719: How to Better Manage Your Emotions, with Ethan Kross

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
Being a leader means our emotions get triggered often many times a day. While none of us can avoid those triggers, how we respond to them can make all the difference. In this episode, how to get better at managing our emotions. This is Coaching for Leaders episode 719. Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential. Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren’t born, they’re made.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:38]:
And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. One of the things that makes us so human are our emotions. And it brings so much joy, so much excitement, so much love into our work and in our families and into our world. And, of course, emotions also trip us up a lot. They cause a lot of challenge. Boy, we wish sometimes we could manage our emotions better. Specifically for leaders, there’s so many ways that we are being triggered each and every day with what happens, with all the relationships that we’re managing.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:13]:
Today, a conversation on how we can do that just a bit better backed by research. I’m so pleased to welcome Ethan Kross back to the show. He’s the author of the national bestseller Chatter and one of the world’s leading experts on emotion regulation. An award winning professor in the University of Michigan’s top ranked psychology department and its Ross School of Business, he’s the director of the emotion and self control laboratory. He’s the author of the new book, Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don’t Manage You. Ethan, that sounds great. Welcome back. So glad to have you.

Ethan Kross [00:01:47]:
Hey. Thanks for having me. It’s always a joy to be with you, Dave.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:51]:
A joy to be with you too. And you start the book by telling a story about your grandmother, and she went through a lot of trauma early in her life. I’m wondering if you could share a bit about that story and how you begin to think about it in the context of managing emotions.

Ethan Kross [00:02:11]:
Well, my grandmother was faced with an emotion regulatory challenge growing up that to this day, I have a lot of trouble wrapping my head around. So she was living in Eastern Europe in Poland when the Nazis invaded during World War two, and she witnessed her family be slaughtered when they came. And then just by, you know, a stroke of luck was able to escape herself and move from from ghetto to ghetto, lived in the woods, in the frozen woods during the winter, and for years was was persecuted. And she ultimately, along with my grandfather, moved to The States after the war, and they moved with nothing, rebuilt their life, and ended up having a wonderful flourishing life. But growing up, I would often think about what she experienced. Couldn’t my couldn’t ever wrap my head around it, and I would always ask her to talk about it as a curious grandson who spent every day after elementary and middle school at her house while my parents were working, and she would never never talk about it. This was not an unemotional person. This was someone who was quite expressive, but she just didn’t like to dig into those memories.

Ethan Kross [00:03:28]:
But what was so interesting about her was that although she wouldn’t talk to me about her experiences in the war growing up, I would hear her talk about them roughly once a year when there was a remembrance day ceremony she and her other co survivors would hold. And on those days, they would just wail. They would cry and lament and share what happened to them. And that experience, that capacity that she had to switch between not thinking about really hard stuff, but then really immersing herself in it for a little bit, almost dosing it and then coming back to it. That was always a puzzling behavior that, that I thought about growing up and that I have since tried to understand with the new lens that I have as a psychologist and neuroscientist now later on in life.

Dave Stachowiak [00:04:18]:
You write in the book, “I wasn’t wrong that my grandmother suppressed emotion in her day to day life. She certainly did. But what I didn’t understand, at least not then, was that her superpower wasn’t denial. It was her ability to flexibly deploy her attention to what she’d endured.” There’s a big distinction there.

Ethan Kross [00:04:38]:
Yes. There is a distinction, and I think it’s a critically important one. And it’s a distinction that was lost on me for a long time. I think we often hear that when bad things happen, we should approach them, work through them, don’t avoid them

Dave Stachowiak [00:04:52]:
Right.

Ethan Kross [00:04:52]:
And, you know, don’t look away. And it’s true that chronically avoiding problems is linked with negative outcomes. But when we frame the situation and the way I just described it, which is often how we hear about it, it almost makes it like we have to choose between approaching and avoiding when in fact we don’t. We can move back and forth. We can be flexible and strategic. That’s what my grandmother did to her benefit, and it’s what countless others do as well. And I think we would all benefit from really recognizing that we evolved to be able to approach and avoid things for a reason, and we also evolved this capacity to be flexible. Let me give you an example of how you could be flexible when dealing with adversity that can be beneficial.

