Why Your Emotions Don’t Have to Control You with Ethan Kross

Time: 47 minutes

Guy Kawasaki:
Hello everybody, it's Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People Podcast. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Today's remarkable guest is Ethan Kross. He's a psychologist, a neuroscientist, and he's the author of two very great books and we're going to talk about one of them, his latest called Shift. He's an expert on emotion regulation and inner voice. He directs the Emotion and Self Control laboratory at the University of Michigan.
I must say that is a very unusual name for a lab, Emotion and Self Control. But anyway, that's not something that would work out well in Silicon Valley. So the name of his two books are Chatter and Shift, and basically he works on building bridges across science and practical tools to help people harness their thoughts and emotions. So welcome to the show, Ethan.

Ethan Kross:
Hey, thanks for having me, Guy. It's an honor to be here.

Guy Kawasaki:
I hate when podcasts host go off the rails from the very start, but I'm going to do that right now. I hate to admit it, but one of the stories that you start Shift with, I'll summarize the story, correct me if I'm wrong, is that somebody found this Incan skull that was hundreds of years old and they sent it to the experts and there was a square hole in the skull, and you attribute this operation that some Incas had done in an attempt to modulate the emotion of whoever's head they drilled.
As I read that, I said, "How can you possibly know that the Incan doctor did that to regulate emotions?" And I was wondering that. So can you just clear that up for my fogging mind?

Ethan Kross:
Yeah, sure. Well, it's not a foggy mind, it's a precise mind. And so the statement in the book wasn't about that particular skull on its own, but rather I was referring to the intervention and why we think historically that intervention was used in some cases. So the intervention was trepanation, carving holes in people's skulls often while they were still alive.
And medical historians believe that one of the reasons why that technique was used was to help people manage big, dysregulated emotions. Why might that be the case? If you go back in time, our theories of emotion dysregulation were quite different from what they are today. You've got a person who's acting out in seemingly irrational ways or maybe is totally withdrawn. Perhaps the source of that malady is an evil spirit inside you that you need to purge yourself of.
And so ergo cutting a hole in people's skull to let that spirit release that idea was actually quite common throughout much of human history. Eight to 10,000 years ago, we were carving holes in people's skulls, but in the Middle Ages, we were slashing people's forearms and letting blood drip out of their system, cleansing the humors, cleansing the blood of toxins that might be creating emotions run amok.
So just to be clear, your question is a great one. I absolutely do not know that it was that one specific skull, nor does anyone. It's rather the intervention more broadly that we think was partially used for that purpose.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Now, Ethan, what happens if 10,000 years from now people are going to say, do you realize that people 10,000 years ago were sticking students inside these big machines they called MRIs and they were bombarding them with magnetic waves and figuring out what part of their brains are active? Like isn't that the equivalent of drilling square holes right now?

Ethan Kross:
It's a question I've asked myself many, many times. I love history and dug deep into the history when I was researching Shift. And it does make me think about whether the things that we ask people to do or the prescriptions we are providing for things that can help people may be causing harm or not. And in all cases, we think really carefully in modern days about ensuring that we are not doing any harm.
And the good news is that we actually have guideposts to steer us. We now are using practices to determine that before we have a student do something that it's not going to create harm, at least to our awareness, which did not really exist back then.
And so the other thing I'd point out is there are of course lots of other things we've done historically to help folks that have not resulted in carnage, and much of Shift, much of what I talk about, there are dozens of tools, maybe we'll talk about some of them, maybe we won't.
But these tools that we have used, scientific techniques, neuroimaging being one of them, but lots of other interventions as well to help us identify. What I love about these tools is they're relatively non-invasive. They're actually not relative, they're just non-invasive, right? These are changes in the way we think or behave that science shows can put people on different emotional trajectories. And so I think the risk in these cases is pretty slim, but always good to ask.

Guy Kawasaki:
My interpretation of Shift is that emotions can be tools. Is that correct, first of all?

