SP1 Special Edition Agile Brain: Emotions Drive The Wheel

We launch a special seven-part series with Dr. JD Pincus exploring the 12 emotional needs that shape decisions, leadership, and fulfillment. Emotions lead, thoughts explain, and leaders thrive when they surface needs and align habits with values.

• origin story from punk band to psychologist
• scope of the book and why the bibliography matters
• emotions as primary drivers over rational intention
• CBT and habit loops for rewiring behavior
• naming and working with the 12 emotional needs
• limits of over-rationalized leadership cultures
• fulfillment, Ikigai, and non-striving compared
• marketing’s promise versus authentic need satisfaction
• preview of next session on safety, authenticity, potential

Get the book. Go to agilebrain.com to take a free assessment. If you’d like a debrief of that assessment, you can reach out to me. Zach has information in the show notes as well as how you can reach out to me.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Series Setup
• 3:54 JD’s Punk Roots To Psychology
• 7:29 The Book’s Scope And Structure
• 13:49 Emotions As The True Driver
• 19:29 Intention, Behavior, And The Brain
• 24:19 Training Habits And CBT
• 28:39 Naming The 12 Needs
• 32:29 Leadership, Teams, And Rationality’s Limits

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:12

Welcome to a special edition of What's on Your Bookshelf with your host, Denise Russo.

SPEAKER_01: 1:20

Hi everyone, welcome back to another episode of What's on Your Bookshelf. This is our Life and Leadership podcast where we're living out loud the pages of the books that are on our bookshelves. I am so excited for the special edition series and to introduce you to my newest guest and special co-host of a seven-part series that's called The Emotionally Agile Brain. And with me today is Dr. JD Pincus. He's the author of the book. He's going to tell us so much more about what's behind the book and what's coming in front of us in the future for business, for leadership, for coaches, for human potential. I'm just so encouraged and excited about this series. So this is a book about mastering the 12 emotional needs that drive us. But before we even get there, I need to share a little bit about Dr. Pincus, or JD, as we'll call him throughout our show. So interestingly, JD is not just a really super smart psychologist, but he also started his career in a punk band, which I found extremely fascinating when he shared that with me. And he'll tell us perhaps a story about working with an artist that got kicked out of a venue, never to come back again. And if you've ever heard any of our shows in the past, then you know my fascination with the music business and some of the interesting stories that I have with some characters on stage as well. But after JB left his punk band, he started to study psychology in college and met some amazing mentors and great colleagues that helped him to look at emotions as opposed to just thoughts, which is what you would think about. I suppose no pun intended or maybe pun intended on psychology. Because he was rebellious from his punk band days, he decided to take the typical psychology route and turn it upside down and was really struggling philosophically with what psychology was teaching at that time and found a tribe of contrarians, he called them. And these are the people that really helped him in this circle to uh to create a new way of thinking about the way we feel. So he decided to create not only uh a new platform, but a way for us to aggregate lots of information. So whether you're looking for results on your team, you're looking at ways to understand your own thinking, maybe understand the thinking of those that you love or those that you work around, or maybe you're just like me and you're really super nerdy and like all of the technical stuff that goes behind what makes our brain tick, then this is going to be a series for you. JD, thank you so much for being here with me over the next weeks that we'll be together. I'm thoroughly excited and honored that you would be with me for this series.

SPEAKER_00: 4:16

Absolutely. I'm so happy uh to be here, Denise, and uh for you inviting me. Uh this is really a pleasure.

SPEAKER_01: 4:23

Awesome. So let's talk a little bit about how we're gonna set up the next several ser uh sessions on this. And then what I'd love to do is just really have an intro about what what this is all about and why people will want to follow us over the next several weeks. How does that sound?

SPEAKER_00: 4:39

That sounds great.

SPEAKER_01: 4:40

Okay, so this book, friends, is not necessarily an easy read. It's kind of thick, it's uh it's written by a PhD, okay, and there's lots of content. There is a giant bibliography at the end. So if you like to do deep dives like we do on what's on your bookshelf, there is plenty of content that will take you even deeper than what we have here with our show. In fact, I was just looking, JD, and your bibliography starts on page 340 and it goes all the way to page 361. So there is tons of extra content for people to read.

