Guy Winch: Internationally Renowned Psychologist & TED Speaker

Guy Winch, internationally renowned psychologist and popular TED speaker, joins our CEO Alex Pascal for a dynamic discussion focusing on the intersection of wellbeing and the workplace and considering what coaches can do to help promote emotional health.

Terms like emotional health and mental health are often used interchangeably, but here, Guy explains why they shouldn’t be. He outlines their distinct definitions, reminding us that poor emotional health can have gravely adverse consequences despite the fact that loneliness and heartbreak aren’t medically diagnosable.

In his work, Guy often supports clients from the highest echelons of business. This episode allows him to share how he switches between a coaching lens and that of a psychologist, recognizing that many workplace issues have their roots in “personal stuff” - whether that be emotional baggage, individual perceptions, or unconsciously inherited narratives.

Many people still believe that emotions should be excluded from the workplace, and Alex asks Guy why he thinks this belief persists as well as what can be done - by coaches and leaders alike - to change it. 

Reflecting on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Guy explains that the pursuit of self-realization is actually a relatively new phenomenon in our society, meaning our structures haven’t yet evolved to embrace it. Listen in to learn how we can move past an outdated “keep calm and carry on” mentality so that leaders value emotional health as highly as material wealth.

Transcript

Coaches on Zoom - Guy Winch

(interview blurb)

Guy: Resilience is something we can all develop and strengthen but it comes from managing challenges and hardships, putting yourself through discomfort physically and emotionally, and if you’re not, then you’re actually weakening yourself in a certain way.

(intro)

Alex: I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is a licensed psychologist and a leading advocate for integrating the science of emotional health into our daily lives, workplaces, and educational systems. His TED Talks have garnered over 25 million views and he has three bestselling books, including Emotional First Aid: Healing Rejection, Guilt, Failure, and Other Everyday Hurts. His books have been translated into more than 27 languages worldwide. Please welcome, Guy Winch.

(interview)

Alex: Hi, Guy. How are you?

Guy: Good. It’s great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Alex: It’s our pleasure. Yeah, we’re very excited to have you today. As we start most of our episodes of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee, what are we drinking today, Guy?

Guy: Well, it’s water today. You can see it’s clear, it means it’s either water or vodka. It’s actually water. It’s two in the afternoon, it’s a little late for coffee and a little early for anything else so water goes well in between. Hydrate.

Alex: Absolutely. I drink about three liters of water a day so it’s great to be able to do it while we’re doing the podcast. So, let’s get started with how you got started in doing what you’re doing today and there’s a really cool fact that you shared that you have a twin, you have a brother, and he’s also a psychologist so people get you guys confused a lot, especially with pictures and articles and things like that. I thought that was pretty funny.

Guy: Exactly. And it’s interesting because he’s also a psychologist. He’s more of an organizational psychologist. He’s the founder of a social business. And what’s interesting is he just did, couple of years ago, a TED Talk which I’ve done as well and he, a month and a half ago, published his first book about the work he does and so now there are a lot of articles about him and they’re constantly using my picture or articles about me or using his picture and people say, “Oh, do you let them know?” and I’m like why? What difference does it make? Like it’s not as if anyone can tell so it’s fine.

Alex: That’s funny. Yeah, probably just you guys and your family can tell. That’s really cool. And it’s interesting both of you are psychologists. So let’s go to the beginning, like how did you end up doing the great work that you do today? Take us through that journey.

Guy: I’ve always wanted to be a psychologist. I was always interested in the mind and why we do what we do and what makes people tick. Obviously, that usually starts from what makes me tick. As an adolescent, you’re interested in yourself and why you are the way you are and interested in other people and why they are the way they are. So that was something I was always very clear that I was interested in. My brother as well, coincidentally. And so I did my undergraduate degree and, at the time, I thought I wanted to do a lot of research as well as therapy and so I realized I wanted to get a PhD and I also had this idea of wanting to live in New York City. I kind of got on a plane with application materials, I think I had $1,000 in my pocket, and I just flew to New York and crossed my fingers, like, “Oh, I hope, but I have to get in and they’ll have to fund me and I hope that will work out,” and, sometimes, when you do things when you’re young and naive, they do work out.

Alex: Absolutely. New York City is my favorite city in the world so I share that. I’ve been wanting to just move to New York forever and I’m not going to be able to do it as a young person anymore, I think I’m past that point, so I appreciate that spirit that you had to just jump on a plane and go live in New York.

Guy: Well, it was get accepted. If I wasn’t going to get accepted into school then I wouldn’t have been able to, but the idea was — I actually applied the year before and didn’t get in anywhere so I actually made sure to improve my application and I thought, “Well, now, it’s better so now they actually have to accept me,” there was no guarantee of that, but I did want to be here, I did want to get a PhD, and if I wouldn’t have got accepted that year, I probably would have tried again because my philosophy in life is if it’s something you really want, then just figure out what the hurdle is and get around it.

Alex: That’s a good philosophy, especially in the line of work that you’re in, walking the talk. So, after you went to grad school, how did your professional journey start?

