Podcasts about emotions what your feelings are trying

What if the emotions we've been taught to suppress are actually the keys to our deepest wisdom? Today, we delve into this provocative idea with Karla McLaren, M.Ed., an award-winning author and researcher whose empathic approach to emotions revalues even the most "negative" emotions and opens startling new pathways into self-awareness, effective communication, and healthy empathy. Karen's acclaimed book, The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You, challenges us to embrace our full emotional spectrum. Karla is also the developer of the EmpathyAcademy.org learning site, where you can learn robust emotional skills and healthy empathy in a welcoming online community. In this conversation Karla shares how honoring our emotions can lead to profound personal transformation.Episode highlights:01:38 Karla's Grand Unified Theory of Emotions04:16 Understanding and Engaging with Anger08:10 Decoding Jealousy and Its Messages14:46 Exploring Envy: Cultural Perspectives and Social Justice21:09 Anxiety: A Valuable and Necessary Emotion26:57 Valuing the Unsheltered and Elderly28:08 The Nuclear Family and Community Care29:55 Understanding Anxiety and Panic31:27 Task-Oriented vs. Deadline-Oriented34:23 Procrastination and Creativity38:56 Empathy as a Skill45:33 The Impact of Digital Communication on Empathy49:36 Dynamic Emotional Integration Framework52:40 Upcoming Courses and ResourcesResources mentioned:Karla McLaren, M.Ed.EmpathyAcademy.orgThe Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell YouGuest's social handles:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KarlaMcLarenAuthorInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/karlamclaren.m.ed/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/KarlaMcLarenP.S. If you enjoy this episode and feel it helps to elevate your life, please give us a rating or review. And if you feel others may benefit from this podcast as well, spread the word, share and help grow our tribe of Superhumans. When we help heal One, we help heal All. Much gratitude and love.Yours,Ariane

Send us a textIf you're anything like me, you have used food, substances, or other people to numb your feelings. That's why reconnecting with your feelings is a crucial step in recovery. Today, I will be reading some excerpts from ACA's “Loving Parent Guidebook” that offer helpful insights on the importance of understanding and honoring your feelings. This week's episode 301 of the Fragmented to Whole Podcast is about how to reconnect with your feelings- a key step in recovery!In this episode of the Fragmented to Whole Podcast, I'm reading from chapter 10, Feeling is Healing of ACA's “Loving Parent Guidebook, and sharing with you some of the profound insights I have gleaned from these readings. Reconnecting with your feelings is a powerful step towards healing and personal growth. By understanding and honoring your feelings, you can break free from victim mentality and take constructive action in your life. Embrace this journey of self-discovery and unlock the transformative power of emotional intelligence. Be sure to tune in to all the episodes to receive tons of practical tips on living a more whole life and to hear even more about the points outlined above.Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, take a screenshot of the episode to post in your stories and tag me!  And don't forget to follow, rate and review the podcast and tell me your key takeaways!Learn more about Fragmented to Whole at https://higherpowercc.com/podcast/ Are you saying yes when you really want to say no? Are you putting yourself last? Perhaps you're the consummate accommodator whose people-pleasing ways are wearing you out. If so, you're a perfect fit for my 12-week private coaching program!After Participating in Private Coaching with Barb, You'll...*Be able to feel peaceful and calm when setting boundaries*Know how to communicate directly with people*Your feelings will become more "right-sized"*Do things because you really want to do them, not because you feel obligated*Live your life by your own values and feel proud of that*Learn to keep the focus on yourself and still be kind and helpful*Come closer to realizing your authentic identitySign up for a free 30 minute Better Boundaries call with me at this link. https://calendly.com/barb-nangle/better-boundaries-callLINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:Loving Parent GuidebookThe Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You  by Karen McLarenCONNECT WITH BARB NANGLE:Subscribe to “Friday Fragments” weekly newsletterFree boundaries resourcesFacebookInstagramWork with Barb! Buy Barb a teaGet a free chapter of my upcoming book: Roadside Recovery 

Send us a textIf you're anything like me, you have used food, substances, or other people to numb your feelings. That's why reconnecting with your feelings is a crucial step in recovery. Today, I will be reading some excerpts from ACA's “Loving Parent Guidebook” that offer helpful insights on the importance of understanding and honoring your feelings. This week's episode 301 of the Fragmented to Whole Podcast is about how to reconnect with your feelings- a key step in recovery!In this episode of the Fragmented to Whole Podcast, I'm reading from chapter 10, Feeling is Healing of ACA's “Loving Parent Guidebook, and sharing with you some of the profound insights I have gleaned from these readings. Reconnecting with your feelings is a powerful step towards healing and personal growth. By understanding and honoring your feelings, you can break free from victim mentality and take constructive action in your life. Embrace this journey of self-discovery and unlock the transformative power of emotional intelligence. Be sure to tune in to all the episodes to receive tons of practical tips on living a more whole life and to hear even more about the points outlined above.Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, take a screenshot of the episode to post in your stories and tag me!  And don't forget to follow, rate and review the podcast and tell me your key takeaways!Learn more about Fragmented to Whole at https://higherpowercc.com/podcast/ Are you saying yes when you really want to say no? Are you putting yourself last? Perhaps you're the consummate accommodator whose people-pleasing ways are wearing you out. If so, you're a perfect fit for my 12-week private coaching program!After Participating in Private Coaching with Barb, You'll...*Be able to feel peaceful and calm when setting boundaries*Know how to communicate directly with people*Your feelings will become more "right-sized"*Do things because you really want to do them, not because you feel obligated*Live your life by your own values and feel proud of that*Learn to keep the focus on yourself and still be kind and helpful*Come closer to realizing your authentic identitySign up for a free 30 minute Better Boundaries call with me at this link. https://calendly.com/barb-nangle/better-boundaries-callLINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:Loving Parent GuidebookThe Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You  by Karen McLarenCONNECT WITH BARB NANGLE:Subscribe to “Friday Fragments” weekly newsletterFree boundaries resourcesFacebookInstagramWork with Barb! Buy Barb a teaGet a free chapter of my upcoming book: Roadside Recovery 

Intuition can manifest as a sudden, sharp knowing or as a slowly dawning certainty. Regardless of its speed, intuition carries a powerful sense of knowing, signaling us on a deep level, "Hey, pay attention. I have something to say."Intuition is a powerful force rarely spoken about openly. And when it is talked about, intuition is often seen as a vague, almost mystical whisper rather than a credible guide.What if embracing your intuition could lead you to tap into more of your power? What if, instead of dismissing odd symptoms or vivid dreams as mere quirks, you recognized them as valuable messages from your inner self and learned how to decode them? What if you could refine your intuition so it becomes a helpful guide when you need it most?Today, we'll explore how we can reclaim this essential part of ourselves and recognize intuition not as a mystical or unreliable force, but as a skill that integrates our most profound wisdom into our everyday lives. We'll debunk two harmful myths about intuition and then I'll guide you through an exercise to help you reclaim your wise, intuitive self.Listen to the full episode to hear:How our cultural emphasis on rationality and logic disconnects us from our intuition from a young ageWhy intuition acts as a complement to, not a competitor of, data and logicHow intuition reflects our experience and ability to recognize patterns in the world around usHow we can compensate for implicit bias in our intuitive thinkingHow intuition helps our “emotional radar” and supports our relationships with others and ourselvesA practice of listening to your yes and no to help you tune into your intuitionLearn more about Valerie Black:The Change AgencyBecoming Power NewsletterCoachingResources:Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Audre LordeSources of Power: How People Make Decisions, Gary A. KleinBlink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm GladwellThinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel KahnemanEmotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, Daniel GolemanThe Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You, Karla McLaren

Do you know what your emotions really mean? Tune in for an inspiring discussion with Karla McLaren, M.E.d., on her new book The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You.#MomentsWithMarianne with host Marianne Pestana airs every Friday at 10AM PST/ 1PM EST in the Southern California area on KMET1490AM & 98.1 FM, an ABC Talk News Radio Affiliate. Karla McLaren, M.Ed., is an award-winning author, researcher, workplace consultant, and empathy expert. Her grand unified theory of emotions revalues even the most “negative” emotions and opens new pathways to self-awareness, effective communication, and healthy empathy. Her applied work, Dynamic Emotional Integration®, is a groundbreaking process that reveals the genius and healing power within the emotional realm. karlamclaren.comFor more show information visit: www.MariannePestana.com#bookclub #readinglist #books #bookish #author #authorinterview #lifeskills #KMET1490AM #radioshow #communication #personalgrowth #personaldevelopment #selfimprovement #emotions #emotionalintelligence #healing #healingjourney

Get ready to tap into the power of your emotions, because they hold invaluable wisdom! From guilt to panic and everything in between, each emotion we feel has a story to tell. And who better to guide us through this emotional journey than Karla McLaren, an emotion and empathy expert? With more than a decade of research under her belt, Karla has mastered the intense power of language in identifying and regulating emotions. Described as an ‘emotional guidebook' for navigating the highs and lows of your feelings while heightening your intuition, enhancing your relationships, and broadening your self-awareness, we're here to dissect the latest edition of Karla's book, The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You.  As we break down anger, envy, forgiveness, anxiety, and even some lesser-known emotions that you might not even realize you're feeling, you'll discover how emotions can be instrumental in healing trauma and why having a negative approach to emotions can be problematic. If you're looking to have your mind truly blown, join us as we explore the exhilarating world of emotions and learn how to decode them like a pro! Listen and Learn:  Between the first and latest editions of Karla's book, The Language of Emotions, what has changed in the world of our understanding of emotions? What's the harm in viewing emotions as something that's a problem? Toxic positivity bias: what is it, and why is it especially problematic in the workplace? How is Karla's approach of using emotions to understand ourselves more intricately and channeling them effectively more beneficial? Why having a valence to emotions can be problematic How emotions can be useful in healing from trauma The relationship between the process of forgiveness and anger The function of shame and how it might actually be a helpful emotion to be aware of Why does Karla refer to envy as our “interactional radar” and how apathy is a mask for anger? The confusion between anxiety and panic Resources:  Learn more about Karla and her work  The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You Follow Karla on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube The Empathy Academy  Lisa Feldman Barrett The End of Trauma by George A. Bonanno About Karla McLaren  Karla McLaren, M.Ed. is an award-winning author, educator, workplace consultant, and social science researcher. Her work revalues even the most “negative” emotions and opens startling new pathways into self-awareness, effective communication, and healthy empathy. She is the founder and CEO of Emotion Dynamics Inc. She is also the author of many books, including The Language of Emotions, The Power of Emotions at Work, and Embracing Anxiety, and she is the developer of the online learning site EmpathyAcademy.org. She is online at KarlaMcLaren.com. Related Episodes:  183. Permission to Feel: Emotional Intelligence with Marc Brackett 85. Emotion Efficacy with Aprilia West 216. Managing Anger and Irritability, Featuring Russell Kolts  240. Talking to Kids and Teens with Big Feelings with Adele LaFrance (EFFT Part 1 of 2)  241. Emotion Coaching Skills for Families with Mindy Solomon (EFFT Part 2 of 2)  244. What You Feel Is Not All There Is with Aprilia West 265. The Power of Emotions at Work with Karla McLaren 282. Toxic Positivity with Whitney Goodman 304. The Emotional Lives of Teenagers with Lisa Damour  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are elated to welcome Karla McLaren to Wednesday Wake-Up! Karla McLaren, M.Ed., is an award-winning author, social science researcher, and empathy innovator.  She is the author of several books, including the upcoming new edition of The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You out Tuesday June 27th, 2023. Check out this book, it is a game-changer. Gregory and Karla have a delightful conversation about working with traditionally perceived "difficult" emotions such as sadness or anger, investigating anxiety, honoring emotions, and finding wisdom in our feelings.  This is also a fantastic episode for our fellow therapists out there! Big thank you to publisher Sounds True. You can read more about Karla HERE. ABOUT HOST GREGORY MALOOF Gregory Maloof is a western Dharma teacher from the Ruth Denison lineage. The Dharma is freely given, but if you would like to support this podcast and pay it forward, you can donate and support it HERE Follow Gregory on Instagram @gregorymaloofdharma To learn about retreats, news, and classes first, CLICK HERE to keep in touch and get on the Wednesday Wake-Up mailing list.   Intro and Outro Music by Lenny Dinardo, Wave Em' In.

