304. Power of Emotional Awareness - Randy Lyman

You are listening to Ideas and Leaders podcast. I'm Elena Paventa, founder of Ideas and Leaders, an international platform connecting leaders around the world. With each episode, I'll share ideas and conversations to help you grow as a leader and create meaningful impact. Welcome to the next episode of Ideas and Leaders podcast.

Today, I'm speaking with Randy Lyman. He's a leadership coach. He is a serial entrepreneur and author of the Third Element book. And Randy is helping founders and executives to understand the role that emotions play in leadership.

So we are going to speak about this hard for some people topic about emotions. Hi, Randy. Welcome to Ideas and Leaders podcast. Thank you, Elena.

It's great to be here with you today. So, Randy, what brought you to this area of leadership, which is emotions, emotional intelligence? Well, I'll try and give you as short an answer as possible. Basically, I was successful to a certain level, but I became my own biggest obstacle.

And I was fortunate enough to meet a woman in 1989 who I spent three years with. and Maria, who I talk about in my book, The Third Element, she introduced me to the unseen aspects of the human experience, spirituality and our emotions. And over time, I was able to get through a lot of my own emotional trauma. I didn't have a traumatic childhood, but being human is kind of traumatic in itself.

So I got through my anger. Below my anger was feelings of abandonment, loneliness and such. So as I became more clear, then I was more effective at work. And then I decided to take the concepts I was learning about emotions and clarity and what's important to people at an emotional level.

And when I incorporated that into my businesses, then they grew 30 times. And it was really interesting how it all evolved. But it all started about 36 years ago. Wow.

I think that many people, they like separate those two worlds. So here is the business world and here is my self-development world. And this is what I speak about very often. And I think that those two worlds need to collide at a certain level because we are human beings and we cannot have those two separate identities.

And what you're speaking about is when you enter this world of spirituality and emotions and self-development, it helped you in business a lot. So what would you recommend to our listeners who are maybe not so much into spirituality, but they want to enhance their business and leadership side as well? So what can we maybe start doing or what practices can we introduce? Where can we start to maybe not have a deep dive from the very beginning, but to start working on this?

I find that with a lot of people I work with, the safest way to start is a yellow pad of paper and four columns. I used to say three, but I've added another column now. So the first column, the left side, what is the problem in the outside world, outside of myself that I'm dealing with? Is it something in operations?

Is it a vendor? Whatever that might be. The second column is what's the logical solution? Because as business leaders, we always want to look at the logical solution.

And even when we are incorporating emotions into our overall big picture, the logic and reason is still absolutely important. The third column is what judgments do I have around the situation? Am I blaming somebody? Am I blaming myself?

Do I think it should be different? Should, meaning a part of me is frustrated with this situation. Not just I have an operations challenge to fix, but I'm frustrated at some level. And then the fourth column, which I believe is most important, is what emotion am I feeling?

And the reason that it's so useful to write it down on a piece of paper is it's safe. The brain says, okay, I'm in charge of this. A logical person says, this is reasonable. I can do this.

And if that person decides, yeah, I want to look at the underlying emotions that are being exposed, they have that option, but they're not forced to. They get to choose. So why do we need to do this? Why do we need to bring those emotions out?

Because very often we try to hide emotions in business and we think, oh, I need to be tough and I need to wear this professionalism leader mask at work. I tried that for a long time. And the challenge is emotions are bigger than time and space. And I explain this in my book.

Our thinking mind is never in the present moment. We're thinking about the past or the future. Our physical body, how we experience life, is only in the present moment. And emotions can only come through our body in the present moment.

But again, emotions are bigger than time and space. So if I haven't felt an emotional experience completely, it doesn't go away over time. It sits and it waits for me to feel that experience. It's like storing gasoline in a metal can.

It'll store for 10 or 20 years, but that energy is still there. And when you pour out the gasoline and light it on fire, the energy is still there. So our emotions want to be felt. Our emotions are a lot like a child.

If a child comes up to their mother or father and wants attention, they'll say something. And then they'll talk louder. And then they'll pull on their pant leg or their dress. And if they don't get attention, that child will go and break something in order to get attention.

