Susan David on why work feels harder than ever and how understanding emotional agility will help.

Susan David

When we are exploring issues around purpose, or values, or you know, even time management, even productivity, these things are impacted by emotional experience. And a central thesis of my work is that as knowledge becomes increasingly commoditized, as we are seeing with AI, it will be more important and more differentiating for a leader who is able to connect with these human beings and with these human skills in ways that are effective. And it's not only how they relate to people around them but it's also how they relate to themselves

Damon Klotz

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Culture First Podcast, I’m your host Damon Klotz and I have something that I need to admit to you.

We have released over 50 episodes of this podcast since 2019. When I look back that’s a lot of amazing guests that I’ve had the chance to welcome into the Culture Amp community to discuss how we can create a better world of work.

I’m not a parent and I don’t have pets, but even I know that you’re not supposed to have favorites.

But…. with a dramatic pause. The episode you’re about to hear might be one of my favorites and end up in the Culture First Hall of Fame one day.

My guest today is an Award-winning psychologist from Harvard Medical School, and when she told me that it’s never been harder to be a human at work, I immediately knew that this is the episode that we all need to hear right now.

Susan David is one of the world’s leading management thinkers and the creator of emotional agility, which was named a management idea of the year. Her first book on emotional agility was #1 on the Wall Street Journal Best Sellers list, and her TED Talk has over 11 million views. 

Susan and I have been looking forward to and talking about having this conversation for a while now, and I believe this episode is coming out when the world needs it most.

We will discuss emotions, how we process them, how we handle them, how they show up in the workplace and how we can create space between ourselves and the emotions to help us take action and move forward.

At the heart of this conversation is trying to understand why we have normalised the idea that emotions are foundational to our experience as a human, yet still misunderstood or sometimes even excluded from our experience at work.

I want you to reflect on whether you’ve told someone at work that you’re stressed lately. We use these umbrella terms all the time at work. You’ll hear in this conversation that our body and psychology doesn’t actually know what to do with these big umbrella terms. Emotional agility is about getting specific. Are you stressed, or if you get specific, is there something else happening? Do you feel disappointed, do you feel unsupported, or do you just feel exhausted? When we get specific with our emotions, we activate our readiness potential, allowing us to move forward and have the necessary conversations about why work can sometimes feel really hard.

Susan will help you rethink the role of the leader and why telling your team that everything is going to be okay when you don’t actually know if it will, means that forced false positivity is just denial and reduces our ability to let our emotions be part of the conversation at work.

By the end of this conversation, my hope for you as a listener is that you will be able to sharpen your emotional agility, learn how to see emotions as data, how emotions are a signpost for our deepest needs and values and how you can have a healthy relationship with your emotions where you own them and they don’t own you and your behaviour. 


The final moments of this podcast gave me goosebumps, so if you need to - lock yourself in a room, go for a walk after a long day and make sure you pack all of your emotions with you in order to listen to the end, then I encourage you to do so.

Alright, Let’s get started and head over to my conversation with Susan David.

Damon Klotz

So today on the Culture First podcast, I have the honor of being joined by Susan David. Susan, thank you so much for joining me today.

Susan David

Thank you, Damon. Lovely to be with you.

Damon Klotz

So in order to open up these conversations, I have a little bit of a tradition, which is kind of trying to get people to describe their work, but in a different bit of a way. So if people were to look you up online, they would see that you are South African. They would see that you're an award-winning Harvard Medical School psychologist and author and one of the world's most influential management thinkers. But let's say a curious 10-year-old has just walked up to you on the streets of Boston and said, excuse me, what do you do for work? How do you answer?

Susan David

love this question. I would say what I do for work is I help people to be the healthiest versions of themselves. My work essentially focuses on the core question which is what does it take for us to be healthy human beings so that the relationships that we have and the organizations that we lead can also be healthy.

Damon Klotz

I love that. And then one of the other ways that I try to open up this conversation is, and this is a question I tell people to ask in their team meetings or in their one-on-ones, which is the, if I really knew you today, what would I know? So I know that we've sort of known each other through our work for the last couple of years, but today is a singular day. If I really knew you today, what would I know?

Susan David

If you really knew me today, you would know that I am passionate about bringing skills that have traditionally been under-taught to people in ways that are powerful, practical and science-based. And that's been my driving passion for every day, including today.

Damon Klotz

Love that. I have to share this little anecdote that in preparation for this interview, I was actually walking around the streets of Melbourne where I'm currently living. And I was listening to some of your content and I was writing down notes really furiously. And then I looked up and you probably won't believe what street I was standing right in front of.

Susan David

You tell me.

Damon Klotz

Fear Street.

Susan David

I did not know there was a Fear Street in Melbourne.

Damon Klotz

Yep, it's in the sort of back suburb, back streets of Richmond right near the culture app office. And I'm like, has this always been here? Because that was just too weird for me to have that moment listening to your content on fear street.

Susan David

I love that. I absolutely love that. So one quick thing as a point of connection, I know you've got a global audience, but I did my PhD actually in Australia and it's my little soul home. So while I come to you with a South African accent from Boston, I have very strong ties there.

Damon Klotz

I love that. One thing that I think, I'm not sure if you've been asked this before, but my experience of working and knowing South Africans is that for the most part, I think they're all incredible storytellers. And I just want to know if you've ever thought of or reflected on what makes, you know, a South African a great storyteller. Is it something about the connection to the land, the ecosystem, the way that you're sort of brought up? Because every South African I know, is able to weave a story that has me like feeling all my emotions, crying, laughing. So I'm not sure if there's something that unites all you South Africans that we can learn from.

Susan David

Well, I think there are a couple of things. I think firstly, in the African tradition, there is the sitting around a fire, telling stories. You know, there is a verbal, there is a very strong verbal tradition. And then I think there is the land. There is this growing up in an expanse that is both complex, but also extraordinary. And many of the memories that I have as a child are being in that expanse. And, you know, obviously not part of the city when we would go away on weekends, this, you know, you've got these incredible animals that are there, the sunset, and there's this gorgeousness. And I think there is a spiritual grounding and storytelling element often comes from that because what is storytelling? Storytelling is both emotion, but it's also about a connect with something beyond you as a person. So there's something very transcendent. And I think there's a lot in South Africa, as well as in many countries that has that quality to it.

Damon Klotz

No, thank you so much for sharing that. It was just something that when I was reflecting on this, I'm like, there's certainly something that connects all of you in the way that you sort of think about story and the whole idea of sitting down and sharing it and it being both a ritual and a pastime and it is really special. So.