Guy: So I went to grad school, I did a postdoc for a year and a bit, and then I decided, usually what people do as a therapist is that you get a job in a clinic or a hospital and you start a private practice in the evening a week or something like that in the off hours and I was not interested in the hospital job, I wanted to just have a private practice and I already had interest because I was well trained in couples and family therapy, I was one of the few men in that field, and so I thought I could get referrals and so I decided to take a leap of faith again and start a practice and hoped to fill it and worked diligently at that, I thought that would be a better track for me and that’s what I ended up doing, starting a practice and then working at the practice quite intensely to try and fill it and maintain it and get my name out, all of that when you start.

Alex: So you have three books that you’ve written and we’ll also talk about your TED speaking as well, which is fascinating. You have something like 30 million views or something like that. It’s crazy. So when, in terms of that journey, did you write your first book?

Guy: So, actually, what happened was, and I talked about this in my last TED Talk, I started my private practice and I worked incredibly hard to fill it because it was this really serious part of undergraduate, straight to graduate school, in graduate school, I was an immigrant in New York City and I was getting financial aid from the university but it really wasn’t sufficient so I had to work a lot of extra jobs and there was no time off. Immigrants in the US, they have to work really hard and I was part of that experience. And then straight to a private practice and I got very burnt out within a year. I do talk about that in one of the TED Talks briefly but I got burnt out to the point where like I didn’t know that I, is it psychology, did I make a mistake, this thing that I always wanted to do, is it now that I finally have it, then I just realized, no, there was just too much stress, it was too much of it and there was no breaks. So I made some changes and I decided to cut down my hours and this other thing I’ve always wanted to do was to write and so I started writing, especially I was writing screenplays, just for myself, primarily, submitting them to competitions once in a while, they got optioned once in a while but nothing came of them. But there was a good 10, 12 years of that, of things starting to happen and then falling through and get optioned but nothing happened. And by the third or fourth go around where I was like, “Oh, yeah, this is gonna happen. Oh, no, it’s not gonna happen,” because with that one, it was actually moving forward and it was 2008 and the financial collapse happened and I was just like, “Okay, I can’t keep banging my head against the wall,” and I knew an agent and she always said I represent nonfiction, write psychology, and I’m like the whole point of screenplays is to not write psychology. And so — but at that point, I was like, you know what, I did have an idea for a book and the idea for that first book was about the psychology of complaining and I called the book The Squeaky Wheel and it looks at the psychology of complaining and the customer service industry as well. And I realized in doing that that, oh, if I find the right topic that I’m interested in, that I enjoy, then actually I do enjoy the writing, I’m fine writing psychology as long as it’s something that’s interesting to me. And so I wrote that book and then, two years later, another book, Emotional First Aid, and as part of that, trying to promote that book, I tried to apply to a TEDx Conference to do a TEDx Talk, because I knew that ted.com, TEDx is a licensed form of TED and TED, there are very few TEDs, 2,000, 3,000 TEDs but there’s hundreds of thousands of TEDxs, but once in a while, if TED likes a TEDx, they’ll put it on the ted.com website. So I thought, oh, it can get them to see it and put it on the website, that would be great. And so I did this talk, my book was coming out in Swedish so the publishing house in Sweden flew me to Sweden to promote the book Emotional First Aid and that’s where I found the TEDx and did a TEDx and it came out, TED saw it, they put it on the TED website, it went viral for them, it got like a million views in a couple of weeks or something, and then a relationship started, I wrote things for them, and then, at some point, they approached me and they said, “We want you to do a mainstage talk in their annual conference in Vancouver,” and they asked me to do that and they wanted me to write a book with it and so I did that. And then I did the third TED Talk and kind of that’s how things got rolling.

Alex: That’s really cool. And your area of expertise is so on point with what’s needed today, which really is around emotional health and you work with a lot of executives and so not only do you apply that and draw from that from your therapeutic practice but you also work with a population that a lot of the coaches listening to us also work with. So, tell us about your specific area of specialization, emotional health. We can talk about so many things in that topic these days. I think in this post-pandemic world, there’s been a lot of attention placed into the emotional health area now, which is probably something that you feel great about because it’s such an important area that perhaps didn’t get as much attention.

Guy: Yeah, about time. 

Alex: So, yeah, let’s unpack that. 

