Julia DiGangi shows you how to harness your emotional energy and turn it into your greatest strength.
You’ll Learn:
- What others’ skepticism is telling you
- How to reframe your brain’s negative patterns
- The root cause of procrastination–and how to deal with it
About Julia
Dr. Julia DiGangi is a neuropsychologist, who completed her residency at Harvard Medical School, Boston University School of Medicine, and the US Department of Veterans Affairs. She has nearly two decades of experience studying the connection between our brains and our behavior. Dr. DiGangi has worked with leaders at The White House Press Office, global companies, international NGOs, and the US Special Forces. Her understanding of stress, trauma, and resilience is also informed by her work in international development and humanitarian aid, where she served some of the world’s most vulnerable communities.
The founder of NeuroHealth Partners, a neuropsychology-based consultancy, DiGangi shows people—at work and at home—how to harness the power of the brain to lead more satisfying and emotionally intelligent lives. She is the author of Energy Rising: The Neuroscience of Leading with Emotional Power.
- Book: Energy Rising: The Neuroscience of Leading with Emotional Power
- Instagram: @drjuliadigangi
- LinkedIn: Julia DiGangi
- Website: DrJuliaDiGangi.com
Resources Mentioned
- Book: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk
Thank you, Sponsors!
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Julia DiGangi Interview Transcript
Pete Mockaitis
Julia, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.
Julia DiGangi
I’m so glad to be here, Pete. Thanks for having me.
Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to get into some of the wisdom you share in your book, Energy Rising: The Neuroscience of Leading with Emotional Power. Neuroscience just gets me all fired up. So, I think, first, I want to hear, for you personally, can you tell us from your own experiences working internationally and with vulnerable communities, is there a particularly powerful moment or story that shaped your understanding of stress, trauma, and resilience from a human experiential point of view?
Julia DiGangi
Absolutely. So, let me just say that I am a neuropsychologist, which means I’m a clinical psychologist with specialized expertise in the brain, and never in a million years did I think that I would become a psychologist. And the reason is my father is actually a psychologist, and I grew up, I’m very close with him. I grew up, he was always telling fascinating stories about human behavior, and I just always thought that psychology was my father’s domain and that it was not going to belong to me.
So, I was called to a lot of social justice work, so I started doing a lot of political work, and I started doing a lot of international humanitarian aid and development. And the reason I became a neuropsychologist was because I started working all around the world, so Detroit, Chicago, Latin America, Africa, and I was working in very, very traumatized communities, very high stress environments.
And the thing that really started to strike me is that, regardless of where I was, people were responding to stress in similar ways. So, I was really kind of struck by this idea that despite this wild amount of diversity, why is it that human behavior looks the same when it comes to extreme stress?
And it was really that question that got my scientific mind fired up and decided to really look at, “What can we understand about the human brain that can explain the way we run our large systems, whether it’s our family systems, whether it’s our organizational systems, whether it’s our companies, and whether it’s our political systems?”
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, the stressors then, I’d imagine, in those different environments are quite different, varied from each other, you know, what’s happening in Chicago versus Latin America are different, and yet the stress reactions and responses of the people were pretty similar to one another?
Julia DiGangi
Yes. So, I was working with a lot of very, very extreme trauma, so I was working with torture survivors, I was working with combat veterans, I was working with child soldiers, I was working with orphans, I was working with war survivors, so really extreme forms of trauma. But the thing that kind of struck me though is, like, “Why are such similar situations unfolding, because they’re all perpetrated by people? And then what was happening to the human body that was then creating additional trauma?”
Because when we’re traumatized, we then show up in our relationships, in our communities, in our workplaces in ways that aren’t really that functional. So, yes, I was working in a lot of different environments and seen a lot of different things, and I started to think, “If we could understand human suffering and human resilience at the most extreme ends of the spectrum, then there would have to be some pretty, pretty powerful advice about how the rest of us can grapple with the more common stress that we face in our ordinary lives.”
Pete Mockaitis
Well, Julia, that’s exactly where I wanted to go. You have piqued my interest to the max. So, I have a lot of notes and things I’d like to cover but let’s just go right where we are right now because that’s juicy. So, tell us, from those experiences, did you discover any master keys to resilience that we can put in place right away?
Julia DiGangi
Absolutely. So, I will say that I feel like I am on this planet, I feel like my core message is that our experiences of emotional pain, and by emotional pain I just mean any bad feeling you don’t want to feel – so stress, aggravation, irritation, inadequacy, fear of rejection – that these terrible feelings that we all experience in our own nervous systems in our own bodies are absolutely not here to torment us; they are here to set us free.