Susan David

I'll try to do it proud. I'll try to do one of two stories.

Damon Klotz

When I reflect on some of the most important conversations that I've had on this podcast, I think what connects a lot of the guests that I think really stand out to me is that they're bringing language and science into the workplace that for many different reasons and context aren't always talked about at work. And when I think about some of those guests that come to mind, it was like Esther Perel on relationships and Priya Parker on conflict and Rachel Botsman on trust. And now I really think we're going to have one of those moments today with you in regards to emotions because… Emotions is a topic that impacts like every single person on this planet. And when I was researching, you know, for this interview, what I found really interesting was that I was listening to some of your episodes that you've been on with like Dax Shepard on Armchair Expert, Dare to Lead with Brene Brown and like The Rich Roll Show. And while I think the overarching context of emotional agility was obviously covered in each episode, you end up having very different conversations with each host based on what they were bringing to the table. So I was wondering, is there something that might be important for you to know about me and maybe how I see the world in order for us to have a richer conversation?

Susan David

Well, you talk about storytelling and you described it a little bit before this conversation about the way things are and the way things could be and, you know, just even the journey. And I'm wondering what you curious about, like, what are some of the things that when you were listening to the podcast struck a nerve or connected with you in a particular way? Because that's maybe a helpful place to start.

Damon Klotz

Yeah. I think for me, when I was both listening to your, your work, your research, as well as the interviews that you, you've sort of done is it's this inner knowing that we're having an experience with our emotions without always being able to translate it to a healthy behavior with how we kind of react to it. And I think in the workplace, um, I don't think we talk a lot about the way that emotions impact our ability to work. And I think the conversations that I've heard you have is certainly more with some of those people was more about personal emotions and how they deal with individual circumstances in their life. So I think the thing that stood out to me was how do we make that leap where we're encouraging people to better understand how they're responding to their emotions and why anger isn't always anger. It might be disappointment or fear. But then how do we make that big leap into being able to have that same language in the workplace.

Susan David

Well, I think that's so powerful because on the one hand we have this narrative that says emotions are the most important aspect of us as human beings. Emotions drive every aspect of our lives, how we love, how we live, how we parent, how we lead. And of course every day as we come to the world in our organizations we bring how we feel and that plays out then in how we lead and interact and collaborate.

And so it's curious that on the one hand, there is this absolute reality that emotions are foundational to all aspects of emotional health and culture. And then on the other hand, there is a question about… How do we have these conversations effectively in organizations? Like, why aren't we having them effectively in organizations? And it seems like a really, really interesting dichotomy that this essential aspect of us as human beings somehow feels like it hasn't found its way into organizations, because that really then is very interesting. And I think as human beings, then we ask ourselves, why is that? You know, why is it that in 2023, we are still having conversations that are things like, well, you know, does emotional health and people's wellbeing really impact organizational outcomes? Like it's curious to me that these are conversations that we are only having relatively recently. And so I think that is probably a really good place to start, which is when we think about the history of emotions, and also how emotions are seen in organizations and why emotions are often seen as soft and ephemeral and where no one would ever question whether strategy or logic or data should have a place in the workplace. And yet there is still this relative tentativeness in a lot of organizations or cynicism, about whether emotions should play any role or whether they're soft, whether they matter, etc.

And so maybe what we do is we go back a little bit where we look at even Victorian times and the feminization that happened with emotions in Victorian times that still plays out in organizations today. So during Victorian times, education tended to be mainly made accessible to men. And the types of education at the time were the science and the so-called hard sciences and then there was the other and the things that fell into the other included emotions and emotions became feminized and what I mean when I say feminized is emotions became associated with things that were more female and that seemed to be the antithesis of the hard sciences. They seem to be things that are not tangible, things that we can't really predict, that we really can't understand. And so what we end up having is this really interesting experience where there is this feminization of the most essential part of ourselves. And that feminization has come at a cost to our global well being and has come at a cross at a cost to our and it's come at a cost to our global cultures within our organizations. Because then what you have is you have this Victorian age leading into the Industrial Revolution. And I'm giving this as background because I think it's really helpful when we are leaders thinking about why do we have some of the biases that we have? Why do we call these skills soft skills? They're not soft, they are foundational skills. And so what happens is the Victorian period leads into the Industrial Revolution. And in thea focus on what goes into a machine and what comes out of it out of a machine and what can be measured. Okay, and of course what was difficult to measure at the time was emotions and these kinds of skills and so again for the next hundred years or so emotions were cast aside from organizational life. So what we land up having is a context in which all of the skills that we've spoken about, the strategy and the logic and all of these things become seen as being the core most important skills to organizational effectiveness. And what happens is Leaders who are brilliant at getting results, but who leave people burnt out, get sheltered. Leaders who are, you know, super productive individually, but whose teams are completely alienated, get sheltered. There is a real impact in the work that every chief people officer, every leader is doing in terms of this idea. And so one of my passions, as you can hear, is about bringing these skills front and center into organizations because how people feel is going to impact how they relate to their customers, to their clients, to loyalty, to experience, to how long someone stays in an organization, everything. And yet… our schools have not taught us these skills and our organizations have not taught us these skills.

Damon Klotz

And I think when we think about employee experience, so much of our experience ends up really being impacted and dictated by the type of, I guess, emotional agility believers that we've spent the most time with end up having. And I know that you've talked about this and also Esther has talked about this idea of like, can you have more than one relationship with the same person, but also can you have more than one career in the same company? And I think you can absolutely change the type of work and your experience of your work by being with a leader who actually understands these concepts and is willing to have those conversations about how our reaction and how our emotions and how our relationship with our work, not just what we're doing, but how we're doing it and how it feels to achieve these things. Whether that's a conversation that a leader is willing to have, I know for me personally, my working experience has always been heavily impacted by the type of leader that I have and their ability to understand, I guess, not only how to get the best out of me, but sort of what makes me, me as a human.

