Conversations on Healing

Welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast, where host Shay Beider speaks with renowned healthcare leaders, practitioners, and thought leaders to explore the world of wellness, the incredible powers of self-care, and what it truly means to heal today. Join us on this journey to become more whole, healed, and connected.

Shay Beider Hello and welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast. I’m your host, Shay Beider, and joining me today is Dan Newby, a global champion of emotional literacy and the creator of emotion-centered coaching. With over 7,000 hours of coaching experience and a rich background in coach training, Dan has helped leaders, educators, and change-makers around the world, turn emotions into everyday tools for transformation. He’s the author of four books on emotional literacy and coaching, and works alongside his partner and co-author of two of his books, Lucy Nunez, to run the School of Emotions. Dan’s current passion is called Dignity Inc., which was created to focus on emotions and support dignity in policing and dignity in leadership. Whether working with leaders, educators, or the police force. Dan’s mission is simple, but powerful: to make emotional literacy common sense. In today’s episode, we discuss Dan’s personal journey that led him to establish the School of Emotions and Dignity Inc.

And how he was able to improve his own life by better understanding his emotions. We talk about how you can notice and name your emotions and use the emotional regulation assessment tool to assess your emotional intelligence, literacy, resilience, and agility. Listening to this episode is a great way to learn how you can grow your emotional skillset and recognize that emotions are a very important part of each one of us, but they don’t actually define us. Dan shares some valuable strategies for how you can choose to shift from one particular emotion to another by choice, which can enhance your wellbeing. So with all of that, let’s dive into this insightful conversation. Well, welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast. Dan, I’m delighted to have you on the show,

Dan Newby And I’m very happy to be here. Thank you.

Shay Good. We’re going to have a fun conversation today about emotions. You founded the School of Emotions, and we’re really going to use this as an opportunity to better understand how our emotions work, how each of us can play with our emotions, explore our emotions, understand our emotions, and so I thought as we get the conversation rolling, maybe it would be good to just first hear you describe what emotions are.

Dan  Yeah, yeah, great question. When I started writing and doing this work, I thought, oh, this will be so easy. I’ll just Google it and I’ll have my answer and I can move on to the next thing. And I was surprised that there are definitions, but the definitions are not particularly useful. They’re things like it’s an affective state or it’s a feeling. I don’t completely agree with the feeling part. The affective state, I think yes, but okay, what do we do with that? One of the things I discovered fairly early in my exploration was that there is no universal definition of what an emotion is or what are and aren’t emotions, because if you go look up a list of emotions, every one will be different. And that led me to conclude that whoever compiled the list had criteria, but not everybody had the same criteria. So I was at that time writing, working with my wife, and we decided, well, we need to figure out what’s our criteria.

So our criteria is this: is that there are three elements that every emotion must have. So fundamentally, what an emotion is- if you go to the Latin root, it says that that moves us. And that’s quite interesting because that still doesn’t tell us exactly what it is. It just says it has something to do with movement, motivation, putting us in action in some way. So our interpretation, our definition became the energy that moves us. It’s what gets us up off the sofa. It’s what gets us out walking. It’s what has us do the laundry, cook, have conversations, read a book. Everything we do has this motivation- which is an emotion- one or more emotions, and what our and aren’t emotions is defined by. Every emotion has an underlying narrative that’s consistent. Every emotion has an impulse to act in a certain way, and every emotion has a purpose. So that’s the criteria we settled on, and that’s guided our work ever since.

Shay That’s great. I think that’s a really helpful kind of three-part criteria for understanding even what an emotion is because it’s true. As I was doing research for this conversation, it was amazing to discover the number of different theories on what emotions are, how they work with the brain, how they work physiologically. There really are a number of different ideas about what comprises an emotion and where they stem from both neurologically and physiologically.

So it’s fascinating- I want to talk a little bit about what drew you into doing this work- into creating a school of emotions that helps people to better understand what emotions are and how to work with them and both in themselves and with others. I know you talk about this a little bit in one of your books, The Unopened Gift. I read that, and I remember looking at you in, I believe it was in the preface, actually speaking to how you had really a pretty strong sense of fear that at one point was guiding a lot of your life, and that it was kind of reckoning with some of your own fear and then understanding how to deepen really the different elements and aspects of fear that you were able to really make some very interesting shifts and changes and kind of move your own life in a different way. So yeah, I’d like to hear a little bit what led you into this journey of creating the school of emotions and this type of work?

Dan Yeah, absolutely. Well, the first steps were completely personal. It was because I was struggling in life very much in my late thirties and my forties. I struggled with addiction, I struggled with depression, and I was just living a pretty miserable life. I was confused, I was fearful. I had lots of emotions, but I couldn’t even name them. I didn’t know what they were. And I thought maybe intellectually I’d missed something. Like everybody else knew, something I didn’t know. And what I discovered over time is that no, actually I was just emotionally illiterate. I was emotionally ignorant. I didn’t know anything about emotions. I couldn’t name emotions. I couldn’t distinguish between emotions.

And that’s what really got me on the path because once I began doing those things, life got better and it got better and better because now I could articulate what was happening for me and I could distinguish between fear and anxiety and apprehension and uncertainty.

So initially, this was really all about me just figuring out how to survive in life. But later, when I became a coach 25 years ago, I realized that, oh, this is central to everybody’s life. This isn’t just Dan. This is a human concern. And as a coaching tool, it’s fabulous because we mostly learn about coaching by listening to conversation, learn conversational coaching, and I think that’s a lovely place to begin. But what it doesn’t help us see is what are the emotions that are driving that conversation or the internal beliefs and ideas and thoughts that a person’s having. So I began to incorporate it into my coaching. Then things just began to grow. So I, with my wife, wrote The Unopened Gift and then a workbook, and then another book with another co-author. And what happened was there was quite a few things to share, but I needed a place to share them from.

