How Can Understanding Emotions Create Stronger Trust?

Ila and Charles sit down with Dan Newby, Founder of The School of Emotions, coach, and acclaimed author of five books. Dan is a fervent advocate for emotional literacy, working with educators, leaders, coaches, and families globally. He shares his insights on how understanding emotions can address many of our personal and organizational challenges.

Dan delves into the concept of emotional literacy as a vital life skill, emphasizing the significant benefits of learning to understand and articulate our emotions. Together, the three of us explore:

• What trust is, and how different emotions foster a sense of trust
• The vast spectrum of human emotions and their impact on trust
• How certain emotions, like skepticism and affection, influence our decisions to trust or distrust
• Understanding the purpose and data behind our emotions, moving beyond the simplistic labels of “good” or “bad” based on how they make us feel

Don’t miss this thought-provoking discussion that challenges conventional views on emotions and their role in our daily lives.

We want to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for his superpower editing work to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to smooth and easy to listen to episodes for you to enjoy. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.

Transcript

Speaker 2: 0:19

Hello, my name is Charles Feltman.

Speaker 3: 0:22

And my name is Ila Edgar, and we're here for another episode of Trust on Purpose.

Speaker 2: 0:27

And today we have another guest, a wonderful guest, whom Ila and I have just been catching up with, because we haven't necessarily had a lot of time to talk with him for a while. Our guest is Dan Newby, and Dan is the author of oh God, I just forgot the title. Hila, help me.

Speaker 3: 0:48

Two books the Field Guide to Emotions and the Unopened Gift. Is that? Do you have another one?

Speaker 1: 0:54

Actually there's five.

Speaker 3: 0:56

There's five, oh, okay. So, there's five books.

Speaker 2: 1:00

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 1:01

And before we go there, I would also like to say that Dan was one of the senior faculty members when I took my coach training. Head and shoulders have been such an incredible guide and teacher and share of knowledge and wisdom. So thank you for all that you have done for me in my life and understanding emotions and now, like I spread your stuff everywhere, you have a fan club everywhere I go because I'm such a fan.

Speaker 1: 1:42

Thank you, hila, I'm delighted.

Speaker 2: 1:44

And I, for my part, will say that I've known Dan for well, probably longer, maybe even than you, Hila, because well, he was involved with that same coach training program when I was as a program coach and eventually became CEO of that organization, and so I worked for him, which was a lot of fun.

Speaker 3: 2:04

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 2:05

So it's a real pleasure to get to hang out with you a little bit, have a conversation about emotion and trust.

Speaker 1: 2:12

I'm delighted and it's a pleasure to see you both again and to be in this conversation.

Speaker 2: 2:18

Ila, why don't you kind of start us off here?

Speaker 3: 2:21

I think, as we were brainstorming and talking about different guests because we definitely love having guests on our podcast you and I spend quite a bit of time around the framework and the application of framework and the other dimension that we talk a little bit about, but I really wanted Dan, here as the guest, to talk about what's the emotion of trust, and in our conversation, before the conversation, dan had shared some different ways that we could unpack how different emotions help reveal or generate trust, how there might be and actually I don't want to say this part because I don't want to take it away from you A few different categories. I think how you approach this is great, so let's just dive in. Let's just dive in.

Speaker 1: 3:06

Okay, yeah, why don't we? Well, the first thing I would say is that anytime we want to take a look at a range of emotions, one of the most helpful things is to rethink how many emotions there actually are, how many emotions humans experience, because many of us have seen emotion wheels or we've heard there are six or eight core emotions and I think those are fine as an approach, but I think they lack the richness of the whole domain of emotions. And just out of curiosity, I went one day to Chad GPT our source for all things artificially intelligent and I asked it. I said how many emotions do humans have? And I looked at the response. It said it's impossible to say because human emotions are so nuanced that there is no number that could be put on that. And I thought that's really lovely, because what it tells us is that, although we can identify two or three hundred emotions, probably without much trouble, is that wow, we live with a palette of emotions. So I think the territory is incredibly rich. So when I think about anything these days, I generally look at it through this lens of emotions and what you know the root of the emotion, what the emotion means, how it helps us, its purpose, what it's telling us.

