Ichi Telethon | The Jumping Cholla Effect with Dr. Jess Garza

Unlock the secrets to mastering your emotions and guarding against the invisible pull of others' feelings with Dr. Jess Garza, our distinguished guest and performance psychologist. As we navigate through the turbulent waves of emotional contagion, Dr. Garza's expertise sheds light on the often-overlooked impact that others' emotions have on our behavior and performance. In a fascinating exploration, we dissect the theories of cognitive appraisal and physiological perception, unraveling how our individual experiences and expectations shape our emotional reactions. Immerse yourself in a conversation that not only probes the depths of emotional regulation but offers tangible strategies to combat imposter syndrome, withstand toxic leadership, and maneuver through the challenging dynamics with coworkers.

As we wrap up this episode, our hearts are full of gratitude for the team's unwavering dedication and the audience's fervent engagement. Dr. Garza leaves us with a trove of wisdom, which each listen promises to augment. Nicole and Liz stand ready to bridge the dialogue further, fostering a community where questions are encouraged, and insights are shared. While we pause the conversation here, rest assured, the journey into the art of emotional resilience is just gathering momentum. The exchange of perspectives will resume shortly, equipping you with even more strategies to thrive in both personal and professional spheres.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Thank you so much for sharing about the initiative that you've got going on, and I think that Event Vines Matter is a really great community to be a part of. Follow around LinkedIn, find anywhere you can with this content, contribute to it, because the more of these stories that we can share with each other, then the more human we feel. As she said, hello, my name is human and that's what this is all about, and we keep going AI and talking about the bots, but this really is about us and, speaking of it being about us, I want to bring in an incredible human. She also was at our barefoot business retreat last December.

Speaker 1: 0:34

Her name is Dr Jess Garza. She's a performance psychologist and she has some really incredible insights for us around imposter syndrome and around her famous TED Talk, actually, which is how to avoid letting prickly emotions stick to you. So we are very excited to bring Dr Jess here to share that with us. I know that a lot of anxiety that comes from events is actually less about the logistics and the challenges and more about the people that are around you the toxic leaders, the toxic coworkers and how do you not let that affect you? How do you not go home and cry about Sunday night because Monday morning is coming again. So Dr Jess is one of these folks who can really really help you understand how this works in your brain and how to overcome that and move forward in some of those situations. We are so excited to bring on board Dr Jess Garza.

Speaker 2: 1:29

Hello everyone. It's true, it's me, Jess Garza. As a sport and performance psychologist, I get to work with a lot of different people Anyone from professional athletes, military and top government agencies all whose career and safety depend on peak performance. And I'll never forget this one story. A soldier was telling me about his time serving in Iraq. Now, this was around the early 2000s, when military had operations both in Iraq and Afghanistan, and during this time, many of the locals in the area were encouraged to come forward and share information about potential threats. So one day, this Iraqi man shows up at the gate of a US outpost to share intelligence about a possible threat, but instead of being met as an ally, he was met with hostility by the soldier who was debriefing him. Now, that's likely because just days earlier, soldiers from another unit were killed in a surprise attack, and as the interview continued, so did the soldier's irritation and, as a result, the Iraqi man became frustrated. Tempers were flaring so high that the interview was cut short, and the following day two separate units were hit by roadside bombs. Now, we'll never know for sure if the attacks could have been stopped had the interview gone differently.

Speaker 2: 2:52

But the reason why I'm telling you this story is because it's an excellent example of a super common problem so many of us have, and it's how well we regulate our emotions. And it turns out how well we regulate our emotions depends on a principle called emotional contagion, and it's just like it sounds. It's how quickly we can catch the emotions of other people and then take them on as our own, and it turns out most of us are highly susceptible to catching other people's emotions, and it turns out that regulating our emotions are one of the most common drivers of a good and bad performance, a good and bad sale, a good and bad meeting. And the way to regulate our emotions depends on how well we can either energetically cleanse them throughout the day or implement the strategies I'm going to present for you today. There are really important concepts about emotions, but I think it's really important to understand where do they even come from? And there's two popular theories about where emotions come from and what they are. On a very basic level, emotions are just energy. Energy is just emotions. And one theory called cognitive appraisal basically says that the experience of an emotion is actually just you evaluating whether your current situation aligns with your goals and expectations. That's kind of a lie. So let me repeat that the experience of an emotion is actually you evaluating whether your current situation, so what's happening around you right now, aligns with your goals or expectations.

Speaker 2: 4:41

Now, a good way to think about this. You had a really long day at work. You're coming home in your head you're like you know, food's gonna be on the table, I'm gonna be greeted with these hello's and hi's how are you, honey, all the things? And you walk through the door and it's silent. Nobody's greeting you. Everybody's off in their own little world doing their own little thing. That's not what you expected. You expected to be greeted in your head in a different way. This happens even in meetings at work. You're thinking that the meeting's gonna go a certain way. You expected it to go a certain way and it doesn't. And when it doesn't, it's not aligning with what our current situation is, what we're experiencing in that moment.

Speaker 2: 5:22

The second theory is called physiological perception. Now, this is all about the emotions that we subconsciously assign to past experiences. So when I feel a certain way about something that has already happened and I'm about to experience something very similar, I might experience something very like the sensations or emotions inside my body and a really good way to see this principle in action is public speaking. How perfect right For me. When I'm public speaking, I typically get all these little butterflies in my stomach. Now let's just say my last speech that I had in front of 500 plus people went really, really well. And as I prepare today, those butterflies, I might experience them or interpret them as excitement, joy, readiness. But let's just say I bombed my last speech. Now, getting ready for today, I might experience that butterfly effect as worry, doubt and fear. So what ends up happening is that we overlay our physiological perception of what happened in the past to our current situation, which can create some really big experiences of what's happening in the future or what can happen in the future. And there's this principle, or this plan I should say, that I like to share and how this all kind of comes together.