And it occurred to me and to us that, well, it’s really a school of emotions. What are we helping people do? We’re helping people learn about emotions and mainly through emotional literacy- through building their vocabulary and their understanding and the distinctions. That was really the focus. But because I was a coach, I also taught courses on coaching and how to introduce emotions into coaching and use them as a tool. And that’s continued to grow into other things. I have conversation groups, I’ve written other books, and now have a new enterprise the last couple of years with a partner in Texas called Dignity Inc., which is really focused completely on emotions, but we work with police, with leaders, with educators to help them bring this learning to their organizations.

Shay And one of the books that you’ve written is a field guide. It’s called The Field Guide to Emotions: A Practical Orientation to 150 Emotions. And it’s actually- literally- there’s a whole comprehensive list of 150 emotions. And I think one of the things I’ve heard you say is that there is a very logical and learnable structure to emotions. And the part of becoming emotionally literate is understanding, as an example, those 150 different emotions, naming them, recognizing how they play out in our own lives, thinking and reflecting upon them. And so I’m interested for those who are listening who might feel like they’re wanting to build more emotional literacy, how do you use things like that field guide to help people to basically evolve their own personal capacity?

Dan So I think the first thing for people to recognize is that they have emotions and nobody is going to teach them emotions. What somebody like me might be able to do is help you learn to articulate and put words to those emotions and to distinguish them one from another and to build your emotional vocabulary and palette, et cetera. So just to be clear that everybody has emotions, and it’s not really matter of doing anything with them. It’s really us learning to see them differently. So the very best exercise I know is one I give to everybody I work with, which is to start three times a day at random times, pausing, noticing your emotion and writing it down. That’s it. You don’t have to explain it, you don’t have to journal. It’s nothing like that. It’s called the notice and name exercise, and literally that’s all you’re doing- noticing and naming.

And then you just keep a running list. And what’s fascinating is that people do that for a week and they do it. What they begin to see on reflection is, wow, there’s a pattern to my emotional life. I experience certain emotions quite often, and there’s some emotions that I thought I would experience that don’t even show up on the list. Isn’t that curious? But what also begins to happen is they start using certain words to name their emotions. And the longer they go with this exercise, the more new words they begin using to describe their emotions. So whereas they might’ve said “anxiety” before, now they’re saying, well, I think this is “apprehension.” I don’t think it’s exactly anxiety or maybe it’s “uncertainty.” So they begin naturally to expand their vocabulary. And that’s really the basis of the distinctions. That’s what I did. That’s where the long list came from, is simply to say there’s hundreds, maybe thousands of emotions.

But you know that the average adult like us- average educated adult- uses the same 15 or 20 words repeatedly to name their emotions. They never vary from that list. So if you think about what that means, it’s kind of like we have such a narrow vocabulary for emotions that we never distinguish between some of the subtleties. And one analogy I would use is imagine if the only word you had was fruit, but you didn’t have the word for banana, pineapple, coconut, or plum. So when you wanted to describe something you ate, what would you say, “Oh, I ate a fruit.” Okay, well, that’s fine, but it’s not very precise. But if you could say, “I ate a damson plum,” oh, well, that’s much more precise. And you could also have a different conversation. If you wanted a fruit, you could ask for exactly what you wanted rather than whatever the other person gave you, because all you did, you asked for a “fruit.” And I think with emotions, it’s quite the same. We use a very, very small vocabulary to try to explain to other people or to understand ourselves something that’s incredibly nuanced. So this is really the beginning place for me is step-by-step noticing and naming.

Those are the first two steps, and you could repeat that exercise for the rest of your life, and you would just keep discovering more emotions and you would become more and more articulate with your emotions,

Shay And you’re not alone in recognizing that there’s value in becoming more articulate with our emotions. I know one of Brene Brown’s more recent books was Atlas of the Heart, which similarly looks at a very extensive list of words and then descriptions of varying emotions to again, allow us to broaden and deepen and enrich our vocabulary. And I think some of that skill building also helps us, in my view, to move beyond the simplicity of a broad word. You used anxiety as an example, but then actually you can dive much deeper into the layers of what that feeling might actually be. And so I’m curious about what you’ve come to understand about our capacity to become more nuanced and to recognize the subtleties of an emotion in terms of how that helps to actually improve the quality of our life.

Dan Okay. Well, I mentioned in terms of making requests or in terms of connecting with people, I think also understanding other people. When I look at someone and I see, oh, there’s something going on, they’re emotionally, I could just say, oh, they’re anxious. But if I have a big vocabulary of emotions, a broad vocabulary, I will question myself and I’ll say, well, is it really anxiety or might it be something else? When we begin to go back to the logic piece- every emotion as a story and impulse and a purpose- what that tells me is that uncertainty has a different story or narrative than anxiety and a different one than anticipation or then apprehension. And when I know those, what’s so helpful is then when I ask the person, “Oh, what’s going on with you?” When they articulate in language what’s going on with them, there’s a big clue for me about what emotion they’re experiencing.

So they might say, “I feel fear.” Okay, well, what is fear? And in a casual conversation, this would be weird to do, but in a coaching conversation, it’s really, really valuable is to say, “Well, what is fear? What is fear to you? What does it mean to you?” Because I can’t see the fear. I mean, I can see their response or the expression they have, but I don’t really know if it’s fear. Now that’s what they’re naming it, but fear’s a word we use a lot. So I want to know precisely what emotion is it. But if they say, “You know what, I can’t even open my computer because I am immobilized by what I might have gotten in my email.” Well, I think about, well, that’s maybe not fear. Maybe that’s dread because that’s a little bit different than fear. Fear is: I believe something may hurt me and I know what it is.