They are literally the line between where we currently are and the next evolution of what I call emotional power. So, if you want to show up at work more powerfully, if you want to show up online more powerfully, if you want to be more creative or more expressive, absolutely the number one thing you need to work with is your hard feelings.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that is juicy, that is a thesis alright. Can you provide an example illustration so that we can get our arms around that conceptually to experientially, like, “Oh, I see. I see in that instance, that person, there was the line, and they surpassed it and then cool things unfolded”?
Julia DiGangi
Absolutely. Sure.
So, I would say that, without question, the hardest thing for us is our experiences of other people’s emotion. So, I think that our leadership is best understood as, “Who do I become in the energy of other people’s emotions?” In other words, “What happens to me when people don’t see me the way that I want to be seen? What happens to me when the people around me don’t agree with me? What happens to me when the people around me don’t understand me?”
If I’m not emotionally powerful enough, and I have this really great idea, okay, let’s say I have a great idea for a podcast, I have a great idea for a social media post, I have a great idea for a new product, if I feel like people don’t understand me, it’s going to provoke bad feelings, it’s going to make me feel insecure, it’s going to make me feel anxious, it’s going to make me feel stressed. If I don’t know what to do about those bad feelings, it will shut down my behavior.
So, it’s only when I’m able to say, “I know, in the energy of you not understanding me perfectly, Pete, it’s provoking the sense of anxiety or stress inside of me, and I know…”
Pete Mockaitis
Like, right now?
Julia DiGangi
Yeah, I mean, I always get nervous before these podcasts, so, yes, absolutely, but I think that’s a perfect example. It’s like, “Can I still, in my fear, in my anxiety, in my worries, like, am I going to say something stupid? Are people going to understand me? Am I still powerful enough to show up here and say the things that I want to say?”
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. Understood. And so then, there you go in terms of, like, the line in terms of it is sort of a border or a fork in the road – I’m mixing my geographical metaphors here – in terms of you could say, “Well, just forget it. Just whatever. I guess we’re done here.” That’s one option, like we give in, in terms of the frustration, the anxiety, the fear, the overwhelm, whatever, just sort of wins out, like, “I’m out of here.” That’s one approach. And then the other way is that you sort of fold.
And for the record, Julia, I think you’re doing great.
Julia DiGangi
Thanks for the vote of confidence.
Pete Mockaitis
I think that you have whipped up a frenzy of curiosity inside me such that now I want to understand all of it and with perfect clarity. And so, yeah, we’re going to be picking up on that.
Julia DiGangi
Let me say this because I think this is really clarifying, too. Everyone has problems, we’re all, like, “All right. So, what’s the biggest obstacle in my life? This problem, this problem, this problem.” But if you really think about what a problem is, there is no problem on the planet until you have activity in your nervous system. In other words, anything that you’re calling a problem in your life necessarily means you have bad energy in your nervous system.
So, let’s say I’m fired from my job, and let’s say I’m fired from my job and people call me like a bumbling idiot in front of 50 people, and I legitimately don’t feel bad about it. I’m not intoxicated or I’m not dissociated. I just really don’t feel bad about it. Because I have no pain, I have no problem. And one of the things, this is such a big shift, it makes you so more powerful in your leadership, a lot of times we run around trying to solve our situations, “Okay, this person is going to say this and so I’m going to do this,” or, “This project might go with this, and I got to do this about this project.”
And I’m not saying your situations don’t matter, but if you really think about the most powerful place to work in your life, it’s at the beginning of your emotional energy. In other words, who would I become in this situation if I said, “It’s okay, Pete, if you don’t perfectly understand me”? actually, I’ll tell you a good story.
So, I interviewed a lot of very, very elite leaders for the book, and one of the leaders that I interviewed, and I said that I was going to anonymize everyone because some people talked about some really sort of controversial and difficult things in the book, but I’ll say it’s someone who leads tens and tens of thousands of people.
And one of the things he said to me in the book that I was totally struck by, is I said, “How do you deal with your own tough feelings? Like, how do you deal with your own feelings of doubt, or insecurity, or fear, or anxiety?” And he said, “That’s kind of a hard question for me to answer but I would imagine that if my wife was in the room, my wife would tell you, if I have to make a hard decision that is not a sleep-loss moment for me. In other words, if there is a thousand people in the room, and only 501 agree with me and 499 don’t agree with me, I’m totally okay with it.”
By the way, this guy has amazing employee engagement scores, so he’s very, very well-liked. He’s not some brute who has no emotional intelligence. So, what that moment is telling us is that this man is powerful enough to be misunderstood in the energy of other people’s skepticism and doubt and confusion. And if we’re really honest, how often does other people’s emotion shut down the big visions that we have inside of our own brains and our own spirits?
