The Art of Living Well: Embracing the Wisdom of Your Emotions

0:00 The topics and opinions express in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability explicit or implies shall be extended to W FOURCY Radio or its employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. What's working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential. Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want working on Purpose. Now, here's your host, doctor Elise Cortez.

1:04 Welcome back to. The Working in Purpose program, which has been brought to you with passion and pride since February of twenty fifteen. Thanks for tuning it in this week right to have you. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. If we've not met before, you don't know me. I'm an organizational psychologist and local therapist, speaker and author. My team and I at Gusto now help companies to onlivee at and fortify their operations by building a dynamic, high performance culture and inspirational leadership activated by meaning and purpose. Why might you be interested in that? Because inspired employees outperformed satisfied employees by a factor of two point twenty five two one inclume more about us and how we can work together at gustodashnow dot com and my personal site, Atliscortes dot com. Before we get into today's program, I am thrilled to announce that registration is now open for a fabulous new conference for women for which I'll serve as the MC. It's called Thrive in twenty five and it is a jam packed few days in Chicago June twenty fifth through June twenty eighth.

1:55 Twenty twenty five is designed to help women develop as whole selves from boasting their bolstering their mindset to financial acumen, to leadership, to incorporating nature and to art into your life, to raise consciousness, and a whole lot more. Visit Thrive dash in the number twenty five dot com for information and when you register use my promo code Gusto all caps and that'll give you more access to some of the free books and programs that I'm gifting to participants. I'll see you there getting in today's program we have with us today. Carla McLaren an author, educator, social science researcher, empathy expert, and workplace consultant. Her applied work, Dynamic Emotional Integration, is a groundbreaking process that reveals the genius and healing power within the emotional realms. Her work revalues even the most negative emotions and opens startling new pathways and do self awareness, effective communication, and healthy empathy. She's the author of many books, including the brand new Language of Emotions workbook, The Power of Emotions at Work and Embracing Anxiety as another She's a developer of the online learning community Empathy Academy dot org. Carla A hearty welcome to Working on Purpose.

3:01 It's great to have you. Thank you so much, Elise. It's great to be here. Shall we celebrate this one of the amazing things you put into the world. Look at this beautiful thing. Oh you have got you one two fantastic. As you know, I'm prone to read my guest books cover to cover and I did, and I said to you in our LinkedIn interaction, I really got some amazing things out of your book, Carla, that really helped me with some areas in my life that I really had been stuck in. So I really want to say thank you for what you put, for what you're doing, and that we get to share you with listeners and viewers all over the world. Thank you so much. And you're ready, So you're so welcome. So let's start with something kind of interesting that I will just presence this.

3:42 You know. The idea is that motions get a bad wrap. I was out, I took myself out for a movie on Saturday night and stopped into my favorite bar to get get a beverage, and I was talking to the bartender and he was talking about his son and going on, and I said, only sounds like such a wonderfully sensitive young man. He goes, no, no, no, no, no, no, he's not sensitive. And I meant you know, he was reading things really really well, but boy, he didn't want to hear sensitive. And if I said emotional, he was probably going to have me leave, right, So. What's up with that? We laugh, But it's so sad. Emotions are very, very very very gendered, and the idea is that women feel them differently or in a better way than men do, and that men are kind of sort of, you know, a bag of hammers about emotions.

4:32 They just don't understand. And that's silly. It's silly, but it lives in culture really really strongly, and sadly. What happens is women tend to do a tremendous amount of emotional labor that is unpaid for the men in their lives, and the men in their lives don't develop human emotion or don't know that they do, or don't have words for it, and it makes their lives so difficult. And you know, when I go up and talk, I'll have men come up and say I think I'm empathic, and I'm like, of course you're empathic. It's a human skill fail or a male skill. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they have to whisper it. Yeah, it's really sad not to have access to your own emotions, since they're a part of cognition.

5:22 They're not separate from rationality or logic. That's very old information. They are right there with everything we think and everything we do. And I know because of the work that you do and sution, because of some of the work that I get to do. One of the most fulfilling things is to help everyone, men and women gain greater access to their fuller spectrum of emotions that they have been swashing for some time now. And so it is wonderfully fulfilling to get to do that work. And you've really placed some tremendous trail here and I really like how you lay out in this particular book, Carl. You say, every thought, every choice, every relationship, every dream, every failure, every triumph, everyment, and every action you take is directed by your emotions.