Susan David

Yeah, and it's really important because when we are exploring issues around purpose, or values, or you know, even time management, even productivity, these things are impacted by emotional experience. And a central thesis of my work is that as knowledge becomes increasingly commoditized, as we are seeing with AI. With AI, traditional tasks and knowledge are becoming increasingly commoditized it will be more important and more differentiating for a leader who is able to connect with these human beings and with these human skills in ways that are effective. And it's not only how they relate to people around them but it's also how they relate to themselves because in many ways we know that we are being outpaced as human beings by technology. Okay, we know that if we look at our evolutionary history as human beings that evolution tends to be really slow. Technology is really quick and so we are being outpaced by technology and we can then ask the question when human beings are faced with lots of stress and complexity, they are more likely to have very particular cognitive reactions. They are much more likely to lock down into wrong versus right, black and white thinking, they're much more likely to be siloed in their organizations, to not think about how what they are doing is going to impact on other teams. There is much more stress, there is much more burnout. Any leader who spent just a moment in an organization, they are, you know, surrounded by all of these realities. And so the need for us to cultivate and focus on these emotional skills is likely more important and more urgent than any other time in human history.

Damon Klotz

I could not agree more and I feel like people who listen to this show are very much in that same camp and it's just about us getting this message out to more people. And I thought maybe just to kind of hit on one foundational element of your work, but maybe talk about it in a workplace context before we kind of get into more of the actions that we're sort of seeing inside of companies. You know, emotional agility is a core part of your work. It has also been recognized as one of the most important new terms, you know, in management thinking.

You describe it as the ability to be healthy with our thoughts and ourselves. Is there any additional lens that you apply to that when you think about emotional agility in the workplace?

Susan David

Yes, every day in the workplace we have difficult thoughts. The thought might be, my boss is an idiot or my team members are fraud. We have difficult emotions. We have emotional experiences like stress and frustration and anxiety because of change. And we have stories. Some of our stories were written on our mental chalkboards when we were five years old. Stories about, am I creative? Am I not? Am I good enough? Am I not?

you know, whether we are cared for by the organization about change, where the change is going to be. So we have all of these thoughts, emotions and stories every day. And most thinking, in a lot of the management literature and even in ways that find itself into leadership dialogue is the idea that leaders always need to be, you know, cheering their people on and leaders always need to be positive and leaders always need to be solution oriented and that that's a job of a leader. And what I suggest in my work is that, is that when people are experiencing these thoughts, emotions, and stories, a leader who unsees them, a leader who says, well, you know, I know you're concerned, but everything's going to be okay in the end, just believe in the strategy, which is very, very common. That unseeing of the individual, that leader is engaging in forced false positivity. And forced false positivity is not leadership, forced false positivity is denial. Forced false positivity is denial wrapped up in rainbows and sparkles, but it is denial. And so a core lens of my work is the idea that human thoughts, emotions, and stories are human and they are normal. And that we as leaders, our job, is not to force positivity or to persuade someone why, you know, they should just believe or to jump to solution. But rather that emotional agility is about recognizing that these thoughts, emotions and stories are not good or bad. They are just normal. They're normal. And immediately, if you are a leader, if you work in an organization where you adopt that stance, you can see what you're doing is you're engaging instead of saying, gee, that person's negative about the change, or gee, some people are on the bus and some people are off the bus. Instead, what you're doing is you're recognizing that everyone is just trying to make sense of their environment. And so there is a holding lightly of people's emotional experience. And when we hold that experience lightly, we are able to come to it with greater levels of compassion, because it's hard to human right now. It's hard to be in an organization going through change. So we bring greater levels of compassion. We bring greater levels of seeing the other person, we able to engage more in the reality of what's going on. So for example, someone who's worried about change in their organization, a leader who's able to gently show up to that, is then someone who's able to understand like, why is the person concerned about the change and that, and that it's not that they're being negative, it's that they actually care about the customer and they care about how the change is going to impact on the customer, that there's something real and there's something powerful and values connected in what the person's experiencing. So really, Damon, I think, Yes, it's about being able to be with thoughts, emotions and stories in ways that are healthy. Recognizing that these thoughts, emotions and stories are normal, with a massive caveat that this doesn't mean it needs to drive every action. It doesn't mean because I'm angry about the change, I get to just have it out with everyone because a very important part of my work is bringing in values. You know, who do we want to be as a leader? What value is it that I'm moving towards in my work? In my organization? What will bring me closer to being the person, the colleague that I most want to be? So that's a very big lens. But it's really what it does is it pushes against a lot of management practice of forced false positivity. It normalizes human experience. It elevates humanity and values. And it also says that there are actually core skills. This is not ephemeral and intangible. There are core skills that are crucial to our ability to navigate these realities effectively.

Damon Klotz

I think we saw some of that behavior that you mentioned play out in the workplace in two major ways in the past sort of three years. The first one was the sort of pretending to know that everything was going to be okay at the start of COVID, where all the leaders were like, don't worry. And like, trust us and we'll work it out. When the reality is no one knew. And then over the last 12 months with some of the sort of more economic changes that we're seeing, it's the amount of companies who probably had leaders telling everyone to trust me, it's going to be okay. We're like, we're going to get there. And then two weeks later, there was a massive reduction in force and people are being made redundant, which they've clearly been planning for, but for the two months before that, leaders were telling everyone to trust us and be fine, and this whole idea of this positivity to keep people working towards a number. But they already knew that there was a decision that was going to be made.

Susan David

Yeah, there is a rhetoric and a reality and I've worked with, you know, the vast majority of my work is with global enterprises. And I've worked with so many organizations where people will have news that they keep quiet and they're like, it's very private, we're not going to tell anyone, no one knows. Everyone knows. Everyone knows. And so you know, what does this do? It evokes cynicism, it evokes an unseeing. And again, what we're doing is we are as leaders, we want to be engaging with reality, be part of reality because it's engaging with reality that enables us to plan and to do the best we can around that. And part of engaging with reality is engaging with the reality of people's experience. And you're so right, you know, in COVID a couple of things that struck me was everyone always talking about silver linings. And, you know, there's a silver lining and of course there are silver linings. There's so much learning that often comes through difficult experiences. But very often it felt like there was a pushing away from reality, a lack of compassion. You know, there was almost this idea that if you didn't use your time in quarantine to either dust off your business strategy, write a novel or perfect your sourdough bread baking, there was something wrong with you. You know, you didn't lack the time, you lacked the discipline.

So whereas actually that moment was instead calling for us to see each other and to see one another and this is continuing. I'll give you a practical example of this which is many organizations right now are going through transformation and every organization that plans for transformation typically spends 99 percent of its time developing out the strategy and the plan and the data and the nuance and they spend all of this time doing this.

