Tag: Self-Discovery

Good Bones

In my last blog post, I shared how integral it is to really know ourselves well — so that we stop the shape shifting we do unconsciously as we move in and out of the many roles we play daily. What we are striving for is a strong, consistent foundation for moving through life – no matter our role and responsibility, no matter the opportunity or the problem.

We have a whole new way of viewing self discovery and personal growth now. We are normalizing the obvious — we are always “works in progress”. We are going to be re-shaped and impacted in remarkable ways by life. The transformational pivot is how we re-frame this ever evolving, organic process. We start with a solid foundation of who we are, grounded in our values. Any renovation starts with the bare bones; the good bones are the core of who we are and who we are becoming.

If we use this metaphor of renovating an old house into our dream home, we can get clarity very quickly about self-discovery and meaningful change. When we see the potential in the “good bones” of a neglected house, we get super-charged about what is possible — and we get to work. We can apply this same approach to personal growth. It shifts our attitude in a whole new direction — it is fascinating, motivating and empowering.

Bear in mind that we are also bringing new tools and skills to our personal renovation process. We now know that the old parenting models hijacked emotional integration which is the most impactful key to really knowing ourselves and what matters most to us. We also know with great clarity that social norms compounded the problem and kept us stuck in limiting beliefs about our full potential.

There is a compelling reason that so many leaders in parenting, psychology, behavioral science and neuroscience point us to childhood to look for the root causes of our insecurities, poor coping skills and problematic behavioral patterns: Childhood beliefs can have a very strong grip on our sense of self, our beliefs about our potential and even our understanding of the world at large.

Here is the story of Florence Nightingale, one of the most heroic figures of the 19th century who saved countless lives on battlefields and in hospitals. Florence knew as a young girl that she wanted to be a nurse – it was her calling, her destiny. She wanted to revolutionize medicine and sanitary conditions. But it took her 18 long years to fulfill her childhood dream. What held her back? Not financial means – she came from a wealthy family. Not acumen – she learned, studied and had practical experience. What held her back was limiting beliefs – her own and others. She was afraid of “what a woman’s role was supposed to be.” It was also the fear of other people’s opinions – her parents held her back, her sister held her back and other people’s opinions hold her back. It was only when she freed herself from these limiting beliefs that she embraced and pursued her true destiny. As Florence journaled about her frustrations, she realized that she’d been “tied down with straw all along” — and she cut through the bonds that held her back. (special thanks to Ryan Holiday for sharing this story recently)

The story of Florence Nightingale shines a powerful light on the reality that old parenting paradigms, gender stereotyping and social conditioning keep most of us from tapping into the best versions of ourselves and discovering our incredible hidden potential. I often ponder how many inventions, advancements and breakthroughs were missed all throughout history due to the grip of limiting beliefs.

In his book, Hidden Potential, Adam Grant does a deep dive into the many ways we got things wrong about our ever evolving potential. He unpacks the distinctions between (a) character and personality and (b) values and beliefs. This sets the stage for building a strong sense of our own identity.

Have you had an overreaction to someone or something and later admonished yourself for “acting out of character?” What were you using as a benchmark for your character?

Most likely, you were acting from your personality and out of alignment with your values.

“Character is often confused with personality, but they’re not the same. Personality is your predisposition — your basic instincts for how to think, feel and act. Character is your capacity to prioritize your values over your instincts. Character doesn’t set like plaster – it retains its plasticity. — excerpted from Hidden Potential by Adam Grant

Kids operate instinctively on “personality” with young developing brains. Children need adult guidance to role model and teach character skills — and be the training wheels for emotional regulation.

If you grew up in a family environment where the adults operated mostly on personality themselves, or had a double standard for family values, it’s no wonder there is real confusion around your personality and your character. Many of us were labeled by adults for our personality traits — our basic instincts for how to think, feel and act. Those labels stuck. And the accompanying limiting beliefs gripped tight.

“The true test of character is whether you manage to stand by your values when the deck is stacked against you. If personality is how you respond on a typical day, character is how you show up on hard day. Personality is not your destiny – it’s your tendency. Character skills enable you to transcend that tendency to be true to your principles. It’s not about the traits you have — it’s what you decide to do with them.” — Excerpted from Hidden Potential by Adam Grant.

Dr. Becky Kennedy, the child psychologist who is championing the game-changing parenting paradigm shift, stresses the importance of emotional integration and teaching character skills throughout the 18 year apprenticeship that our kids have inside their family units.

Just imagine growing up and growing through life free of personality labels and limiting beliefs – scaffolded by parents and family members, as you build your own strong sense of self and foundational core values. There is no better springboard for entering adulthood.

Adam Grant next offers the critical distinction between our values and our beliefs. When we understand the integral difference between the two, we can see clearly that values become the foundation of our real identify (our strong sense of self) that we can build upon for the rest of our lives. This is why values become the springboard for building our lives. Beliefs can hold us back.

Values are what you think is important.

Beliefs are what we think is true.

Our personal foundation is built on our values — what we think is important. Our values create the focal point for where we spend our time, our energy and our resources. Our core values stand the test of time, are both durable and flexible. They become the scaffolding and building blocks for lifelong learning and evolving.

Our beliefs are subject to change and in reality should be updated and refreshed as we acquire new knowledge, more experiences, set new goals and broaden our perspectives.

Did you go into adulthood, marriage or parenthood with a strong sense of what mattered most to you? Were you determined not to do some of the things that your own parents did? Did you make a mad dash for the door when you reached adulthood so that you could go out and live your life just the way you wanted to? What a great place to start looking for the “good bones” of your foundation.

One of the biggest problems we have with separating out our “values” from our “beliefs” is that those childhood beliefs became very intertwined in our life stories growing up. It is hard to even see or think differently with all that overgrown prickly brush covering up the “good bones.” Florence Nightingale’s story is proof positive.

Whatever you long to be “free of” is entangled in limiting beliefs. Do you think you aren’t smart enough or courageous enough to pursue your “dream” career or start your own business? Are you overly concerned with what others might think if you colored outside the lines, took a big risk or moved far away? Do you make yourself small so that others feel better about themselves – and then find yourself resentful for not investing in your own big dreams, ideas and goals? Letting go of those limiting beliefs gives you the wiggle room you need to reimagine and reclaim who you are — and who you want to become.

Malcolm Gladwell invites us to hold our beliefs lightly. He will often offer his perspective on something and add the disclaimer — “for now” or “at this time”. He is clearly acknowledging that what he believes about a subject or idea is subject to change. For any of us who have lived multiple decades, we get this on a very visceral level. So many things in our daily lives have changed in the most astounding ways over the least 20, 40 and 60 years. What we once resisted is now a normal part of our everyday lives.

Take some time to reflect on your own childhood beliefs that got in your way growing up. Identify one or two things that you proved wrong to yourself and others. Reflect on some beliefs you once had that make you laugh today.

Adam Grant pointed out something that is integrally important to understand about an identity that gets built around beliefs. When our identity, our sense of self, is too closely linked to our beliefs (rather than our values), we will feel threatened when we change our mind about something. We will feel like we are “wishy washy”. We might even tell ourselves that we aren’t being true to ourselves if we change our minds about a strongly held belief.

If we are grounded in our values rather than our beliefs, changing our minds is as natural as changing our clothes. Of course we are going to change our minds — and our beliefs — about all kinds of things in our lives. If not, we would stunt our growth.

Adam Grant cleverly named his popular podcast “Rethinking”. Breakthroughs in neuroscience, technology and psychology are coming at us fast and furiously these days. Why not stay current and “rethink” old beliefs?

In his book, The First Rule of Mastery; Stop Worrying About What Other People Think of You, Dr. Michael Gervais adds even more context to limiting beliefs. Just like the vine that has a stranglehold on this tall tree, a narrow identity can never capture the full essence of who we are. The fear of other’s opinions can keep us playing a “narrow” game. Florence Nightingale didn’t want to rock the boat or risk being outcast from her family, so she limited herself to stay connected to them.

“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.

Returning to the metaphor of recovering the good bones of a solid old house, take some time to think about what you may have misunderstood about personality and character, values and beliefs. Take stock of the messaging you received in childhood and take into consideration what the social norms were when you were a kid. Begin your own personal growth renovations by building a foundation of core values that are just right for who you are today and who you are becoming.

