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KF #26. Being Resilient Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

1074: How to Improve Negotiations–without Compromising–with Dr. Joshua N. Weiss

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Dr. Joshua N. Weiss discusses the major misconceptions surrounding negotiations—and offers five steps to build your confidence and resilience as a negotiator.

You’ll Learn

  1. The big negotiation mistake most people make
  2. The mental reframe that helps you negotiate better
  3. The five-step strategy to reviving stalled negotiations

About Josh

Dr. Joshua N. Weiss is a renowned negotiation and conflict resolution and leadership expert. As a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Negotiation Project and co-founder of the Global Negotiation Initiative at Harvard University, Dr. Weiss brings unparalleled expertise to his field. He also directs the MS in Leadership and Negotiation program at Bay Path University and runs a private consulting firm, offering tailored negotiation and conflict resolution, and leadership solutions for businesses, organizations, international entities, governments, and individuals.

Resources Mentioned

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Joshua N. Weiss Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Josh, welcome!

Joshua Weiss
Thanks so much, Pete. It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be chatting and I can’t resist, I’d like for you to start us off with a thrilling high-stakes negotiation tale.

Joshua Weiss
Well, there have been a lot of them. And I think, in general, probably my favorite one is that I was working with a team of people to kind of help them prepare for a merger, a potential merger. And they had asked me, because they were trying to sort of build their capacity for their own negotiations, so they asked me to sit in the room and give them advice at different periods during the process, helping them to reset, to think about where to go from there and things along those lines.

And so, we did our preparation, came into the meeting, and the other side, there were three guys, and we had three people on our side. And the first gentlemen sat down, slammed his briefcase on the table, and decided to sort of say, “Look, here’s the offer. It’s a take it or leave it kind of thing.” And after sort of pushing that onto the table, he just looked at us all and said, “Well?”

And I had talked to my team about sort of the idea of trying to get into problem-solving mode and to thinking together with the other side about how you could do this as best and to try to find things of value that might exist that we are not aware of. And that was not the negotiating approach that the other side was taking.

And the lead negotiator was getting more and more sort of agitated. Like, he just sort of felt like we’re going to put this on the table to take it or leave it kind of thing.

And he’s like, “You’ve got 10 seconds to decide whether you want to do this or not.” And so, they were like, “Well, if that’s the scenario, you know, we’re going to leave it.” And it was interesting because his two colleagues were on either side and they were kind of looking at him like they didn’t really know what he was doing. And they definitely were not aligned with the approach he was taking.

So, after 10 seconds, he’s like, “Well, fine.” So, he starts throwing his papers back in his briefcase and he stands up and storms out, basically opens the door and slams it behind him. And what we realized was that, in his theater or performance, he actually walked into a walk-in closet instead of actually leaving the room.

And the funny thing was he stayed in there for what seemed like a long time. It was probably like 30, 45 seconds because I think he was too embarrassed to come out. And so, the lead on our team looked at me and he turns around, and he’s like, “Is this an opportunity?” And I said, “Yes, it is.”

So, he swings around back to the other two guys, he’s like, “Listen, I think we can do this differently. I don’t know what you guys had in mind, but here’s our sort of initial thinking.” And the other two guys are, like, listening, taking it all in. And the guy sort of slinks out of the closet after that and is really sidelined because they had started a conversation.

And, ultimately, they ended up finding a way forward and finding a deal, but it required that kind of theatrics to go awry for something to happen. So, there’s things like that. And the rule in negotiation, in general, is expect the unexpected.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow. That story is so wild. It’s, like, if that happened to be in real life, I would wonder, “Am I having a dream right now? Is this real life? Or am I currently dreaming?”

Joshua Weiss
It was pretty darn funny. And sometimes it just takes those little “unexpecteds” to change a process, and to seize on it, so.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think that’s perfect. I mean, wow, what a metaphor. When the take it or leave it guy is stuck in a closet, chat with his colleagues instead.

Joshua Weiss
Right. There you go. That’s the lesson.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s funny, this is like Michael Scott buffoonery, you know, “What does the internet tell me about negotiating? Ooh, yeah, that’s the secret move. I’m going to do that.”

Joshua Weiss
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s not so handy. Well, thank you for that. That’s fun. I’d love to hear. So, you’ve been in the game for quite a while. What do you think is the most surprising discovery you’ve made about us humans and negotiating over the course of your many engagements?

Joshua Weiss
To be very honest, most people have no idea how to do it. The reality is that very few people get knowledge and skills about negotiation. And so, they might learn it from Michael Scott. They might learn it from the news. They might learn it, which is all of the wrong places to try to learn this. And the other thing I would say, too, is that there’s a lot of people who are like, “I don’t negotiate.” I’m like, “Actually, you negotiate all day, every day.”

Anytime you’re trying to get somebody to do something you would like them to do, if you’re trying to create some kind of an agreement, whatever it looks like, you’re negotiating. And that can be at work with your bosses and your colleagues and the people that work for you, or it can be with your spouses, or, as we were talking about before we came on, your kids, but also in the world around you. So, we do this all the time and it’s really quite striking to me that so many people don’t know how to negotiate, and what they know about negotiation usually leads them astray.

Pete Mockaitis
So, we don’t know how to negotiate. That’s quite a statement in that, on the one hand, it’s like, “Well, of course, because very few of us have had formal training in it.” But, on the other hand, it’s like, “Well, if we’re negotiating all the time, every day, wouldn’t it be as natural to us as breathing, talking, walking, and yet it is not?”

Joshua Weiss

It’s not because to be effective in negotiation, like if you think about most of your jobs, right, and how to be awesome at work, it requires strategy, it requires thinking, it requires preparation to do things well, and negotiation is no different. And I think that’s the key. You know, lots of people engage in it. The question is, “Are you really learning from it? Are you learning best practices?”

Somebody asked me the other day, “Do you really think you can learn negotiation from a book?” And I said, “Well, there’s really two primary ways that we learn. One is experience and one is through education and learning and knowledge.” And I think it is critical that you learn both. In addition to getting involved in negotiations and doing a lot of training, I teach and I run a master’s program.

And one of the things the students tell me after they take the first class, which is an introduction to negotiation, they’re like, “I had no idea what you could know, all of the aspects that you need to know to be an effective negotiator, the strategy, the analysis, the skillsets, all of that.” And so, their perspective on negotiation, even though they’ve been doing it for a long time, changes dramatically because they become aware of concepts and ideas and dynamics that they really hadn’t thought about.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s very intriguing. And could you give us an example of a concept, or a dynamic, an idea that is just like a revelation eye-opener for people like, “Whoa, I never thought of that, Josh”?

Joshua Weiss
So, if you ask people, “What’s the first word or two that comes to mind when we hear the word negotiation?” usually, one of the words that is uttered is compromise. And I don’t believe that compromise is an effective way to negotiate. In fact, it’s kind of a lazy way to negotiate. And most people are like, “Well, wait a minute. What do you mean? When we get stuck, I often will say, ‘Well, let’s just split the difference.’”

I’m like, “Okay. But have you really thought through and understood what’s going on in your negotiation before you actually compromise?” It’s actually why a lot of people don’t like to negotiate because they perceive that what they’re supposed to be doing at the negotiating table is giving away something of significant importance in order to reach an agreement. And that is not how you negotiate.

Negotiation is not about reaching agreement. And that may also surprise people. It’s about meeting your objective as best as possible. And if you have the metric or if the bar is that, “My purpose in this negotiation is to reach agreement,” it’s not hard to reach an agreement. You can give away all kinds of things to reach an agreement. It’s the wrong bar, though. What you’re doing is you go into a negotiation and you have an objective that you’re trying to meet.

And if you can reach an agreement that gets you there in the best way possible, great. And if you can’t and you realize that, that it’s better to walk away, that’s actually success because it’s about meeting your objectives. And compromise rarely meets your objective. Most people listening probably have negotiated, given up something of great importance to reach an agreement, and then walked out of the room and said, “Ugh, I can’t believe I did that. That doesn’t feel good. That doesn’t feel like what I wanted from this process.”

And that’s the problem with compromise. Compromise is expedient. It helps us to move along and move forward. But rarely do compromise solutions actually meet our objectives and goals.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And so, for many people, that’s an eye-opener right there in terms of, “Oh, negotiation is compromise.” And you say, “Au contraire.” And so, then what is an alternative path, I suppose, like deeply understanding our respective needs and values and interests and positions and finding a creative, awesome thing that makes people feel pretty good about it?

Joshua Weiss

So, to me, and in the book that I published recently called Getting Back to the Table, I talk about the idea of unlearning certain things that are getting in the way. And one of the things I say is unlearn compromise and replace it with creative problem-solving. So, Pete, if you and I go into a negotiation, one of the important things about negotiation to always understand is we are always working with incomplete information.

When you and I sit down, you know certain things that I don’t, and I know certain things that you don’t. And part of the challenge, and if we’re going to make a negotiation work in a way that’s, like, to its maximum benefit, that there are things that you value and you care about, and there are things that I value and I care about, we have to exchange information. And if we don’t, then we can come to an agreement, but it’s not going to be the best one. It’ll be just good enough.

And I remember talking to a woman, because four years ago I wrote a book called The Book of Real-World Negotiations, and that’s really about 25 cases of successful negotiations. And if you look at it, what you find is actually there’s very little compromise. It’s all about understanding what’s really driving and motivating people in a negotiation.

But when I was talking to this woman, she said, “You know, to me, the best negotiations are where everybody leaves the table a little unhappy.” And I said, “Well, why would you think that?” And she said, “Well, honestly, like my boss who kind of taught me how to negotiate, that was his mantra.” And I said, “That way of thinking is a race to the bottom.”

And you’re always thinking, “Let me give something up of importance in order to reach an agreement.” And half the time, at least, if you dig in and figure out what’s actually going on, those compromises are not necessary. But you have to take the time. If you don’t have time, compromise becomes more logical. But if you do have time, then the notion of exploration, understanding, asking good questions, and like gathering information is what you really should be doing early on in a negotiation process.

Hold off on putting offers on the table and things like that, and figure out what you can learn from the other side, because this is an interdependent process, “I need you to say yes for me to get where I want to go, and vice versa. So, I have to understand where you’re coming from.” And the best way that I know to do that is ask good questions and listen very carefully to what is coming back to you.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you give us a quick illustration of how we might think, “Ah, compromise is just what I got to do,” versus, “No, no, here’s a real-world example of folks. They learned some things and then they didn’t have to compromise, and both folks felt good”?

Joshua Weiss
So there’s a book called Getting to Yes, which sounds like you might’ve heard of, and other people may not have, but it was a book that really changed the landscape of negotiation. It was written in 1981, and it’s still on the bestseller list. So, it tells you that there’s something in there that’s still valuable, right?

The book really begins with a story of two sisters who are arguing over an orange. And they go back and forth, each claiming that the orange is theirs. And they decide that the only good solution is to compromise and to cut the orange in half, and they each get half, right? Logical solution. Okay. So, when they do that, one sister goes over to the garbage and peels the orange, takes the peel, throws it away and starts eating the fruit. Then she walks away.

The other sister walks over to the garbage and peels the orange, throws away the fruit and takes the orange peel and starts grinding it up to make an orange cake. Now, if they had talked about why it was they wanted the orange, they each could have had twice as much, but they didn’t. They rushed to compromise. And so, instead, each had less because they just did a split the difference kind of thing.

The key in negotiation is figuring out what is motivating people and what they really want. It’s a little bit like being an investigative journalist, right? So, when a story breaks, here’s the headline. And we’re all like, “Oh, my God,” right? And then over time, we learn more about that story. And the story is often not what we thought it was. And it was not what the headline was all about.

And that’s kind of, like, when people say certain things in negotiation, when people put their positions on the table, which is what we call it, right, like that’s the headline. But what’s going on under the surface is what we need to figure out and what we need to come to understand. Because there are a lot of things that motivate people in negotiations that are unspoken because they’re worried that you might take what I say and manipulate it or things along those lines.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s very well done with regard to the orange. It’s, like, of course, and we just have these assumptions, “Well, of course, they want to eat the orange. That’s what anybody wants with an orange.” And it’s, like, “Well, there could be all sorts of things. Some people might want to put the rind down the disposal to freshen up the scent in the sink.” There are multifaceted reasons for anything.

It’s funny, I think about this in sales too, in terms of my other businesses is Cashflow Podcasting. So, we help businesses launch podcasts. And we just assume, “Well, of course, what they want is more sales in their business. And then that’s why they’re thinking about launching a podcast.” But sometimes it’s totally different.

It’s like, “Well, no, this is really about legacy and passing things on, or to be of service to those who cannot pay us for our products.” It’s like, “Oh, okay.” And so, it really pays to not just assume, but to see what’s really driving things.

Joshua Weiss
And, by the way, assumptions, to me, are the silent killers of effective negotiation because they, essentially, destroy any understanding between people because you don’t know I’m making an assumption, right? And what happens when we make assumptions is we build entire stories off of one assumption. It happens all the time, right, especially around people’s motivations or their intention.

There’s a problem that we often talk about in negotiation of intent and impact, right, where you take an action with a certain intention and it comes across in a way that you didn’t intend and that is actually quite destructive. I mean, just think about if you’ve ever tried to be respectful to somebody and they took it as disrespect.

Or when you get an email from somebody and you read a sentence, and you’re like, “What the hell’s wrong with them?” And that could be read different ways, but you’re adding in meaning to what they’ve said and done.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s amazing how we can read a tone into something. And I think one of my favorite examples was I sent someone an email. I asked the question, “Where is she coming from?” Like, I had the most open-hearted, curious, you know, my intentions were as wholesome as they could be. And then the other person said, “Just look at this interrogation of an email, ‘Where is she coming from?’” I was like, “Wow!”

Joshua Weiss
Yeah, that’s what happens.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s astounding.

Joshua Weiss
It is. It’s amazing. And I think that’s what makes negotiation difficult is that people come into negotiations. Our instinct typically is to be defensive when we come into things. Human beings are all about protecting themselves from loss. That’s what persuades us because of how we got to here from being hunter-gatherers. If we lost out back then, we got eaten.

And so, nowadays, we go into things with a bit of a protectionist mentality. And the problem with that is it’s very hard to be creative. It’s very hard to think differently and in a curious manner when you’re defensive and trying to protect. So, your mindset matters a lot. That’s another piece of this that I think is incredibly important, is that how you come into a negotiation matters greatly.

Pete Mockaitis
Very much. Okay. Well, these are great big principles for negotiation and just being a human, in general. Could we zoom in a bit to your book, Getting Back to the Table: 5 Steps to Reviving Stalled Negotiations. What’s the big idea here?

Joshua Weiss

So, the big idea is that if you look out at the landscape of negotiation, very few people talk about failure, and yet it’s a really important part of this process. I’ve been involved in some peace process work in different places around the world, and the norm is to fail.

And so, the key is, “What do we do with that when we fail?” It’s going to happen. And in the book, I talk a little bit about that there’s three sort of responses to failure when it transpires. And I use the analogy of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, so your kids will like this one. The first response to failure is blame and rationalization. It’s too-hot response, right, “The porridge is too hot.” And what that means is that, “When I fail, when things don’t go well, I blame the other side, I blame the situation, and I rationalize my own behavior.” I don’t learn anything doing that.

The second response, which is the too-cold approach to porridge, is that, “If I fail, I don’t want to negotiate again. It’s too anxiety-producing. It’s too uncomfortable. I’m going to struggle, I know when I sit down, because I’m going to be thinking about those previous experiences that didn’t go well.” Again, can’t learn much that way.

The third process is really what I talk about in the book, which is that if we’re going to fail, and if it’s part of the landscape, which it is, and if you talk to anybody who negotiates on a regular basis, they will tell you they fail. And so, the question becomes, “What are you going to do with that failure? How are you going to use it to become resilient and to learn and to grow as a negotiator?” because negotiation is not a destination. To be a really good negotiator, it’s not a destination. It’s a journey.