What accounts for successful transformation? The single biggest driver, and this is research that's been done at Oxford and EY and beyond, the single biggest driver of transformation is actually people's emotional journey. The single biggest driver of successful transformation. The single biggest predictor of unsuccessful transformation is when people's emotional journey has not been accounted for. And of course you could take that and you could apply to any other aspect of our business from customer acquisition to loyalty to client experience to so on. So it's really profoundly important.

Damon Klotz

I think the humanizing of transformation as well as the humanizing of data is incredibly important. And obviously at Culture Amp, we spent a lot of time thinking about data. On one hand, I can tell you that, you know, one billion data points about the employee experience have flown through Culture Amp now, over one billion. But I always go back down to like that as an individual and that is like someone's individual experience on any given day. And I think, you have this great terminology around data being sort of like emotions being data as opposed to directives and this idea of signposting being important for us to understand how we're sort of seeing emotions play out in the workplace. So could you give some advice to leaders listening about how those two things play out and how they can use those emotions as data?

Susan David

Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of leaders who are listening right now might be saying, well, what should I be doing if I'm, you know, if I'm not positive, like, that's what I need to be doing, I can't be negative. Or leaders might be saying, well, you know, I've got to evoke some trust in people. And I think, you know, we had a moment in history where one of the most important leadership capacities is not asking people to trust the map.

Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, described what I think is one of the most powerful ideas in its simplicity but in its truth. Heraclitus said, as a human being you can never step into the same river twice. And it's so powerful. And as a leader, the idea that there is this map and the map's going to tell us exactly which way we're going and it's a strategy and we're going to be able to check it off, it is an untruth.

There is no map. We can sketch out the best thing we can try to, but in truth, the ecosystem is changing and the economy is changing and everything around us and change is changing. So when we ask people to trust the map, but the map can never be written in pen, then it becomes a falsehood, it becomes something that is ephemeral and is difficult. And so I think a really important aspect of leadership today is that we are asking people to trust the compass. You know, trusting the compass, not the map. What does that mean? What trusting the compass means is the leader who is grounded in values, the leader who says things like, I don't know what the answer is, but even in the midst of this challenge.

Who do we want to be with each other? How do we want to come together as a team? How do we want to connect with each other? What are our values that we want to bring towards one another? So even that simple question, as a leader, what it does is it moves away from forced false positivity into the reality of the people in front of us, and recognizing that people are coming with a sense of who they want to be and how they want to be. And that if we can bring that to the surface, that becomes a very powerful guiding light, or a guiding star for us in our teams as we move forward. And we're not just doing this because it sounds good. We also know that a place of values, connectedness and values alignment, that there are significantly lower levels of burnout, it's something that we can talk about it later. We know that when we act from a place of values, that we are more likely to sustain effective and productive behaviors over time. We know that when we act from a place of values, that it's a core human need for individuals that there is a purpose and something bigger than them. And so there's something really powerful in moving away from the idea of a map into a compass. And then that gets into the question that you asked earlier, which is this idea of, well, when we have these difficulty emotions, how do we use them? And so one of the ways that I think about difficult emotions is, again, that these emotions aren't good or bad, they just are. But that emotions are data. Just like you've got your strategic data or your financial data, emotions are data. Emotions signpost our needs and our values. So so what I'm meaning here is if you are a leader, and you have you know, zoom call after zoom call after zoom call every day or you’re running from meeting to meeting, you can be lonely in a crowd. And if you're starting to recognize that you are lonely, disconnected from yourself or disconnected from others, that loneliness feels really tough. But loneliness is a signpost that you need more intimacy and connection in your life, that you maybe need more authentic conversations with your team, that there is something important for you that is not being met. Boredom. You know, people can be very busy, extremely busy and bored at the same time because you're doing the same stuff day off today. And what is boredom? It feels really tough but boredom signposts very often that learning and growth are important to us, and that we don't have enough of it. So when we or a team member is coming and saying, I'm feeling bored, or I'm feeling angry, you know, or I'm feeling sad, as a leader, instead of pushing to positivity, the hallmark of emotional effectiveness as a leader is going to emotions, going to emotions, not by passing them for solution, but going to emotion.

Susan David

So really unpacking like what is what is it that the person's feeling but also what value is being signposted? You know anger is often signposting a need for equity and fairness. There's so much that our emotions tell us and so they don't need to be seen as ephemeral or difficult or intangible, they're really powerful. So then you know, you said, okay, so emotions are data. Yes, emotions are data, they signpost our needs and our values. But emotions are not directives. They're not directives. And so the example that I use in my TED talk is I can show up with love to my son in his frustration with his baby sister. I can go to his emotions. I can see him. I can empathize. I can do all of those things. It doesn't mean that I'm endorsing his idea that he gets to give her away to the first stranger he sees in the shopping mall. Okay, we own our emotions. They don't own us. So just like you wouldn't take a single number on a spreadsheet and let that number drive your whole strategy, your whole outcome, your whole everything. In the same way, no single emotion needs to drive our action. And unfortunately, often our emotions do drive our actions. So someone will be feeling undermined in a meeting and they'll just shut down. Or they'll say, you know, my Boss is an idiot. I'm just not going to share anymore. And, and, and sometimes, sometimes the more important question to ask is. If the gods of right came down and said, you are right. You're right. Your boss is an idiot. You know, you're right. Your organization is doing things really badly. Like you are right. You still get the choice as a human being stepping into your power, your presence, your wisdom, your leadership, your groundedness to ask yourself, even if I'm right, who do I choose to be in this moment? And so this circles back to this Heraclitus quote, which is the world is changing around us. And the emotional agility is the skills that are skills that enable us to step into the river in a way that is grounded in a way that's compassionate and breathing and and is not ignoring the river, but is born from a position of showing up with humanity and with compassion.

Damon Klotz

When you said that, it's one of my favorite, it is one of my favorite quotes because the way I've also heard it expanded upon is that you can never step into the same river because you're never the same person and it's not the same body of water because the water is always flowing and changing and so are you. And it's, you know, like you said, it's about checking in with the people, the humans in our workplace in that moment because something that you might have used as a data point about them six months ago might have changed based on the changing person and the experience that they're having right now. You also mentioned these leaders who like, you know, am I experiencing loneliness or boredom? They're really, they're really hard things to admit, probably first as a leader to admit, especially if you're feeling responsible for your team, but maybe even more so for an individual who is worried that if they admit some of these things, it impacts their ability to keep their job. So do you have any, I guess, stories or advice around that experience when it comes to admitting some of our humanities that we might feel like we're not allowed to in the workplace.

