Intentional Leaders Podcast with Cyndi Wentland

De-Coding Your Emotions with Charles M. Jones

• Charles M. Jones • Episode 139

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Have you ever wondered why we feel the emotions we do and how we can harness them for personal and professional growth? This week, we sit down with Charles M. Jones, a leading emotion scientist and the visionary behind the Jones Theory of Emotion and Emotional Decoding. Charles shares a compelling story about a near-miss accident in the Alps that sparked his lifelong quest to understand and decode human emotions. His insights into the naturalness of flow states, the impact of developmental trauma, and the ways emotions arise in response to external events are nothing short of groundbreaking.

We delve into the concept of emotional victimhood and the critical importance of taking ownership of our emotions and needs. Charles outlines strategies for identifying and fulfilling subconscious needs, which are crucial for emotional self-sufficiency and personal growth. This discussion provides practical tools for developing an evolving emotional "operating system" that can transform how we navigate life's challenges, fostering growth and resilience.

Leaders, take note: emotional responsibility isn't just a personal development tool; it's a game-changer for workplace culture and leadership effectiveness. Charles emphasizes how empathetic leadership can revolutionize team dynamics by fostering environments where tough conversations lead to increased accountability and innovation. By understanding and addressing the underlying needs behind emotions, leaders can enhance their competencies and drive better organizational outcomes. Tune in for an episode rich with scientific insights and practical strategies for mastering emotional intelligence.

Find Charles here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlesmj/
And his website here: https://www.charlesmjones.com/

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Cyndi:

Today my podcast interview is going to be with Charles M Jones. Now, if you find Charles on LinkedIn, you're going to see that he is an emotion scientist. Is that not the coolest title ever? I love that, and Charles is definitely a thought leader. He has created the Jones Theory of Emotion and Emotional Decoding as a way to think about strengthening emotional intelligence.

Cyndi:

I got his name through my friend and colleague, Ryan Gottfredson, who has done a lot of work on mindsets, and Ryan had taken a course through Charles and he put a post out there to recommend Charles to his network. I saw it and I thought, hey, Ryan's cool, charles must be cool. So I signed up for his course and took it and I swear I thought this was going to be like super easy breezy, because I've been teaching emotional intelligence for a long time. No, it kicked my butt. It was a really innovative way of thinking about emotional intelligence and how to manage, particularly, our challenging emotions. So I know you're going to be intrigued by Charles's framework for emotional intelligence and how to decode your emotions in this episode today. Today, I am thrilled to welcome to the Intentional Leaders Podcast Charles Jones, known as the Emotional Decoder. Welcome, Charles.

Charles:

Thank you, Cyndi.

Cyndi:

Charles, you have developed a framework to understanding emotions in a new way and a breakthrough approach for emotional intelligence. I had the ability to go through your coaching class, which was phenomenal, and, as I mentioned, it was not just great for me as a coach, but it was very, very valuable for me personally, so I took away so much depth and richness from that experience, so thank you for that.

Charles:

You're very welcome.

Cyndi:

As you develop this framework and this breakthrough approach, tell us a little bit about why you developed this. What was it that prompted this approach for you?

Charles:

Well, the short answer, I think, might be fear. I was driving a car with my nuclear family in the Alps when I suddenly found myself between a rock and a hard place. Literally, there was a rock wall on my left, there was a truck on my right and there was a truck bearing down right at us, and we literally had seconds until there was going to be a terrible accident. I experienced this jolt of fear more intense than I've ever experienced in my life at that time and, frankly, since, and it just completely cleared my mind of any thoughts, any other emotions, and I was simply terrified. And then I watched in amazement as a dialogue took place between my conscious mind and the need behind my fear, this need to protect the things that I valued most in this situation, which were me and my family.

Charles:

I immediately came up with the idea of slamming on the brakes and sliding behind the truck on the right, and my subconscious returned to me a prediction, an image of the car rolling down the cliff that was to the right, of the car rolling down the cliff that was to the right. So I slammed on the accelerator and navigated between the oncoming truck and the truck on my right, actually using the Doppler effect to know where they are. So it was enough time to look back and forth and slid right through no accident. Oh my God, I pulled over as soon as I could and I look back and my family were just ashen white.

Cyndi:

Yes.

Charles:

Not saying anything, but I feel better than I've ever felt in my life. This is a flow experience for me. This is a peak experience for me. I felt whole. I felt integrated. I was just in this wonderful state. I felt integrated. I was just in this wonderful state and as I reflected on that, it's like I want to live as much of my life in this state as I can. This was 1982 and set me up on the research project subconscious needs and the role that emotions play in that.

