Maggie Sass:
I think the average person would say, "Oh, emotional intelligence, you just want us to be nicer to one another." And I don't care. Like, you can be nice, that's great, but I don't care if you have emotional intelligence just to have it. I care that you have it so that it works for you, it serves you
Kristiana Corona:
Ever feel like everyone else has leadership figured out and you're just making it up as you go? I've been there. I spent two decades leading design and technology teams at Fortune 500 companies, and for years, I looked like I had everything pulled together on the outside. But on the inside, I felt burned out, overwhelmed, and unworthy of the title leader. Then, a surprise encounter with executive coaching changed my life and dramatically improved my leadership style and my results. Now, I help others make that same shift in their leadership. This podcast is where we do the work, building the mindset, the coaching skills, and the confidence to lead with clarity and authenticity, and to finally feel worthy to lead from the inside out
Hi, and welcome back to the Worthy to Lead podcast. I'm your host, Kristiana Corona. Today, we're talking about a topic that every leader experiences. You know that moment before a hard conversation where your heart starts to race, or that spike of defensiveness when somebody challenges you right in the middle of a big meeting, or the heaviness that you carry home after a long day of trying to hold everything together.
As leaders, we've been taught to push past those moments, to be tough, to stay composed, and to keep moving. But what if the friction that you're feeling is actually important, and it has a purpose? My guests today, Dr. Maggie Sass and Dr. Ross Blankenship, are consulting psychologists and executive coaches, and they have spent decades working with thousands of executives and senior leaders, and they've come to a powerful conclusion.
The emotional friction that we feel is not something we can avoid. It's necessary information that we need to just do a better job of understanding. Because emotions are not the background noise of the work that we do, they are quite literally the medium through which all of the work happens. And as leaders, it's our job to take responsibility for the emotional conditions in the room so that the work gets better and our teams can thrive.
Their new book, Friction: How Tension, Emotion, and Change Reveal Better Leaders, is backed by original research, including a national survey of over one thousand one hundred working Americans, and it makes a compelling data-driven case that human-centered leadership skills and emotional intelligence are becoming even more essential to success.
In the world being shaped by AI and constant disruption, these may be the most critical skills you can build. And the good news is that Maggie and Ross have packaged up all the latest neuroscience, psychology, and research into a fun and digestible book with dozens of practical experiments you can start using today.
It's kind of like having a psychologist, a neuroscientist, and a coach in your pocket all at the same time. In this conversation, we talk about why our obsession with eliminating friction is actually costing us, what the research tells us about emotions at work, and how to start working with the friction instead of running away from it.
So if you're in the middle of a major change or navigating a hard relationship, or maybe you're just curious about what the latest human-centered leadership research has to say, I hope you enjoy this conversation. Let's dive in. All right, Maggie and Ross, welcome to the Worthy to Lead podcast. I'm so happy to have you here.
Maggie Sass:
Thank you for having us. We're excited to be here.
Kristiana Corona:
Yes. Um, well, I wanna start us off kind of at the beginning where you two met, because I think it's kind of an interesting story for people as they think about this topic of friction. So you two met in grad school when you were going through the consulting psychology program, right?
And in your book you talk about, "We've been friends, we've been colleagues, and the occasional antagonist ever since." And so for a long time you guys didn't actually agree on emotional intelligence. So I would love if you could just talk for a moment about what was it that you didn't agree on, and what actually brought you guys together to finally write this book?
Ross Blankenship:
It's a good question. I probably was not a believer in emotional intelligence because of the way that I had arrived at psychology as a field. I had worked in very competitive male-dominated workplaces, especially like on a fixed-income trading floor, and the idea of measuring something emotional sounded like it would not work in an environment like that.
And a lot of the work I had been doing coming out of grad school was assessing executives as part of executive searches for selection. And the flashpoint for this with me and Maggie was that I had signed a contract to write a book for the American Psychological Association about executive assessment, and so was gathering all of the research together, and I kept reading things that were like, "Emotional intelligence is an expression of personality traits," or, "It's a capability that you can learn and develop," or, "It's like intelligence that is inherent."
And one of the predominant views was basically just like, you know, there's so many ways to define it, there's so many ways to think about it, we're not really sure what it is. And so I had written a whole outline of this book and submitted it for review from a panel at the American Psychological Association that Maggie was on, and I didn't include emotional intelligence in my book about executive assessment.
And so I got feedback that was like, "Where's emotional intelligence?" And then I wrote this whole thing in the book. I included it, but it was basically like, "You don't need to look at this."
Ross Blankenship:
I'm not sure you need it. Yeah. It's like, I don't... The assessments are weird. I don't know if you've ever taken one.
Some of them are like, "What emotion is The Rock displaying?" And I have my love for projective tests, but that just seemed like asking an executive to sit down and do that. I was like, "These... Like, nobody will survive this." And then I spent a decade coaching leaders, and all of the hardest conversations we had, all of the hardest problems we encountered were emotional at their root.
And I kept kind of telling this to Maggie, and she's like, "Right. Right, right." Encouraging me on.
Maggie Sass:
Welcome. Welcome, friend. Yeah. Yeah, I think Ross and I, uh, I, I was a year ahead of him in graduate school, but I had taken a more, I think, traditional path into psychology. I studied psychology in undergrad, and my internship and then first job out of graduate school was at the Center for Creative Leadership.
And so I was training and coaching leaders for a number of years. And similar to what Ross just shared, I think I was seeing that the problems that leaders were getting themselves into were very infrequently technical, and most of the time connected to the fact that they were having trouble with interpersonal skills, or they were having trouble building or launching teams, or they couldn't manage change, right?
They couldn't manage the emotions that came along with change, either for themselves or for the teams that they were a part of. And so I had sort of already drunk the Kool-Aid, and that was before I jumped to TalentSmart back in 2021. And so, you know, I think part of what has been fun over the years is to really dissect and take a look at what's happening in the field.
