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00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the show. This is better than Yesterday. I'm watch Gainsburg and this podcast is here to help you with useful tools and useful conversations to help make you all day to day better than yesterday. Every episode since twenty thirteen. Thanks for being a part of the show. If you've never listened before, hello, welcome. If you have, then you would know. I am writing my third book based upon the podcast. So I'm going back through the archives and finding so much amazing stuff, too much to put in this draft of the manuscript. So I just want to make sure you can hear it because I don't know how much is going to end up in the book. So I wanted to bring these things to you today. Today we are going to look back at one of my conversations with the brilliant Susan David. She spent many many years as an emotions researcher at Harvard before she distilled everything that she found Harvard, yes, the place in Massachusetts. Before she distilled everything that she found into a single and quite brilliantly confronting idea that uncomfortable feelings are the of admission to a meaningful life. It's such a brilliant line. I refer to it all the time because it sounds almost too simple, But there's a system that exists underneath what she's talking about, something that she calls emotional agility. She's written a brilliant book all about it. But I have four fantastic skills, brilliant takeaway things that she brought in our initial conversation, which you can hear if you go back in the podcast feed, you can find it. And I'm going to give you these four fantastic ideas today because there's a particular kind of exhaustion that can come when you're fighting with what's going on in your head. You know this feeling. You know, I've both been there. You're on your phone not because you want to be fingering your screen, but because the thing that you do not want to think about is right next to you. So you'd rather be looking at your screen, going through a feed, looking at you know, I don't know, some social media app just doom scrolling anything, but the thing that you know you probably should be doing or thinking about. And every time you look up from your phone, the thing you're thinking about or should be doing is bigger and more frightening. Now Susan's got a name, brilliant name for what is happening there, and she's also going a way to get out of it too. But the harder that you fight a feeling, the worse that feeling gets. What is the alternative?
00:02:17
Speaker 2: In my book Emotional Agility, I talk about, you know, four very important aspects of emotional agility, and the first part is what I call showing up. And really the idea with showing up is that acceptance. And by acceptance I don't mean passive resignation. I mean an open hearted willingness to feel what you feel. Because life's beauty is inseparable from its fragility. You know, you're going to be healthy and then you're going to be ill. You're going to be with people you love in relationships until the relationship isn't working or that person is there no longer. There is something absolutely inseparable in the beauty and the frigidity of life, and so there's part of being healthy in the world is opening up your heart to that reality. And when you open up your heart that reality in a way that is not about passive resignation, but it's really about a compassionate, willing acceptance then what you do is you are able to be, and when you are able to be, you are able to see things as they are. You know that acceptance is the prerequisite to change. So this, you know, this irony, is that when you accept things, you then say this is how it is. This relationship isn't working, this job sucks. I feel bad, and you're doing it in a way that's compassionate. That then opens the door to moving forward in ways that are effective and healthy and values connected and intentional.
00:03:56
Speaker 1: I'm so into acceptance, so I wrote a book about it. So my second book was all about acceptance commitment therapy, because acceptance is not giving up. Acceptance is finally seeing what you are facing for what it is. You don't have to like it, but you can accept that it is there and that matters. And it turns out it's a really concrete step for anybody who's never tried to even come to acceptance, particularly something really uncomfortable like a breakup or an illness or the passing of a loved one. I had to learn about acceptance very very intensely, through drinking and through my mental illness that I was struggling with at the time. The second time was a lot harder because I was fighting a diagnosis that I didn't really want to have. I'm not alone in that. That's quite universal, because we don't want to have this hard feeling. We don't want to need to take the medication. We want to be okay, we want to be fine. And Susan has been studying this sort of stuff in in thousands of people, tens of thousands of people even, and she found something that might surprise you. What is the one thing that automatically, almost immediately makes a difficult emotion smaller. It might be for some people. I mean I I have had to come to acceptance twice in my life, once over my drinking, and then I had to do it all over again around my around my mental illness, because with every fiber of my being, I did not want to have psychosis. I didn't want to accept that I was having this, all right to the point where I did the classics. He gave me this, He said, he's the drug. He's an anti psychotic, take it when you need it. I was like, okay, then it's nanty psychotic. I've got psychosis here and there all right, So if I don't take the drug, I don't have psychosis. It wasn't ended up terribly.