Ethan Kross [00:05:37]:
So I was raised like so many others to always confront my problems when they’re triggered. You know, quickest way to get rid of a burning flame is to is to douse it. You don’t just let it kinda peter out with time. What I’ve since learned is that sometimes taking some time away can actually be quite useful. So if I’m provoked by an email or a conversation or an argument I have with someone, sometimes trying to dig in in the heat of the moment is actually counterproductive for a variety of reasons and forcing myself. And I really do have to force myself to take some time away, a few hours, sometimes even a few days, and then I come back to the problem. That can often be really useful. Sometimes I come back to the problem and I realize there is no problem.

Ethan Kross [00:06:21]:
Now that I can look at it with a fresh lens, I see that this was inconsequential. In other cases, I come back to the problem and it’s still there, but it’s diminished in its intensity. And as a result, I can weed through it more effectively. So I’m not advocating that anyone should always avoid or always approach. What I’m advocating for is that we should recognize that we can do both and that there’s a world in which doing both, being flexible, can actually serve us well.

Dave Stachowiak [00:06:51]:
Yeah. Indeed. And there’s a distinction I’m hearing here between, like, that either or binary that we so often want to be able to put things in boxes. And, of course, we’re all so much more complicated than that. And and, really, the invitation here is regulation of of choice. And you highlight this by talking about the myth of the universal approach. Tell me more about that, and what is it that causes it to be a myth and maybe not as helpful as we’d like it to be?

Ethan Kross [00:07:25]:
Well, you know, you framed it so well. We tend to think in binary terms, and there’s a good reason for this. We like to simplify things. And the problem with the myth of the universal approach is we’re essentially throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So to be clear, it it is not good to chronically avoid one’s problems. There is a wealth of data showing that chronic avoidance, in other words, the moment something happens, your decision rule is to reflexively suppress and repress and never engage with it. Research has looked at people who engage in that kind of coping behavior, and it doesn’t predict good things to the contrary. It predicts bad outcomes.

Ethan Kross [00:08:08]:
So I think from that observation, a lot of people have gone to the other extreme. Well, look, you should just approach the problem. Don’t shy away from it. Really get to the bottom of it so you can work through it and reframe how you feel about it. And, yes, working through a problem and reframing it is vitally important to our emotional lives. But what is often lost when we endorse this idea of universal approach is that sometimes it can actually be really hard to work through a problem. And you can use avoidance to your benefit, taking some time away and then coming back can actually make it a lot easier to engage in that process down the road when the intensity has subsided. This is also really important in interpersonal context, and I’ll share a personal example with you.

Ethan Kross [00:08:57]:
Although I might be someone who tends to work through a problem quickly, I like to address it when it occurs. I’ve learned that in certain contexts that doesn’t serve me well. So in certain interactions I’ve had with other people in my life who I care a great deal about, I’ve noticed that sometimes when I get into arguments with those people, it’s actually not productive to try to work through the problem rationally with them right after the problem is activated. They need some more time to just simmer down, to cool down, I should say, before they’re ready to engage in a more productive conversation. And so if I dogmatically try to approach the problem right in the heat of the moment, it actually backfires. It just makes things worse. And what I’ve learned to do is take some time away, couple of hours, couple of days, and then come back to it later. And I find that those conversations are a lot more productive, and my relationship is a lot more positive as a result.

Dave Stachowiak [00:09:54]:
And you point out that we all get- and you and I both said the word triggers a couple of times in this conversation. Like, triggers are just the reality of living, working, being a human being. We are gonna be triggered by things all day long. Good, bad, whatever. So that’s just a given. The key point though I hear you saying is though, it’s the what happens after the trigger that really is significant.

Dave Stachowiak [00:10:21]:
Tell me more about that.

Ethan Kross [00:10:23]:
So some people wonder whether you can really control your emotions, and we can’t always control the triggers that you just eloquently described. Things are gonna happen. We’re gonna experience these automatic reactions, and we don’t know they’re coming. You brush by someone on the subway that doesn’t smell good, you’re gonna experience an emotional reaction. You have no control over that. You brush by someone at the airport that smells great, you’re you’re gonna experience the opposite kind of emotional reaction. You may be just walking down the street and a a dark thought might pop into your head. That’s an incredibly normal experience.