You know, I think research and practice are two different things. Many times practice is far ahead of research, and I think I, I could always say there, there can always be better assessments. There can always be better sort of theoretical underpinnings to any construct, to any way of looking at something that could be important in leadership.
And I'm fully bought into this idea that emotional intelligence is a set of skills. It is something that you can put into buckets, and you can practice those buckets, and you can see if you're moving closer to the needle, and then you can evaluate what's happening inside me, what's changing between me and other people. How does that help me?
Kristiana Corona:
I think just the topic in and of itself around what can be learned and what is innate is such a... I think there's a lot of misconceptions. So maybe someone sees themself as a certain kind of person. Well, I'm very analytical. I am not geared this way. That's not how my brain works.
But in your book and in your research, you talk a lot about the very tangible ways people can actually build those skills and how that shows up when things go wrong. Like you talk about how, you know, EQs is great when things are, are going great. Like, oh, it's easy. This is how you should show up when things are, are just absolutely flying.
But what happens when they're not? Like, what happens when a peer criticizes you right in the middle of an important meeting with the board or with other leaders? How you handle those moments matters so much, right? So I'm just curious, like how, for people who, who see themselves as maybe that analytical person or that person who it doesn't come naturally to them, like how do they start defining where the moments are that they can lean in a little bit more with EQ?
Maggie Sass:
Ross, since you're like that, maybe you start.
Ross Blankenship:
It's so funny, the description, um, I haven't made this connection in talking about our book yet, but I've thought a lot about what does like psychological triage in an executive space look like? 'Cause we get the question a lot of like, when things are going very badly, what do you do then?
And there's not a really good answer to that, and I think it's really individualistic, and the answers that you would jump to, I think, are a bit rote to the point where they lose some of their spark. You know, like breathing is a necessary, uh, way to change your mental state. It's the only-- Maggie, you're gonna have to correct me on this, parasympathetic system that you can actually have some control over.
You can't, like, your body will not stop breathing as long as you're living, but you actually have some control over it in a way that you don't over digestion or your heartbeat or something like that. So it is a boundary area between, like, what your body will naturally do and what you have some control over.
And beyond that, you know, we recommend a lot, like, having hooks, like mantras almost, ways of resetting how you're thinking about yourself, how you're thinking about your circumstance. We always talk about moving your body. But to your point, Kristiana, you really do have to have a way to say, "Oh, like, the thing that's happening right now is I'm having an emotional reaction, and I need to address that."
Um, and I think the, the main thing we would say is viewing yourself as analytical doesn't mean that you don't have emotions. You do have emotions because that's how your brain works. That's how your body works. Whether you view that as relevant information to how you think about yourself and what's going on around you is an open question.
I have encountered many people who say, "I'm happy to work with a coach, but I want to work with a coach who doesn't talk about feelings." To which I say, "You're not-" talk about the main thing that's going on in your body when you're trying to be a leader." And so I think one of the things we want this book to do is to try to create circumstances for people to have a different way of thinking about what emotion might feel like.
Everybody can identify, oh, there's friction here, there's conflict, there's tension. That is something that everybody can identify. And I think by trying to kind of bring emotional intelligence along behind that idea, it's a way into the idea of like, oh, I'm feeling this way. That is an emotion, and then I have maybe all these tools or experiments I can run and try to address, interact, question what's going on.
Maggie Sass:
I've talked about this before. I think, you know, when I work with groups, one of the activities that we do is I have a slide that says, like, you're so emotional, and I have them think, like, if someone said that to you, what is it exactly that they're saying? And you get very typical responses of like, "Oh, you know, you're so weak," or, "You're so irrational," or, "You're so feminine," or, you know, there's a whole bunch of very sort of negative reactions to that.
And what's sort of hysterical about it is that we're all so emotional. I mean, what Ross just said is absolutely true, right? All information enters, you know, the brainstem, moves to the limbic system before it makes its way to the prefrontal cortex, so everything gets coded in emotional data. I think what gets misconstrued sometimes is this argument that emotions are a more important data set than any other data set, and that's what not what we're saying at all, right?
To over-index on emotions is just as problematic as over-indexing on any other data set. But what I tend to see is people who especially people who are either analytical or sort of their identity is wrapped up in, like, I make great decisions and I sort of separate myself from my emotions, right? Like, that's something that happens outside of work.
I think what we're trying to say is, are you sure? Are you sure that's true? Because my argument would be, I think the emotions are running on autopilot in the background and you're not paying attention to them. So they are getting used to make decisions, but if you can't map them, then it's a whole hidden data set, and that's way more problematic than, you know, leaving them at the door.
The other thing too is just emotional intelligence. I think generally as a, as an area of focus because it's sort of complicated in the research, like what Ross was sharing before, right? There are some differing opinions about what it is or how we should measure it, but I think there isn't a fully agreed-upon understanding that it is this foundation that sits under everything else.
I think the average person would say, "Oh, emotional intelligence, you just want us to be nicer to one another". And like, I don't care. Like, you can be nice, that's great. But I don't care if you have emotional intelligence just to have it, I care that you have it so that it works for you, it serves you. And most of the time where it's getting in your way is where there is friction, right?
I think about this all the time. When I'm having, like, the best day and I go to Trader Joe's, and I can feel, like, how delighted I am to have a conversation with the person who's checking me out. And then I think about the days where that's not what has been happening, right? Where something tragic has happened, you know, like a kid is homesick, I have that kid with me at the Trader Joe's, something's happening in the business.
Like, that's the last thing I want to do is have just a random conversation with somebody who's trying to be kind, right? So, like, I think part of it is separating those things out and understanding that it's a tool set that helps you especially when things are not going perfectly.
