Rich Roll – Inspired New Horizons

Digging in & Getting to Work

The compelling metaphors of spring being a time of rebirth, new beginnings and growth are not lost on me. Every time I go for a walk in nature, I marvel at the seemingly slow process of a tiny bud pushing with all its might at the very tip of a fragile naked branch. Just a few days later, I discover that the tight bud has swelled and softened. And then later in the warmth of afternoon sunshine, voila — the bud has now unfurled and I see tiny green leaves.

Now the process begins again. The fragile pale green leaflets will grow over time and one day later this summer, they will actually provide shade for the ground cover that is the understory of this forest. In the fall, the seeds will drift downward and nestle into the soft compost beneath the understory – and next spring, those seeds will pop up and start the process anew.

I find myself wondering what has taken us so long to reframe our own personal growth in the same transformational way that we view springtime.

It is precisely why I have been encouraging us all to consider self discovery and personal growth in a dynamic new way. We are not only works in progress at every stage of our life, we are ever-growing, adapting and changing throughout our lifetimes. Much like the image of a majestic oak tree used to symbolize strength, stability, endurance and longevity, we too are ever growing.

Taking ownership of our personal growth over the course of our life changes everything. We no longer have to view our past history and adversities as impediments that uprooted us. We can more accurately see how the stories we have told ourselves about our lived experiences have often had a far greater impact on shaping us than the event itself.

As human beings, we are designed to make meaning out of the experiences in our lives. The root cause of our stunted personal growth is that we were only budding young authors during our most profound developmental stages – early childhood and adolescence.

We’ve heard it said over and over again: “change the narrative and it will change the way you see yourself.” This is one of the foundational principles that should be guiding our personal growth throughout our lifetimes. We need to become better storytellers and discerning meaning makers.

Many of the stories we tell ourselves have long roots going back to the first drafts we wrote when we were young. When we go back and revisit these stories with the intention of editing, updating and rewriting them, it is in essence pulling up the weeds and tangled vines — and revealing to ourselves just how much we’ve grown over time.

With a fresh perspective and a growth mindset, we can really dig in and get to work. We can become master gardeners for our self discovery and personal growth.

Re-imagining how we can repurpose what we have learned and discovered about ourselves over the years, helps us dig a little deeper into our raw material and use it wisely and with good intention.

Best selling authors frequently share that they “wrote the book they needed to read” or a well-known psychologist will confess that their “research” was actually “me-search.”

Taking a cue from these folks, we can begin to write the stories that shape us in the most transformational ways. We should not stay stuck in those old narratives that limit our potential.

A Trowel and a Notebook:

When my kids were teenagers, I would often ask them “What have you learned from this experience?” They were not huge fans of this parenting tool, for it required them to stop and think about their choices and the subsequent outcomes. It felt like hard work and they much preferred to be grounded than breaking ground.

I didn’t realize it then — but what I was intuitively trying to do was get them to “think on their own” and be able to make better decisions in the future when faced with similar (but much more consequential) events.

What I knew from my own lived experiences as a 40 year old mom was that a lack of self-reflection usually led to breakdowns. What I wanted for my teenaged kids were more “break throughs” in their self awareness and sense of agency.

“What have you learned from this experience?” was a trowel; an invitation to dig a little deeper into what motivated them to make certain choices and to step back and see if the outcome matched their values. Did their choices and behaviors help them get where they wanted to go in life?

I have a confession – I did not see this simple question as the meaningful tool it truly is when I was a middle-aged mom of fast growing teenaged boys. I just knew they needed something from me that they could take into adulthood as a guidepost for building the life they wanted. The life I hoped they would have; one that was a little less bumpy than my own had been.

Finding our footing and being grounded in mid-life is a super power and not a punishment. But we can only be “grounded” in our values if we have in fact done some serious self-reflection.

For the record, grounding my teenaged boys would not have had the same impact as making them reflect on their own life lesson in real time – just ask Dr. Becky Kennedy.

Today, thanks to Arthur C. Brooks and his book “Build the Life You Want”, I now have a greater awareness of the incredible value of asking ourselves “what have we learned from this experience.” It is the trowel we need in our personal growth toolbox.

Arthur Brooks tells us that whenever something in your life has unraveled, pull out a journal and write down what’s happening and how you feel about it. Come back a week later and write down how you are feeling about it now after some time has passed. Are you able to see a silver lining yet? He tells us to revisit a breakdown in a month, in 6 months and even a year later. Was there a breakthrough?

That old adage “time will tell” rings very true when we take Arthur’s advice to heart. What have we learned from that one heartbreaking experience or major adversity that has enriched our life or opened our eyes in entirely new ways? How has it shaped us?

It is this self-reflection, done over time, that helps us with fundamental building blocks for building a life we truly want. We tell ourselves stories to make meaning of our experiences. But the first draft of our stories is often fraught with too many emotional cliff notes. These jagged first drafts keep us stuck in the painful parts of our stories.

We need time for each experience to fully develop, just like a photo taken with an instamatic camera. It is over time, with edits and re-writes that we grow into what life had to teach us through our experiences. Arthur’s simple journaling exercise is how we plot our changes and observe our development.

Personal growth and self discovery is a process. Of course the events in our life have impact and shape us in ways that we may not even realize. Some of our best lessons have a very long germination period. Getting curious about how we are growing is a fresh new perspective to adopt.

Anyone who loves gardening will tell you that patience is a virtue when it comes to planting seeds, nurturing them and providing the right environment for them to survive and then thrive. This organic growing process is the one we want to emulate for ourselves and our life experiences. We can be much more proactive and intentional about how life events impact our personal growth. It requires patience with ourselves as well as the process.

The beauty in this shift in how we approach our personal growth and self discovery is that we can begin at any time. We can start small and work our way deeper into our library of life experiences for more insight and enrichment later.

Choose just one recent event in your life that felt like you might be breaking ground for something new to emerge.

Did a friend offer you a reframing for a struggle you are having and suddenly you saw a whole new path forward?

Maybe you stopped to realize that the same old approach to a recurring problem just isn’t working and you decided to change how you react and respond.

Were you facing a very difficult decision having to choose between two appealing opportunities? Were you able to feel your way intuitively into making the best choice for you at the time?

We get these little nudges for growth spurts almost daily. Anytime we can stop and do a little check-in about the stories we are telling ourselves, we are acting like skillful gardeners attending to our personal growth and self discovery.

Give This Some Thought:

Take some time to think about how telling yourself a different story would have impacted your emotions and experience over time by reflecting on a meaningful event in your life.

Ethan Kross, author of Shift, encourages us to ask family members and friends to help us see ourselves through their eyes.

My younger brother does this often for me when we talk about our childhood experiences. Where I see myself as a frightened ten year old, he saw me as a strong and courageous big sister who protected him. This fresh perspective helps me go back and edit a childhood experience with more context and nuance than I had access to as a kid.

Over the years, with his help, I have been able to see the tender shoots of my strengths pushing hard through a few childhood experiences, just the that tight little bud on my favorite tree. I was emerging; I just didn’t see it.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Dr. Becky Kennedy’s parenting book is also helpful in understanding what gets in our own way when it comes to relationships and emotions. All too often we believe what we were told as kids and have made behaviors part of our identity. This book will free you up to see all that is Good Inside of you too.

This book is a game-changer. Instead of telling someone that what they are feeling or experiencing is wrong or not appropriate (which leads to telling ourselves unhelpful stories), we simply validate their true experience.

What Marcus Learned from His Mother May 9, 2025 In this episode, Ryan Holiday shares insights from the global pandemic experience that reshaped his life in profound ways. It is the tail end of this episode where he asks thought provoking questions that will help you rewrite better stories for your own life. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily-stoic/id1430315931?i=1000706718469

A Coaching Tree & Board of Advisors

Have you shifted the image of your past experiences and lessons learned into that of your personal greenhouse library, chock full of invaluable reference material?

If so, you are ready to add a Coaching Tree and a Board of Advisors.

Ryan Holiday, author of the Daily Stoic, has long been a strong proponent of a coaching tree. In fact, he dedicates a chapter in his latest book, Right Thing, Right Now to this very concept. Ryan takes a powerful working model for a coaching tree from professional sports teams and adapts it for our personal use.

It is so easy for us to visualize all the branches of support that professional athletes have to help them be their best. We see them on the sidelines on game day – the head coach, assistant coaches, trainers and teammates. We may be less cognizant of the many others who support the athletes, but they have an integral role too. Physical therapists, nutritionists, sports psychologists and family members are all part of the coaching team that provides daily support to bring out a player’s best.

Professional coaches and athletes depend upon coaching trees to foster growth and excellence. The benefits go both ways — a good coach not only offers guidance and guardrails, he also learns from each player, their unique talents and potential and how they integrate what he teaches. These insights deepen his knowledge and hone his skills for working with other players.

Think of the coach as the roots of a tree, growing deeper and stronger with each athlete and assistant coach he is developing. Then visualize how each player and assistant coach takes the knowledge, wisdom and discipline from the coach and branches out on their own. Now you have the concept and visuals image for a coaching tree.

Ryan Holiday recognizes the invaluable interplay that comes from a student/teacher relationship: learning and discovery go both ways. Adam Grant also knows this to be true — that the best way to learn something is to teach it.

When we create our own personal coaching tree, we amplify our potential for fast-tracking self discovery and personal growth. We practice our life and relationship skills, putting in the daily reps in diverse ways. We keep our core operating systems (our brains and bodies) well maintained and updated. Personal growth and self discovery are not a once and done process, but rather a continual lifetime of learning and growing — just like a tree.

Grow Your Own Coaching Tree:

Who has been a rock solid role model for you? Someone who actually practices what they preach, who leads by example?

Who have you turned to when you needed help with a specific situation — someone that you know has had a similar experience and somehow came through it stronger and more authentic as a result?

Who do you wish you could be more like – that one person that possesses signature strengths that you wish you had?

When we ask ourselves these types of questions, we begin to see that we are naturally drawn to certain people for specific attributes that we want to foster in our own lives. Just like pro athletes, we become an amalgamation of the people we admire and who inspire us. We become a well-rounded person by drawing on the diverse strengths of our favorite mentors, coaches and role models.

Ryan Holiday emphasizes that a coaching tree becomes an evergreen “give and take” organic process for personal growth and paying it forward. We take what we need from our role models and personalize it for us. We just don’t “copy and paste” what they do — we make it our own. As we become more skilled and practiced with these new attributes, others will come to us — and ask us for help. We pass on not only what we have learned from our mentors – but also how we personalized it. We “take” what we need for self improvement and we “give” tips and tools to others discover what works best for them.

Here’s a real life example and one that you will find relatable: A friend called me when she had some very difficult personal decisions to make for her spouse with a very serious health issue. She knew I had some real life experience with tough choices that require a delicate balance between practicality and big emotions. I became her sounding board, a grounded friend who could help her sort out the pieces and make the best decision for both herself and her husband’s long term special needs. This didn’t happen in a day — it was months and even years of long conversations, of listening and learning, of being honest about doubts and second guesses and lots of empathy, validation and reassurance that each choice was a building block for her making the right decisions each step of the way.