And there’s a lot to learn from our failures if we give it the space and time. Nick Saban, the winningest college football coach, likes to say, “Never waste a good failure.” And that’s what I’m trying to get at, is something happened, it didn’t go the way you wanted, how do you really learn from it? And what are those things maybe that got you in trouble that you can try to avoid in the future?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, when it comes to these learnings, well, maybe let’s just pause for a sec. When you say, for negotiation to fail, in some ways, just the word fail in itself is so intense. Maybe we should define it. Is it simply when, “Hey, you did not get what you were after when you had that conversation”?

Joshua Weiss
So, yes, failure is not meeting your objective as you defined them prior to the negotiation. Now that’s distinct from a setback, right? And a setback is you haven’t gotten there yet. You can see a pretty clear path back to the table. And so, can you seize on that? Can you figure out a new way to come back to the table with the other side because it’s still of benefit to you? You can see that.

A failure is less so. It’s you can’t really see a way back to the table. And if you’re going to come back around, it might take some time but you probably have damaged the relationship and/or created a challenge and a problem that cannot be fixed right now.

And sometimes that happens and we have to just understand that a lot of times, we’re talking about setbacks and we can find a way back, but if we can’t, then we need to shift the conversation to “What did we really learn? And how do we become better negotiators in the future?”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And so, then, toward the very beginning of your book, you had some really good perspective on failure that, “Hey, it’s all good. It happens to everyone. This too-cold response, really, we need not take it personally.” And, in fact, I was struck with your Steve Jobs iPhone story. I think that’s rather telling when it comes to setbacks or failures. Can you share this with us?

Joshua Weiss
Yeah. So, when the folks around the iPhone were sort of working on its development, they brought the initial concept to Steve Jobs and he wasn’t a fan. He was like, “This isn’t going to work. It’s not going to make sense. We’re not doing it.” And the engineers had a kind of a better sense of this and they felt like he’s not quite getting this, “We need to help educate him as to why this makes sense.”

But in doing that, they also knew that they needed to find the right messenger. So, there was a colleague of his that he had worked with for quite a while who became that messenger. And in business like that, creating a prototype is often, there’s a guy at Duke University named Sim Sitkin, who I spoke with in writing the book, and he talked about intelligent failure.

And the idea with that is that you create a prototype, you expect to fail, but you learn, “How do we build on that? How do we improve or make it better?” And so, the process with Steve Jobs was to go back to him on a number of occasions with improvements so that he could begin to see what they were seeing. But he really dismissed them out of hand initially.

A lot of people, when that kind of thing happens, they just throw their hands up and say, “I guess it’s not going to happen.” And I think one of the keys to negotiation is that resilience and persistence. The best negotiators that I’ve worked with, they always say to me, “Look, we haven’t found a solution yet.” And it’s always yet.

Like, “There’s a solution out there. If we stay at the table long enough, roll up our sleeves and keep working at it, we will get there.” And I think that was the mentality around the iPhone because they were so convinced that this product was going to revolutionize how we communicated, and they were right. It just took multiple times and thinking about what’s going to resonate with Jobs and make sense with him.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, what I find so comforting about that is, you know, iPhone is a big deal, Steve Jobs, super brilliant person. We could think that, and with hindsight, we could say, “For a company seeking to make shareholders richer, launching the iPhone is the right move. And yet, brilliant Steve Jobs was not feeling it at first.”

And so, I just find that all the more encouraging for us in terms of, “We got something. We’re trying to share it. They say no. And that doesn’t mean it has to be the end. And it doesn’t mean that we’re bad, stupid dumb-dumbs or that we really botched it. We may have botched it. But not necessarily, doesn’t mean that we suck.”

Joshua Weiss
No, I think that’s exactly right. And that’s why part of the point of the book is to normalize this aspect of things. And I want people to understand that they will fail. Like, that’s how negotiation works. But I want them to feel exactly what you just said, which is, “We don’t suck at this. Like, maybe this didn’t work out. We need to take a different tact.”

And when I was working on the book, one of my students came to me, and asked me, “What are you working on now?” And I told her about this, and she said, “Oh, thank God.” And I said, “Why would you say that?” And she said, “Because everything we read in the program, I love it, but it’s all about these unbelievable successes that people had. And if we don’t succeed every time, we start thinking maybe we shouldn’t be negotiating.”

And I’m like, “Well, if that’s what you have taken away from all of this, then we’re not doing a good job of helping you to understand the real nature of negotiation in the world around us.” And so, yeah, I’m trying to, in one sense, as one of my friends put it, he said, “You’re trying to decouple shame from failure when it comes to negotiation.” And I think he’s exactly right, that what we want to do is help people to kind of realize this happens and it’s okay.

And part of the purpose of the book is to, when people have these experiences, is to give them a process for trying to figure out what happened. And I think when you go through that process, you might come around and be like, “You know, in hindsight, I’m realizing, I don’t think they ever really had an intention to get somewhere.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well said. Well, you mentioned process, you’ve actually got a five-step strategy for reviving stalled negotiations. Can you walk us through it?

Joshua Weiss
Yeah. So, the first one is, actually, believe it or not, about the emotional component of this. So, when we experience setbacks or failures, it hurts. It stings, right? We’ve all had that. We’re like, “I didn’t get where I wanted to go, and that sucks.” And the thing is that, what I notice is when people don’t allow themselves to feel the sting of failure, they can’t move through it.

And so, I actually use a model that was originally developed by a woman named Elisabeth Kubler-Ross about death and dying and about grieving as a way of trying to understand the kinds of things that you’re feeling, and that that’s normal and natural. And so, I kind of take people through, and I say, “Look, if you don’t cope with the loss that you’ve experienced, it’s a little bit like a backed-up sink. Like, nothing gets through, no learning gets through until you kind of take in the emotional piece of this.”

And, you know, it’s funny because a lot of people, when it comes to negotiation, they want to keep emotions out. They do their best to sort of say, “I’m not allowing emotions in here. I’m not going to get emotional.” And you can’t do that. Human beings are logical and emotional creatures. And it doesn’t mean that emotions need to blow up a process. It just means that you’re going to feel them.

If you care about something, you’re going to feel the loss and you have to take it in and be like, “Okay, this is not what I wanted. Now I need to figure out what happened.” So, the first step is like, “Okay, I’m angry. I’m frustrated. I’m sad, whatever. I have to cope with it and accept it. And then I can sort of address the rest of the process, which is then moving into more of an analysis and to figure out what happened.”

And so, there’s sort of the big picture and there’s the minute details. And I really encourage people to kind of look at the big picture of the forest, if you will. And in the book, I talk about seven ways in which you can fail in negotiation. And I didn’t mean that to be an exhaustive list. I mean it to be, essentially, a conversation starter because there’s not much written on the subject.

But what I’m trying to do is make people aware of these seven ways so that they don’t fall into those traps. So, part of what you want to do is, in that big-picture forest kind of view, you want to ask yourself, “What type of failure did I have?” So, for example, one type of failure is called the slipping through your fingers failure.

And that’s all about from the point of view of you and the other negotiator, like a deal was kind of on the table, it made sense, and yet somehow you didn’t get there. Something got in the way, somebody insulted someone, whatever it might be, there was a real opportunity to reach a good agreement and you didn’t get there. So, what I want people to do is say, “Was that the kind of negotiation? Was that the kind of failure I had?” and then move to the granular, right?

Because in most negotiations, we can pinpoint a critical moment or a conversation, a back and forth, where things started to go south. And so, I want people to identify that and think, “Well, what could I have done differently? How could I have adjusted or modified things to not go down that road?” And once you’ve done the analysis, then the question is, because one of the really important things is, “What are the lessons that you learn from this?”

And one of the things that I found, like when I do my trainings, a lot of times people will come up to me at lunch or at the end of the day, and say, “I’ve got this negotiation coming up. Can we just talk about it for a few minutes, and what might I keep in mind?” And, usually, when I do, what happens is that people are often transferring the wrong lessons from one negotiation to another.

So, if they’ve had success in a negotiation, they’ll think, “Okay, I’m just going to do that same thing in this other negotiation, this upcoming negotiation, and I’ll get success again, right?” But the problem is that, and there was a quote that I use in the book by a woman named Kathryn Bartol who teaches at University of Maryland’s Business School. And she said, “When you’ve seen one negotiation, you’ve seen one negotiation.”

And part of why I like that, I agree to an extent, but not fully, like I believe there are lessons that are transferable, but what she’s really highlighting is you need to be comparing apples to apples. Like, are there the same number of parties in the two negotiations you’re looking at? Are the dynamics the same? Or, in one negotiation, is there a power difference, in another, the power is equal? Is there a deadline in one negotiation or whatever, right?”

So, you can see there are lot of dynamics that you need to keep in mind when you’re analyzing and thinking, “Can I use this approach in this upcoming negotiation?”

And then the fourth step is, really, this idea of unlearning things that led you to your failure. And that’s where, for example, I talk about the idea of compromise, and that I recommend to people that they may want to unlearn compromise and replace it with this idea of creative problem-solving, because that’s going to hold you in better stead in most of your negotiations.

And that’s hard, because it means we have to look back at what our negotiation approach is, what are the pillars of how we do things, and why do we do them. And we have to examine that and say, “Is this still meeting my needs? Is this actually making me a better negotiator or not?” So, I just try to lead people down that road of thinking about all of this.

And then the last piece is, again, getting back to the table. And I talk about kind of moves that you can make. If you believe that you’ve got a setback, what are you going to do differently? What did you learn from the first process? How might you approach this negotiation a little bit in a unique way compared to the last time? And if you can’t get back to the table, what did you really learn about yourself as a negotiator so that you can improve and get better?

And so, that’s the process. And I think that what I’m seeing is it turns the mirror on people, on an individual. And that’s a hard thing to do. People don’t like to really look at themselves and examine their behavior and maybe the things that they didn’t do so well. But that’s actually the only way that you really learn from your failures and grow.

And I’ve had a lot of people email me and say, “This is really interesting because I’ve never reflected in this way on who I am as a negotiator and how I do better.”

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent stuff. Well, let’s hear about the addressing the emotion piece of things. If we notice it and we say, “Okay, there it is. I feel sad and rejected. I feel really anxious and nervous about getting back in there,” or, “I feel really angry. Like, that was some bull crap. That was wrong. We was lied to,” what do you recommend we do with it once we’ve identified, “Yep, that feeling is there, big time”?

Joshua Weiss

Part of it is becoming emotionally intelligent. If people have not invested in emotional intelligence, then I would really recommend that you do. And so, part of it is, if I know, if I’m angry, then the question is, “Okay, what is it that the other person did or said that really pushed me over the edge here?”

And I’m a fan of actually bringing that into the process and saying, “Look, I got to tell you, I’m kind of disappointed with where we’ve gotten to. I thought that the stars kind of lined up here in a way that made a lot of sense. But I’m just not clear why we haven’t gotten where we’re getting. And I’m frustrated.”

Like, to me, what you’re doing there is you’re bringing your emotions into the process without them destroying the process. And the interesting thing about this is, if I sit down with you, Pete, and you interpret something that I did, right, and I can tell you’re, like there’s something going on from an emotional point of view, because human beings are not so great at hiding their emotions. In fact, most of us wear them on our sleeves and we can tell there’s something wrong. It’s not that hard, right?

But if you don’t tell me whether you’re angry, sad, frustrated, whatever, then I’m left to guess at what’s going on, and that never ends well. So, like I said, for me, it’s when you’re doing this, find a way to bring it in. Be like, “You know, I got to tell you, like the way in which we’ve gone about this has really not sat well with me, but I’m still here. I’m not going anywhere.”

And for you, in terms of processing your emotions, one of the best things that you can do is something that we call going to the balcony. And, really, what it means is temporarily step away from the table in order to process things and then come back to the table without your emotions overwhelming you. And a lot of times people, say to me, “Well, can you really just step away?” I’m like, “Yeah, you can. There’s no rules.”

And, frankly, it’s actually in the moment like that where we make our biggest mistakes. And we all feel that, right? Like, we can feel ourselves getting so angry that we’re just going to say whatever we feel. And once we’ve done that, that’s all well and good, but now we’ve just made this process a lot harder, because now we might have insulted the other, and now they’re in the same place we are, and all that kind of stuff.

So, I think it’s important to be able to step away. There’s a great quote by a guy named Ambrose Bierce who’s an American writer and humorist, who said, “When angry, you’ll make the best speech you’ll ever regret.” The balcony is designed to help us to not make that speech. And it doesn’t, again, mean denying the emotional piece. It means recognizing it. It’s happening, whether you want to admit it or not.

And a lot of times, people would be like, “Oh, well, you know, in negotiation, you’re not supposed to show emotion.” I’m like, “Well, that’s not really true. Like, you have to be authentic. You have to be who you are.” Some people don’t wear their emotions on their sleeves, but they’re still feeling them. We’re all human at the end of the day. If someone deceives us, we feel angry, frustrated, whatever.

And so, you know, there’s a lot of self-talk. There’s a lot of self-management. And, in fact, in negotiation, it’s actually the one thing we have control over is our actions and our behavior. We don’t have control over the other side. So, how you react and respond is up to you. And, for me, I’ve been doing this a long time, and so I’m pretty attuned to the different things that get me going.

Like, when I was in a negotiation about a year and a half ago, and a guy said, “Clearly, you’re not smart enough to understand what I’m telling you, so let me break it down for you more simply.” And I was like, “Hmm, time for a balcony break,” because I knew I was wanting to say what he could do with himself. But I also knew that that would mean I was losing sight of my objectives, and so I needed to manage that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I think you’re plenty smart, for the record. Well, tell me, any final things you want to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Joshua Weiss

I guess the most important thing that I would say is negotiation is a difficult realm. And I think people don’t understand how challenging it is to do it and to do it well. And so, try to go easy on yourself. I think our own worst critics are ourselves, and I think it’s really important to recognize that you’re going to have successes and failures, and both of those are opportunities to grow and get better at this.

And to the title of your podcast, I mean, if you want to be awesome at work, this is a realm where, if you invest in it, it will really help you. I have students in my program that are mid-career folks, and they all come to me, and they say, “I’m very good at what I do in the sciences, insurance, law,” it doesn’t matter, right? “But when I have to deal with people who I don’t agree with, or have to get people to come along on a project, I don’t know how to do that.” And this is how you do that. This is a deep dive into working with people effectively.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now can you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Joshua Weiss
Well, I’ll give you two, if I might. So, I’m a big Ted Lasso fan. I believe genuinely that there’s a lot of really great lessons from that show in terms of how do you negotiate, how do you deal with conflict. And the very famous scene where he’s playing darts, and it comes down to the notion of be curious, not judgmental.

The best negotiators are people who are really curious. They come in, they ask great questions, and they’re open. When you’re curious, it’s easier to gather information and to sort of be in a mindset where you’re looking for possibilities as opposed to roadblocks.

The other is by Voltaire, the actor and dramatist, who said, “If you think uncertainty is an uncomfortable proposition, try certainty.” And I think what he’s getting at is that the more certain people are in their views and in their beliefs, the more doors get closed. And when you can sit with uncertainty, we actually have a much better chance of finding a good solution.

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

Joshua Weiss
I mean, honestly, I would have to say that the research that I did in my dissertation was probably my favorite bit of research, where I looked at how mediators in very big conflicts, like peace processes and things like that, how they sequence issues.

Because in the literature and when people would talk about this, they would always talk about, “We have to start with easy issues and work our way up to the harder ones.” And a lot of people believe that about negotiation and dealing with conflict in general. But I sort of thought that seems strange. It seems like there are some conflicts out there that would require a different approach.

And so, I did 20 interviews with lots of interesting mediators and things like that. And I was able to uncover five different strategies for how people try to sequence issues. And it’s actually been an interesting contribution to the field. And I’ve seen people sort of gravitate to it because sometimes you just have to deal with the harder issues first. And if you’ve got that logic and you understand why, it can be really valuable.