00:05:46
Speaker 2: But we'll tie ourselves into I didn't want to, didn't want to.
00:05:50
Speaker 1: I don't want to accept it, don't want to accept it. But thankfully I'd already had to do the heavy lifting part of learning the big acceptance around around
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drinking. If someone's never had to, if someone's this is brand new for someone, if someone's complete definition of my job such because everyone there is terrible, and they will get to vent enter against me, you know, just absolutely not able to see that. Well, I did apply for it, I do show up every day, and I do have the control to go or not to say. Yeah, what's the tiniest sliver of the easiest, biddiest step someone might be able to take towards acceptance, if it's a kind of a new concept for them, Well, I think.
00:06:25
Speaker 2: One of the first things is just ending the struggle by dropping the rope. And what I mean by this is that when we start getting into fights with ourselves about what I should feel, and this is you know, some of this can apply to mental health, but some of it just applies more generally to our expectation. For instance, that we should be happy okay, or that we should be positive. There's really fascinating research that shows that when people have an expectation that they should be happy, they try so hard to be happy, and when you track those people over time, they're actually become less happy over time because you know, expectations and disappointments waiting to happen, and you prime yourself and you want this, and so you're not willing. And so I did a really interesting piece of research where I looked at seventy thousand people and I ask them just a very simple question about what their experience is of their own emotions. Because normal everyday emotions like sadness or anxiety, or frustration or anger, all of these emotions have actually evolved to help us. And this is something that we do not learn. We learn that there are good emotions and bad emotions, but our emotions have actually evolved to help us. And so when we only see our emotions as being valid, if they positive, what we do is we then push aside all the other ones. And so what I found in my research of a seventy thousand people is that about a third of us, a third judge ourselves for having so called bad emotions. These emotions are sadness, etc. And as soon as you start getting judgy on yourself for having bad emotions, those emotions become bigger. You're not dealing with the situation. So one of the first things is simply by naming what you're feeling. You know, I'm feeling sad, I'm feeling angry, I'm feeling guilty, I'm feeling like a bad parent, whatever that thing is. Simply naming it is very powerful and acceptance and emotional agility is not only about the showing up part, but this is an absolutely fundamental aspect of emotional agility.
00:08:49
Speaker 1: That is wild that a third of us are fighting ourselves just for feeling things, piling judgment on top of pain, and the way out just naming it they need accurately. It's so small it almost feels like it won't be enough, but it is. What I love about what Susan has to talk about is that the things she's describing we can all learn how to do. They take practice, and some of them are difficult at first, but that is the important and really valuable thing that she talks about, that you thinking can be in charge of your life. Not the thought that is causing you a lot of problems. But it does take a little bit of work to get there. It requires something more precise than just saying to yourself, calm down, calm down. That never works for anybody, really, So Susan uses a technique that, again it feels like it's too easy, there's no way that this could possibly work, but she describes as in a way that literally saved a marriage of one of the people that she knows. When you feel something, what are two other options? What are two other things that could be happening instead of the thing that you think you're feeling or you think someone else feeling. Have a listen.