Kristiana Corona:
And I think you guys do a really nice job in the book of translating the concepts into more analytical terms, right?
Like, like how you use this information, how you use this data to gain self-awareness. Because, like, when we think about a lot of other areas where we watch metrics on things, we are hyper-aware of those metrics. But how tragic would it be if there was metrics underneath the surface that were incredibly important, but no one tracked them, no one noticed, and then suddenly the entire thing fell apart.
And it kind of feels like through your book you do a lot of that. You reveal this hidden set of metrics that we haven't been tracking, that we haven't been paying attention to, that we need to be aware of because of how much they impact the final success. And I love how you guys even dive into the language that we have around emotion and how, you know, over 2,000 different words for emotion, how many of those words do you know?
How many of those words can you articulate rather than just saying, "I'm overwhelmed, I'm burned out, I'm anxious, I'm stressed"? You know, like the rich variety of words that we have can change how we feel about our current situation. I thought it was really nicely done because I think sometimes books either index towards all research, all data, and no, you know, personal application, or the other way around, where it's all coaching-based, and it doesn't come back to that analytical perspective.
So I can see how you have woven both of those things together because you're both involved, which is Amazing. So one other question I thought was really interesting towards the beginning was around this idea of our culture be- making things frictionless. And as a former design leader of many, many years, that was pretty much, you know, most of our job was trying to figure out how do we make this one click?
How do we make it one click less? How do we remove every friction? Obviously, there's some exceptions where we try and keep people safe, but a lot of our culture is obsessed with this idea of making things frictionless, and you guys have started to talk about what the cost of that actually is, like especially when it comes to AI. What are we losing when we remove all the friction, and why is that important?
Ross Blankenship:
Oh, goodness.
Maggie Sass:
How long do you have?
Ross Blankenship:
I'm realizing it's fun having this conversation 'cause I feel like I'm realizing how far back some of these thoughts go for me. I remember in 2013 or '14 More than a decade ago, I went to a conference about data analytics in talent assessment, and it was run by a group called HiQ, which was a really cool product at the time, and it was like kind of early artificial intelligence, and they were scraping the internet for publicly available data so that they could predict who was likely to turn over in your organization.
Wow. And the guy who spoke there was a guy named Nir Eyal, who is real famous- Oh, yeah ... right now. And he wrote a book called Hooked, which was how to design habits forming products. Beyond Belief, that's the new one, yeah. Yeah. And I read that book and I was like, "This is fascinating." And that book is about friction.
It is about how do you get people onto your product and how do you keep them there? And that is all about friction, 'cause anytime you introduce friction, they bounce. And I think the frictionlessness drive into every area of life, the ones that we typically talk about are grocery delivery or ordering food or dating.
They all have really positive outcomes. Like, it makes it easier to get food. It might help you get food in a food desert. I have very good friends and family members who met their spouse using dating apps. And you're seeing now a boomerang effect back to, "Let's have a running club. Let's go actually get drinks," which is funny that that's gotten popular again.
Uh, but like meeting in person and kind of creating opportunities for serendipity or, you know, Maggie was talking about talking to the checkout person at a Trader Joe's. You're not doing that if you're ordering it from an app. And so I, I think there is... Societally, I think there's an argument to be made about what we lose together when we drive towards frictionlessness, which is like basically human interaction in a lot of circumstances.
I think a lot of what we are designing away from is what makes it challenging about doing stuff with other people. You know, it's AI chatbots who are answering service calls rather than people. And like, there's good reasons for that too. Those are hard jobs, et cetera, et cetera. I think the way that we think about it in the context of emotional intelligence, there are circumstances where we are reducing the friction so much that the way that we're doing work is changing such that the outcome is worse.
You know, there's research from MIT that got a lot of press about how using AI systems too much decreases your cognitive activity, decreases your feelings of ownership and recall over the work that's produced. There's fascinating research about how you can increase the friction of the work that you're doing to increase recall or to study better for tests.
And so I think we just started to see there's a common thread here that's really relevant in how we think about leadership and human interaction that pops up. It's sort of come over from technology into every part of life, but that it's maybe not quite the right model for many circumstances to really optimize outcomes or to increase or improve what you're trying to accomplish.
Maggie Sass:
I think the other thing too, and we write about this a little bit in the book, is I think the average person was just not educated about understanding emotional information. And so if you are in the middle of a really hard conversation, and you've got sort of like a knot in your stomach, or you can feel that your pulse is starting to quicken, I think the instinct is not dissimilar from the other sort of frictionlessness instincts, which is like, "Let's get rid of this."
Like, "I want this to go away as quickly as possible, so we can get on with the real work." What's that, right? Like, to me, I think we have sort of appropriated this idea that leadership is the work and emotions are this very annoying side effect, like sideshow to- Yeah ... the work. And our argument is, that's the work.
Like, that's information in your body. Now, again, not to be over-indexed on, right? Like we're not arguing that you need to stop every conversation and say, like, "I have a knot in my stomach," you know, "We need to discuss this." It's that you need to understand how to pay attention to it and name it for yourself so that you can figure out how to use that in the context of making the next best decision.
And so I think this trade off, you lose things like judgment, you lose things like meaning, like growth, right? There are all of these pieces that I think are really important that come hooked to friction. And when we say, "Okay, no, it's the sideshow, we're gonna put it over here", then you lose those important pieces.
Kristiana Corona:
Yeah. And you guys even go so far as to create different levels or dimensions of this friction in your book. Like, you have a diagram that you call the friction field, which kind of showcases where those friction things show up, like inside of yourself or interpersonally with other people, or within the bigger system of your organization.
And I feel like that's a really big conversation right now that a lot of people are having of, of, you know, where is the friction? Whose responsibility is that friction? And so I love that you kind of see it from all of those dimensions rather than just taking one point of view. So from a friction field standpoint, can you just describe what that is for people that haven't seen your book yet?
