Shift – Ethan Kross
The Retirement Wisdom Podcast
Shifting Perspectives for Emotional Well-Being
This chapter discusses various strategies for enhancing emotional well-being through perspective shifting, including linguistic distancing and internal shifters. It emphasizes the importance of flexibility and self-awareness in managing emotional responses to challenges, while highlighting the benefits of self-experimentation in finding personal strategies. Additionally, it touches on the role of support networks and provides actionable takeaways for improving emotional fitness.
You’re working on your physical fitness, but how about your emotional fitness? Dr. Ethan Kross visits with us to discuss his new book Shift: Managing Your Emotions — So They Don’t Manage You.
Ethan Kross joins us from Michigan.
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Bio
Ethan Kross, PhD, is one of the world’s leading experts on emotion regulation. An award-winning professor in the University of Michigan’s top-ranked Department of Psychology and its Ross School of Business, he is the director of the Emotion & Self Control Laboratory. Ethan has participated in policy discussions at the White House, spoken at TED and SXSW, and consulted with some of the world’s top executives and organizations. He has been interviewed on CBS Evening News, Good Morning America, Anderson Cooper Full Circle, and NPR’s Morning Edition. His pioneering research has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Science. He completed his BA at the University of Pennsylvania and his PhD at Columbia University.
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For More on Ethan Kross
Shift: Managing Your Emotions–So They Don’t Manage You
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Mentioned in This Podcast Episode
Chatter & Your Inner Voice – Ethan Kross
Implementation Intentions – Peter Gollwitzer
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About The Retirement Wisdom Podcast
There are many podcasts on retirement, often hosted by financial advisors with their own financial motives, that cover the money side of the street. This podcast is different. You’ll get smarter about the investment decisions you’ll make about the most important asset you’ll have in retirement: your time.
About Retirement Wisdom
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About Your Podcast Host
Joe Casey is an executive coach who also helps people design their next life after their primary career and create their version of The Multipurpose Retirement.™ He created his own next chapter after a twenty-six-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking. Today, in addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, which thanks to his guests and loyal listeners, ranks in the top 1 % globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 1.6 million downloads. Business Insider has recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference. He’s the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy.
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Wise Quotes
On Emotions
“Emotions are responses to things that happen in the world or in our minds that we judge to be meaningful. And when we perceive meaningful things, it activates a loosely coordinated response within our minds and our bodies that is designed to help us manage the situations we find ourselves in. So just to make that concrete, if my view of what is right versus wrong is violated, and there’s an opportunity for me to fix a situation, I’m going to experience anger. Anger is an emotion that motivates me to approach, get in there and try to fix the situation. If there’s a threat on the horizon that is important to me, I’m going to experience some anxiety. I’m going to have a fight or flight response that’s going to motivate me to zoom in really carefully on the situation so I can plan for it. Those are emotions. And when they’re experiencing the right proportions, not too intensely or too long, they’re vital tools that we have that we use to navigate the world. The big problem, of course, is that sometimes those emotions are triggered out of proportion. And when that happens, that can be a big problem. And that’s what my book Shift is all about, how to manage emotions in those circumstances.”
On Purpose & Meaning
“Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist living during World War II and just experienced massive loss, lost his family, his livelihood, his career. yet he was able to muster through the atrocities of World War II and concentration camps by finding meaning and purpose in his daily life. And his book always really stood with me, stuck with me, because it was an illustration that as bad as times can get, and hopefully they’re not too bad for you who are listening, but if they are, there’s always the possibility of finding meaning and purpose in life. And so I think thinking about that, being flexible and how we construct meaning and purpose is really useful. Lots of us find meaning and purpose from our jobs if we’re lucky, but we can also find meaning and purpose in our families and in our communities. And so I think taking the time, if your retirement is one where you truly are stepping away entirely from a vocation that is to find your life, think about where else you can find meaning in your life and then dive in to those spaces. Because those will provide a kind of compass that steers you through the next phase of your life. Thank you. Well, we evolve the capacity to experience negative emotions for a reason. They help us manage situations that are important to us.”
On Perspective
“Well, the best way to sum up perspective is as follows. I think many of us have the intuition or understanding that we have the ability to change the way we think, to change the way we feel. We can focus on the bright side, we can adopt a more objective stance. The problem is that it can be really hard to do that when you’re in the heat in the moment. It’s often easier said than done. What perspective does is that perspective shifters are tools we can use to step back and focus on our circumstances from a different point of view that often makes it a lot easier for us to change the way we think, to change the way we feel. One example of a perspective shifter something I call linguistic distancing. So trying to think through in a situation, give yourself advice using our own name and you. All right, Ethan, what do you think you should really do here? What that does when you refer to yourself using your own name and you, it shifts your perspective. It gets you to relate to yourself like you’re relating to someone else. And why is that useful? Well, it’s a lot easier to give advice to other people than it is to take our own advice as we often know. And so that’s one example of a perspective shifter. And this is a very useful category of tools because sometimes you have to stare a problem in the face. You can’t get time away from it, which we know can often help people with their emotions.”
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