#7 How to be HappyAF No Matter What the World Throws At You
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Last week I shared that your Emotional Intelligence muscle might be the most important muscle you have despite the fact that we rarely talk about it.
And when you build this muscle, you:
Let go of anger
Amplify your happiness
Have more career success
Are a better leader
And maybe best of all, you have super high self-esteem, so it doesn't matter what the f*ck anybody else says or thinks about you.
You always feel valued and confident. Haters can hate, and you just dust that dirt right off your shoulder.
Plus, you no longer fly off the handle and throw adult temper tantrums, which is total emotional rookie stuff (no judgment, I used to punch holes in walls like a maniac).
The simple reality is we can't control 99% of anything.
For example, almost everybody drives like an idiot. You just can’t control that.
But what you can control is how you respond to those idiots.
Do you wanna:
Give them the power to f*ck up your drive, make you super angry, and cause you to model emotional immaturity to your kids and the world around you?
Or
Keep your power and have the ability to just relax and get back to the music, confident that you're a badass, positive force of happiness and maturity for your loved ones and the world around you?
I hope you answered “B”, because that’s exactly what I have on tap for you as we continue our series on Emotional Intelligence in this week’s episode of The Grit, Growth, & Gratitude Podcast.
Let’s Connect!
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Resources to increase your inner peace and maximize your happiness:
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Episode #7 Transcription
Imagine this, you're driving down the road, you've got your kiddo next to you, or if you're not a parent, maybe your favorite nephew and you're just enjoying the music and the conversation, and then you look in your rear view mirror and some guy is so close to your bumper, he's about to hit you. And right when you're thinking what the F is wrong with this guy, he swerves around you, cuts you off, blows through the red light almost causing a car accident and you feel rage.
But before you respond to. You decide that you are a leader and you're gonna set an example and show your nephew or kiddo how to feel anger but not lose your temper. And so when they ask you like, Hey, what was that all about? You're like, I have no idea. Maybe he's just an aggressive jerk. Or maybe he was late for work or going to visit a dying loved one in the hospital.
Either way, I'm just gonna err on the side of empathy and instead of tensing up my muscles, raising my blood pressure and killing our vibe, I'm just gonna use this as an opportunity to practice mind ownership and to show you how to stay happy and positive regardless of what's going on around you. And he's like, that's dope.
Thank you so much for teaching me how to be a Jedi, and you are awesome. And when he says that, your heart swells up and you feel so good because you're at this place in life where the highs are so high and the lows are not very low, and you could just roll with any punch that life throws at you. With this never-ending feeling of inner peace and gratitude.
Does that sound good to you? Of course it does. It's awesome. And today we're gonna be talking about exactly how you can experience life just like that, and you don't wanna miss it, so stick around. Just because you are struggling doesn't mean you are failing. Remember that. Remember that. Welcome to the Grit, growth and Gratitude podcast with Joe Specter, where we teach hardworking and growth oriented people, how to maximize their happiness and master their minds and emotions and emotions.
And now your host. He's a retired firefighter and mental and emotional fitness teacher. After sustaining a career-ending injury, the loss of multiple loved ones and a very near miss with suicide, he rebounded his wellness with a vengeance to gain unshakable inner peace and ridiculously unreasonable.
This is Joe Specter. Hello. I am so excited that you decided to join me today because we are going to be continuing a conversation that we started last week on what is quite possibly the most important skill that you can ever learn in order to maximize your happiness, have killer relationships, and crush all of your goals.
And this is a series. So if you didn't catch last week's episode, I definitely suggest that you go back and start there. And before I get too deep into this, I've gotta throw out a disclaimer that I use profanity in today's episode. So use your discretion. And to recap what we learned last week, you have a muscle that you might not know about, and it's called emotional intelligence, and it's literally the most important influencing variable in accomplishing all of your goals, succeeding in your career, being a good leader and enjoying your life, basically.
All the good stuff. And growing this muscle involves mastering two different skill sets. The first one is radical self-awareness, and the second one is emotional regulation and processing. And once you've got these two skills dialed in, you basically master your mind and your emotions. You let go of anger, you boost creativity.
You amplify your happiness. You're more successful at work, you're a better leader, and here's a biggie. You have ridiculously high self-esteem and self-acceptance, and it comes from within. So it doesn't matter what the fuck anybody else says or thinks about you. You always feel valued and confident, and it's so good.
Haters can hate all they want, and you just dust that dirt right off your shoulder. . And another thing that gets brought to the table when you up your emotional intelligence game is you no longer fly off the handle and throw adult temper tantrums, which is total emotional rookie stuff, and you're no rookie.
