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The Reload with Sean Hansen
The Reload with Sean Hansen
Transformative Power of Embracing All Emotions - 219
What if embracing the emotions we often label as 'bad' is the key to unlocking personal and leadership growth? This episode of The Reload promises to explore just that. As a performance mindset coach, I share insights from my own life, including a deeply impactful event in Iraq, to illustrate how confronting fear, anger, sadness, and disgust can transform self-imposed suffering into powerful growth opportunities. By diving into 'emotion families' and understanding their physical manifestations, we uncover a path to enhanced leadership and personal development. Our cultural tendency to avoid these emotions is a hurdle many high-performing executives face, but by acknowledging and working through them, we can achieve a more authentic and connected life.
Throughout this episode, we tackle the complex interplay between emotional well-being and professional success, especially in a society that often encourages superficiality. We discuss the psychological concept of loss aversion and its impact on motivation, emphasizing the importance of genuine connections and empathy. By sharing personal stories and emphasizing authentic communication, we highlight the role of friends and family in navigating life’s challenges. This conversation is not just about emotional intelligence; it's about rekindling personal connections and living a fulfilling life while maintaining professional aspirations. Whether you're a leader or someone seeking deeper connections, this episode offers valuable insights for anyone looking to grow through embracing their true emotions.
Are you an executive, entrepreneur, or combat veteran looking to overcome subconscious blind spots and limiting messaging to unlock your highest performance? Feel free to reach out to Sean at Reload Coaching and Consulting.
Welcome to the Reload, where we help unconventional leaders craft the life they truly want by questioning the assumptions they have about how life works. My name is Sean and I'll be your host on this journey. As a performance coach and special operations combat veteran, I help high-performing executives kick ass in their careers while connecting with deeply powerful insights that fuel their lives. Okay, I, what am I doing today? I am interested in discussing this notion of why so many people, at least in the United States of America and I am going to assume that this happens elsewhere in the world, but I don't know for a fact but at least in the United States of America.
Speaker 1:I know that we tend to run from our emotions. Our quote unquote bad emotions, yes, we do. Bad emotions, yes, we do. So you might be wondering okay, what is a performance mindset coach who works predominantly with executives? Why are bad emotions coming up in his work? Isn't he focused on strategy and leadership presence? Well, yeah, I do, but because my particular flavor of coaching works at the intersection between leadership and all of that murky heart and soul stuff that actually creates the foundation for how someone leads, or said more appropriately, or, more specifically, where it is that they truly fail to step into leadership. What are their insecurities, what are their hangups? What is the holdover from other chapters of their life that have driven them to this place today, where some of their oh, I don't know eccentricities or various other quirks start coming forward? Where do they feel tight and pinched? Where do they feel tight and pinched? Where are they operating in a place of scarcity, and how that is allowed to bleed over into their organization that they are leading. So that's where I sit, that's where I do my work, and in that position I see a lot of suffering, much of which is self-imposed, due to so many of these inner demons that we are carrying around. And we all do this. We all have things that have been difficult for us, traumatic for us, that have been difficult for us, traumatic for us, and sure, some of that is going to be capital T trauma, as in physical assault of one form or another. And then some of it may just be just quote unquote the lowercase t traumas, things that were more mundane, things that were more consistent and everyday. But that does not negate the potential powerful conditioning effect that those little things have, especially when we are subjected to them on a daily, weekly basis for most of our life. Hopefully that's not too revolutionary a concept. So one of the things that I tend to see a lot in the work that I do in the sessions that I have with my clients, including, but not limited to CEOs is that people want to run or, alternatively, chase away the again quote-unquote bad emotion families, predominantly looking at fear, anger, sadness, disgust. Now on its face. Why would somebody want to run away from or chase off these emotion families? It's no real mystery.
Speaker 1:Typically, when we are feeling something in these emotion families and you might be wondering, sean, why are you talking about emotion families? Uh-huh, yeah, you should see episode 217 for my chit-chat on emotional literacy. Or, if you want sort of the Cliff Notes version, just go to the Google machine and type in emotion wheel and then you'll see oh, wow, like, yeah, we have these like primary emotion families or the primary title for an emotion family. And then there's all these other emotions that fit in these larger representative titles. So if we were thinking about, I don't know, anger, for instance a lot of people know about that one then you would also have rage, fury, frustration, annoyance, irritation, right, there's all kinds of things that generally fall into the family. And why do we talk about families? Well, because one family is different from another family, and when you are in the midst of one of the families, they get treated differently. If someone is sad, the resolution for sadness or the I don't know if I want to say resolution. But the migration from sadness to something else is a different path than the migration from anger to something else. And whether we're helping someone else or whether we're trying to help ourself, it might be nice to know. Oh okay, I'm more over here and less over there in that other emotion family. And how should I respond? So here we go emotion families.
