E068_How does emotional literacy make a difference to everyday safety leadership?

In today's episode, we explore emotional literacy with our guest and friend of the Safety Collaborators, Dan Newby, an esteemed expert and advocate in the field.

Visit Dan's website, School of Emotions

Dan, the author of several insightful books and founder of the School of Emotions, shares his journey from emotional ignorance to mastery and how it transformed his life and professional practice.

Key Topics Covered:

📍 The journey of emotional awareness: 
Dan recounts how understanding emotions helped him resolve personal and professional challenges.

📍 The impact of emotional literacy on safety leadership: 
Discover how developing emotional literacy can create safer work environments, especially in high-hazard industries.

📍 Emotional literacy vs. emotional intelligence:
 Learn the differences and how these concepts work together to enhance emotional regulation.

📍 Practical steps to enhance emotional literacy: 
Dan provides actionable advice on pausing, noticing, and naming emotions to improve emotional awareness and decision-making.

Why You Should Listen:

Understanding and managing emotions are crucial skills for effective leadership and personal well-being. 

This episode offers valuable insights into how emotional literacy can improve decision-making, create safer workplaces, and boost overall happiness. Dan's insights provide a valuable framework for anyone looking to develop these essential skills. 

Join us for an enlightening conversation that will change the way you think about emotions and their role in your life and work. Tune in today to harness the benefits of emotional literacy!

Thanks for listening!

____________________________________
This episode was produced under Safety Collaborations Limited and now continues as part of Karin Ovari Limited. While we are not currently releasing new episodes, the entire library remains active, and the topics covered are just as relevant today as when they were first recorded.

To learn more about my current work in leadership and communication, visit karinovari.com and the leadership community, The Supervisors Hub.

Connect with us on LinkedIn:  Karin Ovari, Nuala Gage,

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word and leave a review on your preferred podcast player. 
 
 Stay Safe, Stay Well
The Safety Collaborators

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:08

Welcome to. In Conversation with the Safety Collaborators, I am Karen and I am Nuala.

Speaker 1 0:15

Whether you're a safety professional, a leader or an individual committed to making a difference we invite you to join the discussion on creating a culture of safety and care, enabling your team and leaders to design a safer and more productive and collaborative world. What you think you know about emotions may not be the whole story. Today, we explore emotions with our guest and friend of the Safety Collaborators, dan Newby, a champion for emotional literacy, working with educators, leaders, coaches and families worldwide. He believes that emotional literacy is a life skill that can benefit each of us if we take the time to learn, and so do we.

Speaker 2 1:01

As Karen said, today we have the great pleasure of having a discussion with Dan Newby. He is the author of several books the Unopened Gift Field, guide to Emotions, hello Emotions and is the founder of the School of Emotions. We will share links to all of those in the show notes. Dan, it is a delight to have the opportunity to speak with you today. So hello, and would you like to share a bit about who you are?

Speaker 3 1:32

Hello and thank you so much for having me. It's a delight to see you both and it's a delight to be here. Maybe just a couple of things about me. One is that this whole venture into learning emotions really began as a personal pursuit. I was struggling in my life profoundly. My life was, we could say, a mess.

Speaker 3 1:53

I didn't know where to turn. I knew I had emotions, but what I didn't realize was the extent of my emotional ignorance. And once I began to uncover that, I realized that by developing that, it resolved a lot of issues in my life, solved a lot of problems. Later I began to apply that professionally as a leader, as a coach, and I found that it's an incredible domain to work in. It supports my clients and I find that they have a very similar experience to what I had is life becomes much simpler, things begin to make a lot more sense and we all make much better choices. So that's that's how I got here and I'm delighted to have this conversation with you.

Speaker 1 2:39

I love that you know. I think what you say is real for everybody. What we think we know about emotions is just so far from what we believe them to be, and we'll get into a little bit about what is an emotion and how they impact us. I mean, we have known each other, I realized the other day, since about 2016, thereabouts, and we have some linkage in terms of our coaching studies in ontological coaching and that ontological space, which, for people, it means that we coach to the human soul, and emotions and moods are a very important part of that. And then we continue that journey with bringing that emotional literacy into the world that Manuela and I work in, which is high hazard industry. So how can emotions make a difference to everyday safety leadership now? So that's kind of how we got here, and, nils, you have the more recent journey into the relationship, I guess.

Speaker 2 3:39

Well, yes, and that has been doing the Certificate in Mastery of Safety Coaching and just the impact of realizing how many emotions we have. We live in such a small sphere of emotions and when we have a look at that top 20 list of the emotions that really impact in our safety and in that environment, it has been so incredibly eye-opening. Dan, I would love to ask you why is this conversation around emotions so important in the work that we do?

