welcome to insights at the edge produced by sounds true my name is tammy simon i'm the founder of sounds true and i'd love to take a moment to introduce you to the new sounds true foundation the sounds true foundation is dedicated to creating a wiser and kinder world by making transformational education widely available we want everyone to have access to transformational tools such as mindfulness emotional awareness and self-compassion regardless of financial social or physical challenges the sounds true foundation is a non-profit dedicated to providing these transformational tools to communities in need including at-risk youth prisoners veterans and those in developing countries if you'd like to learn more or feel inspired to become a supporter please visit soundstrewefoundation.org [Music] you're listening to insights at the edge today my guest is carla mclaren carla is someone i've had the pleasure of working with for almost two decades she's an award-winning author social science researcher and an expert in emotions and empathy her work focuses on her grand unified theory of emotions which values even the most quote-unquote negative emotions and opens startling new pathways into self-awareness effective communication and healthy empathy which sounds true carla has written the landmark book the language of emotions a book on the art of empathy and a new book called the power of emotions at work accessing the vital intelligence in your workplace what karla mclaren makes clear is that the contemporary workplace most of them expect us to leave at least some of our emotions behind when we come to work listen to carla about why that doesn't serve us and how it actually creates unregulated social structures that we're stepping into in organizations and how instead we need to access the vital intelligence of all of our emotions that intelligence that makes us human and informs our very best thinking here's my conversation with carla mclaren carla i've learned so much from you about emotions and emotions as intelligent messengers and now you've applied your work with the language of emotions to the workplace what happened what happened in your own life what evolution did you go through we said i want to apply the intelligence of emotions to work um i went to work and i saw just how awful the workplace is and i thought it was me you know like i'm just an unusual person or i'm in unusual places and i i i prefer to run my own businesses which you know is a dangerous thing right you don't have any support you don't have any benefits you don't have retirement right it's it's it's its own danger but i much prefer doing that to working in the just the non-functional social spaces that i saw at work and i just wondered why is it so bad why is the workplace so bad and i began to work with emotions and people would call me out of the blue and ask me about things that were going on at work so i went into any number of workplaces and i went oh it wasn't just me it's bad workplaces are bad and so i actually went to school and um majored in the sociology of occupations to kind of understand the history of work i got certified as a human resource administrator i got certified as a career guidance counselor right i just wanted to look at the whole problem i wanted to go all the way around and see what happened here and the one of my ideas was that the human resource administration department in every business they're the people who manage you know and make sure that the emotional [Music] world of the business is healthy and i was disabused of that emotion of that notion uh pretty much right away because i realized that uh hr human resources is primarily a paralegal they handle hiring firing leave really important stuff pregnancy leave illness all kinds of paralegal things they don't have time to to work with the emotions of people unless you know someone in hr decides they would do that but also they work for the business they don't work for the for the workers and so what i've heard from a lot of workplace consultants is hr is not your friend don't go to hr and that is something i looked at in my research as well is people don't go to hr so the only people in the workplace who are set up to help people with their emotional and social lives actually aren't set up at all there's no setup for supporting people in a human way in the workplace i don't know um well sounds true is one of the healthier workplaces i've ever been in do you have any mechanism do you have a social and emotional sort of place that people can go it do what did you create sure well you're turning the tables on me early in the conversation carla and we will get there but one one thing you said that got my attention is this whole notion of what's good for the organization and good for quote unquote the workers is being different and that the hr department is supposed to work for the people who run the business who don't care about the welfare of the employees i yeah i would take issue with that i don't believe in that i believe what's good for all the employees at the business is good for the company and we need to uh hold that in our view and that rhr department is tasked with uh employee happiness and thriving as part of their goals but okay you write in the power of emotions at work the workplace is a social and emotional disaster area it's a five-alarm fire and you're really pointing out this fallacy that we think we can somehow exile our emotions we can leave our emotions at the door and we can come to work and be these kind of productivity machines and i'm wondering what happened in your research and looking at the evolution of the contemporary workplace what happened such that we started to think emotions aren't welcome here how did that come to be i think it was a part of the entire entire process of industrialization where people were moved off of their own land and then it became that the only place you could get work was cities and it was generally cities where um the workers were expected to provide cheap labor for the beginning of the industrial revolution and so your needs as an individual you need to eat to be treated well to have a reasonable eight-hour day to not be a child worker those those weren't even a thing and so i think shutting down the workplace in that in that industrial revolution as people were were moving away from caring for themselves and their communities and actually having to leave their farms and leave their their their villages and go to the city where the work had moved i think that would have been the beginning of it because you couldn't you know henry ford couldn't um he couldn't take the time for people to be having trouble because you were a cog in the machine of henry ford's world you know he's just one guy i'm thinking of right now uh but i think it was a part of the kind of capitalist shift into away from an