 Welcome to the show, Dr. Aprella West. We would love to hear you share a bit of your incredible and diverse work that you do as well as your background with our audience. You know, I came to psychology actually a little later in life. I've had a pretty diverse background, started out in politics as a speech writer and a press secretary, and then actually transitioned from policy work to music and ended up being a staff songwriter at Warner Chapel Music and an artist for a while. And then from there moved into doing some nonprofit advocacy work around campaigns like the Darfur Genocide and also some civic reform issues and got really interested in human psychology there, which led me into getting trained as a mediator. And then once I got into mediation, I was like, whoa, I want to go deeper with people. I really want to be able to understand, conceptualize, hold and work with anything that comes into the room. And that's what led me into psychology. There is a lot of skills going on there. And just for my own curiosity, I'm kind of wondering, how did you go from writing speeches in the political sphere to writing music? Yeah, well, it's actually a more natural transition than it might sound like. Because in both spaces, we're really figuring out how to evoke emotion in people, right? Whether it's activating people around a certain cause or policy direction, or whether it's really bringing them into the deepest experience of heartbreak or new love or some of the other peak experiences that we have in life. So for me, it didn't feel like a strange transition. The cultures are definitely different in politics and in the music industry, but it felt natural. So it sounds like emotions played a big role in your career. And that naturally leads to emotional efficacy. And Johnny and I believe that emotional intelligence and communication are really key to building successful relationships, but also your career. So can you unpack for our audience what emotional efficacy is? Absolutely. By the way, I think he just said it really well. But emotion efficacy in its simplest form is just being able to do what matters most even in the face of intense stress, challenge, or pain. Now, this is a lot more difficult than it sounds because as I outlined in my most recent book, there's a glitch in our code. Our emotions tell us about everything from fake news to what really matters most to us. And so if we don't have the skillfulness to decode what kind of messages we're getting from our emotions, it's really hard to figure out how to choose wisely. I'm kind of curious on the emotional efficacy tip. For myself, I tend to find the music that most pushes my emotional buttons. And it changes from my mood or what's going on in my life, but the more emotional, the better. I mean, it just drives me in so many ways. When I listen to today's music, I find it devoid of any emotion, especially, I mean, it's not to say that there aren't artists who are doing that, but on pop radio, it's empty, at least to me. Did you find that in the same way or were you working in an area that was writing quite emotionally stirring music? I'm not sure that I struggled because in order to write music, you have to tap into something that is evocative for you. If you're bored, you're not gonna write a good song. You really have to find a subject, a topic, a moment, a person who brings out all the emotional stuff to take advantage of that, to put that into music. Johnny's not being honest in his fandom of Taylor Swift. And there certainly are pop musicians who do know how to play those emotional buttons. Unfortunately, a lot of it is with technology and EDM and other forms of evoking those emotions, but circling back on what you were saying earlier, it just feels today like our emotions are being evoked from so many different places on screens, friends, family, work, work from home, uncertainty, the news, politics, everywhere we go, all of these emotions are at play and it feels like many of our conversations are now emotionally charged. So it feels to me like emotional efficacy is more important than ever to be able to sort through, like what really matters to you versus understanding, hey, this person is actually just playing with those emotions or they're trying to evoke these emotions to get me to act in a way that isn't really in line with my values. Yeah, and what you're bringing up is a great intro to this idea of the emotional default world, which really is where we are in this trance of reactivity. We're removing from emotional reaction to emotional reaction and we lack the spaciousness or the curiosity to really think about what is it that I'm experiencing? What is this other person experiencing? To step into more perspective around what's happening and it's so easy is by design our emotions want to suck us in. When you think about it, our emotions are responsible for us surviving and so we are born into this world with an emotional reasoning bias. That means that we tend to believe everything we feel. Our emotions are by design, super sexy, super seductive and it's hard not to get into that emotional mode that what I call the emotional default world in order to unplug from that world, we need to increase our ability to be aware of what we're experiencing to see ourselves as separate from the emotional messages that are always coming at us. We