The Interconnectedness of Disengagement and Emotional Well-Being with JD Pinkus

The salient point of our discussion today revolves around the premise that issues such as burnout, disengagement, and anxiety may not be disparate challenges, but rather manifestations stemming from the same underlying cause: unmet emotional needs. In our exploration, we delve into a comprehensive framework that reframes distress not as a dysfunction, but as valuable information, signaling the necessity for deeper introspection and understanding. As we engage with our esteemed guest, JD Pinkus, a social psychologist specializing in motivation, we unravel the complexities of human behavior and the pivotal role that emotional needs play in shaping our experiences. Through this enlightening dialogue, we aim to illuminate the intricate interplay between motivation, emotional fulfillment, and overall well-being, offering listeners a profound perspective on navigating their own emotional landscapes. Join us as we embark on this intellectual journey, seeking to unravel the core tenets of human motivation and the significance of addressing our emotional needs.

The discourse presented in this episode meticulously delves into the intricate relationship between emotional needs and various psychological phenomena such as burnout, anxiety, and disengagement. The esteemed guest, JD Pinkus, a social psychologist with profound insights into human motivation, articulates a compelling thesis that these seemingly disparate issues are, in fact, manifestations of unmet emotional needs. Through a sophisticated framework that reframes distress not as a dysfunction but as informative signals, the conversation navigates the complexities of human behavior and decision-making. This episode implores listeners to reconsider traditional notions of psychological distress and to view it through the lens of emotional need fulfillment, thereby fostering a deeper understanding of personal and organizational well-being. The dialogue culminates in a robust examination of the twelve core emotional needs proposed by Pinkus, elucidating how these needs underpin various aspects of human motivation and behavior. By addressing these needs, individuals and organizations can aspire towards a more engaged, fulfilled, and productive existence, transcending the limitations imposed by conventional psychological paradigms.

Takeaways:

• Burnout, disengagement, anxiety, and conflict are often seen as separate issues, but they may originate from unmet emotional needs.
• Understanding distress as a signal rather than a dysfunction can lead to better emotional wellness.
• Effective leadership emphasizes the fulfillment of employees' emotional needs rather than prioritizing the leader's own interests.
• The framework of 12 emotional needs provides a comprehensive view of human motivation, integrating various psychological theories into a cohesive model.
• The distinction between promotion and prevention needs can illuminate the motivations behind our actions in various life domains.
• Recognizing that emotional responses are signals of unmet needs can empower individuals to make constructive changes in their lives.

Links referenced in this episode:

• agilebrain.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

We often treat burnout, disengagement, anxiety, and conflict as a kind of separate problems, different symptoms, different labels, and different

Understanding the Root Causes of Emotional Distress

SPEAKER_01 0:11

solutions. But what if they they all stem from the same root cause, like unmet emotional needs? So today we will explore principles of the framework that reframes distress not as a dysfunction but as an information.

Understanding Human Motivation and Emotion

SPEAKER_01 0:32

So welcome back, dear listeners, to another powerful episode of Mind Meets Machine, where we explore the deeper mechanics of human behavior, human performance, and decision making in a complex world. I'm your host, Havik, and today I'm joined by a lovely guest. Please welcome JD Pinkers. So welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 0:52

Thanks for having me. It's good to be here.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

Amazing. And Elismus, before we get into the discussion, I'll quickly love to introduce you with JD. So JD is a social psychologist specializing in motivation and the emotion. He's the author of the emotionally agile brand, mastering the 12 emotional needs that drive us. A book which presents a unified theory of human motivation grounded in the philosophy principles. So his framework has been applied to the leadership, culture, broad effectiveness, employee engagement, and studying kind of for the students like emotional well-being and around the world. So why do it? Let's get started. Welcome to the show again.

SPEAKER_00 1:42

Okay, glad to be here and excited to talk about this. It's my favorite subject.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

Amazing. Amazing. So I mean, uh, your work didn't just emerge from the academic uh curiosity, and it came kind of it came from the lived experiences as well and a deeper personal inquiry. So the curiosity is like, what was the turning point that made you question like how we traditionally understand uh I'd say the motivation and the distress?