Start to challenge your limiting beliefs — do they still hold true?

Once you really know yourself well, and you are anchored in your core values, you will find yourself using those values as a filter more consciously. You will discover that there are far fewer times when you feel like you acted “out of character.” This is living mindfully — noticing what is going through your mind before you act — and being more discerning in your response.

You’ll worry less about what other’s might think (and for the record, they are rarely thinking about you as much as you believe) and you’ll make decisions based on what is truly right for you.

Let Florence Nightingale be your reminder not to let your biggest dreams be sidelined.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Adam Grant gives us a whole new framework for raising our aspirations and exceeding expectations. He shows us that progress depends less on how hard we work and more on how well we learn! Growth is about the genius we possess — it’s about the character we develop.
If FOPO – Fear of Other Peoples Opinions is a concern for you — you will love this book. Dr. Michael Gervais is a sports psychologist who has works with elite athletes, professional sports teams and entrepreneurs. The stories he shares will surprise you.
Arthur Brooks and Oprah Winfrey combine art and science to encourage us to Build the Life We Truly Want. The goal is not to arrive at a final destination of happy — but rather to be happier each and every day.

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

Surely you recall that childhood pleasure of a rainy day when mom or dad would drape blankets over couches and chairs, then stand back prepared to be amazed at what their creative little geniuses would do next. An ordinary living room suddenly transformed into a sensory wonderland that started with a simple blanket fort.

I came upon this sight a few days ago and marveled at the ingenuity of the little architects who began with a pint-sized castle that just kept morphing into something even grander with each “lightbulb” moment and the addition of another toy bin. 

As the plans grew in size and complexity, there was a lot of trial and error. Shrieks of joyful delight filled the room as the framework collapsed and a new idea took shape from the rubble. 

What a lesson to be learned from two small children actively engaged in an organic, evolving, complex and creative process. They were little architects of their playful experience.

Are you aware that we adults can become skillful architects of our own experiences? 

It’s true — and the beauty of it is, we can tap into the creativity and positive outcomes that comes so easily to kids, by using our brains and bodies in a powerful new way.

Just imagine being able to construct experiences and supporting emotions that more consistently align with your goals and big aspirations. Fewer self-made obstacles, more smooth sailing.

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett is breaking new ground in the science of emotion – overturning long-standing beliefs that our emotions are universal, automatic and hard-wired in different regions of the brain. Instead, we actually “construct” an instance of emotion through a remarkable interplay of our brain, body and our culture. 

Anyone who has ever experienced a strong emotional trigger from an event that happened decades ago, has some appreciation for how quickly this remarkable interplay coalesces. It’s no wonder we believe it’s automatic and has become hard-wired into our systems. 

And yet, we also know that it is possible to “re-wire” our brains and release old emotional triggers – freeing us from being snagged by that old experience over and over again. The neuroplasticity of our brains enables us to re-organize our old connections in new and improved ways. 

This rewiring process is analogous to children reorganizing their fort framework to become something more useful for an even more incredible structural masterpiece.

It turns out that becoming “architects of our emotions and experiences” it is not as big a stretch that we once believed. How remarkable is that?

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett is gifted at making this new concept readily accessible to all of us. There are three key components that we need to know more about when it comes to curating our architectural tool bag: body budget, emotional granularity and cultivating more current, diverse experiences.

Today’s post is the first in a three part series about becoming skillful architects of our experiences. Prepare to be amazed at the role our body budget plays in our emotional reactions to life. 

Body Budget

A major part of becoming skilled architects of our experiences involves mastering our emotions. We erroneously believe that our emotions that are the first system to get activated — and we have to “manage” those strong emotions in order to respond effectively to our circumstances.  But this is not the case.

What actually happens first is that our brains are estimating what’s in our tank and predicting how much of our inner resources are going to be required to meet the present moment. It would be analogous to us hopping in our car for a big road trip and looking at the gas gauge to determine how far we can get before refueling.

Our brains are only 2% of our body weight, but they use 20% of the oxygen we consume and 20% of the energy we consume. What our brains and bodies need in order to have a balanced body budget are consistent quality sleep, hydration, good nutrition and movement, i.e. regular exercise. 

We are learning so much more than we ever knew about the importance of consistent quality sleep for our optimum brain health. Even while we are sleeping, our brain is storing and categorizing information, cleaning and purging, updating and rejuvenating. We are even cognizant of the disruption that caffeine and alcohol has on our sleep cycles and the integral neural processes that occur only during sleep. 

The benefits of good nutrition, hydration and regular exercise are irrefutable. But while we know these components are needed, we often forget that we are also draining our resources throughout the day and should pay attention to when we need a break, should take a walk, or grab a healthy snack. How often are we literally running on fumes?

Let’s just pause here for a minute and think about the amount of time we devote to charging our phones, making sure we have 5g network and cooling it off if we get a heat warning. What if we were to become as knowledgeable about our brains which are operating 24/7 for us – and often without any awareness of the drain on our inner resources?

All this time that we believed we were at the mercy of our emotions, we may simply be attempting to function optimally on an empty fuel tank. Very often what we are “feeling” is not an emotion, but rather an indicator that our body budget is out of balance. 

Since our brains are lightening fast at the estimation and prediction process, they get our body ready for a response that might include an increased heart rate, shallow breathing, or release of chemicals and hormones such as adrenaline or cortisol. We “feel” these sensations and “assign” an emotion to it. We might tell ourselves we feel scared, angry, anxious, uncertain, elated or surprised.

We’ve been doing this for most of our lives without a second thought, so it has become second nature to associate an emotion with whatever we are sensing in our bodies. Once we assign an emotion, we are off to the races – and often unconsciously,

Since our brains are prediction machines, it will quickly run through our historical database to find past events that simulate what we are feeling in the present moment. This complex retrieval system is on auto pilot most of the time; we are unconsciously running an algorithm that reviews our personal history looking for matches.

After the match is made, our amazing brain has one more remarkable feature — it runs a prediction error model. This is the brain’s way of giving us the opportunity to discard old data and replace it with newer, more appropriate data that suits the current situation. 

For the record, we often bypass or override this integral prediction error process. If it “feels” like a past experience, we pull the “all systems go” switch. This is how we’ve forged our “go to” behavioral patterns and protective armor. Without a moment’s hesitation, we assign an emotion, recall a past similar experience and jump into a memorized and familiar reactive pattern.

When we are pivoting to becoming architects of our experiences, we can start to pay more attention to both predictions and prediction errors. We can take the time to see if we are simply relying on an old database that no longer serves us well. This is how we “re-wire” those old outgrown behavioral patterns and replace them with new responses better suited to our lives today.

If the first brain system to get activated is simply an assessment of internal resources that are needed for the present situation, then we can start paying attention to body budget first and emotional responses second. This is a game-changing pivot in both mindfulness and self awareness. Think of this as a little “self check-in”. Are you resourced internally? Have you assigned an emotion and if so, does it feel appropriate to the current situation?

If we can make the distinction that our body budget is actually causing us to be under-resourced and not some big emotional reactions, we can begin to dis-engage from strong emotional triggers and respond with more cognitive skills. 

We think that emotional regulation is really hard and that changing our old behavioral patterns is even harder, but Dr. Barrett’s research is showing us that we just might have been making things much more challenging for ourselves all along by not understanding the role body budget plays. 

It is the very reason that we have “variation” in our moods, emotional states and our ability to think clearly. Dr. Barrett offers us a welcome sigh of relief — it turns out that “variation” is the norm.  

There are times when we do feel in control, cognitively and emotionally. We meet even the most stressful moments calmly, with a good sense of humor, a healthy acceptance of reality. We can even help others calm down and self-regulate when we feel this way.

Then there are times when we are short-tempered, can overreact to the smallest of events, or work ourselves into a state of frenzy. We set off a chain reaction of emotional reactions in others and things can escalate quickly.

Variation is the norm. And now we know what might be the real cause — a body budget deficit.

We get notifications throughout our busy day from our brains and bodies about what is needed to keep us running optimally. We even have terms we’ve created to diagnose our body budget deficits – such as hangry, brain fog, getting on our last nerve and no bandwidth. But unlike the ding of a notification from our phone, we often ignore the alerts we are getting from our brain about our own energy drain. 