And let's face it, we can't control 99% of what life throws our. Just like in that example that I gave you at the top of this episode, we can't control that. Almost everybody drives like an idiot, but what we can control is how we respond to those idiots. Do you want to give them the power to fuck up your drive and get you so angry and spike your blood pressure and model aggression and reactivity to your kids and the world around you?
Or do you want to keep your power and have the ability to just shake your head and chuckle and get back to the music and just be a radical, positive force of happiness and maturity for yourself, your loved ones, and the world around you. I know where I like to land on that one, and I know where I want you to land.
So how do you become the badass boss of your own mind and emotions that you were designed to be? It all starts with having a deep self-awareness and an understanding of how your mind and your emotions work. And for some reason, which is totally beyond my understanding, most of us weren't taught this shit growing up, so let's teamwork it here.
Almost all of us, unless you're really practiced at studying yourself. We have awareness gaps on how we're communicating, what message our body language, and our facial expressions and our words are sending to the people we're talking to, what our thoughts are in between our own ears and what emotions we're actually feeling and how we're processing them.
That's the bad news. The good news is this is an emotional fitness skill that you can intentionally grow. But before we can be radically self-aware of our own experience and our own emotions and our own thoughts, we have to have a deep understanding of how the mind and emotions work in general. And last week I shared how emotions are super tricky and we're not always even aware that we have them because they love to stay hidden.
And they do this for a number of reasons. Sometimes they like to stay hidden because we don't feel comfortable experiencing them or processing them, and it's so crazy. We feel more comfortable like punching a hole in the wall or screaming at a loved one. Then we do crying or investigating our grief or our sadness or our shame, and sometimes those emotions stay hidden and we have no idea they exist because nobody taught us how to feel them or experienced them when we were growing up.
Or even worse than that, we were taught growing up that it is not okay to have big feelings or to express your emotions. And so our childhood experiences and the way we were parented has like hit the mute button on our feelings and it's super important to unpack and investigate all this stuff, even if you're feeling like, ah, I don't think I have any hidden emotion.
Well, first of all, if they're doing their job and they're hiding well, you wouldn't know you have them. And second of all, hidden emotions seriously impede your wellness even if you don't know it. They turn down the volume on all of the good vibe, emotions that you experience, like happiness, joy, love, peace, connection, and they amplify all of the bad vibe, emotions like stress, worry, anxiety, and anger.
And even if none of that applies to you, this stuff is still really awesome to study and learn because maybe you have a friend who you could help with difficult emotional circumstances, or maybe you're a leader at work or maybe you're a parent and you can teach your kiddos how their minds and their emotions work and how to avoid mental health struggles and maximize their happiness and be kick ass communicators.
And speaking of kiddos, I gave a comparison last week of how our emotions are like little kids and they love hiding. Like my kids are getting older and they still love playing hide and seek. And here's another way, emotions are a lot like little kids. Emotions love wearing disguises. I'm telling you, man, my kids, even though they're getting a little bit older, they still love playing dress.
It doesn't have to be anywhere near Halloween. It could just be a random Wednesday. And I'll look over and my son will have some sort of Star Wars outfit or Marvel outfit on, and my daughter will be like wearing a wolf mask and howling at the moon, and it's a lot of fun. But I also shared last week how Winnie Moha.
It can really fuck up your wellness. And the same holds true for when emotions where disguises. And to clarify what I'm talking about, I'd like to share a true story with you about one of my best friends. His name is John, and he is an amazing dude. We have been friends for almost 40 years, almost my whole life, and over the last few years, life just kind of happened and we sort of fell outta touch a little bit, but we recently had the opportunity to really reconnect and it was so awesome.
In fact, here's a little sidebar. Human connection and community and deep, authentic relationships are absolutely one of the major tickets to living the good life and all of this emotional intelligence stuff helps you out in those areas big time. But anyways, back to my story. For a couple of hours, my friend John and I were just catching up and chopping it up, and we were sharing all of these big life experiences that had happened to us, and as we exchanged all of the trials, tribulations, what was going on with our families, it was a wild series of revelations for me because some of our mental health issues that we had both not only struggled with, but tackled and conquer.
Were in a weird series of coincidences, very parallel, and John started sharing with me that he had recently gotten into counseling for the first time. And here's another quick side note. If you've listened to my previous episodes, you might already know that I got into counseling when I was already in a mental health crisis, and that is not the time to work on your emotional fitness.
Emotional fitness is just like physical fitness. You don't wanna wait until you've had a heart attack or you have another health emergency to start dieting and exercising properly. Right? Well, the same holds true with your emotional fitness. I would really like to issue you a challenge to work on your emotional fitness no matter where you're at on it and make it a daily practice.