So, I would say something along those lines, which is also something that a lot of people don’t tend to think a lot about is, “Where do I begin with what issues and why?” and things like that. And it’s interesting because it can actually be a source of problems. People want their issue addressed right away. And if it doesn’t get there, sometimes they can get really fixated on that and worried that it may never get addressed.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Joshua Weiss
There’s a book called Negotiating the Nonnegotiable by Dan Shapiro, and it talks about some of the most difficult negotiations out there and how do you deal with identity-based issues in negotiation, like the really difficult stuff related to values, like when we see the world very differently than others. How do you do that kind of thing? So, I really like that book.

In terms of more broadly speaking, I’m a big Malcolm Gladwell fan, primarily because I really like how he connects very disparate ideas, things that seem like there’s no connection whatsoever. He finds a way to weave those together. So, The Tipping Point, Blink, David and Goliath, Revisiting the Tipping Point. Like, they’re all really interesting books, and he’s a really interesting read.

And I think, when it comes to negotiation as well, like, his way of thinking is a way that I think is very helpful in negotiation.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Joshua Weiss
I mean, that would probably be the preparation that I do for my negotiations, and that process that I go through because it’s invaluable. But I do it in such a way that I’m always thinking about a contingency plan because I think one classic mistake that people make in negotiation is they want to have a plan, they want to go through the planning process, which is the right way to think about it. But you can’t have a very definitive plan.

What you have to do is really have more of a contingency plan that you’ve got your end goal that you’re trying to reach. But you want to have three or four different avenues to get there because it’s very possible that one of those avenues is going to be blocked or more than one.

So, when you prepare, I’d really encourage people to think about your end goal, but then think, “What are three or four different ways that I can get there?” And that gives you the confidence to be able to try some of these different avenues.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget, a Josh-original sound bite that resonates with folks, and they quote back to you often?

Joshua Weiss
I think it’s probably that compromise should be the last stop on the train, not the first. You can always compromise if you absolutely need to, but make it the last stop on the train, not the first.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Joshua Weiss
So, I have website that has all my books and material, including some of the children’s books that I’ve written that we talked about before we came on air. And that’s just www.JoshuaNWeiss.com. So, N as in Noah, which is my middle name.

And if people do end up getting the books or things along those lines, I’d love hearing from people and what they thought of this stuff and how it helped or what kind of further questions they have. So, an open invitation to your listeners to get in touch.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Joshua Weiss
Don’t downplay the importance of negotiation. It is a central component to your success and your future. And so, I would encourage you, if you don’t know much about it, embrace it, dive in. There’s a lot of great stuff that’s written out there, largely for public consumption. It’s not very academic in nature. And so, invest the time and energy to do it, and you won’t be sorry.

1065: Harvard’s Stress Expert Shares Top Resilience Tools with Dr. Aditi Nerurkar

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Dr. Aditi Nerurkar discusses the neuroscience behind stress—and offers actionable tips for building your resilience.

You’ll Learn

  1. The major myth that leads to burnout
  2. The rule of two for building healthier habits
  3. How to feel less stressed in one minute

About Aditi

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar is a Harvard stress expert, internationally recognized speaker, and national television correspondent with an expertise in stress, burnout, resilience and mental health. Her book The 5 Resets: Rewire Your Brain and Body for Less Stress and More Resilience is a “must read” by Adam Grant and Malcolm Gladwell’s Next Big Idea Club and “best new book” by the New York Post. Named “100 Women to Know in America,” her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Good Morning America, The Today Show and NPR. She is also a frequent keynote speaker with talks at the Forbes 30 Under 30 Summit and other events.

Resources Mentioned

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Aditi Nerurkar Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Aditi, welcome!

Aditi Nerurkar
Thanks for having me. It’s such a pleasure to join you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s a pleasure to be chatting. I listened to your entire book and I loved it. And there are so many fun alleys we can go down. But, first, I want to hear your hot take. You are a stress expert, doctor, looked at it closely for many years. Tell us, what is something you understand about stress that you think the vast majority of us just have wrong?

Aditi Nerurkar
I think the biggest misconception about stress is that all stress is bad. When you and I say, “Oh, it’s been a stressful week,” or stressful month, or, for many people, the past five years have been incredibly stressful. We use stress interchangeably with the quality of it being bad or difficult. When, in fact, there are two kinds of stress, there’s good stress and bad stress. And they’re not created equal and they affect your brain and body differently.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, how do I know what’s good and what’s bad?

Aditi Nerurkar
Good stress moves your life forward. It’s productive. It’s motivating. And it’s actually a driver for everything good in your life because everything good in your life was created because of a little bit of healthy stress. So, what is good, healthy stress? Scientifically, we call it adaptive stress. And this is like rooting for your favorite sports team, planning a beach vacation, falling in love, getting a promotion, a new job or a new home, things that move your life forward. And that is positive. This is good, healthy, productive stress.

But the other kind of stress, bad stress, unhealthy stress, that’s what we talk about, Pete, when we say, “Oh, it’s been a stressful week,” or a year or five years. That, in scientific terms, is called maladaptive stress. It’s dysfunctional and gets in the way of your everyday life. Bad stress is what causes all of the mental and physical health manifestations that you may be familiar with when you say that, you know, when you’re talking about stress, like anxiety, depression, insomnia, brain fog, irritability.

And so, the goal of life is not zero stress. It’s actually biologically impossible to do that. The goal of life is healthy, manageable stress that serves you rather than harms you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that’s handy there. And I’m thinking about, can I have too much good stress in terms of, “I am having awesome gains at the gym, and awesome opportunities at work, and an awesome newborn?” Somehow all those stress components are good, and yet I might end up in a bad spot. Is that a possibility as well?

Aditi Nerurkar
Good or bad stress is less about the actual event, but more about how it affects you and how you react to that event. So, some people with those three things that you mentioned might be okay, and others may not. I don’t actually think there is such a thing as too much good stress, meaning that when you experience a certain level of stress, we all have a threshold of when stress becomes healthy, productive, and then goes past that threshold to bad.

And when you’re giving me those examples, and it’s happening all at once to someone, you have to think about this idea of the rule of two, which is how your brain responds to change. So, even all of these positive things happening in your life can, in fact, cause you to have a lot of stress, which then veers into the bad unhealthy stress, because even positive experiences in your life can cause a lot of stress.

So, I think when you have a lot of stress in your life, you may think it’s good but, in fact, it’s causing some of the mental and physical health manifestations that bad stress causes.

And so, therefore, it’s less about the thing that is causing you stress and more about your response to it.

Pete Mockaitis
I see, yes. So, our interpretation or frame or reaction, I suppose, do we just know it when we see it in terms of, “I’m stoked and excited and growing,” versus, “Ahh!” and that’s how I know? And so, it sounds like it might be partially just the nature of the thing itself and how it jives with me. And it might partially just be the sheer quantity and my threshold for it.

Aditi Nerurkar
Exactly. It’s the actual event in your life. It is also the intensity that you are experiencing, whatever it is that you’re experiencing, and the frequency, how often is it happening. If you think about your baseline and then when this event is happening, how it makes you feel, is it getting in the way of your everyday functioning? Is it getting in the way of your sleep or your motivation or your day-to-day life? And if it is causing any bad results.

So, a classic example, having a baby, a newborn at home, right? It’s a very wonderful experience in many people’s lives, but it’s also incredibly challenging. And so that one event can be good stress because it’s moving your life forward. A baby is a blessing in the home, but it also brings about a whole host of challenges and mental and physical health manifestations for the parents.

And so, it’s less about the event and more about your experience of it bringing into account. There’s many factors to this. It’s not just like you feel happy and, therefore, it’s good stress, or you feel unhappy and, therefore, it’s bad stress. It’s nuanced and it’s on a spectrum.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, is there means of quantifying, measuring this stuff?

Aditi Nerurkar
A lot of my work, Pete, is focused on this idea that stress, we think of it as this vague nebulous entity, when, in fact, we do really need to think about stress as, you know, I would love one day for stress to be like blood pressure, something that we measure, monitor, and, therefore, can manage. And there is a stress quiz in my book, The Five Resets. You can also take the stress quiz for free on my website, DrAditi.com.

And it’s a way to measure and actually think about how to give yourself a stress number. You’ve got a personalized stress score at the end of the quiz. It’s five questions. And what you want to do when you’re measuring your stress is have a number and then do various strategies to rewire your brain for less stress, which we’ll talk about in this conversation.

And then you want to take that test again, the same test again in four weeks and see, “Is there a difference in your score?” And then four weeks again, “Is there a difference in your score?” Or you take the test every two months because it takes about eight weeks to build a habit for your brain and rewire your brain for less stress.

And so, what you want to do when you’re measuring stress is use the same, we call it a study instrument.Take the same test again and again. That’s one way.

The other way is, if you are thinking about a particular metric in your life, I call it the MOST goal, create some sort of metric in your life, the way to measure, maybe it’s your energy, maybe it’s your sleep, maybe it’s your feeling of being engaged in the world, something that you can tangibly measure every four weeks, every six weeks and see, “Hey, am I making progress in my stress?”

And so, what is your MOST goal? So, when you’re feeling a sense of stress, you often have that inner critic, that berating voice in your head saying, “What’s the matter with me?” You’re like you might not be feeling great. You might be asking yourself that question.

Instead, reframe and ask yourself, “What matters most to me?” And MOST is an acronym, M stands for motivating, O objective, S small enough to virtually guarantee your success, and T timely. Create a MOST goal using that framework. Give yourself a timeframe of two to three months ahead of time. In the next two to three months, you want to achieve this thing. Understand that it takes eight weeks to build a habit, falling off and getting back up is part of habit formation.

And then once you have your MOST goal, you try various strategies and techniques that we’ll talk about today, that can help you get towards your MOST goal. And then there’s that metric that you can use to say, “Oh, you know what? I am getting better sleep. I do have more energy. I feel more engaged with my life,” or whatever it is that you’ve created the MOST goal. And that is one way to really monitor and measure this big, huge, nebulous thing that we call stress.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. And I would also like your quick hot take, since we’re talking measurements, on heart rate variability for all of our wearable enthusiasts. Are you a believer? Is it useful? Is it counterproductive? Should that be a measure you recommend we keep our eye on as we quantify stress?

Aditi Nerurkar
There’s a question mark on heart rate variability. And when I look at a lot of the science on various wearables and different things that you can use, I’m not entirely convinced, though there’s some data that’s compelling and others. I don’t think you can use one particular biometric, like one particular thing that’s saying, “This is my stress response.”

So, I, personally, I don’t really recommend any specific wearables or biometrics, simply because all of my strategies are cost free.

Though, if you feel like you want to use heart rate variability and you have a device and you have the disposable income for the device, that’s great. But personally, I am not convinced yet to recommend that as, like, the gold standard of stress monitoring.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you’ve got a great turn of a phrase. What is the resilience myth?

Aditi Nerurkar
The resilience myth is that resilient people don’t get burned out. And it’s something that I personally experienced. So, my stress story and my origin story is that I was a stressed patient before I became a doctor with an expertise in stress, and I was desperate for answers and really wanted a sense of change.  And I was living the resilience myth at the time.

And so, often you will hear people say, “I can’t be burned out. I can’t be stressed. I’m resilient.” Or, you hear people say that to you, “Oh, you’re not burned out. You’re resilient. You can’t have burnout. You’re resilient,” and that is the great resilience myth because we know, based on the science, that you, in fact, can be burned out and can experience stress, and also be resilient. They are not mutually exclusive.

Resilience is your innate biological ability to adapt, to recover, and grow in the face of life’s challenges. We all have an innate biological ability to be resilient. It’s part of us. It’s who we are as humans. But the resilience myth often will say that, “Oh, you can’t be burned out and stressed and also resilient.” That has been debunked.

In fact, the reason it has been debunked is because so many of us, again, this is not an individual failing, it’s a societal one, ascribed to the notion of toxic resilience, which is a warped definition of the true definition of resilience. And it’s this idea of mind over matter mindset, productivity at all costs, all systems go all the time.

It’s the Energizer bunny mentality, just keep going.  Or, in the UK, keep calm and carry on. And that is toxic resilience. And when you hear the word resilience, if you bristle, if you have a visceral response, I do when I hear the word resilience.

Pete Mockaitis
“Just be resilient.”

Aditi Nerurkar
“Just be more resilient.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, okay. Just like that, huh?”

Aditi Nerurkar
Or, “You must not be that resilient.” You hear it all the time. The reason you have that visceral response is because what that person is describing is toxic resilience. True resilience honors your boundaries, understands your human limitations, and leans into this idea of self-compassion, also recognizing that your human need for rest and recovery is paramount.

And so, in many ways, you want to lean into this idea of true resilience and reject the performative aspect of toxic resilience. Toxic resilience is a manifestation of hustle culture.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and I think it almost feels a little bit like a fixed characteristic the way people describe it, it’s like, “Oh, she’s resilient, he’s not that resilient, you know?” And that gets me fired up because, in my own life, I have seen that my degree of resilience, which I’ll loosely define as the amount of bull crap that could be heaped on me before I freak out, really does fluctuate, and largely based on how well am I able to meet just basic needs.

Aditi Nerurkar
Yeah, I mean, your ability to be resilient fluctuates as does everything. And giving yourself a sense of grace and self-compassion is really important. And it’s also a part of true resilience, knowing your boundaries, knowing your limitations. And if you are continually just on the go, on the move, trying to be productive, trying to achieve, we know that that has its limitations.

So, based on the data, Pete, right now, 70% of people have at least one feature of stress and burnout. Now, of course, that figure varies across industry, but anywhere from 70 to 74% of people are struggling with some, one aspect of stress or burnout.

That’s not to say they’re not resilient. People are resilient. It’s the systems that burn us out: impossible demands of parenting, the expectations of work, and not as not as many resources but lots of time and energy spent to achieve the same or more at work. I mean, we see this all the time. So many examples of toxic resilience.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d love to dig into that a little bit. We had Dr. Tessa West on the show, sharing some perhaps lesser-known symptoms of stress and a delayed stress response. So, if there’s anyone listening and saying, “Oh, well, I’m fine and I’m resilient, and I don’t think I have any of these burnout things,” can you share perhaps some hidden or overlooked stress symptoms that might surprise folks like, “Oh, wait, that’s stress?”

Aditi Nerurkar
Right. In fact, one particular study, you know, stress and burnout are at unprecedented rates, and particularly when it comes to burnout, Pete, we’re seeing a new picture of burnout.

In one study, 60% of people with burnout had an inability to disconnect from work as their main feature.  So, when you think about classic typical features of burnout – apathy, feeling disengaged, unmotivated – you may not have any of those and say, “I’m not burned out. I don’t have any of those.” But you may be displaying atypical features of burnout, like an inability to disconnect from work.

So, this modern-day burnout is becoming very difficult to identify in ourselves and each other. The reason so many people are experiencing burnout is because of the way the human brain is designed.

The brain is expertly designed to handle short bursts of stress. And when you are feeling a sense of stress, you know, so let’s back up. Under normal circumstances, when you are calm, let’s say back in like 2018, right, like before everything started, the onslaught of stress and the tsunami of stress began with the pandemic and now clearly in the post pandemic era.

Back in 2018, you were living in resilient mode. You were governed by an area called the prefrontal cortex, which is right here. If you put your hand on your forehead, it’s the area right behind your forehead. It governs things like memory, planning, organization, complex problem-solving, strategic thinking. It’s what most of us are masters of. It’s adulting in pop culture terms.

But during periods of stress, your brain isn’t governed by the prefrontal cortex. It’s governed by your amygdala, which is a small almond-shaped structure deep in your brain whose sole purpose is survival and self-preservation. It’s cave person mode. Now, your brain can function for short periods of time in cave person mode.

The challenge is that, over the past several years, probably since 2019, maybe 2020 to today, we are not really coming back to baseline. It’s one onslaught after the other. So we went through the pandemic, then we had a racial reckoning, then we had climate disasters, and various humanitarian crises, and lots of political upheaval.