Cyndi:

That's terrifying. I can picture it because not that I've been in the Alps, but I've certainly been on the Amalfi Coast in Italy and all over Italy and France, where the roads are terrifying. I can't even fathom the ability to navigate what you must have navigated very quickly to make a decision and to make the right decision for you and your family.

Charles:

Yeah, I never felt so powerful and confident in my life.

Cyndi:

When you think about your subconscious needs and you think about your conscious experience of that, or how you transformed that moment into doing research. Where did you start? Where did you start to go from there?

Charles:

So my first thought is the experience felt so natural right, and you read this about reports of people who are in these extraordinary peak experiences or state of flow. It felt so natural that I felt like I came home. I felt like, oh, this is how I'm supposed to operate. So from the get-go, it was two questions like who else has had this experience? Are there practices for cultivating this experience, and what gets in the way of the experience? If it's natural to us, then what gets in the way? So I began an investigation.

Charles:

At this point this was a few years before Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote the book Flow. There's some peak experiences and stuff in the Western literature, but I really found some descriptions that completely matched my experience in the yogic tradition, a term called sahaja samadhi or the natural state of absorption. I started studying in that tradition. I basically went all over the world, studied a lot of different traditions, and every tradition knows about this experience of flow. Over time, I began to develop some hypotheses on what it is that takes us out of flow. Okay, I believe there's two things that take us out of this state of flow this natural state of flow and, if you think about it like anyone who's had a little kid. They're in flow state a good portion of the time.

Cyndi:

Yeah.

Charles:

It's easy to see, how it's natural to us. And those two things are developmental trauma. I actually have a new understanding of really what trauma is and a widespread belief that when emotions arise, they're arising in response to what's happening to us. And that belief, this idea okay, if I feel bad, it's because there's something bad is happening to me, If I feel good, something good is happening to me that belief, which started about 2600 years ago in the dominant society that keeps us out of flow.

Cyndi:

Where we believe emotions come from is what you started studying Before I ask you questions of how this affects leadership, which is a lot of my listeners. I want them to understand how you think about emotions, especially like we would traditionally think of the negative emotions, and how do you think about that. That is shifting the belief that has existed for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Charles:

Sure. So I'll give you an example. I had a couple of corporate clients who were very gracious and they actually funded some of my research because the techniques I was developing were so impactful for their employees. One thing I would do is I would invite the people in thought ask themselves the question why am I frustrated? And the overwhelming majority of people wrote down something which was the equivalent of I'm frustrated because someone or something isn't cooperating with me. This subordinate of mine promised to get me this data by a certain date. They didn't get it to me. I'm frustrated. And the moment I heard that they weren't going to get me the data in time, I felt frustrated. So I concluded that I'm frustrated because my coworker won't get me the data on time.

Cyndi:

Yes.

Charles:

So what that perspective misses is that, between when I hear that my coworker is not going to get me the data and I feel frustrated, my subconscious, which is purring along. This is massive, fast supercomputer. People are thinking fast and slow. It's referred to as system one right process information hundreds of thousands of times faster than the conscious mind. We can't even conceive of how much is going on below the surface, right. And so it concluded it's like hey, you were counting on getting that data now, because it's going to take you this many hours to consolidate it, put into a report that you've promised to present tomorrow. So you don't get the data now, you're not going to achieve your goal of delivering this report on time. Whenever you're frustrated, it's always, always, always, always, because your subconscious has concluded that you're no longer on track to achieve a goal.

Cyndi:

You set for yourself.

Charles:

So I started to discover there's these one-to-one relationships between emotions and an underlying psychological need, a subconscious need Frustration you're not on track to achieve a goal. Fear you're not on track to protect an asset that you value that was my experience in the Alps. Anxiety you've looked into the future. Your subconscious looked into the future. It's identified a what if. If that, what if happens some harm comes to you, so there's a risk, and so anxiety shows up, and on and on and on.

Charles:

For about 50 of these emotion need pairs. Okay, so when you understand that your negative emotion is alerting you to the fact that you're not on track to meet a need of yours, then you don't look at the negative emotion as an unwelcome interruption, as a problem, as something you need to manage. You look at the emotion the way you look at the low fuel light on the dashboard of your car. You may not be happy you're running out of fuel, but you're grateful that your car is alerting you to the fact in time for you to go get gas or recharge your electric vehicle, whatever it is.

Cyndi:

Yes, yeah.

Charles:

So, then, your emotions become part of the communication medium of your conscious mind and your subconscious needs being in this state of partnership.