Speaker 3 4:10

I would say fundamentally because, although we think we make decisions rationally, we think there's a lot of evidence that we don't.

Speaker 3 4:18

We make choices driven by our emotions and they're highly dependent on our emotions.

Speaker 3 4:25

And so what can happen is this has happened to most people they think they're going to say yes or no when somebody asks them to do something, and then they say the opposite when they're actually asked.

Speaker 3 4:40

And the reason is is because we, we do think we will say yes, but there's something in us, an emotion, that is causing us to hesitate or to decline the situation. So one of the things, by understanding our emotions, by knowing what they are, noticing them, being able to name them, understanding their purpose and their structure, them being able to name them, understanding their purpose and their structure, what it allows us to do is to be, I would say, more integrated in the way we make choices and the way we make decisions and the things we say. And I think we can live in that sense more clearly, according to our values, according to our standards, what's important to us, what we care about, and we can do so with ease, with much more ease than we do otherwise. You know, a lot of times people talk about. They have a fight between their head and their heart.

Speaker 3 5:31

Well okay, yes, we do. They don't always agree, but there are techniques for bringing those into alignment. So I think there's benefits both in terms of, I would say, the accuracy of our choices, in terms of their alignment with what we care about and who we are. When we don't make choices that we thought we were going to make, we can begin to understand why, when we do things that are out of alignment with what we claim our values to be, we can resolve that for ourselves. So, again, it takes in my world, in my view, it takes a lot of mystery out of life and being human and why we do the things we do.

Speaker 2 6:10

I love that. A friend of mine once described emotions to me as a stop sign. You can either go almost running through the stop sign and just go wherever it takes you, or you can have that opportunity to pause and go. Well, what is actually going on in this moment? What am I feeling? What is the name that you put to that? You can tell me how many emotions actually are out there, but I think we only really think about nine or 12 or something silly like that.

Speaker 3 6:39

Well, there are studies that show that people like us tend to use the same 15 or 20 words regularly to name our emotions. We never vary from that same 15 or 20. But in my work there's more than 200, 250. And just out of curiosity, with the whole emergence of AI, I went to GPT and I asked it two questions. One do you have emotions? And it said no, of course not, because those are a human quality.

Speaker 3 7:09

So I thought, okay, at least he's being honest and then I asked him well, how many emotions are there, how many emotions do humans have? And I thought the response was fascinating. It said there's no way to calculate, there's no number that can be put on that, because human emotions are so nuanced that there is no way to count. And I thought that was quite insightful because I would agree with that. I would say, if we get to a hundred emotions that we can recognize, name, we understand and that we use in our lives, I would say we're quite masterful. But we can go beyond that. There are 200 or 300.

Speaker 3 7:52

It's not always essential every single one, but if we recognize that it's like a palette of colors, they get mixed. Our ability to separate and identify even closely placed emotions, for instance like apprehension and anxiety, the more accurately we can articulate what we're experiencing emotionally, the clearer we are about what we're experiencing in life. So for me that's the value is when we can understand the nuance of them. Then they become available to us to use. And you know, one analogy I would use is if you only knew the word fruit, then if you wanted a fruit, even if you wanted a banana, you could only ask for a fruit, and whatever the person gave you is whatever they interpret as a fruit, and you can be much more accurate about fruit if you know banana, apple, persimmon, pear, pineapple.

Speaker 3 8:57

Then you can articulate exactly what you're experiencing, what you're eating, but also you know what to ask for. You can be more precise in what you're requesting or how you're explaining to someone your experience. So I think that that's how it is with emotions too. If we only know the word anxiety, which is very popular, and if we're not clear on what's the relationship between anxiety and apprehension and uncertainty and resentment and disappointment, then we'll tend to call a lot of things anxiety that are not necessarily anxiety. In a social conversation. That may be fine, but if we really want to understand what's going on with us or in our work as managers, leaders, coaches, the more precisely we can articulate what's going on emotionally, the clearer the situation will be to all of us.

Speaker 1 9:51

I just want to throw in here. I can't more highly recommend your books on this. For that very reason, I have a book here that has got tags all over it, because there are some that I'm constantly talking and sharing with others to help understand that nuance. But for myself, just I'm feeling something what is this? It's not what I think it is. Let me go and have a look at Dan's book. The Unopened Gift is the one I use a lot because I think there's such an apt title. It really is a gift, and the more we can open up that gift, the more we understand. So I'm constantly going back there. So yeah, I just wanted to throw that in there.