Speaker 1: 4:34

And so, as I prepared for this conversation because we're looking at trust I thought, well, okay, so there are certain emotions that probably help us either show that we do have a high level of trust, or that help us generate trust. So you might think of that on positive side, but it has to do with more trust, or increasing trust, or high level of trust. And then I thought, well, you know, actually there are emotions too that show us that. And here's the word you were waiting for a shaky assessment of trust, is that? Well, we're not so sure, right? Well, maybe we do. It's not that we distrust, or it's not that our trust is low, but we're unsure about it.

Speaker 1: 5:19

And the other category is the emotions that either reveal distrust or a very low level of trust, or that they themselves diminish trust.

Speaker 1: 5:32

And I think, if we understand these and if we look through this lens of emotions, for instance, with our team and without judgment, and we just notice that somebody in that team lives in the emotion of entitlement, which means they think the world owes them, and so they're waiting to receive, and when they don't receive, then they're unhappy that it reveals a lack of trust or a low trust, but also it tends to diminish trust, because the person who feels entitled is always looking for the things that they haven't received.

Speaker 1: 6:14

We're not dealing with somebody who is really looking at you know, facts or what is, or agreements, but is really caught up in this idea of you know the world owes me, and so I'm just going to keep checking to see that my glass is filling up, because that's what I expect in life, and I think that those people will not feel trust in a system or a leader or the world, because often they're not getting as much as they think they should be getting. So that's an example. And on the other side, there's some that I think are great indicators of trust, as much as they think they should be getting. So that's an example. And on the other side, there's some that I think are great indicators of trust and some, like I said, in this shaky zone where we may not even be moving one direction or another, but the trust is just not very solid.

Speaker 2: 6:59

So could you give us an example, or a couple of examples, of emotions in those two categories, those that generate or reveal trust, and then those that generate, or rather reveal kind of trust? That's questionable. It's shaky Shaky.

Speaker 1: 7:17

Yeah, shaky, shaky trust. It's interesting that in the trust model that I think the three of us use is that one of the components is an emotion. Sincerity, for me, is an emotion, and so, of course, when somebody is sincere, what do you know? You still may not trust them completely because there's the other components of competence and reliability, but you have a piece of the puzzle and reliability but you have a piece of the puzzle. So, when somebody is very sincere, they're already partway there to either revealing trust because they're sharing with you things that they're just they're sharing things with you without a filter. You know, what I think is what I'm sharing with you, it's what I'm speaking, it's what I'm telling you, and so there's no hidden agenda. And I think that that is a really powerful emotion.

Speaker 1: 8:06

Because, if you think about it, what if somebody, whether intentionally or not, is insincere and lacks the ability to speak in an unfiltered way about what they're thinking?

Speaker 1: 8:18

Well, we can then move into one of those emotions in the shaky zone, which could be skepticism.

Speaker 1: 8:26

Let's say, well, I just don't know if this person is really telling me what they think and believe or not.

Speaker 1: 8:34

So insincerity could be in that shaky zone as well, and insincerity is interesting to me because I've known people, I've coached people who are very sincere about being sincere, but they're not competent to be sincere, meaning they think they're sincere or they want to be sincere and they're sincere about that, but they don't have the ability to simply say what they're thinking. It's not the case in my experience that everybody is capable of sincerity, because some people have had experiences where it was dangerous for them to be sincere. For instance, they lived in a home where if they said really how they felt, they got punished for it, or in a culture or, you know, in an organization. So I think that I can remember in the past having judgments about people who were not sincere or who were insincere, and then one day I realized, oh, you know what, that just may be how they survived for years, but still it has an impact on trust, no matter whether it's intentional or unintentional.

Speaker 3: 9:37

Oh, this is juicy. So this has me thinking about a current team that I'm working with, that there is definitely stuff happening under the table that they are currently unwilling to put on top of the table to talk about, and I can feel it. There is this level of not being completely transparent, and so I think you know that ties possibly to some psychological safety. It could also be past experience where it wasn't safe for me to reveal there were unintended consequences that were not pleasant, and so I'm not going to do that again. But you know yeah, you're pointing to whether it's intentional or unintentional, there is an impact to the collaboration and the ease and flow of the relationship.