Speaker 1:Now, looking at this and looking at why people want to run away from them or chase them off is because they typically feel some sort of pain when they are connected to it. And sometimes that pain, even though it is emotional in origin, actually carries with it a physical manifestation. It can be that intense. You know, if you think about the word heartbreak, in many instances it literally feels like something is breaking. I remember specifically this moment when I was in Iraq and I was there during a time of combat and I watched a friend of mine get killed. We had another teammate that was out there in that blast zone and we didn't know if he was alive or dead. We didn't know if he needed immediate medical attention. We assumed he would. Because of the explosion that happened and as I was running out there to try to render safe the scene from any potential secondary explosive devices which, yeah, there happened to be one it really did feel like something broke, like something physical snapped inside of me as I watched my friend's body fall back down to the earth, and I'm sorry if that's overly graphic for you, but we can very much have physical manifestations of our emotions.
Speaker 1:So there is this association with these particular quote-unquote bad emotion families that lead to the sensation of pain in one form or another. Now, why do I keep saying quote unquote bad? And if you were able to see me, you wouldn't. I see the old air quotes coming out right now. Well, I don't think that they are bad. In fact, I'm going to go so far as to say we might actually want to embrace these emotion families instead of trying to shoo them off or run away from them as our first and primary instinct. Now, I mean right now, you're probably thinking oh God, I cannot believe. I'm listening to this, and obviously you don't have to. That's your, that's your prerogative.
Speaker 1:But before you go, why might you embrace these emotion families that are so are considered so bad by so many people, that are so considered so bad by so many people? Well, I think, for starters, your emotions are what they are in that moment in time. They are real, and there is, in my view, something very powerful to acknowledging the presence of our emotion. There's so many individuals in life who I've come across who want to have a I don't know this like whitewashed, sterilized version of life whitewashed, sterilized version of life and who are so ruled by fear which is another one of the bad emotion families but they're so ruled by fear that, unless everything is so saccharine, sweet, everything has to be good and fuzzy and happy, and let's put our happy faces on that. I think they often live in a world of self-deceit, and so there's something incredibly powerful about recognizing no, right now I'm feeling rejected, I'm feeling alone, isolated, or, yeah, I'm feeling real anger right now, or I'm feeling shame.
Speaker 1:There's this expression. You have to name it, to tame it, but in taming it, I think we can let the emotion breathe for a minute before we jump into some sort of reactionary countermeasure, because these negative or bad emotion families serve as signals. It's a signal that something in our experience wants attention. There is something that we have come across. You know, it's hit the radar boop and then we're in this place of feeling like we actually are allowed to feel. And this is particularly relevant for the business crew that I tend to coach. They spend so much time from the neck up, meaning they're very cerebral, cognitive, intellect-driven, iq-driven people and that's a very powerful tool, but it's not the only tool. And they would stand such tremendous benefit by recognizing they have a heart in their chest and that heart represents emotion and that the people that they're leading also have these emotions.
Speaker 1:And a lot of the seemingly irrational things that occur in their organizations, in their teams, are due to these crazy things we have that are called emotions. And so by actually recognizing oh, this is signaling something, there is something that wants my attention. What might that be? We can get curious. My attention, what might that be? We can get curious, we can start to dig in to what's happening, whether that's in a process, whether that's in interactions between team members or interactions between teams, or whatever your situation is.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's tension that you're feeling between you and your romantic partner, or whatever, you and a kid, you and a parent, you and a dog I mean, I don't know whatever. Maybe you have a very judgmental dog who knows. But they're giving us this chance to notice and you cannot do anything about your issues if you don't first notice them. You will never solve a problem that you do not think exists. I know that it's like earth shattering for you. That's like wow, sean bringing the wisdom bombs. I know, I know I'm being sarcastic here, but we so often lose sight of the things that seem so well, that are self-evident. But we lose sight of them because we're in the midst of our own personal drama, oftentimes sparked up by the emotions that we're feeling. What a tangled web I'm weaving here. But in either case, these emotions, especially the ones that are negative, they really get our attention.