00:10:01
Speaker 2: These skills are critical, and these skills are learnable. We know that they are. And the first part is this showing up piece, but there are other parts to it. Our talk. The second phase of emotional augidity is this idea of stepping out. And really, what I mean by stepping out is being able to create that space between staminiscent response because you know who's in charge here, the thinker or the thought, and when we lashing out because we feel angry, the thought is in charge. And when we're able to say why am I feeling this, what's going on? Who do I want to be in this situation? The thinker is in charge, and we get that by creating a critical space between us and our emotions. And I'll give you some examples of you know, very quick, learnable, helpful skills that people can use. Firstly, often what we do when we're feeling something is we use very broad brushstroke labels to describe what we're feeling. So very common one is I'm stressed. Okay, how are you feeling, I'm stressed? How are feeling I'm stressed? Every day we stressed. But there is a world of difference between stress and disappointment or stressed and that knowing, gnawing feeling of I'm in the wrong career. Okay. So that's as an example, when you instead of just saying everything stressed, instead say I'm disappointed because of X, or I'm actually anxious because I'm in the wrong career. What that starts to do is that accurate labeling starts to activate what scientists call the readiness potential in our brains. It starts to allow us to shape goals and actions and complete your resume or your CV. When you start labeling something effectively it helps people to understand the causes and the consequences. And I'll give you a very practical example. A couple of years ago, I was working with a client who always used to say to me, I'm angry. You know, I'm angry with my team. My team's angry with me, my wife's angry, like everything was about anger. And I started saying to him, you know, what are two other options. I'm not saying that that anger is wrong, but what are two other options? If you were just going to widen the scope, what are two other options? And so he started saying, you
know, maybe I'm feeling disappointed, or maybe my team is feeling concerned, you know, about this change, and maybe my wife is not angry, but she's feeling unseen to use that language. And it was such an interesting conversation. And then probably about eighteen months later, I had dinner with this individual who I was friends with and his wife, and his wife said to me this had completely saved their relationship because she said to me, what was happening is she would be a little upset about something and he would see the set as you are angry, and when someone says to you you are angry, then you become defensive, and so it was this complete escalation that always happened. But when he was able to move from maybe you're not angry, maybe you're sad, or maybe you need a hug, it completely shifted the narrative of their relationship. You feel something, what are two other options?
00:13:26
Speaker 1: I love that story because there's a guy in a marriage with a story about anger. But it turned out that that story wasn't really accurate. The word that we reach for first to describe stuff is often never the right one. Getting to the right one takes bad ten seconds that just that ten seconds can save a lot of trouble. We do need to take quick break back in just a moment. Thanks for listening to the show. We are going back through the archives and finding brilliant stuff that is all going into the third book. But I'm finding too much to go in there, so I just wanted to make sure I share it with you because I don't know what the edit's going to look like. Going back through my first conversation with Susan David, the first time she was on the show, we talked about the perils of social media. Then this is twenty eighteen. I think the first time we spoke. But still it's all still true that it gives us a live feed of everyone and everything that we are, not whether it is a twenty one year old version of you with a luxury car or an old school friend who started a successful company or whatever. We've built a world for ourselves that makes comparison almost inescapable, and that's terrible, because comparison is the root cause of misery. Really, but Susan has got this fantastic way of dealing with comparison. It starts somewhere that most productivity advice, I guess just goes over, Just skip straight past. You've got to know why, not the vague social media caption version of why, but the actual thing that matters to you. Because it turns out that the goal you build on shame and the goal you build on a genuine value do not differ in the way they look. They also produce different biology inside you. What happens, for example, what happens to temptation when the goal is something that you actually want.