Speaker 1: 10:29

And things like that and trust in general. I've moved beyond thinking of these as moral issues. It's just okay. This is about probably, like you shared before, it's about interaction. It's about our ability to interact fluidly, you know, in a way that cares for the interaction in the relationship.

Speaker 2: 10:46

Yeah, in other words, trust is really a behavioral rather than moral issue.

Speaker 1: 10:52

Yeah, I always think of it as a risk assessment tool and I think that's what those people on your team are doing. They're saying, ooh, it feels a little risky to me to say what I really think, because even though the leader is saying yeah, yeah, yeah, you can say anything you want, it's not going to be used against you. If they don't believe that, then that's distrust, right. They are unable to share. And the curious thing to me is it's not necessarily about that leader or other people on the team. Again, it could be something they learned growing up and that was their way of surviving and their way of getting through the world was to not say things they really felt or cared about.

Speaker 1: 11:35

So I think one of the things that is helpful in understanding trust from my perspective is it doesn't matter how trustworthy I think I am. I could be 100%. I could be absolutely sincere, confident, reliable. That doesn't mean people will trust me. Them extending trust will depend on them as much as it'll depend on me. So if somebody doesn't trust me or the other side, if I don't trust somebody, it's because we don't align on these things.

Speaker 3: 12:05

And how do we have a conversation about that, and is that something that's important to us, that we want to do, or do we not want to do it?

Speaker 1: 12:12

Yeah, or is there even enough trust to have a conversation about trust?

Speaker 2: 12:17

Yes, right.

Speaker 1: 12:18

Yes, because sometimes there is not yeah.

Speaker 2: 12:21

You talk about trust itself being an emotion. I think yeah. And then I think there are also other emotions that kind of run with trust, the same with distrust or that other one, the shaky, maybe suspicion or skepticism would be a way of talking about that from an emotional perspective. But what other emotions do you find tend to run with trust, if you will?

Speaker 1: 12:44

Okay, yeah, lovely. Well, when people are talking about themselves, you know, do they trust themselves? They often use the word confidence.

Speaker 3: 12:53

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 12:53

Am I confident in my abilities? Am I confident in my knowledge? And so, for me, confidence is related to trust, and this is a piece that's interesting to me about the etymology of emotions. You know the root, where they come from, because trust comes from a Northern European language, anglo-saxon or Old English, but confidence comes from Latin. So what's interesting is they both address the same aspect of us as human beings and they're very similar for that reason, I think, because they come from different linguistic roots.

Speaker 1: 13:32

So many people do align or sometimes say that confidence and trust are synonyms. Confidence and trust are synonyms, but when I'm working with people, one of the emotions that they don't tend to think about when they talk about trust is the emotion I call faith, and I think faith can be a religious concept, obviously, but I think of faith as an emotion, and as an emotion, what my story is, what my belief is, what I say to myself, is I choose to believe, even without evidence. So I don't have any evidence that this is the case or this is true, but I still choose to believe it. And so faith for me is different than trust, because trust is based on things like your history of reliability and a measure or assessment of your competence. So for me it's quite different, and the value of faith is that I can choose to believe even without any evidence that something is true, and of course that's what makes faith so powerful sometimes. I mean, you can think about it. Do you believe in God? I can give you all the reasons in the world, all the statistics, all the data, that there is no such thing as a God. But if you believe there's a God, there's a God, and vice versa. If you believe there's not a God, I can give you all the evidence or data that I can dig up and you'll still say yep, well, that's really interesting, but I don't believe there's a God. So faith is really powerful in that sense, and I think that it can be an extremely helpful tool.

Speaker 1: 15:18

I know, for a while I put it as a screensaver and the question I put to myself to read every day was what would I do if I was acting from faith as an emotion? Because it was a time in my life when I had a lot of doubt. Oh well, doubt goes in that middle column. Doubt is, you know, shaky assessment of trust. I'm not sure, and so for me it was really helpful because it helped me make some choices that I didn't have evidence were the right choice or would be even a good choice. But I needed to make a choice and I needed to move forward in certain parts in this case of my business, of you know, writing books and creating courses because I didn't know, I didn't know that one day that Hila would have this on her sitting in her office on the desk. I didn't know that I had no evidence that it was going to be of value. So faith helped me focus and get it done and put it out in the world.