Cyndi:

Yeah.

Charles:

To continually optimize your way of being, to better fulfill your needs in an ever-changing world.

Cyndi:

I love that.

Charles:

So if you're in that, you can remain in a state of flow through positive emotions and negative emotions.

Cyndi:

Yeah.

Charles:

Things in interruption. It's just an ease between your subconscious needs and your conscious mind.

Cyndi:

When I heard of your model and your way of explaining it. You know they always say when the student is ready, the teacher will come, and I very, very much believe that. But I had been doing so much reading on mindsets and subconscious and how much they affect us without any clarity about what do I do with all this and how do I help people understand it in a way that translates into something they can do day to day. So for me, what was so powerful about going through your course. I don't even know that I can articulate it well or as clearly. You say it in such a way that's musical to my ears and you describe it in a way that's very practical and I love the framework of it. There is so much going on subconsciously. How do we understand that there's a need there that needs to come to the surface and that none of that is anything to be afraid of?

Cyndi:

So, I think many times people associate all those negative emotions with being afraid of them, because they don't know how to either process them or how to react to them or what to do with them, and so then there's so much dysfunction around. What do I do with those things? I either try to get over it, compartmentalize, or I eat my way out of it, or whatever it might be, because I don't want to think about it as something that it's in fact a positive thing, as you said, like the gas tank, it's just telling me something.

Charles:

To just have some language around this. When we recognize that our negative emotions are alerting us to needs we're not on track to fulfill, and calling on us, the conscious mind, to resolve that needs dilemma, when we're in that frame of mind, I call that state emotional responsibility. I chose responsibility because it's my need, it's my strategy that I've been using to meet the need and it's my assessment, my subconscious assessment, that I'm not on track to meet it. I am 100% responsible for that emotion, right. But as soon as I recognize what the need is, then I can respond to the need. I'm not responding to the situation, I'm responding to my need and so I gained the ability to respond right. So responsibility Contrast.

Charles:

I call the state that we fall into when we adamantly believe that what's happening out there in the world is responsible for our negative emotion. I call that state emotional victimhood, right. And when people are in it they tend to like blame and complain about their circumstances and everything else and it's just a narrow, narrow, narrow kind of nasty state. So I think the reason that people fear negative emotions is a combination of if they're misinterpreting it through this, emotional victimhood lens. It's not a cause of stress, reactivity, procrastination and a lot of you mentioned earlier the dissociative behaviors we have so that we can kind of back away from, disassociate from that emotional experience. Right, we might reach for a glass of wine. Or the way I did this when I was a teenager is I got very Spock-like, I got very sort of hyper-rational.

Cyndi:

Me too.

Charles:

If you have any young listeners out there in high school or junior high, the girls are not very attracted to Spock. You know they might appreciate the calm, but there's not a lot of aliveness in that right.

Cyndi:

You're dissociated from your emotions no-transcript aside, I literally have a Spock doll down in my toy chest and my grandson, who's four?

Cyndi:

He calls him Scott, I think he's like where's Scott? He has Spock play with Sunshine Barbie, which is a doll that I got from my nephew, I don't know. Anyway, it's funny because I think that some people pride themselves in that ability to go analytical and to go cold and aloof, rather than looking at those emotions or, as you said, taking responsibility for them, rather than saying I have to own those and I have to understand what needs are not being met. And that's what I love about your model and the framework that you have too, is it's not about things happening to us, it's about things that are important to us and how do we look at when those needs that are very important to us are not being met, and that is what's generating the emotion. But we don't understand that connection yet, and that's what you're trying to help people decode, as opposed to blaming it on whatever. I love that about your model. So that connection between subconscious needs and emotions you have decoded how many of those combinations to date?

Charles:

About 45 at this point.

Cyndi:

And will you keep going Beyond the 45? Because in our class we learned about nine of them or 10. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is a lot.

Charles:

I'm continuing the research. It's pretty painstaking. You know. The feedback I get when I show them some of these emotion need decodes is oh well, that's obvious. Yeah, it wasn't obvious three seconds before I showed them. And that's true for me too. I've had many teachers that have contributed to my growing understanding of this over the years. One of them is a gentleman named Marshall Rosenberg who created something called nonviolent communication, and he had this intuition. The way he would express it is that these negative emotions, or painful emotions, arise when needs are not being met, and he conceived of needs the way Maslow conceived of needs. We have a need for safety, we have a need for respect, as an example. Okay, when I first met him and listened to him, it's like this connection between emotions and needs made immediate sense to me. But I also knew from the studies I had done the amount of cognitive science and stuff that I'd studied that you can't implement a need for something in a computational system.