Many of us have been taught that the emotions we experience – particularly those that are considered negative, such as anger, fear, and sadness – are less valuable and socially acceptable than our rational thoughts. As a result, we often repress and avoid our emotions rather than paying attention to what they may be trying to tell us.  Karla McLaren, our guest in Episode 152 of The MINDSet Game® podcast, believes that our emotions are special gifts that can offer us important information about our lives and relationships. As a social science researcher and empathy innovator, Karla is the CEO of Emotion Dynamics Incorporated, developer of Dynamic Emotional Integration, and the creator of the Empathy Academy. She is also the award-winning author of several books, including Embracing Anxiety, The Dynamic Emotional Integration Workbook, The Art of Empathy, The Power of Emotions at Work, and her latest book, the updated, revised version of The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You. In today's episode, Karla discusses the following: - The concept of the language of emotions, or the process of learning how to identify and work with your emotions in order to develop a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world around you  - The specific skills and insights that different emotions – including anger, sadness, fear, and shame – can offer when you become more conscious of them, as well as questions to ask yourself in order to access those gifts - Why it's important for teams within organizations to develop a shared emotional vocabulary, rather than trying to eradicate emotions at work  - Steps that leaders can take in order to start embracing emotions and an emotional vocabulary in the workplace To learn more about Karla, visit https://karlamclaren.com. To access her courses and other resources, visit https://empathyacademy.org.  To subscribe to The MINDset Game, visit www.TheMINDsetGame.com.   

Today's episode is exciting and jam packed with info. I talked with author and expert Karla McLaren about emotions, boundaries, trauma, how people respond to trauma, and so much more. You will gain an insight on how emotions relate to yourself and your relationships. Let's dive in!Today's Guest: Karla McLarenKarla McLaren. Karla is an acclaimed author and expert on emotions, renowned for her groundbreaking book, "The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You." In this best-selling work, she offers valuable insights into understanding and working with our emotions in a healthy and empowering way. Karla, thank you so much for joining us today.Website https://karlamclaren.com/Online learning site: https://empathyacademy.org/Your Host: Kimberly Beam Holmes, Expert in Self-Improvement and RelationshipsKimberly Beam Holmes has applied her master's degree in psychology for over ten years, acting as the CEO of Marriage Helper & CEO and Creator of PIES University, being a wife and mother herself, and researching how attraction affects relationships. Her videos, podcasts, and following reach over 200,000 people a month who are making changes and becoming the best they can be.Website: www.kimberlybeamholmes.comThanks for listening!Connect on Instagram: @kimberlybeamholmesBe sure to SUBSCRIBE to the podcast and leave a review!

In this episode, I have the honor of talking with Dr. John Stracks and his wife Lisa Stracks. (See links below) It's always insightful to talk with Mind Body Medicine professionals about how emotions cause physical sympoms, but it's another thing to talk to a couple willing to share how that plays out in their marriage. A big thanks to both of them for their vulnerability and sharing their thoughts on marriage, new relationships, and parenting for those in Mind Body Syndrome/ TMS recovery.Here are a few of the topics we cover.1.Seeing Doctor Stracks as your physician.2.Lisa's role at Cormendi Health3.Anger - Life is lifey and we will always be presented with emotions that, left ignored, play out in chronic symptoms.4.Marriage: What does it mean to feel the emotions in a healthy way in marriage or intimate relationships?5.Relationships: What should those entering relationships with TMS/ Mind Body Syndrome be looking for in a partner?6.Parenting: How do you teach your children about the mindbodyconnection so they recognize physical symptoms as emotional presenting in the body. They also discuss how to help children to begin the process of identifying their emotions.For scheduling:cormendihealth.com/contact(home page is cormendihealth.com)For Cormendi Academy (our live, online program):https://cormendihealth.com/cormendiacademyBooks Dr. Stracks mentioned:Feeling Good Together, Dr. David BurnsThe Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You, Karla McLarenMindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol DweckIF you are curious about my, Jen Johnson's, healing journey or coaching with me, check out my website at ThoughtByThoughtHealing.com#tms #mindbodysyndrome #cormendihealth #anger #alltherage #growthmindset #repressedemotions #suppressemotions #subconsciousemotions #youcanheal #curable #unlearnyourpain #healthyanger #relationshipadvice #catastrophizing #fightorflight

In this conversation, we discuss burnout, self-care, boundaries, Adderall, and tattoos as totems.IG neurodivergent louLou

This is a follow up conversation w/ Darci Laroque to share the lasting IMPACT of childhood neglect, abandonment, and survivalist 3HO training to breed "spiritual-warriors" that she, and other children of 3HO/Kundalini Yoga, "Sikh Dharma" received. Hint: It's NOT Healthy, Happy, or Holy. It's communal abandonment disguised as consciousness.   You can support this broadcast HERE Subscribe to my new podcast -  Uncomfortable Conversations on Predators in Business, Community and Culture - You can comment on each episode and subscribe to get it sent to you directly!  GuruNischan.com ____________________ From Eps. 55: Darci Larocque, was born Darci Clack in 1971. Her father joined 3HO in 1974 in the New Haven Ashram. Her mom and father were divorced and at the age of 5, she started visiting the ashram in Dorchester, MA, where her father had moved. One day in first grade catholic school, her dad and a friend in full Bana showed up in the middle of a school day and took her. Darci was taken to the Dorchester ashram and even though her mom had full custody, her father wouldn't give her back. It was the 1970s - her mom, then 23 year old could not fight it so she joined 3HO and moved in. Darci's dad was Deva Singh. Her mom was Ram Sarn Kaur and her name became Upma. After Children's Camp in 1978, at 7 years old she was sent to the newly created Guardian Program in New Mexico where she stayed for years; first with one set of guardians then with the heads of the ashram. Which among other things, she had direct ranch access that only in hindsight she can now see as “special”. During this time, her mom moved to the LA ashram and YB engaged her to be married. She was supposed to go to India - but stayed behind with even more YB and ranch access. Her friends (other kids in the guardian program) left in the first group to Mussoorie, India. She ended up in LA and NM for a couple years back and forth. She was fully " out" at 13. Her dad stayed in until he died 16 years ago. Her mom left when she was 15 and she continued to work at the Golden Temple and stayed dressed in her turban while she worked. She died 7 years ago. Her whole life in 3HO was her life via her dad and friends. She didn't choose to “be cut” out. Until she was 40, she considered herself a Sikh. Only in the past two years did she finally recognize that she wasn't a Sikh. She was raised in a cult. Song : This is Me by Kesha (from The Greatest Showman) You can DONATE to this broadcast at: https://paypal.me/GuruNischanLLC Uncomfortable Conversations Spotify Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2lEfcoaDgbCCmztPZ4XIuN?si=vH-cH7HzRs-qFxzEuogOqg Subscribe to my new podcast -  Uncomfortable Conversations on Predators in Business, Community and Culture - https://gurunischan.substack.com/ You can comment on each episode!  Subscribe and follow me at GuruNischan.com   Books Referenced:    CPTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Peter Walker The Tao of Fully Feeling by Peter Walker The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You by Karla McLaren

Artist and Dynamic Emotional Integration practitioner Sue Barclay talks to Frances Butt about how important it is for her to be able to express her feelings through her painting, as well as how helpful it is to better understand and engage with our emotions.https://www.suebarclay.comhttps://www.instagram.com/suebarclayart/The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You - Karla McLarenLiving with Feeling: The Art of Emotional Expression- Lucia CapoccioneCall to Ritual - film by Gabby Biazotti---Recorded April 2022Music: Frances

In today’s episode, I speak with ​​Karla Mclaren, M.Ed. an award-winning author, educator, social science researcher, empathy expert, and workplace consultant. Her work revalues even the most “negative” emotions and opens startling new pathways into self-awareness, effective communication, and healthy empathy. Her applied work, Dynamic Emotional Integration®, is a groundbreaking process that reveals the genius and healing power within the emotional realm. She is the author of many books, including The Power of Emotions at Work, Embracing Anxiety, and The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You, and she’s the developer of the online learning site EmpathyAcademy.org. We dive into the following and so much more: ✅ Why understanding our emotions is so important ✅ Why so many people do not understand their emotions ✅ Why “Restoring the intellect to it’s rightful position” ✅ In her book “The Language of Emotions”, we talk about the need for a balanced psyche, and incorporating the elements of air, earth, water and fire. ✅ Some of the dominant emotions she speaks about in her work, specifically, anger, guilt & shame, fear and then boredom - and how to move through them. ✅ What happens when someone represses their anger? And why she says that dealing with your emotions (like anger) should be a restorative act. It was a pure delight to connect with Karla and I think you’ll enjoy this conversation tremendously. Please tag us and tell us what you loved! You can follow @Gateways_To_Awakening on Instagram or Facebook if you’d like to stay connected.

In today’s episode, I speak with ​​Karla Mclaren, M.Ed. an award-winning author, educator, social science researcher, empathy expert, and workplace consultant. Her work revalues even the most “negative” emotions and opens startling new pathways into self-awareness, effective communication, and healthy empathy. Her applied work, Dynamic Emotional Integration®, is a groundbreaking process that reveals the genius and healing power within the emotional realm. She is the author of many books, including The Power of Emotions at Work, Embracing Anxiety, and The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You, and she’s the developer of the online learning site EmpathyAcademy.org. We dive into the following and so much more: ✅ Why understanding our emotions is so important ✅ Why so many people do not understand their emotions ✅ Why “Restoring the intellect to it’s rightful position” ✅ In her book “The Language of Emotions”, we talk about the need for a balanced psyche, and incorporating the elements of air, earth, water and fire. ✅ Some of the dominant emotions she speaks about in her work, specifically, anger, guilt & shame, fear and then boredom - and how to move through them. ✅ What happens when someone represses their anger? And why she says that dealing with your emotions (like anger) should be a restorative act. It was a pure delight to connect with Karla and I think you’ll enjoy this conversation tremendously. Please tag us and tell us what you loved! You can follow @Gateways_To_Awakening on Instagram or Facebook if you’d like to stay connected.