Speaker 2: 16:19

And of course, now I do have evidence, but then I didn't out in the world and, of course, now I do have evidence, but then I didn't. So I wonder what kind of role faith plays in building trust, because we may start from a place where we don't really have any evidence that this person is trustworthy or will be trustworthy. So we're like you said, we're taking a risk. We're risking something that's valuable to us and taking the risk that making it vulnerable to that person's actions, what they're going to do, so having faith that they will treat what we value well, can get us to the point where we have evidence or not. But yeah, okay.

Speaker 1: 16:59

Yeah, no, I think it's a lovely speculation. Let's imagine that Hila and I are in a plane together. We're flying somewhere, small plane. The pilot passes out. Hila says to me don't worry, dan, I can land this plane, I got this thing.

Speaker 1: 17:17

Well, really, what's going to drive me to support her to land the plane is faith. It's not trust, because I might trust her in lots of other domains, but she never landed a plane. I was on before. But faith is exactly that. I would say I don't have any evidence that you can do this, but I choose to believe you can. But exactly what you said in the end, it will reveal whether trust was wise or not, because if she lands the plane and we get done and we can go have a coffee together, fantastic. If the plane crashes, then I'll realize well, that wasn't the best belief in the world, right, but it did come from faith, right, they didn't have any evidence, but they still chose to believe. So I think trust is more, let's say, reliable.

Speaker 1: 18:05

In trust, we are measuring things, we're assessing things, we're doing things, we're building a case that I'm not risking excessively or beyond my willingness to risk for something, because the trust approach would be, I would say to Hila well, show me your flight certificate, you know. Show me your CV that says I got 20 years of landing small planes in emergency situations. Give me the stats on how many times you've done this safely and how many times you haven't, and then look me in the eye and tell me that all of this is true and, yes, you really can land this plane. I want sincerity. That's what I would do if I was trying to build trust in that situation. I probably don't have time to do that, we probably wouldn't be able to do that, and so, in that case, I think what you're saying, charles, is exactly right is that sometimes faith, it can be a stepping stone to the opportunity to build trust or to reveal that trust is not prudent.

Speaker 2: 19:05

And so I also wonder about faith tipping over into blind trust. Where trusting and trusting by ignoring evidence that we should be paying attention to, that this person is not trustworthy, yeah.

Speaker 1: 19:26

Well, it can, and that's a great question. Is what I'm acting out of faith, or is it naivete, or is it denial?

Speaker 2: 19:35

Denial. Yeah, Blind trust for me is all about denial. I don't want to look and see.

Speaker 1: 19:40

And naivete is just simply I want it to be that way, whether it's that way or not. So if life was perfect, that's the way it would be, and I'm going to believe it's that way. I'm going to be Pollyanna in this case. So I think that these are all really related in some way to the emotion of trust.

Speaker 2: 20:00

So one of the things that I tend to talk about with people and ask about is including emotions of trust. What runs with it seem to be emotions like generosity, what we might tend to think of as positive emotions that run with trust. If you will that, if I trust you, those emotions show up. I want to be generous towards you. I want to be Kindness, kindness, yeah, I want to be kind, yes.

Speaker 1: 20:31

Yeah, I think gratitude can go in that bucket. Certainly care can be in that bucket Compassion.

Speaker 2: 20:40

Yeah, and I think they're self-reinforcing. When there's trust and those other emotions show up, it reinforces the trust that's getting built or has been built. But I'm curious about that. What's your thought on that?

Speaker 1: 20:56

Yeah, well, I think those incline us to trust because we feel safe with a person. You know, if they're being generous, then they're showing they care for me, that I'm important to them in some way, and so they're extending themselves to me and in a sense they're building, I think, a foundation for trust. So I think a lot of those emotions that's the way they play the one that I always find curious is the one that seems like it might be in there, but it's a little bit slippery is affection, and so affection is, you know, we like people. But what I find sometimes and I have had this experience in my life, for instance as a leader well, I can make choices and decisions about people based on trust. Well, I can make choices and decisions about people based on trust, sincerity, competence, reliability or on affection, because I like this person. And I think that we confuse those sometimes. I know I certainly did as a leader, where I made choices sometimes about the people I hired. Maybe in the trust category there was sincerity, or I assessed sincerity, but partly sometimes I hired people because I liked them, not because they were competent, not because they had shown reliability, and the problem with that is that then you get a group of people who are not particularly competent, they're not particularly reliable, they're not particularly trustworthy, even though you like them. So this separating affection from trust for me is a wonderful thing to do.

