Ida del Mundo

Pete Mockaitis
Ethan, welcome back!

Ethan Kross
Hey, thanks for having me, Pete. Always great to be here with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I loved our first conversation about your book Chatter. And now we’re talking about your book Shift. Tell us, what made you think that this book needed to exist in the world?

Ethan Kross
Well, the recognition really came from just talking to people about my first book, which you just mentioned, Chatter. So that book really dealt with, “What do you do when you get stuck in a negative thought loop that you just can’t get out of, worrying and ruminating?” I would give talks about that topic, and the audience would be incredibly receptive to the tools that I would share with them.

But then they’d have loads of other questions about their emotional lives, beginning with, “What is an emotion in the first place? Why do we have them? What do they do for us? Are the bad ones good, or can they help us in some way? And what about if it’s just a momentary increase in emotion that I want to regulate, not necessarily a thought loop?”

And the way I think about the experience I had, it was like I had just given a talk on how to combat heart disease, but people had questions about inflammation, cancer, diabetes, and all sorts of other chronic ailments. And so, it really motivated me to dig into what we know about this messy emotional world that we live in and what we could do to manage our responses to it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’d love it if you could kick us off with any particularly surprising discoveries you’ve made. So, you’ve been researching this kind of thing for quite a while at Michigan. Is there insight you share with audiences that make people go, “Whoa”?

Ethan Kross
First off, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions when it comes to managing our emotions. People routinely ask me, “What’s the one thing you should do if you are experiencing…?” fill-in-the-blank, A, B, C, D, or E, anger, anxiety, envy, you name it. I can’t answer that question because what I know from the science is that there are no one-size-fits-all solutions.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, Ethan, if I may, whenever I’m talking to the AI robots, they tell me deep breathing is the answer to calm down.

Ethan Kross
Well, deep breathing can be useful for some people in some situations, but so can a boatload of other strategies. We recently published these studies that looked at how people managed their COVID anxiety during the pandemic. We tracked people for several days over the course of a few weeks, and every day we asked them to tell us, “What did you do today to manage your anxiety about the pandemic?” And we also had people rate their anxiety.

And what we found was there were lots of things people could do to feel better about what they were going through. But, on average, people use between three and four different tools each day. Not one, not just deep breathing. Between three and four, some people use a lot more, some people use a little bit less.

But what we also found, Pete, was that the tools that worked for one person on one day were remarkably different than the tools that worked for someone else on the same day. The tools that worked for one person on one day were sometimes different from the tools that worked for them the next day.

So, I think of all of this now a lot like how I think about physical fitness. A lot of us share the same goal to be physically fit, to be physically healthy. But how we get there can be quite, quite different. If I just look in my immediate social circles. What I do is different from each and every one of those other people in my group, right? We may all like to lift little weights, but I like to do some high intensity stuff, and sometimes I’ll do yoga. Another friend might throw in some Pilates or a different regimen. There are different ways to achieve our goal, and that is true of being emotionally fit as well. So, that’s one thing I want everyone to know. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions.

Another aha, there’s no such thing as a bad emotion. So, we often think, you know, if we’re feeling anxious or sad or anger, there’s something wrong with us. These are emotions we want to rid ourselves of. In fact, we evolved the capacity to experience those emotions because they’re often functional as long as we experience them not too intensely or not too long.

Anger alerts us to the fact that our view of what’s right and wrong has just been challenged and there’s something we could do to fix the situation. Anxiety tells us that there’s a looming uncertain threat on the horizon. Maybe we should pay attention to it. Now, clearly, for so many of us, so much of the time, those otherwise adaptive negative emotional responses become harmful because we can’t turn them off, and that’s where the science of shifting that I talk about in my book comes into play.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, this is good, and there was an author, I think it was Susan David, who wrote a book, and she had a cute little abbreviation about emotions, it’s, “What the funct?” That’s spelled F-U-N-C-T, like, “What is the function of this emotion?”

And I found that to be a much more helpful question when I’m having conversations with myself than “Why are you here anger?” because it’s almost like it creates defensiveness. It’s like if you screwed up something at work, it’s like, “Why don’t I have this document yet?” It’s like, “Ugh!” It almost, like, sparks defensiveness, and you can give some, “Well, I’m angry because of all these things!” And sure enough, then we’re really reinforcing that anger.

And what I’d like to do is sort of quickly understand and move past it to be more effective in whatever context I am. So, I think that’s great to note that they’re not bad things to be fixed but they have a function within them.

