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What if you're freezing up in your most important moments and sabotaging yourself without even realizing it?
You've been there.
The high-stakes feedback session where your chest tightened and you went silent.
The crucial negotiation where you should have spoken up but didn't.
The moment your body betrayed you when you needed confidence the most.
Meet Jay Moon Fields, one of the world's leading experts in embodied emotional intelligence and author of the globally used book Teaching People Not Poses.
With an average rating of 4.7 stars and worked with powerhouses like Apple, the UN, and Patagonia.
For over 20 years, Jay has helped Fortune 100 executives and teams break free from people-pleasing overthinking and emotional hijacking using her groundbreaking Hey Wait framework.
Over the course of this episode, you'll discover how to catch yourself before you freeze or overreact, the body signals that reveal when you're abandoning yourself, and specific techniques to stay grounded when the stakes are highest.
Whether you're leading a high pressure team, navigating difficult conversations or tired of your emotions controlling your success, this conversation gives you the tools to turn nervous system awareness into negotiation power.
Are you ready to transform freezing into presence?
Let's dive in.
Jay, welcome back.
Thanks for coming back on the show.
Oh my gosh, thanks for having me back.
It's always a delight to connect with you.
Yes, and you've got some really cool stuff going on, and I think it would be good.
Let's just start off in general talking about what it is that you do.
What is it that folks know you for?
And then we'll get beneath the surface to understand who you really are, how you got to this point and then what it means for everybody listening.
Great.
Yeah.
Going in deep.
Well, I'm a somatic coach and I'm an author.
And like you, I'm a LinkedIn learning instructor.
And I help smart sensitive, successful people who tend to lose themselves around other people in relationships to learn how to leverage the intelligence of their body and their nervous system so they can unlearn all the bad conditioning they got about what it means to be a good person in relationships and instead learn how to be a healthy person in relationship, which essentially means I mean if I were to narrow it down to one statement I help people like who they are around other people.
Wow.
Okay.
So there's a lot to unpack.
Your elevator pitch has changed and sharpened since last time we talked.
I've been working on it.
This is great.
So let's start off at a very basic place.
When it comes to a somatic coach, I think for a lot of people that is a concept that is foreign to them.
So what does that mean?
What is that?
So soma comes from the Greek word for body.
So a somatic coach is someone who helps people stay present in their body and use some of the information that comes to you in real time from your body while you're in a coaching session.
So it might look like being able to, rather than talk about your past.
You know, I ask you about a situation that happened at work, that's been stressful for you, and I'm helping you pinpoint what was that like in your body in that moment.
What were you noticing?
You know, were you tense in your throat?
Were you kind of shaky?
Were you sweating?
And right now, what's happening as you talk about it?
So we're, so much of our intelligence comes from embodied self-awareness.
And most of us in our day-to-day life, especially when we're around other people, are so much in our heads.
We're so much overthinking.
We're so much strategizing that we're not getting the information that's coming from our body.
And that's the information that is often pointing us to what's most true for us.
And it's certainly pointing us to what our own experience is.
You know, with that, what I mean is.
I don't know about you, but as a recovering people pleaser, when I'm around other people, my default is to pay attention to you.
Right.
My energy is on you.
I'm paying attention to your facial expressions, your body language, what you're saying, what I think you might need from me.
And it's a it was a whole process.
I mean, this is why I do what I do, because it was a whole learning process to come back into my own body, be behind my own eyes, notice what's happening for me while I talk to you, so that I have more connection to the parts of me that allow me to be more confident, that allow me to be more empathic, that allow me to connect with you more.
I can't do that if I'm not in my body.
Yes.
And this is something that is so fundamental to humanity, but it's so interesting that in the Western world we seem to have lost it.
Because thinking is a good thing.
Overthinking can be a bad thing.
And we get to this point where we are so in our heads that we are disconnected from our body.
We don't know who we really are, what we really want.
And so there is a, an unlearning.
That happens because children are very connected to their bodies.
Now,
And then as we get to adulthood, it's almost like we lose this.
And maybe we could use you as a case study, because it sounds like there's a bit of your journey in what it is that you help other people to conquer in your personal journey.
What do you think got you to that point of unlearning that somatic knowledge that we had when we were children?
Oh, how did I lose that?
Gosh.
I mean, I grew up outside of Washington DC and in a family that really valued being smart and not necessarily successful in the sense of making a lot of money, but care what other people think about you.
You're representing our family when you're out in the world, that sort of thing.