Speaker 3 10:34

Well, I'll tell you a secret, which is I do that as well, not to my book, necessarily, but, for instance, I was thinking this week about the word ennui, which comes from French, but it's a word we use in English and it means a kind of discomfort or annoyance or irritation. But I would do exactly the same thing. I would go to an online etymology website to look up the root and see what the meaning is, and then I would deconstruct it the way I deconstruct emotions, and that's actually, I think, the lifelong pursuit. I think we continue to build our emotional literacy exactly by that. So, whether we're using my book as a reference or something else as a reference, that practice is actually at the root of how we become emotionally literate, because once we understand an emotion accurately, then we notice oh, I can remember a moment in my life when I felt exactly that I had that story, I felt that in my body it fits, the purpose fits, and then we can identify that emotion anytime. And then, if somebody else names that emotion, then we go oh yeah, I know what that emotion is because I felt that in my life, but also I understand it in all these different ways. So I think there's no better way to build your emotional literacy, your emotional understanding. Build your emotional literacy, your emotional understanding, which, for me, leads to emotional agility, emotional resilience, the ability to regulate our emotions, to navigate our emotions.

Speaker 3 12:13

I think that's what many people struggle with. It's that they know they have emotions, but one. They can't articulate them, they can't name them, which is actually much more difficult than it sounds. Just put a name on your emotion. But the other thing is they don't know what to do with them. Ok, so now I know I'm angry. What do I do with that? And I think that's when emotional literacy is so valuable, because you realize that, ok, that's one emotion I'm feeling anger, it's there for a reason and as a purpose. Okay, that's one emotion I'm feeling anger, it's there for a reason and has a purpose, all of that. But if it's not serving me, then I have 200 more I could choose from that. I know I could shift to that emotion if I think it would serve me better. This is the beauty of it. It's not just knowing about emotions, it's knowing emotions from the inside out so that we recognize them, but we also have latitude for what we do with them.

Speaker 1 13:10

So what is the difference between emotional intelligence and emotional literacy, if any?

Understanding Emotional Literacy for Regulation

Speaker 3 13:17

We all know about emotional intelligence now because it stormed onto the scene 25 years ago. Daniel Goldman put the name on it and suddenly everybody went, oh my gosh, yes, that's right, we do have this thing called emotional intelligence. I think that's lovely. But if you read his work or other people's work on emotional intelligence, one of the things they say that's a piece of that is emotional literacy. We have to understand emotions. Of that is emotional literacy, we have to understand emotions.

Speaker 3 13:48

So the way I see the relationship is you know, all of us grew up in situations where somebody wanted to assess our intellect. So they gave us an IQ test. And what did the IQ test tell you? Well, the idea of it, at least, was to assess your intellectual capacity. How good are you at learning, how good are you at processing intellectually? But if you think about what do we do with kids to support that or to build that, we use emotional literacy as a tool. We teach them the alphabet, to read, to write, and the amazing relationship there is, that literacy with language gives us access to our intellect, but it also is a tool to build our intellect. So there's this amazing relationship between intelligence and literacy linguistic literacy.

Speaker 3 14:38

Well, if we move to the emotional side. I see it exactly the same way. Now we go oh, we've got emotional intelligence, let's assess it. So we give people EQ assessments. What's the idea? It tells us about their emotional capacity, how much do they have they could develop, how big a force could it be for them in their lives?

Speaker 3 14:58

But just measuring either of those IQ or EQ doesn't increase them. It just is a snapshot of your potential. So what do we need? We need a tool with emotions, exactly like we needed a tool with intellect. And the tool with emotions in my world is emotional literacy. And that's the pausing is all of a sudden, you know, we pause to notice our emotions and then we name them. Oh, okay, now I know what that emotion is. And then we say, well, what's the story of that emotion and what's my impulse and what's the purpose, why is it here and is it helping me or is it a barrier? So we we have all of that that we can do once we name an emotion and then we can determine if we want to stay there and leverage that emotion or move to a different emotion. So I think the relationship is really just simply that emotional literacy is a subset of what we tend to look at as emotional intelligence.

Speaker 3 15:59

But, if we take emotional intelligence and emotional literacy, those two together give us something we call emotional regulation. It's the ability to choose emotions in the moment that will best serve the situation or the relationship. I think that what all of us would benefit from is greater emotional regulation. Nobody controls their emotions, but we have this energy that we could put to work for us if we understood it better and if we weren't afraid of it and if we didn't dismiss it and if we really saw it, like you said, as a tool, as a life skill. And for me that's what I do. It's helping people in a very practical sense, develop their emotional literacy so it can be a tool for them both in their professional lives and in their personal lives.

