Dr. Cathy Greenberg: Today we are sharing a lot of insight and a lot of tools and tips that will be coming out in our new book, Emotional Brilliance: Leading a Fearless Life. I don’t know if you have been listening to what has been on social media and what is promoted, especially for young folks. It’s concerning to me that we are trying to make emotional health into an easy-to-do 5-minute plan. People talk about their spiritual gym, their mental gym, these quick-fix things that, while are helpful and give people an opportunity to understand some of their feelings, it doesn’t really focus anyone on the challenge of doing that work. It makes it seem like if you’ve been 5 minutes in your spiritual gym, or 10 minutes in your mental gym, that you are going to be great.

You’ve got to do the prework. Right? You’ve got to be able to get that emotional intelligence understood. You’ve got to be able to, as you like to say, create the opportunity, creating the proper response to a situation that it’s anything but perfect.

Dr. Relly Nadler: Yes. I will chime in. What we are looking at is to create this healthy gap between stimulus and response. Some of these things like you are saying are quick and what are the hacks that you can do. You know “hack” is a big term—it’s quick, it’s easy, I’ll just do the hack—which is a good start. In this gap between stimulus and response; that’s where your emotional brilliance is, really creating a gap.

Maybe in the way you are talking about Cathy, it’s the hard work. What do you say to yourself when you don’t feel like it? What do you say when you have missed one of your sessions?

It’s all in the gap and how you are dealing with yourself and how you are dealing with others. We like to talk about this moment mastery. It’s in the moment that—what do you know about yourself input, what do you know about others input—so that the output is great decisions, great communications, great judgment, and it’s all happening the more we know around emotional intelligence. The more you know about yourself and be able to manage yourself. I think this is where we are zeroing in with emotional brilliance.

If we think about emotional intelligence as kind of the landscape of all the variety of things that you can do; what we are looking at is to help people say, okay, what is home for you? Let’s zero-in like on Google Maps. Let’s zero-in on your home and what we have been calling your go-to strength. What are those go-to strengths so that in those moments where you are upset, dissatisfied, angry, you can pull out just the right response, kind of the secret sauce, if you will.

One of the things, Cathy, that we mentioned in the last show, and I want to reference the last show because we are going to keep moving on from this. Just to highlight it—feelings are biodegradable. We think that if we just don’t deal with it; so what we have been saying is hold it in, people ask you how you are doing, hold them off, and then hold on.

You can kind of get the tension in that. One of the tools that we want to move forward with, and we’ll talk about some of those today, is how do you let it out appropriately. How do you let others in—the right people, and then how do you really let go and it may transform or navigate some of these emotions?

Listen to the entire interview above.

Relly