6:08 Because of this, understanding them and learning their language is essential. It's key, It's key to everything. If you don't know what your emotions are, you won't really understand yourself, because they are driving how you create meaning in the world and the actions that you take. If you don't know them, who's you know, who's driving that car? We don't know? It's a robot car. It's gonna hit something. They always do. You know. I recently got introduced to Byron Katy's work and I read her book Over the Holiday, which really also helped me a lot. And she's got probably a lot well you know too. You've got the Five Families of Emotions in this last book, but she has two page lists of emotions that are organized by family. I just find that helps when I'm trying to really get clear about, well, what am I feeling right now?

6:59 You know? Am I confused? Am I frustrated? Am I exasperated? You know? So I just I just think it really helps to be able to expand your vocabulary by looking at another list to help you really get clear as to how you're feeling, yes, questions. Vocabulary is crucial. Lisa Feldman Barrett and her colleagues found that with no other intervention, just helping people develop a larger emotional vocabulary help them with emotion regulation. So just knowing more words for your emotions helps you regulate them because you're not clueless in your own body, right, you know, Like what am I am I hungry? Am I angry?

7:40 Am I angry? What are you feeling? Yeah? So I have a free emotional vocabulary list on my website and I think it's in twelve languages now. Because people keep coming and saying do you want to polish one? I said, yes, I do, So We've got free multi lingual emotional vocabulary lists. There's just no downside to learning more emotional vocabulary. I think it's life. It's part of what I'm also doing in life too, Carl. I think I mentioned too that what I've been putting forth is creating a program, and I'm now writing a book on helping people to nurture higher consciousness and deeper emotions to be able to realize more of their higher potential. It's just that critical. So it's one of a million reasons I wanted to have you on because I really respected and have learned so much from what you've done in the world of emotions, not just from professional world, but as I said, for me personally. So let's talk about definition, because I've certainly seen the idea of the emotions and feelings as two different things defined in many different ways. How do you define Let's say, first, emotions.

8:45 Emotions are parts of our cognition, extremely important aspects of meaning making feelings, although many people use them, they say emotions of feelings. Basically, for me, emotion is the noun, is the thing. Feeling is the verb. It is your ability to feel the thing. It is your ability to identify the thing. So I could feel cold, I could feel angry, I could feel lonely, I could feel right. A lot of times there's a breakdown with people in between the emotion and the feeling, like they don't know what they're feeling. And you could say, are you feeling angry right now? But they'll be like, no, your mother's angry.

9:27 I'm feeling this. I'm like, oh, really, I'm mother. Huh so slightly, Why are you bringing my mom into this? I think it's your anger. Yeah. So, so for me, emotion is the thing and feeling is your capacity to feel and identify the thing. Okay, love that distinction. Okay. I thought it would be useful in this first segment here to also just kind of exampleize I'm going to use that as a brand new order, like I just not created it. A few of the gifts and skills that you talk about in your book about emotions, and you talk about your emotions or vital senses that help you understand and respond to the world around you. And you go on to list, you know, the whole family of five and the various ones that are in that, but I just wanted to call out like six of them starting with anger. So you know, people are kind of afraid of anger, and so if you could talk just a little bit about the gifts and skills in anger.

10:30 Yeah, I think a lot of people have had anger used against them, and so they have you know, the idea that anger must be a negative emotion, But in its own self, anger helps us set and maintain our boundaries. The gifts are honor and conviction, healthy self esteem, proper boundaries, healthy detachment, and protection of self and others. So, if you're working for, you know, a larger than you a goal, part of that is anger helping you identify what your values are and then to stand up for them. So anger always means that there's something important going on. You don't get angry about things that mean nothing to you, so you can sort of stop and say, Okay, something here is very valuable to me. And that can stop the kind of knee jerk kind of violence that people will do with their anger and think that's Okay, but that's not anger's fault.