Ethan Kross:
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, you've got it. I would just clarify one thing. All emotions are tools. Even the "bad ones," which is a point that we often lose in contemporary society when we talk about emotions because we often hear, "oh, you should try to live a life free of negative emotions. A, not possible, B, not desirable because they're tools.

Guy Kawasaki:
Now, first of all, I had to wrap my head around that. So to me, a tool is something that gets you from point A to point B. but it seems to me that for many people, emotions is the point B. So I want to be happy, I want to experience the emotion of happiness, but now, you're telling me that happiness is a tool to get somewhere else. So where am I trying to get if not happy?

Ethan Kross:
It could be trying to get to. It can also be a motivational force that puts you in specific situations or contexts that actually serve you well. They're motivational forces that are activated in particular situations that orient us to excel in those circumstances.
So you chose happiness as one candidate emotion. Let me give you a dramatically alternative. Let's say anxiety. Anxiety is an end state that I think most people don't aspire to be anxious. There are some people who do like living in that zone, but I think most people do not. But it can be a tool that helps prepare us for potential threats, right?
So when I think about instances in my career where a presentation didn't go as well as I liked or a meeting didn't go as well as I liked, there were instances in which I felt zero anxiety beforehand, because I felt no anxiety, there was no force that was motivating me to zoom in on the situation at hand and to start preparing for it. When experiencing the right proportions, those negative emotions can in fact be quite useful. Anger's another example. Guy, when was the last time you were angry?

Guy Kawasaki:
How long can the podcast go? I mean, yesterday.

Ethan Kross:
If we were to break down, when do people become angry? They become angry when their sense of right and wrong is challenged. So your view of the world is challenged and there's something you can do about it to rectify the situation.
So when those conditions are met psychologically, we experience this responsive anger. What does anger motivate us to do? You zoom in, you approach the situation and now you try to fix it. That can be helpful in those circumstances. So it's a way of getting us typically to a desired endpoint.

Guy Kawasaki:
You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the fact is you name your book Shift means that these emotions and tools help you shift, explain ‘shifting’ for us.

Ethan Kross:
So there are three facets to ‘shifting.’ ‘Shifting’ refers to when your emotions are no longer serving you well, and we can all easily think about such situations. ‘Shifting’ involves being able to turn the volume on that emotion up or down. It involves in other instances, shortening or lengthening how long you sit in a particular emotional response.
And in some cases, it can involve moving from one state, happiness, to another one, contentment, altogether. So Shift captures those three psychological jiu-jitsu moves, if you will. And the entire premise behind it is we evolve this capacity to experience emotions for a reason. They give us an advantage, they help us quickly prepare for different situations, but they're a very blunt tool.
They can easily be triggered out of proportion to the circumstances we're dealing with. And the amazing thing in my eyes about human beings and the human brain is we also co-evolved the capacity to rein in these emotional responses, but we don't get a user's guide on how to master that capacity, and that's what the book is all about.
I actually want to throw a question back to you if I can, Guy, though, but you said when we started that emotions and self control, those two terms in Silicon Valley might be a little bit, I forget the word you used, unfamiliar, or people might have trouble. I'd love to just get a sense of what you meant by that. I'm fascinated by it.

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm being sarcastic about the current state of Silicon Valley, that it seems that the only emotions that's coming out of many of the most successful people is self-survival and optimization of my own particular case. So I want low rates of long-term capital gains. I want crypto to be successful. It's all about me, myself, and I am turning into someone who is amoral and I will suck up to whoever I have to suck up to get long-term low capital gains and make crypto successful. And I don't view that as the high road even.

Ethan Kross:
Yeah, you're not putting me in a positive mood state thinking about that. Got it. Okay. So it's a kind of instrumentality towards just optimizing financial benefit.

Guy Kawasaki:
If it were as easy as playing them a good song, you psyched up your daughter, I would play them that good song. So let's talk about some of the mechanisms of ‘shifting.’ So you brought up that great story about getting your daughter ready to play soccer by playing a song. What are the methods to catalyze shifts?