Well, opening my computer is probably not going to hurt me, but that resistance to opening my computer, I don’t want to do it because of what I might see- I think, oh, maybe that’s not exactly fear. Maybe that’s dread. Now when we can name it precisely, we can do something about it. One of the examples I use with people a lot is they come to me and they say, “Oh, I feel a lot of anxiety.” Okay, what’s anxiety? And you know what? Anxiety and fear feels pretty similar, but there’s another emotion that also fits into that cluster, which is doubt- or uncertainty- but doubt is the word I usually use. And I ask them, well, what’s the difference between these? Well, fear is “I believe something specific may harm me.” Like I might get hit by a bus or a meteorite. Anxiety is “Something might hurt me, but I don’t know what.”

So I’m vigilant, I’m worrying, I’m looking for the source of the danger. But doubt is very different because doubt is the emotion. Has this prepare. If I doubt whether I know how to get somewhere, what do I do? I get out my GPS or I ask directions I prepare so that I can be successful. So once we have those, then it’s a lovely conversation about, you said anxiety, but if you were to look at these three and give me percentages, what is it? And more often than not, what people will say is, “I feel doubt.” Okay, well, let’s work with doubt. Because working with doubt is different than working with anxiety, and it’s different than working with fear. So again, the more we know, the more connections, the more distinctions we see, the more I think targeted our work can be with people, our support for them. And even if it’s just understanding them- even it’s not coaching them- I have a much, much clearer idea of how somebody else is experiencing life. And if it’s somebody I have a relationship with, well, that’s important. We want to understand and be understood. That helps us connect. So in my life, I think it’s fabulous because it gives me so much insight into the human being that I am or the human being I am with.

Shay Yeah. One of the things you talk about- there’s a really nice section in one of your books on this- is that idea that many people will believe that other people make them feel a certain way. “You’ve made me feel angry, you’ve made me feel frustrated.” And yet what we actually know about emotions is two people can experience exactly the same event and feel entirely differently. And that no one actually makes you feel a certain way that we actually are generating our own emotional response to an event or an experience. And so how do you think understanding and recognizing that we are actually the sort of creators of our own emotional experience- and that yes, people can do all sorts of things, but nonetheless there is an agency and internal occurrence and ownership- how do you feel and see that recognizing that helps us to work more skillfully with our emotions and to better navigate relationships and our life?

Dan So one of the helpful things is to adopt a principle that I am responsible for my emotions. And that’s a hard one, that’s a tough one. And our language betrays us because we do say, “He made me so angry,” “She makes me so happy.” And it sounds like they’re doing it to me, right? I mean, it’s in the language. That’s exactly what it sounds like. But like you said, in emotions, if we understand how emotions occur, we can begin to demystify that, right? Or to take that misapprehension away and learn something else. If we understand the story impulse purpose. So what happens? You say something, I hear it, I interpret it. Whatever my interpretation or story is that will generate the emotion I feel. And of course then it’s my emotion and I’m responsible for it.

It’s a really challenging thing to do, particularly at first because, well, it’s a lot easier to blame somebody else for my emotions than to take responsibility for ’em. The problem with that is then I give away all my emotional power. Then I am not emotionally- what would we say- grounded and in choice about, okay, but what am I going to do with this emotion? I just blame it on you, and then I’m done. But if I say, oh, wow, so this resentment, this feeling- believing that something is unfair- that’s a big one. And what do I feel like doing? I feel getting even for the unfairness, am I going to, well, that’s up to me. I have to decide. And sometimes I might say yes, and sometimes I might say no, but at that point, I have to choose my response. And again, it’s really challenging.

And even when we’re good at it, even when we practiced it, we still slip into that. We still slip into the belief that somebody made me happy or somebody made me angry or somebody made me feel disappointment. And I think the only way to move beyond that is to have this principle, which is what nobody makes me feel anything. And then to keep working on it. And I demonstrate this sometimes in groups where I say, “Well, okay, let me show you how this works. Okay, so Shay, make me happy. I’m waiting. Make me happy.” And people will say things like, “Oh, I just put a million dollars in your bank account.” And my response is, “Oh, life is going to be so complicated now, and I got to pay taxes, and this is going to be a real headache.” You can’t make me happy. I mean, it’s impossible.

Now make me angry. Well, and what are you going to say, “Dan, You’re stupid. Dan, you’re ugly, Dan, you’re ridiculous.” And I say, “Okay, well, thank you. That’s your perspective. And I respect that.” I don’t agree with you, but okay, I don’t have to. It’s not that I’m required to be angry that anger occurs when we believe something is unjust. If I understand that, then if it does start to show up, then I start to say, oh, I must believe that what Shay said was unjust or I wouldn’t be feeling anger. Right? It’s still mine no matter what you did, no matter what you said. And I get that we go through life and we’re tired and things happen and we get ignited with the emotions. I understand all of that. But I think this is why it’s important to spend time with our emotions- reflecting and being curious about, “Wow, isn’t it interesting that I had that reaction or response emotionally when that happened?” Or they tell me about myself. And it’s not good or bad- it’s just information. It’s just data.

Shay One of the tools that you’ve developed is something called The Emotional Regulation Assessment, and it’s designed to help people to better understand how they regulate their emotions. So I’m wondering if you could explain to our listeners a little bit more about this tool and then how you think it can be most effectively utilized.

Dan Yeah, sure. Well, my partner that I mentioned, and I had this idea and it came out of all of his work, all of my work, and we said, you know what? There’s a link here somehow between emotional intelligence, emotional literacy, emotional agility, and emotional resilience. Those are all things that we think are different. They’re related, but distinct. And we believe that all of those, if you rolled them all up together, you would be able to gauge a person’s capacity for emotional regulation. And in all of my work and my learning, I think emotional regulation is what we’re looking for. I think that’s the end game for anything we’re doing with emotions is we want to be able to choose and to shift and to use our emotions as a tool. I think that’s what we want for our kids. I think that’s what we want for our family.