Today's interview is on emotional awareness at work. Do you identify with and accept the entire range of emotions that you experience? Do you feel that you can bring your whole self to work because it is an environment that supports and honors all emotions, or do you feel that you have to hide your emotions? I'm privileged to be joined by Karla McLaren, an award winning author, social science researcher, and pioneering educator whose empathic approach to emotions revalues, even the most negative emotions and opens startling new pathways into self awareness, effective communication and healthy empathy. In this podcast, we will explore different ways to name our emotions with the vocabulary of an embodied experience so that we can grow our self awareness, develop greater self regulation, navigate triggers with skill and have more relationship mastery. We also discuss how to design for empathy and emotional intelligence at work with different questions, strategies and tips. Together Karla and I speak to the powerful practice of developing social contracts that empower trust, psychological safety so that people can really speak the truth even if it destabilizes processes or structures that frankly, should just be let go. There's so much good stuff in this interview. Thank you for joining us!   SHINE Links: Meditation Exercises Leading from Wholeness Executive Coaching Leading from Wholeness Learning and Development Resources Shine: Ignite Your Inner Game to Lead Consciously at Work and in the World by Carley Hauck Contact Carley Hauck Book Carley for speaking Sign up for the Podcast! Carley on LinkedIn   Karla McLaren   Resources mentioned in this episode: Emotional Vocabulary List Empathy Quiz   The Imperfect Shownotes   Carley Hauck 0:01   Hi, thank you for joining the SHINE podcast. I'm your host Carley Hauck. This podcast is the beginning of season five. And it is all about the intersection of three things: conscious, inclusive leadership, the recipe for high performing teams and awareness practices. If you are just joining the SHINE podcast, please go to your favorite podcast application and hit the subscribe button so you don't miss any fantastic episodes.   I would also love to encourage you to write a positive review. If you enjoy this podcast or any of the other SHINE podcasts, it helps so much and spreads the light and brings wonderful people to this community.   Today's interview is on emotional awareness at work. And I have the privilege to have this incredible conversation with a mentor and a teacher that has been in my life for over 10 years, Karla McLaren.   And before I go into a little bit about Karla, I wanted to introduce the interview. And in this podcast today, we are going to be talking about different ways to name our emotions with vocabulary with embodied experience so that we can grow our self awareness, develop greater self regulation, navigate triggers with skill and have more relationship mastery. We're also going to talk about how do we design for empathy and emotional intelligence at work with different questions and strategies and tips will also speak to powerful practice of developing social contracts that empower trust, psychological safety so that people can really speak the truth even if it destabilizes processes or structures that frankly, should just be let go. There's so much good stuff in this interview.   Karla McLaren is an award winning author, social science researcher, and pioneering educator whose empathic approach to emotions revalues, even the most negative emotions and open startling new pathways into self awareness, effective communication and healthy empathy. She is the author of four books, and I believe a workbook and I'm not going to read all of the books aloud but you can definitely go to her website and check them all out. She is an amazing resource that I'm so excited to introduce you to. The Art of Empathy, A Complete Guide to Life's Most Essential Skill that came out in 2013, The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You came out in 2010. That was my first introduction to Karla and her latest book, The Power of Emotions at Work: Accessing the Vital Intelligence in Your Workplace. Karla has also developed the groundbreaking six essential aspects of empathy model that highlights all the processes in healthy empathy, and makes them easily understandable, accessible and attainable.   Karla is so wonderful to have you on the SHINE podcast, I discovered your work and the book the language of emotions. About 10-12 years ago, I was attending these community Enneagram panels in Marin County. And I was often one of the youngest people in the room. And in those days, I tend to be attracted to wisdom. And so I've always found myself among elders. And someone talked about this book. And I think it had only come out maybe a year or two before and I knew that I was a very emotional being and didn't quite know how to navigate those emotions and didn't really have language for it. So I went and got your book.   And it had a huge positive impact on me. Because I started to really turn towards my emotions, really notice what was happening in my physical body and began to ask myself questions and my emotions questions. And it really enabled me to develop better boundaries, to understand my own empathy skills and emotional sensitivities. And that has really evolved in my work and in my personal life. And I bring a lot of that exploration into my own book, Shine. And that is a big part of chapter two of my book, which is the inner game of emotional intelligence. And so your new book, The Power of Emotions at Work, has come out a couple months ago, and we have the same publisher, Sounds True. And you have I believe, published four books with Sounds True. And I listened to your recent interview with Tammy Simon, the founder of Sounds True on your new book, on the popular podcast Insights From the Edge where Tammy is typically interviewing Sounds True authors and their new books. And I loved this interview of yours. And I was so excited to support you in this next book, and to have you on the podcast. So thank you, for your deep contribution, your genius really around the realms of emotion and empathy, for shining your light in the way that you are. I am grateful and delighted to have you here.   Karla McLaren 6:30   Thank you. Thanks.   Carley Hauck 6:33   So this podcast is on the intersection of three things: conscious, inclusive leadership, the recipe for high performing teams and awareness practices. And so one of the questions that I love asking my guests is What does conscious inclusive leadership mean to you?   Karla McLaren 6:51       In my own work as a leader, for me, it is make maintaining an emotionally well regulated social structure around me because as leaders find out, leadership will challenge every part of you, every terrible way that your family taught you how to do emotions, every ridiculous idea you have about your own success, every every piece of you, that is not right on track, leadership will kick you right in that thing.   If you do not have an emotionally well regulated social structure around you, then it is very easy to become kind of a rigid and concrete excuse for all of your personal failures. And if you have an emotionally well regulated social structure, then there is going to be the room for you to say, oh my gosh, I suck. I suck so hard right now. So let me dial this back and figure out what I'm doing. And I apologize and Lord, that was bad. Right?   To for me, leadership means leading with people, never never been over people. So I'm very, very anti capitalist, very anti hierarchy. Because both of those things tend to treat people as things and as puzzle pieces or as tools, rather than as living breathing souls. So for me, there is no, you know, work life schism. My work is my life, and my life is my work. And so I don't want to be in any situation where there is a danger of me becoming less of a whole being and more of a leader. And I'm going to put finger quotes around leader.   Carley Hauck 8:52   Wonderful, thank you. Well, I loved some of the things that you said, you know, leading with not leaving over and what you were talking about is bringing, bringing your whole self you know, to your life and there's no compartmentalizing that at work, or in your regular life. And I also feel very aligned with that, and, and we can't, you know, not bring our whole selves with us, it comes up no matter what. And so, thank you for that.   One of the perspectives that I really loved when I was listening to the interview that you did with Tammy on the Insights From the Edge podcast, where she's, you know, promoting her new authors and books or old authors, and in this case, not that you're old, but you've you've had a couple books with Sounds True. A lot with them. Yeah. You, you. I just felt like that interview was so fiery and you went into places that I feel most people don't have the courage to speak to and so because I know but you're comfortable on the deep waters, I thought I might just go there, are you with that?   Karla McLaren 10:05   Let's do it.   Carley Hauck 10:06   Okay! So you shared in that interview that you've been thinking a lot about the so-called negative emotions and positive emotions. And you've shared that the so-called negative emotions are typically dismissed or we push them away, because they shake up the status quo. And the so called positive emotions go along, and then you went into the deep waters a bit and said, and a capitalist, sexist, racist, ableist, transphobic, homophobic world, these negative emotions would stand up and say, this is some shit, and we need to change it. And we need to change it every day. It's not okay. It's not okay. It's not okay.   And when I heard you say that, Karla, I got goosebumps. And I was just so standing up in my seat saying hallelujah! Yeah, 100%. So I'm gonna let you take it from there.   Karla McLaren 11:10   There's so many, there's so many avenues to go down. But I think one of the most important ways to begin to access your emotions in a functional way, is to understand that there is no such thing as a negative emotion. And there is no such thing as a positive emotion. Because if you believe that, you're going to avoid the so-called negative ones, and you're going to overuse and even abuse the so-called positive ones.   In the workplace. This is really important, because almost every workplace book that talks about, you know, how to work with emotions in the workplace, is basically how do we make everybody feel happy, happy, happy, happy. And happiness is being used as a kind of a drug.   And, oh, I'm remembering what book was it? What book was it Brave New World, Soma, there's a drug called Soma that makes everybody happy. And it's a way for a pretty evil cabal to take over because everyone is asleep in their happiness, right? So they can't feel their anger, which would tell them that their boundaries have been crossed, they can't feel their fear, which is their instincts and intuition. You can't feel their jealousy, which tells them about love and loyalty, they can't feel their envy, and on and on and on.   If people want us just to feel the happiness emotions, I have now realized that we are looking at social control. And so now I've like, okay, social control is definitely occurring here. Now, what is the purpose of this social control? Right? So it means that I pretty much can't go anywhere, with any. Like, Carly, you can't come to this party, this party is about happiness.   Carley Hauck 13:00   Right? Well, and, and what's been so interesting, in my own experience, being someone that feels deeply and always has there been times in my life, when I definitely suppress that and push that away, because, for example, my mother and father expressed so much emotion in our house, that there really wasn't room for me or my sister to express ours. And so I would just kind of put it to the side or hide it. And then eventually, I couldn't do that anymore when I became a teenager, and my hormones really, you know, kicked in, and I felt my rage, and I felt my sadness and, and I expressed it, but I've noticed in my own life, that if people don't feel comfortable, and we'll, we'll go here in this conversation, really turning towards all their emotions, all of them, you know, not compartmentalizing them into negative or positive that it's very challenging for them to be with the emotions of others, and maybe some of the more we call them, or label them as society does more difficult emotions. What do you think about that?   Karla McLaren 14:15   Yes, I agree. And also because empathy is first and foremost, an emotional skill, if people don't develop a full range of emotional skills and awareness, then their empathy will always be sort of a half assed empathy, if that.   There are three positive emotions. There are 14 so-called negative ones. So you end up working with about 17.6% of emotions and if you remember being graded in school, 50% is an F. So if we believe in positive and negative emotions, for getting an F, in emotions and an empathy.   Carley Hauck 15:00   Can you share what those three positive ones are for the audience?   Karla McLaren 15:05   The poor, beleaguered, abused so-called positive emotions, are happiness, which looks to the future and tells you when something is fun or hopeful. The second is contentment, which is an emotion that turns toward you, when you've done something that meets with your own approval, and joy, which is an emotion that opens you up and sort of drops your boundaries, and helps you kind of, I guess, upload an experience of bliss.   And there's a lot of danger in joy, but people don't really talk about it. They think joy is the only emotion to feel. And so these three emotions are very specific jobs, they come up for very specific reasons. And they should never be trapped or laid over the top of other emotions, but they almost always are in our, in our positive and negative emotion culture.   Carley Hauck 16:10   And it was so interesting to watch, you know, last year with the murders of George Floyd and so many other black and brown brothers and sisters of ours, and the uprising of rage that came through and the protests. And again, I was in celebration of that, because I feel like if we were more in touch with our rage, our grief, or fear, we would be making the changes to the structures and systems that are causing hurt and harm in our workplaces, in our worlds.   Karla McLaren 16:50   Yeah, and notice the backlash that happened against those expressions of honest emotion, honest and necessary emotion. Right? It was sort of, you know, you shouldn't be so angry, you shouldn't be full of rage, you should, you know, wait until the system changes. Like that's not how systems change.   Carley Hauck 17:16   Your very suffering then causes the systems to break or be hospiced.   Well, and before the call in the recording started, you and I were talking about climate change, because you were saying, I'm grateful that there's rain today, and that we don't have a big fire. And I lived in Northern California for a very long time, too. And, you know, I feel like that's the next wave that's coming of people really understanding the gravity of our survival. And, and what the science is clearly saying, and we don't have a leader in the office anymore, who's denying this science. And there is some action and there is some change in structure.   But I don't think that most people have really felt the grief and the rage and the fear around this. I know I have. I know I'm still feeling it. I know, there's layers of it. But I'm hopeful and inspired that the more we can turn towards those feelings, we will create the systems and changes to support this hot future that we are inheriting and that we have caused. What are your thoughts on that?   Karla McLaren 18:40   I don't know. I don't know. I'm in a pretty philosophical place about the human race right now. The last four years made me go hmm, is this a species that deserves to survive? It's a question I've had for quite a while. I'm not exactly a misanthrope. But I'm just feeling that without access to our emotional functioning, we are sort of like toddlers with a handgun, in many cases, in terms of our capacity to understand and respond to the troubles that we cause.   Carley Hauck 19:25   Thank you. Yeah. Well, one of the things I'm gonna move it a little bit. I could totally stay in this part of our conversation for a while, but I want to bring it into how we can encourage and inspire folks to access more of their emotions and their emotional intelligence and empathy at work. And I've been conducting trainings and bringing, you know, skills for empathy and emotional intelligence into all the work that I've been doing in the workplace for the last decade, and when I ask folks, What emotions do you not show at work and why? Most often I hear that they're grouped around what's acceptable for our gender norms, and what's not acceptable.   And so for example, men, historically and our culture, and in many world cultures do not feel permission to feel fear, or, or sadness, they're, they're being, you know, labeled more as the weaker emotions, the more feminine emotions.   And for, for women, it's anger. And we can see that when we push those emotions away, that that erupts into other actions. And so I believe that the Me Too movement, the huge domestic violence against women, against non binary folks, against other minorities from them, is coming, because they, they've had to suppress those parts of them. And it's coming out in actions, and women are hiding anger, and it's turning more into sadness. And that's because they don't want the backlash of being coined, a witch or a bitch or aggressive, and I feel curious, what do you hear about what emotions people hide? And why?   And also open to any perspective, or, you know, via those gender measures?   Karla McLaren 21:43   Yeah, the gender emotions are really interesting, because they cause so much trouble between the genders. And of course, I think agender people, they are not outside of this binary, that they are not outside of this binary, if they want to present as one gender or the other or neither. They are still sort of, sort of, well, I don't want to say trapped. But, but, you know, there's ways that by forbidding men to feel sadness and grief and forbidding them to show fear, we turn them into sort of, we turn them into rigid bodies, and by refusing to let women show or feel anger, we turn them into unnaturally softened bodies.   So with men, we have unnaturally rigid bodies, and when we have unnaturally softened ones, and when these two bodies come together, there is usually conflict, because the unnaturally softened, one might look at the rigidity and say, you know, that is the wrong way to be, that is the wrong way, you can't be that way and then you know, the opposite would happen. So I think this, this gendering of emotion is one of the things that helps the the gender divide, maintain itself, so strongly so if a woman or you know, a female presenting person learns how to work with anger, she or they are, are, they are breaking their breaking through the violence of gender.   And if a male presenting person learns to work with sadness, and fear and grief, then they're also in their own body, challenging the gender binary and the gender violence that occurs. And I think this is, you know, that's something you can do, you cannot fix, you know, however many centuries of, of the gender binary and the violence that goes with it, but you can fix it in your own emotional life. And in so doing free yourself and free anybody who is around you, right? It can free the people around you by going into the shadow of what, you know, a person with your gender expression is supposed to feel or not feel. And I like that because that's where my freedom is. You can tell me anything about emotions about what I'm not supposed to be doing.   And on the outside, I can go Sure, sure, I wouldn't do that emotion on the inside I have all freedom in the world. Right? I feel what I feel regardless of what other people want me to feel. Carley Hauck 24:42   Thank you for that, in in the research that I was doing with my book, I really felt that a large role of consciousness inclusive leadership was enrolling men men identifying to be allies, to women to to marginalized communities to people of color, and I had lots and lots of conversations with men, and was really able to hear how hard it is to be a man at times in our culture. And you know, what they've been reinforced and the end the man box, so to speak, of what is acceptable to be a man and what is not. And it was really beautiful to hear their vulnerability and their fear and their sadness. And I am a really big proponent of people in general, again, just embracing all parts of themselves expressing and I, I feel hopeful, the transformation that's happening, and especially that's happening in the workplace, there are a lot more programs being developed and initiated for male allyship, Intel has a very large program, and I've developed a closer relationship with one of the champions and ambassadors of that program. Intel has 100,000 team members, you know, it's massive. So I, I share this because I feel inspired at the microcosm of change that can happen in the workplace that can then transcend into our greater world.   Going into some of the wisdom that you have really developed and understood around emotions, could you share what the deeper wisdom behind rage, fear and grief are and I'm, I'm honing in on those three, because I feel that in this time of the pandemic, most people that maybe never had access those probably have, and I'd love to just normalize them a bit with your support.   Karla McLaren 27:00   Each of these emotions is really necessary at all times. But also in times of trouble, I would like to see these three emotions out playing in times of trouble.   Rage is an intensified form of anger. And probably there's a bit of panic in it. Panic is the emotion that helps us fight, flee, freeze or flock to safety. And so when you see anger that has fight in it, there's usually panic there and panic comes forward when we are endangered. So there's danger, please panic come and help us right. So rage is anger with a kind of a panic chaser. And it comes forward when, certainly when your boundaries have been crossed.   Anger is about setting boundaries and identifying what you value. And protecting and restoring what you value. The power that comes with anger is very, very misunderstood. It comes forward to help you be vulnerable. Like to be vulnerable is a very empowering thing. But people don't sort of see it that way. They see it as a weakness. So anger comes to bring you the power and the strength you need to be vulnerable.   When there's rage. Often, people are raging, not just on behalf of themselves, but on behalf of systemic inequalities and injustice. So there's that need to sort of step it up a bit. It is very difficult though, when panic is there for people to be able to be vulnerable within their rage. This is kind of next level, emotional skill, to feel that intensity of emotion, and to be able to speak clearly, without doing undue harm to others.   We've mostly learned to use our anger as a weapon, which is what it never should have been and never should be. There are some times when you need to weaponize yourself, you need to tear into somebody you need to fight, but not as often as we do. So I'm not I'm not throwing violence into the shadows. There are times when you need to fight. But there are more times when you need to be vulnerable. And that's what anger brings to you.   So welcome anger. Let me see if I can be strong enough to be vulnerable right now. That's kind of the work without emotion. Fear is our instincts and intuition. A lot of people mistake fear with anxiety and panic. But there are three different but connected emotions. Fear is about the present moment. It's your instincts and your intuition. It's your focus and your clarity. It's your ability to key into what's going on right now and it helps you identify change and novelty.   If there's any danger, then panic needs to come because that's the life saving emotion. That's panic's job. But a lot of people when they say no fear, or the only thing to fear is fear itself. There's a lot of really nasty messaging around fear. But what people are talking about is panic. And they shouldn't say that about panic either. But they do.   So the work for fear is to simply become aware of it. That's what it comes to help you do. So you just become aware of the present moment check in. Is there any change? Is there any novelty? Is there anything I need to pay attention to? And that's it. That's the work of fear. If you're good with fear, if you're, if you're very fear-resourced, you will be instinctual and intuitive. And you will be aware of your surroundings. That is a sign of being good with fear.   Carley Hauck 31:00   And one of the questions I often ask fear, and I encourage other people to ask, and I don't know if I was influenced by you in this questions, I'm just going to own that. But it's super helpful for me to ask what's the worst thing that could happen? Because if I look at that squarely in the face, because sometimes the worst thing does happen. But most of the time, it doesn't. If I can face that, if I can turn towards everything that arises in the worst thing that can happen, then I can move into the next step, which is inspired action, which is like, what do I have control of right now? How do I respond?   Karla McLaren 31:43   That would be more of an anxiety question, because it looks to the future. That fears about the present moment, if there's anything feeling like it's coming at you, or there's any kind of dread or danger out in the future panic will be there, but anxiety will too because its job is to prepare you for the future. So that's like a really good anxiety. question is what's the worst that could happen? And then you prepare for the possible worst, right? Carley Hauck 32:14   Yeah, yeah. So then for fear, would you ask, What are you scared of right now?   Karla McLaren 32:18   No, because scared implies danger. And that would be panic. So fear is you simply pay attention in the present moment, the question that I have for fears, what action should be taken? And sometimes the answer is nothing. Everything's fine.   