Guy: So, okay, I want to start by defining what I mean by emotional health versus mental health. People often use the two interchangeably, I sometimes do, but my definition is as such: mental health is about diagnosable conditions. Once you’ve passed a certain threshold where you have a clinical depression or the anxiety disorder, the bipolar, whatever it is, personality disorder, the diagnosable stuff. To me, emotional health is everything that happens up until the line of the diagnosable, which, by the way, includes things like heartbreak. My second TED Talk was about heartbreak. When we get romantic heartbreak, we can become literally non-functional. It’s not diagnosable. Loneliness, long-term health impact of loneliness is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day, it will literally kill you, it’s not diagnosable, there’s not a diagnosis that you get that is in the DSM, the manual of mental disorders. And a lot of people can be quite depressed and quite anxious that don’t meet exactly all the criteria to pass that threshold. So, for me, it’s about everything that happens before because that’s where you can intervene, I think, as a therapist most effectively and that’s where I think spreading the information and the knowledge about emotional health can be most impactful and those are also the interventions that can be scaled to a large extent, apps are doing it today but I think government should be doing it but, nonetheless, that’s what can be scaled. So, when I work with people in my private practice, I tend to work with people who might have a diagnosis of this or that but they’re high functioning people but they deal with stresses, they deal with issues, they deal with relationship woes, they deal with personal woes, with other personal demons in that way. When I work with people in the workplace, especially in the corporate workplace, everything’s on the table, it has to be, and that includes their work life and a lot of times, they are quite dedicated to their work and where a lot of the issues happen for them are in the workplace. And there, there’s this dance between therapy and coaching that I do in which sometimes one has to veer into one more heavily than the other more heavily but I do find that there’s this mixture that goes together that works best in that kind of scenario.

Alex: It sounds like you have a very adaptable style and, I mean, first of all, I like that definition of the boundaries between mental health and emotional health, emotional wellbeing. For many people, it’s not as clear as it is to us so I think it’s helpful to hear that definition. And especially for therapists that work with high functioning populations, being able to meet the client where they are and not necessarily bring all that therapeutic approach is something that I’ve heard from a lot of coaching talent managers that manage coaching programs and practices in organizations, that that’s a challenge that they see from a lot of therapists that do coaching, that having that very well-defined boundary is not as easy for them because you default to what you know, which for a lot of therapists turned coaches is therapy. So, I find the way you write that down very helpful. Let’s explore a little more about how that dynamic, about meeting the client where they are and being able to shift from that therapeutic lens into coaching lens, can you tell me more about what that looks like, let’s say, in the dynamic of the coaching conversation?

Guy: Sure. So let’s say, just make up an example here, so let’s say I’m talking with the CEO of a certain company and let’s say they’re new to the company and they’ve come in, let’s say over the past few years, pandemic happens, it shakes things up because it shakes things up for everyone, now things have to change and all of that. What they bring, what the CEO brings to that scenario is not just their knowledge and experience as a CEO, as a manager, as a leader, but they also bring their personal stuff, their own baggage, and their own style that they’ve developed, their own perceptual style, like literally how they perceive the world, how they perceive themselves, how they perceive people. They bring their own narrative of their own story to that and that can have very adaptive and very limiting factors, depending on the story, depending on the context. And so when they’re talking to me about real stresses they have, let’s say about the workplace, and I’m hearing them talk about some of the C-suite that they’re working with and that people aren’t performing well and when I’m hearing for the third time that they’re addressing an issue with an executive that clearly is either not getting the issue or getting it and not changing, what that CEO is bringing to that scenario is some of their personal baggage in the sense of, let’s say, they came from history and I might know this or I might go look for it, like what was the history growing up? Were they someone who was very coddled? Were they someone who was entitled, who were catered to, or were they someone who actually couldn’t rely even on their parents because the parents weren’t reliable and they grew up figuring out like, “Okay, I have to do it myself is the bottom line, I’m gonna have to get it done if I want it done”? There’s people who have, I’m just making a dichotomy, but there’s all kinds of stuff, and so let’s say they’re of the school of they grew up feeling like, “I can’t count on the people I need to count on so bottom line as I get it done.” That’s going to impact their perceptions and their leadership and management style in the sense of they’re going to give people too many chances or over function for them rather than and then you’re not actually teaching or managing or leading, then you’re compensating for or enabling. And so if they’re not aware of how their earlier life might be impacting their perceptions as a leader, the relationships they form, the communication that they have, then that’s something I want to bring forth. Now, I might have started there and know that or I might talk to them about like, “It’s interesting that we’re having this conversation about this executive for the third time and I’m not hearing any change in your strategy, you’re still talking the same way you did two months ago when we had that first issue. What’s going on that you’re still around the same, like how many times are you gonna go to the well, like how many times you’re trying the thing that doesn’t work? Why are you stuck there? Why are you not noticing that?” And there’s just an example of something that will be an interaction between, and then once we do know that, then we can get into the coaching part of it in terms of, “Okay, well, how should you then think about addressing these issues with this person and tell me more about the person so I understand their limitations and what would work and what they would hear or what they might not hear well,” so I might even coach them very specifically on how to address it with someone knowing that that someone is less likely to get it if they say it this way because they’ve been saying it that way versus another way. So, I don’t know if that gives enough clarity, but just an example of how I might work in that way.

