview, be sure to follow the Ed My Let show on Apple and Spotify. Links are in the show notes. Here's an excerpt I did with our next guest.

I have to tell you, I don't know that I could have a more perfect person on my program today, given the times we find ourselves in. And this woman's remarkable. So first, I mean, the clinical part is that she's a trained psychologist at Harvard. She's written one of my favorite books of all time called emotional agility that we're going to talk a lot about today. But she's also a management thinker, a business thinker, a mental health expert.

And she gave one of the great TED Talks that have ever been given in the history of TED Talks. And so I'm a huge fan, and it's an honor to finally meet her and share some time, because I think she can help some of you persevere and even be more productive during these really difficult times. So Susan, David, thank you for being here today. Welcome. Thank you for having me and being open to my message.

I love your message, as you know, we were talking off camera. So let's start out with something basic. Emotional agility, I read that book in a day and a half, a while ago. And it's one of those books where most of my recollections had stayed very fresh. And so even preparing for this, it stayed with me. Because frankly, some of the things you said in that book made me rethink some of the things I teach. And I'm always open to growing and getting better. But why don't we start with a basis? What is emotional agility to begin with?

Well, I'm gonna start with a very short definition and then I'll dirt it a little bit longer. The very short definition is that it's about being able to be healthy with yourself, with your psychology, your thoughts, your emotions, your stories, the stuff that's inside of you. And really emotional agility is the critical skills that help you to be a healthy human being. And why is this important? Because how we ultimately deal with our inner worlds

is everything, drives everything, drives how we love, how we live, how we parent, how we come to our relationships, how we build our businesses and even our health behaviors.

So it's about being healthy, but if I have to break it down a little bit more, it's about skills that enable us to be curious and learning with our emotions and our difficult experiences, to be compassionate with ourselves and to also have the courage to do what's difficult when it's aligned with what matters to us.

Yeah, I also, that's beautifully said, and since you wrote the book, you should be able to say that the best. But I have to say that one of the things, and we'll dive in this a little bit later, is the concept of being a little bit more agile and not rigid in your emotions, meaning to be willing to embrace the ones that most people connotate as negative ones. We don't always have to be chasing happiness, and I wanna talk about that, but I picture this beautiful little five-year-old girl when I think of you, and where this was sort of born from,

And I'd like you to share that story. Your father seems like such a special man and had really there's multiple defining moments that you talk about him. But this idea that we all have one, I heard you say that we all have one shared experience in our lives that we share the most, which is death and our thoughts of death. And I talk about this.

It's amazing that we're just meeting now because I talk about this so much that I believe that conversation to some extent is going on in our minds almost all the time, the contemplation of that event. So would you take them back to the five-year-old you? Because that leads to this incredible someday, this book and these breakthroughs. So would you share that? This journey, this journey. So yes, as you can hear by my accent, I am not American or Australian. I grew up as a white South African in apartheid South Africa.

And it was very much a country, a community that was committed to denial, to not seeing the other. And as you'll see in my work in my TED Talk, this idea of seeing the self, seeing the other plays a really important part.

So I recall when I was around five years old, when you are five, you stop becoming aware of your own mortality. And I recall night after night finding my way into my parents bed in between the two of them. And I would say to my father,

I'm worried that one of you isn't going to be here in the morning. I'm worried that something's going to happen. And this is very normal. People as five-year-olds, they start becoming aware that there is an end at some point.

And so I'm lying between my parents and I'm saying to my father, promise me you'll never die, promise me you'll never die. And my father, you know, could have done what so many of us with beautiful intentions do with our kids, which is to say, don't worry about it. Everything will be okay. I'll be around.

My father didn't. He, he comforted me with soft pets and kisses, but he never lied. He didn't try to build some false buffer, some forced positivity between me and reality. What he said to me is, um, Susie, we all die.

and it's normal to be scared. And one of the things that you'll find is the capacity to even in the face of fear be courageous. So now Ed, I want to fast forward 10 years when I'm having these conversations. I don't know that 10 years later when I'm 15, my father will actually be diagnosed with terminal cancer.

And I recall my mother, it was a Friday, and I recall my mother coming and saying to me, go say goodbye to dad. We knew that that was his last day. And I go into this room where my father's lying and his eyes are closed.