Speaker 2 16:53

I love that around emotional regulation. I mean it's just brilliant.

Speaker 2 16:56

But, the link between IQ. Yes, there's something, but we've got a lot that we can learn under that. And, jake, do we have the same interpretation and understanding? And I'm going to guess that it's similar with emotions, because I might see anxiety in a certain way and have an understanding around what that is based on the knowledge and that I have around it. But, like we were talking about fruit earlier, there's many types of apples there's green apples, there's red apples, there's granny smith. So do people tend to have a similar understanding or interpretation of emotions? And if they don't, how do we help get that similar interpretation or alignment?

Speaker 3 17:38

So one thing to think about with emotions is we never see them directly. You don't see the emotion. You see the way someone expresses their emotion, we hear what people say, which comes from emotions, but you don't see the emotion directly. So we have to live in the world of interpretation. But what's interesting is, if I ask you what emotion you're in right now, what will you do? You'll check what you're experiencing, what you're feeling, what you're experiencing, what you're thinking, and then you'll say to me oh, I'm feeling the emotion of apathy. Okay, great, but that was an interpretation. That was your interpretation of what apathy is for you. Perfect, now, I have an interpretation too for you. Perfect, now, I have an interpretation too. So what we need to do is we need to agree on a shared interpretation.

Speaker 3 18:30

The challenge often is that people have never articulated what an emotion means to them. So, for instance, let's just take sadness. So when I ask people so what's the narrative or the story, what is sadness to you? And what most people will say is oh, what it means is that I've lost something. Fair enough, but I would say there's more to it than that I would say. So anything you lose will produce sadness for you. Well, not anything, okay. So what's the other criteria? Well, the other criteria is it has to be something you care about. Dog, your dog runs away. Will you be sad? Well, that depends. If you love the dog, yes, you will be sad, but if you found the dog annoying and irritating, no, actually you might be happy, you might not be sad. So sadness has to be always. You've lost something you care about. And I would say there's even one more piece, which is it's not just that you've lost it, but you believe you have lost it. So sometimes we believe we've lost something and we feel sad. And then we find it and we're happy. But if you work with somebody and you have this conversation about let's agree what sadness means when we use it in our conversation, or if you're working with a team or a company, you can do the same thing. But this is something that has to be done in order for us to be sure that we're talking about the same thing.

Building Trust With Emotions

Speaker 3 20:07

But I want to point out this doesn't just happen with emotions. If I say the word house and I ask you to describe your house, and I ask Karen to describe her house and I describe my house, they'll all be different. There are commonalities that allow us to recognize house, but if we want to build a house together, we better have the same set of plans, because otherwise we will never succeed, and it's no different than that. Because otherwise we will never succeed, and it's no different than that.

Speaker 3 20:38

We need a shared interpretation of what our emotions, of each individual emotion, the relationship between emotions. So at least at the beginning those conversations are necessary to be sure that we're in the same conversation. But once we have those in a team or in a relationship, then we don't have to do it again, because now we have agreed on. What does the word sadness mean to us? And the reason why it's so important with emotions is because we can't see them and because most of the time people haven't articulated very clearly, even for themselves, what's the meaning of that emotion. In a general way, yes, but in a very precise way, generally not.

Speaker 1 21:23

I'm sitting here hearing the conversation that you, noah, and I were just having with a potential client, and one of the things that we're going to do step one is to have what I'm going to call a reality check session, which is really is to have what I'm going to call a reality check session, which is really about getting the senior leadership team first to come together on some form of alignment about what is their culture of safety, what is it that they want, because we've already taken some small assessment and the gap is enormous, and a lot of that will actually come down to their emotional interpretation of what all of that is. So this is going to become a really important part of that conversation.

Speaker 3 22:02

And in the work you do, as I understand it, even the word safety. You have to do the same thing, for what is safety?

Speaker 1 22:10

That's an emotional word.

Speaker 3 22:12

Because safety means different things. That mean Because safety means different things, and you can see aspects of it, but we need to agree on.

Speaker 3 22:20

When we say a situation is safe or unsafe, what does it mean? And in different situations it may mean different things. But then, beyond that, you can say with emotions. You know what? Whatever my standard is for safety, there are emotions related to that. They can be fear, hope, optimism, they can be pessimism, they can be cynicism, it can be faith. I mean, lots of emotions are connected with a sense of what is and isn't safe in our lives, and so I would say that it's not just what does safety mean, but what's underneath that. That has produced that interpretation of safety.