Ethan Kross [00:10:59]:
We don’t have a really great understanding about why those dark thoughts sometimes surface when they do, but they do, and they lead us to feel bad. We don’t have control over those triggers, but we what we do have enormous control over is how we engage with our emotions once they are activated. That is the playground for shifting. Shifting being a a term I use to describe how we can increase or decrease the intensity of the emotions we’re experiencing, prolong or shorten their duration, or even shift from one emotion to another altogether. Once an emotion is triggered, if you know what the tools are, you can push that emotion around in all sorts of directions, and that is a remarkable asset that we possess.

Dave Stachowiak [00:11:48]:
we’re able to, like, frame it slightly differently so that we can interrupt that, manage it, what’s different about what I’m doing in my brain, how I’m thinking about it, what I’m noticing that actually allows me to do that.

Ethan Kross [00:12:01]:
So what you’re doing is rather than letting the emotion just run its course, which by the way, doesn’t always mean that it’s gonna peter out. Sometimes you might engage with the emotional response in ways that make it last longer. You are proactively intervening to alter the trajectory of the emotion, right? Uh-huh. To increase or decrease its intensity, lengthen or shorten its duration. And so the way you’re doing that is by activating different tools. I call them shifters. Now there are lots and lots of ways to shift. You have some shifters that exist inside you.

Ethan Kross [00:12:41]:
Ways of activating your senses, for example, listening to certain kinds of music can shift your emotions very quickly and powerfully. All the senses have the potential to shift us. Taste, touch, smell, sound, hearing. If you’re conscious about it, you can engage those senses in particular ways to bring about desired emotional states. We talked before about shifting our attention. You can make the choice to distract yourself by engaging with a really immersive distractor. One that captures your attention in a way that prevents it from going back to the thing that’s bugging you. Giving you some breathing room, if you will, to recalibrate, equilibrate after an emotion is triggered.

Ethan Kross [00:13:27]:
You can also change the way you are thinking about your circumstances by altering your perspective. When we experience big emotions, we tend to zoom in on them. We focus on the awfulness, but taking a few steps back to look at that bigger picture can often be really powerful. There are lots of ways you could do that too. You could jump into your mental time travel machine and think about how you’re gonna feel about this problem down the road. That often makes it clear that what you’re going through is temporary and and will eventually pass. You could also go back in time. Think about how you’ve dealt with similar kinds of adversity and persevered or how other people you know have gotten through worse.

Ethan Kross [00:14:03]:
That is a powerful way of putting our experiences in perspective. So those are a set of shifters that exist within us that when you activate those shifters appropriately, they they they alter the trajectory of the emotions you’re experiencing. And the the real opportunity for folks is to give them tools to push their emotions around in the directions where they want their emotions to go. So when I talk about emotion management, what I’m talking about is increasing or decreasing the intensity of your emotions, prolonging or shortening them, shifting from one state to another based on what you want to do. And we’ve got tools to help us bring those goals into fruition. And we don’t always teach people about what they are, which is why I wrote this book.

Dave Stachowiak [00:14:53]:
Yeah. And I wanna get into some of the details of everything you just said because it’s so interesting, like, so many different ways we can do this. And the analogy that’s coming up for me is you point out in the book, like, if we go out for a hike and stumble across berries, like, you’re not gonna eat the poison berries. You’re gonna eat the blueberries. Right? That’s just a physical reality all of us have accepted. And yet, how often we don’t think about that when it comes to emotions and that our opportunity is to strategically use our senses to modulate our feelings. And like you said earlier, we’re not avoiding it’s not about chronic avoidance. It’s about making choices in the moment so that you’re able to better approach situations and think about it in the context that’s gonna be useful to you.

Ethan Kross [00:15:42]:
Yes. I’m a believer that emotions are tools. They’re responses to situations we encounter in the world, either situations in our external world or situations that we imagine in our mind. And when we imagine those situations that have meaning and importance to us, these emotions get triggered. What are they? They’re tools that help us manage those situations effectively. So when they’re activated in the right proportions, they are a really, really useful guide. Like with the poison berries example, like tasting the berry and learning that it’s toxic, you have this aversive reaction that’s gonna prevent you from taking it again. The problem with these emotions though is that they are unwieldy tools.

