The Neuroscience of Emotions and Images with Sue Langley

You ask them a question, they give you an answer, but you're seeing something emotionally different. You're seeing something in their body language that indicates they may not be fully in agreement with it, or you get the sense that they're putting the barriers down or covering something up. A good coach is going to be able to see and pick up on those emotional cues. And there's a particular area of the brain, sitting almost where the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex join, called the fusiform face area or the fusiform expert area, and it's specifically designed to read emotions in faces. So as a coach, we need to be using all of our brain to pick up on those cues. But we also don't want to get so caught up in the limbic system and emotional empathy that we stop thinking clearly to help our client move forward.

the world. Sue Langley is a leading positive psychology practitioner and trainer working a ton with the psychology of pictures and of emotions. These are the two main areas we unpack in depth today. Sue is based in Australia, but she's just back from a bunch of conferences in Europe, so let's hear what she has experienced there.

You said you have been traveling Europe now. You're based in Australia, and you've been at two different conferences giving talks about your work. Would you like to share a bit where you have been and what you have been talking about?

Positive Psychology, was in Dublin. It was a great event, and I did several sessions. I did a pre-conference workshop. I did a session around flipping the strengths script and thinking about strengths differently. And I did a panel session, a discussion on the future of positive psychology and wellbeing and how practitioners and academics can come together, because I very much consider myself a practitioner, but everything I teach is based on science and rigor and evidence. I'm lucky I get to travel all around the world speaking at different events and conferences with corporate clients, and I do a lot of consulting. Consultant to the consultants, so accreditation programs and teaching people how to teach wellbeing and positive psychology and neuroscience as well.

have done in the early episodes of this podcast to get to know the guests.

Today it's not only about getting to know you, we will also unpack a bit what's actually happening there afterwards.

Let me get some picture cards on the table and ask you which picture describes you lately.

of a red heart and a little person hanging off the heart.

They describe me and my work in a couple of different ways. One is the ripple effect. I often talk about the ripple effect. If I focus on the science, I talk about Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler's work. They found that the health-related behaviors of one person have a ripple effect several degrees beyond you. So if you have more negative or more positive health-related behaviors, the ripple effect in the friend scenario is three degrees beyond you. For instance, if I increase my wellbeing and you are my friend, there's a 15% increased chance yours will go up, a 10% increased chance for a friend of yours, and a 5.6% chance that a friend of theirs will go up. I love that idea of the ripple effect because, for me personally, I have this idea of a rising tide floats all boats. I

work a lot with other consultants and coaches, and if I can help them do better, lift their wellbeing and lift the quality of what they do, then they will go out and teach more people that I will never reach. I've had people who are construction workers who are going to do a much better job at reaching other construction workers around their wellbeing than I will. For me, the ripple effect is that we don't see the ripples we create, but how we show up changes the worlds of the people around us. So for me, it's very much about what drops or what ripples am I creating? How am I showing up on this call right now? How do I show up in my first meeting at 9:00 in the morning and my last meeting at 9:00 at night? How do I show up as the best version of me and then create that ripple effect to as many people as I possibly can? And the second image, the heart with the person hanging off it: we actually have image cards that we

use all the time in what we do. They're called Inspire Action Cards. And we have a very similar image to that, which was taken by my husband. It was graffiti in Florence. I don't know where this one was, but ours was on a wall in Florence. The heart was filled in, so it's a different graffiti. I loved it because, when it comes to wellbeing, when it comes to positive psychology, we know that human connection is so important. I have a keynote called The Future is Human. It's about how, yes, in the age of AI, that's great, but certain human skills are critical to our thriving. If you look at the longevity study, if you look at research from positive psychology across almost every country in the world, you'll find that human connection is one of the number one contributors to high levels of wellbeing. So for me, the little heart with the person hanging is: can I help lift people, lift society, through those human skills of learning about

emotions, learning about flourishing, learning about how our brains are wired, so that I can show up as the best version of me, which helps you become the best version of you? So both of those are linked to what I do. Just one last thing. Across our entire business, our purpose, if you like, is to make a positive difference to global human flourishing. So those two images link to what we do as a team: making a positive difference to global human flourishing.