Ethan Kross:
I like to break them down. I think it's easier for us to wrap our head around categories of tools. So you can bin the ‘shifters,’ which are tools to push our emotions around into two broad categories. ‘Internal shifters,’ they're in-built tools, we take them with us wherever we go, and then they're ‘external shifters,’ which are a more, in some ways, complex set of tools that exist in the world around us.
If we start with the internal ones, there are three categories there. The first one are ‘sensory shifters,’ which are probably the lowest effort ‘shifters’ in our toolbox that we often overlook. And so ‘sensory shifters’ refer to all of the different senses that we possess, sight, sound, touch, smell. What do our senses do? They allow us to take in information about the world around us. I like to describe the ‘sensory shifters’ as like imagine having satellite dishes mounted all over your body.
They're constantly taking in information. And one of the reasons we take in that information is we need to know how to navigate the world in a safe way. And so emotions, the experience of emotions are intertwined with our process of making sense of the world. One of the most powerful examples out there for me is music. I've been listening to music from the time I was five years old. I remember I got my first cassette tape. I'm dating myself now.
I never stopped to think about why I listened to music. I just always did it. And then I had this experience with my daughter that I described in the book where I realized the value of music as an emotion regulation tool that can be strategically hardest. My daughter is young, she's playing soccer. I'm coaching the team. I look forward to this soccer match every week, and she wakes up in a funk. She doesn't want to go. Nothing that I do to cheer her up is getting her excited.
I'm beginning to get depressed. We get in the car and just randomly a pump up song comes on the radio, Journey's “Don't Stop Believing.” I start jamming out, I start singing. I look into the rearview mirror. I see my daughter's bopping her head along and we both are invigorated. If you ask people why they listen to music, almost 100 percent of participants will say, "I listened to music because I like the way it makes me feel."
But if you then look at, hey, the last time you were angry or anxious or sad, what did you do to make yourself feel better? Only between 10 and 30 percent of participants across studies report using that modality, music is an incredibly fast way of modulating your emotions.
It's not going to solve your greatest problems, but what it can do is put you on a different emotional trajectory for a little while, opening you up to the possibility of then using other tools to help you go deeper into solving that malady that you are experiencing. And that's just one example. What are your favorite foods, Guy?

Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, my favorite foods are, I'm going to have to get pretty local. There's a Hawaiian dish called Lau Lau, which is, it's this pork wrapped in leaves. It's really salty. I love Lau Lau, I love poi. I love Spam Musubis. We could have a whole show on food, and I've actually had Andrew Zimmern and Roy Yamaguchi. I love Musubis.

Ethan Kross:
There you go. You're using love to describe these experiences. Few things are as decadent and transportive for me as eating a dark chocolate covered peanut buttercup after dinner each night. Little one, not too excessive, but taste. Think about smell. You go into nice hotels, they pump fumes to change the way you feel about yourself and the places around you. So that's one type of ‘shifter,’ our senses.

Guy Kawasaki:
Well, how about when you get a new car?