That’s what we want for our employees. So my partner and I went out and found a psychometrician, and we said, can you design an assessment that gives the data that shows either this idea is correct and verifiable or that we’re crazy? And he said, yeah, I can do that. And so he started working out. We’ve been working on it now for about 15 months, very close to being finished. And the data all supports the idea that we had, which we’re delighted about, but didn’t expect exactly. And it says that emotional intelligence and literacy are really the two facets of emotions where we are learning. So emotional intelligence- we just learn by experience, we learn by observation, we learn by what we’ve read and studied. And emotional literacy is as I described it. So those are things we can do individually, we can do on our own, and we can enhance those.

But what’s interesting about emotional agility and resilience is those are more practices. Those require other people. They have to be resilient to come back from experiences with other people- or in life. Agility is about being able to move from side to side to shift emotions. And so what we’re seeing is that we can measure all of these independently. And the value of that is this: I will use me. My emotional literacy is quite high, which is great because I’ve been studying it, writing about it, teaching it. I am thankful that I got a high score on emotional literacy. It’s not a hundred percent, but it’s pretty good. But what’s interesting is on my assessment, my emotional agility is much, much lower. And I took the assessment twice. I know I was kind of cheating, but once I did it through the lens of work, and once I did it through the lens of my home life, my personal life, and what’s interesting is I had the lowest emotional agility score in my personal life.

So what does that tell me? It tells me that actually in my work life, I don’t have to be particularly agile emotionally. I set my schedule, I make my plan, I make the changes to it. I’m pretty much choosing in control, some people would say. But in my personal life, I’m married to someone who grew up in Venezuela with Latina people, and culturally, she lives life very different than I live life in the sense that she’s very spontaneous. She lives very much in the moment. That’s her approach to life. That’s what she learned, that’s how she’s comfortable, her preference in life. And what I find is that in comparison, I’m very stilted, structured. I’m a gringo. I grew up in the Midwest of the U.S. I mean, I don’t have that emotional fluidity that she has. And by comparison, it shows up in my assessment. What’s lovely about it is even though I know all this stuff about emotions, now I know exactly where I need to focus.

If I want to improve or grow emotionally, it’s in my personal life- in my emotional agility, my ability to adapt to changing situations in my life. And I think if you asked her, she’d say, that’s completely true. She said, “Yeah, it’s great that you’re stable, but come on, once in a while it would nice to change directions and not have it be a big deal.” So that’s what I love about it. I think it’s so helpful. It doesn’t matter how much or how much you practice. The one other example I’d give is I used this with a coaching client who told me that she had autism. She had been tested for autism, and her real struggle is with emotions- how could she recognize what was happening emotionally in other people and in her? When she took it, her emotional resilience was very high. That’s very interesting.

She’s learned to bounce back in life, and her emotional literacy was quite low- it’s the opportunity for where she could learn. So all these things we’re talking about were part of our conversation. And she grew during our coaching time together more and more to recognize emotions in her, in other people to be more in choice. And she said, “It makes an enormous difference. I never learned this. Nobody ever showed this to me before.” So these are all independent, and they’re not measures of good or bad. They’re just data where we can see ourselves. We can see something about ourselves scientifically, verifiably that we can’t see otherwise. And it’s a little bit like taking your blood pressure, you can’t see someone’s blood pressure, but it tells you a lot about your health when you do take it. So I think it’s quite similar. It’s a snapshot of who you are internally, emotionally, and then if you choose to do something with it, it gives you guidance as to what to do.

Shay And Dan, for people that are listening that would like to take the Emotional Regulation Assessment, where would you direct them?

Dan Yeah, dignity-inc.com is the website. Now the portal to take the assessment is not there yet, but you can send a note to us, you can contact us, we’ll put you on the list, we’ll be in touch with you, but it’s dignity-inc.com. Other things are there as well as also in the School of Emotions website.

Shay Great. You have a lot of tools and resources. Obviously as a School of Emotions you would think that you would. And some of the other things: you have designed emotion flashcards that help to make emotions kind of tangible and playful, where people can actually use these cards and select a card and play with a deck. You also have an app called Emote that helps people to expand their emotional vocabulary by noticing and naming that you were describing earlier in our conversation today, how are you finding that people are using both those flashcards and the app to help them with their emotional skill and development?

Dan Yeah. Well, the app is only on Apple for now, but what people tell me they do with it is, instead of going on Facebook, they go on the app and they look up an emotion that they’re experiencing. Or, like you said, they go through the list to see, “Oh, that’s the emotion maybe that I was experiencing.” On the app it also has clusters of emotions. It also gives some background. It also talks about how much you dial up an emotion or dial back an emotion, the regulation piece of emotions. So it’s really, it’s just a tool for people to explore and see what they find. There’s also a quiz, I think, so you can test yourself on how emotionally literate you really are. So I think it’s an enjoyable way for people just to explore emotions and to get some answers that they’re looking for.

The cards are interesting because those are often used by coaches. But as an example, I also have a good friend who’s an elementary school principal, and he uses them with the kids who are sent to his office. So he’ll take six or eight emotions that every six or seven-year-old knows, and he’ll go through them. He’ll say, “What does this emotion, oh, disappointment. What does disappointment mean? What does resentment mean? What does loneliness mean?” And what’s interesting is- he sent me a video, but he says, “What I do with them is then we have these emotion cards on the table, and I ask them to tell me which one is why they’re in my office today.” Because teachers often think that students are angry or that students are frustrated. And he said, what’s interesting is when the kids sit down and they pick their cars, often the ones they pick are things like disappointment and loneliness.

And when I ask them, “Well, how come why’d you pick those?” They tell me things like, “Well, this is a new school for me. And I thought I’d have lots of friends here, and I don’t. So I’m disappointed and I’m lonely.” And that’s the source of their behavior or their inability to participate or be part of the class. So I think that they can be used in lots of ways like that- to help people articulate their emotions when they don’t have the vocabulary for it. And I do this with adults as well. I use the whole pack. He uses six or eight, both work. But I think what’s so good about them, what’s so useful about them is they’re tangible. So the emotion’s right there on the card. And so it’s not just some nebulous idea that’s floating around in the room. No, it’s right there on the card.