My friend grew in remarkable ways through this very difficult life challenge. She not only handled one of life’s most emotionally tender realities with grace, compassion and love, she learned a lot about herself along the way. She survived — and she thrived. Today she leads support groups, she offers wise, personalized counsel to others facing similar long term care situations, and she has championed changes in memory care facilities in her community.

Guess what she does for me and has been for years — she forwards my Daily Gummy of Wisdom to a her big circle of friends every single day, along with her own insights. She is paying it forward and causing a ripple effect that is making a meaningful difference for more people than we can ever know.

Spend some time reflecting on the people who have shaped your life, especially during times when you faced adversity, golden opportunities and pivotal moments. Who provided encouragement, saw your inner strengths and hidden potential; who listened, validated and reminded you of just how far you’ve come? These are prime examples of those you want perched in your coaching tree.

In his chapter entitled “Grow a Coaching Tree” Ryan Holiday offers this poignant insight: “Generosity is the seed of a great coaching tree.”

Brene Brown reminds us that we can be most generous when we recognize that just like us, others are doing the best they can with the information, tools and resources they have at that moment. Ryan invites us to remember our own challenging experiences and those who showed up at just the right time when we needed the most generous of interpretations — and the generosity of their wise guidance.

Be intentional and discerning as you grow your coaching tree.

Some Food for Thought:

The coaching tree image helps us to see with greater clarity the work we have to do alone, the scaffolding we get from others to help us in this process — and how we can return the favor by helping others.

We have long been told that when we change, others change too.

This is not always viewed as positive however. People like us to stay the same because they believe they can accurately predict how we will behave and react – and they can make contingency plans to cope with what they have come to expect. These contingency plans are coping skills, protective armor and behavioral modifications.

As a result, when we change and make significant self improvements, others have to change their predictions about us. All those old tricks of the trade people once relied on to “meet you where you were” are no longer needed. In fact, others who still resort to shape shifting, conflict avoidance or cognitive dissonance may stunt the very growth we are pursuing.

Even when our self improvement changes make us easier to live with, it takes a long while for others to trust it. There’s a big gap between the old you and this new & improved version of you. It takes a leap of faith to bridge it — and yes, it requires other people to make some changes too.

This is precisely why we shouldn’t do this work in the dark.

We need all the help we can get when we are fostering personal growth and self awareness. Just as a young tree needs rich soil, sunlight, water and wind, we too need a few scoops of miracle grow and some scaffolding to help us get grounded and sprouted.

When we embark on self improvement and self discovery plans, we should tell our family and friends so it is not a secret. After all, we’d tell them if we were trying to cut back on daily desserts or wanted to stop drinking alcohol. Being open up our commitment to change, helps others support us in meaningful ways. It also helps them re-program their predictions about us. That’s a win-win.

Add a Board of Advisors:

When we proactively seek help with the changes we want to make, we bring our intentions out into the light of day. Just like a tree cannot grow with the right conditions and nutrients, the same is true for us. We need a good support system. Ethan Kross, author of Shift, encourages us to create a board of advisors.

Just like a board of directors for a company or non-profit, we need some diversity in our personal board of advisors. While it is very helpful to have like-minded folks who are also committed to personal growth, Ethan reminds us there is no “one size fits all approach”. There are a plethora of resources, tools and modalities that can be personalized to match what works best for us — just like a physical fitness plan.

In a recent Happiness Lab podcast conversation with Dr. Laurie Santos, Ethan Kross shared the importance of having a personal board of directors to help us when we get stuck, noting that strong emotions and self doubts can derail us.

We need friends and family members who can help us get a fresh perspective, pull us out of a rumination cycle and reframe our situation. These are the folks that should be on our personal board of directors.

Who are you going to call? Not ghostbusters! You are going to call an emotional advisory board member.

We all get emotionally triggered – and sometimes in a very big way. It keeps us stuck and pulls us back into old reactionary patterns of behavior. Having that one friend who understands and validates us when we are triggered is the first line of defense. It takes a long time and lots of practice to lessen the tug of emotional triggers and it is also some of the most freeing work you’ll ever do. Enlist someone who has done this work and has great success. Put that person on your board of directors.

All too often, we get stuck in some one-track thinking. We know we need a different vantage point, but our own strong emotions or self doubts, just keep us gridlocked. Do you have a friend who is really good at reframing your current situation and helping you see what you are missing? Someone who flips a situation from negative to positive as though she had a magic wand? People who have deliberately worked on breaking free from the auto-pilot of our brain’s negative default mode are the best advisors for reframing and fresh perspectives. Who do you know readily views a situation from many different points of view? That’s person is a great candidate for your board of directors.

Have you ever asked yourself “What am I missing?” There are times when we are exhausted from all the effort we put in, but we come to the realization that we are not making any progress. In these situations, we may have a big blindspot and an accompanying lack of self awareness. So we find ourselves asking — “why does this keep happening to me or why can’t I catch a break?” Adam Grant offers sound advice for times like this: recruit a “disagreeable giver” for your board of directors.

A “disagreeable giver” is our challenge friend. Chances are you already have one of these people in your life — but you haven’t tapped into the gifts they offer. You may even find yourself resisting the good points they make.

“Disagreeable givers” respectfully and thoughtfully challenge our ideas and opinions – even (and especially) when it might be uncomfortable. Their goal is to help us see our blind spots and move us to better decision making. A caring challenge friend wants the best for us; they are often tired of seeing us so exhausted from our hamster wheel. Challenge friends are not afraid of having hard conversations; they know your life will get easier once you have a breakthrough. Fill that spot on your board of directors with a trustworthy challenge friend.

There will be times when we need a specialist for whatever life has thrown at us. Someone who has had a similar experience and is on the other side of it. It might be a health crisis, a divorce, the loss of a loved one or dealing with family estrangements. This is when we need someone on our board of advisors who has a working knowledge of the many complexities of a shared experience. What we get from people who “have been there” is what we would find in a support group. Yet it is even better because it is personalized empathy, care and healing.

When life hands you a deeply emotional adversity, be intentional about who can best help you. Recognize that you are fragile, your thinking is clouded, and you don’t have deep inner resources to draw on. You need someone who can go deep with you and not drown in your emotions. Who can help you weather this storm and keep you afloat til you are able to do it alone. That’s the specialist you want on your advisory board in the hard times.

There’s one more advisory board member you most definitely want to add — someone who makes you laugh, who loves to play, who brings a lightness and freshness with ease. Who brings out your inner child? Who is that one friend that makes you feel like a 7 year old – running with arms outstretched towards each other laughing with pure delight? Give that person a special seat on your advisory board. Call them often, go on adventures and collect joy.

Growing Your Team:

This may be the first time in our human evolution that we become intentional about the lifelong process of learning and growing. Over the past twenty years, bits and pieces of knowledge and wisdom were floating around, but hadn’t yet congealed into the solid, science-backed insights we now have.

Now we know that emotional intelligence is a uniquely human feature. But we didn’t know that it was a foundational component of our human operating system, so we didn’t integrate it. We floundered for far too long, misguided because our core GPS wasn’t installed. Emotions are data – they point us in the right direction and help us get more out of life.

We are now in a fascinating experimental stage – where we get to play around with the full installation of emotional intelligence and make incredible discoveries about ourselves and others.

Rather than fumbling around and feeling unsure about our growth spurts, our hidden potential and how we stunt our growth – we can build a coaching program. We will get the most out of these new science-based breakthroughs by growing a strong coaching tree and developing a personalized board of advisors.

We will fast track our new knowledge, tools and skills by learning from each other and building on each other’s insights.

By getting very intentional about the 5 people we spend the most time with and how we show up with each other, we can shift our families and circles of friends into a lifetime of healthier, more meaningful personal growth and self discovery.

NOTEWORTHY RESOURCES:

Ryan Holiday’s blog post This Is The Accomplishment That Matters Most:
https://ryanholiday.net/this-is-the-accomplishment-that-matters-most/

Check out this short video from Adam Grant about having a challenge network:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T79PZvUUd4&t=69s

Check out this episode with Ethan Kross: Harnessing the People Around Us to Feel Happier https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/id1474245040?i=1000697654175

The Stories We Tell Ourselves – Part 2

Grab some paper and a pen. Make a list of the many roles you have in your life. Start with an ordinary day — and then expand it out to a week, then a month. Be thorough and thoughtful about the many places you show up and play a part. Start with your immediate family then expand the lens to work and your community.

You may be a spouse and a parent, an employee or entrepreneur, a sibling, a grandparent, aunt or uncle, a best friend, a youth soccer coach, a golfer or triathlete, a musician in the local orchestra, a training buddy, a book club member, a podcaster, a creator, a caregiver, a community volunteer. Chances are the list is much longer than you think.

No wonder we are so complex, fascinating and mind-boggling all at once! We wear a lot of hats and juggle many responsibilities and have a host of hobbies and interests. But wait — there’s more!

Did you know that embedded in all the different roles we have, we also have a specific identity associated with each one. These multiple identities are like the unique blueprints we bring to the roles we play. There is a lot of nuance in these multiple identities because we draw on different characteristics of who we are to highlight the ones that best fit the role we are in.

Ryan Holiday tells us that a great tool for helping us show up as the best version of ourselves in any given situation is to ask: What is my role right now?

This simple question quickly crystallizes our responsibility and our strengths that we bring to the table in the role we now play. Our identity for that specific role becomes the template and the filter for how we show up. It is our unique blueprint.

Ryan’s poignant question grounds by reminding us of the identity we assume as a parent, a spouse, a work colleague, sibling or friend. When we connect with our role, we also connect with our goal. That identity we bring to each role becomes the framework and guardrails for how we show up.

If we fail to ask this question about the role we play in any given situation, we may unconsciously default to another of our roles and bring the wrong attributes to the table. We’ve all done this and in hindsight, we readily recognize we played a part in the clumsy, confusing way things unfolded.

Mel Robbins tells us that we all have an inner 8 year old that can show up unchecked, disregulated and unruly — and if we let that character step in to a role well beyond his or her job description and matching skills, that’s a recipe for disaster.

Most of us never stop to reflect on the many roles we have in our lives and the blueprint we have curated to help us do our best in each one. And here’s a surprising revelation – if we don’t consciously develop a strong job description for each role we play, we are going to default to the inner child quite often. This is often referred to as our “unconscious” self – and that’s where so many of the old stories we tell ourselves become the script for knee jerk reactions.

Knee jerk emotional reactions come from the past. Old stories we’ve told ourselves trap us in our amygdala; it links our current emotions to old memories. Which is precisely why we can act like an 8 year instead of a rational, mature adult. We viscerally feel our emotions and our amygdala supplies all the data we need to remind us of past times when we felt just like that — and underscores a feeling of helplessness (a lack of personal agency). When we were 8, we didn’t have skills and tools to help us understand and regulate our emotions. We only had the warning signs and basic reactions. We hadn’t yet developed our strong sense of self and built reliance on our own agency.

Ryan’s question prompts us to remember that we are no longer a helpless, overwhelmed kid. We have adult roles now and the ability to shift into the executive function of our brains. That one simple question flips the switch in our brain — and gets us running on the right track — our executive function. We can catch ourselves before we shrink ourselves to age 8 and pivot to our better equipped grown up self.