But I know that he knows that I'm there because I have always felt seen with him. And I kiss him goodbye. I tell him I love him and I then go off to school because my mother has, with good intentions said to me, you want to keep things as normal and routinized as possible. And then this is where it kind of segues into, I think, what so many people's experiences, which is

I go after school and my father dies and the months go and the seasons go and I'm this little 15-year-old not dropping a grade, trying to put on a brave face. People ask me how I'm doing and I say to them, like, I'm okay, I'm okay. But you know, it in truth, we were struggling. My mother had lost the love of her life. She was raising three children. We had financial difficulties.

And I started to spiral down fast. And so then the last little strand of this which then breaks into my career is

I was spiraling and I was not doing well psychologically. And one day we had this English teacher who handed out these blank notebooks to the class and she said, write, tell the truth, write like no one's reading. And it was such a remarkable experience because I felt like for the first time I was actually, instead of doing this forced positivity, the master of being okay, but inside I'm crumbling,

actually I felt invited to show up to the authenticity of my experience. And this was revolutionary for me in a way that actually shaped my entire career. I started to become aware of and interested in what are the narratives that we have in society about positivity, positive emotions, negative emotions that sound good on the surface.

but that are actually devastating to our capacity to be healthy with ourselves and also healthy human beings in the world so that we can deal with others pain and the reality of a fragile and beautiful world.

My gosh. So just even the concept of an emotion is positive or negative, I got to be honest with you, I've repeated that sentence thousands of times kind of unconsciously. And I think when you wrote the book, obviously it made an impact on me, but probably little did you know that it may be required reading during a pandemic like this. And one thing you said there, I just want to say to the parents that

More and more people that I know that have five and six and seven year olds have been telling me that their children have been telling them that they're concerned about death and that maybe they even go through about of unhappiness at that age for no explained reason. And I'm wondering now that you've said that I sort of a deeper understanding but I want to ask you these times we find ourselves in.

There's racial reckoning and unrest happening and social justice going on. There's COVID, there's all this noise about the election, unemployment, stress, anxiety. There's not a whole lot of positive things on social media, certainly not in traditional media. And I'd like you to talk about

I want people to consider this thought, because I think it's so powerful, that there are two types of emotions, I guess you would say, but how should someone deal with think of emotions that aren't happiness, that aren't success, that aren't bliss, that are fear, anxiety, worry, maybe even depression? What would you say to people who are experiencing a lot of those emotions and maybe avoiding them, thinking they're negative?

So yeah, and let's explore these narratives more because I think they're so powerful. But what I would say is two things. Number one, emotions of teachers. Okay. Even your most difficult emotions are teachers. And what I mean by this is if you're feeling bored at work and you can be as busy as anything, but still bored. Same old, same old. That emotion of boredom might be a signpost that you value more learning and growth and that you don't have enough of it.

If you have a difficult emotion of loneliness, that loneliness might be signposting to you that even in a very busy household, because we all at home more than ever, that you value intimacy and connection and that you need more of it. So the most difficult emotions signpost, the things that we care about,

And when we push aside these difficult emotions, not only does it not work, not only does pushing aside difficult emotions actually contribute to lower levels of well-being, high levels of depression and anxiety, and lower chance of success than the things that you're trying to do,

But pushing aside these difficult emotions stops us from navigating the world as it is, which is a world in which you might be feeling bored or lonely. And so it's stopping you from learning. So the two things that I would say are emotions on teachers.

And that's very different from a world that would have us believe that if we just think positive, that we're going to manifest everything that we think. And then the second thing that I would say is emotions are teachers, but it's really important to also recognize that emotions are data, so they contain signposts of the things that we care about, but they're not directives.

Just because I feel bad with, you know, my colleague in this business that I'm trying to grow doesn't mean I need to have it out with them. Just because I am feeling really frustrated with, you know, my partner, my spouse doesn't mean that I then need to leave the room. So our emotions are data not directives.

Wow, everyone, I want you to hear this. This is like, for me, this could be a life breakthrough for a couple of million people right now, but I think this positive negative thing, and again, it's just occurring to me as I was rethinking your work that I think we think happy people are successful people, meaning they should have high self-esteem. And I think we've actually attached in our lives that if I feel more anxiety, fear or worry that somehow I am less than these people who are experiencing these other emotions, don't you think so?