Cyndi:

Okay.

Charles:

You can't have a need for safety. If I have a need for safety and a need for respect, I'm in a state of emotional victimhood. I'm waiting for the world to meet my need.

Cyndi:

Yes, okay, yeah.

Charles:

Okay, but I can have a need to protect my assets. So we know that when babies are born, there's two things that stimulate fear in them loud noises and heights. Everything else is learned as that baby grows. It learns. Okay. These situations call on me to protect my assets probably my body initially, right.

Cyndi:

Yeah, of course.

Charles:

Or my rattle or my you know, et cetera. These situations and then they develop strategies for meeting those and they also learn over time whether or not their strategy is going to be successful, whether they're on track to meet that need.

Cyndi:

Yes.

Charles:

This system of needs and emotions. It's our operating system and it also explains how it is that human beings, unlike any other species out there, can learn, not only from our own experience, but from observing other people's experience and how, over time, we just develop more and more strategies for meeting our needs, and our needs evolve. In terms of most human beings, after the age of probably four or so, have a need to elicit the consideration and respect they deserve from others, but how I define the kind of respect I want to elicit from others now is different than even 20 years ago in my life.

Cyndi:

Yeah, for sure. Again, when I think about the framework of how you're talking about this and all the research that has gone into it, it makes sense because it is all about us taking ownership over our needs and having I don't know, having more of the strategies to do something with them. With them. So I love that, like Basil. It's like okay, I'm supposed to have respect, I'm supposed to have comfort, I'm supposed to have security or whatever it is, and those things are supposed to be somehow available to me and if I don't have them, I'm not going to feel good. As opposed to, I can feel good and I can identify the needs that are most critical and I own how to take care of that and how to take care of myself.

Charles:

It also gives you ownership of your own self-development.

Cyndi:

Yeah, absolutely.

Charles:

Because anytime you upgrade a strategy you're using, say, for how you're eliciting the consideration and respect you want from others, that's a moment of growth. That's a moment of vertical development as you become more and more skillful at fulfilling these fundamental psychological needs. So it gives you ownership for your own personal and self-development, and that's what I heard from you. The techniques from the course were useful with your coaching clients, but you were using them for yourself to manage your own continued development as a human being.

Cyndi:

Yes, absolutely, and that was unexpected and awesome, so thank you for that. So let's transition this into the leadership space. And when you think about emotional responsibility, what effect do you see from a leadership perspective? And then also, what are some of the things around emotional? And then also what are some of the things around emotional, and I said management, which is not correct, but when you think about pitfalls of leaders not managing this experience for themselves, what effect does it have on others from your point of view?

Charles:

All right, which of those two do you want me to answer first?

Cyndi:

Answer. First what effect do you think emotional responsibility has on leadership effectiveness? First, what effect do you think emotional responsibility has?

Charles:

on leadership effectiveness. So I now have a number of organizational leaders who have brought emotional responsibility in, had their entire leadership team trained in it, and sometimes middle management too. Middle management really gets squeezed. Yeah, it's probably the most emotional part of the organization, right? Because they need to meet the demands above them and manage the supports below them and everything.

Charles:

The most consistent report that I get from the leaders is that people start having the hard conversations Instead of stuffing their anger and resentment. They hold other people accountable and they air their grievances and they ask to be treated better and so that kind of stuff. If people don't have conversations about it, or if they put on a happy face, you know, you get sort of this almost toxic positivity sort of environment on the whole thing. Resolve them, then they fester and it really builds up to where no one's having the crucial conversations with each other in the organization. Ditto, for, hey, I'm a little worried about this. I've got some anxiety. Oh, you're such a worry board. Yeah, I think this is really a risk. What's our contingency plan in case this thing happens? And that actually tends to be very good for innovation. Yeah, I see changes in workplace culture and people are having the tough conversations. They're having the hard conversation and they're having them because they are having them now to meet their own needs. They're very clear what need they're trying to meet.

Charles:

Let's say, you have a new manager and I'm now managing the people that I used to work with, right? I've just been promoted to a supervisory role and I notice Tom hasn't delivered something on time and I feel angry about it. Well, if someone can hand me a script on how to hold Tom accountable, but I could have a hard time implementing that. I might be afraid I'm going to hurt his feelings. He did something wrong.