need to learn how to tolerate unwanted or uncomfortable emotions so that we can even see that we have a choice about what we do next, about whether we react or whether we design our next moment and how we show up. It's fascinating to me as I just spent some time traveling and didn't have good internet connection and was unplugged from a lot of these emotions that you feel online through work email and Slack and then of course social media, TV, news, all of the like and it created some space for me to actually tune a little bit more into my emotions and I felt that was a magical opportunity but many of us don't have that opportunity to travel. Let's be honest, in the Western world we're working more than we're on vacation and yet we find we wait until vacation to unplug to clear through some of these emotions. So how do we do this in our day to day life, create that space and diffuse from those emotions that feel such a strong part of us? I appreciate what you just said there at the last piece. It's an opportunity for me to clarify that we're not really trying to distance from emotions and we can't do that. That's just a fool's errand for us humans. We can't get rid of our emotions. What we can do is become really skillful with what we do with them, how we interact with them and you're right, like when we travel we have more of that spaciousness to just kind of slow down and sit with what's going on for us but we can do this in any moment. Even right now as I'm sitting here with you guys I could slow down just a little and drop in and I can notice what's happening in my body. What are the thoughts I'm having about what you guys think of me or what I think of you? I can notice those thoughts. I can notice an urge to slow down or to speed up. I can label my feelings of curiosity and excitement and appreciation for the conversation. And that right there is me unplugging from the emotional default world, leveraging some awareness, leaning into some of the discomfort even that is here in this moment with us. I think at this point we should go ahead and define what emotional default world is for our audience because it is incredibly important. And I always say that a lot of the work that we do here and with our clients is pattern recognition and whether or not the patterns are pushing them forward or holding them back and those patterns are based on these programmed emotional default modes. So please go ahead and explain that to our audience. I'd love to twist my arm. I love talking about the emotional default world and I actually developed a model to help people understand what's going on when we just have sort of automatic reactions. And what I designed is this model I call the three Bs and the three Bs are your biology. That's what you're genetically programmed to do in response to certain stimuli. Your biases, which in this case include the emotional reasoning bias that we believe everything we feel, the confirmation bias that we look for evidence to support what we already think and the negativity bias which keeps us looking for any potential threats around us. That's the second B. And then the third B are our beliefs and specifically our beliefs about emotions. All three of these Bs are shaping our behavior in any moment and they're trying to help us index for safety, certainty, coherence and comfort. And that is our default mode. That's what pretty much all of us are on some level doing. If we were able to tune into everyone's most inner world we would sound a little bit like cave people going ooga ooga me want safety or ooga ooga me want certainty. That's kind of what's at the heart of most of our default reactions. Now, that's not always helpful in every context. So this is where we really can imagine an evolutionary upgrade to our emotional coding. Like I say in the book, there's a glitch in our decision-making code when we have on average 35,000 choices a day and 98% of those are actually not authentic choices. Not that every choice has to be authentic. I don't want to decide whether or not I have to pee. I want to just know I have to pee and go pee. I don't want to do a lot of inquiry around it. That's nice and helpful. But there are times where it's not so obvious what choice is going to move me. Like AJ, I think you were suggesting or Johnny, maybe it was you saying that we want to move in the direction that matters to us. So I think comfort, certainty, that resonates but this cohesion piece I think our audience might be a little lost on. Do you mean coherence? Yeah, we like things to make sense. It's uncomfortable when we can't make sense of things. So our minds are really meaning-making, problem-solving machines. And again, for good reason, we have to solve problems. If there's a big bear standing in front of us, we have to figure out how to survive that. What's really difficult for us is we have a lot less physical threats now in the time we're living in. But what our mind has done is it's gone from identifying threats as threats to our physical survival to threats to our social survival. So now we tend to read threats as like, what does someone else think about me and how do I think about myself? That's usually what's at stake when we think about navigating threats on a daily basis now. And in our experience, a big part of that is the bias to personalize a lot of the response that we see in others