Ethan Kross:
Yeah, the new car smell. It's so simple and obvious on the one hand, on the other, we know that people just overlook this stuff. Like you go to the airport, you go into the Duty Free shop. This is an emotion regulation emporium. People are just selling perfumes and colognes. What is the purpose of these substances? They're managing the way you feel about yourself and they're managing the way other people feel about you.
That's the senses and a touch. That's another powerful one. Touch is the first sense to develop. It develops while we're in the womb. The first thing we do with babies to comfort them, to regulate them is we hold them. I don't know about you, but I love to be held even to this day. My kids are getting older. I'm still trying to grab their hand. They're like, "Get away from me. What's wrong with you?"
But even the fist bump with a colleague at work, a hug of my partner. These are regulatory experiences that are available to us. And so it's just low hanging fruit to build into your ‘shifting’ repertoire. Now, of course, that's not again going to help us deal with the really big bouts of anxiety and depression. It's going to contribute to it.
We know, by the way, that when people try to shift in their daily lives, they typically don't do one thing. On average, they use between three and four different tools at any given moment in time to push their emotions around. We did these large studies during the COVID pandemic where we wanted to see, what are the tools that are really helping people manage their anxiety from one day to the next?
It was not one thing; it was combinations of tools. So your sense is that's one set of tools you can use. Another big ‘internal shifter’ are what I call attention. You could think of attention as our mental spotlight.
And one of the things that we often get wrong about attention is we often tell people, you should never avoid the things that are bugging you. You got to work through them. And this is one of the first things that we're taught, right? When there's a problem, what do you do? When you're a little kid, your parents are run away, don't address it, right? Roll up your sleeves and you get to the bottom. You confront that issue.
So we're taught that from a very young age. We're often here as we get older that avoiding things chronically is harmful to us. And so as a result of those different experiences, a lot of us develop this heuristic, this decision-making rule. Hey, when we're in trouble, don't avoid, approach. Here's what we've learned about this. If your approach to managing your emotions involves always, the moment something happens, I'm going to just repress it, suppress it, avoid it, never come back to it.
That's all you do. This is not good. Tons of data showing that chronically avoiding our things leads to negative outcomes. But that doesn't mean that you can't be flexible with your attention when you're dealing with a problem, right?
Chronically avoiding things can be bad but moving back and forth between focusing on a problem for a little bit, taking some time away, coming back to it, going back and forth in that matter, that can be really, really useful. We call that strategic attention deployment.
If you've ever gotten an email and it provoked you and you decided, you know what, I'm not going to respond right now, in the moment I just received that, I'm going to come back to it tomorrow or next week. You have experienced the benefits of strategic attention deployment, and that is an example of how powerful attention can be from modulating our emotions.

Guy Kawasaki:
I never thought about that with email, and I'll tell you, I have an even better system than waiting a day, which is when an email really pisses me off. I send it to Madisun and Madisun answers as me much better than I would ever answer. So she is my strategic attention. What was the phrase? Strategic attention deployment.

Ethan Kross:
But that also touches on another powerful tool. It's actually a perfect segue guide to the final category of ‘shifters’ like boom, which is perspective, right? So sometimes you can't divert your attention away. We don't have the luxury to do it, or we don't want to, and you got to stare at something in the face and deal with it.
And what we've learned is that shifting your perspective, looking at the bigger picture can be very helpful, but that's often really hard to do. It's easier said than done to just change the way you're thinking about something.
And so you just said that when you're provoked, you'll send it to Madisun and have her respond to it, right? Why is Madisun so adept at responding to your provocations and you're not? The reason is we know it's a lot easier to be wise and rational about someone else's problems than ourselves.
We don't have the same level of immersion in the problem, so we can think about it with more clarity. What we've also learned is that there are tools you can use to shift your perspective to adopt the perspective of another person when thinking about your problems. That can make it much easier to not fire off the email that you will later regret.
As an example, there's a tool called Distanced Self-Talk. It's one of the first tools I use, it involves trying to work through my problems using my own name and you. All right, Ethan, what do you think you should do here? How are you going to manage this situation? Now, that may sound strange. Number one, I'll point out a disclaimer. I typically do that silently, not out loud in front of other people, but think about it for a second. Guy, the word you, when do you typically use that word? It's not a trick question.

Guy Kawasaki:
I would say that it's usually used in accusatory sense.

Ethan Kross:
But even more basic, when you're using that word, it's usually about someone else. It's someone else. So the vast majority of times that you use the word you, it's when you're thinking about or referring to another person, we just said other people, they're much better at dealing with our problems often than we are.
So when you use the word you to refer to yourself, it's not like, it's switching your perspective, it's putting you in this frame of mind is now I'm coaching someone else, I'm giving someone else advice. It's no longer me. And you get some space from the ego in that sense like, all right, what do you think you should do here?
Guy, I am really good at giving advice to my buddies much better than I'm often about giving advice to myself. So Ethan, what do you think you should do here? Here's how I think you should manage it. It's putting you in this coaching frame of mind that research shows leads us to make wiser, emotionally intelligent decisions and helps us regulate. And so that's another kind of very subtle tool that you can use to shift your perspective when you're trying to grapple with a big emotion.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Then you are opening up another whole can of worms is a negative.