11:34 Yeah, yeah, yeah, an incredibly valuable emotion. Okay, let's talk about anxiety because there's a lot of there's today we see a lot about depression, anxiety, etc. But you talk about anxiety also has some gifts and skills. What about anxiety? I wrote a book about anxiety, and I talked to a number of people, said tell me about anxiety, And to a person, no matter what kind of education they had, they were describing panic, which is the emotion that moves forward when your life is in danger. It's an incredibly important emotion. But anxiety is actually the emotion of focus, motivation, and completion. It gives you a lot of energy so that you've got foresight, you can achieve task completion, you can prepare, you can procrastinate your way into creativity. Anxiety is your motivational emotion, and it's very forward leaning, and it is very energetic, and sometimes when panic joins it, people get overwhelmed. Right, And so knowing the difference between those two emotions is crucial because if panic's there, it means there's danger. So we need to find out what's going on. Right, Instead of saying I want this to calm down. I want this to go away. And these are two messengers saying stuff to get done. There's some danger and to say go away, like what it's like

13:05 taking your smoke alarm out and just throwing it in the street as yours down. Yeah. Right, So, listeners and viewers, what I want you to pay attention to is Carla talks is I want you to really listen for what she's sharing here. That the wisdom of our emotions, the wisdom of our feelings, there's so much Rather than not trying to understand that we're just dismissing them, there's wisdom here to be had, which brings me to the next one I want to talk about, and that's fear. People have this idea and you do a beautiful job of how people are, you know, try to just squash it down and insist it doesn't exist, it doesn't exist, et cetera. But what are the gifts of fear? Fear is another emotion that people confused with panic, and fear is actually your momentary, present time awareness of what's around you. It's your instincts and it's your intuition. So if you tend to be very instinctual, very intuitive. Then you're working well with fear already. If there's danger, panics going to need to come in. If there's something out in the future, anxiety is going to need to come in.

14:07 But fear is about the present moment and at its most subtle place, it's simply your awareness of what's going on around you. It's awesome. If you don't have it, you're not getting Yeah, we want fear. Yeah, Yeah, it's fascinating. I've had some interesting experiences with fear. Okay, now, as somebody who's written a book on grief, not both of my parents eight years twenty eight days apart, six years ago. Now, what are. The gifts of grief? Well, grief, as you know, is a is a beautiful and necessary emotion. It's mourning, release, being able to lament, and being able to honor what has been lost forever.

14:56 Yeah. If you don't, then you're tends to stack up like papers on a desk, and then you just have a tremendous amount of grief that you've never been able to feel or process, and you don't know how to honor the people and the things that are gone. That's beautiful, said I wish that I would have had you around me as I was publishing that book. That would have been a great testimonial or something that can sort in there. Thank you for that. Related then sadness. Let's be good for sadness. Yeah, sadness is a beautiful emotion. I call it the water bearer or the all purpose healing bomb of the soul. I love that when the all purpose healing bomb of the soul, Yes, ma'am sadness.

15:39 Sadness is different from grief in that sadness comes to help you when you're holding onto things that don't work anymore. They need to go, So sadness will help you relax and let go. With grief, which is a bigger emotion, you don't have a choice, right, you didn't have a say in it. That is not what's happening. But with sadness you still have a choice. And if you can let go, there will be room for things that do work and are appropriate now. But if you don't let go, how does there's no room for you to try new things or feel new things. And finally, we can't we remiss And Bernie Brown would probably be disappointed if we didn't talk about shame.

16:24 I love shame. Shame is such a wonderful emotion, and people have been taught to hate it. It is the emotion that helps you live up to the agreements and the morals and the ethics that are important to you, and shame will help you live up to them. It will help you live in integrity. The problem with shame is that most of us learned about it by being shamed, So people were putting shame on us, which is not how you want to live. Also, we don't understand that if the agreement that we made is unlivable and awful, shame still needs us to live up to it. And so the work with shame is to figure out what you'd agree to and maybe give shame a little vacation. Right, if your shame feels awful, your shame probably feels awful to itself too, because what you're trying to live up to is abusive. And so the work is, like, do I believe that anymore? Has that ever served me? What was I thinking when I picked that agreement up? You know, something like no one will love you until you're perfect. Yeah, that's not a good thing to have, you know, pinging around in your psyche that it's not useful.

17:45 Yeah, what a beautiful way to explain the gifts of just a few of our emotions. Carla, this is amazing time for our short break. I'm your host, Doctor release Cortest. We've run the year with Carla and McLaren. An author, educator, social science researcher, empathy expert, and workplace consultant for applying work Dynamic emotional integration is a groundbreaking process that reveals the genius in healing power within the emotional realm. We've been talking a bit about the gifts of emotions. After the breakway get into what to do with emotions. We'll be right back.