Speaker 3 22:59

It's something you can spend an enormous amount of time on, but I think, in the interest of clients and efficiency, we at least have to have the basic conversation to articulate what do these mean when we say them in this context. Then we're free to move forward, but with emotions, this is the piece that I think people skip over, because many people's interpretation, even in the simple question, what is an emotion? Right? What do they say? It's a feeling. Well, I would say it's more than that Other people say. If you look up the dictionary definition, it says it's an affective state, meaning you feel something in it or it affects you in some way. Yeah, yeah, those are fine.

Speaker 3 23:40

But when we say the word emotion, we need to agree what that means, and so we need to do an exercise together to articulate that, so that it's set for our conversations, and then we can move forward and we can work with emotions as a tool, rather than something that we feel embarrassed about or we want to avoid or we're uncomfortable with. It's just a tool. It's just the energy that moves you, or the energy that causes you to move. It's what animates you in life. That's the word comes from. So this is where I always feel like I need to begin. When I work with people, in whatever domain, I'm working with them, and then we can move into okay, and how do we apply this? How can we use this to help you better understand your situation and make the choices that you want to make, and make them stick?

Speaker 2 24:35

With that particular client. Actually, about a week or two ago, him and I were having a conversation around complacency. And it was just at the moment when I was working through in the course around complacency and curiosity. And what complacency is Just having that conversation. You know, when you're looking at someone, you can just see the light bulbs starting to come on. And it was just amazing because the conversation I had having and I still think I need way more understanding around those two emotions but the limited understanding that I had already gained took the conversation down a completely different path and it was no longer this oh, people are complacent because they're lazy. It was because people believe that they know enough or doing things well enough. And then how can we shift that to going into curiosity and a conversation around that? And it was just so lovely to see in real life for me in that moment because this is really the first time that I'm diving into understanding emotions to this depth and degree how the conversation changes.

Speaker 3 25:47

Yeah, I think it's lovely. I think one of the things you've done and that we need to do if we're going to work with emotions is we need to quit thinking about them as positive and negative.

Speaker 3 25:57

We do that because some emotions are comfortable and some are uncomfortable. But we've confused that to think that that means they're good or bad, or positive or negative, and many people would put curiosity in the good emotions bucket and they would put complacency in the negative emotions bucket. But if you just look at the meaning of it, if you look at complacency, I would say it means exactly what you just said. Well, I'm not going to put any energy into it because I believe that it's good enough already and if you think about that, there's actually a big benefit to that.

Speaker 3 26:30

Then you're not spending energy trying to improve, or change things that you believe don't need to be changed or improved. Now, you may be blind to something, that's true, but the whole purpose of complacency as an emotion, I think, is to help us save that energy to put into things that are more urgent or critical to us. So complacency in itself isn't good or bad, it's just an emotion, and in that emotion we have a certain impulse and a certain story. But you're exactly right. Then what we can do is we can question that. Right, we can bring curiosity. Well, really, are things good enough the way they are? Do they meet our safety standard, or would there be a benefit to putting energy into improving them?

Speaker 3 27:18

This is exactly how I work with emotions is let's listen to the story. What emotion is producing that story, and then, do we want to stay in that story? Do we want to stay in that way of behaving and seeing the world, or is maybe, is it worthwhile to explore something else? And if so, what's the emotion that can help us most to explore other possibilities and then decide whether to pursue them or not?

Speaker 4 27:47

Do you want your people to feel comfortable speaking up, asking questions and sharing ideas? If you answered yes, then sign up to join us on Zoom, thursday, july 11th, from 2 to 3 pm, uk time, and unlock your team's potential with our Introduction to Psychological Safety complimentary masterclass. Register your place via the link in the resource section of today's show notes. Spaces are limited, so get in quick. Now on with the show.

Speaker 1 28:17

I love it. My mind is going in all sorts of directions right now on how we can help people understand all of this a little bit better or at least feel more comfortable with who they are and how they feel on any given time and how they're interpreting that and how will that impact them in what they're doing in the next minute, sort of thing.

Speaker 3 28:39

One of the biggest changes that we could institute or create in terms of our relationship with emotions is we've been actively taught to distrust emotions. We have said, we have been taught get them out of thinking if you want to make a good decision, right, they interfere with clear thinking. You can't trust them. They'll lead you astray. So lots of us receive this message in lots of different ways.