our exercise with the images for is that I know I'm going to be talking about emotions. I'm often dealing with coaches or consultants, doing the train-the-trainer aspect for them, or with senior leaders. If I'm going to get into the emotion stuff, suddenly just saying to somebody, "So how do you feel?" or, "We're going to talk about emotions. Tell me about your emotions," can be a bit awkward. Even if someone says to me, "How are you?" and I say, "Yeah, I'm good," where do I go from there? Whereas when you ask people to choose an image, when you say, "Okay, tell me about yourself in your worst mood," and somebody chooses an image that looks like that, you say, "Okay, describe it to me." And: "Well, I feel stuck, I feel drained, I feel exhausted." But now I'm talking about the image, I'm not necessarily talking about me, so it's kind of safe. Also, people will see things in images that they don't even know what it is. I know one of our

images, I've actually got it here, is this one. Sometimes people are not aware of what it is, so they look at it from different angles and they're not quite sure. And it doesn't matter what it is. I know it's a cat, a side view of a cat's face. But that doesn't matter. It's what the person sees in it. Sometimes we might use it as an introduction around leadership to do with strengths. Choose an image that represents your greatest strength. Choose an image that represents something you're not great at. Sometimes I use the images when it comes to feedback. I'll get people to choose images for other people: "Tobi, this is what I see in you as a strength, and this is what I find difficult about you," or whatever. The thing that is so much more powerful with an image is that people find it easier to articulate more difficult things. As I say, if I ask you your emotion, you'll go, "Yeah, I'm good," or, "Oh, I'm generally happy." But if I ask you to choose an image and you say, "Oh, I feel really connected at the moment, so I've chosen the spider's web,

because when I'm at my best, I can connect people, and I feel strong just like a spider's web," that's a whole rich conversation that goes much deeper than just, "Oh, I feel good right now."

as a profile. And we still sometimes play strengths poker, where they choose cards for themselves or for others. But when I'm working with leaders, I do find it's hard for people sometimes to give feedback. So I often use the images as a feedback exercise, where people can choose an image, not just for a strength but sometimes for a weakness, depending on the group and how it's working. I ask them to choose images initially for each person in their little group. But then I ask them to give the feedback. Choosing the images they're usually okay with, but when it comes to "now I've got to tell you why I've chosen these images," that can be really difficult. One of the things I've noticed is that everybody gets uncomfortable initially, but once they've finished, the connection between people is significant. I've had people hug each other before. I've had tears before. Often people don't give us feedback.

We try and avoid the negative feedback. If we've got someone in our team who isn't performing, we often try and ignore that and hope for the best, or we do it in a not-so-effective way. And the positive feedback, the strengths-based feedback, often gets overlooked, not because we're bad people, but just because we get busy. Things go really well, and I don't necessarily think about it. But stopping and choosing an image and then deliberately saying, "Tobi, this is what I see in you. This is how awesome I think you are. This is why I chose this image," doesn't happen often enough. So I think there are ways to bring that real emotion to life. And as I say, images can create a buffer, a way of going deeper and explaining things that makes it a little more comfortable.

kept doing these exercises over the years, I realized, wow, this is not coincidence. This is not luck. It's really the method.

about regularly. The limbic system, which is the emotional center, and then the prefrontal cortex, which is our logical, our rational, our higher-order thinking. I think sometimes people think, "Oh, we need to be very logical, we need to be very rational," put the emotions to one side, and yet most people hopefully by now know that is not a very effective way of living your life. The reason we have these two systems in our brain is because we need these two systems in our brain. The emotional center is so important for us because it's our instinct. It's that emotional pull towards something. It's why I choose one image over another. For instance, why did I choose the heart with the little person hanging off it? Because I have that image. I resonated with that image. I stood in front of that image in Florence when my husband took it, in a very similar way. It didn't have a rational reason to it. There was an emotional pull to why that one jumped out at me in that period of time.