The other thing is my observation when I’ve worked with leaders with them is that the leaders feel, I think more comfortable- or safer, let’s say- because when we’re talking about the emotion on the card, we’re pointing to the card. We’re not pointing to them. That half step- that having it outside of yourself and tangible- I think is enormously beneficial. And those are surprises. When we created the cards, we didn’t know that that would be the case, but that’s what we’ve seen over and over. So some coaches use them individually, facilitators use them in trainings or in sessions. Some schools use them with their school children. So they’re really used in a variety of ways, but they’re used exactly like you said, it’s like flashcards. They aren’t arithmetic, but they’re about emotions.

Shay And another tool that you offer: you have emotional mastery groups, where people can explore the meaning of their individual emotions, their relationships, and I think these are offered online primarily. Is that the format? So tell us a little bit more about these mastery groups and how those might be of benefit as well.

Dan Yeah, sure. Well, yeah, they’re called the Emotional Mastery Conversations groups, and they’re all on Zoom. And we meet every three weeks. And there’s actually four different sessions depending on people’s schedules, what work for them. And some people have been coming for years, I’ve been offering them for since the beginning of COVID. And there are people who started with me then who are still in the groups, because what we do is: every session I pick a new emotion and I pick an emotion we haven’t covered before, and I deconstruct it. I look at the linguistic root of it, and we talk about that. Where did this emotion come from? Because it came from somewhere. And then we talk about that structure, the story, the impulse purpose, and then I share my interpretation: here’s how I understand this emotion. And then I usually give some examples in sentences or from newspapers or someplace where there’s some sort of real-life description that includes this emotion.

And then I create a cluster of emotions. If you think about what we were talking about with anxiety: well, anxiety we put in the center, but we would have to say that fear is somehow related to anxiety, and apprehension is somehow related, and doubt is somehow related. So by putting them in a cluster, what you begin to see is, yeah, they are related, but they’re also distinct. And here’s the difference between these two, and here’s the difference between these two. Because emotions rarely show up individually. Often we feel several emotions at the same time. Perfectly natural. It’s perfectly normal. But what we tend to do is behave according to the strongest of those emotions. But sometimes we have them misnamed. So again, when we build that vocabulary, when we understand it- and this is really an immersive conversation, so it’s not just me talking.

I want to hear from them, “Okay, when have you felt this emotion in your life? When does it show up? What types of situations can you articulate this?” And this last week we worked with Zeal. Z-E-A-L. Zeal as an emotion. And I’m not a guy who’s very zealous. I’m pretty quiet and not too excitable, but I could find places in my life where, yeah, actually I do feel zeal about that, or I have felt zeal about that. And then the question is always: well, would I like more zeal in my life or do I have so much that it gets in my way sometimes? And so that’s what we talk about. And people- it’s fascinating- because people regularly say, “You know what? I thought I didn’t ever feel this emotion. But now that we’ve taken a look at it, now that I’ve heard other people talk about, now that I’ve seen the examples, I realized that actually I do feel this emotion pretty often, but I just never distinguished it before.”

I never recognized it. I never had the name to put on it. So I think what happens- and I hear this again from the people who have been in these groups over a period time- is that it helps them navigate sometimes really challenging situations in their lives, death of parents, or illnesses. And I can tell you that that’s exactly my experience as well- is that without all of this emotional learning, life would be so much harder, like it was in my thirties and forties. I don’t want to go back there. It’s like life is so much better, and it looks so different. People look different. They sound different. Things mean something different. And I think it’s a little bit of a shame because we’re all born with emotions and human beings. We’ve been so fascinated with our intellect, with learning intellectually and rationalism, which I think is amazing. But I think we’ve overlooked the power of emotions. I mean, emotions are just as valuable to us and just as much a part of our lives, and yet we know so much less about them.

Shay And we’ll be sure for all of our listeners to put links in the show notes so that they get access to all these different tools that we’re talking about today, so that they have the ability to learn more and to continue to broaden their emotional intelligence and literacy. And I’m very interested also, as we think about just that last piece that you were touching on, how much this relates to our emotional capacity, our resilience, our adaptability, our agility, and how all of these skills really allow us to live a higher quality of life. It creates a better sense of enjoying the day-to-day, being able to skillfully navigate our lives rather than kind of feeling at the mercy of, right, because especially once you understand that an emotion doesn’t control you, but that you have the capacity to interact, to understand, to relate with, to kind of work together collaboratively, internally with your own emotions, and also with those of others around you, it’s less scary. Kind of like you talked about with the cards where you can see a degree of separateness, but also interrelationship and interconnectivity. And when you have the capacity to both see how it ties into you, but also how you’re not defined by it, you have a lot more power and freedom. And so I’m curious how you’ve come to understand how all of these specific skills that you’re identifying that we can develop, how those actually increase the quality of our lives and our health.

Dan Well, I think what you’re saying is a big piece of it. We’re in choice. We get to decide. And even when there are things that maybe we don’t really want to do, but we still have the option to choose to do them and to choose the emotion that will allow us to do them. We may be really uncomfortable, fearful, or anxious or apprehensive about a certain conversation, but it’s an important conversation. It’s something that needs to happen, but we avoid it because of those emotions. Well, they’re not really serving us right? Then we, okay, but what emotion would serve us? Boldness, compassion, curiosity, emotions that would allow us to have that conversation. So one of the things I think emotions allow us to do when we befriend them, which is how I think about it, they’re like a really good friend. If you have a really good friend, they don’t always just tell you what you want to hear.