Susan David

Well, admitting or showing up to yourself does not mean that you always need to express those things. So, you know, often when people talk about like feeling your feelings, you know, let's all feel our feelings. Sometimes it sounds like feeling our feelings means we've got to tell everyone our feelings. There is a really important distinction between feeling your feelings. It doesn't mean you need to act on them. So when people are recognizing that they are experiencing some of these things, the anger, the boredom, etc. And we're saying, well, will them to be in a situation where they are compromised or they might lose their jobs or they might struggle. What I would actually suggest is based on the research we know that the opposite is true, that the more we push aside these difficult emotions, the more we pretend that actually these things aren't being experienced, whether that's with ourselves or with other people. The more we push aside, the less ability we have to actually problem solve, the less ability we have to say, okay, what is the value that's in play here? Okay, I'm bored, I need more learning and growth. How can I get it from other parts of my business? Or who can I connect with in a way that might expand the breadth of what I know or my expertise here? So the more we ignore, the more we suppress, the less likely we are to be actually over time. And this is why these skills are so important because you know you highlighted this a little bit earlier this idea of context which is that my sense of the person from six months ago might be different today because they are changing and we are changing and emotional agility skills are really the skills that help us to pay attention to the context so that we can be sensitive to context. And I'll give you an example of something that I experienced recently. I was working with a very senior leader who's and this is a this is a fairly dramatic example but we see it play out in many different ways. So I was working with a senior leader and obviously I'll change all of the details here but this leader was extremely an extremely important individual in bringing food to families in a refugee context in a country at war. And this individual described to me how in order to do his job properly to bring this food to these individuals. He needed to work with a particular government official. And he said to me that the government official completely enraged him and he said to me that every time he spoke to the government official, that this government official made him feel belittled and insignificant like his father used to make him feel. And therefore, the way he was dealing with it was by ignoring the government officials' calls, completely ignoring his phone calls. Now, this is an example not of

Susan David

emotional agility. It's an example of emotional rigidity. Rigidity because this person is now not in the context of the actual situation he's facing. Rather, he's got this story from his childhood that is playing into the context. And it's a rigid story because in order to solve this situation by using this particular story, you either are going to need a brand new childhood, or you're going to need a brand new government official, neither of which is likely. So in order to be effective as a human being, it asks us that we move beyond this rigidity into context into what is in front of me and into the skills that help us to navigate that. And if it's helpful, you know, we can maybe discuss some of those like practical skills that enable these four leaders if they're dealing with teams or challenging situations.

Damon Klotz

Yeah, I would love to discuss that and maybe a lens as well to think about it is this idea of how to better understand the emotions of the people that we're working with when so much of the world has gone from the 3D to the 2D. And while we see maybe more of someone's personal home, we don't see more of them as a person in the same way that when we spend time face to face. So I was wondering if there was any ways that you were seeing our ability to understand the emotions and feelings of others, whether that's become harder with the ways that we're more and more knowledge workers are working these days.

Susan David

In some ways, yes, I think it is harder. In some ways, there is a huge amount of connection if we make the time and the opportunity for it to have really rich and deep conversations that are not in person. In fact, in a lot of my work, I've found that I, even in the days before Zoom, I would prefer having phone calls with people than meeting them face to face because sometimes there is the ability to have a really honest conversation without worrying about all of the, you know, impression management stuff that comes through. So, but I do think that this is a very important question. The first part of emotional agility that I think really is helpful is this idea of showing up to difficult emotions. What I mean by this is, again, moving away from how you think you and other people should feel instead of just to what it is, which is how they do feel. The person is angry or the person is scared or the person is whatever or you are, whatever. And and you know, really what this is, is it's about gentle acceptance. It's about not turning away from, but rather turning towards. And, you know, it's a it's a truism that when a city is being bombarded, it's very difficult to rebuild that city. It's very difficult to build a city while it's still under attack. And the same is true of us as human beings. When we are in a space of hustling with whether we should or shouldn't or someone else should or shouldn't feel something, then it's very difficult to actually move forward in any way that is healthy. And so an important part is the normative aspect of the human experience. A second aspect of emotional agility, which is referenced a little bit previously, is really this idea of compassion. Compassion is often seen as weak or lazy or something that doesn't really have its place in business. You know, we might talk about it on LinkedIn, but when it actually comes to the day to day experience, compassion is often something that feels to leaders like it's, oh, am I letting people off the hook? You know, or am I lowering expectations of myself and others? And actually, you know, if we just imagine for a moment, you go to a restaurant and there is this extraordinary scene unfolding in front of you, which is a little 18 month old child or a 24 month old child that runs away from his or her parents or caregivers at the restaurant. And what does the child do? It like gets up its chair in its little fat bottom and it like runs away, you know, five or six or seven steps. And then what does it do? It turns around and it looks back. And what is it looking back to do? It's looking back to make sure that the parents or caregivers are still there. Why? Because the notion of a secure base, the notion that if something goes wrong, there is someone who has my back is one of the most powerful ways we can be in the world. So what does the child then do? It looks back, sees its parents and caregivers still there, and does it go back to them? No, it runs even further. It runs even further, okay? So what is happening here is the knowledge that if something goes wrong allows me as a child to explore, to risk take, to learn, to develop competence, to do all of the things. Now we take that idea into the workplace. What do we want of our teams?

What do we desire of our teams that they learn that they are able not unrelenting risk calculated effective risk that they're able to do it, that they're able to explore different conversations that they're able to be curious that they're able to be able to deal with conflict effectively. All of this is risk taking. All of this is learning. So compassion, compassion for yourself. When you said yourself, it's hard to be a leader right now. It's hard to human in organizations right now. And I'm going to be kind to myself. That compassion allows you to do better and be more effective. And then of course, when you take that and you turn it towards your team.

Many people on this podcast listening today will have heard of psychological safety. And what is psychological safety? Psychological safety is that secure base turned towards others, that when you are feeling safe, you are more able to point out errors or voice concerns. or help us develop the kind of outcome that we want as an organization. So those are some things that are important. There are many other very practical tools, but I'll pause for a sec.

Damon Klotz

Yeah, I would even argue that the child who does that at a young age continues to do that for the rest of their life, right? They're like, look, I'm going out into the world, but you still want to turn back and know that you're still part of a system, right? And that's been very much my experience as well as someone who's lived in multiple countries and I know you have as well. It's like, look at me, I'm doing it. But then you still turn back and you want to still know that your parents and your family and your community is proud and that they're still on the journey with you. And I think we also want that in all organizations is we want to be trailblazers and innovative and creative and do all this great stuff, but then like not to the detriment of like losing connection to the core and the people and the value and the company.