Speaker 1: 22:28

But the curious thing is that we can trust somebody and feel affection. We trust them and we like them. We can not like them and not trust them. We can trust them and not like them, or we can like them but not trust them. All of those variations are possible and, like you, always share in domains. So one of the examples I think about sometimes is well, I love Lucy, could be a TV show, right.

Speaker 1: 22:55

I love my wife. She's great. I have great affection for her, super, and in general I do trust her. I believe she's sincere, competent and reliable. Except when we agree we're going to leave the house at seven. She is not trustworthy, meaning she's sincere that she's going to be ready at seven, but she seems incapable of being ready at seven and she has a horrendous history of reliability. It's not a secret, I mean, she knows this and we joke about it, so it's an open conversation between us and she always teases me because at seven I'm standing by the door, the door is open, I have my keys in my hand, I'm ready to go, and she's like yeah, yeah, yeah. But here's the interesting thing is, it doesn't diminish my affection for her that she's not trustworthy in that domain. It doesn't. It just means I shouldn't depend on her being ready at seven. If I do, then I'm being naive, right. Then I'm hoping she will be. But it's not based on the reality of who she is, and I think that that's really helpful to see.

Speaker 1: 24:05

And there are people who are our friends. We have great affection for them, but we would never loan them money. Why? Well, because we don't trust them that they will repay the money, even if they're sincere, that, yes, they will. We know by knowing them or by our experience with them maybe they're competent but maybe they're not reliable. Yeah, or maybe they're reliable but maybe they're not competent.

Speaker 2: 24:29

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 24:29

So I think that when I work with people and the question of trust comes up, I often think about this relationship with affection and investigate, because I think people trip over. That fairly often is what I see.

Speaker 2: 24:46

That's a good point. Something else you've said brings up a question for me, or I thought as well, and that is you said you recognize that Lucy is not capable of being right next to you at the door, ready to go at seven, and you still have great affection for her because you really don't have an expectation that she will be. But I think often, especially in the workplace, we create expectations about someone's behavior, their trustworthiness in some way, and then when our expectation is dashed, maybe two or three times, we trip over into some other emotion, like resentment or annoyance, which, by the way, shows up. Those are emotions that tend to show up in distrust. We trip over into distrust of that person. Now you continue to trust Lucy in many other ways, but you just don't trust her in that particular kind of situation.

Speaker 1: 25:48

Yes.

Speaker 2: 25:49

And you don't have expectations that are going to be dashed.

Speaker 1: 25:54

Well, the difference I would make is sometimes I do have expectations, or hopes, at least.

Speaker 2: 26:02

Those are different. I think I would claim that those are different.

Speaker 1: 26:06

But I'm aware that I have expectations. I'm aware that those are my standards, those aren't her standards, and I think that's generally where our expectations come from. You know, we expect people to respond within 24 hours, why? Well, because we respond within 24 hours. It may be a norm within the organization or the family or the company yes, that's true, but we also probably have this personal expectation based on our standards. So I think that that is a big piece too, because if my expectation is 24 hours and you don't respond, then what does that tell me? Well, either you weren't sincere, competent or reliable, but if my expectation is 72 hours and you respond in 48 hours, I'd go look sincere, competent or reliable. I trust this person. So I think that, yeah, that's a great place to look is how much of our assessment trust is based on our standards is hugely important.

Speaker 3: 27:10

I'd like to go back to this emotion of affection and likability and again I'm kind of thinking about some of the teams that I'm currently working with and they are very social, they really like each other, they have a good time working together and thinking of one leader in particular, there are definitely performance goals that are not being met or accountability issues, and I think that this likability or this affection emotion is getting in the way of being able to address, because now we're kind of like, we're kind of more friends and we've lost sight of the reporting relationship or it's blurred, and so that causes some trickies. So some of these issues are not being addressed. The leader just doesn't know how to approach them.