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you know, it’s so funny. I’m reminded of, or there’s so many things that are coming to mind here. I remember a buddy of mine, we had the idea that was basically Airbnb, I think shortly before Airbnb was founded, and so we thought it’s really cool. And so, why not? We were consultants, we saw empty bedrooms, we’re like, “Well, these underutilized resources could really turn into something.”
And so, we thought, “Let’s chat with a buddy of ours who is somewhat high up in Hyatt Hotels.” And then his energy was like, “You know, I think this could be a nightmare for liability, people are going to ruin stuff and commit crimes. And, yeah, ugh, I’m really nervous about that.” And so, we’re like, “Oh, yeah, I guess he’s right.” So, we just stopped.
Now, who knows what life path that we could’ve been to people who started Airbnb, or if maybe hundreds of people were thinking the same thing around the same time in the universe. But it’s true that energy did shut it down, and it’s a common experience. Or, if someone seems to respond to our idea with a sense of, I don’t know, contempt, or disgust, or even just more subtle, like, “Oh,” like they’re not really into it but just, like, “Okay, you don’t find that interesting or compelling. Okay, duly noted.” So, yeah, that can shut it down.
So, are you telling us, Julia, that it’s quite possible to develop the emotional power, force, resilience?
Julia DiGangi
A hundred percent. First of all, your story was a phenomenal one.
Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.
Julia DiGangi
And we all have versions of that, like we all have. And here’s the thing that I think is so important to really get. When we have these moments of inspiration, whether we call it inspiration or creativity, or we have these visions, the whole idea of creativity is the world has never been here before. So, of course, there’s going to be skeptics. It would make no sense if you said, “Hey, you know what we’re going to do, we’re going to start a community on Mars,” and the rest of the world was like, “Of course, that makes perfect sense.”
So, it’s almost like some of our best, most powerful, most transformative ideas, if they’re not being met by other people’s resistance, I think we need to question, “Is it really a good idea?” So, it’s almost like part of our work is to reframe the patterns we have around other people’s reactions. That’s the first thing I want to say.
There’s another second important thing that I can say that can really help our leadership, and that is this. We all know that when people are flagrantly rude to us, or egregiously cynical, that hurts. But something that we egregiously underestimate is the pain of confusion. Well, you just gave a great example where you said sometimes people will meet our ideas and, like, not just be super enthusiastic. They might just be a little bit lukewarm or they might seem a little bit confused.
One of the things we’ve very clear about in neuroscience is your brain absolutely despises confusion. So, a very practical way to think about your brain is as a pattern detector. It’s going through your life, largely unconsciously, going “Apple. Apple. Fill in the blank. Apple. Apple. Apple. Fill in the blank. Apple.” Now what this actually means is “Apple. Apple. Fill in the blank,” sometimes the answer really isn’t apple. But because your brain hates that ambiguity or that openness, it will try to close the pattern in a way that’s going to make sense to you.
When we are confused, what happens is the brain can handle kind of the open-endedness of confusion for a very short period of time, and then very quickly it will close the pattern, and it will close the pattern in a way that is suspicious, fearful, and small.
Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Just this morning, Julia, this was funny, I thought I was going to be making some scrambled eggs for the family. And then Katy said, “Oh, hey, can you come watch Joey, and I’ll make the scrambled eggs?” And I said, “I thought I was making the scrambled eggs?” And she just said, “Can I do it?” And so, I was like, “Well, what’s going on here? I made the scrambled eggs last time, I usually make scrambled eggs, she’s asking to do it.”
And so, it’s sort of like I can’t even stand the uncertainty, the question mark associated with why this is happening. It doesn’t even really matter in terms of I’m thinking, “Is there something wrong with the way that I make scrambled eggs, with the scrambled eggs that I made yesterday?”
Julia DiGangi
Isn’t that interesting? Because, like, your interpretation automatically goes to the brain definitely has a negativity bias, it’s a way to keep us alive. So, now you’re thinking, “Oh, she hates the way I make my scrambled eggs.” And the next thing we know, we’re fighting with our partners over something that nobody really even understands because we’ve all been confused from the beginning.
So, it’s like if we could understand the power of confusion in our lives, like have reverence for it, understand how the brain is really, because I think I always say the brain is the most powerful machine you’ll ever own. You have to operate it powerfully. A great example of that happened in my marriage a lot more at the beginning, is like me and my husband had different texting patterns. So, it’s like I would text and then he would delay for a long time, and instead of just being, like, the man is not near his cellphone, or the man is busy, or the man is distracted by something else, you start to come up with all of these ridiculous stories.
And the craziest thing of all is the stories help no one. It doesn’t help the relationship, it’s not fair to the other person, and we injure ourselves in the process. So, again, if we understand what the brain is doing, which is why I wrote Energy Rising, we become so much more empowered in our lives.