and then have the emotional reaction. So you have someone that you're trying to get to know and they don't respond and immediately you personalize that lack of response to, I did something. They don't like me. They're not gonna want a second date, et cetera, et cetera, when maybe they got in a car accident, maybe it had literally nothing to do with you. And I even fall into this trap. So I had a really close friend and I had reached out to him a few times, hadn't heard from him. And then I come to find out he was in some major legal trouble and I didn't know he was keeping it from all of us and he was very stressed about it. But I had personalized it. Oh, what did I do to him? Oh my God, why is he not responding to me? He normally is so responsive. So this personalization comes up again and again when we think about those social threats. Absolutely, and that is a powerful threat where we internalize and we're taking responsibility for things, even the absence of any evidence that it has anything to do with us. And that is, you know, in the emotion efficacy model, one part of emotional stuff, which are thoughts, it's our thinking. It's how we're languaging our experience. So let's talk about those different parts because obviously thoughts jump out at us for sure, but what are these other parts of emotional efficacy? So if I were to ask you guys right now in this moment, what are you feeling? You would probably be able to tell me, yes, maybe at least one feeling. Okay, if I then asked you to tell me why you know you're feeling that, what comes up? Past experiences of labeling those emotions and feelings. Okay, so you're comparing it to other times where you've had the same experience, but how do you know that you're experiencing the feeling you're experiencing right now? I would most likely look to physical cues and stories, experiences. Okay, so sensations in your body, that's definitely one part of it. Yep, and then you're also mentioning stories, which is thinking, so that's another part of stuff, yeah. What else? What I'm compelled to do because of how I feel. Yes, exactly, urges, perfect. Yeah, and then AJ, you also mentioned labeling, the experience of being able to label your experience. So you guys, well done. You've basically outlined all four parts of emotional stuff, and stuff is an acronym that stands for sensations, thoughts, urges, and feelings. It makes it really easy to remember. And this is always happening for us. Even more basic is the answer to the question, what is emotion in our culture, especially in English speaking cultures, we tend to conflate feeling and the word feeling and emotion. Feeling is actually just an interpretation of your sensations and thoughts. Emotion literally means energy and motion. It comes from the Latin word, emo tear. And all of this stuff is energy and motion. All of your sensations, your thoughts, your urges and feelings is energy and motion. That's a basic model for emotion efficacy training, and it's sort of the jumping off point for people to become more aware of like, when I say I'm feeling something, what's actually going on? Right, I notice in that, for many of the clients we work with men, so they tend to shy away from or try their best to distance themselves from expressing those emotions to others. And there's a bit of an internal struggle there of not wanting to showcase too much emotion, and then it leads to a lack in expressing that emotion and vulnerability and certainly harms their relationships. So are there differences to the experience of those emotions for men and women? Is that something that you've seen in your work? I do see it a lot, and this actually fits into the three Bs we were talking about, what are those default shaping forces in our lives? Because part of our beliefs about emotions have to do with what we've learned, not only just in terms of our own levels of comfort with emotion, but our family of origins, beliefs about emotions, and then also what our culture tells us is okay or acceptable for people who identify as male or female to express or even feel. And so I do think that there's a lot of rules that have been made up about what's okay to experience, especially for men, as you're saying. Why is emotional efficacy so important? Well, if you care about how your life unfolds, then you want a powerful relationship with your emotions. Because even in moments where we're not aware of it, our emotions are our primary motivational force. So I've been watching with great curiosity the rise of interest in stoicism over the past five years. And it's really interesting to me slash amusing because why is stoicism so popular? It's popular because it feels good. It's an emotional experience to feel like your emotions aren't controlling you. At its core, it is still an emotionally driven interest or desire to be able to observe your emotions without being controlled by them. So even people who are identifying as being more rational or stoic are really just embracing a pleasurable emotional experience. Emotions are just at the heart of all the choices we make and the actions we take making it so fundamental to quality of life and thriving. I think it becomes quite apparent as well if we're faced with 35,000 choices a day and 98% of them are in default mode. Well, there's a lot going on there that is probably covering up issues that