SPEAKER_00 2:13

Yeah. So uh in my own experience, there were sort of multiple turning points. Uh one was sort of how I was raised. My my parents, who were both in the business, you know, like my father's a neurologist who studied uh of all things, you know, he was an expert in Parkinson's and he did a lot in migraines. But he what he became famous for was his work with violent criminals, uh, people on death row uh who had committed very serious offenses. And uh he basically taught me uh from an early age uh that you know that there were things in the brain that uh you know have consequences in behavior, and that ultimately all behavior stems from the brain and and how it's functioning. My mother was a social worker, a psychiatric social worker. They actually met on a patient uh that they shared when they were at Columbia back in the must have been early 60s or late 50s, and her view was similar, but she also really believed in sort of spirituality as as a as like the way to get toward well-being. You know, is that it wasn't sort of one of many ways, it was the ultimate way and the best way to get to well-being. So I had these two influences. Um I kind of came up in a sort of turbulent time in the 70s and eighties, and I was not a good student. I was, you know, I was sort of um, you know, I wanted to to play rock and roll, and I was in a band, and you know, and I wanted to party. I I uh ended up having an experience where I had a choice to make. I was gonna either, you know, go with this band on tour, and we had gigs lined up in New York and LA, or I was gonna stop all that and I was gonna go to college and become a psychologist. And I decided to do that. I decided to go to school. And uh the guy who took over my spot in the band, the other guitar player, um, I I never really got to know him. He just, you know, took over my position. But then within a month or so, he was killed at a party that I would have gone to with the band. And that was like a very sure sign to me from the universe that I had made the right choice, you know, uh, as tragic as that is for him and his family. I never looked back. I thought, you know what, this is this is the path I need to be on. So I found myself, though, at a very sort of emotion-first perspective. Like I knew that what I did tended to be emotionally driven, and I knew what my friends did tended to be emotionally driven, and we made a lot of stupid decisions because, you know, that's what you do when you're a teenager, and that's it's coming from emotion, not reason. When I got to college and when I got to grad school, it seemed like all of that was flipped around. And everything was about cognition, everything was about rationality. You know, if we wanted to know what was going to change someone's mind, we would look at the cogency of the arguments and how many arguments it's like this did not sound right to me at all. So in grad school, I basically found a group of like-minded people. I ended up doing my research in a building outside of psychology because you know, these these radical ideas were not so welcome there, and they didn't have the facilities for it. I ended up doing my work somewhere else that had sort of psychophysiological equipment and hidden cameras and you know, the sensors and things that seemed to me like more real science, and ended up uh kind of getting really into the sort of world of motivation and emotion, and then understanding that that that really is what drives behavior. And then it was sort of um, I feel validated now because that was before you know Daniel Kahneman got the Nobel Prize for his system one and system two distinction before fMRI showed that you could actually track in the brain that emotion precedes cognition, that you could actually track that you know the decisions that people make about moral judgments. This is Joshua Green's work at Harvard. You can predict their judgments based on the areas of the brain that light up. And if people feel sort of emotionally invested, they will make certain decisions. If they feel sort of coolly rational and they're removed from the consequences, they'll make very different decisions. So all that to say, you know, emotion always seemed to be at the center of everything. And I'm glad to see that the world is sort of caught up with that. And that's sort of how I got here. When you apply that to questions of well-being in the research that I've done, what you see is that motivation is driven by either wanting more of the good or wanting less of the bad. And you can apply this to lots of different areas of the world. They sort of um, you know, they call it vitamins and painkillers. Like, am I seeking relief from something bad or am I seeking more of something good? And that, it turns out, the balance of that really predicts how well someone is doing. And as you mentioned in your opening, it doesn't matter what label we put on it. It doesn't matter if we call it burnout, depression, anxiety, trauma, uh, you know, adaptive or maladaptive, adaptive coping, stress. This system that we came up with predicts it with wonderful accuracy. And what it shows is that these things are not necessarily distinct concepts that you can trace them all back to need fulfillment. And when people are experiencing lots of negativity in their lives and they have big relief needs, that's associated with bad outcomes across the board. It doesn't matter what label you put on it. And when those needs have been met, and now they're able to shift to a positive mindset and say, okay, now I want more of the good. I'm looking for positive aspirations like success and to fulfill my potential, self-actualization, define my life purpose. Now that's a state of health. So there isn't a separation between those things. And then you can use this system as a kind of a lens through which you can look at a whole variety of topics. Leadership in this lens, effective leadership, is leadership that prioritizes meeting people's emotional needs. Ineffective, you know, toxic leadership is the kind that prioritizes the leader's own needs over everyone else. A culture, you know, organizational culture, a culture that meets people's needs is healthy. A culture that does not meet people's needs or only meets certain needs for certain people is toxic. Employee engagement. People become engaged when they feel like their needs, there's a prospect of their needs being met, right? They'll work toward that. If there's no possibility that their needs are going to be met for whatever it is, you know, recognition, immersion in the moment, authenticity, inclusion, caring, recognition, all of those things, then there won't be engagement. There'll be disengagement. And again, it what's beautiful about this is that this theory has effectively cleaned up a whole series of conceptual messes in multiple fields. The field of values, the field of goal setting, the field of leadership, organizational culture, engagement, teaming, uh, you know, one after another. We set them up and we knock them down because all of these each one of these uh literatures is filled with concepts. They happen to be exactly the same concepts in every single one of them, and they are all definable as needs.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