SPEAKER_00: 5:20

That's right. Exactly. No, we did not skimp on the uh references and bibliography, but in a sense, I felt like that was really important. You know, I I'm covering a lot of territory. I'm basically covering the entire scope of human emotional needs and emotions and motivations. And so it touches on, you know, what doesn't it touch? You know, and and I just didn't want to leave people, you know, making assumptions about, you know, where did this all come from? So it's it's very thoroughly documented.

SPEAKER_01: 5:52

Absolutely. Okay, so over the next couple of weeks together, we're gonna be talking about things that motivate ourselves, things that motivate the material world, the social world, the spiritual world, and then working with motivations. And I'm gonna be curious for you to share with us how you decided to separate the book that way. But maybe before we even go there, will you share with us and our listeners what motivated you to take motivations to write a book like this?

SPEAKER_00: 6:20

Sure. So I had a kind of long history of um, you know, sort of feeling that emotions were really important. And I guess that I can't separate it from the influence my parents had on me. In a sense, I uh you could say I never had a choice about going into this field, in that my mother was a psychiatric social worker uh clinical uh professor at Yale, my dad was a uh professor of neurology at Yale. Uh he wrote the book uh uh behavioral neurology. He literally wrote the book on behavioral neurology. And it he what he was saying in that is that as a neurologist, he couldn't help notice that everything starts in the brain, and that uh he did a lot of really seminal work basically showing that violent criminals, for instance, uh were people who had neurological deficits. Uh, and these deficits affected their frontal lobe's ability to moderate their behavior so that they were basically just living on emotion, uh, you know, unchecked. Uh and you know, I really couldn't ignore that from all of the the talks we had and the you know, the carpools where we would discuss his cases and uh and all that, and and my mother had a very kind of a spiritual sense, which I've also sort of fooled into this work. Um that was all sort of latent in me, was subconscious, you know, just always there, that this assumption that that you know we are uh you know biological and spiritual creatures that uh you know evolved basically on our emotions and our ability to survive and navigate the world emotionally, and that really our ability to think and and rationally you know cogitate is a fairly new invention and it's kind of uh an add-on. It's not really what makes us who we are, it's not really what makes us human, even. It's it's something that's sort of you know a recent addition to the mix, but um our emotional selves really is our core. So um I kind of had that coming into it. I I kind of you know would find myself arguing that position, you know, even in high school, uh in biology classes and psychology classes. Uh I ended up um going through a kind of rebellious period as uh as Denise mentioned, uh, where I was in a hardcore punk band. Uh, you know, not jokingly, it was called controlled aggression. So it was even emotional there. Um and we were famous, I guess, or remembered for opening for a guy named Gigi Allen and the Jabbers who uh was a notorious uh punk act. In fact, he was so foul and extreme that he was actually they stopped the show midway uh during his second set and and basically told him to never come back. So it was uh it was it was a great night for all of us, you know, as teens. Uh but uh as Denise said that I went on to college and began to kind of find my way uh and was then exposed to all of this sort of litany of of you know extremely logical, rational thought about how it is that we make decisions and how it is that we navigate our way through the world. And none of it sounded right to me. It wasn't it certainly didn't uh you know uh accord with my experience. I didn't you know weigh the probabilities of something happening and then multiply that by the positivity or negativity uh of that occurrence. Uh and that's basically what they were teaching. Um fortunately I found a group of people there, you know, sort of uh other contrarians, uh uh Skip Lowe, who was ended up becoming the head of the department of psychology at UConn, um, uh Russ Buck, who was a major motivational theorist who I just was lucky to you know encounter. And I sort of became part of his inner circle there. Actually did my research in his lab in the communication science building, not in the psychology building, because he had the kind of equipment that I needed. He had the sort of psychophysiological stuff, he had hidden cameras, he had, you know, all of the cool stuff that you know I sort of naively thought psychology was all about. Back in the psych building, it was nothing but paper and pencil surveys. You know, it was really quite uninteresting. So uh, you know, under their influence, I kind of really uh started to understand motivation theory, uh, emotions, and took it from there, you know, into a whole range of different applications. I got my PhD. I ended up working in business for a long time, I ended up working in market research for a long time, was a brand consultant. I've worked on like every major brand you can think of at one point or another, either as the client or as a competitor to the client, uh, and uh did that for, I don't know, 18 years or so, um, all the while, you know, seeking to publish, seeking to kind of further my uh, you know, sort of mastery of motivation theory and applying it in every way I could think to sort of real world problems. And then I was fortunate to um encounter uh you know leading indicator systems who uh were sort of at a crossroads. They had the developers I needed, they had the resources I needed uh to kind of bring this whole concept to life. Uh and and uh we've kind of joined forces and hence um Agile Brain was born.

