After the Whistle: Why Naming Your Emotions Improves Your Life and Performance

What happens when you stop trying to suppress emotions and start learning how to work with them? In this episode, I build on my recent conversation with Amy Morin to explore the connection between emotional awareness and mental strength. We discuss emotion labeling and I also share a real-life example on the power of journaling about your emotions from NBA player, Steven Adams.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Have you ever walked into a meeting, a practice, or even your own home already carrying something from earlier in the day? Maybe you had a call that didn't go your way, or maybe you didn't land the recruit that you thought you were anticipating. Maybe you had a conversation with one of your players and you wish you had a do-over. Or maybe there's just a decision that you've made recently that you're still second-guessing. And even though nothing new has transpired, you can still feel it just sitting there. You notice your heart and your chest still thumping, your mind is still filled with racing thoughts trying to figure out what move or call to make next. But one of the most important things to understand in these moments is that it's not the initial moment or interaction that will keep affecting you. It's what has culminated after. It's the lingering feelings that have been prolonged thanks to your mind. So today in this After the Whistle episode, I want to build on my recent interview with Amy Marin and give you a simple practical way to handle emotions so they don't start managing you or those you lead. Now before we get into Amy's perspective that she shared in our interview together, it's worth understanding why this matters. In psychology, one of the foundational skills for emotion regulation is something called affect labeling, which is basically, in essence, naming what you feel, putting words to what you're feeling. And it sounds almost too simple to be effective, but research consistently shows that when you label an emotion, you actually can reduce its intensity. Now why? Because you're shifting activity in the brain out of the emotional centers and back into areas responsible for language and control. In other words, you're not getting rid of the emotion itself, you're just changing your relationship with it. But most people, they never develop the vocabulary or even the awareness to even recognize what they're feeling in the first place. So here's how Amy described it during my conversation with her on the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 2:01

The first step is sometimes to just name what you're feeling. And like you say, we have these feeling wheels online. You can find a list of feeling words. It's really helpful. Because if I were to ask you to name feelings, you'd probably come up with a handful, mad, sad, scared. But beyond that, we really don't talk about feelings that much. And so it's really hard sometimes just to name how do I feel. So sometimes I'll tell people tape a list on your bathroom mirror when you're brushing your teeth, hopefully twice a day. Look it over and just be like, How do I feel today? I'm a little anxious, I'm a little sad, I'm kind of discouraged. And that helps us to just notice that. And then you take it to the next step. Like, how might this emotion affect me today? Maybe I'm nervous about something. Well, then just knowing walking into this next meeting, if I'm a little nervous about something, what might happen? Well, I might be less likely to take on a new challenge, okay? And how do what do I want to do about that?