And so I think I
I learned really early, like so many of your listeners probably, that in order to belong and to be liked and to be respected, I had to be who other people wanted me to be.
And as soon as that consciously or not comes into dictating how a person behaves, you automatically start vacating yourself.
You know, you start abandoning yourself.
And I I can think back to being a teenager and feeling really alone around other people because and I couldn't have articulated this at the time, but I felt alone because I wasn't present in me.
I was trying to, um, project whoever they needed me to be, which meant I wasn't behind my own eyes.
And when I got to college, my freshman year of college, I found yoga and I started practicing yoga.
And I had been a competitive gymnast growing up.
So you would think that they would be very similar.
But what I found was that they were similar in that I had the flexibility and the strength to do almost any pose.
But in my gymnastics practice, so I guess this would be the other place that I learned this.
It was all about make it look perfect and smile.
Even if you're scared and it's hard, you know, it was all about the performance.
Whereas with yoga it was all about.
Can you, while you're in this shape, feel the stretch that you're getting in your hamstring?
Can you feel the way your breath is moving even into your back ribs or your side ribs?
Like it was all about learning to inhabit your self In the different shapes that you take.
And I think that's when I started to realize, oh, I don't inhabit myself at all.
I am bending and contorting in my daily life and I'm not even in here.
And I wonder and maybe this is going too deep, but I wonder if there's a nexus between these two concepts as well.
Because with gymnastics, unlike other sports, many other sports you are yes, you're competing against other people, but you're also performing for the judges who determine the score.
And I wonder how much of a bit of a psychological residue was left by saying OK, I always need to look perfect for the judges.
And that has then crept into everyday life.
I think you're spot on.
Yeah.
It's that like I am being judged.
I need to get a good score because if I don't, then I'm I'm, I'm not going to have safety, belonging and mattering.
Right.
And and so I need to perform.
Absolutely.
But what ended up happening is, you know, and this is so true for so many of the people I work with those strategies that I learned to perform, that I learned to be a people pleaser.
They helped me in my scholastic career.
They helped me in my professional career, but they came at a high, high cost in my personal relationships because I was.
Strategies can get you far professionally, but strategies aren't relating.
And what I wanted more than anything was healthy, romantic relationship and rich friendships.
And I didn't have the skill set for that.
I had the skill set for getting good scores.
But getting good scores doesn't make for healthy relationships.
And I know your story enough to know that this is true for you too, right?
Like you learned how to become popular But that didn't mean that you were being yourself.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And I think there's almost not, I wouldn't even call it a hesitation.
I think it's a complete lack of awareness of the fact that sometimes we don't allow ourselves to even know who our true selves are because we are so focused on playing to the crowd or playing to the judges.
And we're saying I need to be perfect for them to look good in their eyes, rather than understanding who I really am or who I want myself to be.
Hello, my friends.
Before we get back to today's episode, I want to ask you a question.
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And to your point.
When you're constantly strategizing and trying to think about how you can contort yourself into being accepted by other people, you might be getting good scores by them if they are judging you.
But you're still not connecting with them because there is only them and there is no you.
And it can be really scary to allow yourself to be.
And it's almost like we have to first accept ourselves in order to be fully accepted to other people.
But we don't even where a lot of us aren't even aware that that first step needs to happen.
Absolutely.
And I think this is the piece that's also at play here is your nervous system, right?
You talked about how scary it is to even think about considering who your true self is, because then you might start to behave in ways that you don't get good scores.
And our nervous systems are constantly on operation to say, am I safe?
Am I safe?
Am I safe?
Your nervous system does not want you to grow.
It does not want intimacy.
It does not want connection.
It wants safety.
And we it wants safety and it wants belonging and it wants mattering.
But all those things all come down to I want to survive.
And so you.
We all have this hard wiring in our system.
To look around to see who do I need in order to be safe.
Who do I need to be in order to be safe?
And anything that's going to get in the way of that is going to be something that your nervous system shuts down.
And it shuts it down in the form of think about any time you're in a meeting with someone or you're about to have a hard conversation and you feel your body amp up, you know you feel the rev, you feel your heart beating, your breath being shallow, or you feel the opposite.
You feel everything just kind of like shut down, get foggy, get kind of like you can't even connect your brain to your tongue, you can't think of what to say.
Those are all your nervous system's responses to being, to feeling like it's not safe.
And unless you understand that that is just an unconscious response of your nervous system that's saying you can't do this, this isn't safe, then you'll never be able to get past that and go.
Actually, I want connection.
I want intimacy.
I want to be known.
And that thing that's happening in my body, I have control over that.