So this is exactly the issue that we are facing, which is we have this narrative that conflates happiness and success. What happens is that when people feel normal, these are normal human experiences, they are normal to the extent that Charles Darwin

wrote about emotions, including difficulty motions, as being core to our ability to adapt and thrive in the world. That when you experience difficulty motions, they help you to communicate with others, but they also help you to communicate with yourself in terms of how you should shift things, whether there's a dissonance between you and your values, whether you're feeling distant from what matters to you. And so what has happened is this

I think just remarkably sad and

a challenging experience that we have with emotions that I think is actually contributing to the extraordinary statistics that we have around depression and anxiety, which is that when people experience normal emotions, they are now seen as good or bad, positive or negative. So what do we then do? We then try to push them aside. We say things like,

I'm unhappy in my job, but at least I've got a job, so I should just get on with it. I need to put on a brave face. There's this narrative of what I call the tyranny of positivity, where even people who are dying of cancer are told to just be positive, which takes them away from their experience. And Ed, what you spoke about earlier,

How do we possibly have conversations around racial justice and showing up to the pain of other people if we have a narrative that that pain is somehow weak? What that then does is it creates a complete divide where only if you are being

positive, then are you allowed in a circle? And if you're being negative, then you toxic. And I'm going to cut you off. And so there's this very, very difficult, I actually don't believe that we are going to be able to heal society effectively. And I know that sounds like a very, you know, wide ranging proclamation. But I think that social healing comes about through our

ability to be with difficult emotions more our own difficult emotions and others because internal pain always comes out. So it's amazing. That's an amazing statement. I mean, I hope that's an amazing statement because I must say to you, I think people also conflate what toxicity is. So people that experience a broad range of emotions are necessarily toxic. Toxic is someone who's intentionally

out to hurt you intentionally antagonistic towards you. That's somebody perhaps you want to remove from your life, but not somebody who experiences a broad range of emotions. In fact, they're more interesting people. Don't you think so? I mean, if everyone says, Hey, everything's great. Happy. I mean, I like the contradiction. I actually often say, I love, my best friends aren't all very wealthy people by any means, but they're all pretty complex people.

I love people that have a complexity of emotions, a complexity of personality. And I think we suppress our personality. I think we attach our self-esteem to having positive emotions. And when we have negative ones, we think we're less than people that we see celebrating all the time. But I wanted to ask you something specific was

And your works helped me so much. I have a program I did a long time ago about blissful dissatisfaction. It basically says something similar. You just say a lot better than I do to what you were just describing. But I think there's one other reason we, and I want you to help people with this. I think the other reason we avoid these emotions that have been labeled as negative.

is that when we experience an emotion typically it triggers a behavior in us and oftentimes because we have this false belief this emotion we're experiencing somehow reduces our self-esteem it typically triggers a negative pattern of behavior from us and then we suppress the emotion even more and so is there something someone can do

that the unraveling doesn't start to happen. What I call the stacking, where the emotion triggers a behavior that we then want to avoid. Is there something someone can do strategic? Yes, yes. So there are so many powerful strategies. These are things that people can learn. And what you spoke to earlier, which is so often when people are struggling, they'll say, I just want this to go away. I want this difficulty motion to go away because somehow there's this idea that difficulty motions point to the fact

that we're not successful. And one of the things that I think about so much is, you know, if you think about the only people who never experienced disappointment, the frustration that comes with failure, the only people who never have their hearts broken, they are dead. They are dead. So

thinking that you want to live life in a way that is just happy, that is a dead person's goal. We don't get to have a meaningful career or leave the world a better place or raise a family without stress and discomfort. You know, discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life. So to your question then, how do you start to capture this practically?

The first thing that I would say is that often when people have difficult emotions, they start to engage in, as I mentioned, these type 1 emotions and type 2 emotions. The type 1 emotion is, I feel sad, I'm feeling stressed, I'm feeling angry, I'm feeling lonely, that's type 1.