SPEAKER_01: 11:44

That's amazing. I didn't know that story, so thank you for sharing it. And it's fascinating. If you're not familiar with Agile Brain, I want to encourage you to go to agilebrain.com. There's lots of information there, but over our next several weeks, I'm sure that we'll be talking about that even more. Uh interestingly, in the uh forward of the book, JD, there's some there's some really interesting depth to what this book is about. 125 years of psychological theory, over a hundred theories in all. But you've narrowed it down somehow into these four domains, three levels. I know we'll get into that over the next couple of weeks. But at the core of that, in the forward, it says that this is simply about helping humans value emotions that drive positive change. Why is that important?

SPEAKER_00: 12:37

Well, I think the assumption that a lot of people have naively is that what we're thinking about right now is really what matters. And what they ignore is what do they really need? You know, what are they really after in their lives? Because the truth is we don't think about it a lot. Um, you know, Freud knew this, and and Jung knew this, that basically if you have an emotional conflict in your life, like there's some basic emotional need that's not being satisfied, it's gonna find ways to get met, you know, either in a healthy way or an unhealthy way. And you can't really bury them, you know, you can't really ignore them. They will find a way to come back because they're so powerful and they really ultimately shape what we do. Uh, and if we don't acknowledge them, um, we can get ourselves into a whole lot of trouble uh because it's ultimately who is driving the bus. Uh, you know, it there's the metaphor that I know Jonathan Hayde likes uh uh of um the sort of the rider on the elephant, you know, and the elephant is our emotions and the rider is our sort of you know conscious, uh, you know, is it rational selves? And that, you know, we may feel like we're in control, but ultimately the elephant's gonna do what it wants. And we're there to basically sort of justify and rationalize it. And so that's I think why this matters so much that that because we're rational creatures and verbal creatures who explain everything that we do in words, uh, we we tend to overinvest in thinking that that's actually who's in control. Uh the truth is it's not. It's our subconscious emotions that are really doing the work. Uh they're making the decisions and everything else sort of for just sort of uh another Jonathan Haidt uh uh analogy, which I love. He called it uh the emotional dog and its rational tail, it's which kind of captures it. It's sort of, you know, our our rationality is along for the ride.

SPEAKER_01: 14:35

So is the subconscious, JD, this thing that's inside of you, or is that thing you and you just happen to be something outside of it?

SPEAKER_00: 14:43

Yeah, I mean, I think when it comes down to you know defining what the self really is and whether we are actually a collection of multiple selves, I think the sort of the jury is out on that. Uh to me, I believe that who we really are is defined by our emotional needs. Our emotional needs truly are our values. Uh I think there's no difference between emotional needs and values. I think if you're a person who cares about other people, you know, caring is a value of yours. That's an emotional need. You have an emotional need for nurturance, for caring, for being cared for by other people, for caring for other people. You can't really separate those concepts. Uh, same thing, the need for inclusion. Uh, you know, that's a value. You know, do you feel like other people should be welcomed, or do you feel like you know you should form cliques? Uh, you know, that's a basic thing that separates people, uh, these kinds of things. And those are not just, you know, emotional needs, they're they're values. And you can make the same argument for every one of the 12, uh, that these are uh things that, you know, what you need, what you feel you need uh deep inside. Um, you know, if there's some need that's not being met, that's going to drive your behavior. And that's why you really have to, you know, kind of understand what that is, pay attention to it, uh, bring it into consciousness so that you can then be you know conversant with it and act on it appropriately.

