We've been talking so much about be goals, do goals, and action goals. What is the Number 1 do goal that people tell us is important to them? Well, we've done a lot of work with our purposeful application that our company Kumonu, has created. Right up front, we ask people, what do you want to work on? Here's what we find. The Number 1 thing we find in our entire book of business across employees around the United States is emotions. I want to deal with my emotions. I want to deal with my mood. These other things are important. Energy is really important. I want more energy. But boy, compared to everything else, I need to deal with my emotions, super important. I thought we'd be remiss if we didn't talk a bit about how to manage our emotions and actually some action goals around managing our emotions as well. I'm going to go to this wonderful researcher, Ethan Kross, who is a psychologist here at the University of Michigan. He runs the emotion and self-control laboratory. I'm going to recommend his book, Chatter: The Voice in Your Head, Why It Matters and How to Harness It. Such a good book. It's all about emotional self-management, regulating your emotions. He and I have started working together and linking this ability to regulate your emotions to purpose. One of the things Ethan and I did was survey literally thousands of people around the United States, asking what coping strategies they tended to use when they were stressed out, when they're having a really difficult time. We also asked them about their strength of purpose in life. Here's what we found. In all the coping strategies that we looked at, we found that certain strategies were very strongly associated with purpose. Things like, I see a big picture when I'm stressed out. l try to see that big picture, I try to see a silver lining. I know this won't last. Or I might take time out for a religious ritual or a family ritual, or I might take some time walking outside. Those are coping strategies that are very strongly associated with purpose in life. As you see these white bars increasing, getting longer, you see that that's a stronger association between the coping strategy that's being used and a person's purpose in life. You also notice on the other side, the left side, things like drinking alcohol, that's negatively associated with purpose in life. In other words, people with a strong purpose are actually less likely to drink alcohol as a coping response when they're stressed out or eating or hiding their anxiety. Or very importantly, venting. Not nearly as powerful and good as things like seeing a big picture, finding a silver lining, knowing it won't last. Now, I want to map this relationship between coping strategies and purpose to another set of questions we asked about, can you change your own emotional weather? If you're suddenly really upset, if you've been cut off by another car, if you feel dissed by somebody, if you're just somehow emotionally upset by something, can you flip that upsetness to being calm again. That's what we call emotional regulation. Can you change your own weather from stormy or cloudy into suddenly sunny or calm? That's a really important skill to have that relates to a bigger concept that we call resilience. Emotional self-regulation is essential to be more resilient generally. But emotional self-regulation is usually around real specific events that happen to you. Here's how this relationship between coping strategies and purpose map to emotional regulation. Notice how close it is. In other words, people who have these stronger coping strategies on the right that are really strongly associated with having a strong purpose in your life are also associated with your ability to regulate your emotions. That ability to regulate your emotions really strongly associated with resilience. Here what we're saying is if emotions are due goals that you want to work on, there are certain things that we could help you with. One is your be goals, which is to find greater purpose in your life. People with stronger purpose are going to tend to use action goals, these coping strategies, these specific crispy behaviors to help you cope better, to be a better person, to live a better life. The other thing that Ethan likes to say, and this is a really specific strategy. It's been very helpful to me personally. Very early on in this course, I talked about sitting down and writing out the things that mattered most in my life. I used a personal story about how years ago, my 19-year-old daughter passed away. A few months after that, I was in a very depressed state and I decided to look down on myself in a second person, basically as if I'm my own therapist. I said, you have to help yourself Vick, or you're going to die. I had to start thinking to myself, what should I do for myself? I'm a behavioral scientist. I'm here to help people. If I can't help myself, what good am I? I had myself pull out a sheet of paper and write at the top what matters most. I literally started writing those down and that's in one of the lessons here in this course. I started writing down things like my family, my students, other things. I continued writing those downs which formed my be goals, be goals forming purpose, and then starting to try to become more purposeful. But it started by looking down on myself in this second person trying to help myself. Ethan has found very clearly in randomized studies. If you start looking down on yourself as a second person and trying to help yourself in that way as opposed to staying in your own head, this is really helpful as a coping strategy. I thought you'd just might want to know that. It's a really great little action goal for you.