Carley Hauck 32:41   Thank you. I'd like to take a moment to give you a practice around emotional awareness. We're gonna take just a few minutes, and then we'll come back to the second part of this fantastic interview. So bring your attention inside.   By closing your eyes by shifting your gaze downward. Don't do this while you're driving. And slow down. Feel your feet, your hands simply by wiggling your fingers, your toes. start to notice the rhythm of your breath as you breathe in and out.   Breathing in through the belly. Noticing the rise and fall on the inhale on the exhale. Take some deep breaths, make some sounds as you breathe in. As you breathe out. Do any movement that would help you come more fully into this experience into this moment into your body.   See if you can imagine that the energy from your head is starting to move down into your belly into your pelvis are moving more and more into our bodies and out of the thinking, doing and rather being aspect of ourselves.   Doing a scan from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet. Simply notice where your body is feeling the most energy. is it in the head? Is it in the hands? Is it in the chest? Is it in the belly? For me there's a lot of energy in my head. Been very much in work and thinking mode today. And I've had a little bit too much caffeine to power through.   That's what I'm noticing right now. What are you noticing in the body? Where is your body holding the most energy? And what does that energy? Feel like? What are the qualities? Is it restless? Is it heavy? Is it soft? Is it agitated, everything is welcome.   The more that we can turn towards our bodies in our experience, our bodies can settle and have a different experience. Because all of our emotions are held in our physical body.   Now notice, if there are any feelings present. It could be one of a dominant feelings. There could be many feelings. What are you noticing in this one part of the body that we're focusing on because it has more sensation, more dominance than maybe other parts of your physical body? We're just being curious what's here? For me, I noticed there's some sadness. What is present for you?   And just staying with the body, staying with the feelings, not needing to create a story or change it or fix it. Just being here. And then asking this part of the body? How can I support you best right now? How can I support you best. And really listening to that wisdom.   Maybe it's a kind word, an action that you can give towards yourself, maybe it's a placing of a loving touch on that part of the body. So for myself right now I'm placing my right hand on my forehead and just offering some care.   Now moving into my heart and noticing that self care that self love. Seeing what would feel most comforting and supportive to you.   And then bringing your awareness back to your breath back to your body. Just noticing how you feel right now. This is a very small exercise that we can do to grow our inner game of emotional intelligence. You're becoming self aware of emotions, physical sensations, you're regulating your nervous system by slowing down your heart rate, your blood pressure, your breathing.   You're investigating your needs because every feeling has a need. Just imagining what it would be like if you gave yourself more time throughout the day to do this practice, how might it benefit you?   So, if you're interested in growing this inner game of emotional awareness, empathy and intelligence, which I would highly recommend, it will support you to be a conscious inclusive leader at work. It will allow you to excel in your personal relationships with deeper intimacy and connection, I have a few resources to support you in this. There are 15 free meditations on my resources page of my website. The link will be in the show notes that you can listen to. similar to this meditation but tailored to different emotions and different experiences.   You can also get my new book Shine: Ignite Your Inner Game to Lead Consciously at Work and in the World. It's available in hardcopy or audiobook. And I would love to speak with you on this topic or others, and see how I could develop a specific training for your organization, team or leadership. I am currently working with Capital One, which I love. And I'm doing a lot around this particular topic with their leadership team and their organization. The links for booking time with me will be in the show notes. And Karla also has many incredible resources. So back to the show.   Carley Hauck 40:58   And then grief, tell me more about the wisdom of grief.       Karla McLaren 41:04   Grief is a beautiful emotion that arises at a death, either of a person or an idea or relationship, the death of your previous lifestyle, the death of health, right if you move into an illness, and grief is the emotion that helps you make those profound transitions.   We are a grief impaired culture here in white, Northern America, white European, Northern America, I would say that there is a good grief tradition in Judaism. And many people of color, especially African Americans, and people from Mexico have beautiful grief transitions. But for most Europeans, the grief traditions are gone. And so we don't know how to make those profound transitions. And we also confuse grief with the other members of the sadness, family sadness, and depression. So we don't kind of know grief, but our bodies do.   And that's something that's always made me feel really, really happy, that even though culturally, we've been separated from the traditions of grieving, our bodies know how to grieve, they do and I give grief rituals, and people are like, I don't know what I'm doing. But as soon as we move into the ritual, they totally know what they're doing. They totally know. So bodies know grief and, and connecting with your body is one of the key ways to support your grief. And the question for grief is what must be mourned, and what must be released to completely.   Carley Hauck 42:54   love that what must be mourned and what must be released completely. And there's so much to grieve, right now, in our world, there's so much to let go, and release and more. So that we can create the new build the new.   So I want to move into the increased awareness of mental health, I feel like mental health was always present in the workplace. It's always been there. But it's becoming talked about more and more and more, which is fabulous, because then hopefully we can create some changes and give people the support that they need. And part of that has arisen more in the midst of the pandemic because of the social isolation, the increased complexity and challenge and, you know, layoffs mean so many things being quarantined. And it was very easy to find research on this.   But I basically looked into two articles earlier today. And this was an article that was looking at the impact of COVID on suicidal ideation. And it said that COVID-19 crisis, increased suicide rates during and likely will after the pandemic. And it was something that I thought was really interesting, because I know that you have spoken about suicidal urges. And I don't think that's something that is talked about very often and the wisdom behind suicidal urges, would you be willing to speak to that?   Karla McLaren 44:38   Yeah, and I was thinking in my book, I talk about the mental health effects of the workplace, and they're pretty grim. The workplace is a pretty emotionally and empathically abusive place because specifically because emotions were kicked out of the workplace at the turn of the Industrial Revolution, and you can't kick emotions out, you can only suppress them and make an emotionally unhealthy environment.   And I think there was a very large research study on like 17,000 workers in the US. And the numbers that came out of it were just sort of horrifying in that eight out of 10 workers said that they were struggling at home because of the social and emotional trouble at work. So we spend most of our lives in an emotionally troubling or even abusive environment.   And when the pandemic came along, and maybe people then realized, oh, their home lives aren't that healthy either. And there was all the fear that people don't know how to work with the anxiety, they don't know how to work with the sadness, grief and depression, they don't know how to work with the panic. So for a lot of people, a lot of emotions came up and it just became overwhelming. And the emotion that arises when things are, you know, when the shit has hit the fan, and everything is just not workable. The suicidal urge will arise and say, This can't go on.   I call it the darkness before dawn. Because it is a time to look around yourself with you know, this very clear eyed, realistic view, to say, the difference between who I am in my heart of hearts, and what I have become in this world of expediency and meaninglessness is so extreme that it's already like a death.   And the suicidal urge arises to sort of mark that moment. And the question for the suicidal urge is what behavior or situation must end now, and what can no longer be tolerated in my soul? In dynamic emotional integration, which is my work, the rule for the suicidal urge is that the human body that I'm living in is off the table. It's off the table, we can always die, but right now let's look and see what it is the suicidal urges pointing to. And as you've seen, if people don't have that framework, then they simply think that it is their body that needs to die, that they need to die.   But it can be one of the most powerful moments of evolution that a person could ever experience when their own emotions say, No, this is no I refuse to live this way. Give me liberty or give me death. And you know, the way that we work with suicidal urges like take liberty death will come anyway. Like, it's like death and taxes are going to happen. So let's live this life. And you know, take the power of this emotion and let's go. Let's go kill something that needs to get killed. Like, you know, this situation or this ridiculous job or this unhappy life that I'm living in. How the hell did I get here?   Carley Hauck 48:17   Or the fossil fuel industry.   Karla McLaren 48:18   Yeah, let's go kill that real good. Let's blow it up. Yeah, yeah. And there really isn't any.... What I'm noticing is and I'm gonna swear but I've been having this thing in my mind a book called a form of violence that's not fucked up. Because the violence that we see over and over again is fucked up violence that is meant to hurt or kill others but we don't see that kind of sacred violence of killing that which needs to be killed and ending that which needs to be ended and being in you know, intense conflict over something and not having everybody go let's just agree to disagree.   No, let's have conflict, let's go right. So it's something that is just in the back of my mind, how do we create healthy violence?   Carley Hauck 49:12   I believe conflict is essential in relationship. It's just part of relationship and with healthy boundaries with self awareness, with empathy, with emotional intelligence, with care, it can be very healthy, it can bring us closer, it can create more innovation and intimacy.   Karla McLaren 49:33   Yeah, yeah. But you know, you have to go through the shit, like you have to be willing to. And sometimes my husband and I are, you know, I'm like, let's do it dude, bro. Let's go, let's go outside. Let's do it.   Carley Hauck 49:45   You yourself have faced suicidal ideation based on your own childhood and really being you know, with those parts of yourself and being able to really understand and navigate it from that place. Is there anything else you want to add to that?   Karla McLaren 50:08   I, you know, sometimes people ask me, Well, how did you go from being a person who survived? You know, pretty extreme dissociative childhood trauma and homelessness and abuse and, you know, tremendous mental illness and poverty and all that kind of stuff. How did you get from there to here? And I was like, suicidal urge, man. That's what that's what brought me out. Because it continually was my, my North Star, it would continually tell me this is not it. This is Oh, hell, no, this is not it. This is not your life. This is not it.   And I was so fortunate that I learned to listen to it, and work with it. And yeah, yeah. To say you're right. This is not it.   Carley Hauck 51:08   Thank you for sharing that. And, you know, just to step in this ring with you. On Monday of this week, I had a really hard day, Karla, I was really, really hard. I cried most of the day. And I noticed in myself, that I really wanted to stop crying, like there were parts of myself that I kind of wanted to just push away, I wanted to abandon. And so I noticed for myself, when I've had suicidal ideation and urges in my life, it's because I'm, I'm abandoning parts of myself in that moment. And I'm not allowing myself to feel them.   But when I can turn towards and then get to the deeper wisdom of this has to die, this has to stop, this is not working. And that's where I got to, by the end of the day, I have some bigger changes I'm going to be making very soon. So freeing, there's so much clarity and ease, and then, you know, action that I can gather around that decision and that wisdom. So anyway, just speak to listeners, that I myself have gone through that and continue to go through it. And that's been my experience of what I notice. In that.   Karla McLaren 52:35   Yeah, like no, I also want to say that once you get once you befriend your emotions, and you become, you know, pals with them, and you communicate with each other, they don't have to come up in a full scale, like you don't have to go to rage. You can go to slight tiny peevishness, and you'll be like, Oh, no, you know, you could become more sensitive and empathic with your own emotions.   But there is a soft, suicidal urge that I have now identified as what I call the dead flat no. Which is when someone says, Hey, Karla, can you do a whole bunch of work for me? Because I have a party later? For free? No, actually, no, I cannot do that at all. And this no is very different from the relational no of anger.   Anger always has relational pieces in it, you can't be angry about something that's not important to you. So whenever there's anger, it means there's importance here, there's value here. And the no of anger would be. No, I can't do that today. But I can help you blah, blah, tomorrow, right? Or whatever if this person is worth keeping, but the person that I set up in that earlier story wasn't worth keeping. That person's like, Nope, I'm not in a relationship with you, pal. No.   Carley Hauck 54:01   Okay, so I'm going to take this back into the workplace. One of the things that I have been feeling really inspired by now that we have this virtual world of work, it is worldwide. And we have an opportunity to kill the structures and systems that in the workplace that are not supporting as you share in your book, emotionally well regulated structures that actually support empathy and all emotions and us to bring our whole selves.   And so when we think about designing for empathy and emotional intelligence, what do you think are some of the questions we can be asking leaders and teams? You have some really, you know, wonderful questions in your book such as, what environments do you experience as most nourishing? Emotional work? And what environments do you experience the most draining emotional work? And what are the differences between nourishing and draining environments? Those are definitely a start what? What other thoughts do you have about designing for empathy and all of our emotions to be welcomed at work?   Karla McLaren 55:33   I think that I'm sort of starting from the ground up in helping everybody develop an emotional vocabularies, not only so they'll have better language with each other, but also because developing a better emotional vocabulary just all by itself gives you better emotion regulation skills. That is cool. That's a two for one. And I've got a free emotional vocabulary list on my website that we've gathered, so that people can know, you know, are they in soft anger, medium anger or intense anger? And then that can tell them? What does anger mean? And why did that emotion come up right now, another one is making sure that there is a process for mistakes and conflict, that there is that that mistakes are seen as normal and necessary ways to learn. And that, you know, it's not it's not a terror inducing thing to make a mistake in your, in your world.   Because generally, people will be blamed or shunned, which will shut everybody down. Absolutely, everyone will see that happen. And it will shut down the entire community. And I think there was data saying that 85% of workers have not communicated really serious workplace issues upward because of this culture of we don't make mistakes, and we don't want anything negative to happen here.   Another one is that there is an environment of trust, that it has to come from if it's a traditional kind of a hierarchy, which we would hope those go the way of the dodo. Because it's such a bad, hierarchies are so damaging to everybody from the top down. They're just awful situations, but that people must feel safe enough and supported enough to speak the truth, even if it might destabilize relationships or processes. So everybody should be able to have the red, you know, stop button that says we cannot go forward with this process, because I noticed this problem, and you see in most workplaces is if anybody had asked, at least two or three people would have been able to tell them about the problem that they found out six months later after they spent $40 million.   Carley Hauck 58:04   Well, and that's the lack of psychological safety. Yeah, yeah. Right. And that's, that's been a big part of what I bring in as a foundation. Because if we don't have psychological safety, for the folks that are listening, and don't know what that actually means, it's the ability to share our feelings or needs or experiences or worldviews without the fear of reprimand, punishment, or, or judgment. And when that's not present, we actually can't feel comfortable sharing our emotions or our emotional sensitivities.   Karla McLaren 58:48   Yeah. Yeah. And everybody knows that. Yeah, everybody, like they can just see someone get blamed for something. And it will just cast a pall, there will be a cold wind going through the social structure. And these things, these things have so much power. Doing doing things wrong, and making bad transitions is one of the things I see pretty much every workplace do, because transitions require emotions, sadness, grief, fear, anger, and if people don't know how to work with those emotions, their transitions are not going to be strong, they will be lumpy and cause a lot of backlash.   Carley Hauck 59:29   And we're going through such a reorg in our workplace, but in our world. There are so many emotions that are coming up with all the changes in the transitions that you're sharing. And one of the things that I imagine you'll agree with, but I'm open to you disagreeing is social contracts are things that I bring in to support psychological safety, but I was really inspired in reading your book where you call it the nine aspects of emotionally well-regulated social structures and it's, it's actually social contracts that are that are similar and I'm, I actually would love to just read them if that's okay the nine because I find I think they're really helpful when we think about the designing of empathy and emotional intelligence and emotions at work.   So, number one was emotions are spoken of openly and people have workable emotional vocabularies. Number two, mistakes and conflicts are addressed without avoidance, hostility or blaming. Number three, you can be honest about mistakes and conflicts without being blamed or Shun. That goes back to psychological safety. Number four, your emotions and sensitivities are noticed and respected. Wow, to live in a world where these were present and agreed upon I love it. Number five, you notice and respect the emotions and sensitivities of others. Yes. Number six, your emotional awareness skills are openly requested and respected. Number seven, you openly request and respect the emotional awareness and skills of others. Number eight, you and others feel safe enough and supported enough to speak the truth. Even if it might destabilize relationships or processes. Yes. And number nine, the social structure welcomes you, nourishes you and revitalizes you.   I want that. I believe in that those are beautiful. Thank you.   Karla McLaren 1:01:38   Thank you people like where does that happen? I'm like Emotional Dynamics, LLC, pal. We have so many fascinating people working here. I call us the Island of Misfit Toys. Because we have you know, we've hated work, we've hated work. And then we come here, and it's what work should have always been. Yeah.   Carley Hauck 1:02:06   So just briefly, what are what are you offering through this particular you know, community of people to really structure revision? The workplace?   Karla McLaren 1:02:19   What am I offering to my colleagues? Or what are we offering in the marketplace?   Carley Hauck 1:02:26   What are you offering in the marketplace? Oh, support this new design of greater empathy and emotional intelligence and sensitivities at work?   Karla McLaren 1:02:36   Yeah, the book. Well, the books, and we have dynamic emotional integration, we run a licensing program so that people can learn to do this work. And we also run Empathy Academy, which is a place where people can take online courses, it became very popular during the pandemic, because people are like, I'm trapped at home with my emotions, please give me a class.   Yeah, and, and then we're also developing an online community where people can come and talk about emotions and develop their emotional skills and their vocabulary and have a place to laugh uproariously and and say things that are inappropriate. And I will laugh and laugh.   Carley Hauck 1:03:27   Mm hmm. Wonderful. So, so needed. And so what I'd like to leave with all of these resources will be available in the show notes, folks, for those that want to learn how to take advantage of all the wisdom and these offerings that Karla has. But many of us listening know that in the midst of the pandemic, and I found this latest number that about 4 million folks have left the workplace since April 2020. And that is as a result of people seeking more meaning, purpose, better wages, flexibility, more caring teams, and leadership, and likely because they hadn't shared what they didn't enjoy or wasn't working for them.   Like as, as you said earlier, Karla, most people are not sharing these complaints upward for this person. It's not safe, right? It's not safe. Exactly. So instead, they're leaving and trying to find something that's probably more humane, more caring. But if you're listening in you're a leader, or you're not a leader. I feel really curious about what would make you want to stay and what makes you want to leave? And I'd love to hear and Karla, do you have any other thoughts on that?   Karla McLaren 1:04:50   It's a little bit off topic, but it sort of isn't. People talk a lot about workplace culture. And one of the experts of workplace culture, Edgar Schein, he's like the grandfather of workplace culture studies. And he says that, you know, people come in and want to change the culture, but the culture is a living, breathing thing. And any culture change should if it's done in a helpful way, take between five and 10 years, write the whole book, much people come in, like, we're gonna do culture change in six months, I'm like, No, you're not that, usually they say people don't quit their jobs, they quit their manager. But that puts a lot of pressure on managers, many of whom don't have the power, that they have a lot of responsibility, but no power, it's not a good position.   And what people are really leaving is the culture. They're leaving a sick social structure. That is a lot like a sick family. And what I love about the great resignation, which is what they're calling it, as people are seeing it, and they're saying, I can choose otherwise, there's a little bit of a suicidal urge there. Right, I'm going to kill this relationship here. And I'm going to go on, and I believe in the future. You know, and maybe they'll find a slightly less sick culture in the next place, or call the Great reshuffle. I think they're interchangeable. Yeah, yeah.   Yeah. And, and to begin to understand culture, to understand the way the social structures work, and that's what you know, the power of emotions at work does is help you understand the social structure and as, as you would term it, the psychological safety. But it's not just psychological, it's sociological, that there's, you know, an interrelated human structure happening here that is functional. And in most workplaces, sadly, that is not true. That is not true. It is a dysfunctional, emotionally unsupportive culture. So it'd be wonderful to see that change. And people are saying, I'd rather have no job than this one.   Carley Hauck 1:07:04   Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that is happening right now. Well, we are at the beginning stages of this change. And I so appreciate your wisdom, the work that you're doing, your offerings, we are in this together. And I look forward to just seeing how it all begins to evolve. And thank you again for your time today.   Karla McLaren 1:07:38   Thank you.   Carley Hauck 1:07:40   Wow, that was the highlight of my week. Karla, thank you so much for everything that you have learned and are sharing around these important topics with the world. We as a society and humanity need this more than ever right now. If you want to learn more about how you can access Karla's knowledge on these topics, the link for her website and her books is in the show notes. And as always, it is such a wonderful privilege to have you listening and in this community. There are lots of other fabulous podcast interviews, some definitely related to this topic that you can preview from past episodes. And if you're enjoying the podcast, please share it wildly with others. And as always, until we meet again, be the light and shine the light.    