Type 2 is when you start layering a judgment about whether you should or shouldn't have the emotion. I'm unhappy that I'm unhappy. I'm so stressed about the fact that I'm stressed because I'm worried that being so stressed is going to cause me to die prematurely or whatever it is. A very important first part of emotional agility is

quite simply and it is actually a fairly simple choice which is to end the struggle with your difficult emotions by dropping the rope. And what I mean by this is to move away from the space where you second guess or basically guess like yourself as to whether you should or shouldn't be allowed to feel something and just

notice that this is what you're feeling and especially to try to notice that feeling with compassion. It's tough to be able to run a business or grow a business in a pandemic. I'm feeling anxious in the shadow of illness and death. It's normal to be anxious. So if you can

adapt a level of compassion with yourself, that can be really powerful. And compassion is often thought of as being, oh, it's letting yourself off the hook. It's being weak. It's being lazy. But Ed, we've all been in restaurants, and I look forward to the day when I can go into a restaurant again. But we've all been in restaurants, and I'll describe this, and I can talk to more practical strategies as well. But we've all been in a restaurant where

We've seen a very beautiful interaction. And that is you see a little toddler running away and exploring the restaurant. And the toddler turns around, looks, sees the parent or the caregiver there.

giggles and runs more. So in other words, what they do is they keep turning back, making sure that their parents are there, and then they go and they explore more and explore more and explore more. Now, what is it that is going on here? One of the most beautiful psychologist, John Baldy, described what parents are really doing in the situation is they are providing what is called a secure base for the child.

It's the fact that the child knows that if there is trouble they can come running back and they will be looked after. It's that that then allows them to explore, take risks, learn and grow. Now take the same idea and apply to yourself.

When you are kind to yourself, when you have your own back, when you know that even if things don't go well, you will still love yourself and hold yourself because there is a five-year-old in you that needs love and nurturance.

When you do that, what do you do? You are basically creating a context in which you are able to take risks, to put your hand up for a new opportunity. And so that's where this myth of self-compassion, which is self-compassion is about being weak and lazy, is so wrong. People who are self-compassionate are actually more likely to take risks.

more likely to explore and grow and learn because they know if something goes wrong, they will be there for themselves. So that's one those are some strategies I can help with other very practical strategies if you like so you let me know. So good I'm just

I have your own back. I've never heard anybody say that before. That's powerful. Just in that in and of itself. I have to share with you. I want to tell my audience this too. We booked this interview quite a while ago and so I was refreshing myself on your work during an interesting time for me. I just want to share this with you because it helped me and I want to validate what you're saying and then I'll ask you another question but I just want to share this.

So my dad's been sick for a very long time. He's had cancer and his health is deteriorated pretty substantially recently and some scary moments. About that same time I had somebody that I care about very much let me down. Almost a form of, by the way, knowing in my family if everyone's watching this. But a friend of mine, kind of a form of betrayal and sort of reveal part of them that I was just shocked existed.

And it was very hard on me. Normally what I would do as an achiever, right, was be, I'm gonna power through this. You know, I'm gonna be better on the other side. I'm gonna be stronger, especially men, I think oftentimes are wired to have to do this. And I was actually prepping for this during that, even though it was a little bit ago. And I said, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna sit with these emotions and experience them. I have not done that in a long time. I even cried.

uh... which i very rarely cry and uh... i want to cry more now i've actually cried i actually cried in front of a group too and uh... you know what i found on the other side of it was an unbelievable piece about things an unbelievable comfort about

everything will be okay. I learned some things about myself. And ironically, the strength that I wanted to find that I thought if I just kind of shoved this stuff to the side, I found through letting myself sit with these emotions and not feel less than because I had them. And I don't, people know my work. I'm not a mamzy, pamzy, foofy dude at all. I'm telling you that that made a huge difference for me. And I want you to address the part that did go ahead. I can see you want to jump in on this. No, no, no, it's beautiful. Continue. And I'll, I'll add

Well, what I was careful of and I want you to talk about this in your reply was I didn't say I am.

Yes. During it. I'd like you to talk about that and anything else that occurred to you when I was saying that. Yes. So firstly, you know, really what you are doing is the equivalent of what that teacher did, you know, right to tell the truth, right like no one's reading. And the false narrative that we have is that we will be stronger and better through positivity, but actually we become stronger and better

through going through and sitting and learning from the difficult emotion. We generate a sense of insight about ourselves, a sense of resilience, a sense of what you need to do in the situation. And I'll describe what this means from a practical perspective. The first is what you point to, which is I am. So

When often we feel a difficult experience, like we will use language that basically says, I am, okay? I am sad, I am angry, I am stressed. But think about what you are doing in your language.