And think about that: it also engages our visual cortex, because we're taking things in through imagery. It connects with our limbic system and our memory center, so what are the memories that we're then drawing on that are integrating? And then I've got my prefrontal cortex, which rationally explains why I've chosen that and how it links to what I do. For me, it's a way of engaging the brain. The thing that I love about the brain is we have different areas that support things around creativity, the moment of insight with the anterior cingulate cortex. We've got, as I say, the hippocampus, our memory center, which is drawing on things that nobody can see and we often can't explain, but there is an emotional reaction behind it. So I love the fact that our brain is designed for stories, our brain is designed for imagery, and trying to remove parts of that removes the complexity that makes those exercises work. The reason they

work when you've got an image is that so many areas of the brain are then integrated, and it's enhancing the experience for people.

In the middle. And this is where emotions are being processed. And you're saying that through pictures we are making these two parts talk to each other.

prefrontal cortex has been given elevated status over the years, like, oh, we need to be all rational and logical. But if you think about your prefrontal cortex, it's responsible for things like strategizing, problem-solving, self-regulation, paying attention, those sorts of things. We do need that part of the brain. And to your point, in the workplace, yes, in theory, we're doing a lot of that. We're using a lot of that activity. But I think we underestimate the power of the limbic system with that emotional pull, that intuition, that memory center that sits in the limbic system. Often what you're doing, even in the business world, is drawing on previous memories, previous learning, previous emotions, what feels right. If you're in a leadership role, you will hopefully be using your emotional intelligence to read facial cues on your team members that say something's wrong with that person, something's off. You will hopefully use your intuition in a sales meeting that says, "Actually, I need to jump in here because

things are going off track." So I think we underestimate the limbic system. It's got a bad rap, and people say, "Oh no, leave your emotions at home." But to your point, when we work with imagery, when we work with our whole brain, we're going to be way more effective than if we just work with a little bit of it.

I'm a coach and I'm feeling what you're feeling, there is a physiological response I can tap into. I can feel what's going on for you. If you're feeling sad, I might start to feel sad. That's emotional empathy, and that mainly sits in the limbic system. We would see activity in the limbic system. Then we've got cognitive empathy. Cognitive empathy is when I know what you feel and I get it, but I might not come across as particularly warm. I might come across as cold: "Yep, I can see you're sad. I get it. Deal with it." I understand it. That's more prefrontal cortex. But when we think of compassion, what Tania Singer, who works out of Germany, found is that compassion engages both the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex. Because I feel what you feel, and I want to help support you to move forward. So if you think about a coach, whatever language you use, you need to be good as a coach at picking up the emotional cues in your person.

You ask them a question, they give you an answer, but you're seeing something emotionally different. You're seeing that whilst they're saying something, there's something in their body language that indicates they may not be fully in agreement with it, or you get the sense that they're putting the barriers down or covering something up. A good coach is going to be able to see and pick up on those emotional cues. There's a particular area of the brain, sitting almost where the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex join, called the fusiform face area or the fusiform expert area, and it's specifically designed to read emotions in faces. So as a coach, we need to be using all of our brain to pick up on those cues. But we also don't want to get so caught up in the limbic system and emotional empathy that we stop thinking clearly to help our client move forward.

If you think about that as a consultant, or a coach too, a good consultant will use the energy of emotions to take a

room on a journey. They'll know when to lift the energy in the room, because they want high energy, positive emotions, quick thinking, big picture. But they'll also know when to drop that energy to move into a more reflective style, a weighing up of pros and cons, a deeper element. So again, this emotional center combined with the prefrontal cortex: as a coach or a consultant, using those systems wisely and intentionally for themselves and for others can be hugely helpful.

