Navigating Big Emotions

[This is the transcript of Session 5 at the Emotional Intelligence Online Summit 2022 with Corey Gaidzionis.]  

For the last two years, we've lived through this experience that we have called CoViD. It's been different depending on where you come from and how you were affected.  

Here in Western Australia, there were lots of lockdowns and lots of shut downs — visitors were not allowed to come into our community, and many people could not do the things they wanted to do for work. And I was one of them. 

As someone who teaches in schools and takes teenagers on experience camps, during the pandemic, I could not do my work. So that significantly impacted my ability to provide for my family. Therefore, I had to think about how do I pivot and create income for my family. So, I ended up writing a book, but I also found myself feeling lonely and isolated because I was not getting the opportunity to go out, connect, and be in open spaces. And the new normal was having conversations in digital spaces like Zoom. While Zoom is a great tool for communication, I don’t think it is a great tool for connection. I don’t think it hits that spot of having a hug with someone or looking into someone's eyes and really being in that space of heart space connection. For me, that is how I feel. So, I've been going out and dropping into sundowners, creating opportunities, and connecting the spaces I have.  

Because I am working from home a lot, I am sitting in my office and not really seeing people face to face. Yes, I see my family, but other than them, I do not get any adult interaction. 

I felt like my brain could get a bit modelled in that space, so I created tools to go out, create space, see people and be a part of a community.  

I'm going to share a little bit about myself, and then we'll return to this new normal.  

So, in 2014, people would've described me as an angry, arrogant asshole. In fact, those were the words that my wife used to describe me. I had what I now know to be an out-of-sequence event.  

Out-of-sequence events are things that don’t normally happen in your life. 

For me, those out-of-sequence events included a coworker dying in my arms while at work and losing a child.  

In 2014, I went to work and was pretty focused as a sales guy. I had a customer ringing me up saying: “Hey, I need this steel tomorrow. I was very focused on delivering the promise that I found myself giving in instructions to Brendon, asking him to move the steel. And I went back to the phone and told my customer: “Yeah, man, I’ve got this job done for you. You are going to get it tomorrow.” 

When I went back to the factory, it was deadly quiet. There was no noise in the space.  

I've had military training, and I've done fire rescue training, so I can be able to remain calm and help out in those situations. I went over to see what was going on and then started helping out. Then I found myself sitting up, holding Brendan's head in my chest.  

When I passed Brendon off to the paramedics, my brain was broken — I lost that period.  

When I started to go through the journey of healing, a few things came to me. One of them was the thought that if I drink alcohol, I will die an alcoholic. I had this belief that alcohol wasn't going to be able to help me. And I believed my brain was so broken that I could rebuild it however I wanted.  

I sat with those two questions or those two philosophies: 

 “No alcohol”  

“If I'm so broken, how do I change my life?” 

With those questions in mind, I started working with psychologists and coaches and have been on this healing journey. I became a qualified counsellor and rights of passage facilitator, which I'm going talk a fair bit about today because I believe it's relevant to how we can navigate our emotions in the current environment.  

The tools that we teach are tools that everyone can use in their life.  

So, this outer sequence event changed my world. 

Then 12 months later, my neighbour's son passed away, and he was my son's best friend. My son said that losing his best friend was the worst day of his life. 

Twelve months after that, my best mate's daughter passed away. 

So, I’ve had these out-of-sequence events, which have rocked my world and forced me to go within myself and think about each day living life in the present moment.  

It's easy to get caught up in the big scheme of things. It's easy to get caught up in what we don't control, but I come back to: “What can I control” and “How do I want to show up?”  

Because I've had people unexpectedly die around me (young people and a coworker), this has created a philosophy of showing up with love every day.  

So when I leave my house, I make sure I kiss my kids and let them know that I love them. I don't ever let my kids leave angry, and I don't ever leave angry because I do not want them and myself to be in a situation where my son screamed at me, or I had an argument with my wife, and then something unexpected will happen. 

Some people say that you're prophesying your death by doing this. I don't think that's the case. I think you’re just living your best life in the present moment, so you can really, if you’re out here and you get caught up in everything that's out here, you are missing the opportunity to build your emotional intelligence tools. You’re missing the opportunity to reflect within.  

The world is just a big disco ball: it just reflects back to us. Whatever we are feeling is a projection of something the world is making us react to. So, you’re reacting to a situation, and if you can look within, you can start to understand where that emotion comes from and how you can move and shift it and understand how you ended up in that place. 

I'm going to drop into rights of passage and return to tools. When you take teenagers out into the bush, you talk about “what are their big emotions?” “What are they feeling in their bodies?" 