And there’s so much stuff happening in the world and we can access it all in the palm of our hand using our phones and just one onslaught after the other. By the way, your brain, your amygdala doesn’t know the difference between something happening in your backyard or something happening 5,000 miles away. It triggers your stress response no matter what.

And so, this constant onslaught over the past several years without a return to baseline, that stress response, your flight or flight response, stays on in the background. When it stays on in the background, it increases your risk of developing burnout, and that unhealthy stress, that runaway stress, maladaptive stress is that driver of what’s causing people to feel a sense of burnout.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. Thank you. You mentioned the rule of two. What is that?

Aditi Nerurkar
The rule of two is really how your brain makes change possible, Pete. So, think back to New Year’s. You may have had a list of 10 things you want to achieve for this year. And now, several months past New Year’s, you’re probably doing one or maybe zero of those, the New Year’s Resolutions, right?

The reason it’s so difficult to do everything all at once when you’re talking about making changes, even positive change, is because change is a stress on your brain. And so, you could really only manage two small changes at a time if you want those changes to stick. Anything more in your system gets overloaded.

That is why New Year’s Resolutions don’t work. That is why I said, when you gave that question or that example of, like, “Can you have too much good stress?” stress, even if it’s good, if it’s too much, it starts veering towards the negative, unhealthy kind of stress because of the rule of two.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And I like that’s really handy and it feels good in terms of it’s the right number. And I don’t think I realized it until I read your book that it feels so right. What is the underlying scientific evidence that says the number is two, not six, not nine?

Aditi Nerurkar
The basis of the rule of two is in science. It is a study done ages ago in the 1960s by two psychiatrists, Doctors Holmes and Rahe. And they did a study of 47 of the most common life conditions that can happen to people, both positive and negative. So, things like falling in love, having a child, graduating, a huge personal accomplishment, all these wonderful positive things.

Equally so, testing people for divorce, bereavement, tragedy, all sorts of things like that. So, they found that, as people move through life and experienced and accrued many active events, so both positive and negative, it had a predilection for worsening stress and worse health outcomes, like a greater likelihood of chronic medical conditions.

And so, the Holmes and Rahe study is the kind of scientific basis for the rule of two. But we, in clinical medicine, have been using the rule of two forever because that is how change happens. You focus on two things at a time.

So, when you go to see your doctor, and if you have a long list of things that you want to focus on, you’ll often hear your doctor say, “Okay, let’s pick two of these that I want you to work on.” And then you work on those and you come back in three months, and then you focus on the next two. And that’s really how your brain works.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, understood. We’ve got so much goodness within your five resets and, as you said, they’re science-based, they’re free, they’re actionable, simple. Cool. Cool. So, within that, we got get clear on what matters most, find quiet in a noisy world, sync your brain and your body, come up for air, and bring your best self forward, and then 15 techniques within those.

So, we can’t cover all 15, though that’d be fun. So, I want to share a couple that stuck out to me and then hear your hot take. One was about exercise and the all-or-nothing fallacy of exercise. I thought you nailed that so well, because I’ve fallen for this. And I was even in a UFC gym recently, and I was appalled, because I was listening to you maybe at the same time.

And there’s this giant poster which says, “If you’re not willing to go all the way, you won’t go anywhere.” And I was like, “I think that is exactly the wrong mindset for exercise that has kind of been problematic for me.” Aditi, what’s your hot take here?

Aditi Nerurkar
I agree with you. So often, we have this all-or-nothing fallacy when it comes to exercise. Like, either “I have to be ripped and have a six pack and eat a hundred grams of protein, and do all the things, or I should just be a couch potato and do nothing.” And we know that that’s not true. You would never have an all-or-nothing fallacy when it comes to sleep, right?

Like, sleep is an intervention that we do every day for our brains and our bodies and our health. And, yeah, some nights you don’t get great sleep. Some nights you sleep really well, but you go to sleep. You’re not like, “Eh, if you’re not going to get a good night’s sleep. What’s the point anyway?” And so, we have this all-or-nothing fallacy when it comes to exercise. And it’s something that we need to really shift away from.

Because often, when it comes to stress, burnout, when it comes to your mental health, it’s not about the physical promise. That’s very aspirational. When you see those taut bellies and all those muscles. Unfortunately, our society has really bulked up, pun intended, the promise of exercise to be a physical promise. When, really, there’s the mental promise of exercise.

I’ve had so many patients who have done wonderfully with their mental health while engaging in some sort of exercise program. And the benefits are the physical aspects. Yeah, it’s a nice by-product, but that’s not why people engage in it.

And so, I wish, you know, we need a rebrand for exercise first. The dreaded E word, and I think when people hear that word, if you’re not a regular exerciser, like it’s cringe worthy. And so, movement, some form of daily movement. So, the science shows that even a five-minute walk every day could make a difference.

And the all-or-nothing fallacy states that, like, “Oh, why bother walking for five minutes? It’s going to do nothing. I’m just going to sit home and I’m not going to exercise.” No, just go out for five minutes and walk. And what will happen is, over time, you’ll want to walk for 10 minutes. Then over time, you’ll say, “Oh, you know what? I want to walk every day for 15 minutes.”

There’s something called your sense of agency, meaning, “Can you do it?” It’s like your belief in yourself that you can actually make change happen. And when you’re feeling a sense of stress and you’re burnt out, it’s like wading through molasses when you’re making a new change. And so, if you were to tell yourself, “You know what, I’m going to just go to the gym.”

You may say to yourself, “I’m going to go to the gym three days a week. Every week, three days a week, this is the class I want to do. It’s going to be an hour.” The barrier to entry to actually do that, going from a sedentary lifestyle, like most people, again, this is not a gap in knowledge or information. We all know that exercise is good for us, but so few people actually engage in regular exercise.

It’s like 25%, I think the statistic is, of those who actually engage. So, this is not about a gap in knowledge or information. It’s about a gap in action. And so, how do you close that gap from where you are to where you want to be? Instead of telling yourself, “I’m going to go to the gym three days a week for an hour,” when you’re a non-exerciser, instead say to yourself, “I’m going to walk for five minutes a day.”

When you’re starting a new habit, it’s more important to do something every day rather than once in a while because you avoid decision fatigue. There was a time that I was a non-exerciser and I had lots of lofty dreams and goals of going to the gym, but then work took over, so I didn’t go that day.

Next day there’s a childcare conflict, you can’t make it. The next day, something happens, there’s an emergency. So, by the end of the week, you’ve gone maybe one time, possibly zero times. Then you feel like a failure. Instead, set the bar low and just say, “I’m going to walk every day for five minutes.” And then once you do that, you are essentially creating a habit. You’re rewiring your brain and you’re creating a habit for movement, for daily movement.

Over time, what happens, when you create a daily habit, is that you feel like, “Oh, I want to do it again tomorrow. I did five minutes. That felt good.” You remember the reward. You remember the mental benefits. You feel them. And so, you want to go again. And then you want to go again. And, over time, you start building daily movement into your life.

And then, once you are like, “Yeah, I created a habit of movement using the rule of two,” then you can start going to the gym and get that six pack that you’ve been looking for.

But often, we are lured by the physical benefits of exercise because we don’t see the mental benefits of exercise, right? Like, it’s normal. Of course, we’re all going to be lured by the physical promise of what exercise can do. But there is so much good data that shows that the mental promise of what daily physical activity can do, because your brain is a muscle just like your biceps, and what’s good for your body is good for your brain.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And you were sharing research that even one or two minutes of moving is helpful on those dimensions.

Aditi Nerurkar
Yes, it’s called ultrashort bursts of exercise. So, if you’re going to go for a walk, just think about what it would feel like to catch a bus. When you’re late for something, you’re trying to catch the bus, how quickly you walk. Yeah, studies show that even just ultrashort bursts of exercise can have a profound effect on your body, on lots of organ systems, decrease your risk of chronic disease, like cancer and stroke and heart disease and diabetes, all sorts of things.

So, a little bit of movement is better than no movement at all. And bringing that into your everyday can make, truly make all the difference for your brain and your body when it comes to stress, burnout, and also the physical benefits of doing that. By the way, there are studies that show that you don’t even have to lose any weight to feel, for exercise to benefit you, for your heart, your lungs, your brain, all these vital organs.

Pete Mockaitis
And sleep apnea, I’ve read those studies. Exercise with no weight change still improves sleep apnea scores.

Aditi Nerurkar
Yeah, it improves so many things. And so, I think so many of us, and I’m guilty of this as well, like standing on the scale, and you’re exercising every day, and you’re doing all the right things, and you’re like, “How come this, how come that, you know, the scale isn’t budging?” or, “How come I don’t have a six pack yet?”

There are so many invisible benefits to daily movement. Just keep going. Those benefits and those things will come, but you just have to keep going because you’re doing this for your body, for your brain, for your vital organs.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And even if all you’re moving is a pen on a journal, how’s that for segue, Aditi?

Aditi Nerurkar
Beautiful.

Pete Mockaitis
You say there’s some excellent science associated with gratitude and expressive writing practices. Can you share just what are the benefits of doing this and how do I do it?

Aditi Nerurkar
Yeah, so I love that segue, and so there’s the gratitude practice is very simple. This is not your teenagers’ journal. All it means is that you take a piece of paper, a notebook, and a pen, keep it by your bedside, and at night or first thing in morning, write down five things you’re grateful for and why.

You can put a date on it. This is like 60 seconds, 90 seconds of an exercise. And you want to do this every day. The studies have demonstrated benefits for mood, anxiety, depression, all sorts of things, when you practice daily gratitude. The reason you want to write it down, so one of the first questions I’m asked is like, “Can you type it? Can I just type in my note section?” There’s lots of apps also, right, for gratitude.

Whatever works for you, you do. But based on the science, the reason you want to write versus type is because your brain uses a different neural circuitry when you write than when you type. Like, when you go to the grocery store, and you write all the things that you need on a Post-it but you lose the Post-it, you’re more inclined to remember what was on the list versus when you’re typing something, it’s harder to remember just a different neural circuitry, different way your brain is wired.

And so, try to write down five things you’re grateful for every day. Some days you’ll think of three things. Some days you’ll have 10 things, but just keep writing down five things. If you’re feeling a sense of deep stress and burnout, you may say like, “I don’t really have much to be grateful for.” Well, do you have two arms and two legs? Can you breathe? Is your heart beating? Do you have food in the pantry? Do you have a roof over your head?

These may seem like basic to you but, in fact, there are many people who can’t say this, right? And so, being able to be grateful for things can actually change your brain for less stress through a process called cognitive retraining. It means that same amount of good and bad is happening to you at all times, but when you’re feeling a sense of stress, you start focusing on the negative experiences because when you’re feeling a sense of stress, the amygdala is acting up, the cave person mode, you’re scanning for danger, you’re wondering, “Am I safe? Is everything okay?” It’s self-preservation.

And so, these negative experiences, you’re more primed to notice them and you forget about the positives. And so, when you practice gratitude again and again, through this forum of five things every day and why, what you’re doing is you’re rewiring your brain. You’re training your brain to start focusing on the positive things, and it’s called cognitive retraining. So, you’re shifting that attention away from the negative back to the positive. And that, of course, has an effect on your amygdala, has an effect on your stress response. So that’s gratitude.

Pete Mockaitis
And if I may, so if this sort of practice is rewiring our brain in the gratitude direction, can we do the same thing for other emotional states? Like, gratitude practice sounds lofty. It’s, like, what if I wanted a hilarity practice? I’m going to write the most hilarious things that occur today. And in so doing, can I rewire my brain to find the humor in more stuff?

Aditi Nerurkar
Oh, I love that. I don’t know about the research to find humor and what that, you know, I’m sure that that releases all sorts of feel-good chemicals in the brain. We need a study on that. And there might be a study that I’m not aware of, but I love that, to find more humor in life and a sense of levity. We know that that’s so important, you know, a sense of joy and levity.

And so, if you were to write down five funny things that happen to you every day and find the humor in it, that sounds like a great practice. I’m going to try that. I like that. I’m going to look up whether there’s science behind it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. So, we don’t know if it’s been studied, but it would, is it fair to say from your professional opinion in neuroscience, like that seems like the kind of thing that might probably work perhaps.

Aditi Nerurkar
Well, I think it could potentially improve your well-being because laughter, levity, finding joy, that sense of lightheartedness, can be helpful in promoting well-being. And that we know based on the science, but I like this, you know, combining this hilarity practice is absolutely adorable, and I will get right on it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, thank you. I appreciate it. The service here is wonderful. Okay, so then expressive writing, what’s that?

Aditi Nerurkar
Expressive writing is a technique coined by a psychologist named James Pennebaker at Vanderbilt, I believe. And so, if there’s something that’s bothering you.

So, if there’s like an event that’s happened in the past or an emotional event that’s currently happening, and you’re trying to work it out and it’s causing you a lot of stress and burnout, it works well for a discrete event or a discrete emotional state, like you’re angry about something, or you’re frustrated, or something’s happening, or you feel like someone wronged you, or there’s some actual thing. And if it’s intangible and you can’t pinpoint it, that’s okay, too.

You want to spend 20 to 25 minutes free-handwriting, again, writing, pen and paper, and you want to set a timer for 20 to 25 minutes and you want to write, and you want to do that for four consecutive days, 20 to 25 minutes. What happens is, on day three, you might notice an uptick in some negative emotions, and then by day four, you kind of work it out.

So, this has been studied, this technique called expressive writing, therapeutic writing, has been studied in countless populations. So, it’s been studied with college students and people who engage in expressive writing have demonstrated a higher GPA. It’s been studied in patients, and there’s been decreased readmission rates at the hospital.

There’s been data on expressive writing being helpful for anxiety and for depression, stress, burnout, bereavement, grief. I mean, the list of studies that have looked into expressive writing for various groups, it is so vast. And so, this is a really great technique to use for yourself when you’re going through something and you’re trying to work it out. And I use it all the time.

When I’m going through a difficult experience or some things going on that I’m trying to, that I have, it has to be something that’s emotionally charged. That’s when it works well. Like, when there’s a lot of emotions around something. And then the other thing to remember, when you do expressive writing is, you write on a piece of paper and then you throw it out. It’s not for anyone else to read.

It’s just you’re getting it out. You’re getting your thoughts out. It’s freehand, 20 to 25 minutes, consecutively for four days. And then you stop.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s as wild as 20 to 25 minutes consecutively for four days. And yet, as I peeked at some of these human random control trials, the impact for just that, like 100 minutes max, was substantial and lasting in follow-ups occurring weeks later.

Aditi Nerurkar
Isn’t it wild? And in some studies, months later? It’s unbelievable.

Pete Mockaitis
So, can you share with us, what are a prompt or two if folks are like, “Wow, that’s awesome. I want to do that now”? Like, what is the prompt that I should have in mind as I put pen to paper?

Aditi Nerurkar
Think of a particular idea or think about a particular event or a person or something where you feel emotional about, and this is a negative emotion. So, what are you feeling angry about? Who are you feeling angry about? Do you feel like someone wronged you? Do you feel like there was an experience that was traumatic in some capacity or someone causing you a sense of trauma?

Or, it might not even be directly something that happened to you, but we’re in a very charged climate in the state of the world right now. And so, is there something happening in the world that is really bothering you?

So, whatever it may be, sit down, set a timer, 20 to 25 minutes, and just write freehand. And then you rip it up. This is just for you, uninterrupted time, and then you do it for four consecutive days.

And what happens by the end, and I’ve done these many times, for lots of things, personal issues, professional issues. And then it, like, just, I don’t know, the charge that like negative charge and those emotions, it’s just like the volume just comes down, and you work it out.

Pete Mockaitis
Do we think the ripping up is an essential step in terms of the cathartic action or just for giving us license to really go wild? Or, we don’t know?

