#844 - The Emotion Chef: Mastering the Art of Feeling with Kim Korte

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Hey guys. Welcome to this week's podcast episode and I have for you today, Kim Cortay PERSON. And the interesting thing about this podcast episode is she's going to talk about emotions and the role that emotions play in decision making, its impact on leadership, how to apply it to emotional management, emotional intelligence for the audience out there, you know, our motions, how to keep them in check, what to do when everything's, when the shit is hitting the fan, so to speak. And I'm happy to

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welcome Kim to the show. So Kim, welcome. Thank you so much. How are you today? Yeah, I'm doing

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well. And thanks so much. And I think the audience is really going to get, really enjoy what you have to share with them. So talk about, you know, your journey and how you got

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to be doing what you're doing. Well, you know, who has an accounting background interested in

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emotions because it's really not germane NORP, really, but it is. And I had some life earthquakes. I

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live in California, so it's a good term to use because I think anyone knows that an earthquake can be a little scary and shattering to your life at times,

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especially the big ones. And I had the last one was a divorce, and I was literally laying

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on the floor of my condo as I was packing it up to move from San Diego GPE to San Francisco and thinking to myself, oh my gosh, how did I get here? And I just went on this quest. And it's been a long quest. It was, you know, 20 years maybe in the making of just trying to understand. I'm a very process and procedure oriented person. I needed to have some logic. I wanted to know the underpinnings of emotions. And in this journey, I at first had focused on thoughts, thoughts, thoughts.And it was when I read this book called How Emotions Are Made, the Secret Life of the Brain WORK_OF_ART, that I really, really delved into the brain and emotions. We think so much about thoughts, but what thoughts are are primarily led or driven by our emotions. This made me very curious, and it was this theory of constructed emotionsthat I use in my life, but also is very, very influential in the book I just wrote called Yucky Yummy, Savory Sweet, Understanding the Flavors of Emotions WORK_OF_ART.

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Yeah. And we're going to talk about this book a little bit later. And I love, because I love emotions because, you know, everything is sensory input and then it gets into emotions and then it becomes perceptions and it becomes feelings, beliefs, and that that's kind of how we construct and manifest our destiny. So I love your first thing is you talk about, I love being able to create your reality. So for the audience, this idea of the emotion shift and how you construct your feelings every day. You know, talk about that for a second. Yes, it was very eye-opening

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for me in that we are perceiving everything around us and we think we see with our eyes, but we don't, we see with our brain because it gets sensory input coming in and the brain has to tell us what those signals mean or make meaning of them. Sometimes it gets it right and sometimes it gets it wrong. But this is with all of our sensory input. But it also applies to our feelings that we have inside of our body, our emotions.It's a sensory system that's called interoception. But it also applies to our feelings that we have inside of our body, our emotions. It's a sensory system that's called interoception. And a lot of people think interception. So interoception is how we catch our feelings. That's a great way to transition that that autocorrect mistake that often happens when I type the word.But our feelings that we have in our body are a product of the brain. So we feel with our brain. And it's these perceptive inputs that are coming in, that it's using. So those are our ingredients. And the recipes are our beliefs, our memories, our experiences, learning. They're all the same thing. They're like a neuronal wiring that takes place. But I call them recipes because when all of this stuff is coming in, the brain is tryingto say, well, what's the best guess? Like, what is its likely production with all of this? Kind of like that show chopped on TV, the food channel. They get all this surprise ingredients. And yet everybody comes up with a different recipe. Everybody has something different produced. And that's the same with our feelings because we all have a unique history past body makeup, you know, illnesses, all these things play a factor. And so when we when we have all this information come in, our body produces emotions.

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Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, and I love this. And one of the, and I love, because basically, you can basically deconstruct your, you can see where you are now, you know, whether you're in a place you want to be or kind of by circumstance or just kind of neglect. And you can deconstruct how you got there and then kind of reconstruct yourself moving forward, which I really love. It's almost like, you know, kind of like an engineering approach. And yes. Yeah. love it's almost like you know kind of like a engineering approach and um yes yeah and one thing is talk about um this idea of um where you have uh so for example like let's say i'm just giving a hypothetical example you know this um you know he's uh maybe he or she uh they want to move up inthe world but let's say you know she faces sexism at work or, let's say, a minority, you know, trying to move up, but, you know, faces discrimination by, you know, society and, you know, constantly gets beat down. And, like, they want to do well, but like, it's like every time they try, they just, the society won't let them move forward. So, you know, obviously you're going to become helpless or angry. So, you know, how do you function in this environment? I'm just giving you a hypothetical example.