When you ask them that, you see anger, depression, anxiety, and more recently (which I think is a post CoViD thing) stress.

They're feeling more stressed, which feeds into these other things. 

As teenagers are experiencing these big emotions, what we do is we explore that over three or four days in the bush.  

This story can become a tool for you to start navigating your emotions in a new normal. You can start shifting and pivoting what you feel, how you feel it, and how you respond to it differently.  

So, if your thoughts drive your emotions, and your emotions drive your actions, and your actions drive your thoughts, you can potentially end up in this loop of negativity.  

So, we take kids outside of their environment. We remove them from their families, from their school environment and typically from their friends. Therefore, we end up in a peer group situation where they're not with their mates; they are with a bunch of people they don't know. 

That removal from their environment creates an opportunity for honesty, authenticity and connection. If you can create space to step outside of your everyday normal to remove yourself, what that does is it creates an opportunity to look within. This is because we have 50,000 to 70,000 thoughts every day. Most days or every day mirrors the previous day's thoughts. So, stepping outside your normal environment provides you with an opportunity to create growth and change and enables you to look at yourself differently.  

One thing we teach the kids is how to meditate. We do it through a challenge. We want to provide them with tools to be comfortable with being uncomfortable so they can take that back into their lives and into the adult version of their life.  

The first challenge we do is quite an emotional challenge. It's quite difficult because kids ( and most adults) don't even know how to sit quietly with their minds to meditate. Meditation doesn’t need to be sitting, counting beads and chanting; meditation is just an opportunity to let your thoughts come, let them go, and recognise the prevalent thought. And that's where the work is — in the prevalent thought.  

But if we can let our thoughts come and let them go, then that is what meditation is. With this in mind, this means that you can meditate while riding a bike while walking or while driving your car (just turn your radio off).

We often have devices with us (like our cellphones, laptops, televisions or radios) that often fills our time; thus, we rarely have silence in our minds. 

We take these teenage boys, and we get them in silence in a group, and we get them to buy in. We want them to be a part of the community. So that's the first step: We get them to be a part of our tribe. 

When they walk into the circle, they grab a blindfold and put that over their eyes. Then we walk them out into the bush in a chain, pull one person at a time off the back of the chain, and leave them to sit in silence blindfolded. 

They've lost one of their senses, and they are uncomfortable. So, we leave them there long enough to get past: “My bum’s sore”, “I'm cold”, “I have a rock in my shoe”, and whatever other trivial things that are coming up for them, and leave them there long enough to explore what is actually alive in their mind, and let them experience silence and what does that feel like for them. That's something we experience a lot of over three or four days. We spend a lot of time in silence, small periods in silence, just replicating that habit.  

So, I think the first thing you can do when navigating your emotions is to go quiet and be able to name them.  

I heard this analogy about the mouse in the room; if our stuff is mice, what do you have? 

Do you have an angry mouse? 

Do you have a storytelling mouse? 

Do you have a curious mouse? 

What is the mouse in the room? And what is the thing that goes along with that? 

Back to what we do at camp, what’s interesting is that when the boys come back and when we need one person to open up authentically and honestly about what is happening in their world and what is happening for them in their life, one particular boy volunteered.   

The boy came from a boys' school. He seemed the macho and alpha type. He’s good-looking and smart, with many girls probably chasing him. In the camp, he opened up that he did not know if he was gay or straight. The reason for his confusion is that he went to an all-boys school (not that it’s good or bad), and at the bus stop, students from a co-ed school were called faggots, homos and gay (all these things that are still going on in 2022). And that constant chipping away at him and his basketball team started to get him to doubt his mind and who he was as a person, fragmenting his identity.  

But when he opened up, the boys around him didn't judge him; they didn't isolate him but instead rallied around him. When I asked the boys in the fire pit circle to put their hands up and to share their experience with that, 8 out of 13 boys put their hands up and opened up that they had experienced the same thing. So, all of a sudden, this boy no longer felt like he was alone in that experience.  

This is a really powerful piece because two things are happening:  

1. The boy in the group who felt isolated and scared to share this story, stepped up and talked with his peers about how he felt about this.  
2. His peers, who had the same thoughts and beliefs starting to form up, could go, “I feel like that too.”  

These are powerful gifts of connection and opportunity for these boys to bond and support each other in whatever comes up for them.

The next layer of challenge is getting them to do something like hikes, climb up a tower and have conversations with them about those experiences. I think it's easy to avoid doing difficult things, so when we work with teenagers, we challenge them to do difficult things because when we take the easy path, we miss out on so much of life. In the current world, it's easy to do this — to go on a Zoom call, to just be in our house, to be present and to not have a conversation with people outside our world.  