Yes.
And I think to this point, I think a lot of times.
There are people who don't get to that point where they recognize that they can have control over their feelings and therefore their thoughts.
Because a lot of times our bodies, our amygdala, the limbic response, that would happen faster.
And then the way that we feel will then dictate the way that we think.
The way that we think will dictate the way that we speak and then act.
And so as we can understand how to catch these feelings sooner...
Then we get to a point where you can be more in the driver's seat of your emotional intelligence rather than in the passenger seat.
And I think I want to go deeper into this because again, I want to make it as real and practical for the person, because I think they can, they're starting to connect to this.
But I want to draw a clearer line between the somatic knowledge, the body knowledge and emotional intelligence knowledge.
Because, for somebody who this is brand new to, how do we get them to that first step where they can start to understand the messages that their body is sending them and what it really means for them?
When I started this podcast and built the American Negotiation Institute, I quickly realized something.
No one hands you a manual.
You're the strategist, the marketer, the operations team and the tech department all at the same time.
Every day, there's a new decision, a new problem, and a new hazard.
We'll be right back.
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So the first step to me is recognizing when you're having a bad experience of yourself.
And I know that seems kind of silly or vague, but I think the listener, the person out there listening, can go back through your day yesterday and think through the exchanges you had, whether it was with family member or whether it was with the person working at the grocery store and go back and feel like, did I like the experience I was having in that moment.
And you might not even be able to articulate what the sensations were you were having, but most people can articulate.
Did I like how that felt?
And to just start there, because that's where you're going to start to recognize.
Well, what was it about that that I didn't like?
Was I shrinking?
Was I maybe doing the opposite?
Was I puffing up and I like oh, I don't like when I do that thing and I kind of become a jerk, but it was the only way it felt like I could have power in this situation.
Was I being quiet when I knew I wanted to say something, but I was just too afraid to create conflict.
Like If you can notice what were the times when you didn't have a good experience of yourself and then start to get curious about what did it actually feel like?
What was I doing?
That's when you're going to start to recognize what are some of your patterns that are related to that emotional intelligence piece of like.
You know we all got conditioning growing up about what it means to be a good person.
And It's not necessarily healthy, right?
We got taught I mean.
To be a good person in a relationship means that you don't make other people uncomfortable.
That's a big one.
I definitely got that message.
To be a good person in a relationship means that you make sure the other person feels cared for at all times, even if it's at your expense, right?
Mm-hmm, be a good person in relationship means that you never put yourself above someone else or that you do that.
You always show that you're confident and in charge, right?
We've all gotten these different messages that get encoded into our cells and then get reinforced over and over again by the nervous system that said Hey Hey Hey, we learned.
This is what is good.
This is what's going to keep us safe.
So I'm just going to keep doing it and doing it and doing it.
Um, So being able to identify what doesn't feel good and what are you doing when you're doing that?
Oh, this is good.
This is great.
Because what I'm thinking here is that a lot of people struggle with this in some kind of way.
Everybody shoulds on themselves in some type of way where they say I should do this or I shouldn't do that.
And then, if you try to push them to understand where it came from, a lot of times it's connected to maybe something from their childhood, maybe religious beliefs, societal beliefs, whatever it happens to be.
But a lot of times it doesn't come from them and it's not optimized for their situation.
And so I want to take this a little bit deeper, because I think this is a piece where, you know, most people have heard this piece before right,
This idea of like, we've been conditioned to be one way and that's not necessarily healthy.
But one of the things that I find is the underlying cause of all of the people pleasing, the overthinking, the strategizing is operating from this belief that no one else is going to care about your insights.
No one else is going to consider you.
All these behaviors come from this underlying, often unconscious belief that if I give you Kwame, what you want from me, eventually you'll give me what I want right.
If I work hard enough, someday someone will see how hard I worked.
I'll get the raise.
I'll get the accolades.
I'll get the partner, whatever it is.
If I bleed out for you, really, I mean, that's kind of what it comes down to.
You will.
You will eventually one day see who I am and give me what I want or respond to my preferences.
And so this comes from, like I was saying, not believing that anyone is ever going to care about you and your insights.
And the reason why this connects to the importance of somatic work, is One of the things to do in order to start believing that your insides matter is being able to feel what's happening for you in real time.
That's your insides.
When you say this, I feel this way.
When I walk into this meeting, I have this kind of experience.
But what I really want is to be seen as confident and connected.
If you don't believe someone else will consider you, then you constantly go through your life giving yourself away.