What you are basically doing is saying, I am all of me, 100% of me is defined by the emotion. But you aren't your emotion. You are a person who has emotions, but you aren't your emotion. You also contain your wisdom, your values, your insight, your intention.

your breathing, your groundedness, your love. There's so much that is beyond that single defining I am. So what I would say to listeners is if you're feeling that you are having a difficult emotion, it can be really powerful to create space between you and the emotion.

Because of course, when you say something like, I am sad, it's almost like the sadness is a cloud in the sky and you have become the cloud. You know, you have become the sad cloud.

But you are not the cloud. You are the sky. You are as every human being is capacious and beautiful and complex and able enough to experience all of their emotions. The sadness is one cloud in the sky, but there's other parts that we can bring. So what is a way that we can do this? The first is, instead of saying, I am sad, I am angry, see if you can just

label your thought, your emotion, your feeling, your story for what it is. And here's an example. I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad. I'm noticing that this is my, I'm not good enough story. I'm noticing the thought that I'm being undermined.

When you notice your thoughts, your feelings, your stories for what they are, they are thoughts, feelings and stories. As I mentioned earlier, data, not directives, what you do is you open critical linguistic space, but actually emotional psychological space, so that other parts of you can come forward.

And Ed, you know, I'm sure you've brought up at some point in your podcast, but I think it's beautiful to, I think one of the most powerful ideas in human history is this idea that was first spoken to in this very particular web by Victor Frankel between stimulus and response. There is a space.

And in that space is our power to choose. And in that choice lies our growth and our freedom. When we are hooked by a difficult 40 motion and story,

then there's no space between stimulus and response. I am sad. I'm going to have it out with this person. I am angry. I feel betrayed. I'm going to just ignore them now. But when you start using this, like, I'm noticing that this is what I'm feeling, what it does is it helps you to create that space between stimulus and response so that you can bring other parts of yourself into the space. And ultimately,

Instead of acting out of your emotions, you are moving into your values and being able to bring the best of who you are forward in the situation. So that's a practical example. I can give so many, but let me know if that's helpful.

It's so helpful. A couple things occur to me. One, everyone listening to this, I think we'd love to wake up with your voice in their ear every morning. It's so, I never was agreeing with me right now. It's so soothing and pleasing and it's easy to feel at peace and happy listening to you. Today is a special day for me. Like it's a surreal day because not only is the man to my left, a Major League Baseball Hall of Famer, he's got 3,000 hits.

He had 388 one year. He's one of the all-time greats in Major League Baseball, but he's been one of the all-time most influential people in my life as a young man. He became a mentor to me. I haven't seen him in decades, and now he's in my living room on my show. Everybody, this is Hall of Famer, Rod Karu. Rod, thank you for being here, brother.

Thanks for having me. Baseball is a different sport. And people that aren't fans of every sport, maybe this nuance isn't obvious to you. But like football, they're going to play 16-18 games now. There's a game on a Sunday. We all work towards that Sunday. There's an event we have it, then there's a playoffs. Most sports are that way. Baseball is a grind. You're playing 162 games in a very short window of time. And there's a grind. You have to maintain an emotional level of control throughout a season.

And most people, a lot of big league players even struggle with that. How did you maintain emotional control through slumps, through ups and downs, through a full season, and then through a career as long as yours as well? Well, you know, to me, it wasn't a job.

To me, it was just a little boy's game that Campanello said. Little boys, baseball is a game, little boys play. I never can tell you that I've gone through a slump where it has kind of knocked me off my heels and pushed me back. Because I remember I was the longest streak I think I had as a hitter. I was 0 for 17. That was your longest slump? Yeah. The longest. Four games.

So I hate you. So the 18th time I dropped a button down for a bass set. Made an adjustment. I hit a high chopper. Didn't leave the infield for a bass set. I dropped another button down for a bass set. And I had another high chopper for a bass set. Now one of those balls left the infield. But while I was going through this

O for 17. I was hitting line drives and they were going right at somebody. Yeah. And great lesson. So guys says, how do you do that?