18:30 Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise Alisee at Eliscortes dot com. Now back to Working on Purpose.

19:22 Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to Working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. As I'm dedicated to helping create a world where people realize their potential at work. I led by inspirational leaders that help them find and contribute their greatness, and we do business at Betters the World. I keep researching and writing my own books, so my last one came out in March of twenty twenty three. It's called a Great Revitalization How activating meaning and purpose can radically in live in your business. And I wrote it and to help leaders understand the lay of today's workplace, workforce land what do they want, need to be their best and want to stick around. You can find my books on Amazon or my personal site at least Cortes dot com if you are just now joining us. My guest is Carla McLaren. She's the developer of the online learning communityimpathy academy dot org and the author of the brand new Language of Emotions workbook, The Power of Emotions at Work in Embracing Anxiety, which we've been talking about today. So I think we've queued up very well, and I think we've got our listeners and viewers' attention about the importance and the gifts of emotions. Now, let's talk a little bit about what we do with these things now that we're aware of them. So you offer at least three things that we can do with them.

20:25 At least three things. I think one most of us learned about emotions was to either repress them or express them outward. Both of those kind of throw away the emotion. We don't want it. And what I teach people is to work with the emotion as an ally, as a friend. And we call this channeling the emotion, and by that I mean to actually channel it, channeling water in the way that it wants to go. So, if you know that anxiety is about motivation and task completion, you would focus yourself on that instead of I don't want to feel anxious anymore. I just want to feel calm. Right, Just wanting to feel calm is repression of anxiety. And so I have questions that you can ask each emotion that helps you channel it appropriately. Anger for instance, what do I value? What must be protected and restored? Anxiety?

21:27 What brought this feeling forward? So you're kind of searching for what the importance is and then what truly needs to be done. Because if you're kind of riled up by anxiety, you can do I mean, we've all done it where you're just Okay, now I'm going to fix this paper and wait does that need to be painted? And then have about this and then you've done a lot of stuff. Nothing ever got done so with anxiety. Because so it's so energetic, you do need to help it a little bit. Yeah, make priorities or sadness, which we talked about as the all purpose healing bottom of the soul. It is what must be released and what must be rejuvenated. Rejuvenated is me if I've been holding onto things forever and just not being willing to let go.

22:22 It's befriending your emotions, becoming allies, becoming good listening partners with each other and knowing that they come to help. I think that for some people listening to this, that's this is all going to sound like we've just come in from the moon and we're talking a whole foreign language, but it's I think it's so refreshing and so necessary and so happy to have you on and share. You're welcome. So you mentioned a couple of empathetic, empathic mindfulness practices in your book. I just wanted to cover, you know, maybe a couple. Conscious complaining is really kind of playful and fun. Conscious complaining I created. When I started this work, I was like most people, and I didn't understand my emotions and I just wanted them to go away. Conscious complaining is a solo practice, and you can also do it with a partner where you just tell it like it is and with no repercussions. Right, So it's a private practice.

23:23 It's a private thing. And to say, I'm complaining now, and I start with complaints, and usually I start with anger because anger sets boundaries, so it's generally protecting the softer emotions. And I start with why iotta, And then within about two minutes, I'm like, I miss my mother. You know, it's like there's all these things on top of it, but each of the emotions gets that's involved, gets a chance to speak in conscious complaining, and as you know, nobody wants to listen to you complain. So all of these things that are wanting to come out and be said, you cannot say them. So I created this practice for myself and then noticed that it worked for other people too. It's brilliant.

24:13 It's brilliant. And then the other one that I thought was kind of interesting if you could speak to is the idea of burning contracts. Burning contracts is a wonderful shame practice. We look at the agreements you've made about what ethics you hold and what morals you hold as contracts sort of like I'm going to be this kind of a person. I'm going to be this, this is how I'm going to behave, and this is how it's going to be. And we don't remember that at one point in our lives we chose that. We thought, I like how that person does that, and I'm gonna I'm going to do that too, or my grandma feels this way and I'm going to feel that way too. We don't remember that we chose it, and they become like ironclad contracts. And with burning contracts, it's a chance to say this is what I this is what I believe, this is how I thought life was, but it's not working for me anymore. A lot of people don't even know it's a possibility to shift morals and ethics and rules that your family brought down on you.

