Leaders' Playground

16: Leading with Heart: What if your heart did the thinking and mind did the feeling?

• Irene Salter, PhD • Season 1 • Episode 16

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What can the Pixar movie Inside Out teach leaders about management? A lot!

In this episode of "Leaders' Playground," we dive deep into the emotional landscape. A whirlwind of emotions can hit in a single day—fear, joy, sadness, and everything in between. By understanding those emotions, we can transform our leadership style.

We unpack the science of emotions, drawing on the groundbreaking research of psychologists like Paul Ekman, Dacher Keltner, and Lisa Feldman Barrett. Discover how emotional awareness not only enhances personal well-being but also boosts team dynamics, productivity, and overall job satisfaction.

As much as we might wish to shove emotions into a jar and pretend they don't exist, emotional intelligence can turn work into a far more enjoyable and fulfilling experience.

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For complete show notes, transcript, and free downloadable resources go to: https://www.irenesalter.com/podcast

Speaker 1:

Welcome back to the Leaders Playground. How are you feeling today? No, really Like how are you feeling? What's the emotion that you're having right now? If anything? Are you satisfied, happy, frustrated, stressed, excited? Well, this episode is all about our emotional experience and we're going to talk about the science. We're going to talk about what you can do to use this in your workplace and manage your team better and enjoy your work more. I can't wait to share it with you. Keep listening, hi. Thank you for listening. A PhD neuroscientist and science educator with a passion for helping people thrive, not just survive. Please click that follow button so you don't miss a single episode.

Speaker 1:

So this last Friday night, a good friend of mine and I were talking. She said there's so many emotions in my house right now. I replied I know me too. She said just today I felt scared, sad, angry, disappointed and excited all in one day, and I laughed. It's like we're teenagers or something I often suspect. My daughter and her friends have five completely different emotions before breakfast. But why is it that we, the adults, were having so many emotions? Shouldn't it be the kids? Well, we've been having emotions for all the reasons, so many reasons, excited.

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Well, my friend had just closed escrow on a new business. That very day, sad, a dear, dear mutual friend of ours passed away the day before, scared. The park fire in California is burning up straight towards us. As of this, riding the northwest edge is 10 miles from my house, point to point. But don't worry, we're safe and prepped in case we need to evacuate, disappointed. Well, that day our kid's summer camp got canceled Fires, you know, angry. On top of all of that, my water heater is on the fritz and I'm dealing with a fishing scam. So yeah, there's that too. This morning my husband and I were complaining about all of it in bed and we simply pulled the covers up over our heads and we said maybe it'll all go away. And of course our problems and emotions are very tiny compared to what people facing poverty, war or homelessness are facing each and every day. It's tiny compared to what my friend's widow is facing. So of course my husband and I get out of bed and we got on with our day.

Speaker 1:

The reality is, all of these emotions are a natural part of who we are. They are the heart of our humanity and the heart of our minds. It reminded me a lot of seeing the movie Inside Out 2 by Pixar, I decided to devote this podcast episode to emotions and the importance of emotional intelligence in making our work feel more like play, feel more like play. So in the movie Inside Out, what you have is you have a coming of age story for a girl named Riley and you also get to see inside of her head. You look inside of her head and in there are these voices.

Speaker 1:

There's five core emotions joy, sadness, anger, fear and disgust. They're personified in all of these beautiful, funny ways within a mission control-like headquarters and there they are at the control panel guiding Riley's actions. In Inside Out 1, the joy character inside of Riley's mind decides that Riley doesn't need sadness right now and tries to banish sadness. Well, she also finds out that sadness is at the core of Riley's resilience, her ability to ask for help and to look to the people around her that care and love her. Well, in Inside Out 2, she hits puberty and in one of my favorite scenes a puberty alarm goes off in the middle of the night and all the normal controls on the control panel go haywire.

Speaker 1:

And with puberty comes four new emotions Anxiety, envy, embarrassment and ennui. What's ennui? Well, I love how ennui perfectly captures all the most annoying features about teenagers the boredom and lethargy, the smartphone addictions, the way that people deflect uncomfortable situations with sarcasm and disinterest, even how Anhui's socks are constantly falling off her feet because she's simply not motivated enough to pull them back up again. I also love, in Inside Out 2, how the character Anxiety literally bottles up all the five core emotions, pokes holes in the top of the jar and throws them all away, saying it's not forever, it's just until Riley makes varsity, or maybe until she turns 18, or maybe forever, I don't know. I mean, it's such a perfect anxiety moment and that was me at age 13, moving to a new town, starting high school, driven so hard by anxiety to become what everyone else wanted me to be in order to fit in those emotions, feel so real and being able to see that visually portrayed in the beautiful way that Pixar does was amazing to me. Does was amazing to me. I probably should back up a little bit, though, and define what emotions actually are scientifically.