And, you know, how, how does knowing where the friction come from actually change how you respond?
Ross Blankenship:
It's such a good question. One of the ways that- I think about this that I think is most relevant for how people tend to feel at work writ large right now is about burnout. The way we describe it is almost like an emotional response to work, which is a feeling of exhaustion, and it's not quite helplessness, but like an inability to actually have agency over what needs to change to make your work more manageable.
And we treat it like an individual problem where we say, take time, take a vacation, practice self-care, whatever the thing may be. And in many circumstances, if not all circumstances, burnout is a function of the system that you're in that is designing work to create circumstances that cause burnout. And I think the friction field is our way of trying to create a framework or offer a framework that helps people parse where is the primary-- or even just describing the sources of friction that I'm feeling.
'Cause I may be experiencing feelings about my work individually that I need to manage. I may be experiencing conflict with somebody else that is relevant to how I'm performing, but the system may also be designed in such a way that, like, it's not a changeable thing, or that the change has to come from such a high level that you can, I think, then start to think, "Oh, I really need to change my relationship with what I'm trying to do here or how I'm relating to it."
In my personal work, the way that this most frequently comes up is with the pace of change in an organization and how leaders relate to that. Because... So if you cycle all the way back down to the individual level, the individual experience is, "I am stressed. It's too much stress, and I'm not even, like, comprehending the amount of stress that this job is."
And if I look too much at it directly, the, the experience is like, I need to do more, I need to schedule my time better, I need to, like, apply some fix that will make it feel better And then if you zoom all the way out, you say like, "These jobs are not designed for humans." There's not enough time. There's not enough resources.
And so you have to say then, if you can't pull levers to change, how do you change your relationship to it as an individual? And so I think what The Friction Field tries to do is offer a way to think through what am I experiencing, how am I interacting with the people around me, and what kind of system am I in that might be shaping my emotional experience or the friction that I'm feeling and how I might respond to it.
Maggie Sass:
Yeah. And I would say, you know, just for anybody who hasn't seen this book, so the way The Friction Field is laid out, we've got two axes, right? So on one axis, we're looking at the intensity of friction, and then on the other axis is the source of friction, which is either internal or external. And I think this goes back to what we were talking about before relative to frictionlessness.
So low friction probably feels good in the moment, right? It's sort of that path of least resistance, and high friction feels like resistance, right? It feels like struggle. Maybe it's learning something new or being uncomfortable or some version of discomfort, working at the edge of your abilities. And so the way that we parse across that two-by-two is really thinking about low friction is necessary for execution and high friction is necessary for acquisition, right?
So there are different places for different types of work to help you better understand if you are in one phase, this might be a better set of tasks.
Kristiana Corona:
And I love how you kind of frame it up as certain things are to be expected. Like, this is the kind of friction that is helping you grow. This is the kind of friction that is helping you learn.
Do not avoid it. This is the thing that you need to lean into. This is good for you, versus the kind of friction that is depleting and eroding your, your own trust in yourself or eroding a relationship with someone else. And just having those different quadrants to kind of assess where am I right now? What kind of resistance am I feeling? It's so helpful.
Maggie Sass:
The thing that I would say, too, is you don't have to like it. The objective is not to change your mind so that you are slow clapping or cheering for friction when you see it. Friction sucks. And it's really hard, right? The, the object is not to, like, change your feelings about it if you have them.
It's to know that it's necessary for really important things for you and for other people, and to say like, "We're gonna be brave. We're gonna have courage. We're gonna lean in anyway."
Ross Blankenship:
Or to say, you know what, I think we say this in the book, like the, the goal is not to say like, "If you really think about it hard enough, like this is a good thing." That's not what we're saying either Right.
Maggie Sass:
No, I think that nobody ever says that.
Ross Blankenship:
Yeah, right. Well, and it's like, it's such a limited, uh, it provides l- a limited option for how to respond to it. It's like, well, I don't like it. It doesn't feel good, and so then what? And I think the, the field idea also helps us organize the experiments that we offer in the back of the book, which is if you think you're in this kind of circumstance, maybe try this kind of thing.
And so trying to help organize and shorten the distance between I'm experiencing something and I need a different thing to try so I can try to change how I'm feeling or what's happening, and hopefully we're kind of decreasing the, I wanna say friction. It's not that.
Let's say the distance between- the distance or the time, the feeling and the behavior that you could try that may change how you're feeling or what's happening or something like that.
Kristiana Corona:
Yeah. Um, speaking of friction. Hey, Malina. Malina. Mom. That's my daughter.
Ross Blankenship:
This is good relatable content.
Kristiana Corona:
You want to- Now you
Maggie Sass: set it off ... do
Kristiana Corona: Do you want to say hi for two seconds?
Maggie Sass:
Yeah.
Kristiana Corona:
Okay. You can say hi. Hi.
Maggie Sass:
Hi.
Ross Blankenship:
Hi, cutie.
Kristiana Corona:
Hey, mom's on a meeting. Can you, um- Mom ... go hang out out there? What? Oh, you needed something to draw. She needs something to draw with. Mm-hmm.
Maggie Sass:
That makes perfect sense to me.
Kristiana Corona:
And a piece of chocolate, right.
Maggie Sass:
I don't need the chocolate.
Kristiana Corona:
Oh, you just needed the chocolate? Okay.
Ross Blankenship:
I like she said, "I don't need the chocolate." It's like, right, we want the chocolate.
Kristiana Corona:
No. As we were talking a little bit about the negative emotion, it isn't about escaping the negative emotion. It's okay to say, "You know, this, this is terrible that I, I hate how this feels right now. This doesn't feel good."