We frequently overlook the small investments we can be making all throughout the day to keep our body budget in balance.  We may start with a full tank in the morning after a good night’s rest, a tall glass of water and a healthy breakfast; but we are going to begin to drain our body budget resources as the day goes on. Exercising, staying hydrated, making healthy choices for snacks and meals, taking breaks, getting outdoors, and unplugging from our devices are just a few of the multitude of ways we can restock our inner resources.

The biggest paradigm shift in understanding how we “make our emotions” is coming from a deep understanding of the role our body budget plays in our daily lives. 

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett is a pioneer in her fields of neuroscience and psychology – and she is helping us to get very savvy about our incredible, complex brain and body systems. If we take better care of ourselves, and pay attention to our body budget, this whole business of emotional regulation might just get a whole lot easier.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett will captivate you with her compelling Ted Talk about how emotions are made. Click this link to listen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gks6ceq4eQ&t=140s

Check out this episode of the Huberman Lab podcast where Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett is Andrew’s guest to discuss How to Understand Emotions https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/huberman-lab/id1545953110?i=1000631446646

Life Lessons from the Sea

My teenaged daughter and I were aboard a dive boat anchored in the Caribbean blue waters of St. Thomas. As we double checked each other’s scuba gear, our fellow divers were clamoring to jump overboard, creating a frenzy of commotion and noisy, disruptive entry splashes we’d been advised not to make. Two compelling thoughts raced through my daughter’s head and she urged me to hurry up. A fear of missing out by not being first — and a concern about not being part of the bigger group — had snagged her attention.

One of our seasoned dive masters was assessing the chaos that had unnecessarily disturbed the calm beauty of this idyllic setting with chagrined disappointment. As I caught his eye, I turned to my daughter and said “Just wait. It will be more than worth it.”

Some divers descended to the ocean floor quickly while others bobbed on the surface, fighting small waves and themselves, making it harder to deflate their lungs and their buoyancy control vests so that they could calmly drift down by the anchor line. Too many people making too many unskillful moves causing silt and debris to cloud the once-clear ocean waters. 

Paired diving buddies got separated, visibility was obscured, and the dive masters were diverted from their preferred role of ocean exploring tour guides.  Now they had to pivot to become search and recovery teams for disoriented divers and missing gear.

My daughter and I waited a bit longer and then we quietly entered the crystal blue waters just as we had been instructed. As we ever so slowly descended into the ocean, we watched the silt do the same, sinking slowly back to the sandy bottom. We marveled at the rays of sunlight dancing through the now clearer waters illuminating the rich diversity of the coral reef and extensive array of colors in the parrotfish, spotted butterfly, tangs and angelfish. 

By this time, the other divers were nearly out of sight, just a fading trail of fins and bubbles off in the distance. Being patient paid off. My daughter and I explored in leisurely, pure delight as the wonders of this mystical undersea world poked their heads back out and returned to their daily routines now that the coast was clear.

We took our time, investigating nooks and crannies, paying attention to the tiniest of sea creatures and intricate textures of coral reef vegetation.  Our dive guide coaxed small neon violet and lemon yellow Royal Gramma fish from tube-shaped sponge coral.  I could hear my daughter giggling through her regulator.

Our dive guide taught us how to navigate through the reef using our lungs instead of relying solely on our compressed air tanks. We learned to gently rise and descend by using our own inhales and exhales, skillfully navigating without disturbing sand or sea life.  We even had a hovering contest to see who could get closest to the ocean floor without actually touching it.

When we returned to the dive boat, my daughter and I discovered that we actually had a longer dive than the rest and surprisingly, we also had the most air remaining in our tanks. The dive master explained to the group that we conserved the compressed air in our tanks by controlling our own breathing.  He made a point of telling them that their overly excited and sometimes frantic reactions at the start of their dive predisposed them to erratic breathing; so they relied more heavily on their air tanks than their lungs. 

Ironically, we were the last to enter the water, yet we had a longer dive time. However, it wasn’t just more time that made our dive experience so rich – it was being calm and fully present that drew us into discovery and expanded exploration. 

When all the divers were safely back on the boat, the dive masters invited everyone to share their experience and use a laminated chart to identify the colorful fish they had seen. As we listened, my daughter had a big realization. By hanging back and being patient, we hadn’t missed out at all. In fact, we had one of our most incredible diving experiences after all the dust had settled. She gave me a sly little wink.  There were so many life lessons embedded in this one magical, awe-filled deep sea dive.  

Remembering to Use the Skills:

The first lesson that really stands out is how hard it is put into practice the actual training and skills in the “heat of the moment”. All the divers on that boat had to be open water certified in order to even participate in this excursion. They had passed both a written and under water test to earn their dive card. In addition, the charismatic dive masters reviewed in great detail the proper protocol for each dive before anyone entered the water. Nonetheless, all bets were off when the anchor was tossed overboard. Excitement, anxiousness and the strong desire to be first superseded the training and instructions.

This very same experience happens to most of us when we are put to the real life test of using better emotional regulation and relationship skills in the “heat of the moment”. It’s one thing to learn about new tools and quite another to remember to use them.  Ironic isn’t it? We have a strong desire to employ better tools and skills when we take a dive into those murky waters of emotional disregulation, disagreement or overwhelm but we can override our best intentions in a heartbeat.

The metaphorical lesson learned from the dive boat experience is that losing control and forgetting our skills can actually create more confusion and muddy up any chance of clearly understanding what is going on. It can also make things more challenging for others than they need to be as we cause unnecessary and distracting disturbances.

The neuroscience lesson is that when we get excited, anxious or overly stimulated, our brains decide we need energy to match the moment. We got a shot of cortisol in anticipation of what is about to go down. Our hearts race, our muscles twitch and before we know it, we are jumping into the ocean or a confrontation, completely disregarding both our knowledge and our intention to use it.

Pause and Get Your Bearings:

When a diver prepares to enter the water, he or she fills their buoyancy vest with a few puffs of air from their compression tank, so they can initially stay afloat and get their bearings before beginning a descent. 

The metaphorical lesson from this skill is that taking in a deep breath and then slowly exhaling is the equivalent of filling ourselves with the buoyancy we need to be present in the moment, and to get our bearings before we respond or engage.

The neuroscience lesson is that taking that deep breath is how we check in with our body’s inner workings; easing it from autopilot and the default mode to our own agency and self regulation. That simple calming breath slows our heart rate and clears ambiguous messaging in our brains so that we have more clarity.

We Are All at Different Levels:

Just like the divers on that boat, we are all at different levels of awareness and skills when it comes to putting better relationship tools and emotional self regulation into practice. 

A few of the divers may have been newly certified while others may have had 10 to 20 dives under their belt. Since each dive is uniquely different, those people had numerous opportunities to practice their skills in varied conditions and environments. Some divers may be quick studies and are able to easily integrate their education and training into their real life experience of a deep sea exploration. They may be able to relax and enjoy the ocean’s currents quite naturally. Others may be a little unsure, feel tense and have some resistance when the current sways them in a different direction. 

The metaphorical lesson is that we need to put our knowledge and tools into practice through real life experiences. The rubber hits the road when we take our training from a predictable indoor swimming pool to the ever-changing eco system of the sea. Practice does not necessarily make perfect, but it vastly improves our confidence in our ability to skillfully use our knowledge and tools in a variety of circumstances and conditions. 

The neuroscience lesson is that we actually create new neural networks in our brains when we begin to use new skills and tools. It is the consistent practice that moves the needle. We can practice in low stakes situations to gain more confidence with setting boundaries, staying calmer, listening to understand, and not getting attached to the outcome. As we become more skillful with these tools, we will feel better resourced to use them effectively in our most valued relationships.

Becoming Sturdy Leaders:

When I was first learning to scuba dive, I always felt safest with a seasoned diver as my dive buddy. Being with others who have more experience and are highly skillful is how we learn through osmosis and real life role plays.  We pay close attention and keenly observe their actions and choices and most importantly, the subsequent outcomes.

