SUMMARY

• “Even when we’re disconnected from our emotions, emotions are still informing the choices, decisions, and actions that we take.”
• Before you knew language, our first mode of communication was emotion. Emotion is still the most powerful communication we make, whether or not we know what emotion we’re feeling. 
• “When we learn how to center our emotions, we become very powerful in our ability to live a fulfilled life.”
• If you’re looking for tips on how to develop emotional literacy, this episode is for you.
• Watch the video to get the full training.

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 Full Transcript:

[The following is the full transcript of this episode of Joey’s Performance Tune Up With Joey Klein. Please note that this episode, like all episodes, features Joey speaking unscripted and unedited. This video is captured in one take.]

In this session, we're going to talk about essentially, like, where, where our core language comes from and a little bit about what motivates every choice, decision, and inherently action that we take. And so if you think back to, you know, when you were born, right, and you imagine what your reality was, like, your first say, you know, two, three years of life, you didn't talk, right? Because in order to talk and communicate, you needed language, and you hadn't yet learned the language that you speak, whether that's English or Japanese or Spanish or whatever that may be. And so what was our emotional communication? Our communication was all emotional, right? Our communication, the way we interacted with the world was all emotional communication, meaning we were still experiencing feelings even though we didn't know what to call those feelings. 


Meaning the mirror neurons in your brain were communicating with the mirror neurons in the brain of those around you. And so you were learning anger or sadness or joy or happiness or peace or frustration or whatever those emotions were that the people in your environment were feeling. You were inherently feeling those, too, in your nervous system. And so for many years, in your first phase of life, actually starting in the womb of your mother, you were inside of your entire communication system was emotional. And so when people tell me that they're logical decision makers, they're just not. That's just inherently incorrect. Like, many of us believe ourselves to be rational humans, or maybe more logical than other people. But in terms of how we make decisions in our life, what motivates our behavior, no matter how logical or rational you may feel you are or you may seem to be, the reality is that is not what motivates decision and behavior. 


Underneath the rationalization process or all rational, or rationale,  is emotion, and we are either in touch with those emotions or not. Some people think they're non emotional decision makers. That just means they're inherently disconnected from their emotions. Emotions are still informing the choice, decision, and action that we take. We're just completely blind to why we're doing it and therefore helpless to actually influence different decisions, different choices, different options for ourself. And so if we are emotionally illiterate, essentially, meaning we don't have any access to what we're feeling when we're feeling those emotions. And if we don't have the ability to shift and change those feelings and those emotions, then we really don't have the capacity to change our behavior and produce new and different outcomes. Right? 



The other thing that happens if we're not connected to our own emotional language is we become disassociated and disconnected from the emotional language of those around us, and that becomes very problematic if you're looking to build a strong culture in a company and build a team and get people to want to produce outcomes and results on your behalf or with you. It becomes very challenging to have a vibrant family dynamic with your spouse, your significant other, and your children if we are emotionally disconnected or emotionally ignorant to what they're feeling and what's going on for them, and we're not managing that emotional communication that is going on. And so, so many people, they are 100%, you know, acting and reacting based on how they're feeling and how the people around them are feeling, first and foremost. And then they communicate, and then they take action, and then they make choices, then they do stuff. 


But emotion is 100% the first energy that's in the space. It's the first language that's in the space. And we're either, you know, articulate in that language, we speak it well, or we're illiterate in that language and we don't speak it well. You know, just like illiteracy rates today are higher than they've ever been. Like, kids today, they go to school, and they don't necessarily come out of school with the ability to read. I just learned this fact not too long ago that, that kids are going to school today and, like, getting into high school, and they still don't know how to read. They're still illiterate. Right. They still can't read a newspaper or read an article or read their, you know, a book, which is kind of terrifying. Right. But, you know,  if we were to compare the literacy rates to people's emotional literacy rates, people's emotionally, in terms of the rate in which they are emotionally illiterate is far greater than what people's comprehension around reading words on a page and communicating. 


And so, because we've not been trained on how to do the key things around emotional literacy, which is, understand what we're feeling, be able to be in touch with what we're feeling, acknowledge the emotions that are happening, be sensitive to that, and aware of those feelings. Number two, learn how to stop the emotions that aren't serving, like fear based states, as the shame and guilt and worthiness, fear, anxiety, things like this. Right. Panic, whatever it might be. We got to learn how to stop emotions. How do we shut those down? How do we center them? And then the third capacity of emotional literacy is how do we create new emotions? How do we access the emotions that are going to drive the behaviors that are going to produce the results we want in our life. 


And so if we can develop and train emotional literacy, which every human being has the ability to do, which is be aware of the emotions that are there. Step two, understand how to center those emotions, how to stop those emotions from expressing if we need to, and then how do we get the emotions that we want to express and that are relative to the outcomes we want to produce? We become very powerful in our ability to live not only a fulfilled life, but also create the outcomes and results that we clearly want. The higher your emotional literacy, the more likely you are to succeed. Period. End of story. And there's so much research out there about this, and they call it emotional intelligence, right? The higher emotional intelligence one has, the more likely one is to succeed. It's all about emotional literacy. 


And so hopefully this makes sense to you. And if you wanna put it to the test, just start paying attention to any action that you take in life or any choice that you make, as simple as, like, what am I gonna have from lunch to, what am I gonna invest in? And if you start paying attention and you really get in touch with how do I feel in this moment, you're going to see 100% that emotion is there first preceding all action. Emotion is there first preceding all action. Even if it's a simple exchange with your children or your spouse or a friend or a colleague at work, if you pay attention to what you feel before you say something to them, what you feel before you write an email, you're going to see that emotion is 100% informing the actions that you take, even in small exchanges. 


And so if we're not doing something to enhance or create emotional literacy, we are at a extreme deficit. And on the other side, if we become emotionally literate and we develop and we build a high skill set inside of emotional capacity, emotional literacy, you've got an edge on everybody else, and you have a huge advantage in creating a fulfilled life and a life that you want to create. So hopefully this makes sense to you. It's just kind of how we're constructed, how our nervous system works. It's just the science behind human behavior. So hopefully we got you thinking today, and we've got a lot of follow up support for you to understand how to train this emotional literacy. Look forward to seeing you in a future session.