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Welcome to Episode 133 of The Non-Anxious Leader Podcast, I'm Jack Shitama, and we are going to get right into today's topic, which is the idea that emotions are contagious.

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The topic comes from an article in the Atlantic entitled Those Who Share a Roof Share Emotions by Arthur C. Brooks. And the subtitle is Feelings are Contagious. But you can help your loved ones when they are sad without sacrificing your own good mood. As you can probably tell, I like to try to find a family systems take on just about any subject. But this article, in particular, struck me because it helps us to understand the nature of systems just by understanding that emotions are contagious.

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It helps us to better understand the nature of systems, which in turn can help us to be more of a non-anxious leader. When you hear the statement emotions are contagious, you're probably thinking this is an obvious statement, but systems thinking helps us to understand that the emotions of one person can have a tremendous impact on everyone else in the system. We know this is true when someone is especially unhappy, but the converse of this is true as well. A positive person, a non-anxious presence, has significant ability to impact a system in a positive way.

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One study that the article cites reinforces this idea that it's not just negative emotions that are contagious. The article cites a 2008 study that shows that happiness is contagious. If you live within a mile of a friend who becomes happy, you are 25 percent more likely to become happy, too. What I want to focus on today is the idea that a non-anxious presence, a non-anxious leader can make a positive difference in any system in which she works, lives or serves simply through her presence.

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The hard part is understanding how to do this when there is negative energy, when there is anxiety, when there is anger and blame, and people not taking responsibility forself. And that's what I think this article can help you do. Emotions can be spread in a variety of ways, one obvious way is through conversation. Words are one thing. Having negative words or positive words certainly can impact the emotions of others. But there's also body language and tone and facial expressions that spread emotions as much or more than words.

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Frequency and intensity also play a role. The article says, "People who live together tend to have an especially strong influence on one another's feelings. One study of college students matched up depressed and non-depressed roommates and found that on average, the non-depressed roommate started showing signs of depression after living together for five weeks." Again, the focus here is on negative emotions and how they are spread. And I want you to be thinking in terms of how your non-anxious presence can be a positive impact on people around you.

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What this study shows is that the household that is the nuclear family or people who are living together is the place where interactions are most frequent and most intense. And so emotions can spread more quickly. The family of origin is also a place where there is frequency and intensity to varying degrees, followed by the workplace and the congregational setting, where people are interacting less often than if they lived together. But they can still have great influence on how we function.

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You can likely think of a situation past or present where a family member, a congregant or a coworker was consistently a negative influence on the people around her. Whether it was anger, blame, complaining, or some other failure to take responsibility for yourself, just being around this person could ruin your day, week, month or year. Systems that are stuck are full of people like this, and it makes it very, very difficult to be a non-anxious presence, let alone to feel healthy oneself.

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So what is a non-anxious leader to do? This article has four suggestions. The first suggestion to deal with negative energy is to put on your own oxygen mask first. The article says, "Work on your own happiness before trying to change others. Forgoing your own joy for the sake of another person might seem like the more virtuous path, but that is a lose-lose strategy, kind of like suffocating without an oxygen mask while struggling to put on someone else's.

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Remember, unhappiness is highly contagious." I would modify the author's suggestion here, work on your own happiness and don't try to change others. The author says, work on your own happiness before you try to change others. But we know you've heard me say before that trying to change others will not only fail, but will cause them to be even more intractable. Putting on your own mask first is the essence of self-differentiation. It's knowing that you can only take responsibility for yourself and no one else.

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It's knowing that you have no one to blame for the way you respond to the world around you. One point the author is making here is that adapting to the demands of unhealthy others will not make them happy. It will enable them and they will continue to be dependent on you for their own well-being. The key is to stay emotionally connected while refusing to take responsibility for their happiness. This is a hard thing to do, but in my experience, it's the only way through to a better place.

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By taking responsibility for self working on your own self-differentiation you actually help others because you refuse to take responsibility for them, which in the long run, in the short run, it's hard, but in the long run, gives them the opportunity to grow stronger and take responsibility for self as well. The second suggestion is don't take it personally. The author writes, quote, Whether you're at fault or not, thinking that someone else's unhappiness is directed specifically toward you is only human.

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Personalization of negativity and conflict is one of the most powerful ways that unhappiness spreads. Psychologists studying this tendency find that taking negativity personally can lead to rumination, which damages your mental and physical health and ruins your relationships by encouraging you to avoid others and seek revenge and quote. When we take the pain of others personally, we are ignoring the fact that we are not the cause of the pain, even if we've done something they don't like, they are responsible for how they respond to it.

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Of course, when we do something egregious, it's up to us to take responsibility for it. But in general, when people are sharing their pain with us in unhealthy ways, it's something going on inside of them, not something inside of us. And as the author rightly points out, we don't want to take this personally. The author notes two tendencies that occur when we are not dealing with it in a healthy way. One is disconnecting and the other is revenge.

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I would say that revenge is a form of reactivity. It's wanting to continue the fight, get back at the other, make them feel the pain that we think they are inflicting on us. From a family systems perspective, we know that neither disconnecting that is withdrawing emotionally nor reactivity is helpful. Reactivity will only perpetuate a conflict of wills with the other and will get us stuck in a vicious cycle of anxiety and reactivity. Likewise, withdrawing emotionally from an unhappy person may make it easier for us, but it will make them more unhappy and anxious and will ultimately make things worse.