agrarian or more more village and community-minded place where people made their own clothes and made their own food and they didn't have a lot of prepared and industrialized objects right um when that shifted so did the need for emotions to shut up at work just shut up and get your work done and that has stayed with us uh to this very day where people will say your emotions don't belong at work and i'm thinking what they're here yeah they're everywhere what are you even talking about yeah well interestingly i think in most workplaces some of your emotions belong like we want your enthusiasm we want your positivity we want your excitement we want your problem solving skills what we don't want is this other set of emotions you know we don't really have time for your sadness or grief there's not that's this isn't the place for that no uh there's a lot of things that work isn't the place for but share with me your view of that notion like you can bring some of your emotions the ones that you know help us function well and make more money but these other ones that are really time consuming you know go talk to a friend about that after work yeah well i call that in the book a toxic positivity bias which is where and i call it a dangerously mistaken belief that the allegedly positive emotions happiness contentment joy you know enthusiasm are the only emotions that should be felt or shared um but what this bias does and you would think well if it's all just happiness then everyone's going to be happy it's very good but it and it ends up causing extensive suffering as people suppress all their forbidden emotions most of which are the problem solving emotions and they lose their emotional awareness and skills and they become unable to address serious problems because they can't access their emotions and so much research shows this in one study 85 percent of workers did not communicate important workplace problems upward they didn't and these were things that were workplace problems that were going to impact productivity they were going to impact you know everything and they refused and they asked them why and they're like well why should i no one's going to listen they only want to hear the happy stuff you know or nothing will happen nobody's going to want to change and what that tells me is the emotions of change the emotions of awareness and the emotions of problem solving have been mistakenly pushed out the window well help me understand which emotions relate to our problem solving abilities well they all do i saw a funny meme the other day that said you can have all emotions are none those are your choices all or none and someone's like um they couldn't decide because they didn't want the supposedly negative ones um but the emotions of problem solving anger would help you understand when there is there are boundaries being crossed and rules being broken shame would help you understand when your behavior or some process is breaking the boundaries of others and creating like a work slow down um fear is your instincts and your intuition it would tell you if there's some change or novelty happen happening that requires your your presence and your your awareness and anxiety is a beautiful emotion that helps you understand that there's tasks and deadlines coming up and you need to be prepared for them like all of the emotions are just these wonderful brilliant um like a kaleidoscopic rainbow of um of awareness and capacity and most of them are uh unwelcome so you get the modern workplace you you get the modern workplace a dysfunctional um psychologically unhealthy space for most people now there's like 15 to i think 27 of workplaces people say that they're that they're functional but that leaves you know [Music] a lot of workplaces that aren't so just for a moment let's describe a truly functional healthy emotionally wise workplace emotionally wise workplace environment what would it be like well there's something that i've seen when i go into workplaces which is that there's silos where marketing is separate from art is separate from production is separate from shipping right so they're silos and if you're not careful those silos become kingdoms that don't have anybody going across right and in an emotionally well regulated workplace we would realize we need this silo but there is a danger to silos and so we would listen for the anger and the sadness we would listen for the jealousy and envy coming up and if it was up we would all be aware what those emotions did and we would say okay there's a problem in the flow here and some our emotions are telling us something is wrong so what do we need to do as intelligent people who have emotions to listen to these emotions and support them and figure out what happens next because something's not working and if we have a toxic positivity bias everybody knows it's not working but they don't they literally don't have the language they need to speak of it they can't because they can't access the emotions that help them identify problems now you used an interesting phrase an emotionally well regulated workplace what does that mean well regulated it's a term i came up with as i was writing this book um no i think i wrote about it in the art of empathy it was somewhere and um i was looking at what what are the features that that exist in a place where your emotions are are welcome and you are safe to have and feel and share emotions what what does that look like and so i created a nine part sort of sort of list of what would it look like for instance mistakes and conflicts are addressed without avoidance hostility or blaming i don't i don't know many workplaces where that happens right um and uh you and your emotions and sensitivities are noticed and respected nobody tells you to uh cowboy up stop crying you know or whatever get over yourself that that people have a space for you to be a an emotional human being okay those are a couple examples i know one thing that you teach in the power of emotions at work is something that you call conscious complaining and here you are you're talking about people who have an issue there's something wrong and you know i i've heard it said if you're gonna complain that's okay but bring a solution with you don't just complain and i wonder what you think about that and what makes conscious complaining different than just you know complaining which you know if people come to me all the time and are complaining i have to say i'm not sure how emotionally well regulated i think i'll be i'll just be receiving all these complaints yeah what's conscious complaining yeah most of us have experienced unconscious complaining where people just come and they just lay it out and they just load us up with their un i don't know unprocessed complaints conscious complaining is a different process than this because it uses some of the functions of ritual one you