How does this dovetail with our roles and our identities? Well, we develop blueprints for how we want to show up in the various roles we have. We even start this process as kids — when we tell ourselves that when we grow up, we will parent differently or we will handle life’s challenges more responsibly. Those blueprints help us craft the identities we rely on for each role.

As we move through our lives, we update those identities much like we update our resumes. As we become more skilled in any of our roles, we add and subtract from the identity we’ve created for each role. We are always a “work in progress” and we thrive when we have a very strong sense of self and tap into our personal agency frequently. We get to choose how we conduct ourselves in each role — and we feel good when our emotions match our actions.

This is where we can pair Ryan’s question – “what is my role right now” with Arthur Brook’s question: “How do I want to be feeling right now?” This is how we sync up our roles with our identity blueprints and our emotional and behavioral responses. We play the “match” game.

We can cross-pollinate our identity blueprints that we use in the outside world to build stronger and more reliable identities for our family relationships. If you stop to think about it, you readily recognize how reliant you are on your identity at work or out in your community. That identity provides the guardrails that keep you from losing your cool, having a meltdown or curling into a ball. Your actions and responses match the identity you crafted.

Most of us are less clear about our identities in the roles we play within our families. We drop our guard at home with the people we love the most – and in that process, we drop the very guardrails that would help us bring our better selves to the most important roles we have.

Home and family is the one place where we should feel the safest, where we should feel seen, heard and valued. Yet our family relationships are the one place where we have most of our day to day conflicts. Could it be a simple mismatch between the role we play and the actions and behaviors we bring to that role?

Dr. Becky Kennedy has coined the phrase “sturdy leader” for the role of a parent. She uses the analogy of an airline pilot to give us a strong mental image of what a sturdy leader looks and acts like. A competent pilot does not come frantically racing out of the cockpit freaking out about turbulence. We expect a competent pilot to tell us the truth about what is happening, assure us that all efforts are being taken to keep us safe and offering the actions we can take to help the collective effort.

Is this how we show up in our family relationships — as sturdy leaders – those calm, competent pilots?

Are you laughing to yourself right now now? I think most of us can agree that is not our “go to” when we experience emotional turbulence in the kitchen cockpit.

What usually happens at home is a bad case of emotional contagion. We match the emotions of our kids, our spouses, our siblings or parents. We are playing the wrong match game.

The better match game is the adult version. The one where we can readily identify our role, how we “want” to be feeling and we match our responses, behaviors and actions to that blueprint. We become sturdy leaders at home just like we do at work or in public spaces.

The basic blueprint of sturdy leader is a great template for our roles at home. Who wouldn’t want to have a sturdy leader as a parent or a partner? Think of all the skills and personal attributes you bring to the workplace and repurpose them for your roles at home. Add them to your identity blueprint. Are you good in a crisis at work? Do you work well under pressure? Are you a wizard at time management and effective delegation? Can you rally the troops? Do you build a strong team by tapping into the key strengths of each person? Do you provide breaks to reset and recharge when others are on overload?

There is yet another emotional and psychological tool that can be utilized in meaningful ways when we are nailing down our identity blueprints for our family relationships. It is “distancing”. When we are able to zoom out and get a broader perspective, we see the bigger picture. Distancing is a great tool for helping us to pivot to sturdy leader. When we can step out of the fray and turn on our executive function, we often realize we already possess the very skills we need to bring our better selves home.

Distancing helps us see the calm and competent pilot we are at work or out in our community. We show up like this with ease – consistently. As James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, would tell us we have deployed the compounding effect of consistency and frequent practice in the workplace. We practice keeping our emotions in check and our responses mature – day in and day out, several times each day.

Now just think about the difference that would make in your roles at home. All this time, you have been missing the golden opportunity to put in countless reps every day to become a sturdy leader! Practice doesn’t make us perfect, but it surely makes us more skillful, resilient, reliable and easier to live with.

Give yourself a honest evaluation about how you show up at work – and how you show up at home. Are you matching other’s emotions or are you matching your role with your identity blueprint, your skills sets and the goal you have for that role?

Remember that your old emotional database can pull you back into outdated reference material. You want to be operating on better, current data with greater agency and a strong sense of self.

Want some extra motivation for crafting sturdy leader identities for the roles that you play in your life? Just imagine helping those you love amass an incredible library of reference material for the stories they tell themselves. Who wouldn’t want the people they love to immersed in possibility and potential instead of limiting stories about who they are and will become?

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Check out Dr. Becky Kennedy’s book, website and app to discover science-backed parenting tools for raising emotionally intelligent, resilient and empowered kids

Check out Ryan Holiday’s collection of books . Right Thing, Right Now is his latest. The Obstacle is the Way is great for seeing opportunities where we blindly believe we forever stuck. If you are a parent — check out Daily Dad.

Mel Robbins’ latest book is quickly becoming a fast-track resource for letting go – and stepping into your own agency. Let others be thernselves, especially family, and Let You be your best self. This book is so relatable, you won’t be able to put it down.

If you want to fast track what is packed into Mel’s new book, take a listen to this We Can Do Hard Things podcast episode. Mel and host Glennon Doyle crack open the book, the theory and relatable real life stories. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-can-do-hard-things/id1564530722?i=1000682368717

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Some of the most fabricated stories we will ever hear are the ones we tell ourselves. They keep us spellbound — holding our attention so completely that we can barely focus on anything else.

If you have ever doubted that you possess a wild imagination and a flair for creative writing, look no further than the many stories that you tell yourself during the course of one normal day.

We are so skilled at crafting these stories that often we don’t even realize we’ve actually taken the time to pen them with invisible ink in our minds. Sometimes it even feels as though we’ve used permanent markers to write them. The stories we tell ourselves impact our lives in ways we can’t even imagine.

During the course of one ordinary day, we can tell ourselves more stories than a two year old demands at bedtime.

The alarm goes off and you hit the snooze button, telling yourself that 15 more minutes in bed won’t make a big difference. Later when you are frantically searching for your car keys, chugging coffee and yelling at everyone to hurry up and get in the car, you create another story. Now you tell yourself are undisciplined for hitting that snooze button yet again; when will you learn and why can’t you ever catch a break? Next thing you know, your car’s GPS announces there are traffic delays on your route and presto, your inner critic becomes a personal ghost writer. You can almost hear the melodramatic music accompanying the litany of ways you will be forever doomed to failure as your inner critics pounds those typewriter keys.

Those early morning story lines can become a snowball rolling down a hill. Let’s face it, once the inner critic takes over, the plot doesn’t change much and there is very little room for character development. The stories we tell ourselves can block us from the very change we so desperately want.

We are natural born storytellers, each and every one of us. Our brains and bodies are these phenomenal meaning making machines. It is a core function of our brains to make sense of the world by constructing narratives and understanding based on our past history and our unique perspectives. We tell ourselves the story we need to hear in order to process and integrate our lived experience.

When we are crafting those stories we tell ourselves, we can find ourselves rummaging through the old card catalog files in our brain’s database looking for the genre that matches how we feel. Picture a dimly lit basement in an old library with sections labeled “Scaredy Cat” “Underachiever” “Timid Wallflower” “Too Much” or “Born Loser”. (I hope that imagery makes you laugh – It’s intended to help you get the bigger picture.)

If we keep going back to the same old resources as the basis for the stories we tell ourselves, then our series is not going to evolve. And there will be little room for our own character development. This is how we get stuck in the stories of our own making.

How often have you read a book or heard a podcast where someone shares just how stuck they were in an old narrative? They let a strong identity from a past chapter of their life take the lead role in all their unfolding newer stories. Once an addict, always an addict. Once a lost soul, always a lost soul.

Take a few minutes right now to think about all those things you believed were true about who you were as a child – and how you have shattered those limiting beliefs by all that you have actually done and accomplished over the years. Were you told you weren’t athletic but now you run races, play competitive tennis or belong to a local hiking club? Were you told you weren’t very smart, yet you have earned a degree or certification in a field that fascinates you?

Those limiting narratives stored in our dimly lit library are so outdated. It is mindlessly going back to that old reference material that limits our ability to shift our narratives. Of course we have changed — and so should the script for the stories we tell ourselves.

The proof is in the pudding.

The very same set of circumstances on any given day will end up with strikingly different stories. Many of the stories we tell ourselves depend greatly on how we are feeling in the moment and our ability to effectively regulate our emotions. The stories we tell ourselves are rather like a “choose your own adventure” book. There are endless possibilities.

We go in search of data from our past. We simply copy, cut and paste all the old familiar plots into the present story we are creating.

We do our best to make sense of what is happening right now pulling from past experiences – and frequently without any editing or updated research.

We even let our inner critic tell the story without a single challenge. This is precisely how we let something from our past foreshadow what might happen in the future – by staying in an old narrative that was never revised.

You landed that dream job but you tell yourself you will likely be unsuccessful, just like the last dream job you had. You make a new friend but you predict that over time, this friendship will also fade away like so many others. You pursue a new hobby but you tell yourself you will never master it like the others.

Not only are our brains meaning making machines, they are also prediction machines — and these two go hand in hand. If we don’t update old narratives, then we also limit our ability to accurately make better predictions.

Even if we don’t intentionally go in and update our old databases, we are ever-changing. Each experience we have shapes us in some way. We are constantly taking in new information, expanding our inner libraries and making genuine progress in many areas of our lives. The reality is that we don’t often flip the switch and explore the newest additions to our database.

Just imagine what incredible material you might find there! Dr. Ellen Langer, author of the Mindful Body, tells us that when we stay current with all the changes and experiences we have, we vastly expand our inner library. We can make any decision the right decision, because we have viewfinders that are more like kaleidoscopes than microscopes.

Dr. Langer reminds us that we have no way of knowing which was the optimum decision – staying in the old job or pursuing the new dream job. The pivot is in making the decision the right one. Was there something we could have done differently in the old job that would have restimulated our passion for it? How we will go into this new job — with a better prediction for its outcome, supported with new approaches to the opportunity? Either choice then becomes right choice.

The best way to help yourself become better at telling yourself stories that support you in positive ways is update your inner library resources. It is two fold — you need to update those old narratives and limiting beliefs and you need to get more creative with your predictions.

There is one more thing that requires our attention — we can work toward getting more comfortable with uncertainty. None of us knows what the future holds. We can stay gridlocked in our fears about the unknown or we can reflect on just how much uncertainty we have already experienced. Not only did we survive uncertainty, we grew through it!

When we were kids we had no way of knowing what our adult lives would look like. When we became parents, we had no idea what our babies would teach us and how remarkably unique each child would be. We learned to drive cars without power steering and we used paper maps for road trips. Today we drive cars with more technology built in than we could have ever imagined. We once took paper checks to a brick and mortar bank to deposit and get cash. Today, our phones have replaced every aspect of cash transactions.

We are not afraid of change in so many aspects of our daily lives. The last frontier to be explored when it comes to change and uncertainty are in the stories we tell ourselves.