Speaker 1:A while back I really wish I knew the episode number. I don't remember anymore, but a while back I did an episode about shame, and was there any sort of redeeming value to shame? So in our society we often hear this phrase oh, you should be ashamed of yourself, should you? Oftentimes, it seems like shame is actually a pretty toxic fuel and doesn't really lead to a lot of long-term performance, and so the episode was all about well, shoot what might be the benefit of shame, shoot what might be the benefit of shame. And one thing that I did kind of come to in sort of solid conclusion, at least in my own mind, is that shame really causes us to pay attention, with certain caveats. Unfortunately, I would love to direct you to the other episode but can't right now. So, anyways, but this notion that if you think about times when you've been embarrassed and then taken it another step forward, times that you felt shame, those times generally really grab your attention, and I think possibly it may have been episode 202. Don't quote me on that, but I think so.
Speaker 1:Anyways, getting back to the point at hand here, is it causes us to pay attention and with that, these emotions that we feel and the pain that comes with it, also helps clue us in to what we might learn. Contrary to what some of my clients might believe, I don't actually try to foster painful conversations just for the sake of pain or just for the sake of suffering and I know I'm doing a great job selling my coaching services here but ultimately, when we dig into difficult territory, difficult topics, we're doing so in order to learn how did we get here? What are the patterns that are being repeated over and over and, over and over again, that are ineffective, counterproductive, painful suffering for you, others, et cetera, et cetera, so that we can get ahead of that pattern and maybe let some things go that we've been dragging around. You know the old proverbial head trash. How might we let some of that stuff go? Well, you can't, until you actually learn what's going on. And as much as I would absolutely love it, Love it, including for myself If humans were more tuned into making things amazing and great in their life, the pattern that I have been exposed to the majority of the time is that people are more connected with avoiding pain than they are achieving reward.
Speaker 1:And there are all kinds of psychological studies out there, behavioral studies out there, that seem to corroborate this notion that we are more loss-averse than we are motivated by gain. It's not to say we're not motivated by gain, we are, but there's this notion. I'm a very simplistic person, simplistic, simple, same same. Who knows whatever. I'm a simple person and I try to speak in very simple language, not because my clients are stupid, they're incredibly intelligent they're usually more intelligent than I am but because it's easy to understand, right? So if you think about carrots and sticks, you know that old metaphor the carrot is wonderful, it's the reward, but if you do not avoid the stick today, there's no chance of you getting a carrot tomorrow. But if you avoid the stick today, well, maybe you didn't get a carrot today, but you might get one tomorrow. So there it's yeah, like, ah, okay, like between the two, you can see how quite frequently the priority plays out the way it does, and so we are naturally very tuned into pain and the avoidance of pain. But the funny thing is, especially in the work that I do and the way that I see it play out for folks.
Speaker 1:When people come to me, they have been having a lifetime of repeating pain cycles, I think in large part because they run away from or try to chase off these negative, quote unquote, negative emotions. Are you tired yet of me doing the quote unquote thing? I am starting to get tired of it, but I don't know. I'm. Probably you are too. I'm going to keep doing it, though, because I really want to drive home this point that I don't think they're bad.
Speaker 1:I don't think that they're negative. They have a purpose. And there's one other purpose that I came to here in this short little list, and that is they help us connect, they help us recognize that, oh, wow, this person, this person that is in my life, this person that I ostensibly care about, whether I care about them as a team member, whether I care about them as a husband, a wife, a partner, I care about them as a child of mine or just a child in the world, an innocent being in the world, or a parent or an animal, a pet, right or not a pet, just a random animal that's suffering. It helps us to have real, true, no BS empathy. Your empathy is coming through, potentially because of a different set of circumstances, but can you connect with that emotional frequency?
Speaker 1:I, too have known what it is to feel shame or to feel guilty about something I have done. Now, my set of circumstances was X and yours is Y, but the emotional frequency is the same. And, granted, we can do that with the quote, unquote positive emotions love, joy, happiness, excitement, et cetera, et cetera. We can do that, we can definitely have empathy in that way as well and generally, from what I've seen because of the bias that we have towards the quote unquote negative. We we tend to notice it more when somebody is really down and they're really hurting and we have an opportunity to console them.
Speaker 1:Not to just like paint a fake silver lining about something and to say, oh, pish posh, like you know, it's not that bad or you should get over it. No, to like really be with them in in their pain and to sit beside them and to recognize oh, I've been there too. And to let them feel it, let it breathe, let it breathe, and to let them know that it's okay to feel that they can be okay just as they are. They don't need to put on a happy face for you, they don't need to put on some sort of falsehood or mask for you, of falsehood or mask for you. You know, in the US and I'm half American and half German, so I feel and I have like fought and bled for this country, so I feel entitled damn it to issue a couple criticisms about American society, and one of the things that I've noticed in American society is we tend to be oh, I hate saying this kind of fake kind of disingenuous. You know, you with your 10 million Facebook friends who you don't know and you don't talk to, right, and I do it too. Oh, I hate admitting that, but I do in certain instances. I try to curtail that as much as I can. I try to be as genuine a human being as I know how to be and I am not always that thing. But we are very much a society of masks and very much the pleasant, fun masks yay, everything's great. Yeah, my dog just died, but it's okay.