set your intention two there's a beginning middle and end three you are aware what you're doing right you bring awareness to a process you bring consciousness to it and what i find with conscious complaining as an individual is that i think a lot of us well i think we've been trained since birth or before to avoid this supposedly allegedly negative emotions and even though i've been doing this work for i don't know 40 50 years i still will sometimes avoid the the allegedly negative emotions and i'll just power through conscious complaining gives me a chance to catch up with my emotions and say no this is just freaking hard this is hard and this is me talking to myself and i'm overworked and there's no one to help me and saying those things out loud brings me to emotional congruence it tells me what's true and then though i started with complaining what i realized underneath is i also have a great deal of grief because i'm alone and i forgot to ask for help and all those things so you come to this awareness conscious complaining with a partner which i teach in the book is a way to help people be in the presence of other people's complaints without fixing it or without needing to go into those complaints with them i think that's one of the problems with complaining without consciousness is that it's a cry for help and people may take time away from work that they don't have to take away from work to help you deal with your complaining you know with whatever's troubling you in an emotionally unregulated workspace that's pretty much what's going to happen all day if you don't just avoid people because you're like um you know talk to the hand i've got to go i've gotta i've got to get this thing out by three and so all this emotional truth all this reality is is silenced in that place conscious complaining with a partner it's it's a silly three-minute process where you complain and the other person listens not as kind of a dead rock but the person isn't supposed to give any there's no there's no advice there's no solution you just sit there and you go yeah yeah of course you you know you just create a space for the complaining and in so doing you break some of the the emotional suppression that lives with in us every day and around us every day and then you get to trade places and so here um my applied work is called dynamic emotional integration or dei here in the dei uh community we'll text each other and go do you have time for a cc conscious complaining do you have time and we'll just get on the phone and or zoom and we'll just complain the other person will complain and we'll go about our day and we will have found out what was true underneath all that social conditioning that that represses our emotions so i don't want to repress people's emotions or suppress people's emotions uh at the same time i'm imagining someone coming to me with a complaint and i can certainly imagine listening and just listening and taking it in but then after that's over i want to solve the problem like i want to solve the problem because i want the company to work better is that a problem for any reason i mean that seems pretty natural to me it does we have you know my husband tino is a major problem solver and i have learned to say to him tino i don't need a solution i just need to complain and so to know which it is right at your level i don't think you would be doing conscious complaining in this way at work right because you're you're the boss i think people would need to do their conscious complaining before they came to you and bring you something that needs a solution because in an emotionally well regulated workplace they would see you as an individual with your own emotions and sensitivities rather than treating you like someone who doesn't go to solution right they would know if i want to go to solution i'll go to tammy if i want to complain you know i'll go to andrew and then he and i will trade or something right yeah so so your way of being in the world would be respected and people wouldn't take your time to do this kind of internal um i don't know housekeeping of emotion right that makes sense to me now you know carla i i do hear a lot about uh emotional intelligence at work and i also hear a lot about the power and the importance of psychological safety at work and this has become its own uh buzzword psychological safety and it's now been shown if you want to have a high performing team this is research that came out of google with their aristotle project you have to have psychological safety that's the number one factor on the team so i see people who want to create high functional teams at least saying they value the creation of psychological safety i'm curious what you think helps from your work with the power of emotions at work create genuine psychological safety on teams what does it i would say it's certainly those nine aspects of the unemotionally well-regulated social structure did i give you two you offered two of those aspects yeah maybe you could share the other ones as well since there's a look at the list it's a list and i need to find the list there we go number one emotions are spoken of openly and people have workable emotional vocabularies two mistakes and conflicts are addressed without avoidance hostility or blaming three you can be honest about mistakes and difficulties without being blamed or shunned four your emotions and sensitivities are noticed and respected five you notice and respect the emotions and sensitivities of others six your emotional awareness and skills are openly requested and respected and this is really important because if someone's a really good listener they become the unconscious complaining shrine and they may lose their capacity to do their work because everyone needs to come to them with their complaints right seven you openly request and respect the emotional awareness and skills of others you don't unconsciously complain to anybody either you realize that that person is an undiscovered country they are not the garbage can of your emotions um eight you and others feel safe enough and supported enough to speak the truth even if it might destabilize relationships or processes that's a hard one nine the social structure welcomes you nourishes you and revitalizes you so i haven't looked into this concept of psychological safety i wonder what the features of it are um i think it might not be at that level at that at that base level of emotion i think it might be kind of like a higher level language rather than you get to be who you are and feel how you feel and people are going to respect that so i can imagine a business person not unlike me but maybe less familiar with the value of high sensitivity saying you know look i want emotions to be present but we have some really serious hsps highly sensitive people who work in our company and i don't have the time for that