Aditi Nerurkar
Yeah, I don’t really know. I think the reason I say to rip it up is because ripping something up and throwing it away, it will help you become as true and authentic as you can during the act of writing. So, if you’re writing something, and you’re thinking, “Oh, my God, is anyone going to read this?” or, “I hope no one reads this,” that just makes you more inhibited in your writing.

And what you’re really trying to do is like, you want the writing to feel cathartic. You want to get out your deepest emotions and thoughts and feelings. You might not even know what they are right now. Chances are you don’t. And when you’re doing this practice, it just starts flowing out of you. You don’t even know where it’s coming from. And that’s the point.

And so, the reason you rip it up is simply because you want to be free in that 20 to 25 minutes. And you don’t want to think about like, “Who’s going to read it? And what is it going to mean?” Some people want to save the papers, they’re like, “I want to keep this and I want to know what I went through.” You can, if you wish, and if you feel safe, like psychologically safe, and you want to keep it, but chances are you’ll look back on it, and it really won’t make any sense.

It’s stream of consciousness, so you’re not necessarily like writing an essay. You are freehand writing, thoughts and emotions, expressions, and you’re just writing. You can write sentences. You cannot write sentences. But it’s not about what happens afterwards in terms of like what happens with the tangible paper. The important piece is the actual writing and getting all of that stuff out. It’s excavating all of those emotions, feelings, and thoughts.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Aditi, thank you.

Aditi Nerurkar
It was such a pleasure to join you, truly.

1051: Channeling Optimism as a Superpower with Sumit Paul-Choudhury

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Sumit Paul-Choudhury shares the science behind optimism and why it gives people an advantage in the long term.

You’ll Learn

  1. The case for optimism
  2. How to train your brain to become an optimist
  3. How to direct your optimism to where you need it most

About Sumit

Sumit Paul-Choudhury writes, thinks, and dreams about science, technology, and the future. A former Editor-in-Chief of New Scientist, he trained as an astrophysicist, has worked as a financial journalist, and, at the London Business School, received a Sloan Fellowship in strategy and leadership. Currently, he devotes most of his time to his creative studio Alternity, which puts the ideas in this book into scientific and artistic practice. He lives and works in London.

Resources Mentioned

Sumit Paul-Choudhury Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Sumit, welcome.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Hi, glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m feeling optimistic about this interview.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Me too, hopefully, so.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I would like to kick it off. You’ve got a pretty dramatic story in terms of you share that you became an optimist on the night of tragedy. Can you tell us the story and how you came to this position?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Yeah. So, well, it’s not so much that I became an optimist as I realized I was one starting at that point. So, some time ago now, my first wife died of cancer, or complications of cancer. And, obviously, this was a pretty bad time for me. But one of the things I did, or the main thing I did, actually, was in the aftermath, I was to think, “Well, how am going to get through this?” And I thought, “Well, the present is not great, obviously, but I have to believe that the future is going to be better. It’s going to be brighter than today is.”

And so, I started, more or less, kind of like a coping mechanism, really. I sort of declared myself to be an optimist. I said, “I’m going to be an optimist. I’m going to believe that the future is going to be better. And, in that way, maybe it will be.” And so, I started to do things that I thought might help me along that goal. And as I kind of did them, I realized a couple of things.

One was I realized that, actually, it was helping, and something that I kind of thought was frivolous. I thought optimism is kind of a fairly naive way to go about your life. I realized there was more power there than I had realized previously. And the other thing I realized was that, actually, I thought, “Well, this is coming at a very bleak time in my life.”

And then I thought, “Well, I’ve always been an optimist. This is something I’ve always assumed that things will get better. And even now in this darkest of moments, I still think things are going to get better.” And then realizing that I was an optimist and appeared to be quite strongly optimistic was quite difficult because I thought it was frivolous. I thought this was something that if you didn’t really want to think much about life, you’d just say, “Oh, I’m an optimist. Things will work out.” And that’s how you proceed.

So, both of those things came as something of a surprise to me, that optimism wasn’t this kind of throwaway thing, and that I’d always been one, which wasn’t something I identified with myself.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s powerful. Thank you for sharing. And I really relate to that. I remember, when I was 15, my dad died in a bicycling accident.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Oh, sorry.

Pete Mockaitis
And it was terrible and very sad. And, at the same time, in the mix of my thoughts, I remember thinking, “Boy, I’m so grateful that I had him for this long.” Because I just imagined, like, if he had left me three years earlier, I probably could have gotten into some real trouble, really, because I had some, I don’t know, wild rebelliousness within me.

And so, I was grateful for what could have been, that was not looking to the past, and you’re looking to the future, like, you believe the future will be better than today. Well, tell us, you know a lot of reason, fact-based, evidence-based things, is optimism rational, true, believable, defensible for the skeptic?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Well, I’m a science journalist, I should say. And that was one of the reasons I found optimism, or identifying as an optimist, to be difficult, because I kind of prided myself on being a critical thinker, or being someone who made all these decisions on the basis of evidence. Or, at least, that’s what I thought I was doing, right? And then I became a journalist. And, similarly, in journalism, you’re supposed to be a detached critical thinker.

You view things objectively, try and come up with the most accurate possible assessment of a situation, or of what you’re being told. And that doesn’t sit very well with the idea of optimism as this kind of belief that things will turn out for the better. And, actually, the more I kind of dug into it, the more I realized that actually optimism is kind of irrational, actually. I mean, people kind of often try and turn it into a rational kind of way of looking at the world.

And there are arguments for it and there are ways that you can kind of make it more rigorous. But at its core, optimism in the psychological sense is irrational. Psychologists refer to it as unrealistically positive expectations. It’s kind of believing that good things will happen more often than the numbers suggest or the experience of your peers suggest. And bad things will happen less often than the numbers suggest. So, it is basically irrational.

But having said that, you can make a good case for it. You can make a case for the fact that this irrational belief, nonetheless, helps us to get ahead in life. And when you kind of do the kind of research that psychologists have done, you discover that, actually, people who score as more strongly optimistic up to a point also seem to have better lives in many respects. Longer lives, healthier lives, happier lives, and more successful lives.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I want to dig into that. And I guess, with that strict definition of optimism, in terms of the belief that things will be better than they, statistically, are likely to be, I guess I’m curious, though, sometimes just having–we had Jamil Zaki on the show, and he was talking about hope, and that often our default assumptions are more cynical and more doubtful than the reality on the ground.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Right, exactly. And I think that’s where optimism comes into its own, essentially. So, the reason that it’s irrational is because we don’t have the evidence to hand to say, “I believe this thing will work out.” We don’t have the evidence for that, you know, “I think I’m going to get this promotion,” say. You can’t say ahead of time that that’s definitely going to happen. Almost never in the real world are you in a position where you can say, “With 100% certainty, I know what’s going to happen,” or, “I know that things aren’t going to work out.” That’s just not the way the world works.

Most of the time you have to kind of try and make your best guess, and you know that your best guess is not going to be entirely correct. The difference between being an optimist and a pessimist in that situation is that as an optimist, you recognize that there are positive possibilities that you don’t see. There are positive outcomes that you’re not necessarily aware of.

As a pessimist, you kind of write those off. As an optimist, you think, “Well, there are positives. I don’t know what they are. I don’t know what those further solutions, those further opportunities might be,” but you make the effort to keep yourself open to them, to keep looking for them. And so, if they do exist, you’ll find them, right?

If you’re a pessimist, on the other hand, you don’t do anything. And so, you don’t kind of realize those opportunities. So, basically, I mean, you start off in this position where, whatever your best assessment is, it’s going to be wrong. If you assume it’s wrong and there’s no upside, then that’s going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you assume it’s wrong, but there are positive outcomes out there that you haven’t foreseen, then you’ve got a better chance of achieving them.

Pete Mockaitis
This kind of reminds me of Pascal’s Wager.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Yeah, it is very much like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Except we’re not talking about death and eternity, so much as life and the immediate weeks, months, years ahead.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Right. Right, it is like that. Actually, I mean, it’s like optimism in its origins is actually a philosophical argument, not a psychological one. So, it actually doesn’t really come from, it’s become this kind of, you know, word for the way that we look at the world, and that’s essentially what it means to us today. And it has always meant that to some extent.

But once upon a time, it was a much deeper, more philosophical point about, “What way does the world skew?” You know, at a time when the kind of language of probability and risk and that sort of thing was not as evolved as it is today, you had to explain why bad things happened. And optimism was one way that you explained how that good things were more likely to happen than bad things.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, boy, the universe of statistics and probability and risk today is wild. I’m thinking about markets such as Polymarket and predicted and Kalshi, it’s like, wow, we’ve got a number of people putting money on the probabilities of all sorts of things. So, yeah, what an environment we find ourselves in.

So, well, could you share then a few of the biggest discoveries, the most fascinating tidbits you’ve uncovered within psychology that you share in your book, The Bright Side: How Optimists Change the World, and How You Can Be One?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, the main kind of thing about this, as I say, is that you can make a good argument for why you should be an optimist even though being optimistic is not rational. And the way that pans out is that, essentially, by going after opportunities you don’t necessarily know exist, you tend to realize them in due course. And that kind of helps you to kind of benefit from the upside, from benefits from upsides that you don’t necessarily see at the outset.

And where this kind of shows up, in day-to-day life, essentially, is that it makes you better at coping. I mean, as I kind of talked about with my own experience at the beginning of this, I was doing this inadvertently, but it makes you better at coping with setbacks. It makes you more able to kind of bounce back when you hit a roadblock. You don’t kind of think, “That roadblock is absolute and total and I’ve gotten nowhere around it.” You think, “Well, actually there are probably are ways around this even if I can’t see them.”

And that translates not just like to the decisions you make about your own personal life in terms of what might be happening to you in your family life or whatever, as my example goes. But it also translates to the area of relationships. So, optimists tend to work harder at their relationships, both kind of your social relationships and your professional ones. And so, that means that you tend to kind of persevere more. You tend to try a bit harder to get past whatever your current problem is.

And that, over the long term, tends to mean that things work out. But there is kind of a caveat in here, which is that it does have to be something that you kind of do on a routine, regular basis. If you just get wildly optimistic about a particular thing, a particular event, let’s say you are going for a promotion. If you get massively optimistic about that particular event, that doesn’t necessarily help because it doesn’t–you can’t change the odds in your favor all that dramatically.

If, however, you kind of take every opportunity you have to advance yourself, and you take each of those individually with an optimistic stance, that’s what tends to pan out over the long term because, sure, you’ll be wrong sometimes and some things won’t work out, but sometimes they do. And over time that accumulates.

So, optimism is not a short thing. It’s not a one-off, you know, wild overestimation of how likely you are to get lucky in a particular time. It’s a game for the long term. It’s something you have to keep trying and keep trying to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is really juicy stuff, and it reminds me of some of Dr. Albert Bandura’s research on self-efficacy, in terms of the beliefs we have about what is possible for ourselves really do translate into different results, not so much in a mystical law of attraction, universe bringing things into your life kind of a way, but rather a, “Well, hey, if you believe that it’s going to work out this way, or that you have the power to do a thing, then you’re going to go ahead and make an effort, and you get the results more often when you go ahead and make the effort than when you don’t.”

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Exactly. I mean, I think there are other ways in which this pays off. It pays off in terms of your relationships, I say, because people like optimists. People like people who are willing. And this is not difficult to understand, but, I mean, clearly, who’s going to kind of want to hang out with someone who tells you things are going to be terrible, right? I mean, you want to hang out with someone who says, “Things are going to be good. If you follow me, things are going to work out well.”

But if you kind of adopt that stance and you put in that little bit of extra effort, then you tend to kind of reinforce those relationships. And it works both ways, right? I mean, if you develop a stronger relationship, that then becomes a status resource, as it’s called, that you can then draw upon.

It means that when you kind of come to a point when you need something down the line, you’re more able to ring up that person you have that relationship with. You’re more able to kind of ask for a favor. You’re more able to ask for advice. And those are all the kind of things that, gradually, over time, add up to real material changes in your ability to achieve what you want.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, could you share some fun stories that bring this all to life?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, I think the easiest place to see optimism at work at the moment, and you can take this however you like, really, is in the Valley. So, optimism is very strongly associated with entrepreneurship and with innovation. I say entrepreneurship, but I mean, essentially, anyone who wants to take a chance on doing something new or different requires a certain level of optimism because, at the outset, you can’t know that it’s going to work out.

So, whether you’re within a company or an organization, and you’re trying to do something differently or you’re trying to do something on your own, you need some degree of optimism to make it work. And I think there’s no kind of more successful example of optimism than the people we see who run the big tech companies at the moment and where they came from.

If you take someone like Mark Zuckerberg, he started out coding in his dorm room with a project with what eventually became Facebook. There was no kind of realistic way that you might think at that point in time that this was going to become one of the biggest companies in the world and one of the most powerful companies in the world, and that he would still be single-handedly in charge of that now. That this would be kind of his pet project.

Zuckerberg talks about this in terms of that language of the self-fulfilling prophecy. So, he talks about, you know, this is one of his favorite phrases that optimists tend to be successful, pessimists tend to be right. And this is the kind of thing about, so if you’re a pessimist, you can always kind of justify this to yourself. You can always say, “I was correct about that,” because you go and look for the evidence that supports your point of view.

You don’t do anything to confound it and, therefore, you end up being correct that something doesn’t work out. If you’re an optimist, you tend to ignore that and you build the thing, you build the multimillion, the multibillion-dollar company, and you go ahead and do it even though that’s not what conventional wisdom says you can do, even though that’s not something that someone working out of a dorm room is supposed to be able to achieve. That’s kind of where the power of optimism comes in.

Pete Mockaitis
I like it. Could I have another story?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, in the story I tell in the book, I tell the story of how I eventually got my job at New Scientists. And it started off, when I was a kid, I was in my dad’s office. He took me to work when we were on vacation, when I was on vacation rather, from school, and I found a stack of magazines, New Scientists magazines, so science magazine.

I kind of thought at the time that writing in science were not very compatible occupations, which they, by and large, are not supposed to be. And so, I kind of looked at these, the stack of magazines and asked my dad, like, “Who looks after this magazine?” And he said, “The editor does that,” and I kind of, “All right. Fine.” And this is when I was about eight, and I thought, “That’s the job I want, basically. I like writing. I like science. That’s something I can do.”

And, obviously, at the age of eight, you don’t have any expectation that you’re going to be able to make that work, right, or what that means, essentially. But I clung onto that idea. And so, when I kind of went to school, I had to make my choices, I decided, “I still had this kind of thing in the back of my mind. This is the ultimate job for me, essentially.” It wasn’t that I necessarily thought I was going to get it tomorrow, but that was what I was aiming for.

So, when I came to having to choose between writing and science, initially I chose science because I thought you needed to be a scientist. And I thought that you could be a writer even if you didn’t have the training for that. So, I studied science, I studied astrophysics, I did all of that. And then I decided that I would switch to writing, which was kind of this leap into the unknown, essentially, at that point.

And it was kind of a, that was pure unbridled optimism. I thought I could make that work. I had no evidence for it. I had no background in writing. I had no track records. I had no particular expertise in that field. But I thought I’d give it a go. So, I did. And as it turns out, I did turn out to be able to make a career in writing.

But the most important thing, really, wasn’t that I was necessarily good at that. It was that by looking for ways to advance that career, I eventually lucked into a position where the physics background was very useful, which was in covering finance. From there, I kind of did that for quite a long time. I started a publication through a random opportunity, through someone I met through networking, carried on doing this.

And, eventually, after doing that for about a decade, I wrote back to New Scientist, and said, “Can I have a job?” And they said, you know, at that point, they kind of said, “Well, you know, maybe later, maybe if you get some more experience.” So, I got a bit more experience. I wrote back to them. And, ultimately, they gave me a job, a part-time position. It was a two-day a week position that I started out with.

