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Episode 173: Why Negative Feelings Are Signals And How To Use Them For Growth with guests, Terry Hildebrandt and Charles Jones

• Garry Schleifer

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What if your toughest feelings aren’t enemies to defeat but signals to decode? We sit down with behavioral scientist Charles Jones and executive coach Terry Hildebrandt to unpack Emotional Responsibility, a simple, powerful framework that turns anger, anxiety, frustration, and guilt into clear next steps—and uses joy as concrete proof that our needs are being met.

We trace the origins of this work back to research on flow states and explore a core distinction that changes everything: emotions drive thought, while needs drive behavior. That shift helps leaders stop suppressing emotions and start harnessing them. Anger points to a right to assert; anxiety flags risk to mitigate; frustration highlights blocked goals; guilt calls us back to ethics. When we name the feeling, identify the need, and plan a specific action, the emotion naturally settles because the mind registers progress. On the flip side, savoring positive emotions while naming the strategy that worked strengthens neural pathways, boosting cognitive performance, collaboration, and resilience.

From a coaching perspective, ERA opens the door to lasting behavior change. Once the true need is visible, unhelpful programming becomes adjustable. We share practical methods to transform recurring derailers, accelerate soft-skill growth, and even retire trauma patterns by creating conditions where the subconscious lets go. At the team and culture level, ERA tackles what Terry calls the new pandemic—emotional victimhood—by replacing blame with ownership. Leaders learn to translate complaints into needs, empower people to meet those needs, and build trust through clear agreements and consistent follow-through.

Ready to work smarter with your emotions and build a healthier culture? Listen now, then subscribe, share this episode with a colleague who leads teams, and leave a quick review with the one emotion you plan to harness this week.

Watch the full interview by clicking here. 

Find the full article here.

Learn more about Terry here. 

Learn more about Charles here.

Terry and Charles would like to offer our listeners their video course ($100 value) FREE, that teaches coaches "How to Transform Stress Into Growth with Emotional Response-Ability". Click the link here. Use Code: choice

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Garry Schleifer:

Welcome to Beyond the Page, the official podcast of choice, the magazine of professional coaching, where we bring you amazing insights and in-depth features that you just won't find anywhere else. I'm Garry Schleifer, your host, and I'm excited to expand your learning as we dive into this latest article, have a chat with these brilliant authors that are with me today, and uncover the learnings that are transforming the coaching world. When you get a chance, join our vibrant community of coaching professionals as we explore groundbreaking ideas, share expert tips and techniques, and do what we want to do most, make a real difference in our clients' lives. Choice is your go-to resource for all things coaching. But for now, let's dive into the podcast.

Garry Schleifer:

In today's episode, I'm speaking with Behavioral Scientist Charles Jones and Executive Coach Terry Hildebrandt, who are the article authors of an article in our latest issue, "Coaching to Unlock Joy". Their article is entitled "The Dynamics of Joy: Intentionally Turning Negatives to Positives for Organizational Transformation".

Garry Schleifer:

A little bit about Charles. As I mentioned, he's a behavioral scientist with the Institute for Adaptive Mastery and the creator of Emotional Responsibility, which we'll hear more about today. The author of Emotional Intelligence for Stress-Free Leadership and a Chapter of Fielding Universities, Graduate Universities Innovations in Leadership Coaching. Charles's groundbreaking discoveries are revolutionizing the way coaches raise emotional intelligence, improve organizational performance, and develop empathetic leaders. And I am tripping over my tongue today, but hey, I'm happy to be here.