SPEAKER_01 2:54

Now, if you're looking for a real life example of how this might apply within the realm of sport, you actually don't have to look too far. Uh, there was a really great recent viral clip of NBA player in Houston Rocket Center, Steven Adams, talking about um his own way of processing his own emotions and working through his own self-doubt through a journaling technique. Now, he shared this on the Between Two Beers podcast. Um, specifically, he said that I write down exactly how I feel, just the raw emotions, even if it's not a fully made sentence. So he starts with no filter whatsoever. He's just trying to get his thoughts, his feelings out of his head and onto paper. But then the next step is he talks about he goes back through and he rereads what he wrote and he responds to what he wrote, particularly by using a different color. And as he described it, he talked about I imagine responding to it as if I'm talking to my 10-year-old version of myself, that 10-year-old version of Steven. And then my response to it is as if I'm the adult version of Steven. Now, the color change actually is what can also kind of help create some separation, some distance here. It helps differentiate the emotion versus the response or the reaction versus the intention. Um, you could also think of this as this is the way to shift from pain to actually viewing your emotions and viewing what you're feeling from a space of wisdom. So now instead of being stuck inside whatever emotion you're encountering, he's simply looking at it, working with it, and responding to it more effectively. This is a great example of emotion regulation at a really high level. Now, this isn't just something that elite performers will do instinctively, though. And there's actually decades of research that supports it. There's a psychologist by the name of James Pennebaker that's shown that writing about your thoughts and emotions can actually help you process them more effectively and develop a clearer perspective. Now, this isn't just about you venting. What you're doing is you're organizing your thoughts, you're organizing your experience so you can make better sense of it. You're in essence creating structure around what you're feeling instead of just getting lost in the static, the mental chatter and noise that oftentimes starts to flood us when we get consumed with how we're feeling, and then next thing you know, things start to kind of spiral for us. Susan David, in one of my all-time favorite books called Emotional Agility, described it this way: In the process of writing, people are able to create the distance between the thinker and the thought, the feeler and the feeling. That allowed them to gain a new perspective, unhook from what they're feeling, and move forward. This is exactly what Steven Adams is, in essence, doing. But now I want to bring this back to your world as a coach or as a leader because whether you realize it or not, this is happening every single day. You might feel the pressure after a loss or a setback, and then it carries over into how you address your team. You might feel doubt about a decision that was made, and then it starts to show up in how you lead your next staff meeting or how you communicate the follow-up to it. You might feel stress about the job, and then next thing you know, that follows you home. The goal, though, here isn't to eliminate our emotions. Like, good luck with that if that's what you try. And one of the things that's great about Susan David's book is she talks a lot about how uh detrimental it can be to try to avoid our emotions, to try to suppress them. Uh, Amy talks about this in my conversation with her as well, because oftentimes when we try to do so, it will manifest itself in actually more detrimental ways later on. So again, the goal isn't to eliminate them. That's not realistic at all. The goal is to stop letting them drive your behavior. And I think again, this is where Amy's framework's useful because she talks about that triad and connection between your thoughts, your emotions, and your behaviors. You don't get to control necessarily what shows up for you, but you do have a say in what you choose to do with it and how you choose to move forward with it. So if you're looking for a practical way to potentially apply this, this is a framework that I've been developing, and I've been sharing this in some different spaces, been sharing it in a couple of keynote sessions that I've done recently. And it's a really simple prompt that you can use. I feel blank and I will blank. Because by f using this response, using this prompt, you're doing two things at once. The first is you're acknowledging the reality, you're acknowledging what you feel, you're accepting it, you're not necessarily getting stuck in it, you're not trying to deny it or ignore it, um, but you're acknowledging where you're at, and then you're reinforcing the choice that you have. You're reinforcing your own agency or your own power, as Amy talked about it in our conversation. So for example, this could sound like I feel anxious and yet I can still trust my preparation. I might feel frustrated and yet I can still choose to respond composed. Like I might feel doubt, and I can still stay aggressive in how I'm making decisions. I might feel nervous about an upcoming conversation, and I will say what needs to be said because I care deeply about this person. Again, you're not denying the emotion, but what you're doing is you're making sure that you don't hand it to the keys to your car, right? This is what oftentimes happens is we become very uh we basically become passengers to our emotions instead of helping steer them. And that doesn't mean necessarily that we are at the wheel controlling our emotions per se, because a lot of people may not realize this, but your emotions actually only last about 90 seconds from a physiological standpoint. So we're not really trying to control our emotions. However, what we are trying to do is make sure we can control and continue to steer our actions and how we move forward. So as we bring this episode to a close, I just want to, like most things on the show, uh, emphasize that like this is maybe kind of simple, but it's certainly not easy to do. I think we all know what that feels like when you you've noticed your emotions kind of spiral on you, and next thing you know, you feel like it's kind of hijacked your day, it's it's hijacked um the rest of a meeting and so forth. Um, and none of us need to necessarily quote unquote win the battle against our emotions. But it can be incredibly useful to start to change your relationship with them. Because the moment that you can actually name what you feel and acknowledge it, that's the moment where you're gonna start to create some space to choose how you want to lead and ultimately how you choose to show up next. And that's what separates good versus great leaders.