When we tell ourselves better stories — chock full of diverse, colorful and rich real life experiences in our well lit, expansive inner database, we will live with more self awareness and creativity. The possibilities will be endless.

NOTEWORTHY RESOURCES:

Dr. Ellen Langer is an engaging and dynamic person who views life through a kaleidoscope lens. She opens us up to how remarkable it is to live life in a constant state of curiosity.

Get out of your head and into your life by harnessing that inner voice/inner critic that blindsides us time and again. You can also listen to Ethan Kross discuss his book on the Huberman Lab podcast.

Check out this Podcast episode with Dr. Marc Brackett and Dr. Becky Kennedy. Even if you aren’t a parent, what they discuss will expand your knowledge of emotional integration and regulation for the stories you tell yourself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6KYwizMW94

Daily Supplements Make a Difference

Do you take daily supplements to support your physical health? Most of us do and we know that they make a meaningful contribution to overall wellbeing. It’s nearly impossible to get all of our vitamins and minerals from our food alone; thank goodness for supplements and the ease with which we can give our bodies and brains the boost they need.

The same is true for supplements that support our psychological, emotional, cognitive and relationship health — which is why I launched my Daily Gummy of Wisdom over a year ago. My commitment to publishing a Daily Gummy everyday was recently refueled by Ryan Holiday, author of the Daily Stoic. Ryan shared that reading a “page-a-day” book is an invaluable source of encouragement and support for our ongoing personal growth and self discovery.

Having that daily practice of reading a “page a day” of words of wisdom, insight and inspiration helps us to get our day off on the right foot – and can serve as a reminder of our intention to do a little better than we did the day before.

As James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, reminds us – it is the small, consistent practices we commit to each day that compound over time and yield remarkable transformational benefits. I can attest to the fact that reading several “page a day” books over the past few years has had a big impact on me in the most positive ways.

Over the past year, I have been delightfully surprised by the number of times that a reader would reach out to me and share how a Daily Gummy of Wisdom landed at just the right time for them. I have marveled at how many of the Daily Gummies were forwarded with personal commentary revealing just how relatable they are.

Today I am going to unpack what I am discovering as I put in to “daily practice” what I am deriving from my daily gummies of wisdom and insight.

A Daily Gummy About Boundaries:

I surely wish that I had learned about the many benefits of boundaries decades ago. What an indispensable tool for navigating relationships and experiences in a safe and practical way. Boundaries are just like the guardrails on a highway — they help us all navigate safely.

My “go to” approach in the past was to sugarcoat or disguise the fact that someone had crossed a line in our relationship. If I had been disrespected or a behavior was unacceptable, instead of addressing it directly, I would tell a story about a friend who was struggling with a similar issue. My blind hope was that the person who had overstepped a personal boundary with me would see themselves in that story and self-correct. Not only was this approach totally ineffective, it merely created a detour around an important issue. No one saw themselves in those stories. It was the equivalent of building an off ramp to nowhere.

The big pivot in setting and holding boundaries came to me when I learned that boundaries do not require the other person to do anything. I had been going about it all wrong. A boundary is the easiest way to let another person know what is acceptable to us and how we wish to be treated.

When others are having trouble being respectful or controlling their behavior, a boundary is how we say “I see you are having difficulty navigating this, let me help you with that.”

Brene Brown reminds us that “clear is kind”. Reframing a boundary as a clear and kind guardrail for relationships is a game changer. Being clear about unacceptable behavior and the action we will take if it occurs, puts us in the driver’s seat. We can navigate to a safer place and safeguard what matters most to us. It does not require the other person to do anything — but it does provide an on-ramp if they choose to take it.

Very few of us grew up learning about this invaluable tool. We were given ultimatums, threatened with a punishment, or told to go sit in isolation and figure things out by ourselves. Even today, many people believe that these outdated approaches are boundaries, but they are merely off ramps to nowhere. No one makes forward progress.

Boundaries are how we help ourselves and others build healthy relationships with mutual respect and clarity in how we communicate with each other. Clear is kind and consistency is strong reinforcement. That’s the materials that build healthy boundaries.

This Daily Gummy reinforces the ease with which we can help others navigate our relationships safely. Using clear and consistent boundaries is a much more productive way than skirting the real issue. Look for this Daily Gummy in your inbox on July 31, 2024.

A Daily Gummy about Perceived Weaknesses:

Anyone who is familiar with the Enneagram or a skills assessment personality test, will attest to the fact that we often view our weaknesses as fatal flaws. Imagine my relief when Adam Grant, author of Think Again, recently shared that we should “rethink” our attitude towards weaknesses. Adam’s research reveals that our weaknesses are often just overused strengths.

As a reformed people pleaser, I confess that my weakness was in fact a much over-used strength; one I learned very well in childhood. I was always told to “be the helper”. I was an over-achiever in the helper category, and by all means “over-used” the strength. The problem with helping too much is we make others feel incapable, can contribute to a chronic condition of learned helpless, or become enablers. It was through Ian Cron and his Typology podcast series that I discovered we can turn our weaknesses into strengths with healthy reframing. Reformed helpers can become coaches, mentors, cheerleaders and field guides for others.

Take some time to reflect on what you perceive as a “weakness” and see if you too can recognize that it might be an overused strength. If you are hyper-vigilant, you may take all the fun of spontaneity by doing a deep dive into risk assessment. If you are prone to perfection, you might wear yourself and others out with your attention to detail – when “good enough” might actually be perfect. If you perceive yourself as a fierce protector, you might actually be going to battle for someone who prefers to handle things on their own.

Some additional food for thought: It is not uncommon for us to assume that what appears to be a strength in others must be a weakness in us. We look around at others and compare ourselves — often wishing we could be a little more like a friend who seems forever fearless and takes big risks; or the one who is highly educated and speaks with authority in their field. Yet the reality is that our own perceived “weaknesses” might be hidden strengths in a variety of circumstances.

For most of my life, I was envious of friends who held very strong opinions and spoke with authority about those opinions. I believed that my inability to put a stake in a strong opinion was a weakness of mine. It was only in recent years that I came to appreciate the gift of being open-minded and innately curious. I thought my lack of ability to form and hold a strong opinion was a weakness; Malcolm Gladwell and Dr. Ellen Langer showed me a different perspective.

Malcolm Gladwell has long been a proponent of holding our opinions loosely. While he is comfortable with having an opinion he always adds the disclaimer — “for now” or “subject to change”. Malcolm has reflected on his own lived experiences as well as our collective ones and stands at the ready to pivot and re-assess — because change is the only constant. He often shares colorful stories of the many reasons he has changed his opinions or theories on things. He’s actually made a career out of it.

Dr. Ellen Langer, Harvard professor of psychology, and lifelong researcher of mindfulness, fully embraces her natural curiosity and ability to curate a plethora of opinions on any subject. In fact, she encourages us to greatly expand our own capacity to do the same. She considers this an update to our incredible brains and wants us to tap into its full creative capabilities. She invites us to practice becoming more open-minded by steeping ourselves in a variety of new experiences, having deep conversations with people who are different from us, read a new genre, discover new music or artists and challenge our own long-held opinions. I often envision Dr. Langer using a kaleidoscope as her lens on life.

So my takeaway from both Malcolm Gladwell and Dr. Ellen Langer was that my nature is not to form strong opinions – and that is more than okay. Viewing my “weakness” as a strength now enables me to engage in richer conversations with others who do hold strong opinions – for I have much to learn from listening to understand. Instead of being envious, I am now embracing curiosity and leaning in so as to cultivate the raw data my brain craves.

Watch for this Daily Gummy on weaknesses as overused strengths to drop on August 14, 2024.

We all unravel — sometimes it is a mid-life unraveling and other times it is a small, everyday of unraveling where we can’t seem to catch a break.

The unraveling that naturally occurs in life is yet another example of “I wish I knew then what I know now.” How different we might approach an unraveling if we were taught to pay attention to wear and tear in our lives, just as we are with our cars, our appliances, our clothes.

What if we were to reframe “unraveling” as a “revealing”? When we hit a breaking point or rock bottom, we take stock of what isn’t working in a much more realistic and accepting way. We can no longer ignore the places where we are coming apart at the seams. It becomes the time to mend our ways.

Perhaps one of the most transformational pivots about the psychological tool of reframing is how quickly it changes our perspective and allows us to see what had been long hidden in plain sight. What does the unraveling reveal to us? Now unraveling becomes a reset opportunity,

When we view an unraveling as a revealing exercise, we are able to meet these moments in our lives with greater courage; with more curiosity and less fear or shame. We can see the “wear and tear” we are putting on ourselves and our relationships with more honesty and clarity through the lens of self-reflection.

When we unravel, we do open up. Like it or not, it is the opening up to both reality AND possibility; it is as natural as this milkweed breaking open to reveal its seeds. Our own seeds of awareness move us toward acceptance of the places where we have room to grow or need improvement. We may need to ask some hard questions, but it is far better to do that than blindly wait for hard times.

We can become better at reevaluating our “unraveling” moments as a chance to discover what is being revealed to us when we recognize signs of wear and tear. We can also become more skillful at supporting others in their moments of unraveling. We can use the tool of reframing “coming apart at the seams or hitting rock bottom” to help others explore what is being revealed to them. We can become good listeners and strong support systems — for ourselves and each other.

This unraveling Daily Gummy was published on June 28, 2024. I heard from several friends how helpful this reframing concept was at that very moment. This is how the seeds of change not only get spread around – they get planted and watered as they are passed along.

The Daily Gummy of Wisdom is my daily newsletter that pops into your inbox each day bright and early. No scrolling necessary. It’s a page-a-day supplement for your personal growth, self discovery, emotional and relationship health. Click this link to sign up for the no-cost supplement to support your well being: https://inspired-new-horizons.ck.page/3381cf137f

Click this link to get the Daily Gummy delivered to your inbox:https://inspired-new-horizons.ck.page/3381cf137f

Corks Rising

When I first started blogging about personal growth 8 years ago, I had a glass jar on my kitchen windowsill with a cork bobbing in water. It was my touchstone to remind myself that each of us plays an important role in lifting each other’s cork. We need help to stay afloat.

This morning, I read something in Hidden Potential by Adam Grant, that transported me back to that moment in time. It felt surreal and spine-tingling to be in two places at once. I was at the very beginning of my self discovery journey placing that cork in the jar –AND — I was also fully present in my apartment taking stock of just how far I have truly come on that personal growth journey. A smile stretched across my face as I took stock of how my own cork has risen over 8 years — and most importantly, how so many others’ corks have also risen.

At the onset of my personal growth journey, I felt alone in the work – one cork in a small glass jar. Today the massive ocean is full of corks and I am merely one of many. I could not be happier with the company I am keeping.

For over 20 years, Brene Brown has been planting seeds of the very work we are deeply steeped in today. She braved the wilderness back then, schlepping her first book from the trunk of her car and mustering courage to give a Ted Talk on shame and vulnerability. She did not have a crystal ball to guide her — she just followed her heart and her calling, blazing a path and planting seeds.

There is a Greek proverb that reminds us that wise men plant seeds of trees, the shade of which they will never sit under, bubbled up into my consciousness.