Speaker 1: 28:04

I would say exactly and I can speak from personal experience on this is if somebody reports to you but you regard them principally as a friend, versus somebody who is on your team, well, you're likely to operate out of affection rather than to operate out of accountability, trust, you know doing what we say, all of those things. So I think it can be a big breakdown, be a big breaking point, and I think what's helpful is to realize that in some cases, what we're aiming for in a relationship is affection we just want that person to like us but in others, trust is more important. I need that person to trust me, and I think it depends on the relationship and the person. And where it gets tricky is when we have more than one relationship with a person, where we have a friendship as well as a working or a collaboration or a working engagement of some kind, because then we're really approaching that with two different sets of emotions and trust may not be the highest.

Speaker 2: 29:14

I just wanted to put it here. Most of our listeners are used to us talking about four trust assessment domains reliability, sincerity, competence and care being the fourth one, and I know you also consider that as an emotion. You're talking about the reliability, sincerity, competence, those three.

Speaker 1: 29:33

Yeah, I don't dismiss that. What I tend to do is I put care inside of sincerity. So if Hila says, yes, I care about this happening and I'm committed to do it, then it really falls for me under well, does she really care or does she not care? Is she being sincere about her care or not? But my perspective is organize the model so it works for you. I mean, if it works for you, the listener or you, anybody to have the for fantastic, it doesn't matter, it's a fantastic model. If you nest care inside of sincerity, wonderful. I mean. As long as you are clear with what trust means to you and how to recognize it and how to build it when you need it, then I think the model is just the model and fantastic. So, yeah, lovely.

Speaker 2: 30:25

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 30:26

Can we go into some of the emotions around the? I'm saying now shady, slippery, sketchy, and also emotions that may show up around the distrust. What does that look like?

Speaker 1: 30:41

Okay, so here's some of the ones I had for the shaky assessment of trust, but I think it's important to say it's not bad to have a shaky assessment of trust, that's okay.

Speaker 2: 30:51

Not at all.

Speaker 1: 30:51

It's just telling me that I'm not 100% sure, that there's still some questions here. So I think suspicion is one. But suspicion also has the flavor that I'm imagining that maybe there is something I shouldn't be trusting about the situation. So I'm looking for reasons to not trust, or I want those suspicions resolved so that I can move more into trust. I think doubt.

Speaker 1: 31:25

But doubt for me is an emotion. Doubt shows up when we're doing something new that we've never done before, we're driving a new place, we're heading up a project that's bigger than we ever headed up before, we're getting married. We never did these things before, so we don't know what it's going to be like. So doubt for me has the quality of its impulse is to prepare, and I think that's great because if I prepare, a couple of things can happen. If I prepare, a couple of things can happen, I can feel greater trust or confidence in me. But also there's less unknowns out there in what I'm doing. So it's not that doubt will ever go away in a new situation, but I can move more and more into trust if I take a look at the doubt, if I prepare myself, if I resolve some of the unknowns in the situation, then sometimes it's much easier to trust. So this is why having a conversation with somebody who you're not 100% sure what they meant by something is so helpful, because then if you're clear and you believe they're sincere, then okay, then you'll move into trust, right. So the doubt can be very helpful in that.

Speaker 1: 32:42

Ambivalence is another one, because ambivalence to me means well, there's two things I care about, but I'm not sure which direction to go, and ambivalence can be about two things I care about that both have negative consequences, or two things I care about that might both have positive consequences, in my opinion. So, do I want to go skiing or sailing? Okay, well, I might feel ambivalent.

Speaker 1: 33:11

Well, I don't know, but those are both kind of cool things. Do I want to pay taxes or medical bills? Well, not such a great choice, but still I can feel ambivalent about what to do. So I think that ambivalence can be in that shaky area. I think seer can be, because what's fear? Well, something may harm me, and so I'm not sure, but it's a possibility that something may harm me. So I would put that in there.

Speaker 1: 33:39

Confusion, right, just lack of clarity for many people. If I'm constantly confused, well, even about where I'm driving, then I don't trust that I know how to get there. And I think you mentioned Charles skepticism. Skepticism for me is I believe one thing, but Charles is telling me something different, and skepticism is the emotion that has me trying to either choose between those or integrate them somehow. So I'm trying to determine what to believe. But how it's related to trust is because I believe something already. When Charles tells me the opposite, I'm like do I trust that? Do I trust him? So it puts me in that middle ground of being unsure about whether trust would be a good choice or not.