Karla McLaren is a social science researcher and award-winning author of Embracing Anxiety: How to Access the Genius of This Vital Emotion and The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You. Karla is a pioneer in the study of empathy whose trailblazing approaches and unifying theory of emotions – including the … Continue reading "Embracing Anxiety with Karla McLaren"

FULL SHOW NOTES AND TRANSCRIPT:https://www.eggshelltherapy.com/podcast-blog/2020/06/09/all-about-fear-anxiety-and-panic/ I am very excited to bring back a past guest, pioneer in the field of studying empath, empathy and emotional intelligence Karla McLaren. In the last episode with Karla, we discussed hyper empathy and she offered us some great tips on setting emotional boundaries.Today we will talk to Karla about her new book Embracing Anxiety, which feels like what we all need to learn in this trying time. We will cover the differences between fear, anxiety and panic, and why understanding them helps us deal with them. We also talked about how depression can be our mentor. Most importantly, you will hear some useful, practical strategies we can start using, such as burning our unconscious contracts and something she calls ‘conscious complaining’!The New Book Embracing Anxiety: https://amzn.to/2zi8TAP ABOUT THE GUESTEmpathy pioneer and researcher Karla McLaren. M.Ed. is the author of The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life's Most Essential Skill (2013), The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You (2010), The Dynamic Emotional Integration Workbook® (2018), and the upcoming Embracing Anxiety: How to Access the Genius Inside This Vital Emotion (June, 2020).To join our tribe, Please visit: https://www.eggshelltherapy.comFacebook:https://www.facebook.com/eggshelltransformationsNewsletters: https://eepurl.com/bykHRz