Later, when I had earned my certification and my kids wanted to learn to scuba dive, my role shifted from student to teacher. My attention was now on demonstrating and explaining things in a way they would understand. I also felt a strong sense of responsibility, much like we do when we teach our kids to drive a car. Staying calm while exchanging our dive gear on a platform 60 feet deep in a cold quarry was paramount. 

The metaphorical lesson is that we are teaching others, and most especially our kids, how to navigate life and relationships using the skills and tools we’ve honed.  Our own practices, coping skills and experiences influence how and what we teach. We wouldn’t put our kids behind the steering wheel of our SUV and employ the same teaching strategies that we often unconsciously resort to with temper tantrums, whining and confrontation. Parenting guru, Dr. Becky Kennedy, refers to our parental role in teaching life skills and emotional integration as “sturdy leadership.” Sturdy leadership is what a dive master provides. When we are sturdy leaders for our kids and for others, we help them feel safe, find calm and develop skills for emotional regulation and resilience.

The neuroscience lesson is that we co-regulate and co-create with each other. One cool, calm, collected sturdy leader helps others return to their emotional baseline faster. Then with clear heads and more emotional regulation, we can co-create a better situation and outcome. 

Setting a Positive Intention:

Those affable and charismatic dive masters created a sense of camaraderie, fun and curiosity with a group of strangers on a dive boat. They delivered their instructions for each dive with warm smiles, a little humor and attention to detail. Their goal was to keep us safe and set us up for the best experience possible.

Setting a positive intention provides the framework and guardrails for what might be considered two opposing truths: Being and feeling safe – and exploring uncharted territory.

The metaphorical lesson is when we have to engage in a hard conversation, deal with a difficult situation or person, we can also lead with a statement of positive intention. Brene Brown has long taught us that clear is kind; that we can be generous in believing that others are doing the best they can in the moment when we stay in our integrity and set boundaries about acceptable language and behaviors. 

A statement of positive intention is how we enter these challenging conversations. We state clearly and genuinely that we care deeply about a person and our relationship with them. It is our “why” for a desire to resolve our differences or a misunderstanding. A statement of positive intention can diffuse the tension and resistance that often prevents us from having these hard conversations. We offer kindness, compassion and respect – the ingredients to feel safe enough to be vulnerable and truthful. Reframe these hard conversations as a “search and recovery” opportunity.

The neuroscience lesson is that we often get in our own way when it comes to conflict resolution because of the stories we have told ourselves to make sense of things that happened in the past. Our brains are prediction machines relying on a historical database. In our efforts to protect ourselves from being hurt or disappointed yet again, we resist opening up to gaining helpful context, nuance and perspective. When we are open to “listening to gain understanding”, we are in essence installing an “update” to our data base. Taking in new information with context we may not have been aware is how we free ourselves from craggy old beliefs and narratives that snag and entangle us.

On Dry Land:

When my teenaged children were learning to scuba dive, I had a lot of friends who chided me for letting them do something so risky. At the time, I shared with those concerned friends that we also teach our kids to drive, which is equally risky and something we all do nearly every day. Kids take driver’s ed, they study and pass exams to get a learner’s permit and we parents take them out to practice in parking lots and less traveled rural roads. We give them the tools and the practice they need to earn that driver’s license and we celebrate the milestone of turning over the car keys and letting them venture out on their first solo drive. 

How remarkable is it then that we really don’t give much serious contemplation to the emotional and relational skills we need the most and that we will use every single day for the rest of our lives?

We need sturdy leaders to teach us how to self-regulate, to learn from our internal dashboard of emotions and experiences, to use self-awareness, healthy coping skills and relationship tools to navigate all parts of life.

Today, we are fortunate to have incredible new science-based insights and knowledge about the importance of emotional integration, the inter-connectedness of our brain and body systems, and a plethora of resources to support better ways of showing up for ourselves and others.

The Takeaways in Life Lessons from the Sea:

Find the “dive masters” that are the sturdy leaders that resonate with you. Study and learn from them.  Acquire some new and improved relationship skills and play around with them. Start with low stakes situations to build confidence. 

Find some seasoned “dive buddies” to help you hone your ability to use more effective tools. Friends, family members and mentors can become these dive buddies for you. Seek their wisdom, ask questions and ask for help. Swap stories and experiences to deepen your understanding.

Don’t forget to put all that education and study hours into actual practice. Use that calming breath to fill your life vest with some air, get your bearings and then enter an interaction grounded and calm. Remember to use the new skills you are learning. Put them to the test with some patience and compassion for yourself and others.

After each new “dive experience”, take some time to reflect on how it went. How did you feel and what did you learn? Were you able to listen to understand, validate someone else’s experience or perspective, find some common ground? Did you feel more emotionally balanced and recognize that this helped others calm down faster?  Taking the time to do a thoughtful de-briefing reinforces your learning and hones your new skills.

A Measure of Success:

Imagine all the positive changes that are sure to come when we collectively begin to acquire and use better emotional and relationship skills. These new tools and skills will be transferrable to all aspects of our life; fewer self-made obstacles and less complicated relationship entanglements.

After all, look how many of us can competently drive a variety of vehicles on a busy highway or skillfully navigate a crowded parking lot. 

We can teach each other complex navigational skills.

NOTEWORTHY RESOURCES:

Healing Cycles of Trauma with Mariel Buque — if you find yourself telling others they are too sensitive or overreacting, then you will find this episode so insightful https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/being-well-with-forrest-hanson-and-dr-rick-hanson/id1120885936?i=1000640891293

One of the Best Parenting Resources for our time — Dr. Becky Kennedy. Check her out on Instagram and her YouTube Ted Talk

Check out this HubermanLab podcast episode featuring Adam Grant discussing his newest book Hidden Potential. How often do we limit our own potential and that of others without even being aware? https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/huberman-lab/id1545953110?i=1000636628726
Midlife is a Chrysalis, not a Crisis: Life Gets Better with Age. This dynamic conversation with Chip Conley will have a big impact on anyone who is reassessing what they want out of a new chapter of their life. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rich-roll-podcast/id582272991?i=1000641285807

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

Making a Splash

“There are going to be some changes around here” announced my 6 year old daughter, standing proudly in her blue Daisy Scout smock with several Boy Scout merit badge books tucked under arm. She was headed off to her very first experience in Girl Scouts but she clearly had some preconceived ideas about what it might be like. Her brothers were 10 and 11 years older than her and they already had quite a few Boy Scout merit badges sewn on their brown sashes that they wore to their meetings each week. My spunky young daughter was not here for monkey business. She wanted to learn real life skills, like how to pitch a tent and make a fire. Her suspicions that Daisy Scouts would be about making toothpick crafts motivated her to become an activist for change. I’ll be honest — I was incredibly proud of her.

In case you are wondering, my daughter did not last too long in Girl Scouts. This did not come as a surprise to me or her — or even her scout leaders who often felt challenged by her.  It’s just human nature to be resistant to change – and especially if it comes blazing in a pint-sized blonde haired, confident, feisty spokesperson. What could she possibly know?

Turns out that kids instinctively know a lot. Sometimes they are keenly aware that change is in order even when we ourselves can’t see it.

The image of my amazing little girl in her blue Daisy smock and those Boy Scout Merit Badge books is a touchstone for me. It also represents a pivot point for the direction of my blog in 2024 and it is all about change in action. I’ll be sharing real life examples of how game-changing it is to update our brains, embrace new parenting models and modernize our life skills backpacks.

So let’s dive in!

A few weeks ago, I was attending a swim meet for my grandddaughter. Four swim clubs coming together at the premier indoor community pool to compete for the season championship. You could feel the excitement in the air mingling with giggles, splashes and indecipherable loudspeaker announcements. Coaches were busy making last minute changes to their event line-ups when some of their swimmers were unable to attend for a variety of reasons. Anxious parents watched from the second floor gallery as their kids nodded in agreement with a coach or got into big discussions with other swimmers. 

During one of the 200 yard medley events, a young teenaged girl dove into the pool, the last leg of her team’s freestyle entry in the field. All the other teams had already finished this event when this teenager entered the water. She swam the first 25 yards but when she reached the end of the pool where she should have done a flip turn and continued on, she stopped and hung to the edge. An adult volunteer assigned to make certain that each lap was completed, leaned over to talk with the girl who was now shaking her head and visibly crying. Initially the volunteer urged her to finish but it was clear that this young teen had not only hit the pool wall, she had hit her emotional wall. She could not go on.