But then there is also the limbic system, which we often refer to as

the bodily level or the heart level, where it's more about feeling what they feel and sensing it on a less cognitive level.

tune with your own emotions when they might be taking you off track, or when you're getting into a more heightened state because you don't know what to ask next, you're feeling stuck. You're noticing it from a physiological perspective. I have to admit, I love the idea that our physiology changes through temperature, through our heartbeat, our breathing, the tension in various places. Being able to notice that as a coach is really useful. I'll give you an example. I was doing an accreditation program around the MSCEIT 2, which is an emotional intelligence tool, and we were doing some practice debriefs. And this particular gentleman, every time the person asked him a question about anger, his foot started tapping under the table. As soon as they moved on to something else, it stopped. Then they asked a question about anger again, and his foot started going. After the third time, I interrupted and said, "Just out of interest, what did you notice happen when you were talking about

anger?" He said, "I don't know. Didn't notice anything." I said, "Basically, your foot started going." And he was like, "Did it?" He hadn't even noticed. But as soon as we started talking about it, he started noticing the tension in his body, that he was getting agitated. Anger has quite a lot of energy to it. So that was where the energy was coming out, through his foot tapping under the table. Being able to pick up on those cues from an interoception perspective, yes, there's a neuroscience piece to it. But going beyond that to the neurobiology and the full body can be so powerful for a coach if they're able to be in tune with their own and notice others.

Sometimes I ask people to see if they can view it in others. I do a little exercise around emotion poker. I might have one person looking at a laptop with images coming in quick succession, and the people observing don't get to see the laptop. They get to see the person's face, and they see if they can pick up what pictures and emotions are being evoked. That's teaching people to read it in others. If I'm trying to do it in themselves, one of the exercises I often do is I get people to think of an event or situation that's happened to them, maybe a negative emotion, and then I might do a positive emotion, where they recreate the emotion and start to notice it in their body. Where do they feel it? What's going on? I was actually on a TV show called Redesign My Brain here in Australia a few years ago, and the host, at the end

of the series of three sessions, had to be chained up in a straitjacket with chains and dropped into a swimming pool, and he had to get free. My job in the first episode was to teach him how to manage his emotions. So from a physiological perspective,

how could he go from fear to calm? We did some really cool exercises around inducing fear and establishing what fear feels like, what happens in your body: your heart racing, your breathing, you want to take in more oxygen, you often change in temperature, you might get more tense. Well, that's not helpful if you've been dropped to the bottom of a swimming pool and you've got to get free while holding your breath. So we then moved the physiology to calm. How are we going to change that to a calmer state? How do we relax the muscles through the body so that we can actually use those muscles well, but also so we can still think clearly? Because as you know, when you are in a heightened emotional state, your poor little prefrontal cortex goes offline, and

you can't think as clearly to do what you need to do. So from a physiological perspective, even just getting people to practice. I had one beautiful lady. We did a session around interoception as part of a two-day program, and she found it really difficult to feel anything in her body. Her action was, at the end of the program, every time she took her dog for a walk, she was going to stop for five minutes and practice trying to create emotions in her body. I didn't think anything more of it until six weeks later I got a WhatsApp message saying, "I felt something today." She'd stopped halfway through walking her dog and said, "I'm going to do anger." She'd try and create anger in her body. And then, "Excitement." She was practicing these until she could actually feel it. Just like anything, we practice, we get better.

doing body scans, this sort of work would also be useful.

your ability to be aware of what's going on inside your body and to evaluate that. As an example, we know that anxiety and excitement have similar physiological tendencies. Heart speeds up, breathing speeds up, temperature changes. But can you distinguish the difference between anxiety and excitement? Because if you can't, every time you get excited, you think you're anxious, which can be debilitating for people.