Alex: No, that’s a fantastic example. Very dynamic. And just you see it in action, and a lot of coaches that are not therapists perhaps are not going to go back to the childhood experiences and anchor on that. And you can be a very successful coach by going back there and using those skills or not going back there and using another set of skills to analyze and break down a situation. So that’s one of, I think, the fascinating things about coaching, there’s no necessarily one pathway for a successful coaching intervention, coaching relationship, and that’s why we call that a coaching practice. So people have different approaches, it’s a practice you can get on your journey to mastery and there’s really a very open road around how you can enable someone to learn more about themselves and create a very good, actionable path forward. I mean, that’s a very dynamic thing to do, which I think hearing your approach made me think about how would I approach that conversation and what would my approach be given that I don’t have that therapeutic skill set, I’m an IO psychologist, so it’s really interesting. I’m sure a lot of our listeners are going to be thinking about how would you deal with a similar situation. Some are therapists, some are not therapists. So, let’s talk a little bit more about emotional health. So, you defined it in terms of that boundary between mental health and emotional health. There are so many things happening all at once, seems like, in our world, we’re just constantly bombarded with Zoom meetings and calendar requests and all the other things happening in our lives. So, for coaches, what are some good foundational components of thinking about serving clients with resources to build out, and I don’t know if building out is the right way to describe it but really to put clients in a good position to be able to be emotionally healthy?

Guy: Part of my mission statement, as it will, just as an individual, is this idea that there’s so much that we know in the field of psychology, and, by the way, let’s just say writ large in terms of psychology, mental health, and that includes coaching and all the wisdom about those things, there’s so much we know and there is no mechanism by which we disseminate that information to the public at large. So I just mentioned earlier on that loneliness, for example, is the equivalent of — chronic loneliness has the same impact on our health and longevity as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It’s a well-established finding. We know loneliness is very dangerous to your mental and your physical health. The public at large doesn’t. So, the American Psychological Association had a press release. I didn’t see it. I mean, I saw it on the website. In other words, we don’t teach any of this. We don’t teach emotional health in schools. We don’t teach it to people. We don’t teach relationship skills to people when there’s so much that’s known about relationship. Trained couples and family therapists, trained couples therapists can predict divorce with accuracies of over 90 percent. The reason we can predict divorce with that kind of accuracy is because there’s certain markers of communication between a couple that are so problematic that if couples have them and don’t change them, they will be either divorced or miserable. If we know that so clearly, why don’t we let the public know that? Most people would kind of want to know. You give out a marriage license, is it that difficult to have a PDF along with it? My point being, there’s just this general malaise when it comes to psychology, it’s poo-pooed, it’s ridiculed in some quarters as well. It’s like just pick yourself up by your bootstraps and ignore your feelings and just marshal forth until you actually do kind of lose it and get horribly depressed and then now maybe you’re seeking help but you should have been seeking it all along. So, I’m sorry, I’m pontificating, but all of which is to say that a lot of what I do or what I find important is I talk about research and I find it, both my patients and when I’m giving talks and certainly in my books and even in social conversations, not that much in social conversation because otherwise I wouldn’t have much of a social life if I did too often, but I do educate about, “Oh, are you familiar with this piece of research? It’s interesting because it illustrates something here is something you should be aware of there,” and I find that people are very receptive to science-based information that will actually help them and the key missing ingredient is to make it very granular and very, very practical rather than tell people, “Oh, you should get here. No, no, you should do A then B then C then D then E and watch out for F and then you’ll get there.” So, for me, the breaking down of how you get from here to there or how you change your habit from an unhealthy one to a healthy one, the how of that is key for helping people actually implement change rather than just hearing it and go, “Oh, that sounds good but what do I do again?”

Alex: No, I don’t think you’re pontificating. I think that’s the point of having great experts in our podcast, to hear them really think through some of the core beliefs and the work that you do and how they get implemented. I mean, it’s probably a really great thing that we live in a time where that idea around like don’t show your emotions, emotions are bad, or boys don’t cry, that kind of perspective, it’s fading a bit, but still there’s residual elements of that and we also live in a time where corporations are really more open to understanding that dealing with emotions at work and addressing not, having a framework around understanding what conversations we should have that we don’t have, which ones we shouldn’t have that we were having, I mean, we really are in a really interesting stage of the development of those conversations in organizations. Where does that legacy come from? Because you’re talking about like the perspective of like sometimes people poo-poo psychology but that made me think about there’s this long history of us not wanting to talk about as a society, not really talking about emotions and having negative connotations with them. Also women being framed as being too emotional and things that really diminish their opportunity in the workplace and say, “Well, men shouldn’t be crying and maybe men, we should be all the executives we have,” like where does that come from?