And then, over time, I built up from there and, eventually, I became the editor in chief. And the kind of point I was trying to make here is that, really, I mean, there are a number of ways you can think about this. This was not a case of me saying at the beginning of this, I had the very naive, optimistic view that, you know, if I just went out there and did like, you know, wrote for a couple of years, I would somehow end up at New Scientist and end up in charge.

What it turned out to be was that much longer game, but every step along the way required me to take kind of optimistic leaps into the dark, essentially. It meant I have to kind of accept, I had to be optimistic about my chances of being a writer. I had to be optimistic about my chances of, once I’ve been a writer, of being able to run a publication.

And then I’d to be optimistic about my chances of getting into New Scientist. And once I was there, I had to be optimistic about my chances of progressing there. And so, there’s a succession of steps, each of them involved being open to possibilities that were not obvious at the outset. Each of them is kind of optimistic journey, a step down this line, that, eventually, ended up with me getting the job that I kind of set out to do, you know, 25 odd years earlier. And that’s kind how I got to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s very cool. Congratulations.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. So, if we think, “Yes, that’s good. I would like some more of that,” but it doesn’t come so naturally to us, what do we do?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, there are a few things you can do, and some of these are given in the book. They’re not actually particularly complicated. The main thing is that we don’t take the time to do them. So, there are a bunch of exercises that people have suggested for how you can make yourself more dispositionally optimistic. So, the very specific optimism, I think we kind of know how to make ourselves optimistic about how to kind of G ourselves up for a specific challenge.

So, if we’re going for a job interview, or we’ve got a big project to pull off, whatever, I think we kind of all have an idea about how we kind of build our morale for that. But the bigger challenge is being optimistic in that longer term sense, in that persistent sense. And there are a couple of things that people suggest for that, or psychologists have suggested for that.

One of them, which I think is kind of something that has to become second nature, is called disputation. And this is the idea that when something happens, you need to try and explain it to yourself in a way that doesn’t kind of make it entirely an issue, you know, it doesn’t make it an inevitability. So, the idea is that we have different explanatory styles.

And one explanatory style is to say, “Well, I didn’t get that job,” or that promotion, or, “This project didn’t work because it was always doomed to happen that way,” “I wasn’t qualified,” “I’m not ready,” “I don’t have the right kind of skillset for it,” or whatever else, and to really internalize that. And, obviously, there’s always going to be some truth to that and you always need to reflect on the components of that that might have led to whatever situation you end up in.

But the other way of doing it is to think about, is to kind of to challenge that, and think about the other factors that were involved and how you might have controlled those, to think about whether there are external factors, whether you had a bad day, whether you had a personality clash with the person you’re talking to, whether there was a failure in the environment that meant you couldn’t deliver against whatever you’re trying to deliver against. So, with that, you have to keep doing it. It’s not something you can do once and then move on from.

It’s like having a little post-mortem every time something happens, and thinking about it and trying to come up with a constructive frame. And if you do that over and over and over again, you eventually become good at kind of coming up with an optimistic interpretation of what’s happened. And that then makes you better at coming up with optimistic interpretations of what’s going to happen, of the challenges that you face. It makes you better able to frame your challenges, your problems in ways that are amenable to solutions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And can we dig it out into some particular questions or prompts or ways we might point our brain in the direction that gets there?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So there are a few different ways you can do this. One is there’s a model called the best-possible-self exercise, which is kind of you sit down and you, essentially, spend 15 minutes talking about the best possible version of you. So, you try and you can do this in whichever way makes sense to you. You can do it as a written description.

So, one of the things I did when I was in my bereavement was, I did this as a blog posting exercise, essentially. I wrote down what I thought my life could be like. But you can do it that way, you can do it in terms of the things that you want to achieve over various timeframes. You can ask yourself what success looks like to you.

And the idea is to try and do that on a regular basis, to do it something like daily. You spend something like 15 minutes a day doing this for as long as you can manage, essentially. Initially, it helps to kind of do it over a short-term period, so do it for like two weeks or so. And then you can do it less frequently over time because it’s a lot of time commitment.

The thing about that is not something that we never do, but we don’t tend to do it very often. We only tend to do it when we have a particular decision to make. Whereas, doing it on a regular basis means that you keep kind of front and center in your mind what it is that you’re trying to achieve, what it is that you want to do, essentially, rather than being, getting lost in the fog of the moment or of the everyday.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you talk about being lost in the fog of the moment or the everyday, if you do find yourself in that zone of sweeping condemnation or despair, do you have any kind of go-to tactics to lift yourself up out of there?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
I think the one thing that’s useful there is to think about the pivotal moments in your life and to think about the what-ifs. You kind of mentioned earlier the what-if when your father passed. And that’s kind of a quite extreme example. But I think one of the things that’s useful to do when you feel like overwhelmed is to think about the what-ifs in your own life. Think about the points when things could have gone differently for you. And there’s two kinds of implications of that.

One is the ways in which they went right for you and the ways that your life has gone in the direction that you wanted to. And the other is to think about how you would have reacted if they’d gone a different way. Because, usually, particularly with the passage of time, it becomes easier to see that, actually, whatever happened was not the only thing that could have happened and the only way that things could have worked out. There are other ways that things could have gone that would have been equally satisfying.

And you can usually see that with a remove. And that helps you to bring perspective on the current moment. No matter what you kind of look at, if you’re looking at the moment right now and you think, “I can’t see a way out of this. I can’t see what happens from here,” you’ve probably felt like this in the past. There are moments in your past when you would have felt like that, and things either worked themselves out for the better, or you know how they could have done. And that, I think, gives you perspective.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Sumit, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
I think there’s a lot of upsides to optimism, and they pan out over the long term gradually, more than they do in the short term. One of the things about being an optimist, I think you have to be careful not to let it kind of override your basic kind of common sense about how to treat people. I think optimism is a question of directing the optimism that you have.

I think if you kind of think about where you’re optimistic in your life and where you’re maybe not so optimistic, that kind of helps you to identify areas where you might want to concentrate using things like that best possible self-exercise, or where you want to kind of think a bit harder about disputing your version of events.

It’s not that easy to necessarily raise your level of optimism hugely. And I’m not sure that that’s necessarily that healthy an exercise because if you do that, you run the risk of starting to dismiss the problems in your life, or the problems in other people’s lives, or the real challenges that you face. So, I think that with optimism, it’s more a question of directing the optimism that you have and trying to increase it in specific areas than it is with being blanket positive.

It’s not just about being happy or being relentlessly positive about everything. It’s about trying to focus on the areas where you need that optimism. And that’s also true when it comes to assessing what lies ahead of you. One of the things that optimists, an optimist sees opportunity everywhere. And that means you can find it quite difficult to pick one thing to focus on.

If you’re an optimist like I am, you tend to kind of, as sort of from the little description I gave you there of my career, you tend to kind of want to try and do everything. So, you need to bring a little bit of discipline to that as well in terms of what the specific things you want to do, the specific goals you want to achieve, the specific jobs you want to have, the specific roles you want to play. So, optimism is about targeting. It’s not just about being relentlessly sun-shiny. It’s about choosing where you want to increase your ability to see that brighter future.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have any guardrails or pro-tips on how much optimism is too much, or when we’re potentially flirting with recklessness?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
I think the best answer there, really, is to listen to other people. So, generally, it’s the point at which you’re tipping over from constructing a version of events that suits you into denial. There’s a point at which people are saying, “You’re wrong about this.” And you need to kind of think carefully about whether they’re right or they’re wrong. You need to think about the data. You need to think about what the numbers say.

We’re disposed to ignore the numbers completely. You can’t ignore them completely. You need to pay a certain amount of attention to them. It’s clearer in things like in health outcomes. If you smoke 20 cigarettes a day, it doesn’t make any difference what you do. You’re going to have bad outcomes from that.

If you take wild financial risks, those also are not going to work out for you in the long term. So, there’s just a certain degree of remaining grounded and a certain degree of listening to what people are telling you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, my favorite quote on optimism comes from James Baldwin, the Civil Rights activist. And so, he came out of, this is in 1963, he came out of a meeting with Robert F. Kennedy, who was the Attorney General at the time. And it was a very acrimonious meeting. Things had not worked out. They had not been able to find common ground. And Baldwin, as it happened, was doing a TV interview the same day.

And, in the course of that interview, he was asked, “Well, what do you think about the future of America? Are you optimistic or are you pessimistic?” And he kind of thinks about it for a minute. You can see it on the film if you watch it. He’s kind of thinking for a minute about what to say. And then he says, “I think I have to be an optimist because, otherwise, you’re accepting that human life is an academic matter.”

And what he means by that, I think, is that, you can’t afford to– it goes a little bit back to what you saying about cynicism, that you can’t really afford to say that life is a purely a matter of calculation about what is bloodlessly correct. Life is something we live, and you have to kind of be engaged with it. And that, I think, means being an optimist.

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

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
There’s one that kind of sticks in my mind quite a bit, which is one by three psychologists called Armor, Massey, and Sackett. And that was, essentially, about what people think about optimism.

They basically did an experiment where they say, “Here are some scenarios that the people are facing.” Someone is offered a promotion. Someone is asked to organize an event and a few other things like that. And they asked people, “What stance should people have going into this? Should they be optimistic? Should they be pessimistic?”

And almost universally, across the board with all of these scenarios, the answer is they should be optimistic. And that’s kind of very telling because people don’t expect realism from others. People don’t think that realism is the best way to go into things. People think that optimism is the best way to go into a new challenge.

And then it’s kind of a rider to that, so, two, actually. One is the degree to which they prescribe optimism depends on how much control you have over the situation, which is not surprising in some respects. The other one, though, is that they didn’t think people were optimistic enough. We almost never think that anybody is going to be optimistic enough, or that we are going to be optimistic enough in dealing with these situations.

So, there is an enormous kind of psychological weight to optimism, but one that we tend not to allow ourselves when we’re in a professional context. We tend not to allow ourselves to express that kind of belief, I think, because we think we’ll be viewed as naive, or we think we’ll be viewed as being unrealistic in some way. But I think it helps to remember that, actually, almost all the time, everybody thinks optimism is the right way to approach a challenge. And that, actually, we probably don’t make enough use of them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
The book I would recommend is Candide by Voltaire. An old book, it’s published in 1759. The title is Candide or optimism. And it is a book that sets up two different strands of optimism. It sets up one which is, I referred to earlier, this kind of grand philosophical version of optimism in which the world is set up a certain way and things must turn out for the right within it.

And another, which is much more kind of concerned with the here and now in the present moment. And I don’t think either of those two kinds of optimism is necessarily correct or incorrect. They’re both different kinds of optimism. I think it helps to think about both of them. The one in which you try and make sense of the world and the one in which you think about what you can do, what you can do to make your own situation better, what you can do around you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, the main tool I would say, the thing that’s really made a difference to me in the last few years, given that I’m a knowledge worker, essentially, is Roam, which is a personal knowledge management tool.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
My favorite habit is probably my version of the best possible self, which kind of takes various forms, but I do it over different time scales. So, I do one, which is sort of for the next month or so, I do one for the next year, and I do one for the next five years. The one that actually turns out to be most useful for me, I found, is the five year one, in point of fact.

Because I think the others, they get derailed very quickly. Things I need to do over the course of the next week, like everybody I set out with my list of to do, most of them don’t get done, you know, some of them do. The five year one, though, is like the compass needle of where I need to get to over the long term.

And I find that it makes it much easier to make all the little course corrections you need to do. And it makes decision-making easier when I’m thinking about what I want to be doing in five years’ time rather than what I want to be doing next week.

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

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, the best place is my website, which is Alternaty.com, A-L-T-E-R-N-I-T-Y dot com. You’ll find more information about me and the book there, and some other resources fairly soon. Not up yet, but they’re going to be, they will be shortly. Otherwise, I’m available on LinkedIn.

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

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Always stay open to possibility. If you plant many seeds, some of them will grow. If you go out looking for new opportunities, you’ll find them. If you stay where you are, if you carry on doing what you’re doing, you won’t. So, keep moving forward.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Sumit, thank you. This has been fun.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Thank you, Pete. Thank you.

1050: How to Shift Your Mood and Keep Your Cool with Dr. Ethan Kross

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Ethan Kross shares simple, science-backed tools for managing your emotions.

You’ll Learn

  1. When avoidance is actually helpful
  2. Effortless strategies for quickly shifting your mood
  3. The emotional regulation framework used by the Navy SEALs 

About Ethan

Ethan Kross, PhD, author of the national bestseller Chatter, is one of the world’s leading experts on emotion regulation. An award-winning professor in the University of Michigan’s top ranked Psychology Department and its Ross School of Business, he is the Director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory.

Ethan has participated in policy discussion at the White House and has been interviewed about his research on CBS Evening News, Good Morning America, Anderson Cooper Full Circle, and NPR’s Morning Edition. His research has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Science. He completed his BA at the University of Pennsylvania and his PhD at Columbia University.

Resources Mentioned

Ethan Kross Interview Transcript

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.

1045: How to Stop Overthinking and Build Mental Resilience with Joseph Nguyen

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Joseph Nguyen discusses the hidden relationship between thinking and suffering—and offers a powerful framework for achieving peace of mind.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to spot and stop negative judgments
  2. How to PAUSE overthinking
  3. How to beat procrastination with SPA

About Joseph

Joseph Nguyen is the author of the #1 international bestselling book, Don’t Believe Everything You Think, which has been translated into 40+ languages. He is a writer who helps others realize who they truly are beyond their own thinking and conditioning to live an abundant life free from psychological and emotional suffering. When he’s not busy petting his three cats that he’s allergic to, he spends the rest of his time writing, teaching, speaking, and sharing timeless wisdom to help people discover their own divinity from within and how they are the answer they’ve been looking for their entire lives.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Joseph Nguyen Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Joseph, welcome!

Joseph Nguyen
Thank you so much for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about your area of expertise. Your book, Don’t Believe Everything You Think, has just taken off tremendously. Congratulations.

Joseph Nguyen
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
And the title is so good. It’s so funny, Amazon auto-completes if you type, “Don’t believe everything you think.” It’s like, “Nice.”

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, that’s a great advertisement, I guess, and a great slogan just to have all over Amazon. It’s what it should be, instead of all the stuff that we don’t need to be buying.

Pete Mockaitis
Don’t buy many other things here.

Joseph Nguyen
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so can you take us through the journey a little bit of how you and your relationship to thought and the insights that you discovered came to be in your own personal lived existence?

Joseph Nguyen
A lot of what I’ve come to realize comes from, this is not new information. This has been here for eons, thousands of years, from everyone and so many different countries, cultures. I mean, I draw influence from Western philosophy, Eastern philosophies, Zen Buddhism, Christianity. So much cognitive behavioral therapy. Like, you name it, there’s probably some sort of influence there.

But I think the only time that I was able to actually integrate it into my life was when I sort of hit a rock-bottom moment where, after I really tried as much as I possibly could all the options that were available to me, like, I mean, there’s therapy, there’s acupuncture, acupressure, there’s going vegan. I did all these things and it didn’t really quite work until it forced me to look internally.

I was trying to do everything to change everything outside of me, so changing people’s behaviors, how they viewed me, how they judged me, wanting and trying to earn other people’s approval, love, all these sorts of things, all these attempts at finding what could only be found within. So, I think the moment where I kind of hit rock bottom, which was a point in my life where, I mean, I had a business that was growing. It was going great. I accomplished a lot of the goals that I had, but at the cost of my own mental health.

So, every single day, I was just so chronically anxious, borderline depressed. I was probably depressed. I just wouldn’t admit it to myself that that was it. And I just didn’t know when the next client was coming from. I didn’t know if we’re going to have enough money, food. My partner, now wife, she had a lot of physiological illnesses.

So, she had gastroparesis, and so she couldn’t eat, got a feeding tube, hospitalized multiple times. All of that was happening concurrently with, basically, my business falling apart. Then my business partner and I split. I went 50,000 into debt at around 21, 22 years old. And so, all of that happened within a span of about a year.