00:15:14
Speaker 2: We live in a world in which social contagion, and what I mean by social contagion is that we're very subtly in ways that we don't even recognize pick up on what other people are doing. So the most simple example of this is you go to a meeting and someone's on their phone and you take out your phone. Or you go in an elevator and people are on their phones and you take out your phone. So what starts to happen Social contagents This really interesting thing, which is that human beings almost catch emotions and behaviors from other people, if you like, as like a cold, like a virus. And that sounds bizarre, but I'll give you some examples, which is, imagine you are trying to be healthy, you're trying to lose weight, and you get on an error plan. Your seat partner buys lollies. There's been a body of research that shows that your chance of buying lollies increases by seventy percent. You do not even need to know that person. That gets even more frightening, if someone in your social network puts on weight or gets divorced, you do not even need to know that person. It significantly increases the likelihood that you will do the same. And we've all experienced this. You go out for mail, one person orders dessert, and now we all order dessert. So we've all experiences, and so what's what's to happen is we live in a world in which social contagion is pervasive and where social comparison, comparing ourselves to what other people are doing is probably one of the most toxic things we can do as human beings. But now, of course we've got social media, so we aren't just comparing ourselves to you know, the six year old geek who now has like made it through university and stuff at a company. We are now comparing ourselves to twenty one year old multi billionaires driving Ferraris. And so what we've got is, on the one hand, this social contagion where we want things that other people want and we catch this need. On the other hand, we beat ourselves up and feel really bad when we compare ourselves, and so you start saying, what is it that's protective? And knowing who we are, what we stand for, what our values are is one of the most powerful ways that we can come to life. Knowing that collaboration is important, or equity or fairness or seeing the other or humility. Knowing this helps us to make decisions where the rest of the world is telling us to do something different, and so values often not spoken about in these kind of discussions, but they're actually fundamental because if you think about someone who is feeling really sad or really feeling down, and that person just wants to stay in bed as an example, often what we land up having is we have these have to goals. I have to get out of bed, I have to do this, I have to do that. And have two goals actually undermine our ability to make effective changes, because when someone tells you have to do something, even if it's you telling yourself that you have to do something, you have to exercise, you have to never eat chocolate again, you want that very thing. If instead we start to connect with what is the value that sits underneath this difficult experience. I feel really down and I don't want to get out of bed, but I value learning as an example, and
if I just go out into the world today, I might learn something. What this allows us to do is make moves in the direction of our value. And it might feel uncomfortable and it might feel difficult. But one of the things I talk about in my TED talk is this idea. You know that discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life. You don't get to have an effective career, or to leave the world a better place, or to raise a family, or to move forward in your life without discomfort. So if you can connect with the value that is important to you, and you can move from this goal that is a have to goal, a sense of shame and obligation, into a want to goal, a goal that is deeply connected with your values, then you can move forward in such more and healthier ways in all aspects of your life. You know your relationships and your work and your well being.
00:19:48
Speaker 3: So to make sure I'm clear, like I have to goal means, it might be I have to lose weight because I'm disgusting when I look in the mirror, versus I want to lose weight because.
00:19:59
Speaker 1: My kids only see it. But when my kid's sixteen, I still want to be able to run around with him.
00:20:03
Speaker 2: That's exactly the difference. And when you look at when you look at the practical impact of what this means, people might say, well, oh, my willpower. You know I've got this have to goal, which is I want to lose weight, and this have to goal is shame and obligation. The want to goal is this deeply held value that we've connected with. And then people say, well, you know what, if I want to lose weight and willpower is going to come into it, my willpower is going to save me here. But will power actually doesn't work in any aspect of our lives. It's really interesting if you think you open a refrigerator and there's that piece of chocolate cake inside, your brain processes test attributes one hundred and ninety five milliseconds before you even know you are making a choice. What this means is that your brain knows you're eating the chocolate cake before you even know that you are deciding whether you want will power to come into force or not. So what does this mean practically? This means practically that when people have have two goals, have two goals actually ramp up temptation, They create resentment, and they lead to a lack of sustained behavior change. So in the book Emotional Agidity, I talk about habit change making values aligned habit changes. Have two goals actually stop our ability to create effective habit change. Want two goals down ramped temptation. That actually a laugh with more sustainable habit change. And if you think about it, like you know, for listeners who are thinking things like, well, you know, I have to go to this meeting today, or I have to be on dad duty, or I have to give this person feedback. These have two goals can create prisons around us where we become resentful and like you go to the meeting but you don't want to be there, or you give the feedback but you give it really badly. Instead, if we think about what is our value here, the value might be fairness is really important to me. How fair is it if I don't give this person feedback? How fair is it to the team? How fair is it to everyone else? When you surface this want too goal, it allows you to bring yourself more fully and authentically and successfully to the situation that you fas. And this applies in all areas of our lives, our relationships, and our health, and our meetings and our parenting.
00:22:33
Speaker 1: Behind me, right there, you're looking at three sticky date puddings that are left over from last night. He had a premier party last night. They're Vagan gluten free and they're amazing, and they've been staring at me all day, Susan all day.