would be getting us to where we need to go if we could focus in on the fault mode or patterns that are keeping us in that same place. Exactly, the source of most psychological suffering that we're finding now in the research, the research is going beyond symptoms and really looking at what causes psychological suffering is the inability to tolerate and allow uncomfortable emotional experiences. And this leads to all kinds of suffering. I mean, we see this in people who struggle with drug and alcohol, abuse or addiction. We see it in relationship patterns that are unhelpful. Anytime we're moving away from something that we don't wanna experience, it's possible we're also blocking ourselves from connecting to what really matters. And those emotions actually connect all of us because they're universal. So a lot of what we're seeing in society is categorizing and labeling and making emotions good and bad and things to avoid and things you wanna pursue and chase, but all of those emotions are universally expressed across all cultures, across all humanity. And we've found in a lot of the work that we've done with our students is there's also a lack in emotional vocabulary. So with this labeling goes good, bad, I feel okay. And you don't have quite the range of expression of emotions when you start labeling things as good and bad and things to avoid and things to share and not to share. So what have you found in your work around labeling and how does that impact our emotional efficacy? Well, if we can't describe or language our experience, it's almost like being a baby who can kind of like look around and notice their surroundings and has sort of this maybe ambiguous sense of what they're experiencing, but can't make any meaning out of it. What human doesn't love coherence and certainty. So just being able to put labels on what you're experiencing is very regulating for humans. So that's one of the benefits of it. The other benefit which you're alluding to AJ is that we all experience all the feelings and being able to share what we're experiencing is how we get close to each other. It's impossible to experience real intimacy without having a certain level of fluency around your experience. So I think that makes it super important. I also just wanna say I love what you're talking about in terms of meeting all the emotions. I think I recently posted on my Instagram that some negativity is essential for thriving, but we need to know what doesn't work for us. And the way we know that is through our emotion messages and being able to read those clearly. Positive vibes only is not a recipe for thriving in life. If you're only experiencing positive vibes, then you're not really in life, you're not taking risks, you're not loving hard enough to be disappointed when there's a disconnection or rupture in that love. We really have to experience a full range of emotions to thrive in life. And so I've been pretty concerned about a lot of the cultural messages that are encouraging people to try and only focus or only even have positive thoughts. It's not even possible. Feels like the through line between stoicism and hedonism of this desire for certainty around emotion. And it's easier to chase the positive emotion with hedonism, just go towards the positive vibes, YOLO, and then with stoicism to have this certainty that you can control and manage emotions and use them to your advantage when you see fit. Yeah, and both of those are a setup from my perspective. We will never be able to only experience positive vibes and we cannot control our emotions. We only can control how we engage with them, how we relate to them and how we respond to them. So it's more like a keto than it is a black and white skill. I also feel that a lot of times because of these cultural forces to hide or not show the full range of emotion because, hey, you don't want to let people down. You don't want them to see you in the negative and obviously the highlight reel that social media creates, we're lacking this ability then to recognize and others when they might be feeling what we label as negative emotions and also to feel them in ourselves because we don't feel comfortable expressing those negatively labeled emotions and that is not healthy. Right, it's not healthy, it's not helpful. There's also a belief that we perpetuate there that negative emotions are somehow undesirable or ugly and I feel sad a lot of times that people don't have the experience of joining in someone's sadness and really celebrating that we have the ability to celebrate slash mourn together. We're losing a lot of rituals around the experiences that are less positive in our culture as a result of that and that also means a life that has less meaning for people. Well, thinking about Johnny's music selection, sadness is often a part driving force of some of the doom metal that he listens to and it is a very powerful form of music, a sadness and it's funny that pop culture now has labeled this as a negative emotion to run from or avoid. Well, it's funny you bring that up AJ, there's another thing that I had connected it to and there's a certain scene for what is called doom metal and it's just very slow, it's very sad and it's incredibly emotional and when I hear it, I get lifted up, I revel in it, I get stronger. Somebody who's not used to it hears it, they're getting mowed over