And so, that was probably the rock-bottom moment that I hit, where I thought, after accomplishing everything that I wanted, that it would give me this internal peace and joy, but it did the exact opposite. And that was because I didn’t realize where peace comes from, and it doesn’t come from manipulating the environment or other people or the world to whatever I think it needs to be. It comes from releasing that desire, that need to change everything outside of me except myself.

So, rock bottom, I think pain is a great motivator and catalyst for change. Most people, like myself, probably wouldn’t change if it wasn’t absurdly painful. So, I’m actually very grateful for those experiences, but it’s quite difficult to go through it. But that was the genesis of the turning point for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, thank you for sharing that. That’s heavy, and it’s a lot. And I think what you’re articulating dead on, we just chatted with Anne-Laure Le Cunff, who discussed the arrival fallacy, this notion, “Ah, yes, when this happens, then it’ll be smooth sailing. I’ll be happy. I’ll be free. I’ll be at peace. All my problems will be solved.”

And it just doesn’t work out that way. And sometimes we don’t believe it until, as you’ve said, we experience that pain. We have arrived and go, “Uh-oh, shoot, these feelings are still there, that lack of peace is still there.

Joseph Nguyen
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
So, what then? What happened next?

Joseph Nguyen
So, it basically forced me to look inside, because I was trying all these modalities to help, and they did help to a certain extent, but it didn’t really change that much. And it puzzled me, because I thought to myself, “I surely can’t be the only one going through this. So that’s when I started looking for a lot of different solutions.

And then I started questioning my own experiences, and other people’s experiences too, which is I think most people, if not every single human, goes through extremely difficult and challenging events and times or even traumas.

And so, I started to ask myself and run thought experiments, where it was like, “If two people, have similar traumas, how is it possible that one person can spiral downwards and fall into a deep depression and isn’t really able to get out of it, while another person who has gone through something similar is able to make amends and make peace with the past and become okay with what happened?”

And not only that, but become empowered by what happened and go on to want to help other people not experience the same thing. How is that possible if we can’t go back and change the past? So, neither one of them went back to alter the events in any single way, which means it’s not the events that was changed, but their own thinking about what happened to them.

And so, that sparked an epiphany, which was, our emotions don’t come from external events, they come from our own thinking about the events, which is our own judgments, our own opinions, our own criticisms about the event, or even ourselves and our own thoughts about whatever happened. And so, that was what kind of made a giant light bulb moment for me, which is like, “Oh, my gosh, there’s no way to change the past, but I can always change the way that I’m viewing it. Is this helpful or hurtful? This sort of incessant nonstop negative judgment of life, of myself, of other people?”

And so, that spawned a whole slew of new questions for myself, which was like, “Why do I do that? Why do I constantly wish things were different? Why do I constantly tell myself that I’m not enough, not good enough, not smart enough, not whatever it is, and repeating these stories to myself?” And I never stopped to ask myself, “Is that actually helpful? When has overthinking helped me?”

And so, I realized then that overthinking doesn’t solve problems, it creates them and exacerbates them. And I just didn’t understand that I could just not judge, negatively judge, the things that are happening in my life or myself. That was an extremely liberating moment for me. And, I mean, most of the thoughts that we have, we have over 60,000 thoughts in a single day. How is it possible that every single one of those thoughts is true? There’s no way, right?

And if it were true that we are our thoughts, what happens to the thought that just passed our minds, that just left? We’re still here.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d disappear.

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re still here, right? So, that means we are something beyond our thoughts. Same thing with emotions. If we are our emotions, if I am depressed, or if I am anxious, if I am those things, or I am happy, what happens when those things pass, anxiety or happiness? I’m still here. How is that possible?

So, we are not our thoughts and we are not our emotions then. We are something greater than that. And that is the feeling and the space that I sink back into to finally find some peace because I realize that everything in life is transient, including our thoughts. And if we are the common denominator that is still here, then those fleeting things can’t be possibly us. That was the eye-opener for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Wow, there’s so much good stuff here, and I’m just drawing all kinds of connections. I recall I was in a therapy session once, and I posed the same question, and it’s like, “So, is it true that, like Nietzsche or Kelly Clarkson says, that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?” Or, is it the opposite experience in which, “No, I had a bad thing happen to me and I’m somehow less strong, weaker, not as capable as a result of the experience”?

So, it’s like, “So which is it? And under what circumstances, and why, and what’s the distinction?” And he didn’t give me the easy answer, “That’s one of the greatest questions of therapy.”

Joseph Nguyen

He was amping you up, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
So, yeah, I mean, and that is one of the assertions, I believe, of cognitive behavioral therapy or of Shakespeare. There’s nothing good or bad, but rather thinking makes it so, and our cognitive distortions or our thoughts about things and judgments shape the emotional reactions and experiences we have. And we had a Navy Seal Alden Mills sharing some similar notions, like, “Hey, is this thought helpful or hurtful? All right. Well, then let’s bring some energy to the helpful thoughts.”

And we got some real wisdom there. It’s, like, we cannot be our thoughts, we cannot be our emotions, because our thoughts and our emotions are ever shifting and changing. And that sounds wise and familiar. Is this coming from a wisdom tradition? Or is this a Joseph original?

Joseph Nguyen
Oh, no, nothing is original from me. Creativity is just a blend of a lot of different parts and combining it into something seemingly new. But it’s all from Eastern philosophy, some Western, right, some Stoicism, Zen, Buddhism, in that there’s tons of psychology in there, right? Like cognitive behavioral therapy uses so much of this in terms of questioning our own thoughts, our own emotions, trying to figure out the root cause of all this. So, all of that, I definitely stand on the shoulders of many, many giants from centuries or millennia.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you put a stake in the ground, and it seems like you’ve got some real conviction here, that it is, indeed, our thoughts and judgments and overthinking, over-thoughts, about a situation that is the source of our depression, anxiety. And I’m thinking, is it the only source, the primary source? Are we sure about this? It sounds true-ish, but what’s our best evidence for it?

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, that’s a great question. So, in terms of emotions, there’s no way to really prevent “negative emotions.” Those will always come and go. What I propose in the book is less about preventing them, but to reduce the time spent experiencing those emotions. Because a lot of times, we are replaying and ruminating on memories of the past, and bringing them into the present moment and reliving that experience from a certain vantage point of it, which may or may not be true, I don’t know.

But if it makes us feel a lot of anxiety or depression or resentment, is that possible for us to change? And if so, then how? And so, in the book, I started to realize, like, let’s say there’s a lot of people in veteran hospitals or recovering in Alcoholics Anonymous or tons of people who have been through so many different things. How is it possible that there’s people that have gone through something similar, but then have different results?

So, it’s like, “What are they changing? They’re not going back in the past to do that, so they’re changing something now in the present moment to alter their experience.” And so, that’s where the book is coming from, which is like, “What can we do now that things have happened, and becoming more resilient, right?”

This is building and training emotional regulation and resilience rather than a prevention of emotions in totality, because a lot of times, sometimes emotions are very helpful. They help to protect us. They help give us signs. All emotions are messengers to help us and to show us what we need to pay attention to. That’s all emotions are.

But if we believe them to be the only source of truth and an ultimate conclusion about ourselves, then that’s where we run into trouble. And, let’s say, if we’re really depressed, then we might think about ourselves, and say, “We’re not enough. We’re not lovable. We’ll never find love.” These sorts of beliefs about ourselves, which is what I call “thinking” or “negative judgments,” those things are not necessarily that helpful and they harm us more than help us.

And so, is it possible to let those things go? And if so, how? So, for me, why I use the word “thinking” in particular is because it’s the best word I could find to explain the phenomena of just ruminating negatively on something. So I make a distinction in the book, thoughts versus thinking. A thought is a neutral observation or intuitive prompting about an event that happened.

Pete Mockaitis

“I would like to eat some food.”

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, that is a thought.

Pete Mockaitis
I mean, that’s a desire.

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, that could be a desire.

Pete Mockaitis
A thought and a desire.

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, and then thinking, on the other hand, is a negative judgment about an event or your own thoughts. So, let’s take a scenario.

Pete Mockaitis
“I’m overweight. I shouldn’t eat all this food.”

Joseph Nguyen
Right. See, “should” is a great indicator that we’re thinking, right? That’s usually a preliminary word that we use before we judge ourselves. And so, an example of this is, let’s say it’s raining outside. A thought is, “It’s raining.” That’s a neutral observation. Thinking, on the other hand, would be something like, “Why is this happening? Why does this always happen to me? This rain completely ruined my day. I’m always unlucky like this.”

All of this thinking about the thought of it raining is not as helpful to us and is the source of all this suffering. So, let’s say we did have something planned and it rained and it ruined our day, that’s unfortunate, right? Like, we had plans, we planned for it, but is it possible to not let it ruin our entire day? Is it possible to let go of this emotional suffering within a few minutes?

And so, that’s why I say that’s the thinking part of whatever is going on. And although we can’t change the event or even our initial thought of it, we can always let go of the thinking or judgment about whatever is going on, and that’s where the power lies. For example, thoughts have no power over us unless we believe them to be true, right? So, the belief in the judgment is what causes this suffering and is the difference.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, now, as you use the word “thinking,” I am wondering if we could have other, do some other thinking, or judging about the rain in a positive fashion, in terms of, “At last, the crops will be nourished by this rain,” or, “You know what, let’s just frolic like a child.”

And so, in your definition, would you still call that thinking even though it has maybe a positive vibe or feeling associated with it?

Joseph Nguyen
I think there’s two different categories of what we can call positive thinking. On one hand, it could just be an intuitive prompting. An example of that would just be, “It’s raining. Let’s go outside and play in the rain.” It doesn’t necessarily have to skew towards, “This is the best thing that’s ever happened in the entire world.”

See, like where we can over-exaggerate positive thinking is equally where we can fall short of it because who’s to say it is the best thing in the entire world? Because if it’s raining here, it might flood somewhere else. So, it’s very difficult to just, ultimately and conclusively, say if this is good or bad. And so, if we are overly positive about something, then it opens us up for, “Well, what if that might not be the case?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, so it might feel good, but we’re not necessarily getting closer to truth or accurate representation of reality.

Joseph Nguyen
Correct, yeah. And we can skew both ways, and that’s when positive thinking can then open us up all sorts of cans of worms. But that’s not to say that positive thinking doesn’t work, and I don’t want to say that at all. It certainly does work, but the question is, “Is it sustainable? And is it based in reality?” So, if we observe the rain, and we’re like, “Oh, look, it’s like nourishing the crops,” like that’s a neutral and true observation, like it is feeding the plants and all that stuff, and we can feel good about that.

But what I also observed as well was, once we let go of the negative judgment about things, we are naturally at peace. We are naturally more joyful. We skew towards that way. And if you look at children that are a couple years old, they skew towards happiness. They’re smiling, they’re happy, unless they’re like hungry or like something is physiologically wrong. They’re generally just very positive, very happy, laughing all the time.

And that’s our natural state as well if we don’t negatively judge whatever situation is going on. If we let go of worrying about the future or ruminating and resenting the past, that is our default state. So, you don’t necessarily have to try to be positive. And other examples I love giving is, think about or recall a time where it’s like you were very anxious, or stressed, or overwhelmed. Like, how much thinking is going on?

Pete Mockaitis
Plenty.

Joseph Nguyen
Too much, right? But then if we flip and invert the question, recall a time when you were your happiest, in a total state of flow, and you lost track of time, how much thinking was going on then?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s, I guess per your definition of thinking, like, very little. Although, if you’re in a flow and doing a thing, you naturally have to—

Joseph Nguyen
You’re having thoughts.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, you’re having thoughts, but you’re not thinking in the Joseph-sense of the word.

Joseph Nguyen
Right, you’re not negatively judging the thoughts or experience that you’re having. You’re just in it, you’re fully immersed. That’s when you lose a sense of self, actually, and that’s when we are no longer psychologically suffering. And some people in the spiritual community will call this like the death of the ego. It’s when you just dissolve and you feel at one with everything. That’s what flow is and why a lot of times people will say like that’s this ideal state for humans to be in.

Athletes experience this very often when they’re in and playing a game during a competition. They’re not so much thinking about what’s going on. They are just intuitively responding and being there. And that’s like our ideal state that we’re in. Actually, the times that athletes think too much, they tend to miss the shots, or think too much about something and overanalyze, and that’s when they freeze and choke when they could have definitely done something different.

The same thing is true for our own lives. The more that we constantly just ruminate, judge, and criticize ourselves, other people, events, we tend to freeze, and go into fight-or-flight mode, and act as if our life really is in danger, and operate from a place of fear rather than love and expansion and joy.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Joseph, we’re getting near a zone I’ve been pondering for a while, which is, you talk about when we feel a sense of peace or joy and flow, contentment. And I’ve been reflecting on the distinction between contentment and boredom. Because, in terms of an external view of the situation, they’re almost the same.

It’s like, “Nothing’s really happening right now.” And yet, when we feel bored, we’re restless, agitated, and, I guess, negatively judging, “I don’t like that nothing’s going on right now,” versus when we are content, it’s like, “Ah, nothing’s going on right now.” And that feels restful, rejuvenating, restorative, and we like and appreciate the space that we find ourselves in.

So, I guess that is perhaps one of many examples of the judgment we bring to a situation, shaping it, but I’d love your pro tip. If we find ourselves bored and would rather be content, what should we do?

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, great question. So, boredom is not necessarily a bad thing. Boredom, a lot of times, is the birth of creation, new things, new hobbies, new thoughts, new ideas. If we’re not bored a lot of the time or sometimes, then we’re actually just recycling a lot of the same material from the past and constantly going and we feel like we’re in the hamster wheel. So, boredom is not necessarily bad. And when you see kids get bored, what do they do? They invent.

Pete Mockaitis
They invent some games.

Joseph Nguyen
Exactly. That’s what humans do. When we’re bored, we create, and so it acts as a great motivator. But where things can go a little bit south is when we say, “Oh, instead of being content with what’s happening right now,” let’s say we’re on vacation, “I should be working. If I’m working these hours, I could make so much more money or I have all these emails I need to get to.”

You’re not able to actually enjoy yourself in the present moment, and you’re constantly thinking about the future and all these things you need to get done, that’s when the “boredom” or what we would call that in that case, that’s when it robs our peace and takes it away from us is when we think we need to be doing something else other than what we’re currently doing or experiencing.

So, in that case, what I love recommending to do is just to schedule those things and just, like, if you’re on vacation, like that’s the boundary you need to draw for yourself. But if we don’t draw boundaries, it will creep in. All of these beliefs that we have, all these negative judgments that we have about ourselves or what we should and shouldn’t be doing, they will come in unless we set that boundary for ourselves.

Like, “If I’m on vacation, my phone is off,” or, “I’m not taking emails or whatever it is.” But without those, they will creep in and they will start to fester and become uncontrollable at that point. And this is really a practice of presence more than anything else. Are we able to do and give our full attention to what is happening right now in front of us? Or, are we distracted and thinking about something else in the meantime?

Peace comes from being present. It is a natural byproduct of doing so. The more that we are able to do that, that’s the happier we will be, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m reminded of the Scientific Journal article, “A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind,” which, I think it was Kahneman and company looked at just that in terms of empirically checking with people and, “Hey, what are you doing? What are you thinking about?” and seeing the results. So, that’s that there. When you say boundaries, my first thought is sort of external things, like, “I will not be picking up my smartphone,” “I will not be answering emails on vacation.” Do you have some thoughts for boundaries we have, like with ourselves and our own thoughts or experiences?

Joseph Nguyen
Those are the most important boundaries because we can change everything external but if we don’t change anything internally then we’re still going to suffer a lot emotionally. So, some of the most important internal boundaries that you so aptly alluded to are the judgments that we’re making that is really at the core of our emotional suffering, of our resentment towards others, to ourselves.

If we don’t draw that boundary, and say, like, “We will no longer judge ourselves in this light,” then we’re going to keep doing it. And we do this mostly because we’re not even aware that there’s an option out, that, “Oh, we can just not judge everything that’s going on? Like, there’s a way that, as I go about my life, I don’t have to constantly narrate and say this is good, this is bad, this is right, this is wrong, this should be happening, this shouldn’t be happening?”