Guy: So, look, there’s something called a hierarchy of needs. Most people are familiar with the hierarchy of needs. So our needs start with needs for safety, just personal security and safety, then food and shelter, etc., and you go down from there and then when we talk about the hierarchy means, the pinnacle of it was self-actualization or whatever but it’s got to start with this foundation of the basic stuff. Now, we have not been as a society in a place where we can disregard most of those needs because, for example, if you live in Ukraine right now or in certain eastern parts of the Ukraine, you may be less preoccupied with self-actualization in the Donbass region and more about survival. The British expression, “Keep calm and carry on,” was something that was used during the Blitz in World War Two when bombs were falling on everyone randomly every day and there’s nothing you can do about it than just keep calm and carry on, in other words, stuff down your emotions because when you are being shelled or when there’s a world war going on around you, pausing to wonder, “Really, how does that make me feel?” is not necessarily that useful. And so when we’re in an emergency, when we’re in a crisis, it’s not good necessarily to stop and ask ourselves how we feel because we need to be in functional mode, we need to be in survival mode. It’s only truly in the past 40, 50, 60 years, whatever, since World War Two but not even just since World War Two, that we’ve been at a place of global peace and where the standard of living has risen enough for enough people, and certainly not for all and even today, not for all, that we can go beyond the question of how do we manage our daily needs and our survival needs and our just getting food on the table needs to think about emotional wellbeing which comes higher up in the hierarchy. And so that’s new that so many people can actually have some security in their lower base needs that they can have those kinds of needs, like Oprah wouldn’t have been able to be the thing in the 1940s because no one really cares about getting empowered, like how do you mean, with what missile, like, in other words, we were at war, so that’s a recent development, and a good one, thankfully. We’ve evolved as societies and, again, this doesn’t include all people even within any society not in the northern hemisphere or anything like that, North America, not anywhere like that, plenty people who are still struggling very much for their basic needs and survive, but there are many who are not and they can start asking themselves and then we get to this and this actually matters a lot once you’re less worried about survival and less worried about basic needs, getting food on the table, shelter, rent, etc., so that’s why that’s come about more recently.

Alex: Well, that’s a very interesting frame to think about it and it’s both reassuring and makes us feel great about where we are but it’s also scary because we really are at perhaps one of the few, if not the transition point, looking back from the post-war period that has been so good in terms of liberal democracies establishing themselves as the pathway forward. I mean, The End of History, famous book from the 90s, everything’s progressed, that Hegelian concept of the liberal democracy is really the end of history because it represents a movement that history has taken to the point where there’s no real substitute to a liberal democracy. They will evolve, there’s going to be things that change, but the concept of the state as portrayed in this type of government structure and economic system is the omega point of development in terms of human civilization. But, now, when you look at the context of the world today, there’s rising authoritarian regimes that have incredible technological military capabilities. I mean, we are living in a world where perhaps the world order is shifting in balance and, hopefully, that won’t take us back to that situation where we’re thinking, well, it’s almost like we’re in the Donbass region or we are in a macro kind of way, not necessarily like that we would be there, but I hope that the climate is not changing so that we actually go back to saying, “Well, let’s just not pay attention to our emotions because the world is in this phase where there’s a lot of other things that we need to worry about and worrying about my emotions is not kinda where we are.” So I love your description and I think it’s a good way to frame the development of our awareness of emotions and the fact that because the world is in a better place, we can focus on them. Well, I hope that with everything we’re looking from a macroeconomic perspective, we don’t go back to actually shoving down our emotions because the world is in a little bit of disarray, which is almost hard to imagine with all the progress that we see, a lot of it driven by technology, that we would end up in a place where we shut down our emotions, but it is, I guess, it’s yet to be seen. Maybe I’m being a little too fatalistic but I do see a lot of patterns.

Guy: No, I think the skepticism is warranted and I think that we are — it’s very easy to regress, it’s very easy to slip back into war, it’s very easy to slip back into recession, it’s very easy for people who were really focusing on those things to have one financial misstep and really now have to, like it doesn’t really matter whether you feel empowered in your job or not, that’s the one you need and you’re not gonna get another one so just keep it for all sakes and don’t ask yourself how you’re feeling about it.

Alex: Some managers might actually welcome that, because I’ve talked to a lot of people that, although they like empowered employees, sometimes they’re too empowered and they’re more focused on being empowered than actually getting things done. So perhaps there’s a balance there.

Guy: That’s a different thing. I mean, yes, but that’s a different phenomenon that we’re seeing. There is a younger generation coming into the workplace that’s a little less resilient, that’s a little more sensitive. That’s why the whole —

Alex: Could that be because we pay more attention to emotions?

Guy: I think it’s a parenting thing. I think that parenting comes in waves that a lot of people when they have kids are like, “Well, I’m not gonna do what my parents did, I’m gonna swing the other pendulum,” and then it keeps swinging back and forth. But I do think there’s a cultural phenomenon now, the whole cancel culture, part of it is that we can’t be offended because that’s not a tolerable thing whereas if you keep doing that, you’re going to have a lot of people who lack emotional resiliency. And I’m hearing more and more from CEOs that they’re having, let’s say, they might have an all hands or from executives that they’re talking to their teams, they’re talking and something will come up that they’ll address it in a very clear, very strict, kind of like, “Oh, no, no, no, no,” like there’ll be very respectful but firm and they’re hearing from some of the younger employees, “Oh, that was so difficult to sit through, it was so tense, it was so uncomfortable,” and it was like, in other words, yes, it was tense and uncomfortable because somebody screwed up royally and they were called out in a respectful way but it was aired and discussed in the meeting, as it should be. 

Alex: Yeah. 