It is still telling us information, but you call out something really important in the book, which is about your regression analysis, right? Where you found that having confidence in managing negative emotions is directly associated to less emotional drain at work, which is a really key factor of burnout.
And so, like, for leaders who want to actually start managing their negative emotions better, where can they begin with that?
Maggie Sass:
I think the first, and I want to say easiest, but it's not easy. Simple, but not easy, um, is to just get better at cataloging when you are having negative emotions. I think the average person, especially high performer, a lot of the people that Ross and I see in coaching contexts want to believe that they do not have negative emotions about things, right?
That they're either positive or neutral, and that's just not true, right? And there are a lot of researchers that we quote in the book, it's been called, like, emotion labeling. I think that was Marc Brackett. It's emotional granularity, but it's about really understanding something is happening in my body, and what's the word for it?
So we talk about using emotion wheels, right? So you can look up emotion wheels. There are a million different varieties of them, but it gives you a way into sort of documenting and cataloging for yourself, okay, if I feel this in my body, then this is maybe what I might be feeling right now. It's interesting, a couple of years ago, I had a woman come up to me after a talk who was raised by two scientists.
She was a scientist herself, and she said, "I can't remember a single conversation we had growing up about emotions, and I'm now in my 40s having to teach myself what I'm feeling at the same time that I am teaching my young child what they're feeling as well," which is a wild experience. But I think that is, just that alone is a thing that the average person doesn't necessarily know that they need to do as a first step, is just having a better understanding of how they have reactions, emotional reactions to things that could be cataloged as negative.
Ross Blankenship:
I think that might just be the average reaction these days. It's like when you're in your 30s or 40s, here's what you're doing. You're trying to learn about your own emotions and teach your children about theirs too.
Kristiana Corona:
We're all learning with storybooks. Uh, there's just board books. Let's go back to the board books.
Um, so let's say someone does that, and they start cataloging their emotions. Like, as coaches, what do you then do with that information that, that helps it become more effective at managing those emotions?
Ross Blankenship:
The way that I have that conversation is usually, like, the when, where, and, like, with whom are you having that feeling?
And so back to the cataloging idea, like, figure out what's happening. Where's the trigger, if you can? So that's useful information 'cause then you can say, "Oh, I don't ever have that feeling except when I'm with that person," and that tells you something. Or, "I don't have that feeling unless I'm, like, in this circumstance," and that tells you something about maybe how you prepare or how you can help change the circumstance.
The other thing I would say is, um, you know, it's interesting to think about what an emotion is, and the way that we describe it in the book that I think comes from Lisa Feldman Barrett is it's like an amount of energy that is pointing you toward a type of action. And I don't think that we typically think of emotion that way.
We typically think of emotion as, like, something that enters your experience and departs, kind of like the, the inside out effect of, like, rage is in control now, and now rage is gone. And w-what is interesting is, like, rage is telling you something useful. Like, it is giving you information about how you're feeling and experiencing a situation that is, let's say, i- if not suggesting, like, demanding that you respond in a certain way.
And with anger, it's usually, like, setting a boundary, asserting yourself. And so that becomes really interesting of, like, if you're feeling angry with a person really consistently, thinking about, like, uh, do I have a boundary that's being violated, or do I need to be asserting myself or making myself heard?
That's all of the sudden something you can do, or you can think about, "How would I do that?" And so I think what helps with labeling, too, I've described the writing process. Early on, we had a draft of this book that we had to throw away and start over, and I felt anxious about turning it into our editor to get feedback, but as we have written and talked about it, I've gone back and kind of relived that experience, and what I was feeling was apprehension, which is like a sub-domain of anxiety.
And what's interesting about apprehension is it is looking at a possible outcome that's gonna happen. And so I was able to think, like, what is the outcome that I'm anxious about? And that helps me parse through like, oh It's getting feedback of a certain kind from a person I really respect because of how I'm feeling about the project, which helped me get really clear and to say to Maggie, "Here's how I'm feeling about the project."
And then fortunately, she said, "I do, too." And we said, "Let us hit delete and start over." But I think being able to get more specific and kind of get past the what is the thing I'm feeling, but really, like, what is the thing I'm feeling telling me about what's happening to me or how I'm responding to it that may demand a certain type of action or d- a different type of action.
Maggie Sass:
Yeah. Here's the other thing that I would say, too. Years ago, I was running a session where people were put into a sort of fake organization. They all had roles, and I was working with one division of this company. And six-hour sim, and then you spend the rest of the week sort of diagnosing and discussing, giving feedback, all of that good stuff.
And one of my participants, at one point, things were not going well in the APAC region, and he took off his shoe and threw it at the wall. And so in a conversation as a group- Wow ... of eight, right, the seven other people were talking about, like, how they were gonna give feedback to him, and they were apprehensive about doing so.
And so, uh, and so I said, "Yeah, that's okay. This is my job. Uh, I can, you know, I can bring this up and, and sort of s- get the conversation started." And I said, "You know, what were you feeling when you took off your shoe?" And he looked at me straight face and said, "I didn't have a feeling." And I can guarantee you there's a feeling if you've taken your shoe off and thrown it at a wall.
And so I think what sometimes I say to people, especially in coaching context, is there is a difference between saying and displaying emotion. I think the thing that we have gotten right over the last, you know, 10, 15 years is a focus on emotional regulation, and that is important because if you are somebody that is reacting to negative emotions, that will get in your way.
If that's what you're doing over and over again, that is something that is gonna get in your way, uh, especially as a leader. However, if you can find ways to say to somebody, "I'm feeling really angry right now about X. I wanna take a pause here so that I can figure out how we move forward." That's very different than taking off your shoe and throwing it at the wall, right?