Charles:

I'm in this very judgmental frame of mind. Tom can feel me coming with that judgmental frame of mind, but instead, if I'm in this emotional responsibility, it's like I have a right to hold Tom accountable. In fact, I have a responsibility to hold Tom accountable and I can do it from a place of. I'm empowered and authorized to hold him accountable, and it takes the judgment and the moralistic judgment out of the whole thing and that makes it much easier for me to have that tough conversation. It's no longer that tough a conversation. I see this change in the organization's culture. So I came to my clients last week and I'm like you know what's different? He said well, no one can unsee the emotional victimhood in themselves.

Charles:

Yeah, that's what they've seen, and no one wants to be an emotional victim. So people are stepping up and they're doing the work and it's good for them. They're more engaged, their mood is better, they're have less stress, they're burning out less like it's good for the employee, it's good for the organization.

Cyndi:

Oh, that's fantastic. There was a lot of things that you mentioned there in terms of leadership effectiveness, around the culture, around accountability, around engagement, around difficult conversations, and also not just having the difficult conversations but having the right to have them. And also it's almost like being more neutral in the language. It isn't personal. There's an unmet need here that we have to talk about or that I want to talk about. It doesn't feel judgmental. There's more neutralness to that.

Charles:

So a little tip here If I'm feeling judgmental about someone else, or about the situation or the organization or even myself, what's really going on is I have an unmet need and I haven't owned that. I have that unmet need. The moment I own that, I have that unmet need, the judgmentalness just dissolves of its own accord.

Cyndi:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Charles:

That may mean what you're talking about, sort of the neutralness, but for me it's less of a neutralness, it's more of people kind of come alive. These needs are our aliveness, they are our humanity. So you're really actually bringing more of your humanity into your interactions with other people at work. There's kind of a movement in certain domains, especially a lot of tech firms and stuff are talking about empathetic leadership. Yes, emotional responsibility gives you tremendous insight into what's going on with other people.

Charles:

Okay, well, it looks like Mary looks a little anxious there. I wonder what risks she's identified and she thinks we're not on track to mitigate. So I could go to Mary and I could say hey, are you worried about something here? Or I go straight to Mary Is there a risk that you see in what we've laid out here? And we don't have to talk about touchy-feely language at all. We can go right to these needs. And these needs are leadership competencies. They're what you do at work. You achieve goals, you protect assets, you mitigate risks, you assert rights, you manage expectations, you create a dream and you support your team in realizing that dream. Underneath each of these negative emotions is a life and leadership skill.

Cyndi:

That's a great way to look at it and you're right, that isn't neutral, it's empowering.

Charles:

Yeah, very empowering.

Cyndi:

There's a personal agency associated with that clarity associated with that clarity.

Charles:

Yeah, because it's my need, it's my strategy, it's my assessment on a track, all three of those are in my sphere of control. Yeah Right, I have tremendous amount of agency.

Cyndi:

Yeah, absolutely. I love that. So my confusing question you probably answered it in a way, because I talked about the three pitfalls of leaders and when you think about their emotional responsibility, that could be the opposite of what you just said. You know, not having the crucial conversations, not holding people accountable, or are there other things that you see jump out?

Charles:

Many of the organizations I work with have already had some kind of emotional intelligence training, like people go through their assessments and stuff like that, and so some of what I'm saying is actually counter to what they've been trained in. So, for example, this idea that you need to manage your distressing emotions, you need to manage your anger, no, if you're interpreting your negative emotions correctly, there's no need to manage them right. They're not going to derail you. So I think that's sort of a paradigm shift for people. The second is when people get triggered, when suddenly they find themselves starting to be agitated or reactive or move into a fight, fight, freeze, appease response, what should they do?

Charles:

So the emotional responsibility understanding of that is emotions do not drive behavior. These needs drive behavior and it's been confused over the years because needs hasn't been part of the picture. You go into emotional intelligence literature there's no talk of needs, right, but it's the need that's driving the behavior and the need will take things into its own hands and react with an often very unskillful fight, fight, freeze, appease behavior if it's been calling for the attention of the conscious mind and the conscious mind's been ignoring it. So you're standing in front of someone and they look angry and you're like are you angry? They're like no, I'm not angry. You need to be careful of that person. They could lash out.

Charles:

If instead they're like yes, I'm angry, oh, do you think you have a right to hold me accountable? I do, okay, yes, I'm angry, oh, do you think you have a right to hold me accountable.

Charles:

I do. Okay, let's have that conversation. But the moment you name the emotion that someone's experiencing or the need that's generating that emotion, people calm down. And the reason they calm down is because same reason, if you're trying to get someone's attention and you speak louder and louder and louder, trying to get their attention, as soon as you get their attention, you calm down and you diminish the volume of your voice because you've succeeded in getting the other person's attention. Our needs are the same way with our consciousness.