Pete Mockaitis
So, in that circumstance, I’m curious, it feels like we need a narrative or an explanation so badly we just make one up. So, Julia, is there a better alternative for us in these moments?
Julia DiGangi
Absolutely. So, the thing that you want to do is you’ve got to think about this idea of emotional power is, “Who do I want to be in the energy of other people’s bad emotions?” So, if I want to be the type of leader, and, by the way, our leadership totally shows up in our romantic relationships as well so it’s not just a thing at work, it’s a thing in our homes as well.
If I want to be the type of leader who’s trusting and generous, then I need to know that when I start to wobble in uncertainty because, again, the brain has an allergy to uncertainty, I need to really think, “How do I hold the frequency of trust and generosity?” And if I don’t ask myself, if I don’t have a practice of discipline of asking myself that question, the brain is automatically and reactively going to shut the pattern.
And it’s going to shut the pattern in a way that actually makes no sense to our wellbeing. This is kind of the paradox of having a human brain. It’s going to make you start thinking suspicious, annoying. And if you let it fester for too long terrible things about the people in your life who really are on your team. But can I tell you an example from our lab that I just think is so powerful to show you how much the human brain hates uncertainty?
Pete Mockaitis
Sure.
Julia DiGangi
So, in part of our paradigms, we would, in our lab, we had a machine that would shock people. So, this is a way to administer pain to see how people respond in conditions of pain. And what people, as lots of researchers out there who study uncertainty in the brain, in fact, this is at the foundation of all anxiety disorders are. All anxiety is a disturbed relationship with certainty.
So, we would bring people into the lab, and there’s conditions that you can put people in these laboratory settings. So, you can have a machine that counts down five, four, three, two, one, and when the machine hits one, you’re absolutely going to get a shock. Then you have another condition where the machine counts down five, four, three, two, one, and maybe you’ll get a shock or maybe you won’t get a shock.
Now, the “rational person,” and I’m using air quotes here, is the person who says, “Definitely put me in condition two because there’s a good chance I will walk away pain-free.” But statistically, people choose to be in the option where they get the shock every single time. What that is telling you is that emotional pain, first of all, uncertainty is literally emotionally painful. And the pain associated with uncertainty and stress can be more painful than actual physical pain.
And so, when we think about the way that we lead, the way that we communicate with people, how confusing we are, how much clarity, how much transparency, we have really powerful neuroscientific evidence that says really, really think, especially in a world that is filled with a brim of information, think about how to communicate clearly if you want to be powerful. And by powerful, I don’t mean command and control. I mean effective, connected.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we got this allergy to uncertainty, and one master approach is to rather than letting our default brains do what they do – inventing stories that cause turmoil – we could proactively say, “Who do I want to be in this moment amidst the uncertainty?” And so then, we’re making sort of a conscientious choice, “All right, this is how I’m going to be amidst this as opposed to letting autopilot take us somewhere, which is probably not going to be a great place where autopilot would go.”
Do you have any other pro tips in the midst of uncertainty how we can deal with that well?
Julia DiGangi
I do. This one is, like, I think, a fantastic one. I want to teach you guys something that I call a power pattern. So, I said before, your brain is a pattern detection machine. Now, overwhelmingly, the brain is driving you through your life in ways that are unconscious. We all have had that experience where we’re driving in our car and we’re talking on the phone, and somehow, we magically show up in our driveway and we have no idea, we actually have no conscious recollection of it. So, the brain is an incredibly powerful machine and it does a lot of the work for you unconsciously.
Okay. But let’s go back to this pattern, this idea of “Apple. Apple. Fill in the blank.” How that actually sounds emotionally in our lives, and emotion is the most powerful energy in a human being’s life. This is just a neuroscientific reality. So, we’re all running these patterns in our life, and maybe your pattern sounds like, “Things just never work out for me. Things just never work out for me. Things just never work out for me.”
Maybe you have a pattern that’s like, “People don’t understand me. People don’t understand me. People don’t understand me.” So, if you look at your life and you say, “Where are the ways in my life that I kind of keep getting into conflict, or struggle, or stress?” you’re going to see there’s a pattern that kind of connects all those things.
So, let’s imagine that mine is, “People don’t understand me.” So, I write a book, and I kind of have a sense, “Nobody is really going to get it.” Or, I show up at parties and I kind of feel weird because I really don’t feel like people understand what I’m talking about, or people don’t enjoy talking to me. Now, let’s say I’m creating a business, and the whole reason one would create a business is because, hopefully, it’s bringing something novel to the world.
So, I start this business but my underlying pattern, the underlying energy in which I’m doing it, whether I’m conscious of it or not, is, “People don’t understand me.” What do you think the likelihood of success for that business is? I can almost guarantee I am going to self-sabotage. So, what if I said to myself, “Instead of working with this pattern of ‘People don’t understand me,’ what if, if I think I’m really creative and I have these really kind of cool visions for my leadership, what if I started having the…?”