Ethan Kross [00:16:29]:
They’re often they they exert such a powerful influence on us. If you don’t know how to rein them in, sometimes they take you in the wrong direction to go back to the berries. Sometimes the fear of having a toxic berry may prevent you from having any berry. And the good news there is that we co evolved the ability to implement all of these different tools to hone our experience of emotions. And I think the big challenge we face is to identify what those tools are and then figure out how to profitably incorporate them into our lives.

Dave Stachowiak [00:17:05]:
Indeed. One of the tactics you mentioned a moment ago, you talk about in the book, is the power of music. It really can do some extraordinary things to help us to shift, can’t it?

Ethan Kross [00:17:17]:
Oh, yeah. Music is one of those underappreciated shifters. So what’s interesting about music is if you ask people as scientists have done, why do you listen to music? Almost everyone responds, I like the way it makes me feel. But if you then look at what people do when they’re struggling with their emotions, when they’re angry, anxious, sad, only between 10-30% report using music. Music is a powerful tool for very quickly and effortlessly shifting our emotions in particular directions. But we don’t often harness that tool strategically. I will admit before I knew about the science, I didn’t do that. I’ve listened to music my entire life.

Ethan Kross [00:17:58]:
I do it because it elicits emotional reactions for me, all different sorts. But I’ve never really been super conscious about, oh, when I’m feeling this way, let me listen to this kind of music to change my emotions and bring them in a core to how I wanna feel. Now that I know about the science, I’m much more deliberate about doing this. So I have a playlist on my phone that I activate and it has songs for pushing my emotions in different directions. And it’s it’s a powerful kick in the butt in the right direction. And so that’s a tool that was just, like, hiding in plain sight that really can make a difference, and all the senses are tools of that sort.

Dave Stachowiak [00:18:37]:
Are your playlists correlated then to the emotional state that you’d like to enter into? Like, is there a is there a playlist that says something like maybe motivation and that you would say, hey. Let me go and use that when I’m in a place where I don’t feel motivation to, like, shift my mood a bit. Is that the kind of thing we’re talking about?

Ethan Kross [00:19:00]:
Totally. Totally. That’s exactly right. So sometimes when I need to, like, get more excited about something, like, energized, I’ve got playlist that I activate to do that. Sometimes I need to bring myself down, need to calm down. You know, I’m too too excited about something, and I have other music to activate in those situations. Now what’s interesting about those examples is the playlists are tracked with my motivation in those ways because I understand how this works. A lot of people actually do the opposite of what I just described.

Ethan Kross [00:19:35]:
When they find themselves sad, for example, rather than listen to music to make themselves feel happier, they’ll listen to sad music to extend that state. Now there may be some functionality to that. If sadness is an emotion that helps you turn your attention inward to make sense of loss when you experience it and there’s some utility to that, maybe perpetuating that sad state is a good thing. But if you’re sad and you don’t want to be sad anymore, don’t don’t listen to Adele. Right? No offense to Adele. She’s a wonderful artist, but her music can make you feel sad. Right? Go in the opposite direction. That’s the value of understanding how all this works.

Ethan Kross [00:20:16]:
It allows you to be more agentic in how you activate these tools and when you activate them so that they’re helping you achieve your goals rather than possibly pushing you in other directions.

Dave Stachowiak [00:20:29]:
Yeah. And it comes back to that opportunity of using our senses to modulate our feelings. Right?

Ethan Kross [00:20:35]:
That’s exactly right.

Dave Stachowiak [00:20:36]:
Yeah. The one of the other points you make, and you alluded to this a bit ago, is distracting ourselves long enough to let time do its work. And you hit on this a bit ago, but I think it’s worth coming back to of, like, doing a bit of time shifting. Like, this thing happened. I’ve had this emotional response to it. How am I gonna feel about this likely a week from now, a month from now, a year from now? Being able to just stop and grapple with those questions has a way of taking us out of the moment and being able to think about it a little bit more objectively.

Ethan Kross [00:21:16]:
Yeah. So when we experience big emotions, we tend to zoom in on what’s happening to us right here and now and how we’re feeling, and we lose sight of the bigger picture. Do that. And so there are a bunch of very simple tools people can use to help break them out of that cognitive state in ways that can be very helpful. So mental time travel into the future, as you just described, is one of them. When you’re struggling, ask yourself, how am I gonna feel about this tomorrow, next month, next week, next year? We’ve all lived through a lifetime of emotional experiences, and most of them have a specific type of temporal trajectory. The emotional experience is triggered, and then as time goes on, it eventually fades. Some experiences last longer and we are more resistant to the palliative effects of the passage of time.