Ethan Kross:
Yeah, bring it. It's good. This makes it more fun to talk. So go for it.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. If Madisun is a great modulator for me, imagine what AI is, right? So I get this email that pisses me off. I upload it to AI, and I say draft the response, isn't that the ultimate use?

Ethan Kross:
Not exactly. And here's why, I thought one of these days it may be, and with a proper training, I think it can absolutely be Madisun is someone who to be clear to all of you who are listening, I don't know much about Madisun, right? I don't know the background. I don't know how she came into your life, but I'm going to guess that there was some screening involved, that you were careful in your selection of Madisun.
She wasn't someone that just showed up all of a sudden as responding to the most important people in your life who are pissing you off. Other people, as I point out in both of my books, because this is such an important issue, other people can be a remarkable asset or a tremendous liability when it comes to our emotional lives. And so I encourage people to think really carefully about who they are sending their emails to respond on their behalf.
That's a very intimate and privileged request that you are making of her. You would not let anyone do that. And so if AI is amalgamating lots of information from the internet and assuming that I don't know what the weighting factors are, but these are the best ways to respond, my sense is that we can actually get a lot more nuanced and tailored to identify the best types of responses.
Now, if you trained all of Madisun's responses into an AI chatbot or whatever, then we're getting a lot closer and that might well be a bionic response for you.

Guy Kawasaki:
Madisun, do you want to set the record straight or speak up for yourself or do anything?

Madisun Nuismer:
I think we benefit one another, and we balance each other out really well.

Ethan Kross:
Madisun, though, are your services available to respond to my annoying emails?

Madisun Nuismer:
We can try it out.

Guy Kawasaki:
MadisunGPT.

Ethan Kross:
There we go, invest now.

Guy Kawasaki:
In your book, I read about this case of the woman whose baby had this peanut allergy and almost died and stuck an EpiPen in her thigh and saved her. And then for years, she was traumatized by that. So now, you could make the case that the emotion of fear and reaction and all that saved her daughter's life, but you could also make the case that those things lived on and became a very negative thing.
So how does one get past that? You read a story about how Gene Hackman's wife had hantavirus and died and then he died later. And so now, you're afraid of mice all the time. How do you deal with those kinds of emotions?

Ethan Kross:
I was fortunate to have a really wonderful mentor in graduate school who you come into graduate school, and you look at the scientific literature, it's like your mind is going to explode. There's all this complexity, and oh my God, how do I wrap my head around it? And he sat me down in the first couple of weeks and he says to me, "Ethan, at its core, it's really simple."
When you get to the topic of self-control or emotion regulation, I use those phrases somewhat synonymously, it's about feeling the way we want to feel, thinking the way we want to think. There are really two core components. Number one is motivation, and number two is ability. So number one, you have to believe that you can control yourself. And the reason for that is let's use exercise in this example, let's use surfing as an example.
We were talking about surfing before we started recording. If I don't think there's any way that this uncoordinated human being can get up there and surf a wave, why am I going to wake up early to even try? Why am I going to spend the money on the lessons, get the surfing board, whatever? So you've got to be motivated. Yeah, I can manage my emotions.
Number two, just having the motivation is not enough because I can tell you there was an instance in which I was motivated to surf. I went to Hawaii in a family vacation several years ago and I showed up and I got the surfboard, and before I got the lesson, I tried to surf. And let me tell you, it did not go very well. So you also need tools. You need to know what are the tactics that allow you to achieve those different goals.
So if we go back to the mom whose fear response saved her child from dying, but then had that fear response over generalized, now, she's just concerned about anything that could potentially happen to the child negatively and it's consume your life. Number one, you've got to believe that this is something you can get a handle on.
That may seem like a simple idea. Why is this guy even emphasizing this? But if you look at the research literature, some studies report that approximately 40 percent of people do not think they can control their emotions. 40 percent, Guy, if you don't think you can control your emotions, why are you even going? You're not going to try.
So step one is you got to believe that you can do this. And then number two is if you're finding that you are constantly experiencing emotions being triggered out of proportion, you need to learn the tools that are out there to help you reign these responses in.
That is what the book is all about. I find it remarkable that on a daily basis, all of us are frequently challenged with having to manage our emotions in some fashion, whether it be to turn up the volume on our happiness a little bit or turn the amplitude down on our anxiety or spend a little bit less time ruminating about something. These are frequent experiences that characterize a human species. We know about tools, science-based tools that exist that can help people.
And we do not share these tools in a systematic way with folks in the same way that we share physical exercise tools with folks, right? I had my first gym class in first grade. I knew how to do a push-up and a jumping jack in first grade. Why don't people know about how to shift? Why don't our kids know about the Batman effect or how to strategically deploy their attention? I think it's a huge problem.