00:22:47
Speaker 2: So one of the things that the research would tell you is that what you want to do is you want to have one two goals, but you also want to shape your environment in ways that support your goals. So what I'm doing when I'm running a book is I might have have two goals, which is I have to get through this chapter, and I just feel resentful towards it. If I surface the want two goal, you know what am I trying to get out there? Why is this important? That's the want two goal? But what helps me to do it is ques in my environment. You know, I've got the posted note of my goals and my So what the science would tell you is to throw the sticky day puddings away or to give them to someone who really needs them.
00:23:32
Speaker 1: You're made too many there for dinner tonight, but they'll be fine, you'll manage. But I do find that I find that absolutely fascinating. The thing that about that your taste receptors have already decided you're going to eat that thing well before you've chosen to or not. Yes, that is like if that doesn't say don't have bad food around with you. This is your want two goal, I don't know what.
00:23:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's it's like one hundred and ninety five milliseconds.
00:23:57
Speaker 1: That she has. The data blows my mind. Your brain is decides to eat the cake one hundred and ninety five milliseconds before you've even registered the choice. Will power arrives late to the train platform every single time trains left the station, your chilling cake. But what does not arrive late is the value that you hold deeply inside you that will get there earlier and make that choice. I love that idea. I love that. I love that idea. One of the things I talked with Susan about was the kind of changes that we are talking about here, how might we make them a regular part of our life, and how can we build them into a habit that we can do regularly. And I started talking with her about when I turned my coffee machine on while I waited for it to warm up or whatever, I would squat just three squads. But that was it, and it became twenty. I did not engineer or a gigantic life transformation. I was not doing a men's health transformation at the time I
ended up doing, but not then. I just tried to add something tiny to a moment that was already there. Now Susan talks about it entire body of research about why that kind of thing work. The technique even has a name, and it's really good. It's got a name because now you'll be able to remember it because it works and it sticks when everything else stops working.
00:25:13
Speaker 2: So this is called piggybacking. That's it's got a name. It's got a name. It's got a name. It's called piggybacking. It's one of the most effective ways that we know we can change habits, and it's very simple. You've already got a habit in your day. Your habit might be making a coffee, it might be brushing your teeth, it might be having cereal, it might be putting your keys in a drawer. We've all got habits. And piggybacking is very simply where you add a new values aligned habit onto your existing habit, so it becomes a no brainer. So I'll give you an example. Earlier, I've spoken about parenting and being connected with your kids. So imagine every day you've got this value, but you come home every single day and you bring your cell phone to the table and you surfing, and the kids have got their phones, and so now your precious time with your children is now squandered. So piggybacking looks like this. You've already got a drawer that you put your keys in every single day, and now all you're doing is you're adding your cell phone into the draw What's really important here is it's not just for the sake, but it's a values aligned action that you're doing and that becomes your habit. So this is called piggybacking, and it's just one of the ways that we know people can very effectively change habits. You're trying to increase your fruit intake, and you've already got your cereal. That becomes the habit. You're not trying to have fruit multiple times a day to start off with. You're trying to take what you've already got, what you're already doing, and add something to it. And it's very powerful.
00:26:55
Speaker 1: You've already got the habitual thing that you do. You drink a coffee in the morning, you put the keys on the hook, whatever you do with this eral like, the only question is what you choose to attach to it. What are you going to piggyback on top of that? It doesn't have to be twenty squids, just one thing, just connect it to something that matters to you, and you won't forget to do it every day. I love that I get to go back through these conversations because it just does remind me that I haven't been wasting a fucking time these last twelve years. I've been making some cool as fuck stuff, and these conversations are brilliant, and this next book is going to be fantastic. I love Steuvesan David so much. I love what she has to talk about. I love her books. She's brilliant. Get around her and put all the links in the show notes for emotional agility, the book we were talking about when she came to visit this time, and everything else. You can listen to the whole episode, which has so much more. Scroll back through the show in the feed and you'll find it there. It's from about twenty eighteen. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you back here on Wednesday.