And I mean one of the uh striking uh ideas in your work is that the distress is not kind of necessarily a pathology, it's a logical response to the unmet needs. Yes. Yeah, so his question is like why do you so quickly label struggle as a weakness or maybe a kind of disorder thing?

SPEAKER_00 9:54

So it's it's not a disorder, but if you have a chronic unmet need for something, particularly something that's a prevention need, so you're already feeling bad in some aspect. So we have this model of 12 needs. Let's say you just pick one at random, let's say it's ethics, right? There's like I I I'm feeling like I'm subjected to wrongdoing chronically. I'm living in an unfair, unjust system that is not, you know, that that it's all about sort of you know personal gain instead of you know helping uh raise people up, right? If you leave that uh unaddressed, it creates these kinds of problems. So, in and of itself is not a problem. In and of itself, it's a signal. It's a signal to say, okay, there's something wrong here. Either maybe I need to leave this organization or this situation or these people, this friend group, whatever it is, or I can try to change it, or I can, you know, think about it differently. But the original sort of signal that something is wrong is not a pathology. That's that's just information. When you're subjected to that chronically without the ability to control it, without the ability to change or remove yourself from the situation, that's when pathologies begin. So, for instance, we used our method to to measure these kinds of things, all of these 12 needs, both positive and negative. Uh, during COVID, in these very large national surveys, and we saw there was a group that really stood out on prevention needs related to justice. They were felt like they were being treated unjustly, unfairly, uh, without equity. It turned out these were people who identified themselves as being essential workers during COVID. These are the people who had to work at like Amazon and FedEx and UPS to get people's video games to them, you know, that sort of thing. They had been deemed essential by the government. So they had to work in person, essentially threatening their lives and the lives of their family members because they had to be exposed to other people all the time. They did a lot of testing of those people, they had to wear a lot of masks, but they had been deemed essential workers, and they felt that that was fundamentally unfair to them, especially when what they were packaging and transporting was not vital medicines. It was, you know, you name it, you know, just any any old thing. Ethics came up in some recent work that we did uh with the hospital, a hospital chain where we had a group of executives and a group of sort of ambassadors from you know the nursing and and the physicians, and they took our our assessment and we saw, you know, interestingly, ethics lit up negatively, really negative, you know, very strong and very negative. And the group there was sort of, you know, the executives wanted to sort of deny it or, you know, sort of contextualize it. And so, well, what were the images that people saw when they when they, you know, like they wanted to sort of try to debunk it? But some brave nurses spoke up and said, I'll tell you what it means. It means something very real. It means that there's a lot of wrongdoing going on. And the reason there's a lot of wrongdoing going on is because we're so understaffed. We can't discipline anyone and we can't fire anyone because there's no one to replace them with. So it was an incredibly clear signal with very clear action uh or uh stemming from it. We advised them to start, you know, basically making public what their issues were with staffing, what they were trying to do to address it, make it everyone's issue, you know, reach out to people you know who were in this field to bring them. It was basically you know socialize the conflict instead of trying to hide it. And it was a perfect example of instead of it being, you know, it's something that turns into uh a disorder, it was something where the signal was detected so that something constructive could be done.

SPEAKER_01 13:37

That's interesting. And um when the leaders misunderstand this, how does it affect how they interpret disengagement or kind of underperformance?