Guy Kawasaki:
So you touched on it before, but continuing with this woman with the EpiPen and her fears, what are the tools she could throw at this problem?

Ethan Kross:
To help her, well, she could use Distanced Self-Talk, right? That's number one. If she finds herself over-dramatizing a situation, hey, what would you tell your sister if she was going through this with her kid? That's a way of shifting a perspective. You could zoom out and look at the bigger picture. So oftentimes to correct people's in particular anxious response or their worry response, you can get them to think like a scientist about the situation.
Hey, what's the probability that this negative experience might actually befall someone, thinking through the probability of a negative outcome occurring can be really powerful for folks. When you think about the probability of, for example, your plane crashing as compared to getting hit by a car or getting into a car accident, it is a striking comparison. You are much, much more likely to get hit by a car. Those kinds of experiences often have weight.
You could encourage them to activate their senses. You could encourage them to activate their emotional advisory board. We haven't talked about that yet. But who are the people in your life who are skilled at doing two things for you when you are struggling? Number one, they provide you with a sense of comfort and support.
They validate what you're going through, they empathize with you. Yeah, you may recognize at some level that what you're going through is irrational. It's embarrassing. I may not want to share it with you, but these are people who you can confide in who will make it clear to you that you know what?
We all experience those embarrassing kinds of reactions at times, it's normal, but they don't stop there. They also then work with you to broaden your perspective to help you get a handle on the situation. That's a really powerful tool. So lots of different tools that mom can leverage to help herself.

Guy Kawasaki:
Now, what if the mom counters and says, "Listen, humans have been evolving for millions of years. It's our maternal instinct. It's our desire to be safe. I cannot suppress this. In fact, I should not suppress this because that's what helps us survive."

Ethan Kross:
I think what you want to do is in that case point out, look, no one is asking you to suppress these maternal instincts you have. You are talking to me because you are telling me that these maternal instincts are actually getting in the way of you living the life that you want to live. And it's not because you're having the instincts in the first place.
It's because they're metastasizing they’re becoming so big and by your own recognition out of proportion with a situation at hand. So why don't we just try a little experiment to see what might happen if we try to rein those emotional responses and just a little bit and see if that's something that you like or not.
And so it's simply offering an invitation to folks to experiment with these tools to gauge the impact they have on their lives. Ultimately, what I care about doing is helping people self-regulate. What is self-regulation? It's about aligning your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors with your goals. It's about getting you to live the life that you want to live.
Now, that might not be the life that I would want for myself or even for you or someone that I care about, but that's what it is. I don't think someone's coming to me or someone else if they think that their responses are exactly the way they should be, and life should be because they should be happy in that situation.

Guy Kawasaki:
So who is in the Ethan Kross hall of fame for people who are really good ‘shifters’ that you can hold us as a hero that emulate this guy or this gal? They're great at ‘shifting.’ You can learn a lot from them.