Susan David

Yes, and what I would suggest is it's the foundational knowledge of the secure base that actually even allows you to trailblaze because you aren't putting yourself at risk. You know, you aren't putting yourself at risk. You know that there's that foundation. And the most healthy organizations are the organizations that create this culture, that create this culture. And, and often, you know, I'm sure we can have a very rich conversation about this. But when I think about culture, I think about moments making movements, you know, it's the, yes, the organizational culture can be a culture in which there are aspirations around values and who we want to be. And ultimately, the culture is created by individual actions that scale across the organization, individual leader, the individual colleague, the individual conversation. Moments make movements.

Damon Klotz

That's very similar to how I sort of, when I think about, you know, even this idea of putting culture first, it's at many different container levels. One is the company and what it stands for. It's its mission, its vision, its values is what does it as an entity, how does it describe itself and how does it want to be? It is then to the leaders who are then trying to turn all those things into stories and behaviors and actions through inspiration, strategy and sort of setting a direction. And then the other, the real way all of us experience the workplace is then through a and then through us as an individual and our relationship to a manager. We experienced it firstly as ourself with everything that we've brought to this company from previous workplaces, previous experiences, or even in the story that you shared with our relationship with our parents. And then we're doing that in relationship with another individual who is then responsible for our growth and development in partnership with us. But then we're sort of part of a team. And for me, I think one of the most important moments inside of a company that happens, ideally every single week is this idea of a one-on-one and the way that two individuals come together in Conversation to describe what's going on. What are they working on and what support do they need? I know you're really passionate about this idea of like individual development plans and individualized kind of understanding of someone's emotions Is there anything else that you think should be part of a really great one-on-one between a leader and an individual to better surface conversations about emotions in the workplace

Susan David

Well, I agree that culture, you know, culture is not a one or the other. But for example, when we look at the research on values, as we know, a lot of organizations say, you know, these are our values, and we need people to have these values. And it's very powerful. It's sacred. It's very important for an organization to do that.

When we look at the research, what we know is there is no individual and no team who is going to believe the value just because they are told that those are the values that we've now surfaced this year and they are different from the values from five years ago. What we need to be doing is to be helping individuals because individuals come to the organization with their own values. And so what we need to be doing is we're needing to help the individual see how their value can be expressed in the organization's values. So for example, for me, I might have a value of fairness. And that's really important to me. That's really, really important to me. And it might be that the organizational value is a value of honest conversations or that that's a behavior that we really trying to focus on. So so if we've got this huge disconnect, which is honest conversations, and this is an individual with fairness, we're not going to see a behavior change so much as if we said to an individual, so what is fairness look like in a conversation? How do you have a conversation that's fair?

You know, how does not having the conversation? How is that fair to the individual or the organization? How is not giving that person feedback fair to the rest of the team? So what you are starting to do is you’re starting to bring individual values front and center and it's not an either or it's a bothness.

Susan David

So I think that becomes really important in individual conversations, but also in team conversations. We've spoken about, you know, this, this compassion, we've spoken about seeing an individual in South Africa, we call it, I call it Samo Buona, the idea that I see you, I bring you into being, which I spoke about in my TED talk. But also, what we know is, whatever the aspiration is of an organization or of a leader or even of an individual, we all get stuck. We all get stuck in feeling angry or feeling cynical. And so some of the other skills in emotional agility are skills that help us to get unstuck. They're skills like you know, being accurate with your emotions. And I can describe some of these strategies, their skills that help you to unhook from your difficult emotions and help other people to unhook their skills that help you to connect with your values. So in a conversation, for example, very often leaders will go in and they'll say things like, right, what is my agenda in this meeting? You know, what is the agenda? Like, what are the five things that I need to get through this meeting?

But a much more important question for leaders to be asking is, what is my objective? You know, not what's my agenda, my agenda is the things I can check off. What is my objective? How do I want this person to feel at the end of the meeting? You know, do I want them to feel seen and motivated with them that they've had a voice? How do I want them to feel, what is my objective? So very practically asking those kinds of questions before we go into difficult meetings is crucial.

Damon Klotz

We need to name it first, we need to save those words into existence, we need to sort of be able to sort of express that as a leader saying that while the agenda and the desired outcome for the meeting is XYZ, the way that I'm trying to approach this conversation is through the lenses of ABC. And by saying the ABC out loud, it also gives permission to the other people to at least center that feeling, that value is a part of how they're contextualizing this information.

Susan David

Yes, yes, I recently did a talk where I was describing a model for a difficult conversation and in that model there was even just you know of the two people coming together where there's tension and when there's anger and when there's upset and even just this model of saying before we even begin our conversation, I've been thinking about how I would like for me and you to feel at the end of the conversation. And I wanna ask you how you would like for us to feel at the end of the conversation. And when you surface things like I, you know, when I feel like I've been seen, I want to feel like I've had a voice, I want to, then that becomes the grounding value of everything else that is there. And so it's like, the implicit becomes explicit. And the explicit then shapes the reality that helps us to move forward.

Damon Klotz

One of the most powerful ways that I've experienced that recently is by, I started working with a new leader this year at Culture Amp. One of the things that we discussed was just understanding our shared values and things that are important to us. Two of the things that we share is creativity and design and aesthetic. We really love to be always feeling like we're pushing the needle in creativity and bringing new things in and things that you might not expect from a B2B HR tech company, which sounds really boring, but it's like, it's not like this is exciting. And then we both really care about like design and aesthetics and like interiors. And again, it might not sound like someone who hosts a podcast and reports into a VP in a marketing org would be always chatting about these things. But one of the ways that we incorporate it is in the bottom of our one-on-one document in the culture amp product, every week we like drop in links of things that we have found creative or design focus that are inspiring us.

Susan David

No, it's important.

Damon Klotz

And it's just a starting point for us to have a conversation about things that are lighting us up. And then what I find is that it lights up the rest of the conversation, which might be more tactical about like, when's this thing going to happen? How's that project going? How many downloads does the podcast have? Like things that are really numbers focused, which are always important to talk about. But we always open it up with the things that we know are part of our values and how we operate. And for me, it makes for a richer conversation.

Susan David

It's so important and you can imagine that situation, imagine you've got values around creativity and pushing the edge and then imagine you're working with someone whose value is around efficiency. Okay. And if you didn't know that about the person, you might get really frustrated with them because you would feel that they're not giving you the space to explore this part of you that is really important and you might get really frustrated with them because or you know, vice versa, they might be seeing you as, you know, wasting time on creative stuff.