Speaker 3: 34:30

This is all really making me curious about. I think many of us and leaders that we work with have grown up or learned about emotions as there's these good ones and then there's bad ones, and in understanding the purpose of each of these emotions, especially the ones that we've been taught to hold as negative or bad emotions, how much richness becomes available to us when we remove that assessment of the goodness or badness of an emotion and rather lean into.

Speaker 1: 35:05

there's data here for me, I would completely agree and I would say the same is true with trust. You know, one of the things when I work with organizations or teams is they always say that we need more trust. And I'm like whoa, hang on here. You know, more trust is not necessarily better, just like less skepticism is not necessarily better. You know, when you were landing that plane in the emergency, skepticism could have been my friend. That's right, right. It could have saved my life. So skepticism, we throw it in the negative emotion basket, but actually it's a fantastic emotion, it serves us. Basket, but actually it's a fantastic emotion, it serves us. But if we throw it in that bad emotions bucket or negative emotions, then we don't pay attention to it, and I think that that's something we do habitually.

Speaker 1: 35:48

It's something that we weren't. But, to be honest, I work with people in every part of the world and everybody does that. I mean, I don't know, I have not worked with anybody from a culture that says no, we don't assess emotions as positive and negative. I've never run into that. So I think it's a pretty human thing we do. But I think for me it's more based on how it feels to me, like it's pleasant or unpleasant, and we say, oh, that makes it positive or negative, and I would say no, no, no, you can't equate. It doesn't work to equate that. But the other thing is, sometimes we put emotions in that negative bucket because we see them as dangerous or we've been hurt by them, or we've hurt other people when we're in that emotion. So it's not that it doesn't have some value, but I completely agree with you when we look at emotions through that lens, we lose a lot, and if we can just set that aside at least for a moment, we can see emotions, their value, their purpose, their data much more clearly.

Speaker 3: 36:49

I was teaching online the last couple of mornings with a group of leaders from an organization doing an intro to leader as coach or a coach approach, and it was so fascinating as I did a live coaching demo for them how a number of them was like, well, but you're talking like what you did was just therapy, because you were talking about how people feel and their emotions and like that just doesn't seem like something we should be doing. Well, isn't that fascinating? Isn't that fascinating?

Speaker 1: 37:22

Yeah, it is interesting to me because if you listen to people, they use emotions all the time. They talk about their emotions, their kids talk about emotions. I did a facilitation with a big group who was in the aerospace industry, including NASA and one of their prime contractors 22 people that are working on a $2 billion project together. And to get a sense of the group, the first question was in 30 seconds, say you know, share what you're thinking about the program, about this thing. Every single person started their statement with an emotion I'm scared, I'm excited, I'm angry, I'm you know, I'm delighted Every single one. And it's like you know what they're in the room.

Speaker 1: 38:10

It's not like we don't talk about these, but because we label them as well. This is psychology. Then we don't have them as a daily tool and I tend to think about this like arithmetic. I mean, think about arithmetic. You use it every day, but you're not a mathematician. But you still use arithmetic every day and it changes your life, it enhances your life enormously. Think it how could you live without arithmetic? But it doesn't mean you have to be a mathematician. It just means you need to understand it well enough to employ it. You may not know anything about calculus, that's fine, but you got arithmetic and I would say that having the language, the articulation of emotions, the understanding of emotions is one level, using them to do therapy is something else and it's something that I have no business in that territory because I'm completely ignorant about how to do that. But in the territory of coaching or in the territory of writing or discussing emotions, they're just emotions.

Speaker 3: 39:10

Yeah, this has been a fascinating conversation. I'm just watching our time as we close. How can people find you, if you'd like them to find you?

Speaker 1: 39:21

Oh, I'd love for people to find me. So I'm on LinkedIn, dan Newby, I think I'll pop right up. If you're interested in any of the books, you can go on Amazon. Type in my name, I'll pop up. My website is schoolofemotionsworld schoolofemotionsworld, and if you want to write to me, I'm Dan at schoolofemotionsworld, but I'd be delighted to hear from anybody. I love this conversation. I'm always available to explore.