Speaker 1:Clearly, I'm trying to inject a little bit of humor here and while at the same time making the point that when we're down, I think it would be better for us to be genuine about that and to really let people who we trust and who trust us we care about and care about us to be able to see it, to allow ourselves to be seen so that we can be in that experience of empathy. Because that's another piece to this is that it's not just us connecting to them, it's them connecting to us. But so frequently we don't allow ourselves to be seen. And don't get me wrong, I know other cultures have their own stuff. Many Asian cultures are all about saving face, and if that is not a promotional advertisement for masks, I don't know what is so chances are every society has their thing, whatever.
Speaker 1:But in this case, ultimately, the point I'm driving to is that we have to allow ourselves to be seen, and the interesting thing there if I'm going to go even further off topic is this recognition that sometimes we're not even allowing our true joy to be seen. That's an interesting concept to noodle over, especially with men, to noodle over especially with men. This might be changing, possibly, but with a lot of the clientele that I work with, the men that I work with, they still are very much hampered, reigned in. If they feel joy, deep, effervescent joy inside of them, they often tend to throttle it back in terms of how they display it and, interestingly enough, they often only allow themselves to feel so much joy and it more comes out in the form of.
Speaker 1:I guess satisfaction comes out in the form of. I guess satisfaction it's like toast, it's the toast of emotion. Not really even any salted butter on it, just dry toast. So there's this interesting thing that we do on both ends of that quote-unquote good-bad emotional spectrum where we don't let it really be seen. But in my experience working with people, when we're not allowing ourselves to be seen. We are also cutting ourselves off from connection, which I mean, who knows? That may not be important to you, but you might consider, at least in the examples that I've seen, when we cut ourselves off from connection, even when we are wildly successful with our KPIs and our revenue generation and our profitability and all of the career stuff that people talk about, and you know, do you have the corner office and are you driving the car and do you have the watch on your wrist and the whatever the various signs of success.
Speaker 1:The people that I work with who have all those things but who lack connection, they're not very happy. They might have a lot of fulfillment, they might have a lot of satisfaction and those things I'm not trying to just because I'm using some funny emphasis here, trying to make this episode a little humorous. Those are wonderful things and I would say that even though they are wonderful things, they fall more in the logic category of necessary but not sufficient. And it's interesting because I've had a lot of clients kind of fight me on this one. They're like no, I don't care about happiness, I don't care about joy. I'm getting a little snarky here, I'll try to shape up my language here. So they'll say things like no joy and happiness. I think that's overrated, for instance, and I'm all about satisfaction and fulfillment. Overrated, for instance, and I'm all about satisfaction and fulfillment. And then, oddly enough, they come on the calls and tell me how unhappy they are, you know, and it's kind of like well, I mean, I thought you were all about the diet of satisfaction and fulfillment and it seems like you're doing all kinds of stuff to be fulfilled and satisfied. And yeah, so maybe there is more to it.
Speaker 1:And oftentimes the sadness that they feel whether that's hurt, sense of guilt, loneliness, sense of inadequacy a lot of that's connected to their lack of connection Lack of connection with a loved one, lack of connection with a tight friend group. And this is the interesting thing about the clients that I work with they, by and large, really want to make things better in the world and they really. Oftentimes the power that they are amassing by climbing the proverbial corporate ladder is because they want to have greater ability to influence the state of affairs for the people that work for them, and they have correlated an increase in power or authority, or however you want to frame it, as an increased ability to make life better for people? And now would their employees always agree? Probably not, but that doesn't necessarily negate the intention that the client has, that the client has.
Speaker 1:And so there's this interesting disconnect between their desire to make things better for people and then the fact that they often end up spending so much time dedicated to work that they disconnect themselves from their families and their their friend groups. And sure, they have friends at work and obviously they see those people quite a bit, but I'm talking about sort of their personal friends, the ones that did not come through work. And yes, I understand you can make personal friends through work. I mean, yes, I'm not that naive, but what I'm talking about is the individuals that have known them for years and years, since childhood, those individuals in our life who saw us come up and who have been with us through thick and thin for decades, and they often lose touch with those individuals. So what does all this have to do with these quote, unquote bad emotions? Well, I think part of it is.