Alma and Karen Thurber return (together this time!) to share what they’ve learned about supporting each other's healing from the impact of pornography. Creed and Crishelle talk with them about how they carve out time for communication, how they make time for each other to do the things that help them keep progressing, and how inspiring it is to see your partner keep growing. They have a tradition of a weekly inventory, including praise and appreciation for the good things they’ve noticed about each other that week. Pornography is so isolating and makes people want to close in and not open up and be intimate, but at the same time, intimacy is the cure in a lot of ways and helps people break out of their shell. Don’t miss this great conversation with ideas that can help every relationship grow. Show Notes: Creed mentioned the book he is reading, The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You. Alma and Karen talked about ARP Addiction Recovery Meetings - find a meeting here. Submit anonymous questions, stories, or comments here. Get transcripts and learn more about our nonprofit at Reach 10. Contact us at hello@reach10.org. Support our podcast and help us reach more young people here. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram for more!

Karla McLaren, M.Ed. is an award-winning author, social science researcher, and empathy pioneer. Her lifelong work focuses on her grand unified theory of emotions, which revalues even the most “negative” emotions and opens startling new pathways into self-awareness, effective communication, and healthy empathy.  Karla is the author of The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life's Most Essential Skill (2013), The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You (2010), and the new Dynamic Emotional Integration Workbook® (2018).

What does being an Empath mean? Are some people born more empathic than others? How can we manage emotions overwhelm? How can we set better boundaries? What is anger there to teach us? How do we work with shame? In this episode, I have the pleasure of speaking with Karla McLaren, and to download her wisdom regarding Empaths, empathy and emotions.I am amazed by how much I have learned from this short conversation and I think you will too! I have created a transcript and organised our conversation and highlighted some key points. Please be sure to check it out: https://www.eggshelltherapy.com/podcast-blog/2019/10/23/karla/If you are new to the word ‘Empath’, or if you would like to know more about the science/ social science behind it, here is a thorough article that might answer your questions about what it means to be an Empath: https://www.eggshelltherapy.com/empath/ ABOUT THE GUESTEmpathy pioneer and researcher Karla McLaren. M.Ed. is the author of The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life's Most Essential Skill (2013), The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You (2010), and the new Dynamic Emotional Integration Workbook® (2018).To join our tribe, Please visit: https://www.eggshelltherapy.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/eggshelltransformationsNewsletters: https://eepurl.com/bykHRzDisclaimers: https://www.eggshelltherapy.com/disclaimersSound Editing credit: Sam Lehmert (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-austin-lehmert-87043759/)

Elicia created the Core Emotional Healing® process as the culmination of 10 years of intensive training, personal healing, and empathic intuitive gifts. Based on her personal and professional experience, she developed a guided step-by-step process to address the emotional root cause of symptoms and suffering. Elicia provides insightful, direct, compassionate guidance to inspire and support others to be responsible for how they feel, ask for what they want, and to set healthy boundaries. She helps others feel safe and supported so they are empowered to freely express their true selves. She is the author of the ebook Detox 101 and coauthor of the books, One Crazy Broccoli and What’s Left to Eat. Her new book, Your Symptoms Are A Gift, to be released in 2019, is an inspirational guide to help readers realize the emotional connection to their symptoms. The book details the Core Emotional Healing® process to help anyone heal from physical, emotional, and relationship challenges. ​Along with her husband, Psychologist Doug Miller, PhD, Elicia offers Core Emotional Experiential Therapy Private Healing Immersion for individuals and couples in Costa Rica.  Tell us about the work that you do and how you started on that journey. Elicia grew up with a rageaholic father who controlled all of the emotions in the household. Elicia knew what was happening was wrong but when she would try to stand up to him, she would be shamed by her mother for doing so. Elicia coped by numbing herself through drinking, drugs, and sex. She had a lifetime of repression and shaming of her emotions. When she was 38 she had been healing herself for 8 years using every healing modality she could find. She realized that the pain she had been feeling was connected to her childhood. She knew she needed to take care of her emotional needs from the past and the present. And then everything went away. Her addictions, eating disorders and relationship patterns. She found a deeper connection to herself to take care of herself on an emotional level. There were several years where you were struggling with addiction. It sounds like there was a point where you shifted from drugs and drinking to detoxing and spirituality. When did that shift happen? Elicia left an abusive marriage after 3 months when she was 30. That was when she decided to stop living an unconscious life. She asked herself - ‘what made her choose him?’ An experiential therapy course helped wake her up. She realized she could take care of herself and make decisions for herself. She didn’t need somebody else to do that. She started taking lots of courses and connected with helping people in that way. She left her corporate sales job and became a journaling coordinator. She started creating after telling herself she wasn’t creative all her life. She started to feel real happiness. From this deeper connection within herself, she stopped partying and going out. It didn’t stay that way though, things came up which threw her back into her old coping ways. You mentioned that you had all these symptoms in your life but were then able to get to the root cause. How do people access the root cause in their lives? It’s not just healing and going back and feeling these repressed emotions. It also working from your experience. What did you believe about yourself? What did you do to protect these wounds and feel love? We live from this false sense of self that formed from the core wounds. Addressing the core wounds can help shift everything but we need to be aware of what we really need and what we do to get our needs met. But some of the ways we get these needs met are preventing us from living life fully. Let’s use the example of your story. You had a dominant, controlling father and knew this from a young age. Often we can see that somebody mistreated us but what is the actual wound? There are many wounds. We struggle with the emotional disconnection from our vulnerable self. We don’t process our feelings and take care of them. The disconnect is what causes the problem. We have to reconnect to the vulnerable part of ourselves. Elicia calls this our wounded inner child. If somebody is listening to this and wondering about their wounded child is, what’s a question they could start with? The wounded inner child is a part of ourselves that we all carry. It is the wounds we are trying to compensate for. It is the part of ourselves that doesn’t feel good enough or needs to be right or always feels sad. It gets triggered. Or wants to find a way to feel better instead of feeling what it is feeling. The wounded inner child is the part of you that needs you to go into these feelings and take care of them. It is underneath all of the adaptations we form to cope with the world. Things like people pleasing or perfectionism. Is there a specific question that can help access the hurt or the wound? Triggers can be a way into the wounded inner child. How do I feel? When did I first feel that way? A trigger is when you feel disproportionately angry or sad or you withdraw from what just happened. Ask yourself - ‘When did I feel that way as a child?’ What’s your relationship with your dad like now? Elicia has managed to heal her relationship with her father. It took until she was 38 and she had to stop talking to him completely. After her father divorced her mother he went to therapy and did a lot of healing himself. He has become a more loving and supportive person. Elicia has also worked out what she needs and where she can get it from, so she is no longer looking to her father to give her that. Can you tell me a bit more about experiential therapy? Experiential therapy is more of an active process than talk therapy. It uses other people to act out roles and situations. Someone might act as a parent and this helps draw the true feelings out of you. It can help bypass our defenses. Elicia and her husband developed a process called Core Emotional Experiential Therapy which uses over 100 objects to work someone through this process. They use the objects to lay out relationships which can bypass defenses and bring out the subconscious. Sometimes we can get caught up on this never-ending ‘fix-it’ mentality. Do you think this could be another part of the wounded child? There are a few things that could be going on. Never feeling good enough comes from toxic shame and can drive people to continuously want to improve themselves. Reading self-help books can be a way of bypassing what is really needed which is emotional healing. Books can support the process, but focusing on them can be about bypassing the emotions. There are a lot of layers to this. The process is about reconnecting to your emotions and wounds, and then learning how to take care of yourself. Then when you do that you can handle more things. Then more things come up but you know how to work with them on an ongoing basis. What does it really mean to be self-aware? You are the observer of yourself. You notice when you are in a pattern. You notice when you don’t feel good. You notice that something keeps happening. To be self-aware is to continue to seek help when you are in some kind of pattern or are triggered by something. The more we heal our emotional wounds the more we integrate our true self. From that place, we are really able to be our true selves. It’s funny how we think we can know ourselves. We think ‘I am not a creative person’ and then realize that we are that way. It’s a huge shift in identity. Elicia used to say that she wasn’t a writer. This comes from wounding. Now she writes all the time. But as a child what she had to say was dismissed, especially by her mother. Her true and authentic voice got blocked. And the protection of that was to say - ‘I’m not a good writer.’ Once she healed herself she was able to write and connect to her creative authentic voice. What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given? Just keep writing. Do you feel that because you have done so much work, the depth of beauty, joy, and peace has expanded? Absolutely. When she had really connected and healed with her inner child, Elicia started singing and making up songs. That is a part of her natural expression which came out as a joyful playfulness. Tell me how we can get in touch with you. https://eliciamiller.com/ Links Alice Miller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Miller_(psychologist) Healing The Child Within: Discovery and Recovery for Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families by Charles L. Whitfield M.D. https://www.amazon.com/Healing-Child-Within-Discovery-Dysfunctional/dp/0932194400/ The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You by Karla McLaren https://www.amazon.com/Language-Emotions-What-Feelings-Trying/dp/1591797691/