Ethan Kross
That’s right. And so, what I like to tell people is that if you experience negative emotions, there’s nothing wrong with you. It means you’re operating the way you’re supposed to operate. But, these tools that we possess, these emotional tools that we have, they’re unwieldy tools, right, as you just described, and we don’t get a user’s manual for how to manage them.

And that’s really what I try to do in this book, is provide folks with a science-based blueprint for how to understand how to turn the volume on their emotions, up or down, shorten or lengthen how long they last, or even jump from one emotion to another. And there are lots of things you could do there. And interestingly, Pete, there’s also, there are a lot of myths about how we should shift that are actually wrong.

So, maybe we could go into some of those myths because those are often fun and they’re helpful ways to introduce some of the tools. Myth number one, avoidance is always bad. So, we often hear that you should never avoid your problems, face them head-on. This was a lesson that was drilled into me from a young age.

It’s absolutely true that chronically avoiding your problems doesn’t tend to work out very well for people. So just suppressing, denying, drowning yourself in substances that may provide you with some temporary but not long-lasting relief. These are things that many people do. They’ve been shown to be harmful, but we have over-generalized from that observation to assume that all forms of avoidance are harmful. They are not.

Pete, have you ever had an aggravating interaction in person or an email?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes.

Ethan Kross
And you’re smiling already, so I’ll take that as yes. And the temptation existed to respond right away but you combated it. You took time away. You distracted maybe for a couple hours, maybe for a few days, and you came back to the experience and found that it was a lot easier for you to work through it rationally. Does that resonate with you?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. “The Lincoln Letters,” right, that’s a historical legend, which I think is true. Lincoln was angry, he wrote some letters, and he put them in his desk and just kept them there.

Ethan Kross
There you go. So that’s a way of being strategic with your attention, right? You don’t have to choose between approaching or avoiding, as we often describe it. You can approach your problems and then take some time away and then come back to them. You could do that repeatedly. And research shows that being flexible in that regard can be quite helpful. So, avoidance is not always useful. Attention is a powerful tool. You want to be flexible with how you wield it.

Let’s talk about being in the moment. We often hear that the goal should be to always be in the moment. Now it’s absolutely true that being in the moment can be helpful when we get stuck in a negative future or past. But there are also ways to travel in time in your mind to help you deal with the problems you’re experiencing, and these are easy, powerful tools that we all possess.

So, I call this mental time travel. Rather than say in the moment, I could transport myself into the future 10 years from now and think to myself, “How am I going to feel about this thing that’s really bugging me right now 10 years from now?” What that does is it highlights something I know at my core to be true, that whatever I’m experiencing as time goes on, it will eventually fade in its intensity.

The reason I know that to be true is the same reason why you know it to be true, and so many of our listeners do as well. We’ve experienced millions of emotional reactions over the course of our lives, and most of them follow the same time course, the same what we call temporal trajectory. Our emotions get triggered, and then as time goes on, they eventually fade.

Now we lose sight of that when we’re struggling, when all we could think about is how awful and consuming our circumstances are. But jumping into the mental time travel machine into the future, it makes it clear that what we’re going through is impermanent. That gives us hope, which turns the volume on our emotional responses down. So that’s mental time travel into the future.

You can also go into the past. I do this a lot, too. I opened the book with a story of my grandmother who narrowly escaped being slaughtered along with the rest of her family during the Holocaust. She lived homeless in Poland for years before she escaped to the States and built a new life. When things feel really bad for me, I jump into my mental time travel machine. I spend some time with her in the frozen Polish woods.

I don’t have to spend a lot of time, just a little bit, and it powerfully makes clear that what I’m going through pales in comparison to what she endured, and that broadens my perspective quite well. So, myth number two, you should always be in the moment. No, you shouldn’t. First of all, if your goal is to always be in the moment, good luck. I don’t think it’s actually possible. The brain evolved to travel in time.

Traveling in time is something we do in our minds, helps us plan for the future, learn from the past. What we all, I think, want to be doing is focusing on “How can we be better mental time travelers?” And that means sometimes recalibrating in the moment, but also traveling strategically in our minds into the future and past, depending on what our goals are. So that’s another myth.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to dig into that notion of, it’s a mental travel, time travel to the past, think about being in the frozen woods of Poland, and that gives you some perspective that your current problems aren’t so bad. I’m curious, is there a way to do that poorly?

For example, I think some might say that if we are quick to imagine much greater troubles elsewhere and dismiss the feelings we have about our current state or situation, that might be, I guess, “invalidating” of the emotion and potentially counterproductive. How do you think about that?