Speaker 3 29:06

I still see this in television programs and read it, but the thing is is that an emotion is just giving you information.

Speaker 3 29:15

It's not telling you what to do, but it's giving you information that doesn't come from anywhere else. So, being able to trust that, well, emotions exist because they're there to support me in some way, even if it makes me uncomfortable, and to listen to them and then to make our own assessment is what that emotion suggesting to me. Does that fit with how I see things and am I going to accept that information or not? It's not automatic and I think this building trust with the information that we get from emotions and trusting that they're not there to hurt us or they're not there to lead us astray, I think that's a huge step because we're working against decades, maybe centuries, of a message that was the opposite, I would say. We can find lots of situations where emotions are indispensable and help us, and if we see those, then we begin to say, well, maybe there's a different answer, maybe there's something there that we're overlooking that every single human being has access to. Well, wouldn't that be wonderful.

Speaker 1 30:27

You don't have to buy it, you already have it All you have to do is pay attention to it and develop it.

Speaker 1 30:34

Yeah, yeah, I think the words curiosity and wonder, but even those two words, emotions have a whole unpacking to do. But if we can help people shift into, let's say, a mood of curiosity, where it shows up more regularly, and give yourself some efficacy around, okay, this is what I'm feeling and that's okay. Now what? Yeah, yeah, now what, yeah and. And in that question is a choice. We can choose what we do with it. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3 31:10

I completely agree. I think this is the other thing that many people didn't grow up understanding is that they can shift their emotions. In fact, we do it intuitively. Let's imagine you're feeling I don't know, disappointed. You're really disappointed about something. And then a friend calls you up and says hey, why don't you come to my house? I'm having a little dinner party. What's going to happen to your emotion? Even if you're deeply disappointed, you are probably not going to go to their house wearing disappointment. You will find a way to shift into something that's more socially engaging than disappointment, and so we do this. We already know if we pay attention, we can do this.

Speaker 3 31:56

The only thing I'm suggesting is let's do it intentionally. Let's recognize what is the disappointment. What does it mean? Oh, I had an expectation or hope that isn't being fulfilled. What can I do about that? Is there anything? Or shall I just hold on to that disappointment? Let it be there. Choose the emotion. I want to go to this gathering in and work towards that emotion, because that emotion is the one that's going to produce the best outcome for that dinner party. We can do this. We just that dinner party. We can do this.

Speaker 1 32:26

We just have to learn how to do this and it can be done, and it can be taught raising awareness that that's actually what's happening all the time, whether we're in control of it or not, or aware, might be better yeah that, if we can always control it, but yeah I hope you're aware of it at least.

Speaker 2 32:47

And it begs a question that if a person wants to grow their emotional literacy, where would you recommend they start?

Deepening Emotional Literacy for Well-Being

Speaker 3 32:55

the first two steps are exactly what you said pausing, so designing times during your day, when you pause for two minutes, for three minutes, for a minute and just ask yourself the question what emotion am I in right this moment? So the first thing is noticing and to notice. We have to pause. But actually because we're so busy, people are so engaged in doing that, that practice is quite difficult for some people even just to set aside moments to pause and ask themselves what emotion am I experiencing right this moment. You don't even have to go deeper than that, it's just to notice what's the emotion and then to put a name on that emotion.

Speaker 3 33:39

One of the exercises I do with people is I ask them to track that, to find a way, randomly, four times a day, pause, notice, name your emotion, write it down, create a list, just a chronological list of the emotions. You don't have to assess it, you don't have to write like a diary there's a journal about it Just name the emotion and then, after a week, go back and look at that list and see what you noticed, because what people notice is oh well, I only used like 12 emotions this week, but you know what? I bet it's more than that. Based on what Dan has told me, I had one woman do that. She said oh my gosh, I didn't realize how often I feel aggravation or annoyance. I must be horrible to live with.

Speaker 4 34:28

I don't know how my family puts up with me.

Speaker 3 34:29

But she said you know what? I never noticed it before, and now because I see it written down. That's right. That is one of the emotions that I experience frequently. So now I know there's something that I would like to shift emotionally. Sometimes people have an expectation that they'll see joy on the list and they look at the list and no joy. Hmm, that's interesting. Does that mean this week I didn't feel joy in any moment? So what it does is just that simple noticing and naming helps people begin to articulate and shine a light on what's their emotional pattern.