They tell you stuff that sometimes can be annoying. Sometimes you go, well, thanks, right? I didn’t need to hear that. But why do they do it? They do it because they care about you. They do it because you’re their friend, because that’s what they’re there to do. And that’s what I think emotions do. They just help us. Let me give you an example about how the emotions have done something wondrous in my life is that, so some years ago, like five years ago, my sister committed suicide. My sister took her own life. And it was a shock. It was a surprise. But here’s what I noticed: is that my experience of that, here’s how it worked. I was moving through the time after that happened, and what I would notice is my emotions coming and my emotions going and what they were telling me.

So I felt anger. Why did I feel anger? Because it’s unjust that she struggled with depression. I don’t. But she did. But lots of people don’t. So how’s that just, and then I would feel gratitude like, wow, she was my sister for 65 years. Wow, that’s something to be grateful for. And then I’d feel some joy. Oh, remember that time? And then I’d feel this, and then I’d feel that. So the emotions, it’s kind of like they were coming by in a stream. I would just see them, oh, look, oh, look, oh, look. And I could appreciate them and I could feel them and I could notice them, but I didn’t get fixated on any of them. They just kept coming and they kept going, and I let them do that. By contrast, I have two brothers and another sister, and my brothers in particular, I saw how much they suffered emotionally, how much they struggled with this.

Now, I don’t think it’s because I have more shallow emotions than they do. I think in my interpretation, that experience was the first time that it ever happened to me. And I think what it showed to me is that when we’re fluid with emotions, fluent with our emotions, when we see them as a part of us, but not all of us, just like we don’t believe our brain is all of us. We have a body: it’s part of us, but it’s not us. Our thoughts are not us. They’re part of us. Our emotions are not us. They’re part of us. And I think when we begin to make that differentiation and we see that there’s something indescribable about what we are as a human being, and there’s lots of elements that all of us have that go into making that unnameable thing, that we are: that human being, and we can learn about any of them.

People learn about spirituality, people learn about intellect. People learn about, they learn about their body. They learn about what works and what doesn’t work for them. And I think emotions are just another piece of that. So for me, what I would say is much less stress in my life, much less anxiety in my life, and I’m much quicker to recognize when I am feeling something very strong emotionally. And when sometimes I do get caught in emotions and what do I choose to do about that? So I would say what it allows me to do is be much more in choice about how do I want to be as a human being? And I’ll give you another example. So part of what you see my haircut here, it’s a, what do we call it? The solidarity haircut. Because my wife is in having chemotherapy right now. And we together have gone through this cancer that she has and decided, you know what?

We’re going to choose what emotions we’re going to live this in. We’re not going to be victims to this. And yes, we know that sorrow will show up, and sadness will show up, and anger will show up and disappointment. We know that. But what emotions will serve us best? And what we’ve come to is- what we’re going to focus on, what we’re going to keep moving back to are: dignity, perseverance, optimism, and faith. These are the ones that are going to help us the most in this period of time. Well, if I couldn’t name emotions, if I didn’t believe I could shift emotions and choose emotions that would serve me if I wasn’t comfortable, if I didn’t see emotions as a normal part of every experience in life, that would be impossible to do. So underneath all of this, what my desire, my hope is, is simply to normalize emotions. That people begin to see emotions as just part of being human, right? It’s like there’s nothing embarrassing about them. There’s nothing weird about them. We’ve all got them. We’re just emotional beings. So could we accept that, and could we just see them as a normal part of life? Because when we do, then we can use them, then we can befriend them, then we can talk about them, and we can share them, and then we can examine them and see how they can support us more.

Shay And I think for people that are listening that just heard the beautiful example that you provided with the cancer diagnosis that you’re going through with your wife, and they hear that you are making a decision to also choose to experience and focus on certain emotions like dignity and respect and compassion, I would imagine, and many, many others that you mentioned, optimism, et cetera. How do you do that? I feel like that’s a question that people that are listening are going to want to understand. It’s like how do you make that choice? How do you shift your attention? How do you actually do it in real life?

Dan So here’s what I understand about us as human beings: we have beliefs and thoughts, we think stuff. We’ve got really active minds- brains- and we have emotions, which are this energy that moves us. And we have bodies. And the body, for me, is a container for the emotions. And this is why when somebody is really surprised or they feel a really strong emotion, they cry: why? it spills out, or they laugh: it spills out. So for me, when I think about the body as a container, what it also means is how I shape my body, my posture, my movement, all of that is related to the emotion. So here’s what I vision I always have is this: imagine somebody who’s feeling resignation, so they’re thinking something. What are they thinking? Nothing I do will make any difference. So why would I even try? Because nothing I do will.

They’ve surrendered, they’ve given up. But what’s the body? Think about somebody who’s in resignation. Well, they’re all slumped over. They’re all collapsed, probably looking at the ground, they’re expressionless. They’re probably breathing very shallowly. Why? Because that’s the container for resignation. Now, it looks a little bit like sadness. It looks a little bit like disappointment: true, but there aren’t very many emotions that look like that. When you see somebody in a body like that, you go, whoa, you have a pretty good idea what it is. If I am in resignation and I say, you know what I’d much prefer is joy. I like to feel joy. Here’s the thing, people have a story that they have to know how to get there before they decide where they want to go. You don’t do that when you go on vacation. You say, “Hey, I want to go to Santorini.”

And then you figure out how to get there. So with emotions, it’s the same thing. I recognize I’m feeling resignation. Where would I prefer to be? I’d prefer to be in joy. So let’s think about it. What’s the story of joy? Life is amazing. Well, let’s celebrate. Joy is related to what: weddings, births, anniversaries, graduations. So there’s something celebratory about joy, but think about the body. What’s joy look like: completely different container than resignation. And here’s what I have invite people to do. Let’s get really clear on the first one. Let’s get really clear on the second one. Now, let’s practice moving between them. I want you to shift what you’re thinking, but I want you to shift the body at the same time and see if that emotion doesn’t shift for you. Now, it doesn’t happen instantaneously, is that we have to practice, because we’re creatures of habit.