Ethan Kross
I don’t think so. Here’s why. It’s a misnomer to think that you apply these tools, and all of a sudden, a real difficult spot in your life turns into a birthday party with cupcakes and soda and warm cups of tea and pizza, right? That’s just not the way emotion regulation works. So, what ends up happening is, instead, as you get these shifts, these down regulatory shifts in amplitude or duration.

Amplitude meaning how intense the emotional response is or how long it lasts. You’re making it feel more controllable, and so you’re not just saying, “Oh, this is nothing and doesn’t mean anything at all.” I think that’s probably pretty rare, that a kind of traveling into the past and thinking about, “Well, you know, things could be worse.” I don’t think it just turns it off.

Having said that, Pete, I always recognize that there are instances that defy the norms. And so, is it possible that that could happen? Sure, absolutely. And in a minority of cases, like, I wouldn’t be willing to bet that that never does occur. But here’s the good news, that if you find yourself trying mental time travel into the past in this way, and it’s leading to the kinds of outcomes that you’re suggesting, don’t use that tool anymore.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s easy. Sure.

Ethan Kross
Use a different one. And that’s an ace in the hole on the one hand but it’s the truth on the other. Like, I don’t respond well to burpees. Are you familiar with burpees?

I hate burpees. It doesn’t mean they don’t make me feel good. Guess what? I don’t do them. They benefit a lot of people. They don’t really benefit me. And there’s a whole boatload of physical exercises like that. I don’t do dips. It’s too hard on my shoulder. And we could go down the list. I’ll spare you my injuries and idiosyncrasies. But the same is true when it comes to managing our emotions and these tools that I’m talking about.

Some people benefit enormously from what we call expressive writing. Sitting down with a problem and just journaling about it for 15 to 20 minutes for one to three days. Just let yourself go. Talk about your deepest thoughts and feelings. Take it wherever you want. Connect it to your past, your future, whatever you want to do.

Research on that shows that that’s a really useful tool. And, in fact, in that COVID study that we ran, that I mentioned earlier, that was the most predictive of anxiety reductions of all the tools we looked about. But guess what? It was also the least frequently used tool out of the 18 or so that we administered, probably because it’s hard to do. Like, sitting down for 20 minutes. Who has 20 minutes? We all feel like we don’t.

I say this because you have agency in how you decide to assemble the tools that you apply to your life. And again, I think that should be a breath of fresh air because so many people I meet, they say things to me like, “Oh, I tried mindfulness. I tried meditating. I tried diaphragmatic breathing. It didn’t work for me. It works for everyone else. What’s wrong with me?” Again, nothing wrong with you. We know that there are these person strategy fits.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like the way you used that term phrase there, assemble the tools. Because sometimes there may be some assembly required. And I’ve been thinking, like lately, some tools I’ve been leaning on a lot, which are new and yet super handy, is that we had a guest, boy, back in the day, Michael Kerr, talked about putting together a humor first aid kit.

And I have diligently followed his advice and even used like a flash card application to assemble mine. And so, I’ve got, like, over a hundred things that I just thought were laugh out loud funny in the moment that I’ve captured, and then I just review them. And then it’s like, “Oh, I remember that time at that trade in Cancun, the trader did this thing, and it was so funny.” And so, it’s great to just have like 10 rapid-fire jokes, it’s like, “Oh, I’m in a better mood.” And there it is.

Ethan Kross
It’s so funny you bring that up. One of the things that we often talk about social media, how it’s bringing about society’s demise, and there clearly are some ways of interacting with social media that are harmful, but I like to remind people that sometimes it can be beneficial from a mood regulatory point of view. We don’t talk about that as much.

And your example makes me think about how I sometimes engage with social media to help improve my mood. Before bed, I will often watch these ridiculously silly short reels, and they bring me such emotional delight. I just find these pranks and other kinds of things, and I’ll laugh at them, and you know, they’re short, and then I’ll send them to some of my buddies, and they’ll send me back the teary-eyed emojis, they’re laughing, and then we both write back that our partners are elbowing us to stop laughing because we’re making too much noise and they don’t understand our humor.

And so, that little exercise of watching a funny video is both instantly elevating my positive affect. It’s also enhancing social connections. A simple thing you could do. So, let’s talk about simplicity for a second, though, because I think that’s another myth we can address. We often think that managing our emotions is hard, you know, “Pull up your sleeves. Get ready for the battle.” Sometimes it is, no question about it. But it isn’t always hard.