SPEAKER_00 13:51

Yeah, so there there are multiple problems out there right now, one of which is the fact that every one of these labels has its own cottage industry with its own terminology, its own set of interventions that are not integrated at all. So if I define this problem as a problem of disengagement, it's gonna have a completely different vocabulary and uh set of interventions from someone who's working on leadership versus someone who's working on culture versus someone who's working on well-being. You know, it doesn't matter what, you know, each one of them, they have a stake in keeping things the way they are, and they resist any attempt to integrate them conceptually or or otherwise. That's a huge problem because as we started saying, uh these are not independent issues, these are just symptoms. They they show up in different ways. They're just like putting a different level, different unit of analysis on the same phenomena. And it's really hard to make consistent integrated change if you have, you don't speak the same language, you feel like you have completely different theoretical models. And it's all, I think, a waste because I think underlying it all are a very simple set of needs that anyone can understand. And once you do, you begin to see that looks just like this. And then and the same intervention that works on culture is gonna work for leadership, we're gonna work for engagement, or work for well-being. So it actually simplifies things greatly, but of course, because there are vested interests on the other side that want to keep things the way they are, adoption, I think, is gonna be slow.

SPEAKER_01 15:22

And also, like instead of asking uh what's wrong with this person, we might ask like which need is not being met. Right. And I would say that reframing feels both human and practical also.

Understanding Emotional Needs and Motivation

SPEAKER_01 15:39

Right. So regarding the root causes, if I have to say, because uh in every episode we talk about the root causes also. So you propose 12 core emotional needs that uh unify previous theories of motivation. So what distinguishes your framework from the models like Mashlows or self-determination theory?