So our body and our thinking, when we quit paying attention to joy, will drift back to resignation because that’s what we do as human beings. But what I would argue from my experience personally and with people I work with, is that if we make it a practice, if we strengthen, focus on the emotion that we want to develop, that we can make that habitual. The other one will still be there. We’re not going to lose it, but we just won’t go there as easily. It’ll take something bigger to send us to resignation because we’ve strengthened joy so much. I’ll give you a personal example. I discovered some years ago that I lived in the mood or the emotion of entitlement, and it’s horrible. It’s like I deserve a certain income. I deserve a certain standard of living I deserve. It was all this stuff that I thought I was entitled to.

And I was really quite shocked. I didn’t think of myself that way, but I thought, “Ooh, I don’t want to stay there. Where would I rather be?” And in the end, what came to me was gratitude. I want to see everything as a gift. Everything that I have in my life, whether I worked for it, whether I didn’t work for it, doesn’t matter. It’s all a gift. This conversation: it’s a gift for me. Fantastic. So I did exactly what I just described. Okay, what was I thinking in entitlement? What did I need to think to move to gratitude? What was my body in entitlement? And it was kind of like this: give it all to me. And what was in gratitude? It was like this: it’s all a gift. It’s all a gift. And I started putting that into my conversation and talking about it and writing about it.

And now I think mostly I live in gratitude. Now, it doesn’t mean I never feel entitled. I do feel entitled sometimes, but I know what it is and I know how to move out of it. And gratitude has become second nature. I don’t try anymore. It’s just has become habitual. And when we go back to an emotion like anxiety, there are many emotions that become habitual. And so any little discomfort, we go to anxiety. Well, we can change that, right? We’ve learned that in many times. Now, I understand that people are wired a certain way and some people are more sensitive, et cetera. But I don’t know anybody who can’t, to some degree learn to shift emotions or mood in life. But I think we’ve never been shown how, we’ve never been told that. And we’ve always lived with the idea that emotions are fixed. And people even say that. They say, “Well, that’s just the way I am. I always think, well, maybe, but maybe it’s just the way you’ve learned to be, so maybe you could learn to be different if you chose.”

Shay Yeah, it’s a very important point that you’re making around the somatic element to all this, how it lives in the body and how, by changing the body, we actually can change the experience. And also, just you’ve named throughout this conversation the idea of emotions as flow, emotions as movement, emotions as energy, and what all of that means. And even in some traditions, they’ll talk about emotions like the clouds: like that. They come and then they pass that you’ll have them on a given day. And then on another day, it’s clear, bright, sunny sky. And that idea of emotions as being fluid in motion, changeable. And then also in our bodies, somatically ingrained, you could say. But then also with the capacity to be shifted and change through motion, change in energy and change in physicality and positionality. And I would say as much mental positionality too, that you can actually, as you shift the body, you can also make that choice to shift the mind and the thoughts and all of that can then start to change up the emotions. So as I think about all that, to me, one of the skills, it is an insight into recognizing that none of this is truly fixed. And there are certain emotions, particularly like heavier ones like depression or sadness, that often when people experience them in that moment of experiencing, it feels so concrete, so fixed, so real.

Yet, if there’s a fundamental understanding, almost a priori, before you drop into that state of depression that, oh, actually this isn’t a locked or fixed state. It might have felt that way in the past, but I know that truly, underneath that, there is this inherent capacity to create change. And now that I have that understanding, I also have some tools of things that I can do a little bit differently that will create a slightly different outcome. And that is so empowering. That’s the choice that you’re talking about: it’s where we’re not locked into certain frameworks, but we actually have skillful navigation of how we feel.

Dan So three quick things: one, I don’t think of depression as an emotion itself, because often there’s several emotions there, and it’s a clinical diagnosis. So I don’t use the word depression. I might say, “I feel depressed,” but it really means I feel low. So I avoid that. But what you’re saying, I think, is exactly the case, is that, and we can think about it another way. Think about a time when you felt really, really happy and it was your reality. And you know what else? When you were really, really happy, you might’ve been thinking, “How could this ever end? It’s so wonderful.” But it did end, right? It did shift to a different emotion. So I think what you’re saying is great: if we believe or choose to try to believe that, well, maybe my emotions aren’t fixed. So anytime I feel it, even if it feels very intense, even if it feels very solid to remember that, well, it’s going to pass at some point, it’s going to evolve into a different emotion, to morph.

And I think that that is really helpful, because then we know that at some point we’ll have choice, and emotions come and emotions go. But I think many of us don’t trust that about emotions. And many people that I work with are fearful of sadness because they believe that it’s the beginning of that slide into depression. And I’m like, “Well, maybe, but sadness is an emotion and it has a purpose. It has a value. So let’s stay there, right? Let’s experience it. Let’s understand it. Because once you understand it, I think you’ll see that it’s not as scary as you’ve come to believe.” But these are all things that- whoever taught us this stuff? Nobody, even parents who really cared. I think my parents were very caring, very loving. They didn’t teach me this stuff. Why not? They didn’t know it. This is all something that’s being created right now.

We’re doing it today, but people have been doing it for the last 20 years, 30 years, and I think it’s going to accelerate. I just had a conversation with a teacher in Pennsylvania, with an assistant principal, and she’s like, “I can’t get enough of this, because I want my entire staff to understand emotions as a tool to befriend them, to see them as something fundamental that we can offer our children. That’s what the state wants us to do. But to be honest, we don’t really know how to do that because we never learned emotions. We aren’t emotionally literate.” And I’m like, “Great. Well, let’s begin. I mean, we got to start somewhere. So let’s begin.” And your podcast is one of those beginning places. Some people will listen to this and they’ll go, “Oh, I never thought about emotions that way. I think I’ll go investigate a little bit.” That’s the beginning. I mean, that’s how people get started in this. It’s like once they get into the conversation, well, if it serves them, if they see value in it, they’ll continue.