And so this is where this explicit aspect is just so important. And this comes back to again, the compass, not the map. It's very useful for leaders to even just use language like, you know often in our meetings, and even in our strategy, there's this idea that there's like an A and there's a B and there's a clear direction of how you get from A to B. And again, so often that just isn't the truth to the reality of the human experience, which is sometimes we just don't know. And sometimes where we think we're going to go is not where we land. And sometimes we just don't have the answers. And so instead of engaging with the A and B in a pretense, which is what often leadership and management, literature and strategies and books promote, it can be far more powerful for a leader to say, Hi, everyone, you know, we're in the messy middle.

Susan David

We're in the messy middle. I don't have the answers. And one of the reasons that I want us to have this conversation today is because we think we have a sense of what the A might be and we think we have a sense of what the B might be, but we're in the messy middle. And it's in that liminal space of unknowing, of exploring, of giving yourself and your team permission to not know that often the most creative and beautiful ideas happen and where their psychological safety and mission and concerns and fears and richness and beauty that make our leadership more than a job and rather turn it into something that is real and human and elevating and transcendent.

Damon Klotz

Beautiful. And it's, it's what it's the type of leader that we want at a culture first company is the type of leader that we would all argu e would like to be under.I think that this is really important, you know, for many, many years, when I worked with organizations, organizations would treat things like well-being as being either an afterthought or something that they didn't really need to worry about. But of course, wellbeing is or low levels of wellbeing - burnout is probably the greatest public health crisis of our time.

And as knowledge increasingly becomes commoditized, and as the rate of change increases, it will become more important every day and every week, and every year in an escalation, that organizations become far more adept with these skills. And I'll give you just a quick example of what I mean here in terms of how it plays out. So we know, of course, that if people are feeling burnt out, they are simply not going to be able to say hello nicely to their client in the elevator, or to be effective in their work. We know this to be the case. So let's think of like, okay, values, values are often seen as these, again, intangible, abstract ideas.

Susan David

Every day when people come to work, they do both the physical work or the knowledge work that they do, but they also do emotional work. Emotional work is when you forced to agree with something that you don't agree with. Emotional work is when you smile nicely at a customer who's maybe being rude to you. We all do this kind of emotional work. And part of emotional work is just about being polite. But the more emotional work people do the greater the level of burnout. So we know that there are usually two ways or two distinctions in the literature about this emotional work. The one is surface acting. Surface acting is where you literally come to work, you slap on your smile, even though you burning inside, and you literally just go through the motions each day with a smile on your face, but you feel awful. Surface acting is significantly more predictive of burnout and low levels of wellbeing. Now, let's talk about the opposite deep acting. Deep acting, you still coming to work, and you still putting on your smile.

Damon Klotz

Yep.

Susan David

but your smile is coming from a place of greater level of connection with your values. So for example, you work in a hotel reception area and surface acting is just, yes, I'll give you the bathrobes, but you feel like actually screaming at the person. Deep acting, yes, I'll give you the bathrobes, but actually you've connected with the fact that like your work helps you to give people a really lovely holiday, and that family is an important value of yours. And it's something that you just connect with. So now that's the person is still acting, but they deep acting, they're coming from a place of values. And deep acting predicts lower levels of burnout and higher levels of well being. So in other words, in both of these cases, there's emotional labor, but the connection with our values, the connection with our values is what buffers us from burnout. It's what protects us from burnout. And again, this is the reason that these skills are not just abstract any longer, but they actually need to become front and center of what every organization is working to and working with.

Damon Klotz

That was such a vivid example of like, I could see a hotel with the different types of employees and like, you know, you don't even need to run and not saying that you shouldn't be running these engagement surveys, but like, you wouldn't even need to run a Culture Amp engagement survey to know when there is the surface level acting and the deep acting when you just look at the behaviors and how they're showing up in those daily ways.

Susan David

You would know, you would know and, and you would see lag indicators in talent retention. You would see lag indicators in customer loyalty. Like you would see all of this. 18 months down the line, two years down the line. That comes from that place of how someone is experiencing their work and how they're experiencing themselves.

Damon Klotz

In that example, is it, should we try find ways to, I guess, keep those surface level actors and is it about finding other jobs that are more aligned to sort of where they're at both emotionally and their values or should we just be trying to find more alignment to find those deep actors and placing them in the right roles where they can really succeed?

Susan David

A very big part of surface acting is surface acting is often happening in environments where people are feeling unseen, where leadership is not happening effectively. So it's not always it's not always an individual experience. It's also a systemic experience, you know, we can keep on asking people to lean in and lean in and lean in to untenable circumstances. So happening because the person is in a system that is simply not seeing them and is simply not working. And they are disconnected from themselves and they sometimes feel that they don't have any other opportunity. And then sometimes the surface acting is happening because the person hasn't connected with those aspects in themselves. So it's both part of the context, and it can be part of the individual and the leadership that the individual is experiencing. And of course, it's not only up to a leader to help an individual to surface it's also, you know, part of the power that we have as individuals to hear the heartbeat of our own why and to have support in that.

Damon Klotz

There's probably a lot of people listening, whether they're individuals or leaders who have been maybe inspired, but also might be feeling their emotions a little bit more because of this conversation. And it might have increased their awareness about some of the things that have been going on for themselves and their relationship with themselves in the workplace. If there is someone who's listening, who might be feeling like they're a little bit stuck with some of these emotions, and is there a way to get a little bit more granular with understanding their experience with some of these big terms that we've been talking about today. Do you have any advice for those people listening?

Susan David

Yes, absolutely. So if you're feeling stuck in your difficult emotions or in your experience in the workplace or beyond, I've already shared some of the aspects of this, but I think there are a couple of other really key, very practical ways that we can navigate emotions effectively. Number one is be aware of using big blanket phrases to describe your stuckness.