Also, let me just say, when people don’t understand us, especially if we have kind of forward-thinking ideas, that is stressful. But what if I change my pattern, and my pattern, instead of being, “People don’t understand me,” what if my pattern was, “I am ahead of my time”? Now, I kind of have the sense, when people don’t understand me, “Of course, they don’t understand me. I go first. Of course, they don’t understand me. I am a pioneer. Of course, they don’t understand me. How could they possibly understand a place that I’m trying to lead them to?”
Do you see how much more life-giving and hopeful and spacious, “I am ahead of my time” is than “People don’t understand me”?
Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. So, building the power pattern seems like we are reframing a thing that’s a bummer into, “Well, yeah, of course, that’s just sort of normal and to be expected.”
Julia DiGangi
A hundred percent true.
Pete Mockaitis
I think I remember doing this during my dating years because it’s a bummer when you’re digging somebody and they blow you off, it’s like, “Oh, okay.” And what’s so funny, I decided about my criteria, I had to boil it down into four.
Julia DiGangi
And will you tell? You’re going to tell me your four criteria or is that top secret?
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, they’re cool, they’re cute, and one of them was that they’re crazy about Pete Mockaitis because that’s just more fun. And so, it’s so funny, even though the same thing happened, like, “Oh, I texted her and she ghosted me. Bummer,” I reframed it in terms of it isn’t like, “Oh, why? What’s wrong with me? Was I…?”
In terms of it’s like, “Well, unfortunately, this candidate has been disqualified because she doesn’t really measure up on the key criterion of being crazy about Pete Mockaitis. So, yeah, that’s disappointing that we’re going to have to conclude this candidate’s application process, but I guess we’ll have to move onto the next.”
And it was funny because in both instances, they more or less decided they didn’t dig me enough to want to continue communicating.
Julia DiGangi
Well, Pete, I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t dig you.
Pete Mockaitis
Oh, shucks.
Julia DiGangi
But that being said, things happen that are unexplainable, but what a liberating frame. Because the only thing that would’ve happened if you would’ve been like, “Oh, this person doesn’t like me. I’m not good enough,” which we all do, is we just sink ourselves. So, the other piece here is that this is so big, it almost can sound like I’m saying nothing but it really does matter, which is there is no meaning in the world until you use your nervous system to make meaning out of it.
And the way I really learned that this was true, so, first of all, it’s kind of obvious. If it doesn’t hit your brain and your neurons, like, “Did the tree fall in the forest? Who cares? You weren’t around to hear it.” The whole idea of objectivity, it’s coming through our subjective nervous systems. The way that this really kind of became very, very clear for me is I’m fundamentally a trauma researcher. I’ve done extensive scientific research into trauma, the behavioral consequences, the neurobiological associations.
We very commonly see people undergo the same trauma, the same objective event – childhood issues, assault, accidents, combat – and have wildly different experiences. At one extreme, you have post-traumatic stress disorder, which is a form of illness after trauma, and at the other extreme, you have something that scientists are now starting to study more and more, which is called post-traumatic growth.
How in the world? So, trauma is horrific, that definition is what makes trauma, trauma. How could two people experience something that no one is debating was horrible, and have two remarkably different stories, realities, meanings emerge from that? It has everything to do with what is happening inside of their nervous system.
So, you want to say the stories we tell ourselves are the meaning we make, this has everything to do, everything to do with how powerful we are in our lives. Because I will tell you what, I work with people who had every good reason, every good reason to stay down. The amount of trauma that some people go through is mind-blowing.
If they said to you, “I am never up again,” you would say, “I completely understand.” But for some reason, they say, “I rise because I say that I rise.” And when you see people say, what they’re really saying is, “Even though this horrific thing happened in my life, I am still the most powerful person in my own life.” And when we really touch that, our energy is unstoppable.
Pete Mockaitis
Well, Julia, I’d love your take in terms of, I think, sometimes we can see, “Yes, this frame, this power pattern would be more useful and helpful to me than the alternative, and yet, I just don’t really believe that to be true. It’s, like, I’d like for it to be true. It sounds pretty nice. I think it can be true for some people, and yet as I try on that belief, it doesn’t fit, or feel right, or feel me.” What do we do with that?
Julia DiGangi
Totally, you got it right-size it. One of the things I love doing in the area of emotional intelligence, mental health wellbeing, is making just tons of great, great analogs to physical health. If I really had been totally out of shape, and I call you, and I’m like, “Hey, you know what, I’m going to run Ironman. I’m going to participate in Ironman athlete,” you’d be like, “That is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard you say, Julia, and you’ve had some pretty dumb ideas in your life, but that one takes the cake.”