This is, well, you know, I work on my bunning, so if I'm not getting hit swinging the bat, I'm going to the next dimension. I love that. I think there's a lesson there, Rod, and I always go back to like, okay, how's the supply to other things? And that it's true in business. We're always trying to hit these big home runs, and if you feel like things are slipping, just get some base hits, get a sale, get an account, get some momentum, get in early, make extra phone calls, do the extra email, just lay the bunk down.

Get some momentum going. Because sometimes the slump you're in in business, you're hitting the line drives. It's just not the time. It's just timing. It's not always you're doing something wrong. Maybe it's just bad timing right now. Keep making adjustments, et cetera. And the difference about me and other players is I had the six tool. Which was? You know, they always say you have the five tools. The six tool was this. Your mind.

I never let my mind get me in trouble. I stayed positive all the way. I knew, yeah, I'm going to make outs. You know, this is a game that three out of 10 and you're successful. Yeah. You know, so I'm not going to worry about days that I don't get a hit. You know, like some guys, all of a sudden it's panicked. You're right. You know, they panic. What am I doing wrong?

Do you see something? No, you're just hitting them all good, but you're hitting them right at somebody. You think the mental part of your game was the separation? Oh, yes, definitely. And I tell kids that today. I says, this is the most important tool. You can do everything else, but if you can't control what's going on up here,

Things are going to be tough. One million percent. By the way, those are your listeners and audio. He's pointing at his head and he's talking about how important the mental part of the game is, maintaining emotional control, not stacking worries and thoughts that get bigger than they need to be. It's amazing to me. I work with a lot of athletes on their mental game and people will ask me, you know, what are you really working with them when you're if it's a UFC fighter or a boxer or a golfer?

and I'll tell them often. The main thing we work on is their confidence. People say to me, there's no way confidence at that level of play. Yes, confidence at that level of play is even fragile for many athletes as well. Is that not true? You're in dugouts with guys all the time. Oh, geez.

Yeah, and I listen to them talk. It says, hey, dude. Pointy, isn't it? It's a point of my head, you know? Yeah, 100% the mental side of the game. I want to ask you about the hardest part, I think probably of your life. And I could be wrong, but speaking about mental toughness, which is, so guys, this man goes through this heart transplant. He ends up getting the heart from a child he was kind to. It's just bananas.

If he's on the second hole, he's gone. He reverts back to the guardian angels of Michelle. And at the time when Michelle was struggling with leukemia, it became another national story. This was not some secret thing. This was something that I was following, that people all across the world, you were getting letters and mail and all these other things. I have to think that during that time, your mental emotional control was tested the most then. This is not a major league baseball game. This is your little girl.

struggling and dying and I'm sure in a great deal of pain and I don't want to be too personal about it but there are people right now listening to this that are going through their form of tragedy, a business failure, a divorce and illness in their family. I just lost my dad recently.

What was that time like for you and what were the lessons and takeaways that you took from it? It was easy for me because she brought me into her fold. She knew I didn't talk to the press much and she knew that

It's going to be stretching the limit for me to be talking to a radio person or a writer or somebody about what she's going through. But when I was checking her into Children's Hospital in Orange County,

All these skids were like 10 kids out on the hallway kicking soccer balls. They have their poles and they're kicking soccer balls and some of them were wiffle bats and all this stuff. And she just walks up to me and she taps me in my shoulder and she says, Daddy, you've got to start talking to the press. See all these kids? Maybe we can save some of their lives.

So she came to me and told me. And I says, okay, honey, I promise you that from today on, until the day I die, I will give my full efforts towards helping kids. And she says, you promise me? I says, I promise you. Like, gosh.

You know, because I never spoke to the president. I know. I kind of stayed away from him. And when she asked me to do that, I says, I will. I promise you, I will. You know, and for all the time she spent in the hospital, I remember that first day when she found out that she had leukemia when the doctor told her.

And she says, well, what do we do? Doctor said, well, try and clean it up and make you better. She says, OK, let's go. Did cry? Nothing. Not for the time that she was in the hospital. She did not cry one single day. Now, one single day. And the week that she died, I went down to the chapel and I asked God to take her.