Garry Schleifer:

A little bit about Terry. He's an executive coach, holds a PhD, he's an MCC with the International Coaching Federation, also holds the title of MCEC. He is an Organizational Development Consultant, a Certified Coaching Supervisor, an author, and a friend of mine for many, many, many years. And an author for choice many, many times. Thank you. He's the CEO of Terry Hildebrandt and Associates, go figure, and former director of the evidence-based coaching program at Fielding Graduate University. With more than 28 years of coaching experience and 38 years of business experience, Terry works primarily with mid-level and senior executives, including members of the executive committee, board chairs, CEOs, vice presidents, directors, and promising leaders. He specializes in leadership coaching, organized organizational change, and team development. He earned his PhD in human and organizational systems from Fielding. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me today. Wow, what a pedigree both of you have. No wonder you're such a powerhouse and wrote such a fabulous article. Thank you, thank you.

Terry Hildebrandt:

Thank you, Garry.

Charles Jones:

Thanks for having us here.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah, no worries.

Garry Schleifer:

Okay, I promised everybody that I wanted to talk about ERA. So why don't we start with a little bit of the what is ERA and then frame it into this whole conversation about joy.

Charles Jones:

So ERA stands for emotional responsibility, and it is the outcome of a research project I started in 1982 while at the University of Michigan studying peak performance and flow states. And essentially my question was okay, if these states are natural to us, and most people that have had an experience of flow immediately kind of resonate with this idea of, oh, this is how I'm supposed to be. This is me at my best. If that is what our natural state is, then the question becomes what is it that pulls us out of that state? And my research has centered on that. And I believe there's two reasons why we get pulled out of a flow state and kept out of a flow state. So that's where emotional responsibility sort of has its roots. That was the research direction it came from.

Garry Schleifer:

Wow, ' 82, my goodness, that's like lots of information. And those kind of things, has it been consistent, your results over the years? Have you seen any changes due to history or organizational change?

Charles Jones:

In terms of of what?

Garry Schleifer:

The results. You've been doing this testing since 1982. Have you seen any change in the outcome?

Charles Jones:

Well, the first several years were unproductive in terms of generating a hypothesis that I could then apply the scientific method to and see if in fact it it panned out. So there were a lot of false starts along that way. For me, probably the biggest shift or breakthrough occurred when I met Marshall Rosenberg, who your listeners may know as the creator of nonviolent communication. And Marshall had this idea that emotions were associated with needs, and his conception of needs followed Maslow, this idea that we have, for instance, a need for safety. And so my research or study up until that point, you know, immediately it was like, okay, there's something that intuitively resonates about this, and yet we can't possibly have a need for safety. What would our mind, our brain, need to know in order to know whether we're safe? There'd be a trillion conditions that would have to be satisfied. So, of course Martin Rosenberg had adopted that idea from Maslow, this idea that we have needs for. So that just didn't resonate for me. But what I realized is we could have needs too. So instead of a need for safety, we could have a need to protect our assets. And then suddenly, oh, okay, then you know, the baby's born. When babies are born, there's two and only two situations in which they exhibit fear, loud noises and heights, right? Everything else is, you know, the baby learns, okay, I need to protect the asset of my body, I need to protect important relationships, I need to protect my toys, I need to protect my reputation. So you could see then how the child could accumulate a long list of assets that they feel a need to protect. And then how do I protect those? They could learn strategies by observing others, by stumbling upon things, by coming up with new ideas for how they would protect those assets. And then what do they need to be looking for to know whether or not they're on track to protect the assets? And all of this could be orchestrated by the person's subconscious, but there's inevitably going to be situations in which the subconscious doesn't have an existing repertoire for how it's going to meet a given need, at which point it needs the help of the conscious mind and generates a negative emotion, such as fear, to say, hey, super clever but extremely slow conscious mind. Here's a situation in which I need your rational thinking skills to intervene here and get us back on track to protect this asset. Wow.

Garry Schleifer:

Wow. Amazing, absolutely amazing. And Terry, how did you get involved in all of this?