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The great challenge of being a non-anxious presence is being non-anxious and emotionally present, we're able to not allow the other's anxiety to bring us down even while we stay connected to them and show that we care. I have said before, this is one of the most difficult things to do, but it can get easier with practice the more we are aware of what's going on inside of us and what's going on in the system. And the more we are intentional about staying connected even while regulating our own anxiety, we get better at it.

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And I believe this becomes the most important asset of a leader. The third suggestion that Arthur Brooks has is to use the element of surprise. He writes, quote, Helping another person be happy is not straightforward, saying cheer up. For example, what psychologists call reframing is usually counterproductive. Much better to get the unhappy person to engage in an activity that, you know, she likes. Research published last year and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology showed that actively engaging in an enjoyable activity improves mood more than doing nothing, suppressing the bad mood or envisioning good times.

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There's a catch, though. The researchers also found that asking unhappy people to imagine happy activities, a step that is necessary for planting them in advance made them less likely to participate in them. I would summarize this. I would distill this down. And to use your actions, not your words, it's easy to want to try to use our words to make somebody feel better, to tell them to cheer up or to think about some happy thought. But as this article shows that it will not be helpful.

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What we were really trying to do is we're trying to change the other person instead. If our actions demonstrate that we care about them and we want to connect to them, that's how we can make a difference. The element of surprise is showing we care by doing something in a way that helps them to engage in things that they like. For example, would you like to go for a bike ride? This leaves the choice totally up to the other person, it avoids any kind of planning that perhaps feels like a negative experience for them, but gives them the opportunity to engage in the moment.

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I have found that I use this with my four year old grandson quite often, as you can imagine, he has certain moods that swing from positive to negative. And when he is in a negative mood, I will ask him just on the spur of the moment, do you want to do this or do you want to do that? And usually, I can land on something where he is willing to engage and it changes his mood completely. And while we are not dealing with four year olds, mostly it can feel like we are and this idea of being spontaneous, of being willing to do something with another person that might change their mood is the essence of being a non-anxious presence.

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We are not anxious about their unhappiness. We are present and actually willing to engage with them in something that they would like to do. The final suggestion that Arthur Brooks makes is prevent the spread. He writes, "So far, the advice here has been geared toward someone who wants to help an unhappy person if you are the unhappy one. Remember that people want to help. Doing so might make them happier. But more to the point, people who love you don't want you to suffer.

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Isolating yourself or pretending to be happy just to make other people more comfortable won't benefit anyone." I believe preventing the spread is more than just dealing with our own unhappiness or our own difficult times. But it is also not spreading the unhappiness of others by triangling. When somebody takes out their anxiety on us, we prevent the spread by not then complaining about them to a third person. But back to the author's suggestion, which is to not isolate ourselves, that is to stay emotionally connected and not pretend to be happy to make other people more comfortable.

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That is adaptive behavior that is faking that we are happy because we are unable to share how we actually feel in a healthy way. Sharing how you feel without blaming another is healthy behavior, a non-anxious leader is not invulnerable, she's not perfect. In fact, it's the ability to be appropriately vulnerable that makes a non-anxious leader somebody who people want to work with. It shows to others that even for the leader, life is hard and that people can journey together in a healthy way.

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The bottom line here is that emotions are contagious and understanding that is one way that we are able to be a circuit breaker in a system, whether it's a family of origin, a congregation or a work system. And being a circuit breaker helps prevent the spread of negative energy, of anxiety and anger and blame depending on the system. It might make it very, very difficult as the leader to change things, but I have seen it take place over time.

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I may have shared this before, but I think it's worth sharing again, I have a clergy colleague who went to a particularly difficult church, one that had a reputation for chewing up and spitting out their pastors one after the other. And we work together on and off over time, helping her to be a non-anxious presence in the midst of all kinds of sabotage and all kinds of stubbornness. And even after five years, she said that it felt very, very difficult, that she wasn't really sure how much progress she was making.

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But it was around that same time that another clergy colleague said that he was having conversation with another pastor who said, boy, she sure is whipping them into shape. So at least the perception from the outside was that things were changing for the better. And what I would say is that the pastor, the Non-anxious leader, wasn't whipping them into shape. What she was doing was she was remaining a non-anxious presence in the difficult situations where emotions were contagious and that helped that keep them from spreading and that enabled people to increase their healthy behavior over time.

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First with the most healthy, who followed the leaders lead and then with others who over time stopped making their own anxieties a problem for the congregation and started taking responsibility for yourself. This is how a non-anxious leader can change things over time, and it starts with understanding that emotions are contagious. So that's it for Episode 133. Don't forget to connect with me at thenonanxiousleader.com. You can sign up for my two for Tuesday email where I make two recommendations on articles and resources that I find helpful, where and you'll also get a blog post every two weeks.

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Finally, by signing up, you will have my email address and you can correspond with me directly, which I love to do, because people send me situations that they would like me to comment on, as well as ideas for podcast episodes. Until next time, thanks and goodbye.