i don't have this space and you know we have to respect their sensitivity it's too much for me like we will slow down we will become kumbaya central and we will not get our work done uh so can we find like some middle ground here like yeah some of your like some level of emotions are welcome but i can't go into that deep space with you that's not what the workplace is for what would you say to that well one of the things i notice about the highly sensitive person hype you know empath whatever nonsense is that these are generally people with not very good emotional skills and not very good boundaries one of the reasons they're sensitive is that they don't have good boundaries and so we can understand that they would from the dei perspective that they need to begin to learn how to work with anger they need to begin to learn how to work with thresholds and boundaries and how to um um um organize their sensitivities so so making everything into like a soft pillow strewn place i don't think is going to be emotionally respectful for the people who don't need that so in an emotionally well regulated structure these people without boundaries would understand who and what they are and the people who right because um though it's not good for them people without boundaries do a great deal of emotion work and emotional labor and empathy work within a social structure i don't want them to but they do if everybody understands emotions if everybody understands the rules of uh or the the guidelines of an emotionally well-regulated social structure then that's not going to be a problem anymore because these uh boundary impaired people are no longer going to be expected to do the emotion work of other bodies they will be respected and able to function uh without so much what would you call it so much burden so much emotional burden placed on them what if they're taking that burden on that's what they like to do that's what they like to do that's what they like to do and that's a part of creating an emotionally well regulated social structure is to know that in a poorly regulated structure people like that are going to have to arise they i call them keystones a keystone is a stone when you build an arch you start from the bottom of either side and you come up and you arch at the top and there's a stone at the very top in the middle of the two arches coming together it's called a keystone and the keystone is put on last and it is what makes the structure strong in in an emotionally unregulated workplace the keystones hold up the building they hold up the social structure and it's tiring and it's um it's not something people should have to do but when emotions are not allowed the this kind of work is um is essential it's you you can't not have them and so entering into an agreement as as a social group to get everybody's feet on the ground and everybody's emotional awareness raised up means that those keystones are going to stop being stones in in in a structure and they are going to start being functional human beings again who are respected rather than relied upon because the structure doesn't work without them okay so you you teach in the book about four different types of keystones ambassadors connectors peacemakers and agitators and i i recognized all four i wonder if you could just give a couple sentences about each of them just as a way of introducing it and then i have a follow-up question for you but what is an ambassador what's their role um think of of someone who welcomes everybody um welcome to you know to the grand hotel welcome ambassadors are people who take on the usually unpaid task of welcoming and training new people when the social structure doesn't have an appropriate training program and so many workplaces don't they especially don't have an appropriate training program about what are the rules of the existing social structure because nobody knows nobody could tell you because we you know emotions are again shoved under the carpet and thrown out the window and they are how we function as humans so if we don't have access to our emotions these ambassadors are going to be necessary because nobody knows how to welcome people into a social structure that they don't even understand verbally themselves one of the ways you tell if you've broken rules in the social structure like this is silence dirty looks um you know throat clearing because people don't know how to say we don't we don't speak that way to this person before nine a.m in the morning because coffee right we know in our bodies but we don't know because everything again is in the area of the unconscious so ambassadors will have to arise in that kind of a place okay next we have uh connectors connectors when i talked about things siloing like marketing being siloed away from from the art department or something along those lines if they're if the social structure is unregulated they are going to get turfy and they will stop being able to understand each other so marketing needs something tomorrow and the art department is usually used to taking six weeks right there's going to be a tremendous conflict a connector is someone who's going to be able to go from the art department to marketing and back right okay my understanding and see if i have this correctly is that these keystones these roles would not be necessary people would not come in and animate these roles if the social structure was quote regulated unquote there might be people who are kind of connecty because that's just how they are or kind of welcoming but there wouldn't you wouldn't be like oh this person is the connector at our company because it would be built into the organization in some way yes and it wouldn't be that if that person was gone that day you're screwed right because there the silos are so rigid that you cannot get stuff done if she's out that day or he's out that day so that's when you see also in hierarchies you know hierarchies are very rigid structures where you've got the board and the boss and the managers and the workers and they're very separate entities right so a connector will probably be able to go across that artificial fragmentation and be able to talk to a number of people assistants assistants of the more powerful people tend to be connectors and then you have peacemakers and agitators uh just give us a little bit on each of these uh last two types of keystones peacemakers are like connectors they would do the emotion work in the empathy work necessary to keep the art department and the and the marketing department speaking to each other so they would know they go um but they tend to be more specific whereas a connector sort of does it all a peacemaker will be drawn toward areas of conflict and they would want to solve them right so they would hold that sort of position of solving and usually you'll find peacemakers in families they come from families