25:16 They don't even know it's a possibility. Yeah, yeah, Well their shame is working on things that are thirty years old and they no longer apply. But the person is just constantly fighting with this thing, and so it really it gives back choice and agency about how you're going to live. So amazing, so much, there's so much freedom and enjoy waiting for us out there once we do this work, which is just part of what I'm about to help with organizations and individuals as well. So it's just amazing to get your expertise on this. I also along those lines, Carl, it was really it helped me to recognize when you talk about the three nuances of emotions. I really thought I was incredibly useful. If you can just maybe explain that and maybe give an example of what that looks like.

26:05 Yeah, that comes from the Emotional Vocabulary list and the work on developing your emotional vocabulary. A lot of people don't know that emotions arise at many different levels of intensity. So when they think of anger, they think of anger eleven out of ten, right, you know, people with steam coming out their ears. And I was like, well, that's intense anger. But there's also medium anger. There's soft anger. Soft anger might be crabby or cranky or independent. Medium anger might be cold, disinterested, exasperated, And intense anger might be fury, fierceness, raging. Right, And if you have an emotion that generally goes to eleven, it's really important to start understanding that emotion through vocabulary when it's at one, so that you can learn to work with it. Then a lot of people don't even catch their emotion, they're not feeling it until it gets so loud that nobody could handle it, right, nobody could work with that emotion coming right out the gate.

27:16 Yeah, that's really incredible that piece of advice right there, Carlos, or learning how to be able to feel and hear and sense those emotions when they get to one or two instead of you know, takes us, you know, to get our attention that they're at seven, eight, nine or ten. That is right there, I think just worth the price of admission to this whole podcast right there. So thank you for that. And then we would also be remiss if we didn't talk about this idea of when emotions repeat continually and do not resolve, or when they overwhelm you or the people in your life that it's just too much, and you really talk about you know, when when we our emotions and feelings have been trying to get our attention, we just haven't been able to resolve them, no matter how many times we question or attend to their gifts.

28:02 Then maybe it's n that we get some help. Yeah. Yeah, there are a lot of times you're going to need support with your emotions because we just don't. We just aren't taught how to work with our emotions. We're not. And even in psychology, which is where people go to deal with their emotions, there's not a lot that's taught about emotion. The work that I do comes from sociology and anthropology because those guys have got the emotions down. But are you going to go to an anthropologist, No, you're not almost anthropologist. So you know, we kind of go and just try to work on what we can work on. But it really can help, right, It really can help to develop your emotional vocabulary and and learn to learn to befriend your emotions when they're soft, and that you'll be a friend to them as they get stronger and stronger, and you'll get stronger with them. So then when you're just feeling rage, you're going to be able to maintain your behavior. You're not going to be, you know, a canon going off. You will understand what's going on. Mm hmm.

29:18 You know you mentioned something, but you're not going to go through to an anthropologist. One of my colleagues is called to me the empathetic Anthropologist, and I like that. I think that works a lot for me, right, But so it's funny that you said you're going to go through an anthropologist. Well you might maybe. It's me, But so, you know what I think is so beautiful about this, and of course Daniel Goldman's work. I mean, I'm really recognizing if we can recognize our own emotions first and foremost, how do we how are we feeling? Putting names to them such and regulate them, and be able to recognize other people's emotions and then work with them the power of that, And you know, I don't think you or I could go through a day to day without hearing that. You know, leaders need to be emotionally intelligent. I don't think you're gonna miss there's not There's going to be a headline somewhere that says that, yes. But what I think, what I the reason I wanted to have you on is I believe that the work that you're doing, it really empowers people to be able to do those four quadrants beautifully.

30:16 Yeah. Yeah, emotions are you know, one of the quadrants of the of the psyche that is just so overlooked. Everybody wants to talk about the intellect, or work on their body or do their spirituality, but emotions are like yeah, yeah, no, that's that's no good. That's no good. So it's in the shadow, right, Emotions are in the shadow of almost anything. And if you've done any shadow work, you know that's where the gold is. That's where the amazing stuff is in the shadow. So I'm like, let's go, let's go get the gold. Well, and if you take it one to another step further, if you look at like Esther and Jerry Hicks's work, for example, their book The Vortex, they really talk about that in order for you to really bring forth the best possible life that you that you can have for yourself, is learning how to feel your way into your best highest feeling mentality or mindset. So your capacity to really have the life, the highest potential life that you can have for yourself is dependent on your capacity to experience more often those higher level emotions.