Speaker 3 35:08

And if they don't judge it, if they don't make themselves wrong for what they write down, and if they're honest, they begin to see patterns that sometimes it reinforces what they believe about themselves, and sometimes they're like, okay, that's really good. And other times people say, oof, now I'm seeing something I would like to change. So the very most basic thing we can do is notice and name.

Speaker 1 35:31

I love it. We could talk for hours on this. I've done this many times, but just listen to you sharing that wisdom that you have, and funny enough, it always gives me joy. You have, and it's funny enough, it always gives me joy. I always feel joyful in these conversations with you. So, as time goes by, how do you see your work evolving or making an impact into the future? What's? A little bit more into the future for you.

Speaker 3 35:59

So I think I've always approached it in a very general sort of way.

Speaker 3 36:03

So anybody could read the Unopened Gift and they could apply it to their circumstances. Sometimes I'm doing things that are more specific. The book that I just released, this last month, is called Dignity in Policing. It's working in emotional literacy and regulation, but in the domain of law enforcement. And the co-author, but in the domain of law enforcement and the co-author, that's his work, working with police departments and working with them on both assessing emotional intelligence. But now, how do they develop emotionally, when that's always been suspect, that's always been dismissed.

Speaker 3 36:41

Police officers have generally been seen that the way to survive is to be stoic. Right is to put away your emotions, but the emotions are still there. Just as a small example of how critical this is in the US more police officers die from suicide than are killed in the line of duty, and that has to do with their emotional well-being, and so the level of depression, the level of alcohol and substance abuse, the level of partner abuse, domestic abuse, all of these things are very high for police. The problem with that, from my perspective, is, even though police departments have programs, they have therapists, they have psychologists to work with, the average police officer in their career has 180 what we might call trauma events, so events that have a serious emotional impact on them. Well, when you think about that, no quantity of psychologists is going to resolve that. They have to develop it for themselves. They have to develop their capacity to experience and process and work with and shift and understand their emotions. If they don't do it, nobody can do it for them. So, although there are wonderful programs being done, there's also emotional barriers to people enrolling in those programs. Right, there's shame, there's harassment, there's guilt. So unless in the whole ambience of law enforcement there's a shift in terms of their understanding and recognition of emotions, then I think things won't shift.

Speaker 3 38:31

We selected dignity as kind of the uber emotion, because dignity is that you believe you have inherent worth as a human being, no question about it. That's where it comes from, in Latin comes from worth, and so you believe that you have value. When you think about being a police officer, how often do you hear that you're wrong, you're bad, you're abusive. The stories in the press are astonishing sometimes. So if they can't create, generate and bring dignity from the inside out, it will not be available to them. So I think what's happening with my work is they're still general, but there's more and more focused in particular domains, and that's why we're having this conversation with you. You work in a particular domain, but this is probably the first time I've ventured so deeply into a specific domain and applied what I know in association with what someone else knows about that area and the challenges that the people in that area face.

Speaker 1 39:34

Wow. I have to say that was quite a scary revelation actually, and it makes me realize that it's not going to be just that industry or domain. The conversation here in this country around mental health is enormous, and we have this conversation from time to time. I think, well, OK, we want to fix mental health, but how about we go back a few steps and help people understand what their emotions are at this moment? How do we help increase emotional literacy? That may actually assist with I mean, there's clinical sides of things, but I think there's lots of people who are just feeling anxious or sad you know the cost of living and all sorts of things and if we can help them maybe come to terms with how they're feeling or their emotions around, that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to change the situation, but it may also help them to recognize that it's normal, it's not something abnormal.

Speaker 3 40:29

I think one of the distinctions we can make the subtitle to the book Dignity and Policing is how emotional well-being saves lives, families and careers, and I think there's a big distinction still to be made between emotional well-being, which comes from building your emotional literacy, being comfortable with emotions, understanding, being emotionally agile, resilient, so you can resolve your own challenges, your day-to-day challenges, emotionally, and one of the things we put in the category of mental health that can only be resolved by adjusting a chemical balance or by dealing with some truly deep trauma or something.

Speaker 3 41:11

There's two pieces here that we've kind of put in the same bucket, and I would argue that probably 90% or more of the challenges that we individually face day to day we could resolve by elevating our emotional competence. There are always things that will be cases that can only be dealt with medically, and I think that's fine. But you know what? It's no different than physical, right, we have physical well-being and then you have illness that requires the attendance of a medical expert, but we haven't quite yet distinguished those two. But this is why I would advocate for emotional literacy beginning as young as possible, with three-year-olds, because when you grow up with that, then it looks completely normal From the very beginning. You can resolve issues for yourself that you couldn't or that I couldn't because I didn't have that tool. But now we have it. Now it's emerging. Slowly it's working its way into education, but I think the more quickly it does, the better off we'll all be.