So, what we have to do when we’re thinking about our own emotional expansion, our own emotional increases in our power, and our emotional strength, we have to think there’s not a more powerful journey in your life so we have to right-size things. So, a lot of times what will happen is people will reach for the emotional Ironman off the dome. And this is why I do not like affirmations, I look in the mirror and, let’s say, I feel terrible about myself, I look in the mirror, and I say, “I’m so great. I’m so great. I matter so much. I love myself so much.” Whatever.
But there’s huge parts of me that is like, “Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.” Not only is that not going to help, it’s going to make me feel worse because the dissonance between what I’m feeling and what I’m actually saying is like so far apart. What I need to do is say, “What is the edge?” And I talk about this a lot in my book, “What is the edge of my emotional power?”
So, if I go to the gym, and I can lift 20 pounds today, tomorrow I’m not going to try and lift 50. I’m trying to say, “What’s 22?”. I go to a conference and I normally sit in the back of the room. I’m too afraid to speak up. I don’t say, “I deserve to be on that stage today.” Maybe I say, “You know what’s accessible to me, I’m going to sit in the first row.” Maybe the next thing is, “I’m going to sit in the first row, and I’m going to ask a question.” You see, so it’s this idea of if you can think about evolution in other areas of your life, of course, you can think about evolution in your emotional life.
The other thing that I think is so exciting is we have totally misunderstood human development. We celebrate, like, “Oh, the little kid took a step,” “Oh, the little kid is walking,” “Oh, the little kid is eating solid food.” And then by the time you’re 21, everybody is done with you. Graduation, college, you’ve hit all your milestones, there’s nowhere but down to go. Not freaking true.
The next frontier of human intelligence is absolutely going to be emotional. And the sooner leaders understand this, the better, because the human brain is emotional. But what we need to now think is, in the middle of our lives when we’re kind of hitting our stride in our career, the most powerful question is, “How do we think about our emotional evolution?” And by emotional evolution, I mean, “How do I still speak up when other people don’t understand me?”
I think a lot of us are saying we’re exhausted, but we’re overworking. That’s a form of self-injury. A lot of us are saying we have really great ideas in our mind but we’re keeping our mouth shut. That’s not emotionally powerful. We’re saying we want to work on holding our boundaries, “I’m really going to start telling people no,” and the second somebody calls me, they’ll be like, “Hey, can you do this other project, Julia?” I’m like, “Yeah,” and then I’m so pissed off all night because – why? – I’m not really resentful of them. I’m resentful because I betrayed myself.
So, we got to get clear on, number one, where the emotional pain in our lives is coming from. And a lot of us don’t recognize this but the majority of the pain in our lives is actually coming from the ways that we abandon ourselves. And the second we start saying, “No matter what, I will not leave myself. I will pay attention to my emotional energy. I will work with my emotional energy. I start to become more and more powerful.”
The reason that this is so important for our leaders is, do you know what your followers want more than anything on the planet? They want access to their own power. And when you become the embodied standard of a human being who is in touch with your own emotional power, you become the influence, the true influence. We all throw this term around. You become the standard that everyone follows, not because they have to, not because they have FOMO, but because they truly desire to. And this is the leadership that will change the planet.
Pete Mockaitis
This is powerful stuff. I’m digging it, Julia. Let’s hit another example in terms of a power pattern and knowing that we don’t jump to the Ironman, metaphorically, but rather we sort of take one more step, like sitting in the front of the row. Let’s say there’s a pattern of energy associated with procrastination or distract-ability, like, “Ugh, I don’t feel like doing this. It’s boring and I don’t want to.” And then that shows up a lot. How do we apply some of these frameworks to that issue?
Julia DiGangi
So, you want me to tackle procrastination?
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.
Julia DiGangi
Okay. So, first of all, you ready for this?
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.
Julia DiGangi
We have to really get down to the guts, and Energy Rising takes you to the guts of what procrastination is actually about. First of all, let me just say neurodiversity is totally a thing, so a lot of people struggle with attentional issues. I always say attention is the mother of all of our cognitive abilities. If you think you can’t problem-solve, you can’t remember things, you can’t make decisions if you’re not paying attention in the first place.
So, there’s a lot of sorts of taxes on our attention these days, I want to acknowledge that. But if you really look at the research into procrastination, procrastination is always about a fear of not being good enough.
Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah? Okay.
Julia DiGangi
Let’s break this down, and I can actually really speak to this from my own. I just wrote this book, like it was a glorious process but I will tell you it was so hard. And the reason it was so hard, and I would have writer’s block, procrastination, distraction, it’s because you have this sense, and a lot of times it’s not even that conscious, but, like, “If I don’t make this perfect,” and a lot of us aren’t able to, we’re not in touch with ourselves enough to say this.