And so I think the instinct in emotional regulation is to regulate it to zero. That's not what we're suggesting, right? I think the regulation piece is how do you make the best decision in the moment with the biggest data set that you can, right? So you've... That, that means that you've gotta be able to recognize emotions as a data set and label or name them so that you can sort of catalog it for yourself and then say, "Okay, now what?"
Like, what is the best outcome, the most effective outcome in this moment given this situation? And it's not always easy, right? But I think you've got more options than you think in the moment. Because in the moment, you know, you've got histamines firing, and you're sort of up against your physiology, and it feels like a lot of false binaries.
Like, I either throw this shoe or, you know, APAC gets taken over, something terrible happens. It's, it's these, like, two terrible options, and I'm gonna choose this option that at loose at least is me moving my body. Like, I'm physically trying to move the emotion out of me. That's not gonna help though, right?
And so you've got to find ways to... And, and even these really small little strategies of like, "This is how I'm feeling." Like, I used to use this in, in group coaching situations with, like, very contentious situations with senior teams where I would have them practice saying, "I'm really frustrated. How do you feel in this moment?"
Right? And just that seemed earth-shattering because they seem so surprised, one, that they were allowed to admit how they were feeling, and two, they thought it was wild that it would be helpful to find out how the other person was feeling. Right? But I think that because of the way that we've been educated about these things, it sits underneath a lot of radars.
Kristiana Corona:
And I think what, um, what you guys talk a lot about is that emotion goes somewhere, so it- it's not like you can stuff it down and it's just gonna disappear. It physically goes somewhere in your body. So it either is gonna come out now in a way that either you control or you don't, or it's gonna come out later, maybe worse.
And, and so I love how, like, we can get next to the part about the experiments because you have so many very practical ways of giving people tools. So once they finally identify, "Hey, maybe I did throw... Maybe I was emotional that, you know, I was angry about something 'cause I threw my shoe. Okay. Well, I guess I was.
I just wasn't registering it at the moment." You know, all of that leaks out to your team, and they know and they feel it all the time, and that has consequences. So what do you do with that instead, rather than trying to stuff it down or pretend you don't feel a certain way? You guys have so many great practical takeaways.
You mentioned a couple of 'em, but I just... I mean, dozens of different ways that you can sort of look about these things, especially like the internal: how do you self-manage? So, um, I'm curious if you could just maybe pick out one or two of your favorite, uh, experiments that you have in this book. And it doesn't have to just be about managing anger, but just in general about the acknowledgement of the emotions that we're managing and how to manage them well.
Um, I have a whole list of mine but I would love to hear your favorites first.
Maggie Sass:
Yeah. Um, okay, so I'll tell you my two favorites. You are not your job and build the pool. So I think This is a big thing that Ross and I talk about a lot, uh, that if you are-- if your identity is so intrinsically wrapped up in what you do at work, and then something goes wrong at work, then it is very easy for your identity to just roll all the way down the hill.
And so I think part of the set of experiments with that sort of strategy are to help you expand your definition of your identity. It's a very typical sort of Western culture way of thinking about how you are successful, is to sort of highlight and put on bright the work that you do, right? We have sort of inextricably linked who you are with what you do.
And so if what you do takes a hit, then who you are takes a hit too, and you are a person of value regardless, right? Like, I am a good person even if I am a crappy teacher one day, right? Those two things are totally separate. That's not how they feel in the body. And so I think that's one of my favorites because I think it can give you a little bit more perspective and allow you to diversify your identity portfolio in a way that feels really manageable, that helps you...
And, and might help too people who might tend to over prioritize where they're putting their time and attention. I work with a lot of senior leaders who tell me over and over again that their values are out of alignment with what they do, but then we look at their calendar, and I say, "Well, I can tell you why your values are out of alignment with your calendar."
But they have a very hard time taking off unnecessary meetings with people that they could delegate to somebody more junior or, you know, whatever it is. And so I think the first step is in helping you sort of dissect or de- disentangle, you know, who you are from what you do, and then it allows you to make different decisions about your actual behavior so that you can be in alignment with your values.
So that's the first one. And then the second one is this idea of build the pool, and this really came from a lot of the years of work at CCL. So, you know, I would train these leadership development programs, and what I saw over and over again was on, you know, Monday morning, I would get this group of participants who would sort of walk in, like wide-eyed, panic-stricken, you know, that they had taken on this leadership job, and they were delighted to be at CCL 'cause they were like, "You are gonna fix this problem that I have come here with."
Sort of like they just wanted to hand it over. And, and what, you know, I inevitably said like two hours in on day one was, "I can't change how hard this job is. You have taken on a big job, right? You are all in jobs that have a huge amount of pressure. There is a difference between stress and pressure though, right?
We talk about that in the book, too. Nick Petrie's work on sort of the differentiation between those two things, and I think we have more control over stress than we believe, right? If we can understand that stress is the physiological response to pressure. But what I started to say is, you know, right now it feels like you all are treading water in the ocean, which just feels perilous and exhausting and terrifying.
And what I hope is to send you out of here on Friday afternoon feeling like you are treading water in a pool. Because if you're in a pool, then it is in a contained state. You're still treading water, you're still doing the hard work, but sometimes you can touch the bottom, sometimes you can touch the sides.
You can figure out where lanes are. You can help yourself really understand what parts of the job are yours to do and which parts are not yours to do. But also, and this connects to, you know, other experiments on, on rest, like you can get out of a pool. You can find the edge, you know, you can find the stairs, and you can walk yourself out of that pool, which you can't do in the open ocean.
And so I think a lot of the experiments really start in this mindset space that hook to emotions that might be happening for you below the surface, either because you're not paying attention to them or because you've told yourself, "This is just what it feels like." And the reality is that is the saddest thing I've ever heard, and it's not true. You have more control, uh, than that.