She was trembling all over as she gingerly climbed out of the pool. Her coach wrapped an arm around her shoulder and escorted her to a quiet spot on the poolside bench. Her coach stooped down in front of her, made eye contact and was talking with her. Her mother appeared and sat down beside her, wrapping her in a towel and a hug.

Meanwhile, up in the gallery, nosy spectators watched with deep interest and more judgment than curiosity. The comments that were made ranged from pity to criticism to shame. There were more strongly held opinions about how to handle such a situation than there banners hanging above the line lanes. 

I could not hold my tongue – the opening to plant a seed of change was too prime to ignore. “This is exactly what should be happening in a moment like this,” I stated loudly enough for those around me to hear. ”According to Dr. Dan Siegel the power of showing up and being present with a child when big emotions are consuming them validates their experience, builds resiliency and prevents shame and insecurities from taking root.”

In that moment, I felt just like my Daisy Scout daughter, speaking up when it mattered most. We don’t know what we don’t know. 

We don’t realize that our old parenting models were broken and they set us up for failure, for poor coping skills, limiting beliefs and a fixed mindset. 

Shame and embarrassment do not motivate us to try harder, begin again and learn from our failures. Criticism erodes trust – trust in ourselves and our potential as well as trust in others that they will do all they can to help us overcome obstacles.  Pity is the near enemy of compassion – and it puts a lot of distance between us and others (even in the face of a similar situation that we could easily find ourselves in). Pity just enables us to think we are so lucky because we are not having that experience.

But wait — what if it was OUR child having that experience? Would those in the gallery who were so judgmental when it was happening to someone else, do a complete 180 if it was their own child?

Even if it was only briefly, I could see that some people were taking a minute to reflect on my comments.  I knew that some parents were well aware that their own child had been asked to swim in a new event for this meet – and yes, they were anxious about the looming possible outcome.

None of us really know the full backstory for that young teenaged girl. Yet it was clearly evident that something much bigger than swimming another 25 yards was in play. Imagine for a moment that you were asked to swim 50 yards in a relay, to be the last leg of your team’s event. And you knew the moment you dove into the pool that your team was going to finish dead last because every other team had already completed the event. How would you be feeling? Defeated before you started? Why bother? What’s the point? Why me?

The more life experiences that we personally have, the greater our ability to tap into our empathy and compassion for others; the more likely we are to normalize moments like this for children and parents. Why would we ever deny another person the support they need the most in moments like this? 

What if this young girl was really struggling with all the hormonal imbalances of puberty? What if her parents had recently divorced or the family was newly relocated to this town? What if this was her first swim meet? What if this was her first Christmas without her beloved grandma? What if her teammates had taunted her and said she shouldn’t be in this event?

I left that swim meet that day thinking about that young girl, hopeful that her mom was skilled in offering her daughter the scaffolding she needed to fully process this experience and grow through it rather than unhealthily “going through it”.

The power of showing up and listening to a child’s full emotional experience is a game-changer. Validating their true feelings and helping them to name all the emotions they feel is how we become the training wheels for an expanded emotional vocabulary and healthy coping skills. 

This is how we build resilience and inner confidence in our kids.  They are more likely to try again and trust in their own potential. Kids are more open to trying new things that may seem hard and challenging. In fact, conquering their fears feels empowering to them.

Food for Thought: One of the best ways to help others in moments like this is to validate and normalize it for them. We’ve all had experiences like this even as adults. When we know that we are not alone in what seems like the worst moment of our lives, it is incredibly comforting. Refrain from offering how you would feel in that moment — and let the other person fully express their own emotions. Surprisingly, many times what they are actually feeling is not at all what you might feel.  

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

All of us come into contact with children – and being knowledgeable about vastly improved parenting models is like having an ace up your sleeve. Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers and coaches will all benefit from discovering brand new skills and tools for age old childhood emotional moments.

I highly recommended reading Good Inside by Dr. Becky Kennedy and by all means, check out her wide array of workshops on her website: https://www.goodinside.com/about/

Dr. Becky is a mom first and foremost. She is a child psychologist by profession – and she is a shining example of putting her work into practice. 

If you follow her on social media, you will be highly entertained by her sense of humor and oh so relatable parenting moments. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll commiserate and you find real support for real life.

MATT EICHELDINGER – check out this incredible teacher who has created the most heartfelt videos about his students over many years as an educator and caring human being. Life lessons from real life with kids that will stay with you and your kids.
https://matteicheldinger.com/

ATLAS OF THE HEART is a family reference guide that should be in every home. If you want to get serious about building your emotional vocabulary, this book is for you. Not only will you gain a working knowledge of 87 emotions and experiences, you will discover when those emotions are most likely to show up. 

Daily Gummies of Wisdom – Year End Insights

For those of you who follow my blog regularly, you may recall that I created a new feature during 2023 — occasional blog posts that featured a short collection of my Daily Gummies of Wisdom — with some expanded thoughts and reflections.

My Daily Gummies are nourishing food for thought to jumpstart your day and are intended as meaningful supplement for emotional health, self-awareness and self discovery. I launched the Daily Gummies of Wisdom email program in the spring of this year with the hope that the insight I shared might really resonate with every day life situations we all encounter.  

The biggest surprise for me personally was hearing back from so many people all across the country who found the gummies to be worthwhile, thought-provoking, motivating and inspirational. Sometimes the Daily Gummy was printed and stuck on the refrigerator for the family to see; some were forwarded to a friend dealing with the very issue that the gummy addressed; some were incorporated into sermons, support group discussions or a counseling session. A few people have shared with me that reading the Daily Gummy is now an integral part of their regular morning routine. I was deeply touched and overjoyed by the stories I’ve heard about the impacts of my Daily Gummies of Wisdom. What a gift for me — to be learning from others how they digested, metabolized and incorporated the insights into their own experiences. 

What I am learning is that real life examples do a lot to help us integrate better skills and tools in our daily lives. What could be more beneficial than hearing a true story about showing up differently changed an old relationship dynamic, solved a parenting problem, empowered others to become more true to themselves? That’s what I will be sharing more of in 2024 — the exciting changes that occur when personal growth and self discovery are visibly in action in our daily lives.

To jumpstart 2024, here is a recent Daily Gummy of Wisdom and the backstory that inspired it:

We all have the power to create change. It is when we give away our power or deny that we even have any, that we stay stuck in a rut or unhealthy relationship patterns. 

We have to get in the driver’s seat and get into gear – we need to engage in change.

It’s easy to stay stuck in the complaint department, victimhood or limiting beliefs. But we will just be spinning our wheels and making no forward progress.

Our agency, autonomy, choices and habits are the engines of change. Shift out of feeling stuck and into a new habit, a fresh perspective, begin holding a boundary instead of a grudge and speak up when you normally stay silent. These are the tools of change. 

Don’t give away your power. Climb into the cab of your life and start the engine. We can stay stuck being part of the problem or we can shift gears and be part of our solution.

This gummy about our personal power was shared on December 11, 2023. It was inspired by two fascinating podcast conversations that unpacked “power” in a whole new way.  We hear a lot about “power” and we often have a negative association with it, such as power over, strong arming another or “disempowering” someone.

But what if we reframed it and saw power as our engine of change; how we shift from being stuck to making improvements?

The first podcast conversation that reframed my thinking about power was with Esther Perel, the renowned couples therapist and best selling author. Esther is such a compassionate. empathic and skillful couples counselor. She has a bedside manner that would be the envy of any medical professional. She possesses a rare, surgical precision to extract a couple’s key issue and open them up to seeing the deeper, loving relationship that is possible for them. Her ability to pull this out without inflicting more pain while simultaneously guiding a couple to healing, healthy connection is astounding. In a single couples session, she can remove a long-standing impediment and shift a couple from fighting WITH each other to fighting together FOR their partnership. 

Esther offers a unique perspective on power by reframing a common relationship power dynamic – the kind where one partner is strongly supported in pursuing their goals and the other partner makes a lot of sacrifice to accommodate them. Esther reminds the “accommodator” that he or she actually has tremendous power in the relationship.  If the “accommodator” stopped offering support, picking up the slack or doing more to keep the home life balanced, the other person would likely struggle to meet their goals or pursue their dreams. 