and I remember the first time I played some stuff for AJ and he's like, well, I don't even know what's going on right now. And one of the things that I had connected it to why it feels so good, I've also lived in the Southeast and played within the old country scene as well and really sad country songs to the untrained ear is it puts people in a place where they're just, they're squirming and they're trying to get out of it but folks who understand those sad country songs are being lifted up by the same music. I really enjoy how people are experiencing that and I also know that they could easily fall into the joy that I'm getting out of it as well but their first guttural, visceral instinct of hearing that is they're uncomfortable with the overwhelming emotions that it throws onto them. Well, I mean, so they're being true to their wiring, right? Which is to index for comfort, certain decoherence. I will say, I remember when I first started writing songs and for me, country music was the least interesting and then as I began to appreciate it more as a craft and the stylizing and things like that I got more interested in writing it but in the beginning I did feel like it was pulling me into something that felt a little too obvious or too simple to hold my interest. I think it's very contextual for people. That's why we like different kinds of music, right? And different things like, yeah, blow our skirts up. And certainly different time periods. I remember growing up my emo phase and listening to that music now evokes fond memories but I don't necessarily wanna be in that emotional state all the time like my teenage years. So are there any clear signs or indicators that we might not have high emotional efficacy and it might be hindering our success, our wellness, our health? That's such a great question because I think, first of all, yes, there are signs. And secondly, I don't think that people even know to ask themselves that question. You know, what else is possible for me? Yeah. I feel many of us overestimate our emotional efficacy. It's one of those things where it's like, yeah, I have that and we hear this too. I'm highly emotionally intelligent. I can recognize emotions in others and then through some communication with them, you go, well, I'm not necessarily clear that you actually do have the level that you believe that you have. So it sounds like a buzzword that everyone would wanna overindex on but how do we know maybe this is an area for development? Yeah, so a lot of my coaching clients tend to be really high functioning tech innovators or creatives and they fall exactly into this category where they just don't realize what they're missing that they could create in their lives, right? The opportunity cost that being plugged into the emotional default world creates can be really big because you're not thinking about what is possible. You're thinking about navigating just from one moment to the next based on what feels usually most familiar and is the path of least resistance for most people. One of the inquiries you can do is to ask yourself a question. If I had no fear, what would I be doing differently in my life? And if you come up with anything other than what you're doing right now, you probably have some room to grow with your emotional efficacy. Most people I know would be able to come up with things. Even for myself, I did this with myself last week and I came up with three things I would be doing differently right now in my life and so I see my own ability to grow there and facing some of what feel like insurmountable challenges or stress that once I commit and I see why I might wanna move in that direction, I can then see the opportunity in front of me. And this is the kind of thing you would just miss going along in life, maybe being reasonably content even, but it does allow you to stretch for what's possible. It's not just for people who struggle with chronic emotion over control or under control, it's also just for people who want to tap all of what's possible for them. Well, there's certainly that aspect of aspiration and goal setting and if you're setting proper goals, those goals should be outside of your comfort zone. If they weren't, you should have reached them already but if they're real goals, you're gonna have to step outside of your comfort zone and you're gonna have to work. And what comes from that is an overwhelming of emotions that you're going to have to stir through a frustration, anger to being elated and joyful that you've reached those goals. So we have everyone who comes through our programs that we have a program called Unstoppable which basically sets everybody up for the journey that they're going to take. And it sets up with basically allowing our clients to learn their own triggers and mechanisms to their psychology so that when they understand that they're in a heightened emotional state, they are turning towards challenge rather than turning away. Again, to understand their default mode and where it has failed them in the past, the decisions that they made or what they default on and now we're going to begin to install new habits that allow you to face towards that. That comfort zone of breaking that and being out there, you're going to be battered with emotions. And one of the words that I heard you use was emotional surfing that I love, right? Of riding