SPEAKER_01: 16:05

Gotcha. So chapter one is called What Motivates You. And I'm curious, it starts out by talking around that motivation concerns the ultimate reasons behind our intentions and our behavior. And I'm curious, as I was reading through it, do your intentions always lead to your behavior, or are your behaviors always tied to your intentions, or can those two be untethered?

SPEAKER_00: 16:30

Yeah, totally they can. Uh, you know, intentions, uh the word sort of implies rationality, you know, that there's sort of an awareness of what your intentions are. Uh, I think there's enough evidence that's accumulated to show that you can create, you know, intentions and behavior completely outside of rationality. There's a great example that I put in the book of um a neurologist named Yves Aguid, who is uh a French uh neurologist who um Damasio talks about him. He had put um these electrodes into someone's brain uh in a particular place and found that you know, with a click of a button or the moving a dial, you could turn someone from just being completely, you know, normal, um happy, you know, uh stable, into being so feeling so depressed that they were talking about suicide simply because of activation of a particular part of the brain. And so here it is. That's the question. You know, was that their intention? Was that because they had some mental illness? No, it's not. It was because direct stimulation of a part of their brain caused them to suddenly have a bunch of thoughts, caused them suddenly to have a bunch of intentions. Uh that that the emotions really are primary, and they drive a lot of what we believe are our intentions, but not all of them. Uh, and and we sometimes do things that we don't intend to do uh because it's that powerful. The elephant, you know, is kind of taking control and saying, Yeah, we're gonna do this, you know, whether you want to do it or not. Uh that's fascinating.

SPEAKER_01: 18:06

Can your conscious brain, maybe we'll get into this later, but can your conscious brain train, I don't know, your neural pathways or your subconscious brain to change those thoughts?

SPEAKER_00: 18:19

Yes, definitely. Um I I think that's that's why CBT is useful, cognitive behavioral therapy. It's really just practice. It's just practicing over and over again, you know, making certain choices, uh, feeling some sort of reward on making good choices. Uh, and and that what you're doing essentially is building habits. You're kind of not letting your emotions just rule you, you know, unchecked. You're you're using, you're you're funneling those needs and those emotional drives toward positive behavior, positive outcomes, and then finding good results from it, which should be reinforcing back to strengthen that. And really is uh, you know, the brain is just a series of highways, you know, and and the ones that are well traveled are the ones that tend to get used. If you tend to, you know, blow up at people and you tend to, you know, be a tyrant and all the rest, uh, if that works for you, unfortunately that gets reinforced. Uh, if it doesn't work for you and you, you know, are finding that it's leading you to nothing but misery, it's gonna probably get extinguished. So uh that that whole reward pathway, you know, and and what becomes a habit and how strong it becomes um is often defined by the sort of consequences of of that behavior.

SPEAKER_01: 19:35

So if we can train our brain, we can change our thinking, we can change our belief systems, we can change our motivations, we can change our life.

SPEAKER_00: 19:44

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We're not I think that's that's the point I like to make is that as as subject as we are to our emotions, we do fortunately have ways of of channeling them, integrating our needs with each other so that they, you know, fulfillment of one helps fulfill others. That we actually do have quite a bit of flexibility in terms of how we manage our emotions. Uh and it's I I to me I find it much more useful to think of them in terms of a series of discrete needs that you have that that work together, you know, or can sometimes fight each other, but that it's sort of this symphony um of different needs that are that are in play, um, as opposed to thinking of it as just emotion, period, like sort of positive emotion, negative emotion, emotional intelligence. You know, these kinds of concepts don't really get into the specifics of what's going on emotionally, the content of what's going on emotionally. And I think that's a huge mistake. I think you've got to take the time to really say, so what is this emotional need? Am I feeling lonely? Am I feeling insecure? Am I feeling uh I have to, you know, conform or be inauthentic? Am I do I feel like I'm being held back? Do I feel like I'm being, you know, I'm afraid of failing? Uh, you know, am I not able to become engaged in the in the flow? All of those are discrete emotional needs, and and they all are well documented. Uh, it's just, I think you need to kind of consider all of them simultaneously uh to get the full picture.