valence, as in I'm anxious? And this is the thing. Often people don't think about the energy behind emotions, the intensity. The fact that boredom is low-energy disgust. Or the fact that some of the low-energy negative emotions like sadness, despair, grief can be harder to get out of because there's no activity or energy in the body. Whereas you can't maintain rage for very long, or you can't maintain ecstatic for very long, because there's so much energy it's going to dissipate. So I think teaching people about the science of emotions, the emotional energy, is important. We often use our little emotion intensity cards because they help people understand exactly what you've just described: not just the valence, but also the arousal, the energy or intensity in those emotions. Sometimes people never learn that. We learn the basics at school of happy, sad, and angry, but we don't necessarily learn the nuance of the difference between pleased, amused,

and positive, or the difference between curious, interested, and intrigued, for instance.

and I want to get them to a calmer nervous system state, maybe focus on the future, on the solution. What sort of situational exercises could we do there?

Tell me what you notice right now about your breathing, your tension, your energy, the way you're sitting, the way you're holding yourself, and then let's see if we can shift it." I would actually do it with the person, and I've done that often in a one-on-one session. I've literally called it out in the moment: what am I seeing, what am I noticing, and then getting them to shift and change it there and then. The other thing I do is more covert. If you don't want to call it out to the person, you do it yourself. If you are in a one-on-one situation and you're in rapport with somebody and you feel they're too heightened for what you're trying to achieve next, what can you do to bring your energy down, shift and change the tension in your own body, your own voice? Or if you want to move to something more exciting: "So tell me more about that. How do we take you on that journey? What ideas do you have?" And lifting your energy. That links to what I

talk about with the energy chart, which you just described with valence and arousal: I can use my energy to take the other person where they need to go in order to get a different outcome. I've done this on many occasions. I remember one particular lady in a one-on-one situation, and I really got the sense that she was feeling angry. She was answering the questions, we were doing the coaching, but I just got this sense in her body, the tension in her voice, the neck, that there was anger underlying. So I paused and said, "Look, I might be wrong," and I always say that, "I might be wrong, but I'm getting the sense that you're feeling angry." And she went, "No, no, no, I'm fine. Honestly, I'm fine. I'm good." I said, "Okay, cool." We continued on. I was still getting the sense of this anger simmering under the surface, and I said, "Look, I'm going to pause again. I appreciate I might be wrong, but I'm really getting the sense of anger behind what you're saying, and I think it's because you feel like a failure." And she

burst into tears. She said, "You're absolutely right. I am so angry, because I was put in this position based on my past experience. I'd fixed a difficult team before. They put me into this role to fix this team, and I haven't been able to do it, and I'm angry, I'm frustrated. I'm not getting where I need to go. You're absolutely right." Later we talked about how I knew. I talked about the physiological things I was noticing in her: the tension through her chest, the way her gestures were a lot more staccato, the way the tension through her jaw was changing the tone of her voice. And she hadn't even paid attention to that.

Everybody was doing NLP practitioner courses 10 years ago, I have the feeling. And there you learn this idea of pacing and leading. You get on the energy level of the client until you establish rapport. You're really swinging along with the client, and then you can also lead the way. That means either, if you want to calm them down, speaking slower, getting calmer yourself, or lifting up the energy level, being more lively.

to process what they're going through. So yeah, that's for me. As for NLP, some of it was based on science, some of it not. I like to stick to the bits that were based on science, and that's actually a really cool piece: connecting emotions with thought and connecting emotions with body.

emotions, so to understand the progression, the cognitive element of emotions, and to manage emotions, which is based on somebody like Matt Lieberman's work from a neuroscience perspective: being able to label emotions helps calm down emotions. One of the things I find is that often people don't have a very rich emotional vocabulary. With a very low emotional vocabulary, you ask me how I am, and I say, "I'm okay," "I'm good," or, "I'm not bad, thanks." That's very low emotional vocab. If I've got average emotional vocab, I'll say, "I'm happy," "sad," "angry," maybe a few more words. If I've got a richer emotional vocab, when you ask me how I feel, assuming you genuinely want to know, then I'm much more likely to be able to say, "Do you know what? I'm angry, I'm also embarrassed, humiliated, and disappointed in myself." Now, that's a whole other scope when you can go to that nuance, because there are very different

emotional management strategies you're going to use for anger than for embarrassed, humiliated, and disappointed in myself. It's one of the reasons we created our little emotion cards, mainly because my emotional vocabulary was terrible, so I created them for myself initially. To really try to get people to expand their emotional vocabulary and understand the nuance behind them, because it then helps you deal with them better.