This reframing shifts the power dynamic perspective for both partners. Suddenly the accommodator clearly sees his or her own value, impact and contributions in a meaningful light. And the one who is the benefactor of all these accommodations gains a healthy awareness of all that is being offered on a daily basis to pursue a long term goal.  Esther gives the accommodator the gift of seeing his or her “agency” and the benefactor the gift of “gratitude” for the other’s contributions and sacrifices. 

Charisse Cooke, author and attachment-based psychotherapist, recently offered this tool for accommodators who are growing resentful: “match the behavior”. If you are hyper-functioning, overdoing and overextending but not getting anything in return, dial back on the energy, effort and contributions you are making to match the behavior and responses of your partner. This is a great way to correct an imbalance in the relationship dynamic.

We can restore a healthy balance in the “give and take” of our relationships when we recognize how we often give away our power and then feel unappreciated and resentful. 

I learned even more about power from a recent Huberman Lab podcast featuring Robert Greene, author of six international bestsellers. 

Robert Greene believes there is too much negative focus given to power, when in fact it has remarkable positive benefits. He shares that exercising self control is a SuperPower – especially when we are able to skillfully regulate our emotions and respond to life with calmness, clarity and objectivity. 

We give away our power unintentionally when we have knee jerk emotional reactions. We are well aware of this — often instantly regretting that we displayed such an immature response in front of our kids, friends, family or publicly. In a split second, we acted out of character and embarrassed ourselves. 

Think about a time when you witnessed an adult having a childlike meltdown and you lost a little respect for that person or it tarnished the image you once held for that person. This is how we diminish our power. 

Arthur Brooks, happiness expert and another great author, recently revealed that our grandmothers gave us really good advice when they told us to “count to 10” when we were little and emotionally out of control. But now, we have science-based evidence that we really need to count to 30 – because that is how long it takes to move us from the limbic system in our brains to the pre-frontal cortex. In other words, the limbic system is where the strong emotional reactions come from — and using a 30 second pause moves us into our super-power of self-control and emotional regulation (the executive functions found in our pre-frontal cortex.)

Robert Greene urges us to not give away our personal power, but rather to own it as a super-power. Emotional self-control puts us in the driver’s seat and facilitates us showing up in life with our character, integrity and values intact. We actually have greater negotiation and strategy skills at our disposable when we show up cool, calm and collected.

My hope is that the backstory to this Daily Gummy of Wisdom has felt a bit like a factory tour where you discover how the emotional health supplements are made. I love doing the research and distilling what I am learning into the creation of the gummy. What I am enjoying even more however is hearing how the Gummies are helping others. Keep those stories coming!

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

FIND THE HUBERMAN LAB PODCAST on your favorite platform, including YouTube, and scroll through the episodes for the latest science on a topic that interests you.
FIND ESTHER PEREL’S PODCAST on your favorite platform — and listen in on counseling sessions to gain new insights on relationships

Not a Workshop – It’s A Daily Practice

I’ve been blogging about my own personal growth and self-discovery journey for almost 8 years. Like most people, I probably believed in the early stages of this process, I would be able to identify the habits I needed to change and the skills I needed to acquire in order to check the self help box. Then I could move on into the next chapter of my life – happily ever after.

What I have come to more fully understand and appreciate is that personal growth, self-discovery and human evolution are in a constant state of change. As a direct result, we have to change our mindset about personal growth and self discovery.

The answers to our lifelong, puzzling questions about who we are and why we behave as we do are not to be found in a single book, podcast or workshop. We can’t earn a certification, degree or even a merit badge — and then move on as if our work is forever done.

Personal growth, self discovery, emotional health, relationship skills and mindful self-awareness are our life’s work. It is dynamic, integrated and evolving – because we are.

I’d understand if you were less excited, and more intimidated by this revelation, but take heart – it turns out that this work doesn’t have to be as hard and painful as we once made it. Thanks to neuroscience and the social sciences, we now possess evidence-based knowledge of how our brains work. The incredible discoveries that have been made in very recent years are helping us understand why all the old ways of addressing our behavioral, mental and emotional health were not working very well.

As we gain a greater understanding of how our brains actually work — and how our lifetime of emotions and experiences get created, stored and pulled out for reference — we can begin to see the evolving benefits of incorporating consistent emotional practices into our daily lives.

We don’t workout til we get the strength and flexibility we desire – and then stop. We maintain our physical health with daily commitments and practices. And now, we are learning that we must do the same with our emotional health.

Take a moment to think about the last time you lost your patience or your cool; or when you hit a trip wire and became so emotionally triggered by something pretty insignificant in hindsight. How might it feel to have greater muscle memory when it comes to emotional self control?

It’s the time of year when holidays are really amplifying the hard truth that we get tripped up a lot by unprocessed emotions and old family dynamics. Rather than cringing about having to deal with all this messy stuff, we can use it as an opportunity to become an emotions scientist – and to make some discoveries about how better emotional regulation would dramatically improve our quality of life and our relationships.

Let’s take a closer look at an emotion with which we are all familiar — good old fashioned envy. There’s no doubt that the holidays present us with more than our fair share of opportunities to compare ourselves to others in a whole host of ways. It’s human nature to find ourselves envious of others when we look around at the office party or family gathering, or scroll through the festive photos our friends post on social media.

We may feel that tinge of envy in our bodies as we compare and contemplate what others have that we don’t, or if we let FOMO (the fear of missing out) or FOPO (fear of other people’s opinions) take hold in our minds.

A few years ago, Brené Brown shared that comparison is the thief of joy. She was addressing how this exhausting hustle to keep up the with Joneses can lead us to a dead end (and quite often deep in debt – physically, emotionally and financially). In his latest book Hidden Potential, organizational psychologist, Adam Grant, digs a little deeper. He professes that comparison is not the thief of joy – envy is: “Resenting others’ success breeds misery and rivalry. Admiring their success brings motivation and learning. We all compare ourselves to others. A key to growth and happiness is focusing our comparisons on people who inspire us.”

Envy is an emotion; we feel envy. Comparison is a noun and it is simply a consideration or estimate.

It’s not the comparing that gets us in trouble; it’s the unchecked, disregulated emotion of envy. When our emotions are super-charging us, we tend to lose our perspective and our quite often our self control. Whether it becomes a cycle of rumination or an emotional outburst, we get derailed from our own present moment and we rob ourselves of joy. Sometimes our behavioral actions even rob others of their joy. It’s the collateral damage of us getting caught up in emotions we would rather not be feeling.

Until very recently, we did not fully understand that we actually are capable of much more emotional intelligence and self regulation than we realize. For far too long, we believed that the only way to tame emotions was to use sheer will power or “fake it til you make it.” These old strategies did not pan out so well.

Have you ever witnessed your young child having an absolute meltdown about a toy or a treat that their sibling has — knowing full well that your wailing child doesn’t even like that toy or treat? That is a classic example of unregulated, impassioned envy. A young child’s developing brain does not have the capacity yet ….. to engage differently with their big emotions. As adults, we do have this capacity, but many just don’t know it.

As Adam Grant makes so obvious, it’s human nature to compare ourselves to others. The act of comparison is not likely to go away no matter how much we humans evolve. It’s when that comparison stirs up our envy that things actually do come apart at the seams. Now we “devolve” into the little kid who is melting down over something we may not even really want. We may have about as much success controlling our envy as a parent trying to reason with the toddler if we rely solely on sheer will power. We can’t arm wrestle our way out of big emotions any more than a child can.

What’s in that envy cocktail that we shake or stir? Resentment, disappointment, frustration, sadness, insecurity, anxiety – just to name a few.

Have you ever felt envious about a friend or family member but in reality you wouldn’t want to trade places with them in a heartbeat? We cannot make this distinction in the moment that envy has taken over – our brain’s negativity bias and the strong unchecked emotions make it nearly impossible.

If we stay stuck in envy, we become resentful, miserable, and angry; we may fall prey to bouts of superiority just to make ourselves feel better. We run the risk of projecting all we are feeling out onto others. This is the adult version of the toddler temper tantrum.