31:26 Is that beautiful? Yeah? Yeah, Well, and with that, let's take our last break, because after the break, I do want to talk about it a few of those higher level emotions. I'm your host, doctor, Release coretes. We've got on the air with Carla McLaren, an author, educator, social science, social scientist, researcher, empathy expert, and workplace consultant. Her applied work dynamic emotional integration is a groundbreaking process that reveals the genius and healing power within the emotional realm. We've been getting into more details as to just the power and the gifts of emotions, talking about anger and fear, things like that. After break, we're going to talk about some of the emotions that are in the higher realm of happiness and joy and how they function for us.

32:06 We'll be right back. Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Alise A Lise at elisecortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose.

33:14 Thanks for Jane with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. I mentioned in the last break that my latest book came out on the Great Vitalization. What it did for you is I created a very simple three page assessment that you can pull off my website and will help you understand the extent to which your culture today is meeting the standards of today's discerning workforce and give you some ideas of just where you might want to shore things up. You can cind it at gustodashnow dot com. If are just now joining us. My guest is Carl McLaren, the developer of the online learning community Empathy academy dot org and the author of the brand new Language of Emotions workbook The Power of Emotions at Work and Embracing Anxiety. So for this last segment here, I wanted to really focus on some of those what I would consider to be the higher emotion emotional states, and you call that the happiness family. So talking about happiness, contentment, and joy.

34:10 Let's start with happiness. Talk to me about happiness and gives some happiness? Does it give us? Yeah, let's talk about these three emotions because there's some of the most abused emotions that I've ever seen. It breaks my heart. Using happiness, they're a little happiness, contentment, and joy. People thought those are the emotions to have. Right, of all the seventeen emotions, only happiness, contentment, and joy live in the allegedly positive emotions category. Now, one of the things I say is there's no such thing as a positive emotion and there's no such thing as a negative one. But what happens if people think emotions are positive is they want to have them all the time, no matter what. And if they think emotions are negative.

34:54 They don't want to ever feel them. And if we understand these as equally important parts of cognition, you do not want to get rid of them, right. You don't want to not have them, and you don't want to overuse them. So a lot of times, for instance, when we talked about anxiety, people want to go to happiness right, and anxiety is like, we got stuff to do, friend you, and you'll be happy when we finish this stuff. These three emotions are beautiful, but they cannot hold up the psyche by themselves, and for most people that's what they would like, so it's important to understand them. Happiness is sort of a very light, lovely kind of momentary emotion that helps you know that there's possibilities and hope and laughter and amusement and gayety and yay. The questions are what delights me and what makes me feel hopeful. So there are times in your life where things are not delightful and there is no hope. If you try to go to happiness during that time, happiness will say, what are you even doing? Because this situation needs some serious emotional fixing. And if you just want to come over with me, nothing's going to change, right. So that's what a lot of people will do with happiness. I just want to have fun. I just want to laugh, I just want to feel up. I'm like, that's great too,

36:27 But these other emotions are coming to tell you, look, this relationship with this job is terrible and we've got to get out. You know. The other emotion in the happiness family, there's two more is contentment. And contentment tells you it's your self esteem, but it tells you when you've done something that you appreciate or that you recognize. And the question for contentment is how have I embodied my authentic values. Contentment and shame are connected because if you're holding on to values that are not authentic or not livable, your contentment is going to have a very hard time coming up to be heard because you're not living up to your values. And this is the thing where your agreements and your morals and your ethics, if they're unlivable, if they're cruel, then your contentment is going to be pretty low. And a lot of people want to work on their self esteem, Like I want to raise my self esteem and like, it's not a contentment problem here. My friend it's your shaming. Contracts are not livable, so your contentment can't get up in a healthy psyche.

37:37 It's a lovely it's a lovely emotion, but it really has to be balanced with shame, because if you don't have enough shame, your contentment may think that everything you do is great. And contentment is what you see in bullies, right, they bully you and they think, haha, I'm the best person ever. You would think bullies have low self esteem. No, they have inflated self esteem without shame to balance them. They aren't empathic. Yeah, they can't be empathic without their shame managing their behavior. Of course, we've all had shame goal over the top, like that's a terrible agreement that I made. I don't want that anymore. It's awful. So contentment is a lovely emotion, but it is responding to things you're doing that are a part of your authentic values.