Please don't get complacent, because in my case, things were going so well. I was at the top of my game. My family life was awesome, my career was great, my relationships were thriving, and then boom, life dealt me so much trauma, tragedy, pain, death in mayhem that all of a sudden I found myself suffocating under the pain of my circumstances and I couldn't catch my.
And I had my fucking gun in my mouth and I almost ended my own. And I have big shoulders and I was super happy and emotionally well before that happened, but please trust me, everybody has a breaking point and a threshold for how much they can take if they don't intentionally build up their resilience.
So don't be an emotional fitness couch potato instead. Become like the equivalent of a fucking Ironman triathlete in emotional fitness. And that way you can sustain any damage and weather, any storm that life throws your way. And if life doesn't hand you a shit show of mayhem, then you enjoy the fuck out of it.
It's a win-win. And just like in that physical fitness analogy, if you're already a rockstar at this stuff, well that's awesome. But athletes always work on elevating their game. They always want to get bigger, faster, stronger, perform better. There's no downside to going from functional to exceptional, and then from exceptional to extraordinary.
Well, the same holds true for your mental and your emotional fitness. And back to my story in my friend John's case, that's exactly what he did. He went from exceptional to extraordinary because he's already a super successful professional. He's really good at relationships and social situations. He's a great dad.
His relationships are thriving. But there was just one area of his life that he was super uncomfortable with, and that was the level of anger he was experiencing. And so he found a counselor that he jived with and he sat down and they started talking and he was like, Hey, I'm feeling a lot of anger. I get really pissed off and I lose my temper.
I just get mad way too often, and I am not comfortable with. It's not good for my health. It's not good for me. It's definitely not good for my relationships and my loved ones. And sometimes I feel like it's out of proportion with what I'm actually experiencing and reacting to. And the counselor was like, okay, I hear that.
So let's get to the root cause of this anger, and let's talk about what makes you sad and what you're afraid of. And John was like, no, man, I'm fucking fearless. I don't have any sadness. That's not the problem. Are you listening to me? I'm angry. I have fucking anger. And his counselor was like, no, I do hear you.
But a lot of times, anger is not always what it appears to be. In fact, most of the time, anger is just the tip of the iceberg that you see. But underneath the surface of the water, there's sadness and disappointment. And childhood trauma and embarrassment and shame and fear and all these other emotions that you're not even aware of.
And so the counselor continued asking John some provocative questions and trying to get him to unpack some of these challenging emotions and difficult life experiences that he had, and to suss out some of his subconscious fears and sadness and things. Aren't really always on the surface, like in that iceberg analogy.
And again, Sean answered like, no, dude, you're not getting it. I'm very rarely sad, and trust me, bro, if you knew me, I'm not afraid of anything. I'm angry and I don't like it. I get pissed off way more than I want to, and I'd like some help with this. In fact, motherfucker, you're pissing me off right now by asking me all about my sadness and my fear.
Okay, . Just kidding. I made that last part. But the rest of the story is true. And his counselor again was like, no, I do hear you John, but I don't think you're aware that most of the time anger is actually sadness in disguise. And he kind of paused and for whatever reason, that got John reflecting about some of the things in his life that he had been angry about, and he was able to start doing some reverse engineering as to what triggered that anger.
And then his mind started unpacking these subconscious experiences and all this stuff just started coming to the surface. And then all of a sudden these repressed sad feelings and painful experiences, they just bubbled up and the water works started. And John was bawling. And when he told me this, it was a wild revelation because like I said, he and I had been out of touch for a little while.
And yet we both had so many similarities in this regard in our emotional health journey. We both had unknown and hidden and disguised sadness and trauma that we weren't even aware of, and both of us coincidentally found counselors who were able to help us unpack this stuff with provocative questions.
And our reflections started these super uncomfortable but also insanely healthy and healing SOB fests. And I can't quite speak for John on this one, but prior to my first experience in a counselor's office, I really hadn't cried or expressed or experienced sadness or fear since I was a little kid, and I didn't even know that I had all of this stuff festering and brewing up in my mind and my heart until my grandma and my dog died within the same.
And then a bunch of hidden grief from my best friend passing away years earlier was like, peek Kaaboo bitch. Ready or not? Here I come. I hope you're ready for your mental health to be fucked up. And if you're in the same boat as me on having these hidden feelings that I wasn't aware of and I hadn't processed, I have to share a hard truth and be honest with.
That is not healthy. Feeling these feels and crying these tears and venting your challenges, that is the healthy way of processing these emotions and experiences. You've gotta get the poison out. Ignoring it is resisting it, and in the mind what you resist persists. And whether you know it's in there or not, trust me, once you get it out, you feel like you're 10,000 pounds lighter and your cup is super full.