that wave, reveling in it, enjoying it, learning about it so that you can manage it. Exactly. And this is why I think goals can be so problematic. They're very abstract, right, to reach a goal. They're also something you can check on or off your list. But as human beings, we are more than human doings. When people use goals to guide their lives, I find that they come in a lot more frequently with burnout and overwhelm. It's really, for me, what helps with motivation in leaning into discomfort and doing what matters is being really clear about your values. Because values, you can derive goals from values, but also values are what give you the secret sauce. Values give you the willingness to do hard things. There is no way I would do my physical therapy three times a week were it not for being willing to do these boring exercises that only serve to remind me where I'm not, that I'm not where I wanna be physically yet, if I weren't connected to my value around strength and health and all the things that will come from that for me. Again, for our clients to discover those values is incredibly important, and that's part of that program. I know how much that idea changed my life completely and just how I attacked the day. I went from dreading going to sleep because I knew I'd have to wake up and do a bunch of things that I didn't wanna have to do and bitching Amon about it to I couldn't wait to go to sleep because now everything I'm doing is tied to the values that enhance life for me. Even if you don't like some of the activities around them, right? It's connected to what matters for you, exactly. For a lot of our clients, the other challenge with goals and what I call box checking is the influence that others have on those goals. Marriage, kids, buying a home, a safe career choice. I mean, a lot of these things are passed down through our families and culturally as the safe, comfortable route to success. And then many of our clients find us having reached those goals, checked those boxes and still feeling an emptiness, feeling a lack of connection with others and a wondering and a regret around did I make the right decision living my life based on these goals? Yeah, exactly. And so you're referencing the third skill of a motion efficacy training, which is values-based action. And in that part of the training, we're looking at what part of what you organize your life around are shoulds. Things that you've learned or internalized you should do. What part of this are just values that your family or your culture has. What part of this could be old values, things you don't care about anymore. And then what's left that you really do care about? What are your innermost interest desires and yearnings at this point in your life? And that right there is for a lot of people, a huge inquiry that doesn't happen in one session. It's a constant inquiry because our values change over our lives and it also, they change from context to context. It really is this active inquiry that if you're gonna practice high emotional efficacy, you can always be asking yourself, even right now, right here in this moment with you on this podcast, what matters most? Is it me continuing to talk? Is it me making space for you guys to bring me as your guest into the context of your show and your programs and your audience? So it allows for so much more flexibility and tensionality and creativity in life. That word flexibility, psychological flexibility, a big part of acceptance commitment therapy and what we do with our clients is just so important because a lot of this regret, self-doubt, inner criticism comes from that lack of flexibility and the rigidity that comes with these goals and checking boxes and timelines that life just doesn't always work out that way as much as we try, as much as we force it to. That's another nice way of talking about the default is it's essentially like a set of rules that govern our behavior instead of being freely chosen and authentic. It does not lead to vitality and meaning. So can we walk through these five steps to increase our emotional efficacy? I think we did a great job of really convincing our audience that it is important. There's really, so five steps to emotional efficacy. The first is just becoming aware of your emotional experience, which I kind of walked you guys through earlier in this podcast. Just becoming aware of emotional stuff, sensations, thoughts, urges and feelings. And right there, just by even being able to drop in and notice that, you're already unplugging from the emotional matrix because you're disrupting any reaction that's happening. Then the next step is what we just briefly mentioned which is emotion surfing. And emotion surfing adds to emotion awareness hanging out with the uncomfortable emotion without acting on the urge. So that's why we call it surfing. It's almost like being on the wave without being overtaken by it. The third step to increasing emotion efficacy is being really clear on what matters to you in any moment or context and then being able to design actions that are aligned with what matters, with your values. And then the fourth step to emotion efficacy is when you try to surf an emotion wave but it's a huge tsunami and you find yourself pulled under maybe even choking up gobs of saltwater. Sometimes we do need skills which we call mindful coping to dial down