Shay And because it is a buildable skill that through practice, you gain capacity. It’s very promising and exciting in that way.

Dan Newby:
It is. Well, we continue to do what serves us, what’s helpful. And that was true for me. Every little piece, every little puzzle piece that fell into place, I was like, “Oh, that’s cool. Yeah, that makes life better. I’m going to do more of this.” So if nothing had happened, if I didn’t feel anything, if I didn’t notice any difference in my life, I wouldn’t be having this conversation with you today. And I think that most people who can set aside the myths or the misapprehensions that they grew up with and take a fresh look at emotions and say, “Well, let me just start from the beginning. What are they, how do I know it’s an emotion and not…” O nce they begin building that, I find that people continue.

Shay And you gave such a good example because these are conversations on healing. And in this case, how we can work with our emotions to help us to heal. And you gave a beautiful example of that in sharing your story with both your story, actually with your sister and how you healed from that experience, and then how you’re actively choosing to go through the cancer diagnosis with your wife in a particular way that will hopefully make the whole experience more healing as you go through it. And so I’d be curious to hear your ideas around when you think of- in the context of your work around emotional skill and capacity and resilience and agility- how this all relates to what healing is and how you would define or describe what healing is.

Dan Well, healing, in my understanding, comes from a root that meant “to make whole.” That’s how I understand it. I looked it up not too long ago: I was just curious where the word came from. And I think that what we’re doing when we learn emotionally is we’re becoming more whole. There’s a piece of us that has always been there, but we haven’t recognized it. We may not have trusted it, we may have denied it or disregarded it, but it hasn’t been available to us to make us whole. And I think that when we integrate that, when we begin to see, “Oh, you know what, if I want to change what I’m thinking, I could change my emotion because we think differently in different emotions. So that’s interesting. That’s part of wholeness. It’s not separating my thoughts from my emotions or my emotions from my body.”

Right? Well, why do we get ulcers? Because we’re feeling certain emotions or everything is part of one. And so healing, for me, is when we reclaim all the parts of us that may be- or reclaim them for the first time that we haven’t previously- and we say, “Oh, you know what? Now I’m beginning to feel more whole. I’m feeling more aligned. I’m feeling healthier.” One of the expressions I love when people say is: “You know what? I just feel… it’s like I feel comfortable in my own skin.” And I go, “Yeah, that’s great. Why? Well, you’re becoming whole. You’re bringing together parts of yourself that were either not seen or were scattered in some way, or they were misunderstood. But now you’re saying, ‘Come on in here emotions and let’s see what we got and how can you help me and how can I listen to you? And what’s your job here anyway,’ ” Instead of having the presumption that emotions are a problem.

Shay Well, I want to give you an opportunity, Dan, if there’s anything else from your work with the School of Emotions that feels especially important to share with our listeners today, just to give you a chance to bring that forward.

Dan Wow. What a great opening. I would just say this: that when I started working with emotions 15 years ago, people thought it was really kind of weird. And there were some years where I was like, “Is this really worth it? Is this really?” So: some disappointment, some resignation? No doubt. But I’ll tell you what’s fascinating: I think people are so hungry for this. They’re so hungry. And the work we’re doing through Dignity Inc. Even police and police who talks to police about emotions, and when we work with the cards, when we work with the assessment with them, it’s fascinating to hear their insights. And it’s fascinating to hear how they begin to see themselves differently and they begin to see that they have choice and they begin to see that, “Oh, if they don’t get a sense of this now, when they retire, they’re still going to have emotions. They’re still not going to understand them.” So okay, and the impact of not understanding emotions on the way you treat your family and the community and for leaders too, and on and on- everything. So I think the one thing I would say is I think that this is coming. I now am absolutely certain I don’t have any doubt, and I’m grateful because I have had the opportunity to be part of it, and it’s benefited me enormously, but the people it’s brought me into contact with throughout the world: absolutely grateful and incredulous. It’s fascinating that in every culture I work in and every industry I work in seems like people are ready or they’re getting ready and there’s a lot of interest. So I would just invite anybody who is curious to delve into it. And I would also, if we could put my email, I’m happy for people to write to me because I love this conversation. So my zeal is right here: this conversation I love, and I think it’s why I’m here. I don’t know why me, right? Some white guy from the Midwest. I don’t know why me, I have no idea. I have no idea why me, but I think it’s why I’m here. And as long as I’m here, I’m happy to have conversation with people about it.

Shay Well, that’s very generous of you. We’ll include your email in the show notes as well so that people can reach out if they would like to contact you directly.

Dan Well, it’s been a delight, so thank you for inviting me and giving me the opportunity to have this conversation with you. And I love your questions. They make me think in new ways about things, and they provoke certain emotions, which is cool too.

Shay Good. I love that. I want to actually end- you have a piece of poetry in one of your books, and I want to end with that because I feel like it embraces a lot of what we’ve been speaking about in our discussion today. It’s by Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, and the title of the piece is The Guest House. So I want to allow our listeners to take this in:

The Guest House.

This being human is a guest house. Every morning, a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all! Even if there is a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house, empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

So I thought that was a lovely way to conclude our beautiful conversation and just to remind my own self to invite it all in, because it’s one of the many great lessons of life: invite it all in.

Dan Invite it all in. Well, thank you. Lovely reading of the poem. It’s lovely to hear the poem because usually I’m the one reading it, so enjoy listening to this. I hear different things and it’s fantastic. So thank you.

Shay Good. Thank you so much, Dan. It’s a pleasure.

My pleasure. Thank you.We hope you enjoyed this episode of The Conversations on Healing podcast. If you haven’t yet, please go to Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform and subscribe, rate, and review. This podcast, it helps so you won’t miss an episode. See you next time.