But the logic kind of goes like this, “If I don’t make this perfect, people aren’t going to like it. But it’s not just that they’re not going to like it, they’re going to think I’m an idiot. I’m going to humiliate myself. People aren’t going to want to be around me. I’m going to let everybody down. I’m going to be…” It just keeps cascading and cascading and cascading, and this is what catastrophic thinking is.
So, we do a lot of work around catastrophic thinking in both the coaching industry and in the mental health field, but it’s, like, the true thing about procrastination is not, “I can’t make a phone call,” or write four sentences on a page, or get on camera and say a few things. Procrastination is really this deep, deep fear that there’s something fundamentally wrong with myself.
So, first of all, the first step is to name it. And as soon as you start to say, “Hold on, Julia. So, you’re telling me if you don’t write 10 sentences that are absolutely like Pulitzer Prize-winning, you’re going to basically be a troll living in a refrigerator box?” And when you start to make that explicit, it just starts to let some of the pressure out of the pressure compartment.
And then I start to say, “I’m going to write 10 sentences with absolutely no judgment. I can literally write, “The sky is blue and the grass is…” I just need to start going because you want to start getting some momentum. And you also want to say, like, if we want to be effective leaders, the fastest way to get there is to totally release this perfectionism BS. Because it’s so interesting to me, and I will tell you, I treat a lot of anxiety. OCD is an anxiety disorder, and one of the forms, there’s many forms of OCD, but at a pathological form, perfectionism is OCD.
We think that OCD, or we think that perfectionism makes us so strong. It makes us so weak because the person that you’re doing the perfection for isn’t you. You’re performing for some fantasy that you have about what other people think. And if you’re really getting to the guts of it, what you think is that, “They’re going to think I’m a fool, they’re going to think I’m a reject, they’re going to think I’m a degenerate, unless I nail it.”
And what’s really interesting is when you get people to start verbalizing, “Tell me about the fears,” it’s almost hard for them to put it into words because the intellectual part of their brain knows that it’s absurd. The intellectual part of my brain knows that if I don’t write the best book in the history of the planet, I’m not going to be a social outcast and die alone. So, it’s more of this nebulous sense of, like, “This just doesn’t feel good.”
That sensation is generated by emotional systems in the brain. So, part of the work of getting over distract-ability, and perfectionism, and procrastination is to say, “How is my fear of failure playing out here? Let me start to literally list the reasons, and then let me start to take reasonable action.”
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Julia, much good stuff. Tell me, anything else you want to make sure to put out there before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?
Julia DiGangi
I think I just want to say this because I think it’s so hopeful and so empowering and so healing, and I sort of started our interview saying this, is that the feelings, if you really think about any problem in your life, the reason you have a problem is because you have a bad feeling. You feel intimidated. You feel disappointed. You feel overwhelmed. You feel scared.
If you don’t work on the actual feelings themselves, those feelings will just keep popping up again and again and again, which means your ability to be powerful in your leadership will be constrained by that level of your emotion. Let me make this more clear. Let’s say I get really anxious talking in front of five people, and I make it through my talk, and they’re only five people there. Next time I give a talk, it’s probably only going to be to five people. If I want to talk on huge stages to 20,000 people, do you think I’m going to be able to talk on a stage of 20,000 people if I really can’t handle a stage of five?
So, it’s not really the situation I need to work with, it’s the sensation of anxiety and fear. And once I break through that at five people, then I can start to speak to 20 people. When I break through that, I can start to speak to 50 people. So, when we really start to work not just with our situations but we really start to work with the energy in our nervous system, it really transforms our leadership and our lives.
Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?
Julia DiGangi
Yeah. Can I share two?
Pete Mockaitis
Sure.
Julia DiGangi
I have two favorites. The first quote is from Mother Teresa, and it is, “If only we would sweep our own doorsteps, then the entire world would be clean.” I have worked with human suffering and human redemption for a long time, and we’re all out there talking about a better world. If we really want to create a better world, we have to look more closely at our own emotional pain because nearly all of the pain in the world actually comes from people’s fear. It doesn’t come because we’re cruel, vicious, psychopaths. It comes because we don’t feel like we’re good enough. And in the panic of not feeling good enough, we create messes.
The second quote is related to that, and the second quote is, “Everywhere I go, there I am.” A lot of times, we think if we could just change our situation, we could get a better job, we could make a little bit more money, we could have the breakthrough in the business that we just created, the kids could graduate, on and on and on and on. But what I have seen over and over and over again through my work, and also because I understand the brain, the brain is a pattern detector that runs on emotional energy.