Ethan Kross [00:22:07]:
But most of our experiences do follow that time course. When you jump into your mental time travel machine and ask yourself, how am I gonna feel about this next month, next week, next year? It automatically makes accessible the idea that as awful as what you’re going through, it it’s temporary. It’ll eventually pass, and that can turn the volume on our emotions down. Now you could also go back in time, and that works a little bit differently. I will often go back in time when I’m dealing with something that feels really big and arduous. And I’ll get into that mental time travel machine, and I’ll spend some time with my grandparents back in Eastern Europe trying to evade the Nazis. And when I do, what that little dose of mental time travel into the past does for me is it makes it really clear that whatever I’m experiencing pales in comparison to what they endured. And that also that kind of perspective broadening makes it a lot easier for me to navigate the situations that I’m confronting.

Ethan Kross [00:23:09]:
So those are two very, very simple examples of perspective shifts that are very easy to utilize. Some of us may stumble on those tools when we’re trying to get through the muck of our life. Sometimes life is mucky. I think I just invented that phrase, but you know what I mean. Right? Like, we experience these kinds of troubling moments at times. Again, I think the value of knowing about these tools is you don’t have to wait to use it. The tools that I just described, they are my go tos along with a few others. The moment I experience a challenge in life, I instantly activate those tools, and they often help me immediately curtail my emotional response.

Dave Stachowiak [00:23:55]:
As you were saying that I was thinking back to I Amy Edmondson was last on the show about a year ago, and we were talking about her book, The Right Kind of Wrong. And one of the points that she made really related to what you just said was when you have that moment of, like, trigger of, oh, I made a huge mistake. Something’s awful. I’ve got this horrible news, whatever. That it’s helpful to think about the moment immediately before you got that news or immediately before the trigger. And I have been experimenting with that over the last year, like, when things come up just in the normal course of life of, like, oh, I find myself going down this rabbit hole of, like, how did I feel right before this happened? And it is fascinating, at least for me, like, how it interrupts, like, going down this path of feeling awful for however many hours or days or whatever. And it’s just a slight shift, but, boy, the perspective makes such a big difference.

Ethan Kross [00:24:48]:
Well, I think just recognizing so this is another myth that I talk about. We often think that manager emotions has to be hard, and sometimes it is, of course, challenging, and we use tools that are very effortful. But a lot of the times, it doesn’t have to be hard. There are tools that we can use that are relatively easy to implement, and they’re effective at turning the volume down in our emotions. And you just described one.

Dave Stachowiak [00:25:13]:
One of the other perspectives that I thought was really interesting that you talk about and some of the research shows us too is the power of shifting language from I to using the word you. And this is a really interesting one because I think, like, all of us have run into people in our lives who refer to themselves in the third person, and I think there’s sort of like a there’s definitely a social, mantra about, like, avoiding that. Right? And Mhmm. Yet, I think it’s really interesting that there’s some usefulness to this too, especially when you’re thinking about the conversation you’re having with yourself. Could you share a bit of that?

Ethan Kross [00:25:59]:
Yeah. So this is a tool called distant self talk. What it involves doing is typically silently coaching yourself through a problem using you and your own name, and it’s a tool that some people report benefiting from. One of the reasons why we think it works is because it allows you to give yourself advice like you would give advice to another person. And I think many of us have had the experience of finding it much easier to give advice to a friend struggling with a problem than it is to follow that same advice ourselves.

Dave Stachowiak [00:26:28]:
Oh, yeah.

Ethan Kross [00:26:29]:
When you use the word you in your own name, it essentially shifts your perspective. Most of the time, we use names and words like you. We use those parts of speech when we think about and refer to other people. So when you use those parts of speech to coach yourself through a problem, it’s it’s putting you into this advice giving mode, and that makes it easier for us to, wade through our problems. It’s a simple tool. And my advice to folks is if you’re curious about how it works, give it a shot. If it works for you, keep using it. And if not, try something else.