And our emotions are the same way. So if I'm walking into a meeting with a team member or I'm walking into a board meeting and I'm feeling frustration, if I don't acknowledge that, it will find a way to try and creep into my being, my thinking, my actions, my interactions with other people. Now, if I do something simple like write it down, oh, I'm feeling frustrated about our production schedule and I write that down before I go into the meeting, I've given it the attention it needs for the moment and I can come back to it later.

but again emotions want attention they are they want to be felt and released and if we don't give them that attention they will find a way to creep into all aspects of our life and then we're not really completely in charge of our thoughts because our emotions are trying to push their way in we're not completely in charge of our actions because our emotions are going to influence whether we do something or don do something And I know so many intelligent strong people who believe they going to hold down their emotions And I find that the most intelligent, strongest people have some of the biggest challenges in life because they're good at pushing down their emotions.

And it takes so much time and energy and effort to push down those emotions. It distracts us from being our best. Yes. Oh, my God.

I can totally understand this because I'm the one who for many years I was an overachiever and I was doing, doing, doing, doing. And at a certain point, I also started going into spirituality and working with emotions. And I understood that I was suppressing those emotions a lot. But it is hard work to start releasing those emotions.

So how can we start doing this? Because I feel that still many people in the business world, many people think that, oh, I don't want to be not professional. I don't want to show my emotions in public. So what recommendations would you give us?

How can we start doing this step by step so that it is easier for us? Well, first of all, we have to have a desire to find that change within ourselves. Then we have to realize not only is it difficult, it can be messy, but we can do all this work outside of work. We can do our personal growth outside of work.

We don't have to do it at work. We probably shouldn't do it at work. and if we can find books or a mentor or talk to your peers and see if there's anybody else who's worked through some of their emotional challenges and try and get an understanding. So one reason I wrote the book, The Third Element, is so that I could explain to people how emotions work and why it's worth it to go down this road.

So when somebody reads my book, they say, oh, Randy's a a logical guy. He's a scientist and a business person and, and his story makes sense. So maybe this could work for me. So we have an understanding of how it works.

And then once we dive in, we have to know that we're not going to do it perfectly. We have to be willing to make mistakes. We have to be willing to feel the emotional pain that comes up and then know, I'll tell people right now, tell everybody right now, it's not going to kill you. It's going to feel like it, But I can guarantee any emotions that are avoided are going to build up until they're felt.

So we might as well do it on our terms. So I recommend breathwork is a great place to start. Yoga is fantastic. In Chapter 7 of my book, I cover 14 different exercises that are helpful.

But journaling, breathwork, EFT tapping, working out, going for a walk in nature. There are many things we can do that are simple and safe that bring us into the present moment. As I said, our emotions can only come through our physical body as a sensation in the physical moment. And when we have that sensation, it's part of the second law of thermodynamics.

That energy that was stored is turned into heat and released. So now, not only are we not carrying that tension within our body because we felt the energy. For me, sometimes I still have to cry the tears and let the pain go, and people are like, cry the tears. How's that business related?

Well, I can tell you as a 64-year-old man who is a physicist, an engineer with multiple patents, and I've built and run many businesses, the most powerful thing we can do as a human is to feel our emotions, even if, and especially if, that means feeling some tears come through. We're human. We don't have to be perfect. The human experience is about being balanced between our thoughts, our actions, and our emotions.

And so for people who are hearing this for the first time, like, well, that's crazy. No, it's not crazy. It's powerful. We have been conditioned to believe that if we feel our emotions, we're weak.

If we feel our emotions, we're not going to be effective. And if we feel our emotions, they're going to control us. And I found the opposite of all that is true. When we're able to embrace our emotions, find a healing method or multiple healing methods that help us get through the pain, then we find mental clarity and we're more effective.

Yeah, wonderful. I really love what you were saying. So if we don't do this, if we suppress our emotions, what can happen? What can it lead to?

So you're working with leaders who and teaching them how to work with their emotions. So do you see what suppressing emotions can lead to in business and in personal life as well? Well, I'm going to use an example. I never knew Steve Jobs.

I don't know his exact situation. He died of cancer. Cancer usually is related to stress. It's usually related to worry and emotions we don't let go of.

Now, I don't know Steve's exact situation, but he was on top of the world. He was a billionaire. He was influential in the world for most of his life. And yet he was not able to overcome his physical challenges.

My opinion, my unprofessional opinion is because there were emotions there that needed to be felt. And he learned the same as I learned when I was growing up that, again, as we said, we're going to suppress it. And we're going to push our way through by being smart and working hard. But we're finding, and science and medicine is finding, that stress is so hard on the body, whether it's just the hormones that our body excretes and has to deal with when we're stressed, or whether it's that long-term tension.