Speaker 2: 6:56

There was this time I was hiking in Arizona and as I'm hiking up this mountain it was one of my first times out there I saw the biggest giant teddy bear looking shrub. I'm not kidding, it was like nice soft little cuddly thing. And as I reached my hand out to touch it my hand by the time I got ready to touch this plant. The spines off of it jumped and attached to me, like, literally, my hand was completely covered. Okay, here we go. See you guys in a few minutes.

Speaker 2: 7:24

This plant has the most perfect name. It's called the jumping cholla. Every time that you try to remove one of these little spines, it jumps or it splits and can burrow deeper into your skin. This plant left a lasting impression, literally and figured a little bit. So much so that when I teach people how to regulate their emotions and avoid the emotions of other people, I refer to it as the jumping cholla, because the jumping chollas are just like people, I mean man, they can be pricks and if we're not careful we can let the prickly emotions of other people jump and burrow deep into our skin.

Speaker 2: 8:07

But how do we avoid that? That's the question of the day, right? Well, one of them when we talk about these strategies of how to regulate our emotions and how the energy is emotional related, every time that we have either a physiological perception where we're experiencing that physical change in our body, or we're interpreting an event that's not aligning with our goals and expectations, it's being harbored. And on this scale that we have of emotions, we call them frequencies, judgment, worry, criticizing, fear, frustration is at the bottom of the ladder and as we start to go up, we experience contentment, appreciation, gratefulness, excitement, joy. The lower that we are, there are a lot more sticky in nature, takes longer to get rid of them, takes longer to evaluate, assess and reframe. We have to be more intentional, like it, and when we're not, we tend to stay there and I'll show you how that looks here in a second. When we're in business meetings, when we're with our families or when athletes are on the field, because emotions are contagious.

Speaker 2: 9:17

When we talk about emotional contagion, our brains are hardwired to pick up these subtle cues in our environment, meaning that our brain has what we call an open loop system where we are hardwired to pick up if there's a threat, if there's a danger. We've heard this many times, but we don't always realize when it's happening in the moment. And a really good example of this too is you can walk into the office or you can even walk at home and you're coming in through the door and you don't have to say anything to anybody. But, man, can you feel either the tension, the excitement, the peace, the ease, the joy, insert and emotion. You can feel that without even having to say a word. Think about a time that you've experienced that and that emotion then translates to you, but what ends up happening? We're interacting, whether this is even on a virtual site like this, where we're interacting with people, or in person interacting with people. We are collecting an energetic frequency between any and everything, and if we're not intentional about sending that energy back to that person, we're now becoming a garbage bag collector, piling them on throughout the day, and I would probably venture to say that many of us don't do energetic hygiene where we clear them up daily, we brush our teeth daily, we're making sure that our breath doesn't smell when we talk to people and that we're not getting cavities, but how many of us are actually being intentional about the energy that we've collected or the energy that we feel? So there's two strategies that often help with being able to regulate our emotions or having to calm down the nervous system, those physiological perceptions, and the first one of this is what we call we know what cognitive appraisal was right, where we assess to see if our current situation aligns with our goals or expectations. Well, the second one, or the strategy to that, is called cognitive reappraisal. We're now, we're looking at the situation, but we're seeing it for what it is and reframing our interpretation about how we feel about that event.

Speaker 2: 11:31

So I had a client not too long ago who was experiencing some conflict from leadership. Now this gentleman was going into a C-suite role and every time he got feedback from the stakeholders he just felt like they were targeting him, constantly giving feedback and criticizing him. In his head, he legit thought man, this guy just doesn't like me. And in that same state, when he's not feeling like he's liking him, his energy is now becoming irritated because the guy is upset or looks like he has an upset face. So what does he do? Well, what I ended up working him on was how to reframe how he was viewing the feedback and then what he was feeling about it. That guy might be upset the one who was training him, however, I just acknowledge it. I acknowledge he may be upset, but he's also taking the time to walk me through what I need to to be able to be efficient and productive and effective in this position, and so taking out what he needs to reframing the situation helps to calm down the nerves and not attach to the other person's emotional state. So we're creating separation.

Speaker 2: 12:41

The second technique is what we call acceptance, and I know we've heard this word a lot just to accept things for what it is, and it's a lot harder to do than it is to just say it.

Speaker 2: 12:53

With acceptance, what we're doing is we're creating this separation between what we want things to be, but how they really are, and how we do that is by saying, okay, so what now? What? Okay allows us to stop in the moment for what's happening, evaluate the situation. So what? Allows us to gather what we need to? And now what? Allows us to walk through the exact methods from an aerial shot of what's going on. It allows us to see the prickly paths and choose to go into that route or to stay where we are Now. Both of these are highly effective techniques because they allow us to reframe, they allow us to interpret the situation for what we wanted to and not for what we want it to be and, more importantly, it allows us to not get pricked by a prick. I just want to say thank you, guys, for allowing me to join you today. This has been an incredible experience and if you want to know more, please reach out to Nicole and Liz, and I would love to interact with you more, thank you.

Speaker 1: 13:59

Dr Jess, that is always incredible. I think I've heard that conversation multiple times and I learned something new every single time. All right, we're going to take a really short break and then we will be back. We'll see you in just a second.