Guy: And if that’s too uncomfortable for you to sit through, (a), well, congratulations on leading quite a sheltered life because if you haven’t been around conflict in any way, shape, or form, bravo but that doesn’t necessarily serve you because that’s a part, and then, if we actually do slip down again as a society or global society at large, then those people are really going to be in trouble because they’re really not prepared. But I am seeing a lot of that today that there’s a younger generation that are just expecting to not be discomforted emotionally in any way, shape, or form and that’s taking it too far for one main reason, I’ll just say this quickly, is that resilience does not spontaneously come from spontaneous combustion or something like that. Resilience emotionally is only a result of managing and surviving hardships and challenges. And if you don’t have any, if the path has been cleared for you, you cannot have resilience because it’s not — some people start resilience at a higher point than others to start but resilience is something we can all develop and strengthen but it comes from managing challenges and hardships, putting yourself through discomfort physically and emotionally. And if you’re not, then you’re actually weakening yourself in a certain way.

Alex: In the Tao, there’s this saying, “When everything is beautiful, nothing is.” If you can’t build healthy emotional framework or life that involves not hearing all the things that you don’t want to hear, I mean, emotional health comes from embracing the world as it is and finding healthy ways to deal with emotions, not to pretend they’re not there, or, yeah, to be offended by everything. I mean, I think when we’re thinking about that post-World War period, it will be very hard for people emerging from the Second World War to really be so concerned about feeling triggered. And I think feeling triggered also comes from a long history of people being completely insensitive in the workplace and relationships being not quite the way they should be but if you take it the other way, then it actually erodes the whole principle that you’re trying to create so you need to find that middle ground. And middle ground is not where most people, it’s not where we live. It’s hard. That middle ground is hard to accomplish.

Guy: And yet, psychologically speaking, the middle ground, the idea of moderation, the idea of balance, the idea of flexibility, of being able to move from here to there, to be one way to adapt and to change how you think about things and how you’re perceiving things, is what psychological strength is about. I mean, it’s about really being able to deal with things, to bounce back, to work on yourself, but that middle ground is really important. Now, yes, obviously, right after the war and still today, I mean, there’s just a lot of a lot of injustice socially, both gender, race, religion, all of those things, all that bias is still around us and needs managing, needs correction, and there’s a lot of unfairness that needs to be rectified. There’s a difference between rectifying that on the one hand and people saying, “I can’t hear a discussion about that because a discussion about it is offensive,” or, “I can’t hear somebody figuring that out with someone and arguing about it because that’s too much for me.”

Alex: Well, that’s authoritarian, which is the opposite of what the liberal democracy, with that openness about expression of thought, that led to this world that we live in where we have these open societies. If you start to tell people what to say and what they’re allowed to say, that sounds more like what they have in China than what we have in the West. But it sounds nice, because you’re saying, well, I don’t want — it comes from that side of like you’re trying to do good to people, you’re trying to protect, but if you do that the wrong way, it gets operationalized, the opposite of what you’re trying to accomplish and when you look at it from a human development perspective, I think there’s clear development levels, that even saying levels these days, it’s too hierarchical so it’s hard to even find the — see, I’m walking on eggshells around trying to frame this hierarchical developmental model that actually has very clear definitions for the phenomenon we’re talking about. So it starts to become this pervasive thing in society where you want to be a good person and you want to express yourself in ways that are respectful to others, like I don’t think most people like to trigger other people or get off on doing that so I think if we assume that most people are well intentioned, we also should assume that we should have some breadth and expansiveness around how we communicate to each other and not say, “No, you can’t say this or that because it’s triggering.” I mean, what’s happening in college campuses is a travesty to not only education but to creating a society that has a flair for open ideas and communication. You start seeing what you see in countries that oppress their people. So here we’re free but if we are cancelling each other because we’re saying something that someone felt uncomfortable with, we might as well just be in North Korea.

Guy: Right. And by the way, these threats, as you’re saying, obviously, they do come from both the left and the right and the extremes on both sides. Can I say something about the word “triggering” because I have —

Alex: Absolutely.

Guy: I get triggered by the word “triggering.” Here’s the thing, people are either misunderstanding the word or using it incorrectly or assuming something about it which is incorrect. What gets triggered? Our emotions. Not behaviors. Emotions are triggered. What you do with those emotions, how you behave around them, that’s on you. The emotion part is not. If you have a certain history, then your emotions might get triggered, you can’t control that necessarily. I mean, you can in terms of emotional regulation techniques and yada, yada, but, at large, yes, you might get triggered emotionally. It is not a license to behave any way you wish because, “I got triggered, therefore, I get to behave this way.” There has to be a separation between the emotion and the behavior, between the stimulus and the response. And people are confounding the two when they’re using the word, “Well, I got triggered so I did this.” No, you got triggered so you felt this. You then responded to that feeling by doing that. And that is not okay. That’s not that clear to people so I do want to make clear that there is a big difference between those two things.