Speaker 1:

How do scientists and psychologists explore and understand emotions? Well, emotions are characterized by several things. First, there's an outside trigger, like some object or some situation, that causes the emotion to exist, and then, once it's there, three things happen in our bodies. There's a physiological response, which are the sensations that happen inside of our bodies. Things like our face changes its expression, our heart rate changes, our muscle tone shifts All of those physiological things happen. Another thing happens is the ways that our thoughts are triggered. There are thoughts and memories that are brought to mind that are related to that emotion. And finally there's a subjective experience, a feeling. We feel afraid, we feel sad, we feel angry or happy. Those bodily responses lead to a behavioral response, a way that we are driven towards action in the world, or that it changes our motivation and changes what we're going to do next. Those things together the trigger, the things that happen in our body and the behavior serve as a social signal to other people in the world. Our outward responses can be read and interpreted by others. Emotions just aren't internal entirely. They are the basis of how we interact socially with other people.

Speaker 1:

Emotions will last seconds to minutes, sometimes coming in waves one after the other, and that's what differentiates them from a mood. Moods are these emotional states, but they're usually of a lower intensity. They don't have a clear trigger and they can last a lot longer than the seconds to minutes that emotions stay around. Well, the science in Inside Out was guided by these emotion researchers, paul Ekman and Dr Keltner, who spent their entire careers exploring the psychology and neuroscience of emotions. I even had the privilege of overlapping with Docker while I was at UCSF and he was at UCLA Berkeley, and we were both part of this multi-university emotion research program. What was so cool is how those two movies trace the progress of the scientific studies of emotions. Those two movies trace the progress of the scientific studies of emotions.

Speaker 1:

Emotions began to be studied by Paul Ekman In the 1980s. He turned emotion from something that could only be studied subjectively by self-report, into a truly data-driven science. Ekman and his team began by cataloging facial expressions that are associated with different life events, like the death of a child, a fight or reuniting with a dear friend. Their research uncovered five emotion families, things that are universal, that all human cultures express and recognize, whether you're an American teenager or a Papuan from New Guinea with zero contact with the outside world. The five emotions are you guessed it joy, anger, disgust, fear and sadness the same ones that are portrayed in Inside Out. The cool thing is that even people who are born blind will make the same five facial expressions without ever needing to watch others. These emotions seem to be pre-programmed into our biology. They're not things that we necessarily learn. They're just who we are as a human. Well, there's been many years between that first movie and the second. Well, there's been many years between that first movie and the second.

Speaker 1:

One of Paul Ekman's protégés, dr Keltner, began to expand upon these core emotions and he brought them into a much wider range of experience. Dr focused on awe, but there are many others in the world who are applying these same scientific techniques to study other emotions like anxiety, jealousy, guilt, love, compassion and dozens and dozens more. What a lot of researchers now think about emotions is that they are these constructed experiences. Experiences there, yes, is this trigger in the world which creates some physiological changes and also our cognitive experiences. The brain takes those together and integrates them, creating that feeling that we have and the responses that we create. You don't have emotions. They're not these predestined things. They're constructed, they're malleable, shaped in time. So, for instance, if, in the middle of an emotional experience, you take the time and pull up different memories, that will also change the way that you feel and the way that we behave. We're not always conscious and aware of all of the aspects, but one of the prime creators of this idea of constructed emotions, her name, is Lisa Barrett, and she says in a sense you can think about emotions as tools born of the social reality we create that influence and regulate one another's nervous systems. Isn't that cool? Emotions are there to influence and regulate each other's nervous systems. Take a pause.

Speaker 1:

One of the biggest tools that you can use to make work feel more like play is to get in touch with your emotions. You begin by understanding what emotions you are feeling right now. See, remember back when I was 13,. I had so much anxiety and I bottled up a lot of my emotions, just like in the movie. For much of my adult life a lot of my emotions were hidden away, suppressed and constrained. I actually took pride in the fact that I rarely cried and I never screamed. I distracted myself by staying so incredibly busy that there just wasn't enough room or time or space to acknowledge my emotions. But then those bottled up emotions would burst out in all sorts of unhealthy ways Passive aggressiveness, chronic stress, self-doubt, an inability to be present in the current moment. The shift that I've made in the last couple years is doing a whole lot of unbottling. If you're a suppressor like me, the thing that we need to learn is to simply name emotions when they arise.

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Brene Brown is the queen of a lot of this. She is this social worker who's turned into a psychology guru who you see all over. She says that the language of emotions is so important. I quote when we don't have the language to talk about what we're experiencing, our ability to make sense of what's happening and share it with others is limited. End quote. Brene describes 87 emotions in her book Atlas of the Heart, one of my favorite books. Did to create those 87 emotions arose from taking the words of 66,000 participants and really analyzing them and pulling out all of the different emotion words and experiences that came out of those writings. She took the collection and found 150 words, and then she held focus groups with therapists, counselors and social workers to identify the emotions that are most important to be able to name in order to process and heal from the experiences we have in the world.

Speaker 1:

In putting this podcast together, I took a little extra time to consider the names of the emotions that I was feeling. I'm not just sad about my friend who passed far too soon. What I'm feeling is grief. I'm not actually angry about my water heater and the stupid credit card phishing scam. I'm feeling helpless and a bit outraged. I'm not merely anxious about the fire. I'm stressed and feeling vulnerable because I have so little control over the outcomes. And while I'm disappointed that my daughter isn't able to go to the summer camp she would have been looking forward to, I'm really grateful that we're able to have a little extra summertime, together with some little extra summer fun.