Terry Hildebrandt:

Well, I was fortunate to know Charles's business partner at the time, Jim Nickerbacher, and I got invited to one of his inaugural events launching, essentially, what was at the time was called Tenor, which has since been renamed to Emotional Response-ability. But I went to the original workshop about 10 years ago in Boulder. And I immediately fell in love with it. I immediately saw the value of this, that this was not the same old EQ that your grandmother grew up with. This is something brand new and radical and transformational. So I immediately actually started using it that day and started telling everyone I knew about it, and then brought it to my clients. So I've been actually using a version of emotional responsibility for about 10 years and partnering with Charles that whole time in various ways. And more recently, really in the last three or four years, we've gotten much more engaged in rolling this out in a broader way. And emotional responsibility has really, I think, hit its stride. And you know, Charles has a book out, and he published an article in my book that I did for Fielding, we've had a great deal of success rolling this out in organizations at this point, and I use it almost with every client that I have at some point or another, because everyone has emotions and everyone has needs. So these are universal human things that we all have to deal with pretty much every single day at some point or another. And it is , I think, transformational in its approach. And you know my goal is that Emotion Responsibility or ERA, as we call it, should become a household word for everybody. And I think if children learn this at a younger age, we could have a different world than we live in today.

Garry Schleifer:

Wow. Wow, that would be amazing. Now I'm gonna go back a second or two. Earlier you made reference to EQ and that it's different. How is it different from EQ?

Charles Jones:

So I think what's the same about it is this idea that how you respond to your emotions has a tremendous impact on your interpersonal effectiveness and your ability to manage yourself. That perspective we very much share. I think the perspective we don't share is this idea that negative emotions are a problem, that they're the enemy. Right? From our perspective, negative emotions are serving the same purpose as the warning lights on the dashboard of your car. Right? And so the low-fuel light comes on. What is that? Well, that's a prediction that unless you make some adjustment in your course, you're going to run out of electricity or gas. But if you mistake, if you don't differentiate between the emotion and the need, and recognize that the emotion is simply instrumentation, it's a signal, it's a call for conscious thought, then you might be led into thinking that emotions drive behavior. When we've known since 1994 that that's neuroscientists have shown in 1994, that's not the case. Emotions don't drive behavior, needs drive behavior, emotions drive thought. So this idea that somehow negative emotions like anger or fear or whatever it might be, are things that you have to manage, which is usually a shorthand for either suppress or dissociate from, we completely disagree with, right? These are hey would make about as much sense as the low fuel light comes on and you're like, oh, let me sort of just push that away, or let me observe the low fuel light and just breathe mindfully until the fuel light goes away. Right? It's absurd, right? Once you really think about it in that way. So this idea that you need to manage your emotions, we don't agree with. What you need to do is harness your emotions, right? Because every negative emotion is bringing to you a performance problem. Some adjustment you need to make to your own performance. And the amazing thing about emotions is simultaneously they're optimizing your physiology to meet the underlying need. In fact, studies have shown that if you allow yourself to feel just how frustrated you are, you're more likely to find a creative workaround for a goal that you're struggling to achieve. If you allow yourself to feel just how anxious you are, it sharpens your awareness of the risks and puts you in an optimal state to come up with contingency plans to mitigate that risk, right? Where mitigate risk is the need that generates anxiety. So, and then positive emotions. Maybe this is sort of a segue maybe into the article.

Garry Schleifer:

I was gonna say a segue over into joy a little bit.

Charles Jones:

Right, right, right. And so, you know, positive emotions, it isn't just to help you feel good. Positive emotions are the subconscious is like, hey, we're on track to meet an important need of ours. Let me give you this nice slow, steady stream of dopamine to encourage you to stay on track. And if your mind isn't otherwise occupied with needing to respond to a negative emotion, really savor how good it feels to say, feel respected or productive or whatever it might be, where there's a one-to-one correlation between these positive emotions and the need you are on track to meet. And that's been shown that if you will savor those emotions, those positive emotions, with the awareness of what needs your meeting and the strategy you're using to meet that need, neurons that fire together or wire together, that reinforces the neural circuitry that's proving effective for you. So it helps to retain what you've learned and build on your momentum. In Barbara Friedickson has some great work in this area on the value of really savoring positive emotions, which has been kind of a tenant to positive psychology for a long time. But now we understand why that's such a valuable practice and how you can maximize the use of that practice not just by feeling good, but by connecting it to what needs you're meeting and how you're going about meeting that need.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah, well said, and thank you for referencing back. I want to remind our listeners that in the article the two of you highlight the benefits of joy, things such as enhanced cognitive function, greater collaboration and trust, better resilience and stress recovery, employee engagement and retention, and improved health and reduced absenteeism. Who doesn't want any of that? Sounds like a great uh way to get there. Thank you for that. And okay, so then when I'm listening to both of you, I hear the word mindfulness comes into my mind. It sounds more than just mindfulness. It's like I'm thinking maybe I'm confusing mindfulness with awareness, and ERA is taking it beyond that. Tell me which 'm I need to go with that thought.

Charles Jones:

So I'm a huge fan of metacognition, being self-aware, paying attention to what's going on in your body and what that tells you about what's going on in your psyche. I'm a huge fan of that. What I'm not a fan of is using, if you're familiar with mindfulness-based stress reduction, using mindfulness to reduce the stress you're experiencing in context of a negative emotion. So how that looks like is um you know, the negative emotion arises instead of suppressing it, tensing up your body so that the somatic expression of the emotion is stifled, allowing yourself to feel fully that emotion in your body. We're 100% in favor of that. We're in agreement on that. Second step in that mindfulness approach to you know managing your negative emotions is to name the negative emotions. And again, we are a fan of that because when you name the negative emotion, particularly in the beginning, if you actually do it out loud, I feel angry, for example, then your subconscious hears you and it's it starts to relax a little bit of ah, my distress call has been heard and acknowledged. I don't need to continue to amp up the volume of this negative emotion to get the attention of the conscious mind, I've gotten its attention. If you then simply breathe through, you continue to breathe mindfully while until that negative emotion dissipates, then the analogy would be breathing through the low fuel light on the dashboard of your car. And what's actually happening is let's say you're angry and you breathe, count to 10, you breathe mindfully until the anger dissipates. The reason the anger is dissipating is because your subconscious is down there and it's like, okay, well, my conscious mind knows what we're feeling, therefore, I'm gonna assume they know what we're needing and isn't doing anything about it. Therefore, we must not be committed to, in the case of anger, asserting this right we believe we have with this person. Let's say it's the right to hold my coworker accountable for something, right? And so then what this theory would predict is that if you breathe through your anger, you will not only be less assertive in that moment, but your subconscious learns from every choice that you make, you'll become less assertive in general. If you breathe through your frustration, which is achieved goals, you become less ambitious. If you breathe through your guilt, you will become a less ethical person. And it was actually that was the peer-reviewed study that kind of woke up the whole community to hey, there's a problem here.

Garry Schleifer:

Wow. Thank you.

Terry Hildebrandt:

The one thing I would love to add to that is I describe it as being fully alive. Sometimes with mindfulness, you might be fully aware, but you're not fully alive anymore because you've breathed away your emotions or you've dissipated your strong feelings with the goal of managing stress. But we have a different methodology for managing stress instead of breathing them away. We instead look at the root causes. Like, why exactly am I feeling this anxiety? Okay, let's take a deeper look at that, which of course coaching is a perfect tool for that where you can explore the risk because anxiety is always tied the need to mitigate risk. So for creating risk analysis and looking at contingency plans in case those things actually did occur, I have witnessed people's anxiety immediately drop. So it is an immediate solution to reduce stress by actually putting together strategies to meet your needs. So that's really what emotional response-ability is. I always say dash because it is two words. Because we're really looking at those underlying needs and getting to the root cause of stress. Not just papering it over with breathing or going and working out, not that those things aren't good, but they the stress will just come back immediately after the workout when you realize you haven't really done anything to deal with the root causes.