where that was a role they learned how to get between mom and dad or sister and sister yeah and the agitators and the agitator is my favorite um the agitators would also be called the um they act out whichever emotions are not welcome in the workplace they're the shadow workers so whatever we we all agree that no one is angry in this workplace and it's like why don't you just put a sign out in front of your workplace saying please angry people come and work here because they will come and you know everybody will project you know their anger shadow on to them but they are just they are acting as as um balancers of an unbalanced workplace so again just to make sure i understand this in this mythic regulated social structure in this regulated workplace i say mythic because it's hard to find individuals let alone couples let alone small groups of people let alone a whole workplace that's regulated but let's just say that it exists just say this could exist yeah um you would not find agitators you wouldn't find connectors is that your hypothesis here that you there you would not find un unidentified and unpaid people doing these jobs and getting um and doing this work uh and burning themselves out behind it you would not find people in this work in an essentially an abusive way you you would have connectors and ambassadors and peacemakers but they get paid for it and they would maybe even have that title on their door and you would have an agitator you would have someone we have at dei we do have this it's not mythic we have it here at emotiondynamics.com or whatever um but there are people who are really good with grief and people are really good with anxiety and people who are really good with anger and i will go to them and go i'm thinking of doing this what do you think they're like no but you know we know that's who they are we know that's what they can do they have other job descriptions and they do all sorts of things but there are people that i'll go to when i have a problem in my own psyche i tend to be very positive i tend to be extremely optimistic it's a very bad way to be and i have people here who were drawn to this social structure to fill out my problems just like i fill out their problems when they need optimism right but we know we're doing it we're trading now you said something kind of in passing that i'm very optimistic and that's a very bad way to be i think most people think it's a good way to be especially a good way to be in business so that's provocative in and of itself yeah i understand what a toxic positivity bias is for some reason i have an extremely high uh positive outlook and sort of absurdly so and what that means is i will agree to things that maybe i can't do maybe nobody could do but i'll be like that would be awesome um i will look ahead and i will think you know trends are going up it'll never change um that is a tendency of my of my neurology that's just a tendency and it works out um it's 50 50 in my own personal life but in terms of a business somebody like me who doesn't see the problems coming is just like a i don't know a baby with a loaded handgun and i have learned that i need to check in with people who have a naturally more negative outlook and say what do you think of this is this good and they'll be like no and so i've become i've learned how to develop a more negative outlook because i have these people in my life who are mentors for me you know my my neurological mentor and i am mentors for them because if my friend with a very my co-worker with a very negative outlook starts going on this is never going to work that and i can say hold on let's look and see what can work and how do we you know how do we plow ahead so we find ways to balance each other rather than i'm just this boss going off you know in on a rainbow traipsing journey of unicorns and pulling everybody with me or my workers are just cranky ass bastards all day long and their they're managing me unconsciously and i'm living unconsciously so and does that make sense well it's interesting to me um what i hear you saying is a a welcoming of all of the different emotional perspectives that there could be and that they all have value and yet i've had people on this podcast relatively recently who have shared about uh how important having a positive outlook is in terms of the results that you create at work that it's actually a skill it's something to cultivate and uh so anyway so to be honest with you i'm at the moment i'm holding both in a kind of questioning way inside myself and yeah i'm wondering what you have to say about that i've really become very interested in how and why we shut down the emotions and how and why we develop this absurd and dysfunctional idea of positive and negative emotions um and what i've realized is that the so-called negative emotions shake up the status quo and the so-called positive emotions go along in a capitalist sexist racist ableist transphobic homophobic homophobic world these negative emotions would stand up and say this is some and we need to change it and we need to change it every day and it's not okay it's not okay it's not okay i think that turning emotions into negative and positive which was a terrible idea is a way to maintain social control and keep uh [Music] keep a kind of death cult going i think the the so-called positive emotions happiness contentment and joy they're beautiful they're lovely they're wonderful and they belong with their friends all of the other emotions i notice that when people believe there are negative emotions they don't develop any skills with them but when they believe there are positive emotions they become abusive toward those emotions they strap them on and they try to keep them with them at every possible time and happiness contentment and joy are like i'll do what you ask but my god i need my friends i need my anger to set boundaries i need my shame to help me figure out what's going on need my grief to see what has died i need my my depression i need my suicidal urge i need my fear and my anxiety my panic okay people i'm i'm sure people at that moment when you said that i need my suicidal urge said okay what the heck is happening here on insights at the edge so you're going to have to explain you're going to have to explain that carlos in dei the rule about the suicidal urge is my human body or your human body that's off the table that is off the table the suicidal urge does not come to kill us although because it's one of the most negative emotions we don't develop skills in it in any way shape or form what i notice about suicidal urge and its very close friend depression depression comes forward to to pull our energy away when the way we are going and the things we are doing are not going to work they are not going to work and if you if you look at your depression and talk to your depression you'll see within