You did. I said, Father, please take her. She's suffering. And I don't want her to suffer anymore. So would you take her and put her in your in your garden?

And he gave us another week with her. And then we found a four out of five cord blood that we were going to use instead of the marrow. She couldn't find anyone with a marrow to save her life. And when she was walking in that room, she said, Dad,

I know that I'm not coming out of their life. I said, come on. God's going to be with you. She says, Dad, I'm not coming out of their life. And I know that God's going to be with me. So I'm not going to worry. Here's a 19 year old. Wow.

kid talking to me like that to her dad. And I'm like, you're going to be OK. You're going to be OK. But she knew when she went in that room, she knew she was going to die. You know, just like you knew you weren't when you had your heart attack. Yeah. What an amazing story. I

You just honored her so well with your life because you've done, guys, if you just do a simple Google search, you'll see all the tireless thousands of hours Raj put into doing things for children and how you've honored her, you know, little one-on-one things, things at the stadium like you were talking about. The thing you were doing the night before your heart attack was an extension of the promise that you made to her in the hospital.

And you know, it's funny. I remember driving down the five freeway. I had gone to Washington and spoke in front of Congress about raising funds for the NIH. And then he got a call, my agent called me, and he says, guess what? They just passed a $50 million bill for the kids. That's crazy.

And I opened my sun roof. I said, honey, thanks so much. We did it again. And that's the way it was. And even today, some nights, I'm sitting at home and I don't have anything to do. I get in my car. I go for a drive and says, Pish, how you doing? I used to call her Pish.

How are you doing? I'm hanging in there and I talk to her. Do you really? Yeah, I do it many nights. It makes me feel good. I'm sure she's saying I'm proud of you, Dad. I'm proud of you. I'm sure she's doing what you're doing. We're doing it right now.

I'm proud of you. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. You changed my life. You know, and I just thank you. I was just telling this lady that off camera that her works really made a profound impact on me, even in the last few days of my life. Her name is Ty East Gibson. Today's conversation will be different than most anyone we've ever had on the show before. So, Ty East, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Ed, for having me. I'm really grateful to be here with you. Yeah. Basic question. You cover it in the book. By the way, thank you for this. It's just, I love real work that really makes a difference and really changes people. How do our emotions affect our actions? I know that's a general question, but it's actually part of the book as well.

And I don't think most people step back and look at that, that not only the state you're in, but the emotional state you're in and how it's impacting the action. I know that's a broad question compared to the very specific place we just went, but I think when we get really granular like we just did, it's time to kind of go to concept for a second as well to understand why that matters. So how do emotions affect behavior?

amazing question. So a neuroscientist named Antonio DiMazio, I believe it was in 2008, actually discovered conclusively that every single action we take or decision we make is based on our emotional state. So some people are very quick to rationalize or justify through logic. They're like, I'm a logical thinker, I only make logical decisions. But the reality is at the tipping point, you're making an emotionally based decision, and then you're just quick to then rationalize it through logic.

And so we are not in control of how we feel, then we are not in control of the decisions that we're making. And it would make a really strong argument that when we go back to this topic of core fears, I often give people this acronym of BTEA, which is our belief patterns, we'll create patterns of thought, which then we'll create emotions and then actions.

will follow. So, so if I, for example, let's pretend have this core wound, I'm not good enough. Well, that may, I might start thinking thoughts like I'm not interesting enough. I'm not smart enough. I'm not pretty enough. Whatever it is, fill in the blanks enough. And then what will happen is how will I feel or a moat? According to that, we'll feel insecure or afraid or sad. And then we all go into our actions or coping mechanisms, right? We're not even in charge. When somebody's feeling that way, what do they do? Do they go to their fridge and eat a whole bunch of junk food?

Do they withdraw from the world and go into their shell? Do they become really big and tell everybody how amazing they are to try to overcompensate, but it feels arrogant? So really, if we're not being able to reprogram and identify these core beliefs or these old fears or wounds,

then we're gonna have have a grief on our thought patterns throughout the day. Our emotional state we're not in charge of and then our actions we're not even in charge of either. And when we go and change and recondition these old stories or belief patterns, everything else will follow how we think, how we feel about ourselves and even our actions and behaviors will become healthier. This is the end of my life show.