38:26 And so that's when it comes out. And then joy. Joy is lovely. It's a massive emotion. It's an extremely expansive, radiant, blissful emotion, and it kind of drops your boundaries and it helps you uptake a surprising, delightful experience it just life has changed and now we are people who have experienced this. The question is what brings me deep connection and infinite expansion. The second question is how do I integrate this radiant experience? Because a joyful experience can be very on grounding, and it's supposed to be. You have to be very careful with joy. The Dowday Chain calls joy the most dangerous emotion, and I bet they don't say that in joy groups.

39:16 You know, they will tell you that that joy is a very powerful period of your life changing because you have been exposed to something just grand and massive and inspirational. And so as the Buddhist teacher Jack Cornfield says, after the ecstasy, the laundry, oh. My gosh, evidently notable. Yes, that's a good one. Yeah, So with joy, it's very important to keep a balance with that powerful emotion. Another emotion that's similar to that is grief, where you drop everything because your life will never be the same again, you know, And if you stay in grief too long, that can be difficult too. Yeah. So these three emotions, you know, in my psyche they have a couch. They each have a couch they can go sit on like you don't have to be circus ponies in this world.

40:18 You can just rest when things are really crappy. You don't have to get up. Okay, I will handle it. With these other emotions. Over here, Such a beautiful way tis to yourself and talk about self love. That's just so beautiful. Well, I want to dig down just a little bit here because I think that some of these emotions are really really interesting from the research that I've been doing. And I love your perspective. You may have a different perspectives, but I thought I remember reading somewhere that joy is our longest lasting emotion. No, is that right? And something else that is on the other end of that is is our grieflest emotion. Do you have any insight into that?

41:00 Well, it's so specific to the person in the situation. Okay, okay, Well, then I would like to dig into wonder in AWE. I had Monica Parker on my podcast. I think it was January of last year. She's brilliant, she wrote, I think had two hundred and eighty three page book on wonder. It was amazing how much I learned from her about wonder. Your perspective on wonder. I would say, wonder and aw I live in the realm of joy. Yeah, okay, that's why I brought happiness too, right. Happiness is about Yay, look at this awesome thing. You know, let's look forward to it. So yeah, I would put those in the joy area. And then Keltoner. I think it's Keltner Dotcher who wrote and pad the book on awed and he discovered there are basically eight major ways people tend to experience awe and there could be nature, and they could be you know, moral, beauty, et cetera. Anyway, all kinds of things that I thought were interesting. But in both cases, especially the further because Monica Parker talks about five kinds of aspects of wonder and I forget what they all are. But I know that there's a woe, a wonder, and a wow in there.

42:07 I know that a wittle in there. But the latter ones are the ones that speak to what you were talking about, where we experience such an expanseness that our mental models can't make sense of it, and therefore we literally are expanded in the process, which I think is really really fascinating, and that, of course is interesting to me as somebody who is trying to help people elevate their consciousness. Yeah, perspective on that. I think the joy that I was talking about is really expansive. That would be intense joy, right. See, we can have joy that is in the medium and in the soft spaces as well. I think to make major change in your life, joy is one of the emotions that would lead that. There are other emotions too, Susie Lurge, grief, depression, hatred. Hatred is a huge one if you want to make changes in your life, if you know what you're doing. Hatred is beautiful if you don't.

43:03 Everybody run okay because yeah, yeah, But I like to let joy do what it does on its own because it's so manipulated in most psyches. Happiness too. I just like to let the joyful thing come to me, right, instead of creating it. One of the things I was a cult survivor and I'm a cult researcher. One of the ways that people are ungrounded and made to stay in a cultic environment is through what's called love bombing, which keeps people in a state of joy, constant, exhausting state of joy, and that that attaches people to the group.

43:53 That extreme emotion will attach people to the group and make it so that they can't they can't leave because the in the group, right, they've never felt it to that extent. So it's a it's an interesting manipulation of a human emotion that can be very dangerous. I think the Dowday ching is like, we didn't know wrong cults, but we were right about this. You know what a powerful experience to have, Carl, I didn't know that about your background. That is powerful And the intensity of emotions is very, very, very interesting. Two things. I think we need to go back and make sure that we visit what you just kind of brought up there, served up there on hatred. And the reason I think that's important is, you know, today's times, there's such a divisiveness going on, and I would hate to leave people hanging or maybe guessing as to what you meant by that.