Speaker 1:

In the show notes, what you're able to have a little extra summertime together with some little extra summer fun. In the show notes, what you're going to find is two different resources to help you name your emotions. There's one that's called a feelings wheel, where you start with your basic emotions and then you can start to differentiate and learn new vocabulary to really differentiate and explore what that feeling truly is for you. There's also in the show notes, a PDF that Brene Brown created that shares the 87 different emotions and the categories they fall into. So what I would encourage you to do is exactly what I did is to take the emotions that you feel and explore them just a little bit deeper to see if there's a couple more emotion words that you can add to your vocabulary to help you really get a handle on the experience. All right back to the show. Back to the show. So that ability to name your emotions is the first part of what's called emotional intelligence.

Speaker 1:

Daniel Goleman is the psychologist who is the ultimate expert on emotional intelligence, and emotional intelligence is defined by how well we can handle ourselves and our relationships when it comes to our emotions. He breaks it down into four domains. First, there's self-awareness, then self-management, then other awareness and other management. I mean self-awareness is knowing your own emotions and understanding why you're feeling. What you're feeling. It's exactly what is happening in the strategy that I just named for you. Then there's self-management being able to handle your emotions, especially the negative ones, in productive ways. Then you can come into other awareness. That's empathy and being able to name what other people are feeling based on the cues that they're giving off. And finally, the top level is other management. That's the social skills. It's putting all of those things together your own emotions and other people's together in social relationships.

Speaker 1:

People who are good at emotional intelligence are better in the workplace and their work is more fun, it's more enjoyable, it's easier. The research suggests that people with better emotional intelligence have better work performance, higher productivity, better relationships, better team dynamics, greater life satisfaction and more happiness, and it feels better. Emotions don't come out in wackadoodle ways like the angry outbursts inside of a meeting or snapping at your husband when you come home after the end of a hard day. Those really strong emotions are dealt with in healthy ways. It's easier to handle them if you have some emotional intelligence, and let me give you some examples of how this actually manifests inside of a work environment. So, for instance, employees at Motorola went through an emotional intelligence training to increase their productivity by over 90%. That was the tangible result of just that emotional intelligence training. At emotional intelligence training.

Speaker 1:

As to performance and success, there's a gentleman named Mark Fenton O'Creevey who's a professor at the Open University Business School. He was trying to look at what made stock traders more successful who made more money. Interestingly enough, those that relied purely on data, logic and statistics were less successful than those that allowed their emotions to impact their stock picks. What? How? Really Well, when they had limited information to draw on those stock traders with greater emotional intelligence, they could acknowledge their emotions and name them, and then use those feelings to help guide their choices and then use those feelings to help guide their choices. They understood also that when the emotions became too intense, that you could step back and manage them.

Speaker 1:

The issue for the successful traders wasn't how to avoid emotion, but how to harness it. This also matters so much for leaders. For instance, leaders at Pepsi those with higher emotional intelligence improved employee retention by 87%. How, why, how did that work? Well, a study by Elisa Yu from Stanford offers a strategy you can use right away to do exactly that to improve employee retention and the connection that employees feel to your organization.

Speaker 1:

Alyssa and her colleagues found that in work situations, one of the keys is to simply acknowledge other people's emotions out loud. That strategy helps you manage others and yourself. In this study, employees reported higher levels of trust in managers who engaged in emotional acknowledgement than those who did not. That means if a manager says, hey, a lot of things came up in staff meeting today. You looked upset, how are you feeling? Or a manager who would say you're really quiet, what are you thinking, all of that acknowledges the employee's emotional state and that adds a great deal of trust and engagement to the team to the team.

Speaker 1:

The end story here is that emotions are beneficial and so, so important. We all have emotional voices in our heads. Many of those drive the way that we feel, the way that we act, the way that we think. They coordinate all of those things together. So being able to name and acknowledge your emotions and the emotions of others makes us better, more whole people. It makes us better managers and better leaders.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much for joining me here at the Leaders Playground. I want to thank several people in my life for keeping my emotions in check Tyler Lakami for being the amazing sound producer and designer that he is I couldn't be doing this podcast without you. And Robin Canfield and Tessa Borquez, who keep all of the back end of my business humming. In the show notes you are going to find a link to trailers for Inside Out, several of the books that I mentioned, as well as the research on emotional intelligence in the workplace.

Speaker 1:

Finally, would you please do me two favors? Do you know a leader or a friend who is surviving, not thriving? Maybe they're facing some big emotions at work? We just talked about this in my leadership circle today and in a training I did yesterday. If so, and if some emotional intelligence would be helpful. Please text your friend a link to this show and, secondly, go ahead and click follow on Spotify, apple, youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. That will ensure you're going to find out about the next episode where I tell you a story from my middle school years and link that to what it's taught me about being an authentic leader today. Join me next time here at the Leaders Playground.

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Irene Salter, PhD

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