Brene Brown planted the seeds of human connection with an emphasis on vulnerability, the importance of our emotions, and the necessary healing work of addressing old generational patterns — and those seeds took root.

It has taken nearly two decades for the seeds to grow into the full awareness that we got a lot of things wrong about humanity, how the brain and body really work, and what is truly possible for our evolution on so many fronts.

I sat under the shade of the tree that Brene planted just yesterday. I listened to Scott Galloway and Rich Roll openly discuss vulnerability on Rich’s podcast. It was visceral to experience this refreshingly deep and honest conversation with two men in their fifties get real about their emotions and what they want for their sons and daughters.

Even more importantly, is the education and messaging that Rich Roll and Scott Galloway are collaborating on — the need for us all to take very seriously the crisis of loneliness, depression, social isolation and lack of human connection that is paralyzing our younger generations.

When I began my personal growth journey, I read Dr. Bruce Perry’s compelling book, Born for Love. In that book, he was sounding the alarm for our growing empathy poverty, but his voice was drowned out as our collective attention turned to the novelty of social media. We blatantly ignored the warning and gleefully plugged into social media and our devices, so certain that we’d find the connection we craved through technology.

Today, Jonathan Haidt draws a through line from the early 2010’s to today and holds up the reality of our human condition for us to see clearly. Our younger generations need to be unplugged and reconnected to reality. In his book, the Anxious Generation, he is carrying forward the message that Dr. Bruce Perry warned us of in Born for Love. Our growing lack of empathy, our self-imposed social isolation and addiction to devices, has created an epidemic of AI – artificial intimacy. It is Esther Perel who coined that term – Artificial Intimacy. She is the dynamic psychotherapist who fearlessly weeds out conflict between couples to help them discover that plot of ground begging for seeds of love, intimacy and connection to be planted.

We can no longer blatantly ignore what is hidden in plain sight. We must focus our attention, resources and real life support on our children.

Ask anyone who has ever hit rock bottom, and they will tell you that it was in their lowest place that they faced the truth that in order for meaningful change to happen, they had to dig deeper – and do the hard work of rebuilding.

This is where we all are today – collectively at rock bottom with an opportunity to nurture the seeds that have been planted over the past twenty years in psychology, behavioral science, neuroscience and modern medicine.

It is my strong belief that we have reached this breaking point because humans are hard-wired for connection and we do not thrive in continual chaos and uncertainty. If this dilemma were happening in the animal kingdom, our hearts would be breaking open as we watched adult animals leave their young unattended without teaching them any life skills. Their basic instincts would atrophy over time.

If you are familiar with epigenetics, then you may realize that for generations we have passed down unprocessed trauma and overloads of stress and anxiety. Dysfunctional generational patterns are the emotional inheritance that has never been unpacked. Old parenting models failed to install one of the key components of the human operating system — emotional intelligence. This combination is the one-two punch that delivers a compelling warning to us. Unpack the old emotional baggage, heal old traumas. The time has come. Our kids are on overload and they are drowning in cognitive dissonance.

The reality is that we have made this work of unpacking emotional baggage, healing old traumas and installing emotional intelligence so much harder than it needs to be. Psychology has shifted dramatically in the past decade with a focus on somatic healing and understanding how our brains actually work. Neuroscience fires up this better approach by highlighting the neuroplasticity of our brains and how we can re-wire healthier neural pathways in a relatively short amount of time.

As I wrote about in my last blog post, the creative coalescing of so many fields and modalities is helping us fast-track the triage that we need — and can no longer ignore. This creative coalescing is the little forest that has grown from the many seeds that have been planted over the past twenty years.

As many of you know, I am impassioned about teaching our kids all about their innate and integral emotional intelligence. I have a “Marie Kondo” approach to cleaning out generational baggage – let’s stop dragging it around, unpacked and continually weighing us down. Let’s travel more lightly through life and make new discoveries.

By the way, have you noticed how mainstreamed words like vulnerability, mindfulness, self-awareness and emotional intelligence have become? Little seeds have been planted over and over again by people like Brene Brown, Dr. Marc Brackett, Andrew Huberman, Kristin Neff, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, Arthur C. Brooks, Dr. Becky Kennedy, Dr. Peter Attia — and a host of others. They are the corks that jumped into the sea of change and lifted us all up.

So many resources have cross-pollinated that little forest that began with a few seeds several decades ago. We are at the tipping point of a huge, positive human evolution. Just the other day, author Arthur C. Brooks told Ryan Holiday that we now have the neuroscience to prove all the wisdom of the ancient philosophers. His excitement and enthusiasm was contagious.

Here’s what I know — Brene Brown did not have a crystal ball twenty-five years ago, but she felt a nudge so strong she could not resist it. She poured herself into shame and vulnerability and stayed the course because it mattered. She networked the hell out of her platforms during Covid, lifting others up when we were most receptive to learning and discovering all kinds of new things – the missing parts we didn’t know we needed. Brene was planting seeds of awareness all throughout our dormant period.

I used to think that the law of attraction was mostly like wishful thinking — but through Brene I have learned that the law of attraction is sharing, networking and lifting each other up. That is the momentum that brings the changes and opportunities we want.

Michael O’Brien (@the.mindful.cyclist) was also a recent guest on the Rich Roll podcast. His recovery from a near-death cycling experience was the catalyst for his seminal shift that changed his perspective, mindset and actions. He expressed this profound wisdom:

“Things don’t happen for a reason. Things happen….and we give it meaning.” — Michael O’Brien

I am taking this profound wisdom to heart today. Things have been happening FOR us for nearly two decades and we can give it a transformational new meaning and pivotal new direction.

There has been a big clearing of the weeds that prevented us from seeing what was possible for us. Seeds were planted and cross pollinating was happening. mostly in the background.

The self help space got a little traction with mindfulness about a decade ago. It was a wake up call but we kept hitting the snooze button. We turned to devices and poor coping skills; social media was a siren call we falsely believed would bring us the connection we craved. Our attention became a commodity traded in futures markets.

Unfortunately our devices and social media stole our attention and mindfulness; it amplified our disconnection from real life. Highlight reels and filters gave us a very distorted picture of the beautiful complexity and realities of life.

What it also took from us was the fuel that runs our human engines – the neural energy and connectivity we get from being with each other. There is so much that neuroscience has to teach us about how the human brain and body works – how we jumpstart, co-regulate and scaffold each other. We know more about our incredible brains and how to care for them than we ever did before.

So, taking Michael O’Brien’s wisdom to heart, the meaning we can give to this moment is the discovery that we are better together, that human connectivity is integral to our physical, emotional and mental health, and our longevity.

We have the rare opportunity to lift up our kids out of their malaise with greater knowledge, tools and awareness than we have ever had before. We can have a dramatic, positive impact in short order if we meet this moment quite differently than we ever have before.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Michael O’Brien Shift: https://www.michaelobrienshift.com/about/

Do yourself a favor and click that link to read about Michael’s transformational life experience. Then listen to his deeper conversation with Rich on the Rich Roll Podcast.

Check out this episode of the Rich Roll Podcast with Prof G – Scott Galloway. At about 54 minutes in you will hear the 5 minute deep conversation about vulnerability and emotions. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rich-roll-podcast/id582272991

Connective Tissue

A few years ago, I started to notice that the more I was really getting to know myself, the greater my curiosity about others. Even when I watched a Netflix series or read a compelling fiction book, I found that I was more empathetic with the characters and their backstories. Truth to be told, I discovered that I could see parts of my own life reflected back to me in their experiences and reactions. It was also easy to see the patterns of cause and effect that we messy human beings bring to our relationships.

It dawned on me that I was now engaging with books and shows on a deeper level and I loved it. I was able to feel and relate to so many characters almost as if I knew them personally. The story lines and plot twists of shows like This is Us or Parenthood were intimately familiar. Some felt like they had been pulled right out of my own family history. It was easy to readily identify with characters and events because I too “have been there”.

Conversations with some of my closest friends revealed that the same thing was happening for them. As they deepened their own self awareness, they too were more intrigued by the complexity of their favorite characters in a book or tv series. They could recognize blind spots and insecurities that contributed to missteps and bad decisions.

Discussing episodes of these shows with friends was much like being in book club with a fascinating twist — our focus was on the whole of the family dynamics and how one issue could cause a cascade of varying problems amongst the family members. We could clearly see the through line that ran from childhood experiences right into the adult lives of each family member.

These mini series became a classroom for recognizing familiar behavior patterns and coping mechanisms. We got a zoomed-out view of how complicated families are. We gained a deeper understanding of what drives people to make some of the choices they do; again, because in many cases, we too “had been there”.

While my friends and I laughed that it is easy to recognize the many fault lines in family dynamics when we simply watching a show, we did agree that we gained from observing the bigger picture. These programs give the viewer a different vantage point; we get an abundance of nuance and context from so many different perspectives and experiences. That is rarely the same lens we use in our own complex family dynamics.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that we rarely know our family members as well as we think we do.

Another is that we rarely know the “whole” of each other.

The Bigger Picture:

I titled this blog post “connective tissue” because that is what we are growing and strengthening when we become cycle breakers and agents of change.

I am a firm believer that replacing that tightly woven yet constantly unraveling fabric of complicated family dynamics with healthy “connective tissue” is the ultimate safety net for our families and relationships.

Dr. Michael Gervais (one of the world’s top high-performance psychologists) shares this wisdom with us: “To lay the foundation for a strong sense of self, the prime dictum is to not focus on the self. The way to do this is not to think less of yourself, but to think of yourself less often.”

The real value of personal growth and self discovery happens in relationship with others. When we truly get to know ourselves well and change how we show up, that’s where meaningful change occurs. When we take Dr. Gervais’ advice to heart, we build a strong foundation of who we are and who we wish to become. We pay attention to how we get unmoored from ourselves in our relationships with others.

This is a giant step in building healthy connective tissue. It’s sticking to our core values and getting more consistent in behaviors and skills that match who we want to be. We can cultivate greater self awareness about how we show up at work vs. how we behave at home, how we act with parents and siblings vs. our own kids and friends. It’s exhausting to shape shift and adapt to all these different relationships if we are constantly matching the environment instead of who we really are at the core.

So often in the self help space, we are told to shed outgrown behavioral patterns that we learned in childhood. Yet they are second nature to us and fit like our favorite pair of comfy jeans. Eventually a good friend or our spouse is going to tell us that it is time to ditch the well worn jeans — they look terrible, no longer fit the body we now have and surely don’t match who we are today.

The same is true with childhood coping skills and poor emotional regulation. They are just old jeans that need to be tossed and replaced with something that makes us feel like a million bucks when we put them on. And while the jeans become a staple in our wardrobe, we can dress them up or down depending on what we are stepping into. Our strong sense of self is that great pair of new jeans. The jacket, the hat, shoes or other accessories are all the skills and tools we use when stepping into relationships with others.

A strong sense of self is our core foundation for everything we do and all the relationships we are in. We become more consistent in how we show up whether we are at home, work or community. When people describe us to others, they capture the essence of who we really are — across all our relationships.

A core reason why family dynamics are the most challenging is that we have a long history of shape shifting, people pleasing, shrinking or puffing up to get our needs met and to also feel a sense of belonging. One false move and we become an outcast. Misunderstandings, rifts and estrangements are so commonplace for this very reason.