just a few seconds what that thing is depression pulls your energy away suicidal urge is a stronger emotion that comes forward when the difference between who you are in your soul and what you have become in this world of expedience and lies and emotional repression is not just unlivable but it's gonna kill you eventually and so i've learned throughout my life to to trust the suicidal urge completely and also to understand how to identify it when it is it is in a very soft and subtle place so that i can work with it then when i i experienced early childhood assault for a number of years this is not good and often people will develop a depressive disorder which i did my first suicidal urge came upon me when i was 10 years old and i grew up with suicide so it's it's a path i have walked with my friend's suicide and when the suicidal urge comes up now in its soft place it's what i call the dead flat no no i refuse there's a power behind that no it it can't be moved that is where i come to with a suicidal urge but when it's more intense and there's that death urge what we've learned to do with it in dei is turn it to away from our bodies away from our life and turn it toward what it is and if you ask your suicidal urge what needs to die it's not me suicidal urge what needs to die it will point it out this poverty this loneliness this shitty family this racism this right it is one of the most life-affirming emotions there is but if you believe in positive and negative emotions which is a terrible idea then you will miss some of the most beautiful emotions in the entire emotional realm and you'll just be over with the you know the ones that think everything's okay okay let's talk a little bit more about the power of emotions in the workplace and specifically this notion that you have that uh positivity uh isn't necessarily better than sort of a critical assessment of how everything could go wrong i'll say one thing carla if i had to work on a team with people you could say would you like to work with this angry depressed negative person or you could work with this positive well-resourced optimistic can do person who do you want to work with tammy it's not a hard hard question for me to answer i want to work with the person who sees the possibilities in this situation i mean that's what's going to lift me up that's what's going to help me so i'm challenging you on this because i want to welcome the full range of people's emotions at the same time i love working with people who see possibilities and are positive well i think everybody does and i think there's a there's an attribution error there that's happening that a person who is feeling the emotions of anger or depression or rage must therefore be acting them out and and taking their whole psyche and putting them into the house of anger and rage and depression and then that way that person could not be optimistic and that is again that slicing of emotions into those two unnatural and untrue categories of positive and negative i'm an extremely optimistic person and i work harder than most people could even imagine and i have learned that when my panic comes up uh something's dangerous stop i've learned that when that dead flat no comes up that is that's the rule don't go any further i know that when my anger comes up something's going on my fear my anxiety with any emotion when my happiness when my joy when my contentment to be fully resourced as an emotional person as an emotionally well regulated person is not to sit in one emotion you know in the way that i do with my optimism which is very toxic uh you know to be just optimistic and not intelligently optimistic meaning you see the problems you see the issues you call them out um you're just gonna traipse forward into you know silly land and you're going to make something that people who are better with their other emotions are going to have to come fix for you because you didn't consider all the options because you didn't have access to all of your emotions which are not there they're aspects of your cognition and your genius if you don't have access to your emotions you simply do not have full access to your entire psyche that's helpful that's clarifying now i have another question to ask you about hard emotions in the workplace and this is something that i've you know i haven't been clear on the best way to to deal with it which is how to work with grief when it comes up and it always comes up in a once you have more than you know a few people working with you someone is having something happen in their personal life their mother grandmother their friend sup major suffering death of a pet you know on and on and what is i'm not sure if appropriate is the right word but what's skillful in terms of how the workplace responds when someone's grieving sometimes people can grieve for months yeah yeah and i it's really important i have that in um an a con an area called emotionally what did i call it emotionally agile transitions is what do you do when someone dies what do you do when there's illness or trauma the death of a worker or family member grief rituals you do some form of a grief ritual and in a place where there's not a great deal of understanding of rituals you would have a remembrance wall you would check in on the person you wouldn't pretend like it's um it's business as usual if if the workplace has more of a ritual awareness then there might be a whole wall like a like um um [Music] i don't know what would you call it in in a in a spiritual tradition it would be a whole tribute wall it'd be a shrine right and so you would do what humans do when there is grief there's no reason that the workplace cannot make a space for what humans do when there is grief which is grief rituals okay now you talked about the possibility of something like a wall of remembrance and i thought one of the really interesting sections of your new book had to do with this whole topic of empathetic design if we were to bring our care and our empathy to our physical environment at work what would that ask of us in terms of our physical environment how do we design with empathy in mind i wonder if you could give us some of the most important things we need to look at in terms of physical workspaces the most important things are a space to rest privacy and break times and sadly here in the united states break times are mandated at 15 minutes every four hours and uh one you know 30 minutes to 60 minutes lunch break if you if you work more than four hours that is simply not enough break time and you will find workers creating break times even though there's not a break time so it's really important to understand whatever the mandate is in the us workplace throw that out and help people find what their natural break time is one of the ways you find out is if you start getting distracted or if you start getting bored and those are