Dr. Becky Kennedy (34:19)
Yeah, again, just separating behavior from identity again comes into play here because especially let's say you're a junior employee. You just get Yelled at. And again, I know, too, when I'm yelling at someone. I had such a bad day for a million things, and I was just waiting for one tiny, somewhat irrelevant thing. And then all, you know, I hadn't metabolized it, so it all comes out. But I think you could say, look, notice the spiral, which probably comes from that moment, all of a sudden being a barometer of your worth, right? And if you notice that, you can start to separate it. I put your feet on the ground. I'd say, okay, I'm even going to visualize. I'm a good person. I'm a good product manager, whatever the company is, who just had a really emotionally difficult moment in that meeting. Like, I always like to say, two things are true. Our brains, especially this day and age in the world, like to go to one thing is true mode, right? And so what happens is you feel so uncomfortable. So you're like, my career and world is over. Because that would be one thing is true versus two things are true. Like, I've been actually doing a pretty good job at this company. My latest review, like my conversations with people, I also have an internal barometer of my work that is all true. And what is equally true is I had a moment that felt really bad, and I have some very understandable, uncomfortable emotions about that. Anybody would panic. To me, the phrase, I'll go through this thing called avp. I think it's like the ultimate emotion coping A is acknowledge. V validate. P permit. So I acknowledge, say, okay, just acknowledge to me is saying, hi, hi, racing heart, high thoughts that I'm gonna get fired. Just saying hi to you, acknowledging it. And then V validate. Everyone talks about validating feelings, but I feel like it's hard to operationalize that. To me, validating feelings is telling yourself or someone else that their feelings make sense. I just think there's something about the phrase makes sense that our feelings love. I always imagine, like, our feelings feel accepted by logic or something. They're like, oh, finally. And so to say, well, I did just get yelled at publicly, so it makes sense I'd have a racing heart and some worries about being fired. That just makes sense. And then P permit would just be saying to yourself, I give myself permission to be having all these feelings. And then after that, to me, we have a really important phrase that comes next that's always the same. And I can cope with this. Our feelings don't inherently give us problems as much as the way we talk to ourselves about our feelings give us problems. And I think the other things that feelings can do that are tricky is they make you lose touch with just this inherent truth about you, which is that you're capable, you can cope with hard things. You've probably coped with many hard things in the past. This is one that you're going to do again. And as soon as you can hold together validation of your feelings and being in touch with your capability. It sounds dramatic, but, like, the world changes. And even if you're just like, oh, I probably don't even need to focus on my feelings right now. I just need to remind myself I'm capable. Or maybe your balance is the opposite. And then in terms of how I would repair the relationship, let's say you have a boss who doesn't repair. I don't know, maybe you're doing that thing with your feelings and you move on. And maybe you're like, I do actually think I could talk to my boss about it. I think about people in my company who'd be like, becky, that didn't feel good. And Becky would want to know if, as a valuable person at Good Inside, I'm about to leave because of this thing and the series. Like, she would want to know that or she should want to know that. And to me, another phrase that just can take any hard conversation from conflictual to actually connecting and productive is just saying out loud to someone, we're on the same team, hey, I want to talk to you about something hard. I feel a little awkward. But you know what? I always come back to Becky, like, you and I are on the same team. Like, we're on the same team in general. We're definitely on the same team and wanting what's good to good inside. And I feel like you'd want to know about something that was getting in my way of, like, feeling as good and productive at work. And so with that in mind, I want to share something. And then all the classic stuff using I and not you, that really matters. But what you do with this little preamble is you preload a story in someone else's mind to interpret your words through, so they're less likely to say, like, oh, this person just thinks I'm awful. It's like almost giving me credit. It's true. I am a CEO who wants the best for my company. Yes, you're right about that. Thank you. Yeah, you know, it's like. And then I can hear someone say, look, you yelled at me in this meeting. We all have our moments. I don't even know if it was the yelling or the not saying something to me after it probably was that that felt bad. And honestly, we could have that moment now. And I just figured I owe it to you to let you know that I kind of still feel like I need that. And again, we're on the same team, and I figured you and I could talk through that.