Garry Schleifer:

And thank you for that. When you say it like that too, and I just went back to think of those three words together emotional response ability. Like it's this plus this plus this. It's not even like it's dashes. It's like it should be pluses.

Charles Jones:

Well, the origin of that or the rationale for that name so starting back in 1982, what is it that pulls us out of our peak performance flow states? Okay, and I believe the number one thing that pulls us out of this is this widespread misconception that emotions are responses to what's happening in our external environment or in a kind of nuanced version of that to our own internal thoughts. So people will say things like, Garry, you made me angry, right? Where the presupposition is that I'm angry because of something you did or didn't do, right? And our contention is that's not the case. Your emotions are not between you and the world. Your emotions are between your subconscious and your conscious mind. So I'm angry because given what you did or didn't do, I believe I have a right that I want to assert with you with regard to that. And the problem with me thinking that I'm angry because of what you did or didn't do is now you're at fault for my negative emotion. You're at fault for this discomfort that I'm feeling in my body. And I will then solve for what's wrong with you or the world or me instead of solving for the need I'm not on track to meet. So it's it's very insidious.

Charles Jones:

I did a study in two Fortune 500 companies, one technology, one financial services, and which took the leaders from the supervisors up to the C-suite. And what percentage of the time when a negative emotion arose did they interpret it in terms of their underlying need, and what percentage of the time did they attribute it to what was happening around them? And it turned out that 70% of the time they misattributed their emotion to what was happening around them. All right. So if you if you extend this further, then if I'm equating, if I think I'm stressed because of my negative emotions, and you're not stressed because of the negative emotions, but I'll talk about that in a second, then I think my stress is between me and the world. I'm stressed because I have too much to do. I'm overwhelmed and I have too much to do. No, that's all an assessment about what's going on in here. I'm stressed because I'm not responding to my subconscious need. Right? So it's a total inside job. So then if I take this view, I'm a hundred percent responsible for my emotions. It's my need, it's my strategy I'm using to try to meet the need, and it's my assessment that I'm not on track to do so. Those are all inside of me. So then the second meaning, the hyphenation of responsibility, is once I understand that, once I understand what need I'm not on track to meet, I have three and only three options for what I can do in that situation, but I can respond to the need. Now I'm not reacting to the situation, I'm responding to the need. Right? So I can examine. Oh, I'm angry with Garry because I think I have this right. Rights are social agreements. Have I established I have this right with Garry? No. I wish I had this right to hold him accountable in this situation, but I don't. I told him I want it done as soon as possible. Yeah, and he may have a different interpretation of that than I have. Then suddenly, upon that moment of metacognition, boom, my subconscious gets the message, I don't have this right. The anger completely dissolves because I no longer have the need.

Garry Schleifer:

Right.

Charles Jones:

But if I decide, yes, I do. Then the moment I formulate a plan in my mind for how I'm going to respectfully hold Garry accountable, when I'm gonna do it, how I'm gonna do it, my subconscious now has a plan for how we're gonna hold Garry accountable, assert my right to hold Garry accountable. And in that moment, it believes I'm on track. And so just a few seconds after me recognizing I'm angry, I don't feel angry anymore. I feel empowered because I'm now on track to hold Garry

Garry Schleifer:

Oh, I love that. When you're saying that reminds me of a saying we have coaching as an inside job. We have control over some of these things. And it also reminds me of a personal development program I took in the late 90s where we had a distinction about managing expectations, but unfulfilled expectations lead to upset. What I'm hearing here is you have a tool to, hey, let's take a look behind that. You know, what are the needs that are not being addressed and stuff like that? So it takes that conversation a lot deeper. I love it, love it, love it. Hey guys, what's next for ERA? Where are we gonna see it? It's gonna take over EQ.