Speaker 1:If you are one of those people who is so dedicated to work that you've lost that connection, physically lost it, meaning you're not talking to these people, you're not communicating with them. Pick that back up, even if you feel awkward about it. Let's see if it's anywhere in my emotion wheel here that I'm looking at. I forget which family it fits in. Anyways, whatever, if you're feeling awkward because maybe you haven't held up your end of the communication bargain there, well, get over it. If they're your friends, they're going to, you know, after you make a couple attempts and be like, hey, no, I'm sorry, I totally dropped off the face of the planet and you know, I've been doing this thing over here, running this company or running this division or whatever. They're going to come back, it'll be all right. Maybe send them a bottle of wine or something and then, yeah, mea culpa, right.
Speaker 1:So reach back out, get reconnected. And then when they say, hey, how's it been? Don't just be like, oh, it's great, it's amazing, my life couldn't be better. If you're feeling that, then fine, if that's genuine and authentic. But if you're feeling overwhelmed, or you're feeling a mix of oh, it's amazing and it's overwhelming, which is also perfectly valid, then be genuine about that. But let yourself be seen. And if you're feeling fear, anger, sadness, disgust, whatever, you know those families, you can be honest about that. There are times when we really want to be there for the people we care about.
Speaker 1:And, admittedly, I think there is a bit of a caveat here, right, because most of the people are going to be like well, yeah, but nobody likes some wet dish rag that's just always so mopey and gloomy. Yeah, okay, I agree, I can get there. But there's a difference, I think, between wallowing and if you are actually in a full-blown depression, you should seek professional help. There is the possibility that you might need to go on a prescription for a short period of time. I am certainly not qualified to make that determination, but there are professionals out there who can say, okay, hey, look, for right now would it be beneficial to maybe have a little bit of a you know pharmacological assist as we work through some of these additional factors that are leading to this clinical depression.
Speaker 1:But there's a difference there, right, there's the notion of, oh wow, I actually am in a full-blown depression and I'm going to ask for help to navigate this so that this does not become the rest of my life. And then, if you're short of that sort of clinical boundary line and you're feeling sad or you're down in the dumps, as it were, well, there's a difference there between communicating about the sadness that you're feeling, the overwhelm that you're feeling, and just wallowing in it, and every time you speak with that friend or any friend or anyone that cares about you, it's just oh my God, I'm suffering, because if that's the case, then that's again this signpost or this signal that's like maybe there's a pattern going on here and you can do something about it. But to be able to reach out to a friend and just communicate yeah, this is heavy right now, it's okay, because they're probably going to do the same thing to you at some point. And that's what friends and family do for one another. We help pick each other up when we're having that stumble and most of the people that I've ever come across, they're not stumbling indefinitely. They'll have certain things that trip them up and then their friends and family rally around them, help get them back on their feet. They don't do all the heavy lifting for the person. The person does a lot of their own heavy lifting, obviously, and then the person's back on their feet and it's like, oh yeah, what'd you learn from this? Oh, I learned this and this is how I'm going to change things and this is how I'm going to improve things. I didn't artificially try to rush my way through that process Because, again, just to restate, when is addicted to some sort of substance, whether it's booze or drugs or porn, or well, when my clients work, most of my clients are addicted to work and it's fueling them like some sort of drug. The affirmations, the bonuses, the increases in power, there's all kinds of reward that happens in that place, but deep down, oftentimes my clients are saturating themselves with work so they don't have to look at something else, and that something else is often difficult family relationships, but I digress. In either case, being in those emotions helps you begin to recognize. Hmm, something's happening. What is it? Where am I replicating patterns? Where am I keeping patterns ongoing and when am I going to get serious about changing the pattern? Boom, there you go.
Speaker 1:Hopefully this was useful for you. If it was, I would love it. If you would do the internet stuff, feed the algorithm gods so they smile upon me and this show Like, subscribe, follow, share, share would be most important. I think If you know that somebody would benefit from listening to this, just send it to them and say, hey, I want you to listen to this guy. He says some crazy stuff sometimes, but man, somebody's told me that he's got a pretty good radio voice, and so then you can have a talk about the concept.
Speaker 1:And maybe, jess, maybe you think I'm full of S and cause I'm trying to cuss less on the show, so I do actually have my little. Uh, what do I have here? I've got a sensor button. Maybe you think I'm full of it. Oh, that was amazing. I've never actually used that button in a recording, so maybe I'll start using that more, but anyways, I'm so excited by the technology. Anyways, yeah, so like follow, subscribe, share, share, share, share, share with people you like. Share with people you don't like Share with people you don't even know. Just take your phone, show them the episode, be like hey, I think this would be good for you, and they'll look at you like a crazy person, which is how I often get looked at. But then we can connect over being looked at as crazy people. Oh my god, amazing. Okay, until next time, cheers, take care and take care of each other.