Adam Grant offers a tool to avoid envy robbing us of our joy: “A key to growth and happiness is focusing our comparisons on people who inspire us.” In other words, he is guiding us to become “discerning” about our comparisons. This makes so much sense because it keeps us grounded and helps us maintain perspective. Think of your inner GPS being your “inner adult”; the voice of reason.

Becoming “discerning” about who and what we are comparing ourselves to is similar to an effective distraction technique often used with young children to help them get out of an emotional spiral. We disrupt the brain’s runaway emotional train with a pause between stimulus and response, and then we use discernment to switch tracks. Simply put, we refocus where our attention is going.

There is another tool we can implement to super-charge self-regulation skills. We can “substitute” a better emotion, on purpose, and in real time.

In his latest book, Build the Life You Want, happiness expert, Arthur Brooks, introduces this dynamic new emotional practice with a very relatable metaphor:

“Most people use caffeine because they aren’t content with the way they feel naturally, and want better outcomes in mood and work. It does so through substitution of one molecule for another. Caffeine is a good metaphor for this principle of emotional self management: You don’t have to accept the emotion you feel first. Rather, you can substitute a better one that you want. ” — excerpted from Chapter 3, Build the Life You Want.

Think about what we are trying to accomplish as parents when our child is over-reacting. We want them to “substitute” a different emotion for the one they are currently feeling. In fact, we mindlessly offer this common refrain to our distressed child: “Oh honey, don’t feel that way” and then we offer them other choices. These choices are often rooted in gratitude — all the things they already have.

Are you surprised that you already possess this skill of “substituting” a different emotion — helping others to see that they can choose an emotion that is more constructive to “act” on? It’s so easy to employ this tactic with our child or friend — and one of the most challenging to rely on for ourselves.

Our Own Social Science Experiment:

Our labs will be well stocked with opportunities for us to practice the pause, discernment and substitution over the holidays. Our labs are our ourselves, our families and our interactions with others as we make celebratory preparations.

What might your hypothesis be about the tiny Petri dish that has no emotional regulation — yet.

What are your predictions about the middle sized Petri dish that ignites quickly and has only sheer will power to overcome the emotional wildfire?

What outcome might be revealed when the larger, more advanced Petri dish, uses a pause between stimulus and response, discernment to shift focus and attention, and emotional substitution — choosing the emotion they wish to act from rather than the emotion they initially feel.

Why Daily Emotional Skills Practices are Needed:

Emotional intelligence and skillful emotional regulation are the natural next steps in our human evolution. Neuroscience and social sciences are giving us the proof positive that our brains have the capacity and neuroplasticy to create new, healthier neural networks, especially when it comes to the complexity of our emotions. With the advent of all these new discoveries, better skills and practices are replacing old paradigms for mental health, parenting, education, modern medicine and psychology.

An Emotional Skills Workshop may provide us with a diverse array of emotional tools like being mindful about where we place our attention and substituting a better emotion — but without consistent, regular practice, we will either forget about them or atrophy our ability to use them skillfully.

As Arthur Brooks underscores: “emotional substitution is a skill that takes practice, not just an insight. With practice and dedication, it can become quite automatic, and you will love the results.”

What really resonates with me about Arthur Brook’s wisdom, is that we are trying so hard to parent our kids to be in control of their emotions but for generations we have gone about it all wrong. Intuitively we sort of know what to do when we are trying to help them, but we were never taught how our brains and bodies work, the mechanics of emotional intelligence and regulation. It’s hard for us to teach what we ourselves don’t fully understand; what we ourselves are not consistently role modeling because we are not yet skillfully practiced.

That old adage “practice what you preach” is more relevant today than ever.

Modern day parents have so many ways to protect their children than we older generations had. Baby monitors, car seats, safety gear for sports, sunscreen, well baby checkups and preventative dental care are some powerful examples. Now they have at their fingertips, scientific breakthroughs about happiness and fulfillment — it is emotional integration.

We can install emotional integration in our young children and we can teach them how to use their innate emotional intelligence in ways that actually support and protect them. We are entering the age of “meta cognition” and it is a game-changer.

Food for Thought:

The reason that a single workshop will never be the answer for personal growth and self discovery is that we are literally changing every single day. Emotional intelligence and skillful emotional regulation is not a quick fix or a workshop — it is a life practice.

Emotions are here to stay – and for good reason. They are the guard rails, channel buoys and lighthouses for our quality of life and meaningful connections with others.

We take our emotional past into our present and we build our futures with our emotional responses in the present moment. We bump into each other every single day, with our emotions, ideas, perspectives and experiences. When we change, others change. We need better life navigational tools and skills to do this in a way that matters most to those we love.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

HOW TO UNDERSTAND EMOTIONS https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/huberman-lab/id1545953110?i=1000631446646
If you don’t want to dive into this big read just yet, listen to Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett discuss emotions in the Huberman Lab podcast shown here. You will discover how integral emotional intelligence is for our children especially.

Emotional Airbags

Just envision this for a moment: When we are emotionally triggered, it is like an airbag exploding to protect us. However, it catches us off guard – the impact so sudden and so strong that our brains send out high emergency alerts to our bodies. We get hijacked rather than assisted. We feel like we can’t breathe fully, our hearts are racing and our ability to see clearly is limited.

I’ve never experienced an airbag deploying in a car, but I can imagine that it feels more scary than protective when it happens. While we know that air bags are a safety feature designed to protect us from serious and even life-threatening injury, it is not something that we get to practice. We can only imagine what it might be like and we can mentally prepare for how we would hope we can respond in such a situation.

Our natural human response to an emotional trigger is the equivalent of airbags deploying. Our emotions are intended to protect and inform us but a strong emotional trigger can feel surprisingly overwhelming.

Our very first experiences with our internal emotional airbags occur in childhood and they have lasting impacts.

For many of us who are older, the cars our parents drove back in the day didn’t even seatbelts let alone airbags. Those safety features only came along when a critical mass of human beings realized that we could actually save life and limb by being proactive and installing numerous safeguards. It is this very same analogy with our emotional airbags; back in the day, our parents did know about the profound benefits of emotional intelligence and most importantly, skillful emotional regulation.

We are now at a very important tipping point — we are fast gaining critical mass in the awareness that emotional integration is the human operating system upgrade that should be modeled, taught and integrated into our children’s developing brains.

The challenge for many of us is how do we teach something we were never actually taught? The truth is that we have actually done just that in many areas of life. Just look how quickly we taught ourselves to embrace technology, electronic banking and Zoom meetings. If we stop resisting what appears to be harder and even unpleasant work, we might discover that life and our relationships actually get a lot easier and more fulfilling with emotional integration.

I recently learned that we can gain a lot of traction in our own emotional integration education by being around children. This makes so much sense because we can witness in real time what happens in childhood when kids are given tools and support to understand and handle their emotions. It’s a visual aid more engaging than a magic act.

When something new comes along such as an upgrade to our phones, our laptops and even our car’s technology, we can readily see how the improvements enhance our life and address a problem we may not even know we had. The same is true with emotional health. When we become keen observers of children and their interactions with their parents, siblings, teachers and friends, we witness firsthand how having meaningful emotional tools would have made a huge and dramatic difference for everyone — most especially for children who have very limited cognitive resources for making sense of a complex world.

In my prior blog posts in this multi-part series on Game-Changers for our emotional upgrade, you may have noticed that no matter who is leading the charge, or what modality or field they represent, everything points us directly back to childhood.

All the behavioral patterns, the protective armor, the coping mechanisms that we deploy have been handed down to us for generations, with no real advancements at all. In fact, what once seemed so complex about personal growth, trauma and self discovery have been boiled down to some pretty obvious truths: we really had a “one size fits all approach” and a small closet of possible options for navigating childhood. We were so handicapped for how we made sense of what was happening in our world.

A quick review of psychology, neuroscience, the enneagram, behavioral science, etc. reveals that our small closet of options held just a handful of “one size fits all” behavioral patterns and coping mechanisms. We are people pleasers or contrarians, we hide or we fight, we avoid conflict or we create conflict, we numb, we run, we freeze. Normal, child-sized responses to emotional airbags exploding in us, as well as members of our family and community without warning.

