Today we welcome Mollie West Duffy who is an expert in organizational design, development, and leadership coaching. She’s helped advise and coach leaders and founders at companies including Casper, Google, LinkedIn, Bungalow, and Slack. She’s experienced in designing talent processes and systems, as well as organizational structures and behaviors, cultural values, and learning and development programs. Mollie is the author of the Wall Street Journal bestselling book No Hard Feelings. Her most recent book with Liz Fosslien is called Big Feelings: How To Be Okay When Things Are Not Okay.

In this episode, I talk to Mollie West Duffy about how to navigate big feelings. Our emotion-phobic society has a lot of misconceptions about dealing with difficult emotions and what they mean. According to Mollie, big feelings can lead to a deeper understanding of ourselves if we sit with our emotions and work through them. Mollie and I share our personal experiences with depression and anxiety and how we coped. We also touch on the topics of anger, perfectionism, social comparison, burn out, and uncertainty.

Website: molliewestduffy.com

Twitter: @molliewest

Topics

01:43 Mollie and Liz’s collaborations

05:08 How Big Feelings was published

08:31 Our emotion-phobic society 

12:26 Illustrating emotions

15:13 Myths about big feelings

18:32 Emotional labor

21:14 Anxiety, uncertainty, resilience

25:03 Scott’s tips to manage anxiety

29:48 Separate the “withins” from the “beyonds”

32:14 Assess your tolerance of uncertainty

36:26 Embrace comparison 

43:00 Mollie’s tips to manage depression

48:30 Translate your anger

50:43 Perfectionism isn’t as helpful as we think