SPEAKER_00 16:04

So yeah, so let me um back up another another one of my disappointments in graduate school. Besides it being a very cognitive, rational focus and sort of dismissing emotional motivation as sort of primitive and Freudian, they also would serve up these what they called mini theories. You know, mini theories of needs, mini theories of motivation. So you start with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you know, need for safety, a need for belonging, need for esteem, self-actualization. Then you had he focused on people who were self-actualized. So that's of course where his pyramid ends. You had people like David McClellan who focused on the world of work, and he had very different needs. He had the need for affiliation, the need for power, the need for success or achievement, you know, very different orientation. You had people who focused on artists and athletes like Chekim Holly, who then talked about flow theory and the need for immersion, others who talked about the need for cognition, the need for sort of effortful work. You had Ericsson talking about the need to establish your identity and all the different conflicts that you have to overcome to become a mature person. Then you have all the folks who focused on things like justice and ethics and purpose. Lawrence Kohlberg, uh the stages of moral development. Piaget spoke about that. You had uh Paul Bloom and uh Joshua Green, who have done more recent fMRI-based work, or work with young children, the babies, looking at the the seeds of a justice motive that are there by only a few months old. And no framework to integrate all this. Of course, you had Desi and Ryan, you mentioned self-determination theory. So they basically, this is the problem in psychology. Everyone who wants to come up with a new theory wants to say this is the thing that matters. This is ultimately the only thing that matters. For Maslow, ultimately it's self-actualization. Desi and Ryan, it's autonomy, relatedness, and competence. It all boils down to these three things. And uh, you know, if you asked Piaget and uh Kohlberg, they would say it has to do with moral development. The truth is, they're all right and they're all wrong. It's not any of those things, it's all of those things. And I think that's what's radically different about my approach. My approach is inclusive. It tries to say, well, what are the first principles that define this space? And can we find homes for every single one of these with nothing left over? And that's exactly what we did. So basically, motivation and emotional needs are all about change. It's about changing from a less desirable state to a more desirable state, essentially in service of homeostasis, keeping you alive and happy and well. The first question is where do I want to make a change? And I can make a change within myself or the world of other people. So self versus social. I can also make a change in the world of things and objects and work and play and money, which is the material world, or I can make a change in the spiritual world. Things you can't see, the immaterial, things like concepts and principles and ideals. So here you have the four things self, social, material, spiritual. It wasn't me that came up with this. I simply did a literature review and found that every major world religion posits that these are the four states of being, essentially, the four domains of life. And it was in psychology, it's in history, it's in self-help books, it's it's it's all or it's ubiquitous. And uh, if anyone's interested in that, they can go back to my my 2022 publication where I kind of introduced this model. The other question you can ask is once you know where, the next question is what level do you want to make? Is it entry-level, foundational, is it experiential, sort of becoming, or is it a state of actualization, a kind of an end point? And for this we borrowed Aristotle's modes of existence. He had a sort of three-level model of modes of existence. Say you have a load of lumber that's been dropped off in front of your house, you know, by a distributor, and you have a contractor come and build something for you, it's in a state of pure potential right now. That's foundational. Once you decide what you're gonna do and you begin to build, it's in a state of becoming. Once you've built a shed and you can put some, you know, your things in it and lock the door, now it's in a state of actualization, right? So that's those three. When you cross those three by the four uh areas of human life, we end up with 12. And lo and behold, every single one of the many theories of motivation and emotional needs that had ever been proposed in the last 150 years, they all have a home. There's nothing left over. And I mentioned in the beginning, each of them has a positive face and a negative face, right? Each of them has you can express as promotion needs, or you can express them as prevention needs. And you know, here's a difference from Maslow. Maslow believed that the bottom row were deficiency needs inherently. So safety was a deficiency need. So he's defining it as the prevention need. But that's not exactly true. Uh, there's plenty of people who, when they become wealthier, will move into a gated community with you know round the clock security and cameras everywhere and rest. And it's not that they particularly feel vulnerable, it's that they want they're aspiring to a higher level of security. You know, they buy gold instead of stocks because they're aspiring to a higher level of security. Right? It's not, it's not just negative, it's sort of prototypically negative, but it that's not only negative. And I think that's a really important realization across this entire framework that every single one of these can exert its force, negatively or positively. So, and we end up with these 12, and they build on each other uh in a really interesting way. In the self-domain, you can imagine it starts with safety. I've got to feel psychologically safe. If I don't feel psychologically safe, I can't get to the next level, the experiential level, which is authenticity. I can't really speak in my own voice. I can't really come out as who I really am because I don't feel psychologically safe. Why would I take that chance? If I do feel psychologically safe, I can speak in my voice, I can say what I want to say and dress how I want to dress and be who I want to be. And that's the only opportunity to get to the top level, which is self actualization, because you're never going to get there speaking in someone else's voice. You're not going to Get there sounding like your manager, sounding like your professor, sounding like ChatGPT. You need to speak in your own voice and you need to have something to say that's authentic. That same logic extends to the other three. Uh in the material domain, it starts with a sense of autonomy, right? I have to feel that I'm capable, I have the resources, I have the permission to move forward. If I do, I can then get I can dive in, I can do, you know, lose track of time, do some amazing things and look up, and that's where flow theory lives. I look up and I've done something amazing, and that's where success occurs. There's no way to achieve success if you don't have that immersion, that that flow state at some point in that process, if you're sort of faking it and distracted the whole time, you're not going to get there. It's not going to be good. So they build on each other that way. In the social domain, it begins with inclusion. I have to feel like I'm part of my family, my tribe, my community. If I do, I can begin to form one-on-one closer relationships, which is caring. And then if I have those relationships and I've done good social behaviors, including and caring, then I will get respect, validation, recognition, affirmation, which is the top level of the social domain. And then in the spiritual domain, it begins with a basic sense that good is rewarded, bad is punished, basic justice, right? If I don't have basic justice, I can't start worrying about the next levels of the spiritual domain. If I do have justice, I feel it's basically good is rewarded, bad is punished. Now I can apply those principles to questions that are the gray areas of life about self-interest. To what extent do I need to restrain self-interest for the greater good? And this is where, you know, sort of having honest claims, honest pricing, transparency, you know, corporate ethics, all of that plays. If I now have justice and ethics in place, it's a fair system, people restrain self-interest appropriately, this is the first opportunity to define a higher purpose. And it's not me saying that, it's every theologian who ever lived. You know, from Thomas Aquinas, uh St. Augustine, Maimonides, Martin Luther King Jr., they all say that the way to judge if if a transformation is actually sort of divinely inspired is to look at its effects on justice and ethics. If it has no ameliorative effects on justice and ethics, then it's not real. Because you can't, there is no getting closer to God. There is no getting closer to the sort of you know ideal without first treating other people with dignity and respect and having justice and ethics in place. To try to leapfrog that as many people do uh is fool's errand. So that's essentially the model. So I'll pause there.

SPEAKER_01 24:35

Amazing. That's really uh great learning, I'd say, and clarification as well, I would say. So suppose someone who is listening right now and wanted to audit their own well-being, what signals would you tell them what kind of specific emotional need is unmet?

SPEAKER_00 24:51

Yeah, and I think that's that's where my approach differs pretty markedly from a lot of people's. A lot of the I call it all roads lead to mindfulness meditation. You know, it doesn't matter what's wrong with you, it doesn't matter what you've been diagnosed with, depression, anxiety, trauma, you know, uh stress, burnout, you know, the answer is always mindfulness meditation. And that there's nothing wrong with that. Mindfulness meditation is good, it works, I do it. I I think though, it it it presumes that there isn't something you can do to change your situation.