signs are fidgety that you need to get up and walk away from your workplace and so that would mean there's places for you to go that would mean there's private spaces i talk about what i call the devil's the devil's floor plan which is the open the open office which you don't get privacy you don't get privacy from sound you don't get visual privacy and there's really no place to go so there's no way to get away from work and you'll find people beginning to you know browse find them browsing on the computers because it's the only way that they can get any kind of time to themselves so privacy rest uh and and break times are crucial for mental health and for cognition how much break time do you think people need because you said 15 minutes every four hours that's not enough that's definitely not enough um well there's been a lot of studies that show that for most people there's a place there's a sweet spot and it can depend on how tired you are and what else is going on but it's between 50 and 90 minutes that you can work straight through for that long and then you've gotta take a five or ten minute get out and away so if you're working and you're writing and you find yourself getting distracted don't go on social media get up and get out and go and have an actual walk away from work this is especially important for people doing high high specificity work like art or or or building or manufacturing they need to get away from that after the if people go past that natural place that's when mistakes happen so if you want a better um a more productive workplace you've got to let people rest it's crucial it seems backward you have this notion you call it repair stations i thought that was uh an interesting clever phrasing what's a repair station at work a repair station is from sociologist irving goffman's work and basically it's a backstage place where you can speak the truth i think you've been to esselm and uh it's a big or it used to be because i don't know if esslin's going to open back up but it's a big famous retreat center and i'm always fascinated to go to retreat centers because of the stressors that are placed on the workers people come there and it takes them a long time to get there and they come there to have their peaceful time but that peaceful time can sometimes mean that they act like jerks to the workers right if the workers don't do everything perfectly so i gave a workshop there especially about the front desk workers and i was like it's a completely open it was open on two sides work where you come in and and you and you check in and i was fascinated i just stood there and watched them um dealing with people who were late people who were frazzled people who were and i was like there is no where do they go how do they function if they're always supposed to be these smiling open peaceful space of i'm the excellent person and i did a workshop with them and i asked them i said what emotions do people come to you with and they had a sheet of emotions that i had given them and what happens if you are just overwhelmed and you need to get out you can't say anything because you're out in the open so how do you go into the back office and they said we have a i we have an eye movement we do with each other and we just learned it and that means um if one more person comes up to me i'm gonna i'm gonna go off so they would go back right and then someone else would come forward and you would never know because they're all with their peaceful you know pastel the energy of excellent colors but i asked her what emotions are people coming to you with when they come up and i thought they're coming there to have a peaceful time right so to be happiness contentment and joy and she goes um um let's see anxiety suicide depression and anger and i looked at the others i said do you agree and they said yeah and grief so people are coming and they're dumping off all of these supposedly negative emotions so they can have their excellent experience but they are dumping it on the staff and yeah i was they need breaks they need a repair station where they can go and talk right if they don't have that you're going to burn that staff out you're going to have so much turnover now you know in terms of empathic design and physical spaces i think you've given some good insights here on what's essential now a lot of people are working from home of course we've heard the remote uh and it's interesting that you say yay because what i was curious is what your view is of our emotional regulation and an emotionally regulated workforce when people are working from home that is harder now my workforce at emotion dynamics is there's only one person here in california with me everybody else who works for me is on zoom everybody um and so it means creating that on zoom it means having time together it's it's quite a bit of community building when people are separate from each other and it's really helpful to have things like conscious complaining with a partner so people can stay together i also have a practice called ethical empathic gossip so that people can do the the natural um social bonding that uh that they do when they gossip but we add ethics and empathy to it so it's not mean-spirited you know unethical gossip but but let's talk about that for a moment because you know it sounds true we really encourage people to go direct if they have an issue not to go to someone else who can't solve their problem but go to the person that you have the issue with yeah and you know the idea being that when you're engaging in a lot of gossip or talking to someone who can't actually solve the problem it's nothing to do with it it can create a lot of drama and it can take a lot of energy out of the work so what is ethical empathic gossip that's how is it constructive gossip not well draining gossip gossip is understood anthropologically to be important in every culture at every age and all genders that there will always be gossip and what gossip is it's informal communication that is not um sanctioned so the sanctioned communication in a workplace might be you know the memo goes here and this happens and this result this is a text and this is when we're meeting and we take notes and we do robert's rules of order um the the unsanctioned communication is did you know that mary's dad just died right there is no sanctioned way for mary to say that within the structure of that workplace if you don't know that if you don't know that unsanctioned informal information you could make a terrible faux pas or you could put a bunch of work on to mary that she literally cannot do right so that is what gossip does it gives us informal communication in an emotionally unregulated social structure gossip is ugly it tends to be unempathic it tends to be jockeying for position it tends to be we've all been gossiped about in that way in an empathic and unethical