No wonder we ran for cover and struggled to make sense of the unpredictability and scariness of it all. We ducked into those little closets to find something that would soothe us and keep us safe from things we were feeling but did not understand.

Dr. Becky Kennedy explains this so beautifully when she reminds us that a small child who is overwhelmed with big emotions – and is throwing a tantrum or having a meltdown – lacks the skills he needs to manage that big emotional explosion. She tells us that we teach our children the skills they need to learn to swim, ride a bike or read. So why — she challenges us — would we expect them to be able to handle big, overwhelming emotions coursing through them — without some helpful tools?

I’m hoping that this brought you to a full stop.

Take a moment to think about how you are handling your own “sudden, big feeling moments” in real time today when your adult emotional airbags get deployed — especially in front of your kids.

We teach our children a lot by osmosis. What skills and tools are we reaching for when we are emotionally triggered, extremely tired, or overwhelmed by others or events? We not only need to role model and actively discuss how our emotions impact us, we really need to engage in the installation of emotional intelligence in our children. We need to teach emotional skills just as we teach them good hygiene and manners, how to share with others and how to use their words. In fact, when we install the emotional upgrades, all the other things we are attempting to teach them will be greatly enhanced in the most remarkable ways. Honestly, the parenting job is less exhausting and more productive with strong emotional skills and tools.

The reason for this is that our brains release adrenaline and cortisol when we are emotionally unmoored. Since we co-regulate each other, if we overreact when our kids’ emotional airbags have deployed, it is like double-dosing all those stress hormones. We would never double-dose our kids cough medicine or Tylenol – but losing our cool with emotionally distraught kids is like giving them an extra dose of stress hormones and throwing back some for ourselves.

Here’s what happens when our bodies get flooded with cortisol: Our heart rate and blood pressure go up; our bodies fight or flight response kicks in; our digestive system slows; our immune system weakens we become anxious, irritable and on edge. Chances are you are now realizing that this is the exact opposite of being a calming first responder when emotional airbags inflate.

We cannot be at our best as parents and emotional first responders when we are over-reacting to our child’s emotions and out of control with our own.

Take a moment to think back to an experience that you had as a kid when your parents or caregiver lost control — do you recall how it felt? It was probably pretty scary and you put a bookmark in your memory banks of how you might avoid that reaction in the future.

This is how our childhood emotional triggers begin. It is precisely why all the intersecting research points us back to childhood for the tap roots of our emotional triggers, inner critics and insecurities.

Old parenting models exacerbated the problem because emotions were treated as a bug and not a feature of our core operating system. Kids and parents were flooded with emotions and cortisol and the parenting rule of thumb was to send us to our room til we were able to be with others. We were often punished or dismissed for our outbursts, while our parents got to return to whatever they chose to do. No consequences for them. No repairs for the relationship rupture. We made a mental note of that too. We got a lot of mixed messaging to go along with our repressed and unprocessed emotional experiences. This double standard also created a lot of issues with our basic need for a secure attachment – and resulted in many of us having anxious, avoidant or disorganized attachment styles. Yet another clue from our childhood about why we might be having relationship issues in our adult lives.

Our brains are prediction machines. While we are not consciously aware of it, we have mental notes and bookmarks on a clunky old database that it still uses when we get hijacked and go offline. Our bodies and brains coordinate all their defense mechanisms very quickly when something feels oddly familiar and we need to be on high alert. Our emotional triggers are in those childhood databases.

The pivot is catching ourselves in the act. We have to catch ourselves in the act of being hit with our own emotional airbags and realizing that we are off-line, defaulting to that childhood database.

When we are operating our incredibly complex cars today at high speeds in heavy traffic, we have the ability to stay fully engaged with our current knowledge and awareness. We don’t default to how anxious and insecure we felt when we were first learning to drive. We have the awareness, dexterity and maturity to handle a frightening situation like airbags deploying in a car in the event of a collision. We most likely would act like the adults our kids need us to be in that circumstance. We can do hard things. In fact, we are pretty proud of ourselves when we handle a crisis like this with confidence.

We can do the same for our kids’ emotional airbags; we can become the trustworthy, grounded first responders they need and deserve.

I believe that the reason doing our own emotional integration work gets a lot of traction when we interact with kids is that we get a lot of opportunities to both observe and practice. As we pay attention to the common emotional triggers our children have, we can get equally more in touch with our own.

Kids haven’t changed; what has changed is knowing that emotional integration is an incredible feature of our brains and bodies — not a bug. Our children will have the same big overwhelming emotional responses that we did when we were little. They will get scared, angry, frustrated, confused, belligerent, shy, bossy, sensitive — the list is endless. But instead of leaving them to their own devices and that small closet of coping skills, we will be showing up as caring, comforting emotional mentors.

We can teach them or we can repeat the past. This is where real change takes place.

Each emotion our children feel is legitimate and is real for them. Acknowledging that is huge. It reassures them that they will be ok, that they are seen and heard and that we will help them manage their big feelings. They do not have to do that alone. In fact, they unable to do that alone because they do not yet have access to “top down” executive functions in those small developing brains.

We become the training wheels for our children’s emotional awareness, intelligence and regulation.

No overdosing on stress hormones for you or your child. Helping your child return to their baseline is how we teach them to “ride out” their emotional waves. As they grow older, they will then have a lot of experience with how emotions come on strong, and can subside with a little skillful assistance. We can teach our kids to label their emotions, to understand what they are trying to tell them and to process them in real time. This is how we help our kids get more skillful at their own emotional regulation. We teach them to tolerate a little short term discomfort and to learn from it. This is the preventative step we take to help them avoid numbing their pain.

It is also how we introduce them to the incredible benefits of self-compassion. Rather than our children growing up with harsh inner critics, fixed mindsets and limiting beliefs, we will be helping them build resilience, resourcefulness, confidence and growth mindsets.

We aren’t born afraid of our emotions. In fact, emotions are a baby’s first language and how they get their basic needs met. Rather than pulling the plug on emotions when our children learn to talk and express themselves with more context and complexity, we help them differentiate between self-identity and their behaviors. Telling a child they are bad, stupid or too much is the root cause of adults who struggle with their core identity, self-worth and lack of inner confidence. Label the behavior not the child. We have good kids and sometimes they have unacceptable behaviors.

We use boundaries as guardrails for our kids – to help them learn how to make good choices on their own later. Our boundaries teach kids more about the consequences of their behaviors more than any lecture ever will. And we want our children to become very skilled at holding boundaries when they are teenagers and adults so that they can clearly let others know what is acceptable behavior to be in relationship with them. Boundaries are a relationship tool that keeps us safe and in alignment with our core values.

Did you know that children have this same inquisitive nature about emotions? We are the ones who grew up with emotions being labeled as good or bad, positive or negative, even gender restricted. It’s time to peel those labels and reframe emotions as neutral, necessary, invaluable internal information. Emotions are a feature, not a bug of our core operating system.

Both our parental teaching experiences and our child’s learning experiences will be markedly changed for the better when we integrate emotional intelligence into everything else we introduce to our kids. Without all those airbags exploding, we will have more room to fully engage in the dual process in healthy, relaxed and mind-opening ways.

Just out of curiosity, check in with yourself to see how you actually plan for big emotional experiences for your kids on purpose. A surprise birthday celebration, those costumes they will be donning for Halloween, unveiling an upcoming family vacation — these are all intended to evoke great joy, delight and wonder. How do we support our kids when we have bad or sad news to impart — we lean in, comforting, soft and assuring.

Imagine yourself growing up without the impediments of limiting beliefs, false narratives or restrictive social conditioning. Imagine yourself understanding that your emotions are helpful information, normal and acceptable. If you are capable of imagining this, you may find yourself smiling, feeling free and adventurous, even child-like with wonder and curiosity. That feeling right there is what we are going for — that is what happens with emotional integration and giving our kids the skills and tools they need to make sense of the world in a healthy, growth-mind set, ever evolving kind of way.

Magic happens when we begin to take our own adult emotional integration seriously; when we teach and learn simultaneously with our kids. If you are a parent or grandparent, you have the best environment for this “on the job” training.

We all have the potential to contribute in a meaningful way to integrating emotional intelligence for kids and for each other. Bear this in mind with each interaction you have. We can be the scaffolding that we all need to come fully online with emotional intelligence.

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