I'm going to use a couple that you've got on there as examples. You've got shame and guilt on there. I think it's really interesting.

There's a distinction between shame and guilt, because guilt is: I feel guilty about something I have or haven't done, and it's usually an action orientation. If you think about guilt, I might feel guilty because I haven't rung my mother for two weeks. Guilt is great because it's an action. I'm more likely to rectify it by ringing my mother, because it's something I haven't done and something I can do. Shame is really interesting, because it goes internal. Shame is more about: I am a bad daughter because I haven't rung my mother. I am a terrible daughter. I'm the worst daughter in the world. I am bad because I haven't rung my mother. That's really interesting, because it's internally focused, and they've found that then I'm less likely to act. Because I feel bad,

I feel worthless. It's not about the action. I think that's a lovely way of thinking about guilt and shame, because if I can turn shame to guilt and turn it outward again, "No, I'm not the worst daughter in the world, but I probably should have rung my mother, so let me pick up the phone and ring my mother," I am dealing with that emotion. Whereas if I just sit with it... They found this as well in the workplace. I make a mistake, which, let's face it, all of us have done at work. If I make a mistake and feel guilty about it, I'm much more likely to come to you, my boss, and say, "Boss, I've stuffed up. This is what's happened. This is what I can do. How do I rectify it?" I'm much more likely to take action. If I feel shame, ironically, I'm more likely to try and hide my action, not tell you, and hope I can get away with it.

I can't do anything about my identity.

"As far as I'm concerned, I have to leave." I said, "What you've got to be careful of is that you don't then take it on board and say, 'I am terrible. I am no good,' because then you won't put yourself forward for another role in the future, because you'll be like, 'Oh, no, I shouldn't be in this role.'" That's the imposter syndrome that comes out of "I'm no good." So I think they're two very interesting emotions. If we can externalize it again and say what was the action, what is the thing that I should or shouldn't have done, that saves my self-esteem a bit of a battering.

As you said, guilt has a cognitive element, as in I haven't rung my mother, and I feel I should have rung my mother. There's an expectation: good daughters ring their mother. I feel guilty because I haven't rung her. But I can make the argument for shame as well: I'm a bad daughter because I haven't rung my mother. Oh my goodness, I'm ashamed of myself. I am so bad. There's a cognitive element. Why do I think I'm bad? Because my expectation is that I should ring my mother every week? There's a cognitive expectation in that. So to your

point, the way the brain works is you can't take emotion and cognition and separate them, but these are absolutely still both emotions. Whether the person agrees or not, they have an emotional component to them. Curiosity is an emotion, but it has a cognitive component, as in I'm leaning in, I'm wanting to find out more. I'm interested in something, and I'm being curious about it. So I think most emotions probably have a component of both. There's a cognitive element in most of them. Even if you think of the basics, most people would agree that happiness and sadness are emotions, but there's still a cognitive element. Happiness is what anybody experiences when something is going my way, or I gain something of value. Think about the words "of value." There's a cognitive component to that. The example I often give is when I do a keynote presentation, even though the client is often paying you to do this, sometimes they feel they need to give you a little gift at the end. So you come

off stage, somebody says thank you, and they go, "Here you go," and there's a gift. In many cases, in my experience, it's been a bottle of red wine. A bottle of red wine is lovely, but I don't drink red wine. So there is a component that says, yes, I'm happy, thank you for the gift, but I don't value it because I don't particularly like red wine. But if you give me a bar of chocolate or a box of chocolates, I value chocolates more than red wine, so I'm going to be happier. Does that make sense?