There's research that supports that eventually our stress and our worry will get to us. Well, stress and worry, those are emotions. And I also, through my own experiences, thousands of my own experiences, realized that when I have a problem I cannot fix with my mind and I cannot fix it with action, if I slow down and I feel the underlying emotion, sometimes it's pain, sometimes it's happiness that I really am supposed to feel that I've been suppressing. then my thoughts are more effective and my actions are more effective and the outside world changes around me.

And I give many examples of this in the book so that people can see how it played out for me and how it works And the people who read it tell me it makes sense But if we just talk about emotions in general terms then it really difficult for somebody to say how do I do this And again that why I wrote the book I didn write the book to make money. That's not what this is about. This is because I've had such an amazing life based on understanding how to influence my world through addressing my emotions.

I still think, I still do the hard work. But now that I understand what buttons to push and what levers to pull, I can find the emotional clarity I need to create a great life. And I want to see everyone else in the world have a better life. I want to see people take control of their situation at work, at home, and especially as leaders.

When leaders can understand that they don't have to have all the answers, they don't have to be right all the time, they can ask for help and they can still be effective. And usually when they do that, they're more effective. Yeah. So if we want to avoid this stress, if you want to avoid this burnout that suppressing your emotions can lead to, it's definitely worth starting the work.

I feel that many people, they are afraid of working with emotions because it's hard. I was. So what would you recommend from your experience? How did you get over this fear and how did you start?

Well, excuse my language, but it scared the hell out of me. Because when I started to open Pandora's box of my emotions, because I had suppressed it most of my life, I was 28 years old, I felt so many things come through that were uncomfortable. And I felt like and I thought I was going to lose control. Well, Maria, who I spent three years with, she was able to hold that space for me where I could feel what I needed to feel.

And she would say, stay with it. You're going to get through this. Everything's fine. And having a partner, whether it's a professional partner or a domestic partner or somebody, a friend we know to say, OK, I'm here with you.

Let's do this. It makes it easier because when we suppressed for myself, when I suppressed emotions for so many years and I started to let it come through, it felt like it was going to kill me. It felt like I was not going to survive. And after going through, I don't know, three or four or five different real extreme experiences, some of them I did through earlier forms of EFT tapping, some of them through body work or breath work.

And then I got a feeling of, okay, I can survive this. But having somebody there who had been through a lot of emotions themselves to hold that space for me, that helped a lot. So when we tell ourselves and we tell the universe, and whether it's prayer or visualization or we write down our goals, I want to work through this. I want to find a way to heal my emotions.

The universe responds. And I can't explain that as a scientist here in a few minutes. But everything in the universe is created for us in resonance with our thoughts, in resonance with our actions, and in resonance with our emotions. And so when we set our intentions or our thoughts of what we want, every moment is co-created for us at a quantum level.

Physics is talking about this now, and I've explained it all in my book, whereas matter does not become solid. It's just energy until it's called into action in the moment. And if you go back to 1927, almost 100 years ago, there were two different scientific discoveries that were extremely important. They're the last major real discoveries of science in our lifetime.

The first one was Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which says we can't know everything about energy. We can't know where it is and what the energy is at the same time at a subatomic level. And that still holds today. That led to, well, there's many possible outcomes, meaning there's many possible realities that exist.

And we step into the reality that matches our thoughts, our actions, and our emotions. And then another experiment that happened in 1927, completely unrelated to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, is something that was called the double slit experiment, where they took singular photons, particles of light, or singular electrons, and they projected them at a panel with two slits cut in it. And then it showed up on a photographic panel behind the panel with the slits. so they would send a bunch of these electrons through and the electron would encounter the two slits and the energy would split and they knew it split it split because of the pattern on the backside on the photographic target so they they ran this experiment with um several times and they said okay these particles are energy they act like a wave they're energy wave as they go through the two slits and then they took the lid off the experiment they watched it with their human eyes They didn't touch it.

They simply watched it. Now, these particles that were not being observed act like wave packets of energy. But as soon as they were observed, these same particles created out of the same machinery, same equipment, now acted as solid particles. As they went through the two slits, the impact on the target behind them was not wave interference.

It was individual particles. And they said, holy cow, energy responds to interaction through human sight alone. And everything in our reality is energy that is coming into the temporary form we need it to be for our experience in this holographic simulation that we live in. And people say, well, can you prove that?

Not exactly, not completely, but all evidence supports that. Yeah, this is a great story and great example. I think that there is so much that we don't understand. That is also a science, but that was not discovered yet, maybe.

and I feel that we are getting closer and closer to building, to closing this gap between spirituality and something that we don't understand and science and business. So I think... I'll have a comment on that. So I think it's important that we close the gap, but I still think faith is something that we're always going to be called on to find within ourselves because science can answer a lot.