Exploring Emotional Needs and Wellbeing

SPEAKER_00 25:23

And I think that begins with asking, what are my unmet needs? Like, what is this? I'm feeling badly, I'm having an emotional response. Why? I'm not getting something. I'm either not getting relief from something bad, or I'm not having the opportunity for something good. And you've got to bring that into focus and really be able to get comfortable and conversant with these 12 needs and their different manifestations, and then it becomes actually relatively easy to identify what it is that's being blocked. And then that helps you to actually change the situation because you now know what to ask for, you now know what to do. It's not just about tuning out and feeling better in the moment. Although there's nothing wrong with feeling better in the moment, it doesn't actually change your situation unless you go through this exercise. So I would encourage people to come to the website. We have a free assessment there. It's an image-based assessment, it only takes three minutes. It's called uh you go to agilebrain.com. And if you go there, you'll see take a free assessment. You click on that, and anyone can do it. It's free. You can just you pick what area of your life you want to focus on. So there's prompts like, you know, I think about my work, I wish I could feel a little bit more. You know, when I think about the direction my life is going, I wish I could feel a little bit more. And essentially it's an incomplete sentence task. So I'd say, okay, when I'm thinking about my current situation, I wish I could feel a little bit more. And then images will flash at you very quickly, one every second. You have no time to think. Your whole job is to simply tap the uh the the spacebar or the screen, depending on your device, in response. Does it complete the sentence for you or not? And you have no time to think, and that's exactly what we want. Uh, this is completely an emotional exercise. There's no thinking required, there's no right or wrong answers. And this exercise will generate a report for you instantly, which will give you a map of what your unmet emotional needs are, and a whole bunch of uh verbiage to explain, you know, what this is, how this might be showing up in your life, some questions to ask yourself. And we also have a chat bot that you can go right into and it'll read your results and say, okay, this is what I'm seeing, and you can query it and say, you know, tell me about that. This is my situation, how does that apply to this? And it will it will work like a very uh attentive and skilled therapist uh in terms of identifying, you know, what are those things that you actually can change in your life in order to meet your needs. So basically, uh one of the things I should mention about the chatbot is you know, here's the book, the emotionally agile brain. And it's an LLM that's trained on this whole book and on all of my publications. I've got like 16 peer-reviewed publications, all of those are in there, along with everything else I've written or spoken about. So it has a lot to work with. And it's very flexible. Hopefully, people will go, they'll try it and hopefully have a good experience.

SPEAKER_01 28:05

Definitely. And it's definitely it sounds emotional, it it like emotions uh become data. Right. So uh also your title uses the phrases emotionally agile. What does agility look like in real time? I mean, especially when things are under stress.

SPEAKER_00 28:26

Yeah. So I'm using it in the same way that um Susan David does uh in her book, Emotional Agility. I think what she meant and what I mean is if you are sensitive to the signals, right? So it could be a physiological signal, it could be a psychological signal, you know, you're feeling constriction in your throat, your heart's racing, your palms are sweating, whatever it is, those are pretty extreme. Most of the time, fortunately, we're not in that sort of state of distress. But we have little hints that something isn't quite right, or that something is good, and we want to avoid or uh approach or withdraw. Those are enough of a signal in order to begin to identify what's the need. You know, what is the need that I'm excited about fulfilling, that there's an opportunity to fulfill, what's the need that I need relief from? You know, there's a bad feeling here, I'm feeling constrained, I'm feeling like my autonomy is being taken away. You know, that is a bad feeling. But now I know what's causing that feeling, and now I know what I can do about it. I

Understanding Emotional Agility

SPEAKER_00 29:25

think that's to me, that's the essence of emotional agility is to not just recognize the emotion, you know, because that that's sort of where emotional intelligence, I think, gets stuck. It's about sort of accurately labeling your emotions, like I'm feeling happy, I'm feeling surprised, I'm feeling excited, I'm feeling, you know, sad. That's good, but that's not enough. To me, those are just the epiphenomena that just keep rolling through your nervous system all the time. But it's why is it happening? That's the real question. You know, there's an emotional need that's not being met, either positive or negative. That's what's causing those emotions to ripple. And as many authors have said correctly, they can take many different forms of emotion. You know, there isn't a one-to-one correspondence between an emotional need and a feeling that you have in the moment. You can have a lot of different feelings. You can get angry, you can be afraid, you can be sad. But you tracing it back to the emotional need, that's where the real magic happens. That's where you begin to have the ability to actually do something about it.