Ethan Kross:
My wife is unbelievable at ‘shifting.’ Actually, we were on a walk last night. I was saying like, "Are you ever worried about anything?" Because I don't hear very much about it. And mind you, this is someone who I've been in a relationship with for twenty-five years, quarter of a century, right?
It's a long time. I, of course, know that she can worry about things at times, but she's amazingly adept at being proportional about when the worry begins to percolate, she quickly looks at the bigger picture like, well, is this something that I need to worry about right now? Or maybe if it is something that's significant, she comes to talk to me or someone else about it.
She's really, really good at ‘shifting.’ But here is something that is very important and that stems from your question that we haven't talked about yet that I think don't think I want everyone who listens to this conversation to know, you can look at my wife as a ‘shifting’ role model, but the tools that work for her may not work for you.
So one of the truisms that we have discovered as a field is that different combinations of tools work for different people. I wish there were three or four things that I could tell everyone to do and it would lead them to experience a life of nirvana. The science simply does not support that. In some ways, that might be deflating to folks.
On the other hand, I think it might also be a welcome message that, hey, if meditation doesn't work for you, no worries because there are lots of other options you have available to yourself. So I think that's just something important that people keep in mind when they search for the right tools to try in their lives. Things that work for your friends may or may not benefit from you. The challenge is to figure out what tools work best.

Guy Kawasaki:
And do you have any explanation for how your wife got to this point besides being married to you?

Ethan Kross:
No, that's definitely not the reason why that marriage to me. I think some of it is genetic that she's predisposed to not be overly reactive. She had a wonderful upbringing. We know that adverse childhood experiences can make it more challenging for folks later on in life. So she grew up in a family with wonderful positive attachments and love.
She also has some intuitive understanding of the different tools that exist. She has both stumbled on tools that work for her in her ability to perspective shift, in her ability to have a great emotional advisory board. She also is a psychology major as an undergrad, has learned about other tools that are out there and has been discriminative in how she has folded different tools into her repertoire.
The stuff that works for her, she leans on, the other tools that don't, she doesn't, to give you it by way of analogy, to stay in physical shape, she likes to walk and do Pilates and occasionally she does spin. I like to walk. I've never done Pilates. I'm not a big spinner. I do other things. She has learned which exercise regimens contribute to her physical fitness. And the same is true when it comes to her mental fitness. And I think that's the challenge we all face to learn, hey, what do we got to do to be mentally fit?

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, since we're discussing all members of your family now.

Ethan Kross:
Oh, boy.

Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, let's glean some wisdom from your grandmother. Now, it seems to me that kind of her path was she put these bad memories into a box and kept that box closed. Is that a good practice or is that dysfunctional and that box is somehow going to open up someday and what should we do? And the dysfunction we're talking about is, of course, the Holocaust, which is a big thing to put in a box. So when do you put something in a box or when is that advisable?

Ethan Kross:
I'd give one caveat to the description of my grandmother. She put things in a box, but she didn't seal it airtight and leave it buried for the rest of her life. She would actually open that box a few times a year. She'd have a Remembrance Day that was organized with co-survivors where they would let that box open and just dig into it deep.
And on the rare occasion that she'd bump into another survivor in between the yearly Remembrance Day events, they would sometimes talk about these experiences, at all other times though, it was locked shut. That was an approach that worked for her.
And there's research which shows that ability to compartmentalize an experience and then come back to it on rare occasions that can work for other people too. We cannot predict yet for whom and when that is going to work. We're doing the science on precisely that issue right now.
What scientists have done a pretty good job at doing is identifying specific techniques that can help people or harm them. What we have not yet done is identify the specific contingencies that explain when you should use different techniques. Hey, if someone with guy's background is in this kind of situation, they should do these three things.
But if they're in this other situation, these should do these four. I cannot give that prescription. I don't know of any scientists who can. We're doing that work. Having said that, if you want to start experimenting with this approach to boxing something up for a while and then coming back to it later on, there are a few tips that I provide people with.
How do you know that avoidance is working or not working? Here's how you know it's working. You put in a box, you go, you distract, you look at other things and you don't find yourself thinking about this thing.
Once you put it in the box and move away, you're living the life you want to live. If so, no need to go back and reengage with that experience. As many would argue, this is not the case. I mentioned an anecdote in my book actually a point of conflict in my relationship with my dad and you brought in my grandmother, my kid, my wife, but I might as well bring in my dad here.
My parents got divorced when they were twelve. It was painful when it happened. I dealt with the situation, moved on. I think it was good for the family that that had happened. I never think about my parents' divorce. I'm forty-five now, never think about it.
The only time I go back there is when my dad tells me, "Hey, we need to talk about the divorce." And my response is, "I've got nothing to really say. This doesn't bother me at all. I think it was a good thing." He hasn't let go of it. And that can create some conflict.
And so this can show you how there are individual differences here. If you put it in a box but you find yourself keep thinking about it over and over, that's a cue that this strategy of compartmentalizing is not working. And then what you want to do, use some other strategies or maybe even open up a box and figure out why it's intruding into your current awareness.