And so the this is where can I tell a teaching story to make.
I'm like trying to make, I'm trying to make a tactile, and let me do it this way.
So this story came from My mentor, her name's Nancy Dreyfus, and she's an incredible therapist.
And years ago when I was working with her, she gave me the story to tell me.
She's like, Jay, this is where your behavior came from.
Okay, so listener, Kwame, I want you to imagine here's a scenario.
There's a little girl playing on the floor with her blocks and she is completely enthralled with her blocks.
She's building a whole little world.
And mommy A walks into the room and says we've got to take your grandma to the doctor's appointment.
We got to go right now.
And she takes the girl by her wrist and she takes her out of the room and leaves her.
And the little girl's like, but I don't want to go.
And mom's like, tough.
We got to get your grandma to the doctors.
Okay.
So that's mommy A. Let's imagine mommy B comes into the room.
Same scene.
Little girl is sitting on the floor playing with her blocks.
Mommy B comes in and says, oh my gosh, Look at what you've done here.
This is incredible.
You built this whole little city.
That must be where your horses go.
And oh, wow.
And little girl's really excited.
And then mommy B says I hate to do this, but we've got to go take your grandma to the doctor's appointment right now.
And the little girl goes, but I don't want to go.
And the mom says, why would you?
This is so much more fun, but we have to go.
So my question for you, and since you're the one in front of me Kwame, I'm going to ask you What's the difference between what Mommy A and Mommy B did?
Wow.
This is a great parenting lesson, because with Mommy A, what she did was she said well, there was no acknowledgement or validation of what was being built or done.
That's one thing.
So there was probably not a feeling of being seen.
And then also with the way that they left, they said, well, you have to go.
We have to go.
Well, I don't want to go.
It doesn't feel good to go.
It doesn't matter how you feel.
We still need to do this.
That's the message that's being said.
And then in the other one, there's validation.
So you actually take the time to see the child first.
And then you say, the child says, I don't want to go.
And the mother says, your feelings are valid.
You don't want to go.
And it would be weird if you did.
And we still have to do it.
And I think it's just the recognition that your feelings do matter.
And sometimes we might have to do things despite what our feelings are saying.
But it doesn't mean that those feelings themselves don't matter.
Yes, you are unsurprisingly very good at saying what was happening there.
Yes, there was validation.
There was saying your feelings make sense.
It would be weird if you didn't feel that way.
And the big thing here too, is in Mommy A's scenario there was only one reality, and it was Mommy A's.
She didn't see the little girl's reality.
She didn't recognize, like you said, what she built.
She didn't recognize what she was feeling.
She just said I have to take your grandma to the doctor's appointment and you have to come with me.
One reality.
In the mommy bee scenario, there was two realities.
Wow, look at what you've done.
I see you.
I recognize you have a whole thing going on right now.
And then like you said, there was also, of course you feel that way.
Why would you want to go?
So your feelings make sense.
So this is what I mean by expecting someone to care that you have an experience, expecting someone to be interested in your insides.
Most of us had mommy ace.
And that's not because we had moms that didn't love us or caregivers that were cruel.
It was that they were busy and they didn't know better.
They didn't understand that the way to give someone an experience of themselves is to mirror it back to them and to validate that right.
So There is this, when you're used to having that mommy A influence, and it isn't just our caregivers, it's anybody, it's our friends, it's our coworkers.
We're not very good at saying to someone else, wow, look at what you're doing.
I see you.
How do you feel?
Of course you feel that way, right?
So the third scenario then, and this is the healing scenario.
Third scenario is little girls playing with their blocks.
Mommy A walks in and says, hey, we got to go.
We got to take your grandma to the doctor's appointment.
Little girl looks up at mommy and says, hey, wait, look at what I'm doing here.
And there was a point in our lives early on when all of us could say, hey, wait.
Because like you said, little kids are embodied.
Little kids are in the present moment.
Little kids understand that I have a reality too.
But at some point we stopped being able to say, hey, wait, because it stopped working.
You know, we were in the worlds of other people who were saying this is my reality and this is the one we're going with.
And we stopped saying, hey, wait.
So what I do to go back to your very first question to me, Kwame is I teach adults who tend to lose themselves around other people because they've been trained out of believing that anyone's ever going to care about their experience unless they're the perfect performer and get all the good marks.
I teach them how to say, hey, wait.
I have a reality too.
Hey, wait.
This is my experience.
Can we talk about this aspect of it?
And that's actually setting the foundation for true relating and true connecting, which not many of us are doing.
Especially when you break down this example.