way but that doesn't change the need for gossip and informal communication and so when we know it's time for an ethical empathic gossip session with somebody that we trust it's because we've tried what we can with this person we find ourselves gossiping about them in an unhealthy way we find ourselves sniping and griping and just being a jerk so that's when we call for ethical empathic gossip and we tell the story we generally take 13 minutes that's the sweet spot we've found each person does it we call it eeg and we'll also text each other and we'll go on our facebook groups it doesn't even have time for an eeg and we'll just jump on zoom it keeps us connected but it also helps us trust so you find someone you trust and you say look i've been being i've been just in such a bad state about david and here's what's going on do you have time and so the person who is the partner in ethical empathic gossip listens asks what have you tried and gives input and feedback so that the person can go back to david having worked it out with someone they trust if i am riled up with david and i don't do this ethical empathic gossip first and get somebody's opinions and input that i require because remember we're a social species we regulate each other emotionally other people are crucial to our emotional functioning and if i go there and i am still riled up and i'm still like anti-david and i go and try to talk to him i'm probably just going to tear into him you know i'm just probably going to be like well david here's what's going on you do your thing and we'll just agree to disagree like you won't have any skills so it's so crucial to be able to go to that third party figure it out as long as they agree and they get to do theirs with you or they owe it to you at a later time or you owe it to them and then you can go to david and try a different way usually my empathic gossip partners are people who know the party that i'm having trouble with and sure what's the what's the ethical part carlo what's the ethical guy it's ethical because the rule is i must go back and work with david in a new way okay it's not just gossip it's it's action focused um and it helps me develop a stronger relationship with my partner but also with david because now it's a triangulation that's not toxic i don't know i grew up in a big family and they did toxic unethical and empathic triangulated gossip all the time so i built this for them it's helpful thank you for the clarification now you know we've been talking a lot about unregulated social structures at work what most of us have walked into and the idea that we could possibly take all of this knowledge and acceptance and intelligence of our emotions and start to create regulated social structures my question to you is what's the role of just regulated human beings you know i mean i think it's great in that your work you're focusing on the social structures like don't just put it all on the person to have their mindfulness practice and their dance class before work and it's not all on the person because they're stepping into these truly dysfunctional emotional environments i get that but now let's just for a moment talk about what what responsibility does a person have as they enter the environment for their own self-regulation in your view to have a functional emotional vocabulary to understand the importance of emotions to understand how crucial our i guess to your point how crucial my capacity to function and be grounded and present and and engaged and empathic is to the health of everyone right so if i'm not together uh and and it's time for me to go do a presentation or meeting in the dei community i will tell them i did not sleep last night and so you know i'll be honest and say i'm not at my best right now and if somebody asks a question and you see me you know you know struggling would you please step in right so i know myself well enough to know where my holes are in my psyche and in so doing and being honest about it as the leader of dei everyone else is developing in that way as well right so as a leader in in an emotionally well-regulated social structure you really have to take a equal and egalitarian position as a human being and then you know show the beautiful parts of it and show the crappy parts of it so that it's okay to not always be at your best you know you know carl i have to say every time i talk to you i learn stuff and i learn uh also and challengingly the ways that i have biases towards this or that some part of me is not wholly accepting of this difficult aspect of emotional life so you always help point that out to me in a way that i think is very growthful so thank you it is it is you know i was thinking uh you are an agitator but you're living at a time when our entire society is uh so dysfunctional that of course we need agitators so as a final question what do you think about that what do you think about that you agitator i'm like i would like to give up that job and have everybody please lord learn how to work with your emotions okay one of the things i say is if you know how you feel you'll know who you are i also noticed in this last period of the president who shall not be named is that if you don't know how to work your emotions someone's going to come along and work them for you and what i saw in the tremendous breakdown of our country and also the uk and these these these these very very troubled leaders and that people were fooled and manipulated and had their emotions and their empathy manipulated it's like if you do not understand your emotions you are not in control of your life you do not know who you are and you are you are pray for people who can manipulate you this is true everywhere um so i'm an agitator for the soul like you have these brilliant emotions inside you they've been talking to you from the moment you were born and probably before then they know what's going on they tell the truth they always do they may not be fun but sometimes truth isn't fun an agitator for the soul i've been talking with carla mclaren which sounds true she's written the new book the power of emotions at work accessing the vital intelligence in your workplace she's also written the landmark book the language of emotions the art of empathy and a book on embracing anxiety carla great to be with you as always thank you thank you thank you for listening to insights at the edge you can read a full transcript of today's interview at soundstream.com forward slash podcast and if you're interested hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and also if you feel inspired head to itunes and leave insights at the edge a review i love getting your feedback being in connection with you and learning how we can continue to evolve and improve our program working together i believe we can create a kinder and wiser world soundstrew.com waking up the world [Music] you