Kristiana Corona:
Yeah, I feel like that metaphor is very apt for how a lot of people are feeling right now, just feeling tossed by the waves. So being able to construct your own version of reality and what you can control and where your resources are and what rest looks like, super valuable. I love that one. Um, how about you, Russ?
Ross Blankenship:
The first one that comes to mind for me is always, um, we call it management begins with your feet, but I think of it as move your body. This has been my experience, and I have, um, had conversations with a lot of men that have had similar experiences, which is if you go out and walk or run or engage in some kind of like physical movement, biking, without listening to music or a podcast, you will learn something about what's going on in your head.
And you might gain access to different emotions. Like I've had experiences trail running where, um, you cycle through from like frustration to sadness to like gratitude, like very interesting, odd, um... I mean, I, I like sometimes go on trail runs as an experiment to be like, "Let me go see what I'm feeling."
But I think it's 'cause like a lot of the emotional experience that I have gets like trapped in my body somehow, and you have to like move it around to figure out what it is. So there's that version of it. There's also the like, if you are feeling a certain way and it feels like inescapable, you have the ability to move.
If you can't stand up, like you can move your arms, you can lay down, but the, like physically changing your posture can change like how chemicals are moving in your body, how hormones are moving in your body, like where the blood is going in your brain. Back to the triage idea, like getting your legs above your heart is how we treat shock.
And like if you are so angry that you can't think straight, it might help to just lay down and put your legs up for a minute, 'cause it will change how you feel if you give it long enough. So I like it both as like a tactic and as like an exploration. And then the two-word reset, one of the things we talk about, uh, in relationships is that it may not be possible for conflict to go away, but what you can get better at is repairing it.
You can, uh, like reduce the cycles of repair, and I like that one because it's really simple. It helps you get better at naming like what it is that you're feeling or experiencing and what behavior it's related to, so it becomes less... The tendency in repair is is very frequent to say like, uh, it's to do like inadequate apologies.
Kristiana Corona:
Right.
Ross Blankenship:
Say like, "I'm sorry that you felt that way." Which is not an apology.
Kristiana Corona:
A non-apology. Uh-huh.
Ross Blankenship:
Um, or it's like to take your feeling and make it the other person's to solve. And I think our experiment does a nice job of saying like, "I need to tell you how I'm feeling, how I received that." So it's really useful at work.
It's even more useful at home. That's why I like it, 'cause it's, it works everywhere. It's one of those things, if you can get better at it at work or at home, then you can get better at it in the other area. You know, I balk so much at there's advice out there all over the internet like, "Don't apologize at your job."
I disagree with that. Like, it's like taking that tactic doesn't acknowledge the fact that you work with humans and that we make mistakes and that we have feelings about the mistakes that we make. And I think it is so much more valuable to figure out how to make repair and to move forward to build more trust over time.
Maggie Sass:
And to that point, I think it's interesting 'cause language matters. We talked about this in the book too. The word feedback is sort of triggering to a lot of people. I think the word sorry can be triggering too. I think part of the importance is in owning your responsibility in a situation. And so if the word sorry is the word that's, you know, tripping you up, then take that word out and think about repair as your responsibility to sort of own your side of the street so that you can help a relationship move forward even a half step, right?
And I think that's the other thing that we talk about in that experiment too is that, you know, a five-year conflict does not get solved in one conversation, right? And so we've got to, we've got to dissuade this idea that if, like, it hasn't been solved in 30 seconds, then we continue to abandon. That's likely how you got to a five-year conflict, right?
So we've got to figure out ways that we are reconceptualizing repair so that it can get us somewhere forward, right? Like, we're just trying to get to the next step forward so that we can keep building.
Kristiana Corona:
Yeah, and I feel like all of these concepts really build nicely on each other. Like, you kind of talk about in the experiments not feeling forced to do them all and do them in order, and it's more like find the thing right now that is the most useful in this moment for handling this problem, and try it, and give it a, give it a try.
Do it for a certain period of time. Like you, you say in there a lot of these things, it's like do it for a week or do it for seven days. Do it for however many days until you have enough information to see if, if something is working. And I love the, the repetitiveness of that because you're right, you can't gather enough data in one interaction, or one time saying, "I'm sorry," or one time practicing doing a breathing cycle.
Like, you need to be able to do it over and over and over again for that learning to stick, right? Right. Okay, so you named some of my favorites. Uh, but I also really liked calibrating your inner forecaster, which I think is a really interesting way to think about how much of the time we are imagining what will happen in the future, the doom and gloom, how bad it's gonna be, you know, the one thing that could completely tarnish our reputation and then we'll never recover, and how vastly wrong we are most of the time.
So can you talk about just what that means? Like, what does it look like to actually calibrate your inner forecaster? Yeah.
Maggie Sass:
So the way that we talk about this is that if you think about something that scares you or is making you nervous, m- maybe it's you're going in to have a negotiation on salary with your boss the next day, or you're giving a keynote, or you're gonna have a conversation with a direct report who has not in the, the past taken feedback well and you need to give that person feedback.
Whatever it is, what we tend to do is sort of ruminate. We tell ourselves, like, the worst version of how that is gonna go. And then when it happens, sometimes it's really hard, right? Sometimes it's as hard as we thought it was gonna be, but we tend to do this thing, the psychological terms are like impact bias and durability bias.
Like, we tend to think that they're gonna be much worse than they actually are, and we tend to think they're gonna last much longer than they actually do. And what's so fascinating, which just think about this for yourself, like go back in your mind to like a thing you were afraid to do, so then you did it.
A lot of times you have this, like, this crash of emotions, like this relief that it's done, but then your memory sort of hooks to the forecast, not the reality, right? You are not creating a memory of, "Okay, so I thought it was gonna be, you know, a 9 out of 10 in severity. It was really a 4 out of 10, and I thought it was gonna last for the entire day.