Cyndi:

Kind of like the baby crying. The baby crying because it needs something and it wants your attention. So that's the way it knows how to do it.

Charles:

Right, right, yeah, so many people call this name the emotion to tame the reactivity. Yeah, that's something. And the third one is particularly in middle management. A lot of people report experiencing a lot of stress. Yes, the important thing to understand is actually your stress is self-inflicted. So think about what happens when someone is stressed. If my shoulders are up like this and I'm tight between my shoulder blades, the reason that's true for me is my subconscious is generating anxiety, and anxiety somatically expresses itself as this anxiety and I'm tensing the muscles between my shoulder blades to keep myself from feeling anxious.

Cyndi:

Yeah.

Charles:

And then the need to mitigate risks is like, okay, well, I'm going to double down, I'm going to up the volume, I'm going to pump more hormones into the bloodstream and if you would listen to me, right away, you'd have exactly the right amount of hormones to deal better with this situation. But because you don't, you're now in the state of hormonal imbalance, with this muscular tension and that's what we call stress. You suppress awareness of your frustration, your jaws get tight, your resentment, your chest gets tight we have this expression getting something off my chest. You tighten your sphincter to keep yourself from feeling afraid. You knot your stomach to keep yourself from feeling ashamed, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And all that is unnecessary. Stressing yourself out, breathing through your negative emotions, practicing mindfulness it's all unnecessary. The one thing you need to do is to accurately interpret your emotions so you understand what unmet needs are calling for your attention.

Cyndi:

That's all you just need to do that attention.

Charles:

That's all you just need to do that. As you know, it's very simple, but it's not easy, because we've been trained in this other way of relating to our emotions our entire life.

Cyndi:

Yes, absolutely.

Charles:

So it's habit change, it's a mindset change.

Cyndi:

Yes, absolutely so. The three things you said are one, people trying to manage their emotions. Number two, that whole getting triggered by something.

Charles:

And then the third thing that you mentioned is about stress and how we inflict it on ourselves rather than looking at what is the emotional need Rather than just allowing yourself to feel the emotion, and actually one of the discoveries here is, when the emotion somatically expresses in the body, part of what's doing is optimizing your physiology to meet the underlying need. If you allow yourself to feel frustrated and people talk about this all the time well, I finally allowed myself to feel frustrated and a creative idea appeared. It optimizes our state to find creative workarounds appeared.

Cyndi:

It optimizes our state to find creative workarounds. It seems like a no-brainer in a lot of ways, but again, I was wanting, even as a young child, to be Spock-like, so I wanted to push down my emotions and pretend they didn't exist, as opposed to, as you said, feeling the feelings. And part of going through your course was like I have to get more in touch with feeling the emotions in my body. I have to be more self-aware of when I'm experiencing a sensation, where it is, what it is, what I need, what it's telling me and I'm very out of touch, and I think that was probably the most profound impact that experience had on me is the need to get more in touch with my feelings and my emotions and feeling them on purpose and with purpose. So that was changing for me.

Charles:

One of the implications of this idea that our conscious mind can process 50 pieces of information per second and our subconscious can process 11 million pieces of information per second. One of the implications of that is okay, my subconscious is so much more aware of what's going on around me than I am. If you doubt that, there's something called the cocktail party effect, which is you're at a cocktail party, all these conversations are happening, you're talking to this one person, someone mentions your name, maybe even another room, and suddenly your ears perk up. Oh, yeah. Well, your subconscious has been monitoring all those conversations. It brings to your conscious awareness the few, the tiny set of things. It's like this filter of your experience.

Charles:

So do you want to be the one choosing where to place your attention, or do you want to allow your subconscious, that knows so much more than you do at any given moment, to draw your attention to the things that are most important? And it does this with sensations and emotions. How often do you realize, oh, my goodness, I was so wrapped up in my work I forgot to eat and now I'm ravenously hungry. Well, you ignored the pangs of hunger, or you ignored the thirst, but if we remain exquisitely attuned to those sensations and exquisitely tuned to our emotions. Then we get information that our subconscious is prepared as soon as possible about where our attention is needed.

Charles:

And this skill of staying in touch with the sensations and emotions being expressed in your body is called interoception. And it's been shown that people who are high in interoception are very quote intuitive, including Wall Street traitors, because they're waking up to the fact that their subconscious has figured something out much sooner than other people, because they're waking up to the fact that their subconscious has figured something out much sooner than other people, because they're much more in touch with what's going on in their body. So that's sort of the downside of trying to become Spock. Shortly after that experience in the Alps, I was studying with two different teachers from different traditions kind of meditation traditions and I saw that one of them would run everything through their conscious mind. They distrusted their being and they would manage their emotions and their impulses and everything else. And this other teacher used their conscious mind completely differently. They allowed themselves to be totally spontaneous and whenever they made a mistake or something wasn't going well, they'd use their conscious mind to retrain their subconscious.