So, your situations can change, you can move from Chicago to Denver, and you might feel good for six months, but pretty quick, you’re going to feel the way you’ve always felt unless you work at the level of your emotional energy.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?
Julia DiGangi
I’ll say one of my own studies that I really like and then I’ll talk about someone else’s work. The study of my own that I like the most is I looked at what’s called pre-morbid predictors of PTSD. So, this kind of goes back to this idea of we have so much power to make meaning out of our own lives.
So, basically, the idea here is that most people who experience a traumatic event will naturally recover. Just like if you fell down on the street and skinned your knee, if you give it some time, chances are good that your leg is going to recover naturally. So, scientists are asking the question, “Is trauma alone not enough to describe who gets sick and why?”
And so, this study really looked at, “What’s going on with people even before the trauma has happened that can describe who’s at risk and who’s really resilient?” Because if we understand that, there’s so much potential to heal people. So, that’s kind of my work that I think is really exciting.
And I’ve also really liked a lot of the studies around uncertainty and boredom. There’s a great study where people were put in a room, and they thought they just had to go in this waiting room for a little while, they thought they were going to be part of another study but it was actually a setup. They were put into this room, and the only thing that was in this room was an electrical shock machine.
And they were like, “We’ll be back in three minutes to come get you,” that’s what the experimenter said, but the whole experiment was just to leave people in the room. And you saw that in a relatively short period of time, people were so bored that instead of just sitting with themselves, instead of just being still, meditating, thinking, people started using this electrical shock machine to shock themselves.
And I think that’s such a powerful metaphor because we are so resistant to just sitting with ourselves. And if we really want to feel better in our lives, we don’t need to achieve more and do more, I’m not saying those things can’t be done, but they come from a much more powerful place when we really understand our own inner energy.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?
Julia DiGangi
So, a great book, I can’t say my favorite because I have a lot, it’s like picking your favorite child, is The Body Keeps the Score. Are you familiar with this book?
Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.
Julia DiGangi
So, obviously, a great book about pain and how it shows up in the nervous system. So, if we really want to empower ourselves, it begins with our brains and our bodies.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?
Julia DiGangi
Well, this isn’t going to be this fancy but it’s going to be honest. I do a tremendous amount of work texting myself. I wrote enormous sections of the book texting myself. So, a lot of times, it kind of goes back to what we were saying about procrastination and fear of failure, when I would fire up the computer, I felt like there was all this pressure to start being, I don’t know, Ernest Hemingway or something. And a lot of times, I would get paralyzed by it.
And it was a night when I was calm and my kids were asleep that a lot of times, I would have all this inspiration – there’s that word again – all this creativity, and I would, in my Notes app and in my text message, do a lot of really beautiful work.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?
Julia DiGangi
I would say my favorite habit is I free-write every evening. I’m very, very disciplined about this. And the reason I do this is because it’s a great way to integrate your thinking and your feelings. It’s a great way to have the most powerful brain. So, you have systems in your brain that think, and systems in your brain that feel, and they are connected but not perfectly integrated.
So, if you free-write, in other words, you’re not writing with a goal, you’re not trying to answer a very logical question, it’s a great way to link your emotions to the way that you think. And the most powerful person is a person who knows what they feel and feel what they know.
Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?
Julia DiGangi
Yeah. “Emotional energy is a currency, and you cannot give what you do not have.” We get this in all other domains. If I came to you and said, “Pete, I really, really need five bucks,” and if you really wanted to help me but you genuinely did not have five bucks, you would go, “Julia, I’m sorry, I don’t have five bucks,” and that would be the end of it. I would clearly understand.
In our workplaces, in our homes, we’re now talking about all these emotional currencies: transparency, empathy, inclusion, belonging, authenticity. And leaders are supposed to give these things to their teams, they’re supposed to give these things to their children, they’re supposed to give these things to their partners, the problem is I cannot give something I do not have.
How can I give attunement to my child when I’m not even attuned to myself? How can I create a culture of belonging if I’m always feeling, like, “I’m not really sure I belong in this organization. I’m kind of worried about my relevance. I don’t really feel like people like have my back”? We cannot give what we do not have.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?
Julia DiGangi
I would love to connect and talk about emotional power in leadership. I’m on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram @drjuliadigangi. Or, you could check out my website which is DrJuliaDiGangi.com.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?
Julia DiGangi
Yes. I would say think about, look for a pattern in the ways that you get stuck. Where are you getting constantly overwhelmed, constantly stressed, constantly feeling frustrated? And ask yourself, what can you do that would push you a little bit further out of your comfort zone to be able to feel your feelings a little bit more so that you could ultimately release those feelings that don’t feel good?
Pete Mockaitis
All right. Julia, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck and good energy.
Julia DiGangi
Thank you, Pete. Likewise.