Isabel Hundt is the author of The Power of Faith-Driven Success: A Journey Toward Living Your Dream by 30 and certified vision and Transformation Coach and International Speaker. She’s a world visionary and an ambassador of Global Presence Leadership. She travels all over to share her enlightening message of tuning in to our true selves by understanding the connection between our heart and our brain. She is also teaching how to use our emotions as a powerful guide for success in all areas of our lives instead of experiencing emotions as a distraction. She’s a proud Christ follower, wife and a mother to son Jonah. Isabel enjoys kick boxing and body combat.   Question Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey How do you feel about customer experience in your own life, the things you’ve experience and what role do you think that plays in you being able to help people transform into their best selves? What are some everyday solutions that you believe can help improve customer experience? How do you feel about leadership in a business? What role do you think leadership plays in the whole customer experience process and the emotions around that as well? As a Visionary, as a Coach, what are some important considerations that you would recommend they take into account moving into the online space in order to be successful? How do you stay motivated every day? What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business? What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you? If you were sitting across the table from another business owner and they said to you that they feel they have great products and services but they lack the constantly motivated human capital, what’s the one piece of advice would you give them to have a successful business? What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people? Where can our listeners find your information online? What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?   Highlights Isabel Hundt shared that she that when she was young, she had a lot of out of body experiences, at some point she had a head trauma and when she had the head trauma, she was out of her body and she could watch herself and there are other times where she felt like she could leave her body which was weird and she always reacted weird to other people that were in pain. For example, she laughed when they were hurting and she know why, she would say, “oh my god, it’s so embarrassing, I shouldn’t be laughing, it’s not funny, they are hurting” and looking back she knows it was a coping mechanism for her to not take on their stuff but when she was 12 years old, she had a vision that she would be moving the United States of America, she is originally from Germany where she grew up and her family is there. She had the vision and that she would be speaking in front of a lot of people and she didn’t quite know how it was going to happen because she didn’t have any connections and she also got into psychology and sociology around the same time, she grew up in the so call DDR, East Germany and they grew up Christian and so her dad wasn’t allowed study because he participated in church activities so when the walls came down he was finally able to get his Degree and that was when she was about 12 years old and that time she studied with him which was fun and when she was 18 years old, she went to the USA for an exchange year which was interesting because she really sucked speaking the language, she didn’t know what, “you’re welcome” meant. She then had to go back and she didn’t feel at home anymore, something didn’t feel right, it was just off and her dad would always say, “one day we’re going to do something together, we’re going to work together” and of course when you’re 19 years old you’re like, “heck no, I’m independent now.” She studied economics and failed, they kicked her out after 2 years and she started to have really bad depressions and she didn’t care if there was a car coming or not, she was just done with the world, everything was noisy and loud. When they kicked her out of university, she had to figure out what she wanted to do next and she finally admitted that she probably should go into the social science field because that’s what she was always been interested in, so she did that and started over and somehow she got into a really bad relationship with an American guy but that’s how she really came over so she is kind of grateful to him but that ended too after she finished her studying and she still came over and worked as a nanny. In that process she got to know her now husband and because he didn’t want to get married right away, she almost got deported and that was interesting. She had to go to Canada which was quite the experience and all that up and down and she didn’t what she wanted to do, she never felt like she really trusted her intuition and that’s when through a friend of a friend she started to get into the coaching world and she participated in a training, “This was exactly what I need to do because I need to understand who I am. I don’t feel German, I don’t feel American, who am I?” and within that journey of becoming a certified coach, she also realize that she is an empath which means that she experience the world more intense, she can see through people, she sees color around people, it’s a lot of stuff that she takes in and never knew how to trust that intuition or to work with it and throughout the journey she got to where she is today. Isabel Hundt stated that she used to do a presentation at Ball State University about customer service and they would look at like she’s crazy because nobody really understands that the customer service starts with you and they believe that customer service is the foundation to success in whatever you offer in your business, customer service is nothing different than creating relationships and being open to the experience with the other person. The problem that she sees often with customer service is that we don’t not have that self awareness, that often we don’t understand is what we focus on we create more of, what is going on inside of us is being reflected on the outside, that’s what’s happening around us. For example, if somebody comes into work and already has a crappy day and you have someone call you and they need help or support, you would react differently to them than if you had a happy or great day and even though the other person’s reaction wasn’t any different, you just experience it differently so if we have that awareness of what’s going on. For example, you can simply acknowledge, “oh shut, I have a crappy day today, I don’t know what’s going on, I feel frustrated, I feel angry, I’m not sure why” but if we just simply acknowledge it, you don’t have to go through the whole process of analyzing but just acknowledge it, we are able to take that apart from what we experience in relationship type of setting and we can say, “okay, I hear them differently, it’s nothing personal what they’re saying, I don’t have to react to it, I can set my stuff aside to be available to them” and that’s why she thinks self awareness is the foundation to great customer service, yet customer service is the foundation to successful life and business. Isabel stated that emotions aren’t just emotions; they are what we make them, who would determine that anger has a certain chemical reaction in your body, we define it and we can acknowledge, “oh, that’s what’s going on, it’s okay, I am okay, I just don’t have to act on it react to it by pushing it on someone else” Isabel shared that for one, it depends on the setting but if you have a small business and it’s just you, definitely having a ritual every day, if it’s in the morning or before whenever you start working and for her, it’s usually around lunch time because she has a 3 year old when he’s finally asleep. Before she really start getting into work or connecting with people, she sits down and either meditate in her case and sometimes just a reflection yourself is really important just to understand, “okay, what’s going on today, what do I have to work through today that could get in the way for me to create successful connections with people that I really want to be of service to?” that’s the one thing that she really stretch with everyone. When she teach that at universities, the staff always looks at her like, “yeah, can we have a little more business like instead of all the psychology behind it” they don’t really want to take that responsibility, so it’s a little tough. If you can be compassionate with yourself and understanding and acknowledging it, you are more likely to show more compassion to those who you serve, if they have a bad day, you’re not jumping on board, you can just say, “hey, do you having a bad day? I’m sorry if you do, it’s okay and I still see you” so feeling seen creates the connection, the connection again is the foundation of a successful business. So the most important if you remember anything from this conversation, self reflection is the first thing someone should do to have a successful business. Isabel agreed that leaders have their own emotions and depending on your mode, your energy can manifest into the physical space and that can have a positive or negative impact on the staff and then eventually spill over to the customers. She stated that she used to work in corporate America for a year and she didn’t like it because she was the Administrative Assistant and was responsible for all those people and sometimes she would sit there and listen to people talk to customers and would say to herself, “do you actually want to work with that customer or you don’t? Because right now it sounds like you don’t” and even with each other. She thinks that customer service starts with the group itself, if there is tension within the people that work for you, those tensions come across with the customer, so for everyone that is a leader who is leading a group of people needs to stretch on team building and team building is the focus on self that’s why really successful companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook as well as Amazon, they all have life coaches, so their employees, most of them have at least one session a month or they have free access to a life coach and there is more of team building going on as their foundation than the actual growth of the business. If your team feels valued and seen, automatically your business will grow too because they do whatever it takes to grow this business because that means they feel a part of a big team, a mission, something that’s really important and that as a leader of a company if you have employees, for one you need to do the work yourself, that’s something she has realized, they usually send their employees to her workshops and expect that they will change the environment they are working in but they don’t want to do the work and that’s what hurts most companies. Isabel stated that most of her clients are online. She said that for one, it is more convenient with a child at home that young but it allows her to work with people from all over the world, from France, Sweden, and India and all over the USA and she found and it depends on where you live. She stated that where she lives people are very conservative so it takes a lot to break through that wall and outside of it people are more open to what she’s talking about and what she teach and coach on. She does work mostly online but when she speaks, then she is travelling. Isabel stated that if you want to take everything online, the most important for her is authenticity, if suddenly you come across online differently than in your physical store, that will distract from your brand and people get confuse and when people get confuse, they will not buy from you. Authenticity, really understanding what you want to bring across online, what you want people to understand about who you are and your business that you can also implement or that you have already implemented in your brick and mortar business. Especially if you have a store and you want to take it online she really believes in help from people that have a lot of knowledge like Web Designers, they understand how to use different colors that really reflect your personality and your work because callers also have frequency as well as emotions where they create emotions or support certain emotions so people have to be aware of what they use even there online, what do you want to bring across, how you want people to feel when they look at what you represent. That goes back to personal development, Who are you? What is your message? What do you want to bring across? How do you want to serve people? What do you want other people to take away from it? And you can’t really answer those questions unless you are really aware of who you are and your purpose. Isabel share that sometimes we take My Why a little bit too easy, it’s not just, “my WHY is to support my family financially” it needs to serve for the greater good. She stated that her WHY is to create a deeper connection inner culturally to understand that even though your background is different or the way you grew up or the traditions are different, it doesn’t make you any different as a human being. Her big Why is to bring people together to really connect on such a deep level that we can understand that without each other we can’t do anything and even if we live a thousand miles away from each other, we still impact each other in the way we think, in the way we operate, it has a ripple effect, that’s her greater purpose, that’s greater vision that she has so if you start with the WHY and only say, “my WHY is supporting my family” that’s not enough, that keeps it too limited and you don’t think outside the box. Isabel stated that what keeps her motivated is one, her Why, the essence of what she do what she do, she can’t just let it go, there’s too much at stake to not to do her work and she would be responsible. She always remind herself that if she doesn’t do the work that she is call to do, she is responsible for the people she could have impacted or that she could have supported and served if she had stuck with it, so the moderation is to keep that vision in mind, “Who am I impacting and what are the consequences if I succeed?” that is her biggest motivation and music helps her too. Music changes your vibration energy which the frequency of your body either increases or decreases depending on what you listen to and when she feels really demotivated, she listens to inspiring music and it feels like she is able to conquer everything, she is a leader and once she gets to that she feels she can move forward and stay motivated. Isabel stated that she was thinking about that question and she couldn’t quite find an answer, she was looking though everything that she is using but what she could not live without is her Virtual Assistant or her Web Designer the two people, she knows that they are not a tool or something that she uses online but those are the two things that if she didn’t have them her business would not be where it’s at or where she wanted it to go. She stated that they take such a load off her shoulders, it’s incredible. She stated that if you have an online business she would recommend that you get a Virtual Assistant and have a Web Designer always on your side. If something happens, within 2 minutes they can check, “okay, I got it” without you having to try and figure it out or make it even worst. Isabel stated that the other online resources that are really helpful like Buffer or Hootsuite are important if you want to save time and one thing that she learnt is focus on a few social platforms, don’t try to get into everything and get on board with everything new. Focus on 2 or 3 things that you are comfortable with and do whatever it takes to get your name out on those social platforms. Isabel shared that the book she read over the last year that really impacted the way she thinks and the way she experience things is The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You by Karla McLaren, it’s more written for empathy so if you’re not really an empathy and don’t want to get too deep into it, don’t read it but if you’re really interested in it then it will definitely help in coping with a lot of things and understanding a lot of things. Isabel stated that the advice that she would give is the advice that she gives herself everyday and that is trust. If you are in alignment, if what you do, what you send out is in alignment with what you have on your heart, that dream that really fires you up every single day, you need to trust. You can’t go out and follow everyone strategy and try to make everything work and sign up for every program that you can find just to make something happen, you need to trust and with every decision you make, ask yourself, “is that in alignment with who I am?, does this really work for me? And is it in alignment with my greater purpose?” If it’s not trust that you don’t need it at this time or ever but really trust. Trust, reflect and listen from within, those are the small advice points that she always give that she always give to herself as well. Isabel stated that the one thing that she is really excited about is doing sessions that are called Releasing Trapped Emotions because those are really important for us to be able to move forward otherwise we will always ending up where we started. Those are the 2 things that she is really excited about but she is also excited about working on a Ted Talk and that’s something she is doing right now and she got a lot of support from people who have done it before, who have the connections so she is super excited and nervous. In the near future she wants to create a more specific course about emotions and how to identify them and work through them with getting all wrapped up in it and that’s something she going to be working on in the spring and those are the few things she is working on right now.   Isabel shared listeners can find her at – www.isabelhundt.com Isabel Hundt Facebook Isabel Hundt Istagram Isabel Hundt LinkedIn Isabel Hundt Twitter Isabel Hundt YouTube   Isabel shared that she usually reverts to Matthew 17:20 and usually people say that you can’t bring the Bible into your business but for her it’s faith and science. It says, “So Jesus said to them, “Because of your unbelief; for assuredly, I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.” And especially when we know the science part about it that we are able to just with the way we think, that we really can move mountains in that sense, just knowing that keeps her going. We are here, we are destined for something greater and we as a human world society, we have a responsibility to do better than what we’ve done so far.   Links The Power of Faith-Driven Success: A Journey Toward Living Your Dream by 30 by Isabel Hundt The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You by Karla McLaren  