We just aren’t taught that. Most people just don’t know, and I wasn’t aware of that until I was basically smacked in the face with it and had to hit rock bottom to find it. But that is probably the most important boundary to set, which is, “Can we let go of the judgments that we’re having about ourselves, the world, whatever’s happening? Are we able to enjoy it as it is?”

When we go about life, most of the time we judge everything, “This person’s good,” “This person’s bad,” “This person’s evil,” “This person’s not,” “This is beautiful or ugly.” Like, there are so many things that happen. But when we walk in nature, like how many of us are saying, “This flower is ugly. This flower is like beautiful,” or, like, “This tree is crooked or what”?

Like, we just observe and enjoy nature as it is rather than constantly pick apart every single thing that we think is wrong with this tree. As soon as we do that, that’s when we suffer. So, nature is a great way to reset because of that and it brings us back to our true nature, ironically, of just being aware and giving our full attention to someone without judging them. That’s what the basis of love is, unconditional love, which is to fully accept someone as they are without wanting to change them, without wanting them just to be something different.

Full acceptance of that is where peace comes from. This not only goes for people, but for situations, anything. That is the root of unconditional love. And use that thought experiment for yourself. Like, when do you feel most loved by someone? When they’re constantly judging you, nagging you, saying you should do this, saying you should be different, you should be better, you should be doing any of these things, or when they fully accept you as you are without judging? That is the goal of everything.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that. My children would say, when we do hugs and kisses in flying blanket mode.

Joseph Nguyen
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
But it falls into a subcategory of what you’re describing. I like that notion about the narration that we’re just doing it all the time, and it might not even seem too intense, like, “I’m such a stupid idiot.” But even just like, “Oh, oh, oh, the sun is kind of in my eyes. Oh, it’s kind of hot. Like, oh, I’m getting tired.”

Like, there you are in nature, you might not be condemning the tree for being crooked, but we are narrating and judging – well, I am often – experiences they’re in, in terms of like the air temperature or the illumination that is not perfectly aligned to the preferences I have in that moment.

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, and that’s where all the suffering comes from, is just what we wish would happen, what we want the world to be. But peace comes from letting go of what we wish everything would be and accept it for how it actually is. And, yes, same goes for anything in life, people, even ourselves. In AA, like one of the first steps is acceptance. The five stages of grief, acceptance is what you’re trying to go for.

And in CBT, acceptance of whatever emotions we’re feeling is also a core component of the whole process. So, at the end of it all, like all these different modalities are pointing to the same thing, which is, “Can I let go of the judgment that I’m having of whatever is happening and going on?” Once we’re able to let go of that thinking mind, the fear-based mind and the judgmental mind, then we’re able to find a little peace.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you said that we have the option to stop the narration, and I am a frequent Audible listener who likes to pause my audiobooks. And I understand you’ve got a little acronym you can walk us through.

Joseph Nguyen
Yes, exactly. So, this acronym, I tried to make it as actionable as possible in terms of, I mean, what we’re doing is letting go of the judgments. That’s the whole purpose of this. And so, this makes the act of letting go a little bit more tangible. So, the first letter in the acronym is P, which is pause. So, pause and take deep breaths, and you don’t need to get fancy with it. Just take five deep breaths. There’s no specific way you need to do it.

But it’s been scientifically proven that taking deep breaths allows us to lower our heart rate, to regulate our emotions, and to come back to center. So, just do that in the beginning of anything, because it’s really hard to regulate or do anything or make decisions or come back to yourself when we’re in a fight or flight mode. Next is A, which is ask ourselves, “Is this thinking useful?” Just like the other psychologists you mentioned before, like, “Is this thinking making me feel the way that I want?” If not, the next step is U, which is understand that you have the ability to let that thinking or judgment go. We always have that power. We may not be able to control our thoughts, but we can always control our thinking about the thoughts, and therein lies our entire power to change our experience of life.

S is, say and repeat the mantra, “Thinking is the root cause of suffering.” You can use any mantra in this matter. Another one, for example, would be, “I let go and choose peace.” Any mantra rooted in truth will work, and it needs to be short and memorable. What mantras do is that it’s very difficult to think of two things simultaneously.

So, what it does is it focuses your attention on this one thing, which means you can’t be thinking about the future or ruminating about the past. So, it forces focus and attention on something that is true. So, repeating that for maybe 30 seconds to a minute is really all you need, and that will slow the thinking mind. It will calm things down significantly.

That’s the basis of Transcendental Meditation as well, what a lot of the Tibetan monks use to go beyond the mind and to achieve oneness with the universe. But we take it here and you’re able to use it in real time.

Then E, the last step is to experience your emotions fully without resistance. So, we’re not trying to bypass the emotions by just not thinking about it. We’re actually removing the judgment of the emotions because what we resist persists. So, if we are resisting the anxiety, it usually gets worse, which is why a lot of times, when someone has a panic attack, they’re much more prone to more panic attacks simply because that’s how, it’s just like self-fulfilling, so to speak.

It’s like once we experience something and don’t want it to happen, we just put up a wall and just constantly resist it. But in physics, an object in motion will stay in motion, right? But also, for every force, there’s an equal and opposite force happening. So, if you have this force of an emotion and you’re resisting the emotion, that emotion is going to constantly be there and it’s going to stay stuck unless it passes through your system.

Anything that is stuck creates a significant amount of suffering. So, for a slightly more comical and light-hearted example is, like, if you eat a lot of food and it doesn’t pass through your system, what happens? Like, a week, a month passes, it’s going to be very painful and it’s going to cause all sorts of issues.

The same thing is true for our thoughts and emotions. The more that we hold on to our thoughts and don’t let them pass through, the more it’s going to cause us a lot of emotional suffering. Thoughts, emotions, all these things are transient and meant to pass through us, just like water flowing through a river.

As soon as a river is dammed up, that’s when wildlife begins to dwindle, fish begin to die, all these things start to happen. But as soon as the river is able to flow, that’s when life begins to flourish. That is the same thing for our own lives. So, letting thoughts and emotions pass through us without resistance. So, the way to do that is to create space within ourselves, to honor and hold the emotions, and to not judge them.

See them as another entity, like our inner child, or even one of our own children, and to hold them within our hearts, and to give them space to be there, without judging them, without saying, “You shouldn’t be here. Why are you here again?” That’s what we say to these emotions a lot of times, like, “Why are you still here, anger?” And we’re angry at the anger, and so it just compounds.

But as soon as we say, “Oh, you’re welcome here. You’re not an enemy. It’s okay.” As soon as you give children space, time, and attention, things begin to settle and we’re able to regulate. The same thing is true for all of our emotions and it passes so much more quickly when we’re doing this rather than kind of putting up a wall. So that’s the whole entire process.

Pause, take deep breaths. A, ask yourself, “Is this thinking helpful or useful?” U, which is understand you have the ability to let that thinking go. S, which is say and repeat the mantra. And E, which is experience your emotions fully without resistance.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. And if I may put some numbers into this, so you had a mantra, I counted, it was about seven words. Is that around the length that we’re thinking about? Like, if you push it to 20, it’s outside mantra zone?

Joseph Nguyen
Probably. It just creates so much more thinking and you’re probably going to have to try to remember, “Am I saying it right? Did I forget a word?” And you’re trying to make it as simple as possible so that you don’t have to overthink it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And then with experience, I think when I’ve resisted, historically, it’s been almost out of a fear that, “If I begin to experience this sadness, this sorrow, this grieving at this deeply unfortunate thing that has occurred, then will it swallow me? Will it persist for a long time and impact the things I need to do this day, this week, this month?”

And so, I can sometimes push away. But you say with the water flowing situation, and that which we resist persists, we are better off experiencing it fully. I mean, Joseph, for those fellow aversive pushers, away-ers…

Joseph Nguyen
Master push-up-ers, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
…how long are we in for a rough emotional experience if we allow it to hang out?

Joseph Nguyen
I will say shorter than if you’re resisting it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Joseph Nguyen
So, the irony in it is that, when we’re pushing it away, we think that we’re not dealing with it but we’re still suffering. We’re constantly thinking about it, we’re wishing it were different, we’re ruminating on it constantly, but what we don’t understand is that when we just allow it to be there, that it passes so much more quickly.

I think neuroscience is saying now that it takes about 90 seconds for an emotion to be regulated in our bodies. The only reason why it’s prolonged most of the time is that we begin ruminating on the event or judging the situation that happened, and it resets that time period. So, we’ll go 90 seconds, and right before that, we think about it again, we’ll judge it again, and it keeps prolonging the cycle.

And so, it only takes a few minutes to do this and to let go, and it’s not like the entire emotion will go away, but the intensity of the emotion will be drastically reduced than what it was when we were resisting. And, over time, as you build the muscle of emotional resiliency and emotional regulation, it becomes a little bit easier to do every single time. And the threshold in which we become overwhelmed is significantly expanded, so we can take on a lot more in life.

We’re able to do a lot more. We’re able to endure a lot of these events with a lot more grace and a lot more love. But, yeah, it’s definitely scary to kind of allow these emotions to come in because we think that we might not be able to handle it. We might crumble under the emotion. But you have to ask yourself, like we were saying before, like, “Am I my thoughts? Am I this emotion?”

And think about all the difficult times and trauma that you’ve been through, and all the trauma, like, you’re still here. So, I mean, you’re greater than every single emotion that you’ve ever experienced. And the same is true now and it will ever, and it will be true forever because those things are not us.

Pete Mockaitis
Joseph, beautiful stuff. Could you share any final thoughts before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, I would run micro-experiments with yourself. Like, you actually don’t have to believe anything that I’m saying, ironically, like the book title. Test it out for yourself. See if it’s true, if thinking is the root cause of your emotional suffering. And the way that you can test this out is to try to suspend judgment, negative judgment about yourself, your own thoughts, your own emotions, external things, people, circumstances.

See if you can suspend judgment for about seven days. That’s it. You don’t have to do a month. You don’t have to do a year. Just see if you can let go of the judgments that your mind is creating, for seven days and see how you feel afterwards. If it significantly improves your emotional well-being, awesome! Continue doing it.

And if it doesn’t, that’s completely okay, and you can find another modality that might work for you. But at the very least, try it and see what happens. And it is only through our own lived experience that you know what truth is, rather than just taking someone’s word for it. So, that’s what I would encourage everyone to do, and just see for yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Joseph Nguyen
One of my favorite quotes is actually in the book, which is from Jonathan Safran Foer, which is, “I think, I think, I think. I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, very good. Very good. Thank you. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Joseph Nguyen
The neuroscience study that I was alluding to before, I don’t know exactly what experiment it was.

But they were studying about how long it takes for our emotions to actually pass through our systems, and it was about 90 seconds, which was mind-boggling to me because I thought it would take, you know, like multiple minutes or at least like, I don’t know, 10 minutes, for like, if you’re angry of something, like it feels like it takes way longer than 90 seconds.

So, that was a profound shift in me to realize that, “Oh, my gosh, like it is possible to let go of a lot of these emotions quite quickly.” And it’s actually important to follow this. You don’t have to follow this process, specifically, but you can follow any process, but it’s really important to do it in real time as you’re going about your day.

So, this process is, if you’re experiencing something in traffic, or your boss says something, or your parents say something, or your friends says something that creates a negative emotional reaction within you, it’s important to use the process then rather than only use it in the morning or in the evening like meditating, right?

That way you are actually strengthening your emotional resiliency throughout the entire day. It’s a little bit easier to find peace when you’re alone in your room and it’s dark, your blindfolds are on, there’s like Zen music, right? It’s like a little bit easier to find peace there, but the true test is, “Are you able to find peace while also, like let’s say your boss is screaming at your face, or making fun of you, or your friends are doing something that you don’t really approve of, or your parents are criticizing you in front of other family members?

That’s the time that you’re truly tested for, if you’re able to find peace. And this is something that you can use during those times rather than you need to bust out like a 30-minute meditation just to find a little bit of alleviation. So, that’s one other thing I would do, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. And a favorite book?

Joseph Nguyen
This one’s very interesting, maybe slightly controversial, but it currently is Outwitting the Devil by Napoleon Hill.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Joseph Nguyen
I like to use this particular framework on just when I’m doing work because I have issues, a lot of times. Just like procrastinating like most people or just putting off things that I know I need to be doing. And one of the most effective things that I’ve done is to follow the SPA methodology, which is just, if I’m overwhelmed by something, just take the next smallest possible action, so SPA, and doing that.

So, if it’s, “I need to write another book,” that’s a pretty big task, pretty scary, daunting, and it’s like, “Am I able to bust out a whole book in this one session?” Now, that’s typically what the mind thinks of. But if I break it down to the smallest possible action, like, “Am I able to just open the Word document? Can I just do that?” And I’m like, “Yeah, I can definitely click on Notion and open it up. I can definitely do that.” And if I still can’t do that, “Can I just sit at the computer desk?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Joseph Nguyen
So just keep breaking it down.

Pete Mockaitis
“Sit up from the couch.”

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, sometimes it’s hard, right? Sometimes it’s really hard. And so, it’s okay if we need to break it down into those baby steps, but that works wonders for me. So, it’s like, “Can I write one sentence?” And when I write one sentence, I’m going to want to write another sentence, like I’m just going to go.

And, lo and behold, there’s like a couple dozen sentences, a couple hundred words pass, and that was way more progress than if I force myself sit down and write my book. That’s a big task. So, smallest possible action is what I like to default to when I am frozen in procrastination or analysis paralysis.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, you hear it quoted back to you often?

Joseph Nguyen
Our emotions don’t come from external events, but from our own thinking about those events. That is something that people just didn’t really realize, and so it’s like a massive epiphany moment for them. Other ones are just like, “I didn’t realize that I could just stop judging. I had no idea I could just not listen to that incessant negative critic in the back of our minds, and that I could just be and just be present. I don’t have to be thinking about something else or doing something else. I can let go of whatever that incessant chatter is, and to finally find a little bit of peace.”

Yeah, that big epiphany was like, oh, yeah, during the times that we are happiest, like we’re not really thinking about anything else, or ruminating on anything. We’re just there, fully engrossed by the moment. And so, those are probably like some of the biggest nuggets that people have gotten.

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

Joseph Nguyen
Probably, I would say my website and newsletter, so JosephNguyen.org, J-O-S-E-P-H N-G-U-Y-E-N.org. You’ll be able to find like my newsletter there, sign up for it. I do have a YouTube channel. I don’t post that often but a lot of the content there is evergreen. All my socials are just itsjosephnguyen, I-T-S and then Joseph Nguyen. Those are probably the best places to find me, but email is where you’ll be able to be up-to-date on any new projects I’m working on.

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

Joseph Nguyen
Let go of the fear of being judged. The more that we’re afraid of being ourselves, to be awesome at our jobs, the less effective we’ll be. And sometimes being ourselves will ruffle a few feathers. People will judge us one way or the other, even if we’re playing conservatively and not really showing that much at work.

People are still judging us anyway. So, we might as well be judged and criticized for being who we truly are rather than masquerading ourselves behind something else. And the more that you’re able to be yourself, the more awesome you’re going to be at your job, the more that you’re able to lean into your own gifts, your own talents, your abilities. All of that is usually held back if we’re afraid of what other people are thinking.

So, stand up for yourself, do what you believe is best for the work that you’re doing, and definitely defend it, and to not just let it be pushed over. Because at the end of the day, if you’re coming from a place of love, generosity, true selflessness, and wanting to do the best that you possibly can, there’s no shame in that at all. So, if you’re going to be criticized, definitely be criticized for doing what you believe is right, rather than hiding behind and playing it small.

Pete Mockaitis
Joseph, beautiful. Thank you.

Joseph Nguyen
Thank you so much, Pete. It’s been such a pleasure and so much fun with you. I love your energy.