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Well, you know what? I can't say for sure that their experience is because they are a minority or like I, it's hard to say, but I do know this. If you think that your experience is because you're a minority, then it's going to be that, right? And so you might be missing opportunities to self-reflect and improve how you are performing, how you are behaving in the workplace, because your expectations.I just was talking with a woman who was always angry at work. And she realized, and it was a lot of self-reflection, that it was because she expected her coworkers' behaviors and responses. And it wasn't necessarily that they were attacking her, but that she was perceiving it as being attacked because that's what she expected. So when you talked about deconstruction, this is very easy to apply to a dish. When you have a deconstructed dish,it's all the pieces of that dish put together in separate parts of it. So it's not like all mush together. A deconstructed salad, you're going to see all of the different aspects of this salad, and then you can put it all together. So you can deconstruct that situation,realizing that you might be perceiving that because it's what you expect because you believe that it's all because of X, Y, or Z, and then look at that situation differently. And perhaps it is, but perhaps it isn't. And it's only perceived that way

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because you expect it. So the law of expectations. Well, it's brain. So if you've been fed that,

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and that's your recipe, and you've been eating it for a long time, it's going to have that flavor. And so it's not just the law of expectations, it's the law of repeatable processes and prioritization and prior emotions and what you've learned. And that's where I really want to hit as to why that happens and why it can happen. And that you can deconstruct it and reconstruct it differently. Sorry to interrupt, but I just wanted to make that point. Yeah.

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Yeah. And then so kind of what the other thing is this, which kind of brings me to my, I kind of lost my train of thought, but I kind of wanted to hear.

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So, you know, a lot of people talk about, you know, so you talk about perception,

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and how your brain gets your feelings wrong.

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What is, what do you mean by that?

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Well, we, so I'm going to just take a non-emotional situation.

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And I love to use this example is that you you see

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something someone and you think it's your friend Bob PERSON and Bob is with someone other than his wife and he has his arm around her and you're like oh Bob is cheating on Barb PERSON. And oh, my goodness. But it looked like Bob PERSON. It wasn't really Bob PERSON. And our brain is predicting all the time what you see, what you hear, what you're perceiving.And so it can get it wrong. And I think we've all been in situations where we thought we saw someone and we didn't. But if we didn't look again, we wouldn't, and observe a little more closely, we wouldn't know that we got it wrong. And so our brain does the same things with our emotions. It's predicting all the time. And so when it's using these ingredients, what we expect or what we quickly perceived, it can get it wrong. It's called prediction error. You can look it up of brain prediction error and you canread a lot about it. And so for that very reason, we can perceive incorrectly and then that can translate into incorrect emotion responses. But just like the last example we gave, we could have a belief system that is driving how we feel that might not necessarily be correct in that situation.

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Yeah, I love that prediction era. Interesting. So, and then, oh, so one, the thing that came to my mind while you were giving that elegant response was, so, you know, you talk about emotion chef and you create, you know, you can create a recipe.

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And if, you know, you go to a nice restaurant, you know, you order your meal. You know, these are ingredients, right?

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And you have a delicious steak or whatever. But in the area of emotions, you may have bad emotions. You may have negative emotions. So, you know, kind of analogizing that to like a meal, a nice meal. So how can you have bad and negative emotions and have a positive outcome? Okay.

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But let's take that and think about how we do it in a cooking world.

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Like, I am not a professional chef, but my husband has been in the restaurant world. I've learned a lot about cooking. We have chef friends. I live in a very foodie town. So I know a little bit, enough to be dangerous.

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So when you have a fiery situation, there's heat.

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And let's just say it's like a habanero pepper. What cools that down? Honey. So our, and I really need to be clear is that what we do with the ingredients from other people that create a hot situation is ours. We own that. They just provide the ingredients and how we respond emotionally is ours. And that's why I'm saying it's really important to get it right. So when wefirst taste it, and I'm going to do some chef analogies here, like a chef would taste something and it might at first taste really spicy, right? And if they take a second sip, a second taste of it, they might go, oh, it seemed really hot, but it wasn't. So I always say take a second taste of this emotional situation, make sure that it really is as hot as you first perceived it. And if it is, what can calm that is honey, something sweet, adding sugar. So using something like focusing on something that you're grateful for,focusing on a positive aspect of the situation. You know, depending on the situation, you know, you might just need to walk away from it and not consume it again. Like there might be just some really toxic bad tasting people in your life and you just need to just walk away from it. So it's being able to take that self-awareness that gets developed, you know, through these processes and make decisions of, well, is this one thing the whole situation? So it's like, is this one ingredient that was reallyspicy, truly representative of the whole person, the whole dish, the whole situation? And if not, then focus on the thing that is more tasty. If it is, like I said, walk away or find your gratitude, find something that, that, you know, you can use to pivot from that because it impacts

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you, right? It doesn't impact them. It's all about you focusing on taking care of your emotions for you because you produce them it's so nice to say that it's someone else but it's yours and you you own your recipes and it's up to you to deconstruct