Speaker 2: 39:51

And would you, before we close, also share with our listeners the titles of the books that you have written?

Speaker 1: 40:00

our listeners the titles of the books that you have written. Sure Well, the first one was the Unopened Gift, and it's a primer in emotional literacy. That's the title and the idea is that we all have emotions, but most of us haven't opened them, we haven't unwrapped them, we haven't seen them, and they are a gift. We all have them. The second is the Field Guide to Emotions, which is not exactly a dictionary, but it's a place that you can search through and say, well, I've got this emotion. I'm not sure what it is, so I'm going to go through these 150 emotions to see if something resonates with me. So that's the second book. The third book was a workbook that accompanies the Unopened Gift and it's really the process, step-by-step, about how do we build emotional literacy. It's quite a small, self-guided workbook.

Speaker 1: 40:43

And then I collaborated with one of my Vietnamese students to write a book called Hello Emotions, and it's lovely because it's her stories about how she befriended emotions, and she came from a very technical background, so emotions were not part of her life before she moved into coaching and working with people.

Speaker 1: 41:02

So she wrote those stories and then I wrote after each of them how those emotions could be seen from a structural perspective and deconstructed and related emotions, and so the more technical part, you might say. But her writing is beautifully lyrical. It really reflects Vietnamese language, although she wrote in English, and the last one that just came out last month is called Dignity in Policing. It's a collaboration of somebody who works in Texas with 100 police departments. What it focuses on is the opportunity for police to develop emotional literacy, because it would help them, it would help the agencies, it would help the community. And the statistics among police for suicide, for drug abuse, for spousal abuse, for depression are astonishing. They're three, four, five times the norm. And the statistic that really caught me is that more police in the US die from suicide than are killed in the line of duty.

Speaker 3: 42:15

That's horrible.

Speaker 1: 42:17

And I was completely astonished when I learned that. So it's really an offer to people in that territory who have never seen emotions as a tool or something they could learn or something that would benefit them, to take a look and it's been really well received and we're thrilled with it and I think it's going to really going to have an impact eventually in that territory of law enforcement first responders.

Speaker 2: 42:48

Nice Thank you. And thank you for today's conversation, Dan. It's been great.

Speaker 1: 42:53

Absolutely my pleasure. I'll come back anytime, yay, yay.

Speaker 2: 42:59

And will you bring a different joke with you when you come back?

Speaker 1: 43:02

Oh sorry, I will, absolutely. I commit I will learn a new joke for the next session.

Speaker 2: 43:09

And for those of you who are listening, Dan shared a joke with us before we started the conversation today. That was pretty good. I mean, we got a good laugh out of it.

Speaker 1: 43:17

Here I'll even go one better, charles. Next time I'll bring a joke that has to do with emotion.

Speaker 3: 43:26

All right.

Speaker 1: 43:27

How about that?

Speaker 3: 43:28

I didn't even have to double-dog, dare you? You just offered that.

Speaker 1: 43:31

I know I just offer it and I don't know what that joke will be. I have no idea Do?

Speaker 3: 43:35

you have faith.

Speaker 1: 43:36

I'm sure it's possible. I have faith. Yes, I have faith Absolutely. I don't trust myself so much as a joke teller, but I have faith that I can find a joke.

Speaker 2: 43:46

I love it, Dan. Thank you very much. It's been great talking with you today.

Speaker 1: 43:51

Thank you, it's been a delight. Thank you, your wonderful host. Thank you, thank you.

Speaker 3: 43:56

On behalf of both Charles and myself, we want to say a big thank you to our producer and sound editor, chad Penner. Hillary Rideout of Inside Out Branding, who does our promotion, our amazing graphics and marketing for us, and our theme music was composed by Jonas Smith. If you have any questions or comments for us about the podcast, if you have a trust-related situation that you'd like us to take up in one of our episodes, we'd love to hear from you at trust, at trustonpurposeorg.

Speaker 2: 44:29

And we'd also like to thank you, our listeners. Take care and keep building trust on purpose Until next time.

Speaker 3: 44:41

Until next time.