There are lots of tools that exist that are relatively effortless to implement. So expressive writing would not be an example of an effortless tool. That’s a pretty effortful tool, right? You’ve got to sit down, 15-20 minutes, you’ve got to write hard. But there are lots of things that you could do that are pretty easy. I’ll just kind of spit off a few. Spit off. Spit out. Mention. Mention a few sounds a lot more appetizing than spit off.

Music. I’ve been listening to music since I’m five years old. I’m guessing you’ve been listening to music for a while, too. Why do you listen to it?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s fun. It sets the vibe or the mood.

Ethan Kross
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
In terms of I got young kids, like, “Let’s have a dance party,” or it’s like, “Are we are we feeling silly? Are we feeling like cue the Rocky theme to spark the motivation, or ‘Eye of the Tiger?” It’s like a movie, that we’re going to score this thing for the emotion or vibe we’re looking for.

Ethan Kross
There you go. So, close to 100% of people, when asked, “Why do you listen to music?” they answer that question by saying, “I like the way it makes me feel.” But if you then look at the percentage of people who, when they’re struggling, reach for music as a tool, it’s only between 10% and 30%. percent. So, music is an example of one way of harnessing your senses to shift your emotions.

All of our senses, sight, sound, touch, smell, hearing, I’ve probably left a few out, those are some of the major ones. Part of the way your senses work is through emotion. So, the senses refer to the different apparatus we possess to take in information about the world around us. Part of the reason we’re taking in that information is so we understand how to navigate the world, and a key part of navigating the world involves understanding what’s safe, what’s not, what should we approach, what should we avoid.

So, your senses are intertwined deeply with your emotions. Again, you know this to be true, like we all do, right? Sounds can elicit emotional responses. Scents, you’ve got a multibillion-dollar industry that deals with just spritzing yourself with scents to change the way you feel about yourself and change the way that other people feel about you. It’s called perfume and cologne, right? Hotels pipe scents into their ventilation system to change the way their patrons make them feel.

Pete Mockaitis
And cars.

Ethan Kross
Food, restaurants, cars. Cars do it.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m working on that delivery.

Ethan Kross
Yeah, little spritz. I mean, it’s wild. For me, it’s wild. I don’t want to assume that everyone thinks it. I find it amazing. I look at the world through this filter now of our senses managing our emotions. Like, restaurants, why do we pay all this money to eat? This is an emotional experience. It’s not like we’re just lining up for an IV drip. We could get away with just an IV drip, right? Like, getting all the nutrients we want from somewhat no flavor bypassing senses.

Pete Mockaitis
Oatmeal and multivitamins and protein shakes, and move on.

Ethan Kross
Yeah, but even those are spiked with senses. Instead, we spend sometimes hundreds of dollars on these fancy meals. It’s all about an emotional experience. Touch. When a touch is registered from someone who we accept the touch from, that can be an amazingly pleasant experience. We caress our children, our partners. Some people even do it themselves when they’re showing, like they self-soothe, they kind of rub their face, right, when they’re trying to feel better about stuff.

So those are just some examples of very, very simple things you could do to get momentary shifts in emotion, and there are many, many others like it. So, all right.

Let’s talk about one more myth having to do with other people. Other people can be an amazing resource in our emotional lives when it comes to shifting, but they can also be a liability. And one of the things that we often hear from those around us and our broader culture, I think, is sending us in the wrong direction when it comes to how to engage with other people, when it comes to our emotional lives. And this is directly relevant to the work experience.

We often hear that when you’re struggling you should find someone to vent your emotions, to just get it out, let it go. Express it, don’t keep it inside. What we know about this is that venting your emotions can be useful for strengthening bonds between people. Good to know someone is willing to listen to me, take the time to listen and care.

Problem is if all you do is vent, you leave that conversation, you feel good about the person you just connected with, but all the problems are still there because you haven’t actually worked through it. They’re not just still there, they’re even more activated because you’ve just spent all this time rehearsing the awfulness of the situation.

So, if venting isn’t the solution, what is? It’s a two-step process. Find someone to talk to about your problems and spend some time initially getting it out. They do need to listen and learn so that they can help you. Empathy is good. But once they have a sense of what you’re going through, and once you feel heard, then, ideally, talk to someone who can help you put your experience in perspective, someone who can help you work through the problem. Other people are in an ideal position to help you do that because the problem isn’t happening to them. So be wary about venting.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Well, yeah, there’s a lot of cool stuff and a lot of places we can go. I want to check out what you said with regard in your book. It was a powerful sentence. Well, I wish I could quote it directly. Maybe you can. You said something, like, “We cannot control what triggers our emotions, but we can control the trajectory of them,” in terms of like the intensity and how long we’re there.