Dave Stachowiak [00:26:59]:
Yeah. And it’s really interesting. Like, you mentioned the book some of the research around looking at, like, transcripts of psychotherapy sessions. And as people have progress and are doing better managing something, it’s interesting that the language they use with their therapist sometimes shifts from more I language to you language of, like, being able to put a little bit of that distancing there is just helpful.

Ethan Kross [00:27:22]:
Yeah. So the words we use to talk about ourselves and our lives can be can be really illuminating windows into what’s going on in our minds. And one thing that we’ve discovered over the years is that when people become increasingly emotional when we’re they’re dealing with difficult times, they tend to become more immersed in their experience. That makes sense. Right? You’re you’re think you’re zooming in on it, on how you feel and what’s happening to you when you’re struggling with adversity. And you can index the degree of immersion that a person is experiencing by essentially indexing the the number of first person singular pronouns that they’re using. So they’re thinking in more I, me, my terms. And what some researchers have found is that as time goes on and people start working through problems more effectively, you see a shift from thinking or from talking about one’s problems using those parts of speech to using more distance language.

Ethan Kross [00:28:25]:
So words that are like second person pronouns and other other distanced linguistic terms of that sort.

Dave Stachowiak [00:28:33]:
There’s so much of what I hear in your work, and the opportunity is for us to have choice around this. Like, a lot of times, we think, like, something comes up, a trigger. We feel the emotional wave come over us, whatever it is, and we feel like we don’t have any choice. And our ability to regulate a bit better helps us. There’s a fascinating study you cite in the book of one of the researchers who looked at students in the New York area after September 11 and just how being able to do some of this really helps. And you write the participants who perform best on the initial task, those who were able to both express and suppress emotions successfully were best able to cope in the wake of nine eleven. What they found was that a person’s capacity to flexibly deploy their attention, both avoiding and approaching, was the best predictor of resilience. And it gets back to what we were talking about earlier, like, that myth of universal approach, this binary that we often think about things of, like, either I’m gonna avoid or I’m gonna engage with it fully.

Dave Stachowiak [00:29:36]:
It’s thinking about it from a standpoint of it’s a both end. Right?

Ethan Kross [00:29:40]:
That’s right. That’s right. That’s exactly it. You know, I use the metaphor in the book of push ups and pull ups. Right? And push ups are like pushing away and pull ups are pulling you towards These are different muscles, different exercises we use to train different muscles. And approach and avoidance are are also different behaviors. And if you are skillful at using both and being flexible, the research increasingly shows that that is a good thing.

Dave Stachowiak [00:30:09]:
You’ve been at this work for a long time. You are embedded in this research more than anyone I’ve talked to. As you’ve put together the most recent book, been doing the most recent studies, I’m curious, what’s come across your thinking that you’ve changed your mind on on this in the last year or two?

Ethan Kross [00:30:27]:
The importance of adopting this toolbox approach to thinking about emotion management and that there are no one size fits all solutions to manage your emotional lives. So much research, including a lot of the work that I’ve done over the course of my career, has really focused on profiling how individual tools operate. And that’s really important work because it is important how we under it is important to understand how specific tools operate. But what we’ve learned is that being emotionally fit is a lot like being physically fit. Typically doesn’t involve doing one thing, but rather a set of things. And actually, the set of tools you use or exercises you engage in, they may even vary over time. The combinations of tools that work for you at one moment of time for dealing with one kind of situation may be different from the tools that you benefit from in other contexts. That’s something I remind myself of quite often, and I think it would be useful for a lot of people to think about that.

Ethan Kross [00:31:27]:
Not only do I think that’s gonna make it more possible for people to achieve emotion management success in their lives, I I think it should also take the edge off because sometimes we hear about tools that change people’s lives, things like meditation, mindfulness, going for walks in nature. And those tools work really well for some people, but they don’t work for everyone. And rather than beating yourself up about that, recognizing that different people benefit from different tools, and you don’t have to choose. There are lots of different options. I think that provides people and it certainly provides me with a sense of hope about the prospects of really getting better at managing my emotions as time goes on.

Dave Stachowiak [00:32:09]:
And it is a book full of tools. Thank you so much for it. Ethan Cross is the author of Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don’t Manage You. Ethan, thank you so much for the book and your work.