the intensity of emotion or regulate your emotions. Not for the purpose of getting rid of emotional distress or pain, but just so that we can get clear again about what matters and how we wanna show up in that moment. In the training that all the skills are practiced in the activated state because to borrow a quote from Morpheus it's one thing to know the path it's another thing to walk it. So we do everything is experiential the practice is experiential. It's really easy to know what you think you should do when you're in a moment of choice when you're stressed or triggered it's a whole other thing to actually have access to doing something different. Identifying, labeling and being coming more aware of these emotions certainly gives you more control that you've had in the past and AJ brought this up earlier that everything is now triggering from the music that we're listening to, the messaging that we're seeing you go on Twitter and it is built specifically to row you up and it's coming from everywhere now because now everyone has the tools to be a marketer and be effective with this stuff. And I've one of the things that I tell people like if you're online and you feel yourself in a heightened emotional state ask yourself three questions to work through it before you just lose yourself in how mad you are which is what's the message who is this message for? What do they want you to feel and what do they want you to do? If you answer those three questions you can see it for the marketing and advertising that it is and it kind of gives you some detachment from it and then you can see like oh well this is for this group to fill this and to do this. Answering those questions is enough to allow you to calm down a bit and see it for what it is. That is a nice slowing down and I would just add one last step to that which is how do I wanna show up in the face of this marketing? You know maybe it's even marketed to you. Maybe it says something that's really offensive to you or something that feels very threatening and maybe you can or can't see their agenda but ultimately what you do next is about your ability to design your actions how you wanna show up. And with this high emotional efficacy you know what does it actually look like on the other side having developed it for those who do have it? That is such a good question. I'm gonna give you a couple of really different examples. It can look like someone choosing not to take their life because they know that what they feel is not all there is that feelings can come and go and can change and that what they're feeling in this moment might not be what they're feeling you know in an hour or two hours or a day from now. It can look like someone learning how to listen in conversation with their partner where they may think they already know what the other person's gonna say but they decide and get clear that what matters most is being open and respectful and showing the person that they do care what their experience is even if they think they already know it and it can look like a CEO in the middle of making a deal to sell their company instead of choosing to react by being offended at the first number that's put on the table being able to stay curious and open noticing their feelings while staying focused on what matters most to them which is making the deal happen. All of those are in the face of a level of uncertainty right each one of those examples is working through that uncertainty. Threat and uncertainty and often in coherence like I'm not really sure what's going on here maybe. Right. Yeah. What strikes me in all of this and Johnny and I have talked about this is this loneliness epidemic that we're facing. So even as the COVID numbers come back and the amount of people who passed took their life and the amount of loneliness we all collectively felt being disconnected from the social fabric it seems to me that emotional efficacy is one of those key areas of focus to create these relationships to bring the level of vulnerability that adds depth that protects from the loneliness that might lead you to those suicidal thoughts that might lead you from feeling disconnected and in pain and suffering. And yet this isn't taught in schools. This isn't widely available which is so frustrating to me and Johnny and many of our students who come to work with us they want simple tricks and solutions and strategies and they also see and they're confronted with we've talked about not only triggering marketing messaging but also this false ideal that emotions are something that you need to be able to control on a whim. You need to be zen in the face of that wave and you can never let that wave of emotions overwhelm you to the point that you need coping mechanisms. And all of that seems to just be working against this healthy state that we need as humans. No, that's a dangerous belief in my professional opinion because again we can't control or even stop what we experience emotionally. What we can do is get really good at how we respond to it. And to your point about loneliness, my hope is that people like you and me who have some kind of public platform or ability to model will model vulnerability that we will share when we are lonely because the more that we normalize that as a healthy acceptable experience the more people will feel comfortable calling someone up and saying