And these experiences and this trauma and this stuff, it doesn't just go away on its own. The only way out is through, and you've gotta walk through that fire. And so anyways, back to my story. John had all these realizations that he had some major unpacked trauma and sadness and stuff, and those emotions were hiding and disguising themselves as anger. Those tricky bastards.
so he started working through all of this stuff and it's just been a really amazing healing and fruitful experience and journey for him. So I really would encourage you and challenge you to do the same. Before I wrap up, I just have one more element of this that I'd like to share with you.
When I was still working on the firetruck, I started working through a bunch of this stuff that we're talking about today, and I was really passionate about sharing with all of my homies, the mental and emotional fitness skills that I was picking up and all of the healing that I was going through.
Because it is really brutal. Like indescribably rough doing c p R on babies who had drowned and seeing people all burnt up and all the stuff that we went through at work. And to be quite honest, The fire department culture is not quite yet on point with processing and experiencing and acknowledging challenging emotions.
And the P T S D and suicide rate is like through the roof. So I would bring all this stuff up and some of the guys were really into it and we had a lot of healing sessions and it was amazing. But oftentimes I'd get like an eye roll and it would be like, okay, bro. Here we go again with the fufu emotions and the crying, and the journaling, boohoo, yada, yada, yada.
And I have to tell you, not doing emotional work doesn't make you tough. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Ignoring challenging feelings and being afraid to step outside of your comfort zone and unpack your mind and your emotions, and maybe even cry. That's the weak way of doing things, the warrior's path, is to walk through that fire.
And let me finish this episode off and prove that point by just sharing a little bit more with you about my friend John. John is 100% as tough as they come. No doubt about it. When we were growing, He was never afraid of anything. I'm telling you, conflict and confrontation were this guy's specialties and he was really into the punk rock and the hardcore music scene, and occasionally he would somehow convince me to tag along to these concerts.
And I would be so scared, dude, like standing in the corner watching all of this craziness unfold. There were guys on the stage like screaming until their throats were bleeding, and then there were these crazy mosh pits. And I'm not talking about like one of these M T V just for fun mosh pits. These guys were not fucking around.
They were like bare knuckle brawling and having fist fights, and they weren't even mad at each other. This is how they had fun. And John was always right in the middle of it, just totally mixing it up and never scared. And then as we got older, He found a new passion, Brazilian Jiujitsu. In fact, just a few weeks ago I was so privileged and honored I got to watch him get his black belt.
And if you're familiar with martial arts at all, you know how legit it is to get a black belt in Brazilian jiujitsu at a Gracie school. So this guy is not to be fucked. But hey, he's got a big old heart and big feelings too, and he's all about his mental and his emotional fitness game, and he loves processing his experiences and working through his trauma and growing and learning.
And so if you happen to think that emotional fitness and all this other stuff that I teach here on this podcast isn't for you, then you better watch the fuck out because I'm gonna have my friend John track you. And he's gonna put you in a Jiujitsu arm bar, and then he's gonna choke your ass out like you guys are right in the middle of the UFC octagon.
Okay? Obviously, I'm just kidding. But seriously, stick with me in this series and continue to grow your emotional intelligence and awareness muscles because this stuff is really mission critical to you thriving, and I want you to thrive. And so to wrap things up, now, you have a deeper understanding after these last two episodes of how your mind and your emotions, So the next step is fostering your self-awareness and actually observing and watching and learning what specific emotions you're feeling at any given time, what your triggers are, and what repetitive thought patterns that you have going on in that pesky mind of yours, and also how you're communicating and expressing yourself to others.
And there is no greater practice to do that than meditation. And I know if it's not your thing, sometimes meditation is boring or it sucks, but I've got a couple of fun ones for you to do. They're free. The link is in the show notes and they are designed to foster the exact skills that we're talking about today.
So check 'em out. And that's all I got for you today. That's a wrap of this episode. But before you go drop everything immediately, tell everyone you know about this podcast, subscribe and leave a raving five star review, or else I'm calling John. And he's gonna track your ass down, put you in that arm bar, and like I said, choke you out.
And nobody wants that. Okay? Obviously, I'm just kidding again. But if you do hook me up with a subscription and a review, which I totally would appreciate, send me a screenshot of that review and I'll mail you two free super dope stickers, which you can also preview in the link in the show notes. Other than that, thank you so much for listening today.
Go meditate, master your mind in your emotions. Have fun and be happy. Until next time, stay calm and stay strong. Peace. Thanks for listening. This has been Grit, growth, and Gratitude with Joe Specter. Your source for mental and emotional fitness. Just because you're struggling doesn't mean you are failing.