Charles Jones:

Well, so the main initiatives that we're pursuing are training coaches. Coaches love ERA, right? Because once you can surface what need is at play, you actually gain access, these needs are programmable. I gave the example of the child that learns the assets they need to protect and how to protect them. Once you can, as a coach, shift your client's attention to the underlying need, then you can help them change the programming of that need. So it unlocks behavior change. And I'd argue that the role of a successful coach is that you support your client in making performance-enhancing changes in their behavior. So this absolutely unlocks that. So coaches love it, and it's not only useful in these situations where the client feels you know, they're in some kind of emotional distress, they're stressed, the emotional responsibility has this step-by-step process to take them from that being stressed to being composed to using their metacognition to come up with changes they can make in their programming, to change their behavior, to make a creative breakthrough in that situation. It also has step-by-step methods for if you want to accelerate the development of a soft skill that your client wants to develop. It has step-by-step things for outgrowing behavioral derailers. So, with really only two exceptions, the types of behaviors that derail people as they advance up the corporate ladder, all but two of those are actually have their roots in misattributing their emotions to what's happening out there and entering this judgmental state.

Charles Jones:

And then finally, it's actually very powerful for uncovering trauma patterns that are in the way of someone's living the life that they want to live, and for creating the conditions under which the subconscious will retire the trauma pattern of its own accord. So you know, it hits a lot of these things that coaches need to do on a on a regular basis, and it's very simple. It's a very simple framework, right? So we've got a self-paced version and an instructor-led version coach training program. So that's one of the directions that this is going and then I'll let Terry speak to it's also a fantastic team building and culture change framework for an organization.

Terry Hildebrandt:

Yeah, one of the things we talk a lot about is there's really a new pandemic, and we call it emotional victimhood that has taken over many workplaces and teams where people are pointing fingers and unhappy with their boss, unhappy with their employer, unhappy with their coworkers. All of that is often rooted in unmet needs. So when we bring in emotional responsibility, it's a cure, it's a little literal cure for emotional victimhood and victimhood cultures which are really toxic, I think, to corporate settings. When we roll out these programs to whole organizations, it can change their basic assumptions around who is responsible to meet our needs, and it's ourselves. And we also give people empowerment and teach the leaders how to actually coach and mentor their people to meet their needs. So when they hear a complaint, we help them understand how do you get to the root need and how do you get that employee empowered to meet their own needs. So they're not, you know, expecting you know the employer to do it all for them and then everyone's happier and thinking about performance as opposed to you know blame and shame. So you know, one of my goals in life at this point is to really transform cultures from victimhood to ownership as we describe it.

Garry Schleifer:

Wow. Well, Terry, I know you. You already have, so now you're just doing it on steroids.

Terry Hildebrandt:

Absolutely.

Garry Schleifer:

Gentlemen, I want to thank you very much for our conversation today. Oh my god, it's amazing. It sounds revolutionary. Where can people go to find out more about all of these offerings?

Charles Jones:

So you can visit our website, which is www.adaptivemastery.com.

Garry Schleifer:

Adaptivemastery.com. And the best way to reach you? Is their email there or where would you like them to go? There?

Charles Jones:

Sure, they can you know Charles@ adaptivemastery.com or Terry@adaptivemastery.com.

Terry Hildebrandt:

And you could also connect with us on LinkedIn as well. So we do accept the LinkedIn invitations and see all our articles, including the choice article on on LinkedIn.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah, thank you. And thank you again for both writing for this joy issue and also for being here for our audience to learn more about what's behind all of it. It must have been hard for you guys to keep it down to 1400 words based on everything that this can do and uncover. So, and all your great work. Thank you.

Terry Hildebrandt:

Thank you, Garry. It's a pleasure.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah. That's it for this episode of Beyond the Page. For more episodes, subscribe via your favorite podcast app, most likely the one that got you here. If you're not a subscriber to choice magazine and you're watching this video, you can sign up for your free digital issue by scanning the QR code in the top right hand corner. If you're listening only, go to choice- Online.com and click the sign up now button. I'm Garry Schleifer. Enjoy the journey of mastery.