Alex: That famous line around that is what is free will, like that gap between that stimulus and response so I love that, that’s so powerful because you’re going to get triggered but what do you do once the triggering is the emotional response and then that’s kind of where you are. Well, I had this emotional response to that comment, the response cannot be like, you cannot activate my emotional response. What kind of world is that where we’re trying to not activate each other’s emotions? I mean, emotions are there for a reason, like from an evolutionary biological perspective, I mean, they were probably our most helpful ally as in creating these complex societies that allows us to triumph as a species. So now we’re here and we have all these that we’ve created together, well, let’s not go back to understanding our own responses to other people in a way that is not conducive to building like the next gen of society. It’s like that doesn’t seem like the right pathway. So, no, I thought you put that in a very eloquent way. As you’re saying that, that you were triggered by the word “triggered” and you started explaining what that was, I can see why people watch your YouTube videos because you have that knack to be able — not your YouTube but your TED Talks because that ability to break down a very complex topic and just simplify it, it’s like explaining what trigger is is very powerful because even the word “trigger,” it has some political ramifications these days. And I’m a moderate so I really try to live in the middle and I find ideas appealing on both sides of the political spectrum. What I don’t find very appealing is not being able to express yourself and saying things that are innocuous that are trying to elevate a conversation, trying to not even elevate, just have a conversation with other people and get to the point where you’re labeled as one thing or another because someone disagrees with yours. When you look at, let’s say, a recording of that conversation, you’re like it’s innocuous, it’s really someone trying to express their view to someone that probably has a different view so that they can say something and both people can probably learn something from each other. So that’s what we’re needing. That discourse is dead if we don’t focus on these areas.

Guy: Yeah, and I just want — another thing that I see from that is that, just kind of going back to the coaching idea here, that I’m hearing from a lot of managers at all levels that they’re starting to get confused about what managing means because their inclination is that they need somebody, that they’re working with someone, they have a subordinate, somebody who’s reporting to them who’s not functioning well and they want to manage them but they don’t want to offend them. This worry about offense is tying their hands and I’m like — and here the distinction is not what you’re saying but how you say it so it’s not the message, it’s the how. Offense can be taken from the how. It shouldn’t be taken from the actual message if it’s a managerial message. Managers are allowed to tell someone, “Do this this way. That’s what I need you to do. That’s how we do things here or that’s what’s required of you now.” A manager is allowed to say, “Oh, I’m sorry, we’re having a huge emergency going on,” like I work with somebody who runs a tech company, it’s a tech company, they had a huge tech problem, that thing was about to crash, like that’s an emergency, that’s the whole, and the metadata manager were like, “Well, I can’t really ask people to come in on the weekend.” Yeah, you can. It’s an emergency. That’s the definition of an emergency. It’s not part of your job regularly but you do need to ask that and they were like, “Oh, they’ll find it offensive,” and I’m like what part of — this is an emergency and this is urgent and this needs to be done and people are starting to not be clear about where those lines are and where the lines are should be quite clear.

Alex: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. We’re talking about the post-war period and the state of the world today. Well, you’re competing against countries where they’re not going to think twice about having someone in the office to fix it and their merchants to fix something that is an emergency. So from a geopolitical, this kind of way of relating to each other has ultimate like geopolitical consequences and we’re creating a society that has certain ways of operating, which may be more or less competitive. What’s important for us is that I think, coming from someone that is an immigrant in the US, like these values that we have or these open societies enable us to do incredible things. Our model evolved in a more successful way than models that are more autocratic because that’s where we’re trying to escape from, like, as immigrants, we typically are coming from places that have less freedom to places that have more freedom and what we’re talking about, the way we’re really creating these safe spaces with good intentions is that, ultimately, it may have negative consequences that takes us back to places where we don’t want to go. I just love, as a systems thinker, I’ve always been interested in connecting the dots. So, in our conversation today, just talking to you made me very clear around, well, emotional health is so important. If we don’t understand it well and we misunderstand certain components of it, it can actually lead to shaping the world differently. I mean, it is really such an important topic and we came at it from the perspective of heath and people development, but the dark side of a good thing is still a bad thing. And I think we’ve done a good job of navigating the conversation that is difficult in a way that’s just trying to make sense of it and trying to understand both sides. It all started with just us thinking about that post-war period and where the idea of being more attentive to people’s emotions came from, which is very interesting.

Guy: Yeah, I want to say that a lot of times I get the comments like, “Well, you know, you’re older so that’s what you think,” and, “Okay, boomer,” kind of put down thing. 

Alex: Yeah. 

Guy: And my response to that is always, people don’t say that to my face, obviously, but, online, people leave comments, and my response to that is always like I really wish that, because I think there’s so much that somebody of my generation can learn from the younger generation, I always think that’s true, I can learn from every generation because every generation has the things that they do better and the things that they don’t do as well and so I just wish generations would rather than categorize them as Gen Z and Gen X would be like, okay, but what can I personally be enriched by by taking something from that generation that they do better than I did or that my generation did and vice versa. I think it’s a much more adaptive, enriching, and useful approach than just stereotyping or siloing or just dismissing, and I know plenty of older people who dismiss the younger generation for some of the things we’ve been talking about as like so they shouldn’t be part of the conversation or they don’t really have anything to say and they have so much to say and, in fact, they have much more to say about where the world is going than you probably do, by you, I don’t mean you, I mean the older person, myself, in that sense, and there’s so much I try and learn from younger people because they grew up in a different context and a different world and I want to understand it and that’s one of things that I consider myself very fortunate for and it’s true of a therapist and it’s true of a coach that you get to talk to a lot of people and you get to learn the perspective and the experience of a lot of people and that is one of the most enriching privileges, interesting things about what we do, that it’s like you really get to a window into other worlds that you wouldn’t have otherwise, you’d have to do it on a social level and spend a lot of time doing deep dives with someone where they’re like, “I thought we were just having dinner, leave me alone.” So, the fact that we do that for a living and that we get to have that experience for a living and to vicariously through other people’s experiences enrich and deepen our own understanding of the world and where we’re going and where we were, I think is one of the benefits that not enough people talk about enough. But, for me, it’s like I’m so grateful every day for that.

