Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…which people not able to feel really limits their life. Just one that's like almost everybody can relate to is feeling excitement is something that most people can only do for about 10 to 20 seconds. Most people aren't like, "Oh, I'm excited." If you walked into a Denny's and there was this person, a 60-year-old man and just excited and was excited for 10 minutes, you'd be like, "What's wrong with this person?" When we're excited, it's contagious. I walk into a meeting and I'm excited, probably other people are going to walk out excited. We're limiting just our ability to create collaboration by the fact that we're limited by our excitement. I could go on forever. There's so many experiences like this. What I'm hearing is the core issues, we're not able to feel our emotion, but there's something there, like we are angry or scared. Because we can't feel it, we just can't break through that. Not quite. If you have somebody who's experienced a lot of emotional abuse in their life, then they might not be able to feel the emotions that they're having, and particularly where you experienced the emotional abuse. That might be the case for them. For instance, if you had physical abuse and I put a quarter in one of your hands and a key in another one of your hands without telling you which was which, you wouldn't be able to tell me if you'd suffered enough physical abuse because you've literally cut that sensation off. Similarly, people who've experienced emotional abuse can often not tell what the emotions are. Now, emotional abuse is, it's a big word. Generally, people don't even like equating the two. Just to agree on terms here, when I say emotional abuse, I mean you were told that you weren't allowed to have a certain emotion. That's what I mean by emotional abuse. Maybe you got fed every time you got angry or you got your love removed, or you got punished, or maybe every time you cried, you were made fun of. My particular background was that. It's when you weren't allowed to feel certain emotions, you were told to cut it off because it wasn't going to be safe because you're either going to get bribed out of it or punished out of it, or loved removed because of it or made fun of or whatever it is. That might be a step that one has to take, but the place you want to get to is where the emotions are fluid, where it just moves right through you. It doesn't mean that you lose control. As a matter of fact, losing control means that there's still resistance in it. The way I think about this is that emotions are like a tube, let's say, and there's water moving through the tube. You kink a tube one way, the water comes out a little funny. Kink the tube the other way, it comes a little funny. Let's say you have anger and that's the tube of, and you kink it one way and it's like, "You son of a bitch. You blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." You kink get another way and it's like, "Nice dress. You crank it another way and it's guilt. It's like, "Why would you ever do that to me?" Then if it's unkinked, then it's like Gandhi or Martin Luther king. It's this very loving boundary that's set. It's this clarity of purpose. That's how I think about it. The idea is to get to fluidity, to unkink the hose so that all of the emotional experiences come out with love.…

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