having these thoughts that are really scary I need support or I just need to share them or I need to feel like someone cares about me today. And that's one of the keys is just being able to actually share those thoughts, right? It's very easy to feel trapped by those thoughts when you just keep them inside internally and sometimes the simplest share could be a journaling practice of just actually writing out what you're thinking and feeling in the face of those emotions or that tsunami of emotion that's knocked you off that surfboard. Even if you have one or two people that you can be that vulnerable with that's successful relationship. You have deep relationships. In fact, there's a lot of people that don't have one or two people and then the opposite side of that are the people who just floodlight mass audiences on social media, which is like, well, you're being sure you're being vulnerable but are you really because I think that vulnerability is sharing space in those emotions with somebody else when you're just floodlighting your platform and an audience that you're not sharing in that with them you're not there with them they may be feeling it for you but you guys aren't sharing that together. It's harder to have that kind of quality sharing and connection on those big platforms. I have seen some people successfully share on bigger platforms and I think it's made a difference for some people but in general, what we're talking about is really getting that sense of like someone's a witness to my life, I matter on the most basic level and that usually happens in much more intimate kind of settings. Absolutely agree there. I think the other piece to this equation on the emotion front that I know we have shared a lot on the show is understanding that even in this state you might be labeling and feeling negative emotions opening yourself up to new experiences, new opportunities is a big part of the work that we do so that you're not just in this constant environment that might be the triggering environment and it's very easy right now with devices and social media and the messaging that we're seeing to feel trapped in this environment in this emotional state and to not have the ability to maybe step outside. So for me, on a weekly basis I've shared this with our audience, I have a men's group and a lot of what we do is body check in talk about the sensations in our body and the emotions that we're feeling and we create space to hear from others and then I also have a daily gratitude practice to try to ground myself in some things that I am grateful for in the face of whatever negative emotions I may be feeling. Do you have any daily practices that you recommend or things that we can do and our audience can use to start to work on these tools? Sure, yeah, I mean my favorite one is a really brief just inquiry which is in any moment just check in with yourself and ask yourself, you know is what I'm doing right now in this situation, what matters most to me? It's just, I call it an intentionality check and it's something that pretty much anyone can figure out without a lot of training. I love your gratitude practice because what that does is it helps offset our negativity bias, right? And it's really easy in this culture of increased emotion activation or reactivity that we're living in right now to be more attentive to all the threats in our environment. So it's really helpful. I do this too at the beginning of my day. I always write down at least three things that I'm either thankful for that I appreciate in my life because it helps me also maintain a balance between attending to things that feel scary that I don't necessarily want to be overwhelmed by and then also things that I really do wanna open to and enjoy and appreciate that I might otherwise miss. Love to hear the answer to our favorite question of every guest, what is your X factor? What makes you unique and extraordinary? Ooh, wow. I was so not prepared for this, which I love actually. I'm just noticing in my body a little bit of fluttering in my stomach, a little bit of tensing up some thoughts like, what's the right response? And then intentionally going a little deeper and asking myself, what is an authentic response to this? So I think that my X factor is how much I freaking love helping people stretch for what's possible. I can hang out there all day. I never get bored. I find it energizing. I truly love it. It is a very generous contribution and it's incredibly selfish for me because of how much I enjoy it. So I think that that's what I would say. I love that. Thank you so much for joining us. Where can our audience find out more about your latest book and all the great work you do with your coaching? Yeah, thank you for asking. So the most recent book, what you feel is not all there is, is a self-help book. It's available on Amazon and across the interwebs. And if you wanna find me, I am on IG at Dr. Aprilia West. That's A-P-R-I-L-I-A-W-E-S-T. And then I also have a website where I have a lot of professional offerings. I also have a quiz if you wanna take a quiz and find out what your E-E-Q is, your emotion efficacy quotient. And that is at www.drapriliawest.com. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. You guys are fun and thoughtful. And I can tell you're making a big difference in people's lives. I appreciate that. Likewise.