So, one, I think that’s a heck of a statement because, one, if there were a way, you would know about it, like you of all people, having studied this for so long, so intensively. So, I think that’s kind of telling, in and of itself, that to be realistic about what is, in fact, possible for us as a species. Could you elaborate on that?

Ethan Kross
You ever had the experience–where do you live, Pete? What city or town?

Pete Mockaitis
I live near Nashville.

Ethan Kross
Near Nashville, okay. You ever, on a muggy summer day, walk down the street and just catch a whiff of someone who doesn’t smell very good and experience an emotional reaction?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure. Okay, yeah.

Ethan Kross
Okay. Yeah, me too. That reaction was out of your control. You happened to encounter something in the world, it activated your senses, in turn, activated an emotional response. We experience emotional reactions like that all the time. We see things, we hear things, we think about things that just pop up in our head. We don’t know why the thoughts pop up in our head, but they elicit emotions. We don’t often have control over those different experiences. They just happen.

However, once those emotions are triggered, then that’s our playground, then we can get in there and alter the trajectory of those emotional responses, right? Like, you catch a whiff of that stinky person, maybe you could choose to inhale more deeply. That might perpetuate the response. You might close your nose, pull your shirt up over it. You might start thinking about how selfish is it for this person to carry them in this way.

Or maybe you might think otherwise, “Well, you know, maybe they’re not aware. Maybe they don’t believe in wearing deodorant.” Lots of ways you could think about the situation to alter the trajectory of that response. And so, this is a chapter in the book, and the setup for it is, several years ago when I was doing research as I do now, I came across an article that said that 40% of adolescents sampled in this study did not believe they could control their emotions.

That statistic just floored me because if you don’t think you can control your emotions, why would you do anything to actually try, “I don’t think there’s anything I can do to get healthier, to get more physically fit. Why am I going to go to the gym and do these painful things,” right? It just doesn’t make sense. You need to be motivated in order to use these different tools.

And, of course, I’m a director of a lab called the Emotion and Self-Control Lab. I’ve dedicated my life to understanding how people can control their emotions. And so, when you dig into it, what I’ve learned is that those 40% of students were right if they’re thinking about the trigger of our emotions. We can’t always control the trigger. We don’t have control over all the factors that could activate an emotional response.

What we can control is the trajectory of those emotional responses. And I think just knowing that can be really empowering, too, because it means that if you do find yourself experiencing a dark thought that you’re ashamed of, recognize that that’s not always under your control, but how you engage with that thought is.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, it sounds, is it accurate to say, in your informed, researched view, that no matter what you do, smelling a stinky person is going to trigger an emotional response, just period, even if you’re like trained with exposure to lots of stink for weeks at a time, you’re still going to have a degree of emotion trigger problem?

Ethan Kross
Well, no, no, no. Hold on. Hold on. No.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Ethan Kross
Not. No, no, no. You can certainly train, be trained, or train yourself to become immune to certain kinds of provocations. This is often referred to as stress inoculation therapy. Stress inoculation is often utilized in various military trainings, where the idea is, “Okay, put people under stress, under relatively controlled conditions so that they’re used to it, so that when they find themselves in those situations in everyday life, they don’t respond with this huge reaction.”

You, I’m sure, just as I, like we’ve experienced many things the first time around. They were tremendously distressful, but then you realize you get through them. There are things you could do, and they’re not so bad later. Sometimes you don’t even register anything at all. So, certainly, if we have our eye on a particular kind of situation that provokes us, we can train for it, so to speak, to either reduce in its intensity or get rid of it altogether.

That said, you can’t train for every situation in life, and some situations are likely going to always trigger an emotional response. Certain kinds of, I would argue, sensory events. Pain as an example.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. So, we always have control over, or influence, over the trajectory of the intensity and the length to which we are experiencing an emotion that is triggered, and we may, in certain circumstances, be able to train for, inoculate against certain triggers doing a thing. And so, I’m thinking that hypnosis is one interesting kind of intervention if people have phobias or kind of reactions to things.

There seems to be some good science supporting that, “Oh, okay, with a hypnosis intervention for some people who are hypnotizable, they are not so triggered after kind of going through that.” And then also, you mentioned like a training or inoculation. Let me just make an example. Let’s say I, and it’s true, I feel pretty irritated when I’m interrupted, whether in speaking conversationally.