Guy Kawasaki:
Since you open the can of worms, I don't mean that in a negative way, but since you open up the can of worms about your dad, isn't this a case of the shoemaker's dad has no shoes? Can't you give him advice about what to do with that situation?

Ethan Kross:
Yeah, that's another really interesting phenomenon. Of course, I can give advice. The question is whether the advice is uptaken, right? And we know when you go from kid to parent back or parent to kid, that can often get a little bit dicey. Yes, absolutely. These are tricky situations and we otherwise don't have any conflict. But on this particular issue, there's still some lingering emotion.

Guy Kawasaki:
Ethan, I have to apologize. I had no intention of making this the Ethan Family Show.

Ethan Kross:
Hey, once this airs, I might be sleeping in the hotel for a little bit, but no apology needed, because you know what? Everyone in my family is a human being. And part of the message of this book and something I believe devoutly in is that emotions and the trickiness that surrounds managing them. This is something that we all experience in our own unique ways. All of us, these are universals. I'm not talking about anything that isn't relevant to any other person who is listening right now.

Guy Kawasaki:
The bottom line is it's a messy situation for everybody.

Ethan Kross:
I was on book tour for about two weeks, went all over the place, and I came away from that book tour both with the recognition that it doesn't matter who you're looking at and how put together their life seems on the outside. We are all dealing with curveballs at times. And that was actually not something that I found to be disheartening, to the contrary, there was something very normalizing about that.
And I shared that message with lots of folks. We're all trying to stumble through this existence. And what's great is that more so than any other point in my adult life, there's a recognition that paying attention to these issues is important and actually matters and that you can use scientific methodologies to weigh in on them. And so that's an exciting message for a guy who runs Emotion and Self Control lab to bring us full circle here.

Guy Kawasaki:
Yes. So I think that is a perfect place to end this episode. I think we've given just enough insights and perspective into your book and your work that more people will want to read that book. The book is called Shift, and Ethan, give your pitch for people to read Shift and let your emotions ring true here.

Ethan Kross:
Shift: Managing Your Emotions-So They Don't Manage You, that's the name of the book. If you're curious about what emotions are, why we have them, why it can at times feel painfully difficult to manage them and want to learn more about how to do so according to science, pick it up. That's why I wrote it.

Guy Kawasaki:
All righty. That's terrific. And clearly managing your emotions is part of becoming remarkable. So fits right in line here. Ethan, thank you very much for this most ‘shifting’ episode and shift happens. And it's a very fascinating read and very fascinating episode. Thank you so much and my best to your grandmother, your wife, your kids, and your father. My God, I'm glad they all made it on our show.

Ethan Kross:
It'll be a family event. We'll have a dinner as we listen to this one and launch as well. True honor to be invited on and it was an immensely enjoyable conversation. So thank you.

Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, thank you very much. Just let me thank Madisun, the good side of Guy who has clearly figured out how to be better at being guy than Guy. And Tessa Nuismer, our researcher, Jeff Sieh and Shannon Hernandez, our sound design engineers. And that's the Remarkable People team. And with guests like Ethan and his book Shift. That's how we're trying to help you be remarkable. Thank you. Until next time, bye-bye.