If you've ever wondered if your skin was too thin, if you feel other people's emotions too much, or perhaps even wear your emotions on your sleeves, then do we have the show for you! Today we'll be talking with Karla McLaren, a pioneer in the field of empathy and emotions, and the author of The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You and The Art of Empathy: A complete Guide to Life's Most Essential Skill. Today we'll talk about the Art of Empathy, and it's often overlooked importance ina world where we often hide our emotions. WE'll look at how we're all more empathetic than we could ever imagine, and how and why we should cultivate it, work with it, and sometimes even run from it. That plus we'll also look at goldfish and broccoli, dolls that make babies cry, and what it means to be einfulhung about einfulhung. Questions and Topics Include: Were you always empathic? How kids who had traumas become more open to the world. What a monster-catching machine looks like! When did she begin studying empathy? What she unexpectedly told her neurologist at 3. Are we all born highly empathic? The importance of two kids studies The Doll Experiment Goldfish and Broccoli Experiment What it means that generosity is not empathy What is Einfulung? What is the difference between sympathy and empathy? How kids with autism are often incredibly empathic Check out the movie Loving Lamp Posts Why is empathy so important? How do we start cultivating empathy? What's going on in social media with unempathetic responses these days. Why empathy brings about self-love, but self-love isn't required to be empathic What empathetic contagion is? How do we improve empathic accuracy? What is empathic regulation? How do we work on emotional regulation and separating our emotions from those around us? What is perceptive engagement? What's the myth of negative emotions (and why “negative” emotions are so important for us? How to notice your emotions and what action to take based on it. How grounding helps us with empathy? How to practice conscious complaining What the healthy purpose of anger is. What's the purpose of anxiety? A great exercise to help the anxiety to let go. How our to-do list can actually help us calm down What a get-aheader is vs. a procrastinator What is the healing power (and importance) of artistic expression How do we cultivate empathy in our children. The importance of Harold and the Purple Crayon for kids (and the most important question to ask them) Why Lynn McTaggart (The Field) talks about what can we do for we instead of what can we do for I What was her mom's magic empathetic tool? How do we teach children (and ourselves) how to self-soothe. How the 4/5/6 breath can help – and help manage one's body. Why gossip is amazing. What's the allure of Pentatonix Acapella and why we all need to listen ;-) Discover How the Art of Empathy & Learning How to Read Emotions Improves Your Relationships, Career & Every Aspect of Your Life - Important for Parents & Kids Too! Karl McLaren| Inspiration | Motivation | Spirituality | Meditation | Health | Self-Help For More Info Visit: www.InspireNationShow.com  

Hosts Ryan Ripley, Amitai Schlair, Arlo Belshee Discussion Ryan Ripley (@RyanRipley) Amitai Schlair (@schmonz) and Arlo Belshee (@arlobelshee) covered one of the most diverse agendas ever covered on the podcast. We started with a discussion about scaling agile, the limitations of frameworks like SAFe, LeSS, and DaD. We then moved on to the limits that consistency puts on innovation and how tuning consistency can be a serious competitive advantage. However, this is complicated task because “anytime we are going for consistency we are necessarily hurting innovation in that same space.” Next we discussed the controversial topic of refactoring vs test driven development (TDD). Arlo described his views on the differences between the two skills and ways that teams can work to refactor their designs safely – with tools – so that the code can then be come testable using TDD practices. On the TDD side of the discussion the group agreed that “a unit test that uses mocks is not a unit test.” Mocks are a smell that can reveal design issues within your code. Arlo also provided ideas about how to work without mocks and improve designs. Finally, we covered hiring people for emotional intelligence instead of skills. If smart, inquisitive people can be taught programming and other related skills quickly (~6 months) then what advantage does hiring for skills really bring to a team? Couldn't it be better to hire for empathy and culture first if skill are cheap to grow…especially in a pair/mob-programming environments? The answers to these questions and how this mindset shifts hiring led to an interesting conversation about how such thinking can help companies build innovative and effective teams. Empathy and Emotional Intelligence are skills worth hiring for.Tweet This And then…we called it a night. Agile for Humans is brought to you by audible.com – get one FREE audiobook download and 30 day free trial at www.audibletrial.com/agile Resources, Plugs, and More Ryan – https://ryanripley.com No plugs from me this week. Just a big thank you to the listeners for your feedback and support! Amitai – http://www.schmonz.com/ Agile in 3 Minutes Podcast What's there to be afraid of? Approval Tests via Llewellyn Falco Arlo – http://arlobelshee.com/ Industrial Logic Blog 7 Languages in 7 Weeks by Bruce Tate The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You by Karla McLaren The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life’s Most Essential Skill by Karla McLaren The post AFH 016: Are You Mocking My Unit Tests? [PODCAST] appeared first on Ryan Ripley.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What is empathy? What does it really mean? What does it look like? Karla McLaren is an award-winning author, researcher, and pioneering educator whose empathic approach to emotions revalues even the most negative emotions, and opens startling new pathways into the depths of the soul. She is the author of The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life s Most Essential Skill (2013), The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You (2010). Karla has taught at such venues as the University of San Francisco, and the Omega Institute. Last time Karla McLaren was here we talked about understanding the importance of your emotions and listening to what your emotions are here to tell you. In this interview, Karla talks about empathy Can you feel something if you don’t have a word for it? ~ Karla McLaren, on How She Really Does It LISTEN HERE In this interview we discuss: link between words + emotions what is empathy good + bad emotions empathy versus martyrdom advice giving emotion practice what empathy looks like how can one develop skills for empathy Two takeaways – to practice empathy Empathy happens in the smallest, tiniest moments. ~ Karla McLaren, on How She Really Does It Mentioned in this Podcast Six Essential Aspects of Empathy, part 1 Six Essential Aspects of Empathy, part 2 The Art of Empathy The Language of Emotions smiling, The post Karla McLaren: Empathy appeared first on howshereallydoesit.com.

We strive to be Happy but we have these darn negative emotions in our lives. Some of us try to run from them via food, alcohol/drugs, sex, work, or exercise. Have you ever thought your feelings were a messenger here to tell you something important? Karla McLaren is an award-winning author, researcher, and pioneering educator whose empathic approach to emotions revalues even the most negative emotions, and opens startling new pathways into the depths of the soul. She is the author of The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life s Most Essential Skill (2013), The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You (2010). Karla has taught at such venues as the University of San Francisco, and the Omega Institute. Karla is here to discuss what your feelings are trying to tell you. We end up growing up with no emotional skills. ~ Karla McLaren, on How She Really Does It LISTEN HERE In this interview we discuss: why we need to listen to our emotions negative emotions are not bad things –> what can we learn from them? positive psychology questions to ask your feelings how we learn our emotions Trauma Olympics boundary + grounding + focusing inside what are our emotions telling us? how do we learn what are emotions are trying to tell us what to do when we want to flee away from the emotion do happy emotions also cause us to distract? Two takeaways – to practice listening to emotions “Develop an emotional vocabulary.” ~ Karla McLaren, on How She Really Does It Mentioned in this Podcast website The Language of Emotions The Art of Empathy Antonio Damsio’s TED talk smiling, The post Karla McLaren: The Language of Emotions appeared first on howshereallydoesit.com.

Tami Simon speaks with Karla McLaren, an award-winning author, social science and empathy researcher, and educator. With Sounds True, Karla has created the book and audio series The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You, as well as the new book and audio series The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life's Most Essential Skill. In the second half of this two-part interview, Tami speaks with Karla about two unusual skills she teaches called “conscious complaining” and “ethical empathic gossip”; the concept that there is no such thing as a positive or negative emotion; and how a feeling of hatred can be an important key to working with the shadow part of our psyche. (66 minutes)

Marie interviewed Karla McLaren at the top of the hour and talked about the Otherside for the second half of the show. Karla is an award-winning author and pioneering educator whose empathic approach to emotions has taken her through the healing of her own childhood trauma into an empathic healing career, and now into the study of sociology, neurology, and cognitive and social psychology. She is the author of The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You (Sounds True, May 2010), the online course Emotional Flow:Becoming Fluent in the Language of Emotions (Sounds True, 2012) and the upcoming book and audio learning set The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life's Most Essential Skill (October, 2013). Karla has taught at such venues as the University of San Francisco, Omega Institute, Naropa University, Kripalu, and the Association for Humanistic Psychology. Additionally, as a prison arts educator with the William James Foundation, she has utilized singing, drumming, and drama to help men in maximum security prisons explore and heal long-held emotional traumas. Karla lives in Sonoma County, California with her husband, Tino Plank, a Master's level nurse working in hospice and end-of-life care.

Karla McLaren is an award-winning author and pioneering educator whose empathic approach to emotions has taken her through the healing of her own childhood trauma into an empathic healing career, and now into the study of sociology, neurology, and cognitive and social psychology. She is the author of The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You (Sounds True, May 2010), the online course Emotional Flow:Becoming Fluent in the Language of Emotions (Sounds True, 2012) and the upcoming book and audio learning set The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life's Most Essential Skill (October, 2013). Karla has taught at such venues as the University of San Francisco, Omega Institute, Naropa University, Kripalu, and the Association for Humanistic Psychology. Additionally, as a prison arts educator with the William James Foundation, she has utilized singing, drumming, and drama to help men in maximum security prisons explore and heal long-held emotional traumas. Karla lives in Sonoma County, California with her husband, Tino Plank, a Master's level nurse working in hospice and end-of-life care.

Tami Simon speaks with Karla McLaren, an award-winning author and empath whose approach to working with emotions has helped countless numbers of people heal from trauma. She is the author of The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You, as well as the Sounds True audio learning series on The Language of Emotions about how to unlock and learn from the wisdom held within each of our emotions. Karla discusses what it means to be an empath, how to talk to children about their emotions, viewing emotions in terms other than positive versus negative, and learning how to listen to our emotions. (54 minutes)