Cyndi:

Okay.

Charles:

That influenced me. So I think the real role of the conscious mind is actually to train the subconscious, and the subconscious goal is to perform at peak ability.

Cyndi:

Yeah.

Charles:

I think people that coach athletes know this, yeah, but coaches who are coaching knowledge workers, they could take the same lesson. But, instead of training the muscles and physiology, you're training these subconscious psychological needs.

Cyndi:

I've read so many different books. Several of the books are highlighting exactly what you're saying about subconscious, that our subconscious knows something and it scans it out, it knows it, it knows the answers, it knows all these things before it reaches our conscious mind and some of it doesn't even reach our conscious mind. But how much it's doing on our behalf without our knowledge and how much in advance of things. So there was all these experiments that have been cited about exactly what you're saying, which kind of freaks me out. But then it comforts me to say, hey, I have to get more in touch with what my subconscious is telling me already. And how do I get more in tune with it and how do I become more aware of it? And, as you said, it's that communication channel between your subconscious and conscious thoughts connecting yeah so.

Cyndi:

I love that.

Charles:

There's some disagreement in behavioral scientists about the percentage, but it's anywhere from 95 to 99 percent of the decisions you make in a given day are made by your subconscious without any conscious intervention, and the ones we're aware of that we think we make most of them. We're not making those decisions, we're justifying the decision that's subconsciously used, and this has been something that behavioral scientists have suspected for a long time. But now that we have MRI machines where we can actually see when the decision is made in the brain and then the person reports on when they made the decision and the rationale for the decision, we actually have proof of this.

Cyndi:

Yes, and when I went to the university decades ago I was in rehabilitation counseling psychology. At the time it was all behavioral, it was all Skinner and all those the researchers that weren't getting in to what you're saying, and the research around the subconscious and the effect of that on the behaviors and decision. So I just find that endlessly fascinating. Let's continue to evolve. So most people are going to make an assumption when they go into leadership that they're going to have challenges and then they're going to have problems. And if you think about two tips because, as I said, I went through your class and I'm still trying to grasp it all in order to implement it but if you think about leaders trying to enhance their leadership effectiveness, what would be two things you would tell leaders that they could do or start thinking about? To move in the direction of emotional responsibility, about to move in the direction of emotional responsibility.

Charles:

The two, I would say, are pay exquisite attention to your negative emotions.

Cyndi:

Okay.

Charles:

And, depending on the role that you're playing, there might be some negative emotions that are more important to pay attention to than others. So think about your role and what are the most important needs for you to meet. Odds are, if you're a leader, achieve goals is going to be near the top of your list. If you're in an industry where there's a lot of innovation there's potentially disruptive, like technology you better pay exquisite attention to your anxiety.

Charles:

Actually a great case study in this is a book Only the Paranoid Survived written by the COO of Intel, andy Grove, and he talks about how he would bring his team together and he would induce paranoia in them, basically, and from that they identified risks that eventually led to the development of CPU chips and their dominant position in the market. So the odds are there's a handful of needs that you're responsible for. For me, achieving goals, mitigating risks If you're in finance, it's probably protecting assets or PR, you know, marketing, the reputation of the company. Get really clear what those needs are and become exquisitely attuned to the negative emotions that arise from your subconscious when your subconscious has the assessment you're not on track. To that I would say that, okay, scan your body, make sure you're not holding any muscles tight to suppress awareness of an emotion, and check in with your emotions to see if any of your needs have identified an issue with the course of action that you're intending to pursue. And then I'd say the second one is that's kind of looking in. The other one is looking out and becoming exquisitely attuned, empathically attuned, to what's going on with your key employees.

Charles:

Most executives that I've coached they'll have some member of their team that may be very risk sensitive. So they look over to her to see how she's feeling about this decision. Does she show any signs of anxiety? I'm about to announce a change in how we do things around here, or direction or strategy, and I see that person starting to get angry. What right do they think they have? They probably think they have a right to weigh in on this decision before it's implemented, or to weigh on the change. So I think becoming sort of exquisitely attuned Now that's a property of emotional intelligence is what are the other people feeling? But where the emotional responsibility adds is if you can accurately guess what emotions are running through their body. You can probably guess, between the emotion and the context, what the need is.