SPEAKER_01: 21:17

Thank you. There's a lot of interest in people that are in L and D, coaching, HR, the people side of business right now with the science of the brain, the science of thinking, the science of driving behavioral change, the science of saying if you have a certain result at work, it's not just about the action or inaction you took, but how you thought about it. And so you mentioned in the book around how the rise of the era of neuroscience really got turned into different ways of thinking through irrationals, like Kahneman and winning the Nobel Award. We were talking about that a little bit off mic. I'm curious when you think about where you think the future of the way that we think on these things, especially for those that may be listening that either lead teams uh or lead programs that help uh teams succeed in business. What is the best approach for people to take something like this body of work that you have and be able to look at it in a way that becomes a guidebook for them?

SPEAKER_00: 22:27

Yeah, that's a good question. Uh I think there's a natural resistance. Uh, it's sort of, you know, part of its cultural, it's part of our our sort of uh, you know, Aristotelian heritage of Western civilization. Uh, you know, uh it's sort of what this is founded on in some ways, uh, this concept of of rational, you know, democratic, you know, decision making that that we really prize rationality above everything else. Uh and and I I totally get it. It has many wonderful benefits associated with it, but it does get in the way a little bit of recognizing the importance and the power of emotional needs. Uh so I think there's absolutely nothing wrong with rationality. Uh, the more rational people can be, the better, probably. Uh, but um, I think what's ideal is to surface those emotional needs and then integrate that with rationality. So to bring it into consciousness, uh, make conscious, deliberate decisions about what to do with it, how to fulfill it, recognize that need, sort of validate it, and then don't ignore it. So I think if someone's leading a team or they're an L and D, I would say that that's that's the thing you've got to be careful about. Is it's not overly rationalize, you know, uh, you know, and sort of um make everything so logical that uh, you know, it sort of sounds very convincing. It would make a good, you know, sort of legal argument, but does not actually reflect reality. People do things for all kinds of reasons, uh, you know, uh and they they make terrible decisions all the time. Uh we just saw that that really I find it kind of sad case from that uh cold play concert the other night where the uh the CEO has got his arms wrapped around the head of HR and then they end up on camera and then they immediately, you know, if they had just played it cool, it would not have been a story, but they they they headed for the hills. Uh uh but why did they do that? They know that's wrong. They know that's not a good example for their teams. They know it's the head of HR, I mean, oh my god, uh, and and the CEO. I mean, they don't they know better, but but they did not know better enough to actually change the behavior because the behavior was driven by emotion.

SPEAKER_01: 24:50

I lady said the word fulfillment, that you also shared this story that has come out in the news, and it's interesting because maybe to the side of all of this, also, you were talking about values, but there's also the side of ethics. And you talk about in this first chapter, and I know we're almost out of time for today, but we talk about personal fulfillment. Isn't the word fulfillment an interesting word? It's about full and fill of some sort of something for yourself. And you were even talking about how we look to things to give us fulfillment or refreshment. And you mentioned some really great brands out there that they use their advertising dollars to give you this fulfillment that you think you're seeking. And on what's on your bookshelf, we spent an entire year, JD, studying the science of happiness. And it was a really interesting series. We did four different books around that topic, but it was seemingly like for most of the authors that there's this elusiveness to it. Like you have to be on a journey towards something that you don't already have, as opposed to living inside of something that you do have. In fact, earlier, before we did that one, we did an episode about one of my favorite topics, Ikigai, which is a Japanese concept about finding the center of your purpose in life. And what the contrast is is from a business side, there was an author that talked about how you have to be finding this thing you don't already have. But the Japanese say that that's not what the word means at all. It means that you have it inside of yourself. You just have to recognize it. And it almost seems like in your book and what you're talking about with the subconscious level is that these motivations and emotions, they've always been with you. But if you don't recognize them, how can you activate them? Or into into your example of these, this really busy highway system, how do you make sure your car is on the right one?