Ethan Kross [00:32:21]:
Thanks so much for having me back. It was, great to chat with you again.

Dave Stachowiak [00:32:24]:
Same here. If this conversation was helpful for you, three related episodes I’d recommend. One of them is the last time Ethan was on the show, episode 516, how to find helpful advisors. We talked about his previous book, Chatter, and the noise that we hear in our heads a lot and sometimes follow well and sometimes don’t. And we talked in that conversation about how do we get out of our own heads and actually be able to reach out to other advisers who can help and support us and provide objective perspective. And how do we think about that? And, also, tactically, how do we begin to do that better? Episode 516 for that. Also recommended episode 663. Amy Edmondson was my guest for a conversation on how to grow from your errors.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:17]:
Amy also suggests some of the time shifting we talked about in this conversation and thinking about what happens it happened or how did you feel right before something happened where you figured out you made a big error or something really triggered you in a big way. Such a helpful tactic that’s been useful for me and many others. Episode six sixty three for a lot more there. And then finally, I’d recommend the episode with Dan Dworkis that we had last year, episode seven zero one, how to handle high pressure situations. Fascinating conversation with Dan. He’s an emergency room physician who teaches other ER docs how to handle the high pressure situations, how to handle the mental load, how to perform well under pressure, and so many incredibly useful and practical things that all of us can do, not just ER docs, that can help us in high pressure situations and fascinating the work he’s done and the mental models that are helpful for so many of us in doing that better. Many of you told me that conversation’s been really helpful in thinking through high pressure situations. Again, that’s episode 701.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:25]:
All of those episodes, of course, you can find on the coachingforleaders.com website. I’ve been airing the show since 02/2011. There’s so much inside the library since then, and we have arranged everything on the website by topic, so you can find exactly what you’re looking for right now. Whether it is handling a difficult situation, or working on your coaching skills, or delegating more effectively, or developing talent in your organization, or dozens of dozens of other topics that many of us are wondering about every single day, we have designed the free membership on the website to be as accessible to you to find what you’re looking for right now. And if you have not yet set up that free membership, go over to coachingforleaders.com. Set up your free membership. We’ll give you a full access to the episode library, plus a bunch of other benefits, including my weekly leadership guide. Once a week, usually later in the week, I send out a single email with an overview of the episode each week, all of the links that we’ve mentioned, the related episodes I just mentioned a moment ago, plus what I have been finding in the news publications, Harvard business review, the Wall Street Journal, many of the other publications out there that I think would be helpful to you.

Dave Stachowiak [00:35:34]:
And usually, I’m pulling a quote from one of the books we featured in the past as well to continually bring us back to the lessons we’ve been learning all along. That’s all part of the weekly guide. It’s a single message each week. You can get access to it by setting up your free membership. It’s one of the many benefits. Just go over to coachingforleaders.com and set up your free membership. Speaking of Coaching for Leaders Plus, I get the feedback fairly regularly from leaders who say, I am asking people for feedback. I’m asking my employees for feedback.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:07]:
And what I am hearing often is, everything’s great. All good. No feedback. Keep going. Some sort of generic positive response. Even sometimes, when the leaders know that there is stuff going on and people do have feedback and there’s things that they’re not happy about. Oftentimes, they just respond very generically and very positively when a leader asks for feedback. And often, not always, but often, I find we are making it way too hard for people to answer the feedback question that we’re asking.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:44]:
It’s one of the reasons in a recent journal entry that I highlighted three key steps that I think are essential for all of us when we are asking someone for feedback, especially if that person happens to be someone we manage, and how we can make it way easier for them to answer that question. It’s one of my recent journal entries. If you’d like to get access to it along with every single journal entry that comes each week into your inbox, go over to coaching for leaders plus. It’s one of the key benefits inside of coaching for leaders plus. You can find out more by going over to coachingforleaders.com/plus. Coaching for Leaders is edited by Andrew Kroeger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. Next Monday, I’m glad to welcome Margie Worrall to the show.

Dave Stachowiak [00:37:30]:
We are talking about a discussion on the way towards a bit more bravery. How do we find more bravery and courage in our work every day? Something almost all of us are trying to do. Join me for that conversation with Margie. Have a great week, and see you back on Monday.