But if we always turn to science, then we're missing out on what, from my experience, faith brings us. Because now with faith it easier to be optimistic With faith it easier to take risks With faith it easier to be kind to our neighbors And so, yeah, I embrace science, and I love how science has positively impacted our reality. But I think that seeing the beautiful spirit in the people we work with, in our family, and in our neighbors, that beautiful soul that exists in everybody.

And there's people who have a lot of evil in them, but at some level, there's still a soul having an experience. And we look for the good. We have the faith to look for the good. We find more good.

And that makes the world a better place. Yes, beautiful, beautiful. So, Randy, let's give our listeners some tips from your book, not to give away everything, because, of course, we encourage people to read your book, The Third Element. But what can we start doing?

So can you give us several techniques or tips to actually be more in tune with our emotional side? Well, the first thing is to be able to stop and take a breath or something that we do. Sometimes it can be prayer beads. It can be a breath.

It can be walking in nature. We need to quiet our mind. We can't turn off our mind. If we can find something that occupies our thinking mind while we become in touch with our physical body, then we can become grounded and in the moment where emotions can come through.

And our mind is not always trying to hijack us from our deeper experiences. Our mind protects us from everything except itself. So our mind protects us from physical pain and emotional pain that we want to re-experience. And yet we can't turn it off.

So whatever works for anybody, me, I can't sit still and meditate. I've done it twice in my lifetime. I've tried it many times. But if I go for a walk or I'm doing yoga or stretching or an exercise, I'm moving meditation.

Suddenly I find calm. So I think that anything that works for people to find that sense of calm, to calm their mind is a great start. And I always go back to journaling. So I talk about all these in my book, but journaling, write down.

Journaling doesn't mean we have to write in any particular form. If somebody wants to draw cartoons or pictures or just scribble on the page, it brings us into the physical moment through our physical hand. And that is more powerful than people realize because it causes us to slow down. So slowing down is the first step.

And then just knowing that we can't be attached to the outcome. When we become attached to the exact outcome, we limit ourselves and we surrender to faith and higher power. And yeah, we're still going to take action and we're still going to have our own plan. But when I say, universe, show me a better way to do this, I get answers.

People show up in my life. I get thoughts and creative ideas that I wouldn't have had through my thinking mind. So it's a new experience for so many people. But those are some of the better tips that I can offer at this point in time.

Slowing down, writing lists, scribbling on pages, going for a walk. Perfect. Amazing tips. And sometimes those tips are even counterintuitive because we are now used to think all the time, overthink and start with the end in mind.

And, you know, we have KPIs at work all the time that we're working towards. So I think that what you're saying is we need to reverse some of the thinking patterns that we have. Especially as a leader, because as a leader, it means we're leading people. We can't do the job by ourselves.

And how powerful we are is dependent on how much work those who we lead can accomplish. We don't accomplish the work, but we set the environment. We set the direction. And more importantly, we help these people who we lead feel good about who they are, who they work with, and feel good about the work they're doing.

and we create that environment, that environment produces more work, better results, and things work easier for us as leaders when the people we lead understand how to do that. And that's something that I coach on and the people I coach find out, wow, I invested some time, but I got so much of my time back. So when we look at whether it's slowing down to meditate or go for a walk or slowing down to teach our team something new or learn something new ourselves. These are investments, investments in ourselves, investments in our team that pay off in our personal life and in our business especially.

Yeah, yeah. Brandy, thank you so much for all your tips and for your recommendations. I think that for people who are listening to us, it is really, really important to work with their emotions, especially when we're working with other people, when we're working with teams, we are leaders. This is the thing that we need to embrace in our work.

So thank you so much for that. If our listeners want to reach out, want to contact you, where is the best place to find you? The best place to find me is through my website, randylyman.com, R-A-N-D-Y-L-Y-M-A-N.

com. They can find social media links there for Instagram, for LinkedIn and such, and my free offers, my book, my workbooks, and other things that I offer to help leaders find a way to become more clear within themselves and to be more effective at work through my sharing what I've learned through the many years of mistakes I made along the way and the wonderful things I've learned from the great people I worked with. And my goal is to share as much as I can of my own experiences to help shorten other people's learning curves.

Perfect. Thank you so much. We'll put the links in the show notes so that our listeners can immediately go there and connect with you. Thank you so much, Randy.

It was such a pleasure talking to you today on Ideas and Leaders. You're welcome, Elena. I really enjoyed it. Thank you for listening to Ideas and Leaders Podcast.

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