Remember that takeaway from the mini series I mentioned above — We have no idea of all the nuance and context of our family members unique emotions and experiences. If we don’t even know ourselves well, how could we possibly know others? And if we are all donning different behavioral patterns to “make things work”, it’s unlikely anything actually stands a chance of working.

A little perspective here: Even if your sibling is only two years older or younger than you, their childhood experiences can be remarkably different. First of all your parents were not the same that they were when you came into the world. They learned a lot from raising you and they adapted in a lot of new ways. What might have changed in your parent’s lives in that time span? Job change, relocation, loss of a parent, health issues, financial struggles? Life events have an impact on parents and kids. If there is a five year or greater age difference in siblings, then essentially it can be like being raised in two remarkably different families.

Healthy connective tissue for family dynamics has to replace the old tangled web we weave by losing ourselves in multiple identities. No wonder our relationships are so complicated.

Our sense of self, our identity, gets shaped and molded like Playdoh when we are growing up. By the time we reach adulthood, we’ve been cut, pounded, stretched and kneaded so many times that we have a hard time figuring out who we really are. It’s unfortunate that most of our self worth and self identity is under constant scrutiny and subject to change at any given moment throughout childhood.

“The world will ask you who you are, and if you don’t know, the world will tell you.” — Carl Jung

Being a change agent and breaking generational family cycles, starts with us. Once we free ourselves of behavioral patterns that keep us stuck, we have more wiggle room for self discovery — and to forge the identity we truly want. We can spend our energy on getting consistent with who we are, rather than exhausting ourselves to fit in.

We need to get very clear on our own identity and self worth. Again, this is a familiar refrain in psychology and the self help space, but it is not cheap talk. It is only when we know our worth and what is critically important to us that we can use a relationship tool like boundaries. Boundaries help others recognize how we want to be treated. Every time you set a boundary, you are getting clearer with yourself about your value and worth.

For the record, when we use boundaries in parenting instead of punishment or dismissive attitudes, we are leading by example. We teach our children not only how to treat us and be respectful, but also how to use this invaluable tool in their own lives (both when they are young and when they are adults).

The fear of other people’s opinions is yet another detriment to really getting to know ourselves intimately.

Most of us lived in this thick fog of other’s opinions all throughout childhood; especially with those old parenting models that did not integrate emotions into our experiences. Kids were told they were too much, too sensitive, too bossy, too timid. First and foremost, we were labeled by behaviors and those identifies stuck with us. — you’re a jerk, you’re a good girl, you’re perfect, you’ll never amount to anything. Secondly, we had to wrestle with these assessments of who we were while trying to figure that out for ourselves. Most of our childhood behavioral patterns and coping skills are rooted in the “fear of other’s opinions” – at home, in school and beyond.

“Identity is our subjective sense of self built on our experiences, beliefs, values, memories and culture. It’s a set of physical and psychological characteristics that is not shared with anyone else. Often derived in relationship or comparison to others, our identity provides a framework to better understand our place in a complicated social world. “ — excerpted from the book The First Rule of Mastery by Dr. Michael Gervais.

“When we have fused ourselves to an identity that is not true to who we are, or to an identity that’s too narrow to contain the whole of who we are, or to an identity incapable of incorporating new information and growing, the opinion of another can feel like an assault where our survival is at stake.” – excerpted from The First Rule of Mastery by Dr. Michael Gervais.

When you let these two excerpts soak in, you can see why we get so confused about who we are. The first excerpt addresses how we make sense of the world when we are kids. It is a private internal narrative we create about who we are. We create it when we are young and powerless and that identify feels vulnerable and in need of protection even when we are older.

The second excerpt reveals why we develop coping skills and behavioral patterns. Our identity does leave us vulnerable to the slings and arrows of other’s opinions so we develop armor to protect who we believe we are.

It’s that armor that gets in the way of us really knowing who we are; and it gets very complicated by the fact that we keep returning to home base to figure it out. Yet, that identity we created at home when we were young no longer feels like it fits who we’ve become.

Without honest self-awareness, it is incredibly hard to see how we stay stuck in an identity we’ve long outgrown and how we stay trapped (especially in our families) in old limiting beliefs about who we are.

We are not the same person we were when we were 5, 10 or 15. We are works in progress throughout our entire lives. A pivotal shift in our mindset around our personal identity is to recognize and embrace this.

We change over time and that is a marvelous thing. We are not forever stuck in an old story, or shackled to a troubled childhood, or doomed to relive an old trauma like a recurring nightmare. We would never want this for our children. When we get clear about who we are, we can parent from our most authentic sense of self. It frees us from protecting our kids unnecessarily from the things that once had a big impact on us.

The benefits of “connective tissue”:

Just imagine the positive difference we are making for younger generations, when we steer them clear of the pitfalls that derailed us from building the life we wanted. Today we have better life skills and relationship tools to teach them. We have a much-improved parenting model and are integrating their emotions into their developing complex brains. We are validating each other’s emotions and experiences which is the preventative medicine for suppressed emotions and unprocessed trauma. We recognize that rupture and repair strengthens our relationships and builds enduring trust. In fact, we normalize the fact that ruptures happen in life and we have a responsibility to repair our most valued relationships. We are learning the integral role body budget plays in our daily lives and the importance of sleep for our brain health.

Most importantly, we can help our young people develop a strong sense of self and be the scaffolding they need through all the growth spurts and life changes they will surely have.

This is an extensive list of key components of “connective tissue” for our families. It’s so much more beneficial than what most of us experienced — because we don’t put each other in boxes, but rather we give each other room to grow – with a big safety net underneath. We encourage each other to explore, discover, stretch, try new things, experiment — with the confidence that they can express themselves honestly and will have the support and guidance they need and deserve.

Dr. Michael Gervais has a nugget of wisdom that he shares on his Finding Mastery podcast that serves as a core reminder for the changes we want to make: No one does it alone.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

If you struggle with FOPO –the Fear of Other People’s Opinions, you will love this book. Check out Michael Gervais podcast too — Finding Mastery

LISTEN TO DR. ANDREW HUBERMAN’S CONVERSATION WITH PARENTING GURU, DR. BECKY KENNEDY, author of Good Inside This Episode is entitled Protocols for Excellent Parenting and Improving Relationships of All Kinds https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/huberman-lab/id1545953110?i=1000646851810

If you are unfamiliar with Internal Family Systems, you might be surprised to learn that it is all about YOU not your whole family! Discover all the parts of you that have something to offer about what is most important to you and how to best take care of YOU!

Architects of Our Experiences – Part 3

Are you starting to realize just how much control you really do have to shape your life and experiences in remarkably beneficial ways? If you have read my last two blog posts about becoming Architects of our Experiences, you may already be discovering some changes in how you “meet the moments” in your life and in your relationships.

The more we know about how our brains and bodies really work – especially how they impact our wide range of emotions – the easier it is to get a little traction implementing better skills and tools for emotional regulation.

My guess is that now that you have learned a little about “body budget”, you are consciously and even unconsciously doing a little check in from time to time to look at your own “battery life”. You may even be catching yourself when you are “hangry” and choosing to be a little more emotionally in control than you would normally do. Congratulations…you are becoming an architect of your experiences!

It shouldn’t come as a big surprise that a balanced body budget is the foundational key to any self improvement initiative we might have. It’s just that we didn’t know about this connection until recently.

Think about how much harder we make things for ourselves in large part because we simply don’t have the energy or power; how often do we push through or burn the midnight oil? No wonder we get in our own way so often. Our best intentions are not enough to integrate real changes in our emotional regulation, relationship skills or healthy habit initiatives. We need a balanced body budget…..full stop.

This reality is bubbling up everywhere now, most notably in modern medicine, psychology and mental health. Although it is basic common sense, we overlooked this foundational principle for far too long. The intake process at the doctor’s, trainer’s or therapist’s office now includes an assessment of how well we are sleeping, eating, exercising and hydrating. In many cases, we are also asked how we are coping with life and navigating our relationships. It’s become evident that our emotional health can have a major impact on our physical and mental health.

Better intake, expanded assessment of our health and well being = more accurate and effective diagnosis and treatments. As Dr. Andrew Huberman has been promoting since the onset of COVID, there are so many no-cost steps we can proactively take to improve our physical and mental health as well as the overall quality of our lives.

The fundamental foundation for becoming skillful architects of our emotions and experiences is a balanced body budget. Sleep is the bedrock of this foundation.

In my most recent blog post about becoming architects of our experiences, I shared the versatile, multi-purpose tool of emotional granularity. Having this tool at our disposable means that we will become much more agile when it comes to emotional regulation. With a balanced body budget and emotional granularity, we are setting ourselves up for much greater success in all areas of our lives. We will be meeting the moments in our life better resourced than ever before.

Just imagine feeling grounded and clear-minded throughout most of your day. What would it feel like to know that you were not at the mercy of an emotional sandstorm that could blow in at any moment? This is what it means to be an architect of your experiences and emotions. You feel in control, you can more accurately assess a situation and more skillfully deal with it and others.

Emotional granularity is analogous to that intake process in the doctor’s office. If all that we can tell the doctor is that we have a pain in our mid-section, the doctor will probe for more clues. A physician always starts with foundational clues like heart rate, lung capacity and blood pressure. She gets more granular by asking about the level of pain, its frequency, any pattern when it flares. We might also go through a battery of tests for deeper investigation.

We can begin a similar “intake process” when we feel a core emotion like anger. If we are angry, it is just a warning light to get our attention. We need the details to clarify what we are angry about. We need emotional granularity to help us find context clues. Just like that investigation in the doctor’s office, we want to explore so we are treating the right problem.

Can you see the distinction? An unskillful “do-it-yourselfer” might run into a heated situation with a hammer and an accelerated heart rate. A skillful architect does a quick assessment of body budget, then reaches for that versatile multi-purpose tool and calmly assesses what the real problem is. A skillful architect develops a viable plan to solve the right problem with the right tools.

Happiness expert, author Arthur C. Brooks taps into this architectural approach by suggesting that we try “substituting” a better emotion for the one that doesn’t feel so good. Just like we choose the healthier option of an apple for dessert versus the cake, we can choose an emotion that will get us a better outcome. In the book, Build the Life You Want, Arthur even uses architectural language:

“Sometimes you want to replace some of your negative emotions with something that fits and is more constructive, leading you to act the way you want to, not the way you feel.” (excerpted from Chapter 3: Choose a Better Emotion in the book Build the Life You Want)

Ok, so let’s just pause here for a moment and really take in just how empowering it would feel to be able to pull this off a few times each day. Simply by paying attention to body budget and choosing emotions that better align with who we want to be, we would proactively practicing becoming an “architect of our experiences and emotions.”

And now, let’s add just one more component that will dramatically enhance your architectural prowess. Drum roll, please…..

Upgrading and Updating Our Brain’s Predictions:

Our brains are prediction machines, not reaction makers. Yet another thing that we got wrong, especially about emotions but also about how we engage with our experiences. Scientists have long believed that brain neurons were dormant until stimulated by something from our outside world. But thanks to major breakthroughs in neuroscience, we now know that this is not the case.