the element of value. You might get angry about something where I'm like, "What's the fuss about?" And I get angry about something where you're like, "Eh, who cares?" But the value that we place on it will often be a cognitive element.

on? One of the things I think is interesting with strengths and values, though, is values work. In fact, in the meeting I had just before this one, the lady said that on the program she did with me, it was the values exercise that changed her life around. She'd been offered a role that she didn't think was for her, and she wasn't keen. She said it was the pointy end of mental health, and she didn't know if she wanted to be there again. But then she checked her values during this values exercise, and she realized that actually it was aligned to who she was. It took her where she is now, which she's absolutely loving, and it's shifted her life. I think most people know what values are. From a cognitive perspective, they can put a definition to it, your guiding principles or whatever. But stopping and asking yourself what your values are and whether you are living aligned to your values can be a really powerful conversation,

and your values, in theory, underpin everything you do. They underpin the decisions you make, how you reward yourself, everything. So I think values work and values activities can be really useful for helping somebody get to grips with who they are, what they stand for, how they want to live their life. Strengths for me are a tool that you might dial up or dial down depending on the situation. As an example, I have fairness as one of my top values. If I see something that is unfair, it causes me an emotional reaction. I have making a difference as one of my top values, so I want to make sure everything I do every day is about making a difference in the world, that ripple effect that we mentioned. But strengths are like the tools that I might bring in order to make that difference. So right now, for instance, I am using my strengths of narrator and spotlight. I'm telling you stories in answer to your questions. I'm in the spotlight. I'm on camera.

Those are strengths I'm dialing up right now to bring making a difference to life. But there might be other occasions where you dial up or dial down other strengths. All of those are in pursuit of my value of making a difference and my value of fairness, but I'm using different strengths in order to bring those values to life. So that's probably how I would decide what to do with a client. Emotions underpin everything I do. It's just part of it. Neuroscience underpins everything I do. But values and strengths: I love the strengths approach, because you will have many different strengths. I love the fact that the strengths you used this morning will be different from the ones you'll use this afternoon. You'll use certain strengths in a one-on-one coaching session that differ from those in a group session. You're more than just one or two things, and that's what I love about strengths. It's a bit like lights in

your house. I use the example of when you get home at night, you don't turn on every light in every room of the house. You turn on the ones that are suitable for what you're doing. If you're cooking, you want the kitchen lights on and the hob light on, because you want to see what you're doing. If you're watching a movie, you want the lights down low. If you're having a romantic dinner, you want candles. If you're reading a book in bed, you want your bedside light. Strengths for me are a bit like that. It's an opportunity to use your strengths to contribute the best you can to the situation you've got at the time.

strengths, as in that's my identity, and yet you will have many. I keep mine beside me. But I don't want to think that just my top ones are my identity. It's like tools in a toolkit. What's the analogy? If you've only got a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.

If you've only got action as a strength, then you're just getting on with stuff all the time, but you might not be thinking about it. You might not be looking at the big picture. So for me, strengths are about the different tools or the different lights that you turn on. One of the phrases I really love, and Robert Biswas-Diener talks about this a lot, is that strengths are not necessarily about your ability to shine. It's your ability to contribute. How are you using your strengths to contribute in your meeting today? Maybe the meeting you're in this morning requires your strength of counterpoint, because you want to challenge and offer a different viewpoint. But there might be a meeting later on

this afternoon where somebody needs to dial up their strength of compassion, because it's a one-on-one and somebody's going through something difficult. You don't want your counterpoint in that meeting. So that's what I love about strengths. It's not just identity. It's part of who you are, but it's really about dialing them up and down depending on what's needed in the situation.

values buttons pushed, if you like.

message that comes my way.

an inspiring summer break and all the best on your journey towards becoming an impactful coach. I'm Tobi, co-founder of metaFox. Hear you soon again here. Bye-bye.