I thought I was gonna take it home with me, but it lasted for 17 minutes." We do not sort of take that new data set into the next time we're thinking about something hard or something that's making us uncomfortable. And so I think part of this, back to our previous conversation, I do think, you know, one of the things that we're trying to do here is to speak to people who wouldn't necessarily pick up a book about emotional intelligence, right?
We're trying to say there is a way to analyze emotions that can be really useful to you. Like, what we manage, you know, we can actually do something about. What we recognize, what we pay attention to, we can actually change. And you can do this. Like, every person in leadership roles have hard things that come up on their calendars over and over again.
You have the data to collect to help yourself better attune to the way to really walk into those situations. One, because all of this drama that you event- invented in your mind, that doesn't feel great, so you're creating additional sort of negative emotion baggage. But the second is it's really hard to learn in the midst of those storms.
It's hard to, like, put your best foot forward into thinking about, "Okay, I'm gonna contingency plan. Like, I'm walking into this conversation with Dan. He tends to be terrible at getting, at receiving feedback. Here's contingency plan A, B, C, D," right? Your brain doesn't stay online to do that if you're just constantly Paranoid that you're gonna get the worst outcome.
Kristiana Corona: Yeah. Oh, I, I just love how concrete you make all of these concepts feel. To your point about someone who maybe wouldn't have otherwise picked up the book because it's not a topic they resonate with or feel comfortable with, every exercise in here has components of data that go along with it, and what was the duration and what did that feel like and what did that tell you?
And I mean, it goes so deep, just as if it was a real scientific experiment. And I, I think that the way it extrapolates out to organizations is also really powerful. Like, when you think about what areas do we need to be focusing on, how might we focus on those things, what questions might we ask, you really cover very comprehensively all of those domains.
And so, yeah, I just, I wanna encourage people that when this book comes out, you need to get a copy. And you're gonna want a physical copy so you can earmark it and you can you know, take photocopies of notes or whatever you wanna do. It's just a really interesting and powerful set of experiments, and I've never really seen a book that has quite as much depth and rigor to it as far as the practicality of how you apply these concepts.
So you get the concepts, and then you get the practical application, which I think is, is incredible. So maybe just to round out this conversation, I feel like I could talk to you guys all day, but I will let you go. Um, what else would you want people to know about this book?
Maggie Sass:
I would say the thing for me is, and we explore this a lot in part one, but I think it comes out in the experiments in part two, is this idea that leadership is emotional.
And I think we don't mean that in terms of, you know, sentimentality or over-emoting, but the idea that you are doing the work in an emotional field, and if you can experiment with yourself with that idea alone, it is likely that that will change your experience with leadership. And I think, like I said, we, we explore that in different ways throughout the experiments in part two, but I think that's one of the biggest takeaways.
Ross Blankenship:
We worked with an editor who really pushes us to get down to the core concept and really to try to communicate that in, like, the title and the subtitle. Shout out to Michael Signorelli. But the thing that I keep thinking is, you know, we wrote this book to try to help people, and I think our experience of talking about it is that people really do see or experience friction.
They can identify that feeling in their own lives. And now that we've talked about it so much, you will see it everywhere. It's in the media about everything. But to look at those experiences or to consider, like, if I think, "Where's the friction in my life right now?" To look at that and think, like, "What can I learn about that?
What is that maybe telling me about what's going on or what I should be attending to?" You said kind of almost like as a scientific experiment, but, like, taking that perception to your own experience of like, "What is going on here? What could I learn if I tried something different?" Maybe I might get a different experience, but I think just tuning into that feeling and being like, "There's something there that I could attend to that might be useful."
Kristiana Corona:
What's helpful about all of this is the, like I mentioned, the depth that you go into. And so while it is helpful for leaders to read for themselves, for them to share with their team, it's also helpful for coaches, and I've been a coach for almost 10 years, and I've heard a lot of concepts, but it's not repeating the concepts in the same way with the same data you've always heard.
Like, there's a lot of new research coming out, a lot of new perspectives, new learnings, and I think it, it just does such a nice job of capturing all the most relevant concepts of how we're thinking about the brain and the body and what we're able to learn from that intelligence. Um, and so I, as a coach, also very much appreciate it and, you know, like I said, earmarking questions.
I've got some questions I'm gonna steal now from the exercises. So really appreciate you guys coming onto the show today. Um, I think this is gonna be such a powerful resource, and the book comes out August 25th, 2026. And where can people go to find it, and where can they go to find more about you?
Maggie Sass:
Yeah. So you can find us on Amazon and all of the independent bookstores, big bookstores. You'll see it in the airport as well. And you can, uh, see more writing from both Ross and I at talentsmarteq.com. But Ross, where else can they find your writing?
Ross Blankenship:
I would say go pre-order it on Amazon, and then it'll come out, uh, and be in all those locations.
I don't know that it's available for pre-order in other places, but we're on LinkedIn. We're posting about these ideas and about the book and its release. And then I have a Substack newsletter called Theory of Change where I kind of go in the more esoteric side of some of these ideas. So you can find us in all those places.
Kristiana Corona:
All right. Well, thank you guys so much. It has been such a pleasure to have you on. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Maggie and Ross and the unplanned cameo from my daughter, Malena, who is never one to want to miss out on the action. If you want to find out more about Maggie and Ross's book, Friction, you can go to our show notes for details on that book, as well as the many other books they've written, and their amazing content on LinkedIn, which I highly recommend.
You can pre-order the book now, which comes out on August 25th, if you go to Amazon and search for Friction. If you're enjoying this podcast, go ahead and hit subscribe so you never miss another episode. You can subscribe at worthytolead.co/subscribe. Until next time, keep showing up, keep doing the work that matters, and keep leading like you're worthy to lead, because you are. Bye for now.