As well as just sort of, like, you’re doing a thing. It’s like, I’m doing a thing, and then there’s an interruption, like a knock on the door. It’s like, I am kind of flustered by such things. And so, that’s just kind of in there, kind of like involuntary.

I remember there was a time, someone knocked on my door, I was in a podcast interview, I actually gasped, like, “Huh!”

And so, if there’s a thing in us, like we find there’s a trigger that we know is not helpful, and here, for me, it’s being interrupted, I’d like to feel more adaptable and less inclined to being flustered upon interruption, what’s my playbook?

Ethan Kross
Well, that gets to the final chapter of the book, and it’s about “How do you go from knowledge to action?” And what I do in that final chapter is I give you a framework for identifying situations you want to target to minimize the emotional impact they have on you. It’s called W.O.O.P, and here’s how it works.

So W.O.O.P. is an acronym. W is wish. What’s your goal? State your goal. Maybe for you it’s to not be perturbed every time you’re disturbed. The first O, that’s an outcome. Okay, well, what’s the outcome that will come about if you are successful in accomplishing this goal? “Well, I’ll be more emotionally healthy and maybe I’ll have better interpersonal relationships.” The point of that first O, focusing on the outcome, is to really energize you, to put in the motivation to achieve this goal.

Now let’s get to the second O, which is obstacle, “What are the personal obstacles that may stand in the way of me achieving this goal? Well, I just have this automatic reaction when someone disturbs me. I just, I can’t take it. It affects me to my core.” Okay, now we at least know what the problem is. Let’s get to the final element of this framework, the P, which is the plan, but it’s not any plan. It’s called an if-then plan.

If I’m disturbed and I find myself going to that dark, dark place that Pete goes to when he’s disturbed, then, and then you plug in what you’re going to do. And what you’re going to do is use one of the 20 or 30 shifters you’ve just learned about, and maybe a combination of them to stay calm in that moment, to broaden your perspective, so that you can achieve your goal.

If we were actually training for you to achieve this goal, I would have you write those different elements down, maybe once, maybe twice, and have you read them over a few times. Research shows that this framework is incredibly useful for allowing people to achieve all sorts of goals because what it does is it systematically targets each of the impediments of goal pursuit and it nips them in the bud from the start.

This framework has been applied with older adults to help them with emotional and health goals. It’s also been applied to kids as young as first graders who are trying to improve the way they achieve. This also happens to be a framework that is mightily similar to what one of the most successful organizations in the world uses before complex engagements, i.e. the Navy SEALs.

The Navy SEALs do something very, very similar when they’re planning a mission, “What’s our goal? If we achieve this goal, what is going to happen? What are the obstacles that might stand in the way? And then for every obstacle, we’re going to come up with three to five different specific plans, so we’re virtually never caught off guard.”

Now, we can’t plan for everything, and the good news is that if you are caught off guard, you still have knowledge of these other tools we’ve been talking about to fill in the blanks.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, Ethan, tell me, any final shifter you want to make sure to get out there before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Ethan Kross
You know, I think we covered a lot. We covered senses, we covered attention, we covered some perspective-taking, we covered people. Physical environments, get a healthy dose of nature, put some pictures of loved ones around your office to give you an emotional boost when you need it. Yeah, I think we’ve covered a bunch of it. We’ll leave a little bit more for people to discover.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. Well, now can you share a favorite quote?

Ethan Kross
“This too shall pass.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Ethan Kross
The study I talk about in chapter one, which tracked newborns and through adulthood, they’re still being tracked, and found that the ability to manage one’s emotions in childhood predicts all sorts of great things later in life. But even more importantly, that capacity is not fixed. It’s malleable. You can get better or worse at managing your emotions, which I love that finding because it really speaks to the agentic side of what we’re talking about, that your destiny is really in your own hands.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Ethan Kross
I’ll give you two. One is pretty common, “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl. And, in a different direction when it comes to fiction, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite Ethan original nugget or soundbite that people are vibing with?

Ethan Kross
If you experience negative emotions, there’s nothing wrong with you, there is everything right with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Ethan Kross
www.EthanKross.com.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Ethan Kross
Learn about the tools that are out there for managing your emotions. Leading other people, I think, starts with leading yourself. The tools that I talk about, decades of research, hard work went into identifying them, but the take-homes are really, really simple and straightforward. So, learn about those tools, practice them to find the tools, the combinations that work best for you, and share them with other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Ethan, thank you.

Ethan Kross
Thank you so much. Always a pleasure, Pete.