A lot of times, people will say things like, I'm stressed. Okay, I'm stressed. Or they say I'm busy. And they use this label to describe everything, you know, how was your day stressful? You know, how was the meeting stressful? When you use language like stress, this umbrella term like stress, your body and your psychology doesn't know what to do with it. Okay, what do you do with stress? It feels amorphous, it feels difficult, very important skill of emotional agility is get specific. What I mean here is ask yourself what are one or two other emotions that might more accurately describe what I'm feeling? So you might recognize that what you calling stress is actually disappointment, or that you feeling unsupported, or that you feeling exhausted. When we move from an umbrella label to a more accurate label, what it does is it helps your body and your psychology understand the cause of the difficulty motion. And move it forward. We know that it activates what's called the readiness potential in our brains, the part of our brains that says what do I need to do next? So you can see that if you move from something like stress into unsupported, you already are starting to think about, gee, now I know why I'm feeling this thing and how do I go about getting more support. So that is one very powerful strategy and is, you know, as we've mentioned before, associated with increased well-being and effectiveness.

A second aspect is very often we use language that's I am language. I am angry. I am being undermined. I am not good enough. When we use I am language, what it makes it sound is as if you are the emotion. Okay. In other words, I am sad. All of me, 100% of me is sad. There's no space for our wisdom, for our breathing, our compassion, our connection when we are literally all of us defined by that single thought emotion or story. So if you stuck in a meeting or in a difficult conversation or about to go into it or just feeling disengaged in the workplace, see if you can move from I am into noticing the thought, the emotion or story for what it is. It's a thought, it's an emotion, it's a story. So for example,

Susan David

I am sad because I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad.

Susan David

I am terrible at this job. I'm noticing my thought that I'm terrible at this job. Now this might sound like it's linguistic gymnastics. But what you are literally doing is you're creating linguistic space between you and the emotion so that you can be a little bit gentler in that space and choose how you want to act next. You know, in that beautiful Viktor Frankl language of between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space, there is our power to choose. And in that choice lies our growth and our freedom, both emotion, granularity and noticing thoughts, emotions and stories for what they are, create space. And the idea that I often use visually for this is that when you say something like I am sad, it's almost as if there is a sad cloud in the sky and you are that sad cloud. Okay, you are it and it is you. But for anyone who's listening right now, you know, you aren't the cloud. You just aren't the cloud. Every single one of us is beautiful and human and capacious enough to experience all of our difficult thoughts, emotions, stories, and still choose who we want to be. Because you aren't the cloud, you are the sky. You know, you are the sky. We are all able to take that bigger perspective. And then the last thing that I would say is that a core part of emotional effectiveness for both leaders, but also for humans, for parents, for loved ones, is this that when we are with someone who is struggling for whatever reason, often what we want to do is we want to go through those emotions. I mentioned this earlier, it's like we want to jump to solution we want to fix, we want to show the person the silver lining. But when we do this, we are avoiding difficulty emotions, and we will not cultivate sustained behavior change. On the other hand, if we just go to the emotions, Oh my goodness, it sounds like you said, it sounds like things are awful, it sounds whatever, we literally can get stuck with the person in ruminating, in brooding, in water cooler talk. And that is also not effective when it comes to emotions, because it's getting stuck in emotions, but avoiding problem solving. So if you are a leader, if you are a person struggling, or trying to get better in emotional skills, it's useful to recognize that emotional effectiveness comprises going to emotions, how are you feeling what's going on?

And then both are necessary, neither one is sufficient. And then going through not trying to solve a problem for person, but helping them to think through and coaching them through solutions. Go to and go through what is the bridge that builds between the two it is values. Okay go to go through. And in there, there's emotions that are sign posting our needs and our values. So see if in the conversation, through the person's difficult emotions, you can surface actually, it sounds like you really care about growth, or actually, it sounds like you really worried about such and such, because this is important to you. So now how do we move forward with those values? And Damon, this, the reason I highlight this is because we can often stuck in difficult emotions, or we can bypass them. And it's, it's important that we act not in a way that's driven by our emotions, but rather that's enhanced by the wisdom of our values. And that I think is a very powerful way for any of us to have a conversation.

Damon Klotz

I feel very tingly even listening to that, because it's such a, your work has been such a powerful mode for me to really tap into and your, and everything that you've shared today is like, I sort of made a promise to the guests at the start that this would be a really special episode in the same way that I think some of the other seminal episodes in terms of bringing incredible academic rigor, but real stories and words into the workplace and, but also just as humans and like one of your most famous sort of lines that has really stayed with me is this idea of discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life. And I think it's by understanding the space between us and our emotion and how to get unstuck. Like that line has fundamentally helped rewire my brain and how I've thought about all of the sort of different trials that I've gone through over my sort of, you know, 30 plus years. And I think my default behavior used to be every obstacle is an opportunity and was always trying to like do the whole stoic, you know, rephrasing of things in order for everything to be something. But I think your work really allowed me to sit with some of these things. And I know one of the things that we both share is you lost a loved one when you were sort of quite young, when you were a teenager and I lost my best mate to cancer when I was 14. And I think about that statement all the time because it really is this idea that discomfort is the price that I think we all, you know, pay for a meaningful life because it allows us to sit with these emotions more and allows us to not get stuck by them. So I just want to thank you so much for your work and the way that you use these stories.

Susan David

And it's the love that you have for someone that ultimately invites loss. But it's the opening your heart to that enables the bothness of it. Yes. Love. Amazing. Thank you so much for this. I loved it.

Damon Klotz

A huge thank you to Susan David for this incredible conversation today on the Culture First Podcast.

When I hit the stop record button, I remember looking at my arms and seeing goosebumps. When I was listening from start to finish as part of the editing process and preparing my final reflections for these voice overs, I started to wonder how you were feeling at the end of this episode. And if you’ve made it to the end, whether you had some of those goosebumps as well.

My aim with this podcast is to create a space to have conversations that will create a better world of work. This conversation falls into a different category, because I believe Susan’s work creates a better world. A world where we can be in conversation with our emotions, not let them overwhelm us or become all of us, because we have the knowledge and the skills to understand why we feel them and how they are a signpost for what we truly value in life.

Susan taught us all that “it's important that we act not in a way that's driven by our emotions, but rather that's enhanced by the wisdom of our values.“

Her ability to use stories like the idea of the sky and the cloud are a great way for us to have healthier conversations about our emotions in the workplace. It’s so easy to say “I am” statements, where we let the emotion become all of our being. Rather than seeing ourselves as the sky and the emotion just being a cloud that we can explore further. I’d love to hear how this episode has helped you be in better conversation with your emotions.

Leave a review on Apple with your takeaways from this episode, or if you’re listening on Spotify send me a message in the comment box.

I’ve been your host Damon Klotz and the Culture First Podcast is brought to you by the team here at Culture Amp, the world’s leading employee experience platform. Learn more about Culture Amp by heading to www.cultureamp.com

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