Speaker 1 42:21

We'll all be moving forward.

Speaker 2 42:23

Completely. I remember a friend of mine. Her little one was having a bit of a moment and there were tears and all sorts and her husband walked up and looked at him and said come on, my boy, carboys don't cry. I was so proud of her because she went stop, carboys do cry. Everybody cries and had a very different kind of dynamic in conversation and that was so special, the fact that she was also very comfortable to just say stop, that's not the way it is. Let's have a better conversation, let's help our little one grow up to understand that it's okay. But now what do we do?

Speaker 3 43:02

The other thing that can lead to is well, what is crying and why do we have tears related to emotions, and it's not just sadness or it's not just disappointment. We cry with joy. We cry when we're happy.

Speaker 3 43:18

So what does it really mean when we cry? Well, from an emotional perspective, it means you're touching something that's deeply important to you. So the question I would have for that cowboy is to say, okay, well, there's something really important to him going on right now. What is that right? What is it that you're experiencing that's so important to you that it's spilling out in terms of tears? Because that can help him understand too. So I think lovely what happened in your story, and we can see that there's so many more pieces here that we could put into play that would normalize emotions, allow us to acknowledge that they're just part of every single one of us as a human being in the world. Every human being has emotions. So even if you don't know somebody's culture or background or family situation, one thing you do know about them is they do have emotions and they have the whole range of emotions.

Speaker 3 44:17

And when they speak, they will speak from emotions, which means you have an entry point with them. You already have something deeply in common with them, even if it doesn't appear that you do so for me. I think that's lovely, because I don't have to know everything about everybody. If I just know they have emotions and I know how emotions work, then I'm already off to a great start in terms of creating a relationship with them.

Speaker 1 44:44

My goodness me. I'm sure this could go on for some time, but let's wrap up.

Speaker 3 44:49

Okay.

Speaker 1 44:49

Do you have any last words you want to share with our people, our listeners?

Speaker 3 44:54

The only thing I'd say is that learning about emotions can be challenging. I mean, it can be scary sometimes, it can be uncomfortable, but not knowing about emotions can be scary and uncomfortable too. So I think in the end you have to decide for yourself how do you want to live life. And I will say that every ounce of energy I've ever put into learning about emotions has paid off, and my life is so different it's unimaginably different than it was when I lived in emotional ignorance. It's so much calmer, it's so much freer, it's so much more pleasant. There's just so much about it. There's so much more gratitude. And it's not because I was trying so hard to achieve those, it's just emotions and emotional learning bring those.

Speaker 1 45:44

So I would just invite people to dip a toe in the water and see what they discover now I'm going to guess that that doesn't mean you never get angry or sad or any of those emotions, because they're just healthy emotions well, I have the full range of emotions.

Speaker 3 46:02

I get emotionally stuck sometimes but the the difference is I know they're not permanent, I know I can shift them, I know I can come to understand them and I know they're there to help me in some way. So just knowing that gives me a completely different perspective on emotions than I used to have. So no, it doesn't make you less emotional. It just means you can navigate them with greater ease.

Speaker 1 46:27

Dan, thank you so much for joining us today and, as always, it's just wonderful to have conversations that matter. We have learned so much in this conversation Huge, and could just continue on, so really, really appreciate it. Someone wants to join the School of Emotions? They can do that. They can visit wwwschoolofemotionsorg.

Speaker 3 46:54

No world and they can find me on LinkedIn. If not, they write to you and you'll tell them Exactly. I'd be delighted.

Speaker 1 47:02

So, of course, as Dan just said, connect with us as well at safetycollaborationscom, where you will find the show notes for this episode and links to Dan's world of emotions.

Speaker 2 47:15

Thank you for joining us today. It is always lovely to have conversations that matter To learn more about creating a culture of safety and care. Please visit our website safetycollaborationscom to access our show notes, resources and guides. Leave us a message via the message us section on the show notes page and we'll get back to you.

Speaker 1 47:37

You can also join our community on social media by following us on our LinkedIn pages Safety Collaborations Karen Avari and Noorla Gage and on our new Safety Collaborations social channels YouTube, facebook and Instagram. Our handle Safety Collaborations is much the same. Sharing is caring. Follow us on your favourite podcast platform. Leave us a five-star review. It would be awesome. Doing these things helps us to grow and share our collective conversations. Till next time stay safe and stay well.