44:35 So could you say a bit more about when hatred is actually a good thing than when it's not a good thing. I called hatred the profound mirror. It's not like anger where you're just cranky with someone and you've lost you know, you're stepping across their boundaries or they're stepping across theairs. It's a blown out boundary, and hatred is full of projection toward the other. If you know how to do that work of hatred and its shadow work that Carl Jung developed, the questions are what has fallen into my shadow and what must be reintegrated. What it means is that you've become an unhole person, that you've lost huge parts of yourself, and when you see it in another person and you're not fully conscious yet, you will likely hate it or adore it. Both hatred and adoration or are the same. They're the same in the brain, they're the same kind of behavior. If you can do your shadow work, write down what you see in that person and see if those are any of the things that you can be, You can become whole, you can integrate if you just throw your hatred at them. The next world is going to be a lot like this one, right there won't be. So when we see people expressing hatred toward immigrants or women or trans people, for God's sakes, there is something inside that person that is unfinished and they need to call it out in another person the

46:07 way that it has been called out to them. So it's kind of like, you know, extending the violence that has been done to the self. And once we get boundaries and grounding and understand emotions, we can do some of the most profound work in the world is shadow work. That was incredibly powerful, Carla, Thank you for that distinction health acause understand hatred amazing. Okay, So I want to finish with this. One of the things I love doing as an inspirational speaker. When I go out to speak to audiences, I'm really looking to be able to touch their souls. You know, it really touched them in a way. And really my gauge is if there aren't tears, I didn't do it right. If people don't get moved to tears somehow, then I didn't actually bring my message home?

46:51 Can you? So what is you know, what is that help me get. Language around that? When I'm trying to touch someone's soul. What emotion am I trying to provoke there? What is that? Well? Sadness? I would say, because you're asking them to let go of a preconceived idea right before you're looking for tears, You're looking for them letting go of something. Yeah, and that does bring a healing. Yeah. I've watched a really good show that just makes you cry and cry and you're tired, but it changes you. Yeah, I love that.

47:34 I think that's absolutely part of it. I also think that what I'm hoping to do is to situate such a beautiful possibility for them to walk into that it moves them. Yeah, And so I think what I what you've just helped me do is I do think I'm navigating both of those spectrums when I'm out speaking. Yes, I do want them if I see what are you passionate about? And you don't know the answer to that? Yeah, I think maybe I want to evoke some sadness in there, because you can do something with that sadness. So that was very helpful, Carla. Thank you for just you know, serving me on the show here never any of the listeners and viewers who might be listening to this, but thank you for me. So you know by now that the show is listened by people around the world, and they generally tend to come if they like the topic or if they really are trying to become better leaders themselves, they're trying to do something that improves their their workplace.

48:22 What I would you like to leave them with. Just to know that emotions don't cause problems. Your emotions arise to help you deal with and solve problems. And if you can learn their language, you can change everything for the better. That's beautiful. Thank you, Carlo. I am so happy to know you, and as I say, you help me tremendously. I've learned so much from you already and I look forward to diving into more of your work, and listeners and viewers you are going to want to learn more about this amazing woman, her Empathy Academy, her various books, the work that she does. You can go to a couple of different places to learn about her. First is her own site, It's Carla McLam Let me spell that for you, Carla k r l A McClaren mc l a r e n Carla McLaren dot com. Her other site is Empathy Academy dot org. Last week, if you missed the live show, you can always catch it being recorded a podcast. We were on air with Christie Pretzinger talking about how she built and grew her healthcare content company All one hundred percent Remote, through an insistence on self awareness, kindness, and vulnerability. Next week, we'll be on the air with Chavan McHale talking about her new book, The High Minded Work, Harnessing group intelligence to create meaningful and lasting change. So you then remember that work is one of the best adventures and means of realizing our potential and making the impact we crave. So let's work on Purpose.

49:48 We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortes, each week on W four CY. Together we'll create a world where business operates conscientious leadership inspires and passion performance, and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose they crave. See you there, Let's work on Purpose.