Alex: So much to unpack there. Learning from different generations, so powerful. It doesn’t happen as much. Bill Maher is one of my favorite comedians and he always talks about how in America, we don’t really respect elders the way other societies do. And, yeah, like, “Oh, boomer,” that kind of approach, actually, I think a lot of the future of coaching is really, there’s a lot of people coming into the profession that are retiring and they have so much to offer and getting the coaching methodology and approach to be able to work with other people, to use that experience in a way where you’re listening to others and framing and reframing and asking questions where they will be conducive to enact their learning, to me, that’s a beautiful thing that is actually something that can empower that cross-generational divide that sometimes exists, to bridge that divide and that gap with the methodology that is really all about listening and, to me, that just has so much potential. When I look at like the boomers retiring, it’s just there’s a wealth of knowledge there and perhaps the way to pass that on is through that coaching approach. And there’s a lot of people coming into the coaching profession, I think, given it’s a great thing to do in your retirement. It’s also great to have young coaches so we have a combination of a lot of different things happening in the industry. But I will second your observation of how enriching it is to listen to a lot of people’s perspectives. And so, Guy, really enjoyed our conversation today. I think it went places, like a good conversation does oftentimes where I wasn’t even thinking about going but I think it shows the range that the emotional health topic has and how it’s very nuanced. It’s both practical and it has a layer of philosophical underpinnings and a history of where we are in terms of our understanding of the topic, which I think it’s fascinating. So, thank you for a great conversation. And I know that you have a fantastic podcast where you do live therapy sessions so can you tell us a little bit more about your podcast? I think our listeners might be interested.

Guy: I just mentioned my podcast because we do live therapy sessions and it might be interesting to people. Yeah, it’s called Dear Therapists, with an S at the end because we’re two hosts, myself and Lori Gottlieb is the other host, and what we do is we’re trying to democratize therapy in the sense of most people don’t really have an idea of what therapy looks like unless they’ve been in it and when they’ve been in it, they only have an idea of what that specific therapy looks like with that specific person and that specific therapist, and people always come to me and they have such — I can talk to a friend and they don’t quite know the difference between what those things are, and so what we do every week, each episode is we get letters, we’re both advice columnists, I write an advice column for TED called Dear Guy and Lori writes an advice column for The Atlantic and we choose a letter, we agree on a letter but we don’t discuss it and then we both show up, she’s in LA, I’m in New York, to session, one of us will read the letter to the other person, we’ll do a little case consultation about it and then we’ll bring in the person who wrote it to do a session. And that session often goes very different than they expect, much like our conversation today. When you talk to therapists and psychologists and the like, you think the issue is here, we think the issue is there, and that’s where we’re going to take it. And the challenge for Lori and I is we haven’t discussed the case, I don’t know where she wants to take it, she doesn’t know where I want to take it, then we have to somehow work in tandem in an organized way, which is, while challenging, do bring some energy to the session. And at the end of the session, we give the person actionable advice that they have to do, it’s usually in multiple parts, you must do this this week, have this conversation, say this, do that, join that, and then we have them call back in and tell us how that went, because what I don’t like about advice is you give it and then you don’t know what happened. Did it work? What did it change? What did that person say? So, in this case, you actually hear how it went and then Lori and I have another kind of case consultation discussion without the person about what we think the issues are and how that went and what we’re thinking about it. So every episode is a full arc of a story but it gives people a good sense of what therapy actually is and this is quite therapy, this is not coaching at all. But what’s interesting about it is that most people, the feedback that we get is that you might listen to an issue that has nothing to do with you and you’ll learn something about yourself from it. Because we typically do go back to the history, we do look at what happened in childhood. And, again, we have an hour to an hour and a half with that person so we have to do it all at once but we can do it all at once, we can find out about the present, we can go back to the past, we can see where patterns got set up, we can see how they’re impacting them and what they need to do to change and find a way to try and get that through to them. And so I do recommend it for people just because it gives a good flavor of what therapy does and you will learn about yourself and it’s kind of like free therapy, it’s vicarious, but it’s a different kind of model, especially the tandem approach of it. So, again, it’s Dear Therapists and I think people might find it interesting.

Alex: It’s very interesting. I like the idea of democratizing therapy in that way and I think coaches perhaps that don’t have a background in therapy will be interested in learning more about what that looks like and I think it’s a really good approach to get them exposed to that. So thank you, Guy. I really enjoyed the conversation. It’s great having you and enjoy the rest of your day over there in the best city in the world, New York City.

Guy: And we’re waiting for you to come. Thank you so much, Alex, for having me in for a very interesting conversation.