SPEAKER_00: 26:37

Yeah, exactly. And I think there is a kind of an interesting uh east-west divide on this, uh, in that, you know, the sort of ultimate good of in Buddhism, for instance, is the state of non-striving, right? That you you don't want anything. You're basically in a state of sort of gratitude and bliss for just simply, you know, being present and in the moment and and aware. Um, and I actually agree with that. I think that's not actually not inconsistent with what I'm saying, which is that the goal here, you know, it's very hard for us, particularly Westerners, to imagine a state of non-striving. But if you think about it, that's really what my my position is here is that you're you're you have a series of unmet needs. They are gonna sort of occupy you while they exist, while they remain unfulfilled. Uh and uh this may be different than Buddhism in that I believe you should go and take active steps to fulfill those needs. Once those needs are fulfilled, I think the next step, and this is at the very end of the book, and we're kind of jump ahead here, the the high next highest level is the sort of integration of needs, so that what I do, you know, for for fun is actually something meaningful. Uh, what I do uh, you know, for work is something that actually is ethical, uh, that there isn't a trade-off between those things, that you've actually integrated your needs so that what you do for one satisfies the others. When you're living that kind of life, to me, that's indistinguishable from nirvana, right? That's that's a state of non-striving because you actually have uh to a large extent satisfied those needs. And then I think you can get there's a whole other set of needs that that can emerge, but we'll we can save that for uh uh another another day.

SPEAKER_01: 28:26

That sounds good. Well, we're almost out of time for today, so let's just set the stage. The next episode, we're gonna dive into part one, which is about the things that motivate ourselves. Seems like maybe that's the base layer the safety, authenticity, and potential. We'll jump into that a little bit. If you are listening and you want to learn more about what we're talking about, get the book. We'll make sure that Zach has a link to the book in the show notes. You can go to agilebrain.com and even be able to take an assessment for free for yourself. If you'd like a debrief of that assessment, you can reach out to me. Zach has information in the show notes as well as how you can reach out to me, and I'd be happy to talk you through getting set up with a debrief on Agile Brain. But before we go for today, JD, what is anything that you'd like to leave our listeners with that you want to make sure we don't miss? Since all we did so far was not even touch on anything beyond the first section of the book.

SPEAKER_00: 29:25

Yeah, I mean, one one part of the the intro that I like uh that I think is worth kind of commenting on is the fact that, you know, and you touched on this a bit, that the sort of a Madison Avenue commercial uh, you know, offering to fulfill all your needs uh that that comes in various forms in TV commercials and social media and and you know, online ads, uh, that all you know promises to meet all your needs, and it's no accident that every brand out there basically positions themselves according to these needs. Uh and and we can talk about that more in depth some other time. But the point I like to emphasize is that that is not authentic fulfillment. That that is it it's pretending to be fulfillment, and that's probably good enough to get some sales, uh, but that's not actually gonna meet your needs long term. So uh drinking a coke uh uh is not the same thing as feeling included and and and feeling a sense of belonging and connectedness. That's how they position it. It's not actually gonna deliver that. Having a diet pepper isn't uh Dr. Pepper is not going to make you your authentic self. You know, it's not gonna say that you're maybe it says to somebody else that you're different, but it actually doesn't satisfy that need at all. So that it's really important to kind of recognize that you know uh the marketing and advertising world gets very deeply what our needs are and they market to them, but that's not authentic fulfillment. Authentic fulfillment comes from within and and through recognizing what we really need and actually taking concrete steps in the real world to achieve those things.

SPEAKER_01: 31:09

Awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much. Friends, if this has been of value to you, please share the episode with others. We're going to be together for the next several weeks. It is worth your while to get the book to walk you through the deeper sense of what this book is about because we're really not going to be able to go into depth in each and every chapter. We will actually have some opportunities for those of you that may want to do that as well. I would definitely encourage you to get to be a part of those special offerings that we'll have, to be able to learn more directly from Dr. J.D. Pincus. On behalf of my friend Dr. J.D. Pincus, my name is Denise Russo. Thanks for joining us today on another episode of What's on Your Bookshelf.