We're recognizing that there are a lot of invisible barriers to true connection.
Our inability to acknowledge and accept the fact that we have feelings and the feelings matter.
And then the other person's unwillingness to do the same.
And it's hard for them to do the same if we're not even willing to acknowledge our own feelings.
And it seems like when we go back to the scenarios that you provided, a lot of times those interactions, they stick with us on a subconscious level.
And then the mother who was in this example saying, your feelings don't matter.
Let's go.
That then becomes the little girl's internal voice.
And that's the voice that she hears when she's making decisions.
Well, I don't really want to go to dinner here.
Well, that doesn't matter.
You're supposed to sacrifice for your partner.
And then it perpetuates throughout their lives.
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What you're learning in that mommy scenario is that your choices are either to comply with someone else or defy them.
Those are the only two choices.
If you're living in a one reality system, whatever that you know, Between you and your boss, between you and your partner, between you and your child, if you think there's only one reality, your only choice is I'm going to go along with theirs or I'm going to fight.
And so why hey wait is such a different and softer approach is?
It's not like I'm going to give myself up for you, but it's also not.
I have to fight for you, to see me.
And I think this is the thing that so many people again, and these unspoken, unseen dynamics, we don't understand.
If, if we're used to not being seen, the only way we're going to get there, we think, is to finally just blow our lid.
You know, have the argument fight to be seen, fight to be heard.
You're, you're smiling and not like this is.
Yeah.
And so, Hey, wait, is, is, is really simply, Hey, wait, I want to be considered.
And so there are the three steps to using it.
And we already talked about the first one.
The first one is notice when you're not having a good experience of yourself, right?
So you're in an exchange with a coworker, let's say, and you're starting to realize.
Let's say the the, the coworker is assigning you a task and you're like in your head, you're like, Oh my God, how can I do one more thing?
This is?
This is bananas, you know, and your insides are speeding up and you're starting to get stressed out.
That's your first notice.
Notice someone else has asked you to do something in inside.
You started to have a bad experience.
You started to get nervous.
You started to get stressed.
The second step is to pause and, with yourself long enough to feel what's actually going on for you.
So you've noticed like in this kind of peripheral way, ick, right?
You've had the peripheral ick.
I don't like what I feel like.
And then to pause long enough to see what your insides are, right?
To be the mommy bee to yourself that looks around and goes, wow, look at what's happening here.
Of course, you feel this way, so that you know what's true for you, so that you can do the third step.
And the third step is to literally say hey wait, hey wait.
I'm going to have to look at my calendar before I get back to you about that.
Hey, wait, I notice I already have a lot of stuff going on.
So if this is what you want me to prioritize, I'm going to have to shift something else.
Hey, wait, I
I need to talk about this more with you.
This isn't sitting well.
Whatever it is hey, wait is the way that you it's almost like a tiny little timeout where you pivot the situation.
Because if the person listening right now is like, oh my God, this is so me, then you know that when you're kind of trying to be everything to that other person where you're, you're complying or defying to someone else's reality.
Reality seems like it's speeding up.
It's like this train that is happening to you and you're just trying to be as strategic and and quick as you can to respond.
And Hey, wait, is that it like puts a glitch.
It really, it's so funny.
People who say that they use this with their, with every, you know, partner.
Someone just told me they used it with a telemarketer.
And I was like I love that you use it with telemarketer because hey wait, it makes everybody like kind of pause and realize something else different is coming.
And for the people who are used to being people pleasers, who are used to complying, who are used to never saying anything that might make someone else uncomfortable.
The feedback that I've gotten about this and I feel it in myself too is if I can say hey, wait.
It's almost like the slightest permission slip to let the other person know I'm about to say something that you might not expect me to say.
I'm about to change our dynamic so slightly, but it's not mean and it's not confrontation.
It's just, hey, wait, I need to be considered here too. before this train runs me over.
This is powerful.
And I know you know it's powerful because it's worked in your life and in the lives of the people that you've coached.
And one of the many things I love about this is that you've actually given people steps for the power of the pause.
Because a lot of times we hear people say that embrace.
Silence is something that's often said in negotiation and difficult conversations.
But we don't talk about what to do in the silence or why it's so hard to maintain the silence.
And in these conversations, things happen quickly.
And I love the idea of thinking about it as a timeout, because if you think about it, you don't even need to understand sports to understand this.
Just sometimes in sports, just like in other parts of life, sometimes there is momentum.
Momentum is real.
It's like a nebulous force.
You might not fully understand, but you can recognize when it's ticking action, taking hold of an interaction.