The neurons in our brains are firing constantly, stimulating one another as well as different regions in our complex brain systems. It is this very brain activity that represents the millions of predictions that our brains will make about what we will encounter next — all based on our lifetime of past experience.

This all happens so fast and so automatically that we usually aren’t even aware of it. We might even refer to it as our “unconscious”. The irony is that we can be very conscious of our past experiences –especially when we get emotionally triggered.

Anyone who has ever attempted to free themselves from an old emotional trigger or an overreactive behavioral pattern knows firsthand that it feels like a labyrinth. We even use metaphors in the self help space to talk about how hard this process can be: it’s a journey searching for clues on a jagged, rocky path through the thick entangled forest of our past. The definition of a labyrinth is a complicated, irregular network of passages or paths in which it is difficult to find one’s way. Sounds exactly how we describe self-discovery and behavioral pattern change.

Again, we have made this work so much harder than it has to be – because we misunderstood how our prediction machines work. If we want to vastly improve our predictions, we have to update and upgrade our internal data base. We do this by loading new content; adding richer, nuanced context; and curating a diversity of new experiences.

When we proactively update our inner database — our brains can make predictions that more closely match what we really want our lives to be and feel like and not reruns of unhelpful, old experiences. If we are trapped in the past with old emotional triggers and dizzying rumination loops, it is our brain retrieving old files to make predictions.

Your brain predicts and prepares your actions based on past experiences. Mental distress, anxiety and even old trauma arise from flawed predictions. Of course, these inaccurate predictions don’t feel good or correct in our present moment – they do not accurately fit our current situation. We get caught in a trap of outdated information that produces outdated, ill-fitting, unchecked reactions.

Think about all the ways that we have rather seamlessly updated how we do daily life. We are no longer tethered to land line phones or hanging laundry outdoors on a rope to dry. We aren’t using multi-folded, printed paper maps to navigate from one city to the next. We shop, transfer money, take photos and send emails on our phones all while waiting in a check out line.

We’ve got this — We already know how to update and upgrade our lives – and we have done it rather effortlessly — on the outside.

Now we need to do the same — on the inside.

We simply have to get intentional and proactive about upgrading and updating our internal database for much improved predictions. The bonus is that once we begin to integrate newer, more relevant information and experiences into our brain’s predictive database, we set ourselves up for greater success with each and every subsequent experience and interaction we have.

We begin to operate more fluidly and efficiently from a fresh, current database – not a relic from the past.

We know that our limiting beliefs, outgrown behavioral patterns and childhood social conditioning can be fossilized in our internal database. Because we misunderstood how our brains truly function, we just reinforced that old science too. We simply reinforced the old science by repeating our personal history – over and over again.

We are learning that neurons that fire together, wire together. By getting stuck in the past, we literally were dropping our needle on the same spot and creating a well worn groove for repetitive, familiar predictions. This is what we did with our old vinyl music records back in the day. No wonder those records would skip, slide past the next song or get stuck.

Now we have this groundbreaking neuroscience about how our complex brain circuitry really works. We now know that our brains are prediction machines not reactivity makers – and we are beginning to understand how neuroplasticity helps us to rewire our brains in healthy, optimal new ways. We can actually build new neural networks that operate more seamlessly like streaming music.

Here is an easy example to help us grasp the concept of neuroplasticity — of neurons that fire together wiring together. If we want to break an old habit, we are given all kinds of tips that actually disrupt the related neural pattern: don’t buy the potato chips, take a walk when you get a craving, replace the potato chips with almonds, etc. This is the equivalent of pulling that needle up and off the old groove; that habitual pattern of reaching for the bag of salty chips without much thought. Each time we disrupt the pattern, we tap into our brain’s neuroplasticity and create a fresh, new neural network. As it becomes easier to resist the chips, it is a clear indicator that different neurons are firing and wiring together – making us much more successful at resisting the urge to binge on chips.

For the record, it doesn’t mean that we won’t ever binge on chips in the future. But we will have greater awareness because of the new neural pathway and we might catch ourselves before we consume a whole bag. If we do fall off the wagon and succumb to the whole bag, when we renew our pledge to do better tomorrow, we are starting from a much improved baseline and not square one.

See the difference?

This is precisely what we also want to begin doing with our emotions and experiences. Disrupt the old outdated brain prediction that makes us feel reactive and out of control. Replace it with an emotion and response that feels better and more in line with how we want to show up in life. Create new and improved neural networks that strengthen over time. Toss out the rusty, dusty old files in our internal experience and emotion database – and update them with something fresh, that more closely matches how we want to feel and act, and is much more beneficial for our present moments.

There are two key ways that we can deliberately become proactive in housecleaning and updating our internal database: reframing and adding new concepts.

Reframing is simply getting a fresh perspective on an old familiar situation. Cognitive reframing is a major tool used in psychology for identifying and shifting how events, emotions, beliefs and old narratives are viewed. Reframing also serves to disrupt those well-grooved old stories and ruminative patterns.

When we reframe a situation, we not only get a fresh perspective, we are reorganizing our internal database. Reorganizing an old story or limiting belief, helps our predictive brain to use valuable take-aways from our experiences in more productive ways. This is how we can extract important lessons from our life experiences and learn from them rather than having the same lesson get repeated over and over without any real progress.

The second way to dramatically improve our predictions is by keeping our brains well stocked with new experiences, new concepts, new words and definitions. It turns out that being open-minded, curious and engaged in learning, is the portal for updating our prediction database.

See how we were making our lives, experiences and relationships so much harder than they have to be?

There are very simple things we can be doing on a daily basis to keep our prediction database fresh, updated, repurposed and creative:

Read – read a real book; reading from left to right stimulates the brain, engages learning and builds empathy. Read fiction and try a variety of authors and genres. Read non-fiction to engage learning something new and challenging.
Learn new words – words seed your concepts, concepts drive your predictions, predictions regulate your body budget and your body budget determines how you feel. The more finely-grained your vocabulary, the more precisely your brain calibrates your body budget (excerpted from How Emotions are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett).
Watch movies or listen to thought-provoking audio content — this will broaden your perspectives and shake you free from old social conditioning. This is a great way to break out of echo chambers where we simple engrain over and over what we once believed or were taught. Often, we are unaware that we unconsciously do this — stay in our comfort zones and look for confirmation for our opinions and beliefs. Think of this like pouring a little water on a very dry sponge….you are just creating softness and the ability to absorb some new, possibly contradictory, concepts.
Be open to paradox — two opposing things can be true at the same time. Begin to notice how paradox shows up in nature, in our families and friendships. What one person finds thrilling, another finds scary (amusement park rides, movies and crazy drivers). Building a repertoire of paradoxical examples, stimulates our brain’s ability to be more creative, relaxed and receptive to contrasts.

If you can reach back and change how you feel about your past, your brain would predict differently – and you might act differently, and experience the world differently, as a result. Your actions today become your brain’s predictions for tomorrow. and those predictions automatically drive your future actions. (excerpted from 7-1/2 Lessons About the Brain by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett)

The Wrap Up:

I hope you are amazed by the new path forward for our emotional intelligence and emotional health. No wonder we have struggled in every sense of the word to live more authentically. We’ve been working so hard to grow, to heal, to understand ourselves and each other – and we’ve been doing it with stale, constrictive, outdated information all while we were attempting to blaze more spacious and engaging new trails.

The springboard for building the life we want and living it with greater fulfillment, is taking care of our brain and body. This is the missing puzzle piece that we have been searching for. Go have some fun implementing these new tools and concepts. Discover the difference it makes today — and how it better prepares you to be flexible, resilient and creative tomorrow.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Check out this resource to get some impactful highlights about your brain’s predictions – and dive into some of the resources suggested to learn more: Predicting Better. org https://predictingbetter.org

Check out this timely episode on the Huberman Lab podcast with Dr. Mark D’Esposito: How to Optimize Cognitive Function & Brain Health https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/huberman-lab/id1545953110?i=1000645842679

When the Student Becomes The Teacher

Many months ago, my young granddaughter was scared. As she described her experience to me, I could fully understand why she was frightened. She felt as though she was having some kind of out of body experience – something that was not at all like her – and yes, it was scary to think she might be changing and had very little control over it. My granddaughter was angry; not plain vanilla angry – she was infuriated. Along with that infuriating anger was a fear that she would forever become an angry person – and that was scary – because she didn’t want to change who she was.

We’ve all been there haven’t we? We reach a breaking point and suddenly we too have an out of body experience and act way out of character. We have a jolting knee jerk reaction that surprises even us — or our simmering kettle of stuffed emotions boils over at the most inconvenient moment and we regret it the moment it happens (even though it is too late). In hindsight, we have said or done things that we’d never dream of in a much more rational moment.

The distinction between us adults and my young granddaughter is that we know we will not stay stuck forever in this “out of character” form; we will return to our emotional baseline and be back to feeling like our normal, “true to character” selves again. Sometimes we can even do that BEFORE we overreact – and other times, we have the wisdom to make those necessary repairs; we apologize and put in real effort to do better in the future.

Little did I know that my granddaughter was giving me a golden opportunity to understand the benefits of emotional granularity. Simply put, emotional granularity is when we are able to identify all the emotions that we are experiencing in any given moment. There are always more ingredients in our emotional experiences than simply happy, sad or mad. But we often hit the brakes as soon as we identify those 3 core emotions and we stop a profoundly important process. Angry, sad or happy are just the headlines; we need to understand “the rest of the story,”

In my granddaughter’s case, the anger was ginormous in this moment. She’d been patient with her younger brother all day long, but now she was tired and hungry, which served to amplify the slow build of her frustration. We could all understand and empathize with her feeling angry. That was normal and justifiable, especially at the end of a busy day.

The anger problem could be remediated by both validating her feelings and giving her a break from her energetic, fun loving, free flowing brother. But my granddaughter had more to share – she was also feeling afraid that she’d stay stuck in anger — and she did not like the way that felt to her.

Even without a textbook or podcast, she knew instinctively that there was more going on than just the anger. Thank goodness I did have some working knowledge of emotional granularity. I silently expressed my gratitude to Brene Brown and Dr. Dan Siegel for this education and proceeded to help my granddaughter. I asked her to describe to me what anger was making her feel like. For the record, kids are much better at articulating this than most of us adults. No wonder she was fearful of staying stuck in that feeling — it’s downright icky. I assured her that strong emotions don’t have a long shelf life, that they do fade and we return to feeling like our normal selves in short order. I wish you could have seen the relief that washed over that precious face. A big warm hug and a reassuring smile soon had us both laughing. Astonishingly she could even reframe her brother’s prior annoyance as just his silly antics – the very same antics and playfulness that she loves so much about him.

What a rebound! This is the magic of emotional granularity; we can hold both sides of an experience and keep them in balance.

My young granddaughter recognized that her brother can bring her great joy and he can also annoy her. Both are true.