Cyndi:

Yeah.

Charles:

Okay, she's anxious. I wonder what she's anxious about, and of course, I could always ask her. He's angry? Oh, he probably thinks he has a right to weigh in on this decision. So those are the two places, I think, which are kind of low hanging fruit, for where you can use emotional responsibility to increase your leadership effectiveness.

Cyndi:

That's great and I love that you're doing it in a way that is more in alignment with your own self and agency and understanding your own emotions and needs. And the connection and I've been doing a lot of reading, too, about the importance of empathy in leadership today and what we need to move forward with that connection, the humanness and the human connection that is so important and that ability to understand emotions, not in a way that's again scary. I think for a lot of people as a leader, they look at the emotions of someone else and think, oh my gosh, that's scary, there's something there that I don't wanna get into because I don't know what to do with it and there's a lot of fear. There's fear enough looking at my own emotions, but someone else's is like, oh my gosh, who knows what's going on in there. But, as you said, if you attach it to a need what is the need that that person has that is driving their emotional reaction then it's kind of something that you're trying to look at with curiosity and compassion and understanding and connection, and I think that is such a great thing.

Cyndi:

I mean, as a leader, what more could you want with connecting to people around you is the ability to do that. So I love those tips. So I named my company Intentional Leaders, because I believe that people doing things intentionally and deliberately will create the best path for leadership, legacy and effectiveness. So my last question for you is what is one practice that you think you do that exemplifies intentional leadership?

Charles:

So I have a small firm right. I've got myself, I've got a number of coaches and trainers, some admin people as their leader. I see it's my job to support them in meeting their needs. So the more empathetically attuned I am to them, the more observant I am to them, you know. So I ask them how they're doing or how they're feeling. It's really the same question, right? If they ask how they're doing, they might answer more like what needs they're on track to meet or not? How are they feeling? They're positive and negative emotions, but I can translate one to the other. You know it's like algebra and geometry. You can translate one to the other. I want to understand, sort of how they're feeling and doing and be clear which needs they're responsible for, media on their own and, given that they're a member of this organization, which ones I want to support them in meeting, because the happier they are, the more sense of emotional wellness they are, the more productive they are.

Cyndi:

Yeah, I think that's fantastic and I know that about you. I mean my experience with you through our course, even with how you manage the process of learning. You were always checking in with people you know, even around the questions they asked. You were curious and inquisitive to go a little bit deeper about what people were experiencing or why they were questioning in a way that was very consistent and very predictable and also, to me personally, very comforting that there was this sense of curiosity, there was a sense of compassion and you're great at observing those things because that's what you do but it came to life in a way that felt very comforting and supportive, which I thought was fantastic as an educator and as a coach.

Charles:

Right before this call, I was actually reading a research paper on organizations are strategies for meeting human needs.

Cyndi:

Yeah.

Charles:

The needs of the employees, your customers, your shareholders, the overall community. If you're skillful as a leader and your vision is to meet as many of those shareholder needs, stakeholder needs, as you can and come up with strategies and systems for doing that, that, to me, is what a good leader does.

Cyndi:

It's completely reframing that purpose and that responsibility, which I love, because who thinks of it like that every day? Most people don't.

Charles:

Well, and I think to extend the analogy further, if you think of the conscious mind as the leader of this organization called the self, its job is to make it easy for these subconscious needs to fulfill themselves and to help them solve their problem when they struggle.

Cyndi:

Come out and play, it'll be all right, yeah, struggle, come out and play, it'll be all right, yeah, oh well, Charles, thank you one for carving out the time and two for creating a great learning experience that I went through, and I know you're doing this on a bigger scale and I will put in my show notes links for your websites. You have masterclasses where people can learn about some of these concepts and you've referenced a couple of the subconscious needs that come out as negative emotions, and that was really again. The pairing in our course was really focused on some of those more negative or challenging emotions. How do we understand the unmet needs that are surfacing and arising? So it was super helpful and I know people will want more information about that. I will put that also in the show notes. Thank you for the opportunity to learn again from you and also where your research came from and why you have such a deep passion for this.

Charles:

Well, thank you very much, Cyndi. I appreciated your participation and inquisitiveness and endless curiosity in the course, and that's what I came through in the interview as well. So thank you. Thanks for having me on your show, you bet.

Cyndi:

Do you know someone who would be great on this podcast, or maybe it's you? If so, head on over to our website, wwwintentionalleaderscom, and at the bottom of our homepage you're going to see a podcast guest application Fill that out and we will check out the content and the episode that you would love to create.