And so if you're a coach seeing something bad happening on the court, you might not even know what's happening.
That's bad.
You just know it's bad and you need it to stop.
And so here in this situation, it's like, my body's telling me something's not good.
Okay, so I'm going to notice that bad experience.
Now I'm going to think long enough to actually fully appreciate what I'm feeling.
And then I'm going to say hey wait, I don't even need to say what, I don't even need to know what's coming next.
I just need to know I need to slow this ship down or else I'm going to end up in a really bad place.
Right.
And sometimes that's all you need to say.
I mean, hey, wait, I need this to slow down.
Hey, wait, I don't know what's going on right now.
Give me give me a beat.
I mean, just that.
Because so many of the people I work with say they can tell when they're feeling anxious, but they get so tongue-tied they don't know what to say.
And that just having these two words gives them something to say.
And then they can figure out what comes after that, right?
It's not rocket science to then put in some words after that that, even if it's just hey wait, I don't, I don't know what I need to say here.
Give me a minute.
It just buys you time to be able to come back to what's true for you.
I mean, this is, this is the piece that I want the listener to hear, which is your reality gets to matter, even when you're with someone else.
You are used to being the person that disappears when you're with other people.
And then you get home and you're like, oh, it's so good to just be alone in my room.
And if you feel that way, it's because you give yourself away when you're with other people.
And hey, wait is a way to put yourself in the room again.
When you think about this.
Actually hold on, i see, this is why i need to wait.
I i need needed the thing to print out.
I forgot we have a listener question.
That would be good.
Um, let me see look, you almost did.
Hey wait, right there you're like.
I know i have a listener question.
Let's pivot like there's something happening here.
Yeah, because this is this is the perfect time uh, to throw in that listener dilemma.
Hi jay, I'm a team lead at a fast paced consulting firm.
We just had a really tough client presentation that didn't go well.
Afterward, my boss pulled me aside and gave me some really intense feedback in front of my team.
I know it wasn't personal, but it felt personal.
My chest tightened, my face flushed and honestly, I shut down.
I barely heard the rest of what he said.
Later, I beat myself up for not staying composed and not advocating for myself.
I keep replaying the moment and thinking, why didn't I say this?
Or why didn't I explain that?
This happens to me a lot.
When things get heated or high stakes, I just freeze.
And then I ruminate on it for days.
My question is how do I stop freezing and start showing up more powerfully in those intense moments, especially when I feel emotionally flooded?
Thanks, Taylor.
Oh, I'm sure there's so many people who feel like they could have written this exact same thing.
This is so common, that sense of, again, something's going on that doesn't feel good.
And that's your nervous system putting into a freeze, right?
You end up not saying the thing you want to say, or you end up coming across in a way you don't want to.
So To this person, the first thing I would say is well, going back to the steps, notice when you're having the experience.
You usually start to feel it come on.
It's not a sudden thing.
There's a slow ramping up before the freeze happens.
And then in that second state, that second step with the pause, here's what I want you to do.
Because you spoke about how... you will ruminate about the way you felt for days.
You'll beat yourself up and say, I should have done this or I shouldn't have felt this way.
So another little key thing to know about emotional intelligence and emotional regulation is your brain loves when you make sense to yourself.
So for you to say to yourself in that moment of course I feel this way, or it makes sense to me that this you know that my boss gave me this feedback and now I feel embarrassed or ashamed.
And instead of trying to overcome that, instead of trying to push it down or away, instead of certainly, instead of judging yourself in that moment, I want you to think about what mommy B did.
Of course, you don't want to go.
Why would you?
It's so much more fun to play with your blocks, right?
The moment that you see yourself for the way that you feel and you tell yourself feeling this way in this situation makes sense, you become an ally to yourself and your nervous system loves that.
You will calm down.
It seems counterintuitive to say that you're going to acknowledge that you feel embarrassed or ashamed and that that will make it better.
But in your system, it absolutely does.
So then the third piece is, I would say, is hey, weight can be used internally as well as externally.
You can say to yourself after you leave that meeting hey wait, I didn't like how that felt.
And I need to take some time to be kind to myself, like to to come back and go ouch, That didn't feel good.
And, instead of trying to fix everything, just be with yourself in that way.
That's of course that didn't feel good.
Of course, that's how I felt.
So that then you'll be able to advocate for yourself.
Because I heard that too in your question.
It's like, how do I not ruminate on this?
But also, I want to be a powerful advocate for myself.
And sometimes it can't happen in that moment.