SPEAKER_01 30:30

And so, like even with the awareness, people regress under pressure. And so what tends to derail someone who understands their emotional needs but struggles to consistently fulfill them? What do you say?

SPEAKER_00 30:49

Yeah, and and you know, it's not a panacea, you know, like if you were a person who is being held against your will somewhere, and you don't have, you know, you're not having interactions with people that are positive, and I mean, that can lead to chronic stress, that can lead to a whole variety of psychological and physical disorders. I I I think, and I talk about this a lot in the book, what happens when our needs aren't being met, and all of the sort of neurological and physiological studies that have been done that show when someone is, you know, has a need for caring that's unfulfilled over many years, it can stunt you, it can really mess you up. It's all to say that there are real consequences to unmet emotional needs. It doesn't mean that being aware of it is a cure. You do have to start at that foundational level and ensure that you have justice. There is a path that you can have remediation if you're being treated unfairly, that there is safety, that you're not actually being threatened or victimized in some way, that there is autonomy, you have freedom, you're not a slave, for instance. Inclusion, you're not excluded, you know, unfairly, you know, you're not being discriminated against. All of those are very deeply interwoven concepts. And what we see, the most profoundly negative profiles are the ones that have a lot of promotion, a lot of uh prevention needs in the foundational level for that reason. And to get to the point where you can begin to focus on aspirations, positive aspirations, you really do need to deal with those things first. And that can take a lot of forms, you know, not all of them are pleasant. You know, it might have to be leaving a relationship that's going to cause all sorts of upset. It might be uh, you know, breaking out of prison, you know, it can take it can be really quite serious. But if you can get free from that first, you know, foundational level of prevention needs, that's your first opportunity to begin to actually grow to your full potential as a person.

SPEAKER_01 32:48

Exactly. Amazing. So for someone who's listening who feels stuck, frustrated, chronically dissatisfied, what is the one question they can ask themselves today to begin identifying on unmet emotional need?

SPEAKER_00 33:06

Yeah, so I'd say the best way for me, in my experience, has been to just lay this these these 12 needs out in front of you. Just look at the framework and just think through what's happening in each one of those areas. And and one exercise that I've done with a lot of people that works really well is say, go get an image. Just find an image online, find an image from your life, take a picture of something that represents how that need is currently being satisfied or how that need, or what the ideal state would be for that need. So, and just build this framework. It becomes like a collage, right? So when I did this, I remember uh, you know, for for um authenticity, you know, it was like I had a picture of a famous author who I really respected, you know, as sort of my my placeholder for authenticity. And I had a picture of you know, uh for inclusion, like a group of people around a campfire. I was very involved in Boy Scouts at the time. That was sort of my social group. And sort of like that's the state of my of my need fulfillment currently. And from looking across that, it can really, again, we like images because they they're powerful, they're emotional, visceral, and they don't require a lot of explanation, a lot of words. It really is about an intuitive sense for what you're missing. And if you look at your collage and you you see you know your attention's drawn to something is not quite right, that's sort of a major uh that that is a salient unmet need in most cases.

SPEAKER_01 34:39

Correct. Exactly. So if someone wants to connect with you, how they can connect?

SPEAKER_00 34:45

Yeah, so I'm on LinkedIn, it's JD Pincus. They can reach me through our website through agilebrain.com. We um have monthly meetings and uh office hours for people who are like in the coaching world or therapy world. We have a whole training program and a certification program. We're in lots of different countries right now. We're in Ukraine, Nigeria, China, all over North America, South America, South Africa. So uh we're we're spreading out. So we're very delighted to talk to anybody, no matter where they are, no matter what their circumstances.

SPEAKER_01 35:18

Amazing. So, dear listeners, what I'll do is I'll put all the links and the details into the show notes for your easy reference. And I would love to say that technology continues to evolve, markets fluctuate and strategies shift. But human motivation, the architecture beneath the behavior remains constant. So here we are on Mind Meets Machine and we explore not just the innovation but the psychology that powers it. And in today's conversation, today's conversation gave you the language for something you have been feeling but you couldn't articulate and share it. So until next time, this is your host awake and this is my name is Machine. Listen closely to your emotions, maybe pointing you towards exactly what you need. Thank you so much.