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um change change your recipe yeah interesting and what it sounds like is basically um

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it's it's waste to get what you make of every experience and how you can turn it around and basically how you construct your perceptions and your stories and your beliefs. Even if even in the most negative, like you can have like, for example, Oprah Winfrey PERSON, you know, becoming a, you know, you know, a, you know, all of the success that she had. But, you know, she turned all of her, all of her hardships into, you know, or just, you know, somebody like, for example, Victor Frankel PERSON, which is really interesting. So kind of ending it, because I know your time is very valuable, you know, with, in terms of limiting beliefs and, you know, emotional baggage just from, you know, basically repeated exposure.How can you use interoceptive awareness and impact critical thinking and decision-making in terms of just like self-limiting beliefs?

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So that's a lot in that question, by the way.

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And you want me to end on that one.

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Okay. So first of all, our emotions, if you think about thoughts, thoughts are really a bunch of memories put together to form thoughts. And in some ways, it's the same as true of emotion. But when you think of your decisions and decision making, it's truly a product of how you feel.It's used to filter and sort and prioritize your decisions. And as, you know, you think you're rational, you think all, you know, I'm making 100% logical decision,

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but in the end, it's how you feel that makes the final answer when you're trying to decide amongst all these things. What feels right is the direction you're going to go. So feelings are

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involved. So I know for all you major logical thinkers, sorry, but emotions are involved. So when interception appears in the body as a sensation. So feelings or emotions are hunger, are thirst. So we use this interoceptive system for more than just the traditional emotions that we think of like love, sad, anger. And when we feel this in our body, instead of just shutting it down, trying to get comfortable with noticing it and then feeling like what's going on and questioning it. So in the book, I have this emotion chef progression.And for people who just are not comfortable with feeling, you know, those feelings as they come up, there's a way I have this, this, this process to kind of get you more comfortable with it by using food, by using just non-threatening, you know, because emotions can feel threatening, but using non-threatening sensations just to get used to it and then kind of build up from there to where you're able to say in a situation, I feel this sensation come up for like me. I know that when I have this sensation that comes upand it kind of goes across my chest, I need to pay attention. I need to go, okay, what's going on here that is making me feel this way? And it's just a way for me to have higher levels of self-awareness so that when I'm making a decision, I'm more present. I'm more consciously involved. And I'm not letting this sensation shut me down so that I can't observe what's going on because it's communication. And we do have

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miscommunication in our perceptions and in our internal communication.

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So the more we do this, when we get our recipes so that we can taste it like a chef can taste a recipe, know all the different flavors in it, when we can get that way with our emotional palate, that's when emotional awareness comes. That's when we have a higher level of ability to adjust our emotions, recognize how we're feeling, which is really the greatest thing I think you can have because emotions are where we get the real flavor of life, the color, the just the way life is supposed to be is when we canexperience the emotions. But it's also how we have connections to ourselves and others. So I was a long answer, but it was a big question and I don't even know if I answered the whole thing.

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I'm so sorry. No, it's wonderful. The reason why I'm just so curious because I've been always interested in just kind of high performance and how, you know, how you function in this kind of very chaotic world these days.

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So I really love your answers, you know, they think someone told me that emotions are information.

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So even though you get triggered, like you get triggered by anything, make yourself get triggered because then that teaches you, you know, what is going on and you kind of uncover the stories or whatever trauma, you know, kind of resolve that.

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Well, fear, and we're talking about fear here, right? And so fear is real or imagined, and more oftentimes than not, it's imagined. Because our brain is always predicting, right? And we have this habit of saying, oh, this isn't going to turn out well. And yet most of the time, it's never. I mean, I think they tracked it like 7% of the time.Our anxieties are true. So when we go through life thinking like, hey, I'm afraid of this, but likely there's nothing to be afraid of, it kind of makes those emotions a little bit easier to handle. Yeah.

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And I know I want to give you a chance to plug your book and how can people find you and follow you and reach out to you because you really have some very interesting ideas.

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Oh, thank you. My book title is called Yucky, Yummy, Savory Sweet, Understanding the Flavors of Emotions, and you can find it on Amazon, or you can find a link to it at kimcorty.com ORG, and you can subscribe. You can, and follow me. I'm starting my own podcast soon, so you can be aware of my podcast as it comes about because I'll be talking about topics like this. And if you go to my site, you can get a freedownload that is the introduction to the book and the first chapter. Oh, nice. Yeah, I'll definitely

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check that out. And, you know, all of Kim PERSON's resources will be in the links and show notes. And be sure to check out her book. And give her like and follow on social. And thanks so much for a very fascinating discussion.

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Oh, thank you for having me. It was it was very enjoyable. I appreciate you're inviting me. Thank you.