Sometimes the best you can do is say, hey, wait to yourself.
Like, hey, wait, this isn't going well.
I'm going to need to be kind to myself and do some self-soothing for a bit.
And maybe it's not until the next day or the next week where you reach out to that person.
You say, hey, wait, I need to talk about what happened at that meeting last week.
I appreciate feedback and I welcome it.
But that was really difficult to receive in front of the team.
Would it be okay for me to ask you to consider me and not do that again in that way?
Yes.
Oh, this is good.
This is great.
Oh, go ahead.
Oh, I was going to say it all comes down to considering, right?
Like considering yourself, considering your feelings and then asking someone else to consider you too.
And this is what you were saying a bit earlier about like, We can't ask someone else to relate to us until we're relating to ourselves.
So first you have to show that you can be the kind and attentive parent to yourself that says, of course I feel this way.
I see what's true for me.
And then from that place, you can advocate and speak from that truth to ask to be considered.
I love how practical this is and how it applies internally and externally.
And then it just ties into just classical neuroscience, where we have essentially affect labeling, where we're labeling the emotions that we see and feel.
And then that actually quiets the amygdala, makes it a little bit more easily managed.
And now tell me if I'm correct in assuming this, because we know that through affect labeling, actually labeling the emotions, it calms people down.
I know from my own anecdotal experiences.
It seems as though the more I deny my emotions, the stronger they become.
Like.
The more I try to suppress them, the more likely it is to leak out inappropriately or inconveniently at another time.
Absolutely.
Because you know, in that, in that naming your emotions you are essentially like the way I think of is, you're matching up with yourself.
Like you're you're you're getting behind your own eyes again and being in your own experience and being like, I don't necessarily like how this feels, but I can resonate with myself and be here.
When you are trying to deny that you are feeling a certain way.
The way I imagine that in my body is like the feeling is happening in my body.
And if I don't like it and I want to deny it and I want to push it away, the only option I have is to leave my body.
And when I leave my body, that's when I'm in my head, That's when I'm out here performing.
That's when I'm trying to pretend that I'm not how I am.
And that, as you said, that goes sideways real fast.
It goes sideways because you're not connected to yourself.
And you can get by doing that for a really long time.
But it's kind of like the old saying of if you're navigating just one degree off, You're going to end up hundreds and hundreds of miles away from your destination.
That's what that is.
If you leave your body so that you don't feel what's true for you, you will go very far, but you will be very far away from the destination you wanted for yourself.
It's powerful.
It's scary, but it is also very powerful.
And I think what's really exciting about this is that you've given us a toolkit that we can use to get back on track so we don't find ourselves in this situations.
And it's also empowering to recognize that, even if we do have made the mistake of not honoring our emotions and connecting to our body and getting that somatic knowledge, we can start now and start reorienting to something that works so much better.
And so I just appreciate you coming on and making it so clear, because this is something that can be a big scary, weighty topic that feels theoretical, but you've made it practical so everybody can understand what exactly to do.
So I appreciate that.
And before you go, for the person who's listening.
If there's just one piece of advice that you want to leave them with that could change everything for them, what would that one piece of advice be?
You're not living in a one reality system.
No matter who you're around, If it's two people, there's two realities.
If there's five people, there's five realities, which means your reality, your experience of yourself, your preferences, your feelings.
They never go away.
They don't disappear when you're around other people.
And I want you to really start attending to that, to start believing that you live in a universe in which your reality doesn't disappear.
When you're around other people and that it gets to matter and that you're the one who starts to make it matter, simply by paying attention to it.
So good.
Jay, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Really appreciate it.
And, before you go, let the listeners know about your book, your podcast and how they can get in touch with you.
Yeah, so my podcast is Hey Wait.
You can hear it anywhere you get podcasts.
And we go deeper into what this looks like in solo podcasts, but also I have on people who, like you, are experts in what it is to relate to other people or relate to alcohol, relate to sound, relate to all these different things in our life that when we're not paying attention to our own reality, we miss the things that aren't making us feel good.
So that's the podcast.
And then people can find out about all the other stuff I have.
The best way to do that is to go to my website, which is jmoonfields.com.
And my book's there.
My courses are there.
The LinkedIn learning courses I do are there.
And you can sign up for my newsletter there, which is also where you'll get ongoing connection to all the stuff I'm up to.
Amazing.
Jay, thank you so much for coming back on the show.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you.
It's my pleasure.
And before we go, here's one final bonus question from our producer Simone, because he always makes us think deeper.