Emotional granularity keeps us from getting stuck in a single core emotion. It helps us discover many pieces of our experiences puzzle. Nuance and context are key ingredients for how we “feel” in any given moment. For example, earlier in the day when my granddaughter was fresh from a good night’s sleep, had a full tummy of her favorite breakfast and a full tank of patience and energy, her brother’s antics were light-hearted, fun and tolerated. It was only later in the day, when her tank was running low that she felt quite differently.

Take a moment to think about that for your own daily interactions. When you are well resourced with sleep, nourishment and bandwidth, you most likely flow pretty easily with other’s moods as well as the diversity of tasks and demands you are juggling. When you are running low on fuel, it gets harder and your mood and emotional state shifts. Emotional granularity helps us parse out the underpinnings of happy, sad and mad.

More recently, this same granddaughter was having an off day. She wasn’t her usually bubbly self and she wasn’t keen on all the suggestions we were offering to snap her out of it. Not sparkling water, her favorite breakfast or a fun craft was moving the needle. She announced that she wasn’t in a hurry to get out of this mood and she was going to go be alone with it for a while. When she rejoined the family activities later, she was in good spirits and all in on the fun stuff we were doing.

It wasn’t until later that day that my granddaughter told me that the reason she likes to stay in her moods is that she knows what I told her is very true. Emotions and feelings fade faster than we realize – and she doesn’t want to miss a chance to explore hers before they drift off. In that moment, the student became the teacher.

I am a firm believer in the advice that ogre Shrek offered years ago — “Better out than in.” It is better to get our emotions out where we can examine them than stuff them away in cold storage. My granddaughter is living proof that doing this sooner rather than later is precisely how we extract the most wisdom from what our emotions are trying to tell us.

Doing this emotional awareness processing in real time is when we have the sharpest clarity to fully appreciate and understand what our emotions have to tell us. If we postpone sitting with our emotions, they will change and shift – just like clouds in the sky. We will end up blurring or diluting them. We may even stuff them so far down that we completely ignore them and their valid warning signs.

Processing our emotions in real time is the best preventative measure we can take for cultivating our self-awareness and vastly improving our ability to skillfully regulate our emotions. We now have science to support this.

In her book, How Emotions Are Made, neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett teaches us that emotional granularity is the integral key to keeping our internal “emotions and experiences” data base updated. Our brain and body are our uniquely personal information processors. They are prediction machines that rely on the data we store. The greater our ability to identify and process the multiple emotions we experience in any given situation, the better our “prediction machines” will operate in the future.

It should be pretty self evident by now that the lack of full emotional integration when we were children is the major cause of so many “prediction errors” in the way we are able to regulate and understand our emotional triggers in adulthood. When we are getting in our own way and making life more difficult than it needs to be, chances are that our “prediction machines” are feeding us old, outdated data. Emotional baggage is like the fruits and veggies growing moldy in the fridge. We never took the nutrients out of our emotions and experiences when they were fresh. Yet we still have to deal with all that mushy mess when we clean out the fridge.

There is another compelling reason that we need to get much better at processing our emotions in real time — it is because our current mood greatly impacts how we experiencing life. If we are overly tired or famished, there is a greater likelihood that we will feel more negative about what is happening. In other words, we can skew our emotions, file them away without any self reflection, and end up with an internal database full of misinformation. Talk about an algorithm that feeds us more of what we really don’t need, but that feels oh so affirming.

Let’s go back to the story of my granddaughter’s emotion of big anger. She was experiencing this giant-sized anger more intensely because it was the end of the day; she was both hungry for dinner and ready for bed. She just didn’t have a lot of bandwidth to cope with her brother’s antics. Earlier in the day, his silliness made her laugh and her delighted responses encouraged him all the more. As the day wore on, her tank was ever so slowing draining. On the other hand, her brother may have had a nap and ate more snacks, so he was still going strong. My granddaughter’s context had changed and my grandson’s had stayed the same.

Two opposing things were true here — my granddaughter loves her brother’s zest for life AND she also needed a break. My grandson believes his antics are adorable and valued no matter how tired others are.

This very scenario plays out in our adult lives all the time but we are mostly unaware of it. We do ebb and flow in our moods all throughout the day. When we feel rested, nourished and energized, we have greater coping skills and better judgement. When we hit the wall, all bets are off.

When we hit the brakes when one of the 3 core emotions jumps out – and then step on the gas and barrel through, we actually stay stuck in happy, sad or mad. Imagine if we were in our cars, hit the brakes to avoid hitting a small child, and then while our heart was racing and our nervous system was on high alert, we hit the gas pedal and were doing 80 mph in 10 seconds. We would not be at our best to reflexively respond to another potential accident – in fact, we might cause an accident.

We know that it is encouraged for us to take that meaningful pause between stimulus and response when we are feeling strong emotions washing over us. Far better to take a few deep breaths and calm ourselves before we “react without reflection”. When we are working on developing better emotional regulation, we want to ground ourselves and consciously “respond” in a calmer way.

Yet there is one more beneficial skill that we would be wise to cultivate: Stop, look and listen.

Pretend you hit the brakes at a railroad crossing. The flashing lights and the gate that lowers are big emotions trying to get your attention. Stop, look around at the current circumstances and how well resourced you are to make good decisions. Listen to all that those accompanying emotions have to tell you. They are the messengers of the context and nuance needed to proceed with caution.

If an 8 year old can do this, so can we.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Chapter 2 of Arthur Brooks newest book is entitled the Power of Metacognition. If you only read this chapter in his book, you will have a much better understanding of how we can proactively choose better emotions to enrich our experiences. A worthy read.

Listen to this short YouTube video with Lisa Feldman Barrett about how past experiences and emotions impact how we respond to current experiences. You’ll be inspired to get more skillful at processing your emotions and experiences in real time, so that you are operating from a fresh and updated data base rather than old, outdated and clunky information
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYAEh3T5a80&t=31s

Lisa Feldman Barrett was a recent guest on the HUBERMANLAB PODCAST. This episode will give you a foundational understanding of how we could be vastly improving how we teach our children — at home and in school — with a more updated understanding of how emotions impact us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeRgqJVALMQ&t=318s

New Year, New Skills

Can you feel that little updraft in inner drive and determination that comes from a brand new year? There’s nothing like a brand new calendar, clean and pristine, to let our imaginations run wild with big dreams of how well organized and productive we will be. This psychological phenomenon is called the “fresh start effect”. It marks a clear delineation for our “out the old and in with the new” mindset. A brand new year is when we get to double dip in this fresh start effect — it’s not just a new month – it is a brand new year.

I confess that I love a Happy New Year fresh start and I prepare for it as eagerly as I do for Christmas. My desk has stacks of colorful, inspiring blank journals and brand new chunky, spiral-bound idea notebooks; along with an assortment of gel pens and varied sizes of neon post-it notes. And the real gem is that pristine 2024 planner. Thanks to my grandkids who gave me a generous gift card to Quail Ridge, I also have an inviting stack of new books I cannot wait to read. There is a rush of pure joy and an eager excitement every time I look at the endless possibilities that will manifest when I actually use all these tools.

It was in that moment, that it dawned on me that this was the direction I wanted to take my blog in 2024. This year, my blog posts and Daily Gummies of Wisdom, are going to become more relatable and digestible. This is the year where the “rubber hits the road”. I want to share more real life stories, examples and experiences that reveal how beneficial it is to be using better tools and becoming more skillful with them.

This is the year that I want my blog to help others stock their desks, toolboxes and backpacks with diversified resources for building the life they want and showing up more often as their best selves. It is an exciting time to be alive because thanks to science, we have taken a lot of the mystery out of old paradigms about emotional and mental health, parenting and relationships – and yes, even personal growth.

I love diving into groundbreaking and ever-evolving data. I also love distilling it in a way that is easy to understand and implement in real time. I’ve become a bit of a “reverse engineer” with 7 decades of life experiences to draw on. By sharing familiar and relatable real life stories, I can teach and role model how and why these much-improved relationship and life tools are meaningful game-changers.

There is another confession that I have to make: I am over the moon thrilled that it no longer feels necessary to keep self discovery and personal growth under wraps. The proof of this is in our current overuse of the word “normalize”. We toss that word out like a disclaimer reminding us that no one is immune to “feeling” their way through life.

No more cloak of secrecy when it comes to mental and emotional health — it is now fully mainstreamed! And, it is not only mainstreamed, we are making genuine progress in connecting the dots between our physical health and our emotional health. Our eyes are being opened to the many no-cost and low-cost steps we can take to proactively improve both.

The pivot I will be making with my ever-evolving blog will mirror the pivot that is being made in modern medicine, psychology and neuroscience. There is a shift from problem solving to prevention. Many fields, modalities and people are taking proactive steps to improve their physical, mental and emotional health to safeguard against future health and relationship issues. An ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure.

Food for Thought: This is a new element that I will be adding to my blog posts this year. I will wrap each one up with a little food for thought, something to reflect on and then consider putting into practice. The “food for thought” I offer today is to take time to look through – and reflect on – your planners and journals, camera rolls and playlists, on the biggest challenges and fondest memories of 2023. Before you toss them in the trash, or pack them in a box with birthday cards, archived bills and tax receipts — spend some time distilling what mattered most to you in 2023. Use that as a map for where you are headed in 2024.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Arthur C. Brooks is a well known happiness expert. His last book was entitled “From Strength to Strength” and it had a big impact on me. That book was really meant for those of us who are transitioning from one stage of life to another. It was such a helpful guide for reflecting on past experiences and using it as a solid foundation for reinventing ourselves for the next chapter.

In this powerful new book, Arthur works his magic once again — and makes it easy to understand the latest breakthroughs in science and how to take that knowledge and weave it into your daily life. One message comes through loud and clear as you read this book – we need to put in the reps – we need daily practice with all kinds of situations and people for these new tools to stick.

THE RICH ROLL PODCAST: Treat yourself to a new podcast in 2024 – and check out the diversity and dynamics of Rich Roll and his inspiring guests.

There is a vast ocean of podcasts these days. It can be both time-consuming and overwhelming to sort through the catalog and find the ones that call to you.

There are times in our lives when we need a little extra knowledge about core physical health tools like quality sleep, nutrition and exercise. Other times, we need some encouragement to get through tough times. We also need to be inspired through other’s stories of how they used all these new tools we are learning about; stories from others help us digest and metabolize new information.

My recommendation is to listen to Rich Roll’s podcasts in chunks. Few of us really have the time to sit and listen (let alone pay full attention) to a lengthy podcast. But if we listen for 15 – 30 minutes at a time on our drive to work or while running errands, we can gain a lot. Instead of scrolling on your phone when you need a break, listen for 10-15 minutes to part of the podcast. This is how we put some really nourishing and healthy content into our brains.

There are so many subjects, modalities and tools to support our self-discovery and personal growth. What captures your attention? What do you want to learn more about? Rich Roll offered two podcast episodes at the end of 2023 that offer a diverse menu of choices. I am sharing the links for these two episodes, rich with guests that we all know and love – and full of inspiration to get you super-charged for the new year.

Rich Roll Podcast, The Best of 2023: Part One https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rich-roll-podcast/id582272991?i=1000639648780

Rich Roll Podcast, the Best of 2023: Part Two https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rich-roll-podcast/id582272991?i=1000639901420