It can be difficult to put ourselves out there, have conversations and join men’s or women's groups to create a connection or whatever it is. 

I've run hundreds of men's circles, and men come along as these circles create an opportunity for them to feel seen, connected and not feel alone in the world.  

Statistics say that one in three people feel isolated and alone. So even though we have all this technology, it's not making people feel more connected to each other; instead, it is making people feel disconnected from the world and that they are all isolated and alone in this life experience. Eighteen months ago, that statistic was one in four. So, it's scary to think where that goes in 2024.  

Does it go to one in two? I don’t know. 

But if you don’t create the opportunity for connection or step into some challenges, you don’t take these opportunities. You will be in a space where you will continue to feel isolated and disconnected.  

So those are some of my top tips.  

In the current environment of the new normal, some of you potentially get two hours back in your day. 

You’ve got an hour's commute to work and an hour's commute home. So, you’re getting two hours back that you would've otherwise lost to commuting. So maybe you've had the opportunity to work at home, do that. 

But if you can go to the office one or two days a week, make that effort. Because what will happen is it'll create this sense of connection.  

Stop at your local coffee shop.  

Get a coffee.  

Go and get on a train commute.  

Have a conversation with someone. 

Go to the office and talk to your workmates.  

Create that opportunity to really start connecting in with other people. I think this loneliness piece is as scary as it is. This loneliness piece is a choice. This loneliness piece is an active decision; you can do the opposite by stepping out.   

If you are working from home, maybe spend one day working at the local coffee shop; put a sticker on the back of your computer that says, “Hey, I'm free to talk. I'm free to have a conversation.”  

I think that is a powerful way to create the opportunity to connect and to really be a part of something that's bigger than yourself. I guess that's a good segue for the final thing.  

In my journey of PTSD and of feeling broken, the thing that brought me back into the world was giving back. So, I joined the local surf club and started a not-for-profit. And being of service became the most healing thing.  

The first thing I actually did was read at my son's school. I started one day a week, and I ended up reading to 50 kids a week. I went in every day. I'd drop my kids at school and just hang out and read books to all the kids.  

That act of being of service really created the opportunity to connect to other people's lives and just be of service. 

What they saw in World War I and the Great Depression, even though people were really poor, they were not depressed; they did not have high levels of suicide.  

However, what we see with CoViD is the opposite of that — people have gone into their houses, and they've not come out and feel isolated and alone. So, I think the number one thing we can do for our emotional intelligence is to be of service to others and support others in their journey. To really step in and just show up and be a part of something that's bigger than you.  

That's what we talk to teenagers about. We talk about:  

What is your purpose?  

What does that look like? 

How are you going to be of service to the world?  

What's the thing that makes your heart sing?  

We're in this space of “the great resignation” and “the great retirement” and all the quiet quitting because people see this opportunity to work online. People see this opportunity to earn money.   

But life is more than that.  

Life is about connections.  

There's a reason that there is no language that only one person speaks because you need somebody else to communicate and connect. So, we have this innate ability to connect, have conversations and communicate with each other. But what we're seeing is that we're not doing that.  

When you are with someone you've just met recently, share a little piece of you; share something about you they might not know. Share something a little bit vulnerable. It doesn't have to be a big story like, “someone died in my arms.”  (Yeah, that's a big story. I don't really talk about that. People who are in my world now don't know that particular story. However, I share that when I’m speaking in public because I want people to know that sharing vulnerably will create a connection with other people.) 

People want to know your story. 

People want to know you.  

How did you become you?  

And I think that's a really beautiful piece.  

So, what’s one thing you can do to improve the life that doesn't involve you being isolated?  

It’s just one thing.  

Can you join a surf club?  

Do you like playing soccer?  

Can you join a mother's group? 

Or can you join a men’s group? 

There are many men’s groups around.  

You can  Google “men's group” or “women's group”. And you see that there's a movement happening at the moment. If you can’t find any, reach out to your mates and say: “Hey, we're kind of used to doing this, but we're not doing it anymore.”  

So, you need to really challenge yourself to step out of your comfort zone and to step into that space of connection — step into that space of being a part of something bigger than you.  

Corey Gaidzionis - Lived Experience Speaker | Workplace Wellness and Emotional Intelligence Coach for Executives. 

Corey has become a specialist in the field of Rites of Passage. He trained with The Rites of Passage Institute to become a facilitator in these programs and, over the past three years, has worked with hundreds of young men through in-school and camp experiences on what it looks like to step into adulthood as a healthy man with Adventure works and through his own organisation Side by Side.  

Corey has extensive experience across a number of industries, such as business, commercial construction, and sales and construction management. Corey uses his years of experience to help men find balance in their careers.