Emotional Engineering - Using Emotion as a Guide Through Divorce, Leadership, and Life with Dr Brian Paris

You use the phrase emotional engineering.

And I want to unpack that because it immediately challenges the way many people think about emotion.

What does emotional engineering mean to you?

Great question.

And thank you for double clicking on it.

So the way that I look at as emotions, we have seven basic emotions.

And those are fear, sadness, excitement, sexual excitement, disgust, joy.

There's one more.

I got to bring that last one up and I'll go back to my books and get it.

But basically, we have these core emotions that every human being on the planet experiences.

And all of those core emotions have a physiological or visceral response.

Right.

So I know you have kids, right? And if you have milk, do they drink milk?

Yes.

Okay.

And if there's bad milk in the fridge and one of your kids takes it before you get to catch them and they drink it, are they smiling when they drink that bad milk? No.

You've seen things like, right? They eat something and you're like, right? They have a face of disgust.

So disgust is a raw core emotion that has a visceral response.

Right.

You actually get the feeling in your body.

Your body will speak and then the brain will listen out.

On top of those emotions, you have grief, shame, and anxiety.

Those are inhibitory experiences or inhibitory emotions.

So really having an understanding of this around emotions itself first, I think is very important because we go from the left brain because most men are, you know, we're intellectual first, but then we have to start diving into, okay, once I can differentiate those emotions in me as a coach, I'm able to kind of discern, all right, this is anxiety.

Can we put that aside for a second? And what's underneath that? And that takes some engineering on my part and engineering on the client's part as well.

You use the phrase emotional engineering.

And I want to unpack that because it immediately challenges the way many people think about emotion.

What does emotional engineering mean to you?

Great question.

And thank you for double clicking on it.

So the way that I look at as emotions, we have seven basic emotions.

And those are fear, sadness, excitement, sexual excitement, disgust, joy.

There's one more.

I got to bring that last one up and I'll go back to my books and get it.

But basically, we have these core emotions that every human being on the planet experiences.

And all of those core emotions have a physiological or visceral response.

Right.

So I know you have kids, right? And if you have milk, do they drink milk?

Yes.

Okay.

And if there's bad milk in the fridge and one of your kids takes it before you get to catch them and they drink it, are they smiling when they drink that bad milk? No.

You've seen things like, right? They eat something and you're like, right? They have a face of disgust.

So disgust is a raw core emotion that has a visceral response.

Right.

You actually get the feeling in your body.

Your body will speak and then the brain will listen out.

On top of those emotions, you have grief, shame, and anxiety.

Those are inhibitory experiences or inhibitory emotions.

So really having an understanding of this around emotions itself first, I think is very important because we go from the left brain because most men are, you know, we're intellectual first, but then we have to start diving into, okay, once I can differentiate those emotions in me as a coach, I'm able to kind of discern, all right, this is anxiety.

Can we put that aside for a second? And what's underneath that? And that takes some engineering on my part and engineering on the client's part as well.