I have a couple of friends that they have perfect families, perfect lives.
But if they manage to stop for one second and say hey wait, maybe their lives will change completely.
Yeah.
Because it can be just OK.
Maybe at work I can say hey, wait.
But I can say hey, wait with my whole life.
So it requires courage because sometimes it is very big.
It is very big.
My life changed completely.
And I was really afraid.
I am afraid still.
So how can we manage when the hayward moment is that big?
How can we manage fear or how can we do it so that it is not that painful for the person or the people that surround you?
That is such a good question.
I think, so you're pointing to two things here.
One is that There are two forms of hey wait that, there's the small ways that we can say it in a work meeting.
Or once we're used to saying it, we can say it with our partner.
Hey, wait, I feel like you didn't listen to me there.
Can you, can we come back to that?
But then there's the ways that it's giant and they're seismic and it's life-changing and it's terrifying.
And I would say they're both terrifying in their own way.
But the more that you get used to saying it in the small ways, the more you trust that saying hey, wait in the small ways is setting up a trustworthiness with yourself that when it comes to a bigger way, you'll be able to, You'll be OK.
And I'm thinking back to the thing that I was just saying about when you're one degree, off course, you end up hundreds of miles away from your destination.
And I think what you're speaking to there and what you're saying is like you're speaking to the people who
Who didn't say hey, wait along the way, in all the small ways, because they didn't know to, or they didn't know how to, or they were too scared to.
And now they're.
They're at this destination that's shiny and beautiful and sparkly, but it doesn't feel like the destination that makes them feel fulfilled on the inside.
And I've been there and I didn't do it gracefully.
I think that I'm kind of all over the place in my answer to you here.
It is such a good question.
It is so big.
But When you're in that place where saying the big hey, wait.
Feels like it would blow everything up, I think I would tell someone to not start there.
To know that every time you say hey wait in a little way, you are course-correcting.
And you're giving the life that you've built around you and the relationships that you've built around you the opportunity to course correct with you.
Because typically what's happened is someone has not said all those hey, wait moments.
So they're in a life where they don't feel considered.
They're in a life where they're technically part of it, but they're not of it.
And if you can say the little hey, waits, you give. you start to get information.
Is this a life that actually can support me being considered?
Or is it not?
And those little pieces of information build confidence in you that, like I, like what it feels like to be a stand for myself and be considered.
And I'm going to start reorganizing in little ways so that, if it does end up coming to the place where I have to do the big changes, I have It in me to do that.
I have an example of.
It was actually my.
One of my team members said to me he was like I used hay weight the other day on my mother in law.
And he was like, it was terrifying.
But there was just this moment where he said you know, she has this pattern of being generous and saying I'm going to, I'm going to treat everybody to this experience.
And he said, then we went on the experience.
And at the end of it, she turned to me and she said, you're going to you know, you ready to pay?
And he was like, what?
And this is a pattern in his.
And he's like, I love my mother in law.
She's a wonderful person, but I'm fed up with that.
And he said, my wife and I went to the car while she stayed back for a moment.
The mother-in-law stayed back.
And I turned to my wife and I said, this is a hey, wait moment.
We've got to tell her.
And he said, my wife was she she had a nervous system response.
She got dysregulated.
She started panicking, was like, you can't say that to her.
And he was like, but it's just true.
I'm not going to say anything mean to her.
I just am going to say what's true.
So he said she came back into the car.
And he said, hey, wait, I remember you saying yesterday you were going to treat us to that.
And she he said she didn't bat an eye.
She just was like, I did.
I didn't remember that.
And he was like, yeah.
And so she Venmoed him right then and there.
And then she turned to her daughter, turned to her daughter and said I can't understand why you wouldn't feel comfortable telling me that.
I just forgotten.
Wow.
And so I think this is that fear that you speak to is so real.
And sometimes it's completely linked to something that isn't present day.
It's not what's going to actually happen.
And even if her response had been to blow up and be like, what the hell?
I can't believe you're not being grateful.
Underneath it all, all he said was something that was true.
And what I will say to my clients are is your job isn't to change the other person's behavior.
Your job is to like who you are when you're around them.
And for this person to say to his mother-in-law hey wait, I was under the impression you were paying for this, because that's what you said.
He had a better experience of himself.
And that's what I want for the people who are out there using this.
They're used to being around other people and feeling small and feeling bullied and feeling pushed over.
And it isn't about fighting back, nor is it about getting the other person to change.
It's about getting to a point where you like who you are inside your own life.
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The best things in life lie on the other side of difficult conversations.
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