Speaking and Communicating Podcast

If you can look back and look at your responsibility in a situation, I looked back at my divorce and I was like, I didn't cheat, but I chose him.

So when I chose him, what was behind that decision to choose him as my husband?

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host, Robert and Leila.

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Now, let's get communicating with Kim Korte all the way from Napa in California.

She is a sensory perception and emotion management strategist.

Since we talk about communication, she's going to help us understand the flavors of our emotions.

Before I go any further, please help me welcome her to the show.

Hi, Kim.

Hello.

How are you?

I'm doing fantastic.

How are you doing?

Equally fantastic.

It's a great day.

It certainly is.

Thank you for being here.

Welcome.

Please tell our listeners a little bit about yourself.

I have a background that has nothing to do with emotions professionally.

I had a consulting business implemented, Procure to Pay Systems, ERPs for the real estate vertical, like large owners and operators of real estate.

But my interest in emotions came from personal reasons.

It was because of a lot of trauma.

You know, I was a kid in my teens, in my early 20s.

And it wasn't until I went through of extremely painful divorce, it was kind of like hitting rock bottom.

That was when I took a real interest in trying to figure out who I was, what my feelings were about, and how do I keep it from happening to me again?

Which you can't, right?

Like there's just no way.

We can't control other people as much as I would love to, because I do have a bit of a controlling personality.

Please, so I've been told.

As much as I would love to, I can't.

So I needed to figure my own stuff out.

That's really what got me started.

Based on the printful experiences you had, in wanting to learn about yourself, how did you discover that understanding your own emotions was a big part of that, of learning about yourself, who Kim is?

It's one of those things like you don't know what you don't know, right?

And so I thought I knew how I felt because I felt what I felt.

And then it wasn't until I went on this journey and I read this book called How Emotions Are Made, The Secret Life of the Brain.

And that was when things went like boom, crazy big for me because I just didn't understand how they worked.

And because of my systems implementation background and this love of process and procedures and repeatable processes, I understood like the brain has a process.

And then when I understood how much it controls our thinking, even our most logical thoughts are still directed by our feelings, are very much influenced by our feelings.

And then I started to really, really understand how it's a communication.

Emotions are our base communication.

There's a process, like I said, that it has where it's looking at all of the data coming into the brain.

We don't see with our eyes.

We don't hear with our ears.

We don't smell with our nose.

We do all of this with our brain.

Our whole world is inside of our brain.

And it shows us what we see.

It tells us what we smell.

And that's just the workings of the brain.

This is why we can think we see someone or something kind of smells like this, or we taste something, we taste it again.

It's a little different.

It's because the brain is constantly predicting.

For many good reasons, it's constantly ahead of the game predicting our experiences that we deem is real or that somehow we have control over.

And we do have control over it because we can be more conscious about our experiences.

But what the brain does with this information that comes in through all of these sensory systems and another system that we don't often think about, which is how we feel inside of our bodies.

And it uses it like ingredients to predict our emotions.

And predictions are based on all of our past experiences, which are kind of like recipes.

And so this is why I liken our internal communication as to it producing recipes and us tasting it.

Because when we experience feelings, it can be pushed down, right?

Like we may only feel certain feelings because we're in this habit of pushing them down.

And that's what I was.

I was a pusher downer, as I call them.

And it was when I understood that we can be better listeners to our body.

And then when we're better listeners to what our body is telling us, our brain is telling us, then we're actually able to know ourselves better and to identify our emotions better and define them better.

And then we actually have the ability to become better listeners to others because we're more in control.

Control is a difficult word, but we're more connected to how we feel, identify it so that in a hot conversation, we can say, oops, this is coming up.

I still need to pay attention to what's going on.

Not let our feelings rule what we hear, because that happens quite easily.

It does.

Like you're saying, if I understand myself, it helps me be a better listener with other people.

And we say that the first communication happens internally, as you've mentioned.

So the question is, do I feel first, and it creates a certain thought, or do I think a certain way, and it influences how I feel?

Which comes first, that I can sort of switch or have control over?

You know how motivational speakers can say, change your thoughts, then you'll feel better.

Or learn to feel better and do your priming exercises in the morning, and then your thoughts will improve.

So which one do I do first, and then it influences the other?

I think what I would like to do is kind of just go back and talk about what is a memory.

Because I think if you were to ask any neuroscience to this, they would say, our thoughts are the product of all of our memories.

So when we have a memory come up, it's going to include all of those sensory systems that I talked about.

What you saw, what you heard, maybe the music that was going on, who you were with, and how you were feeling.

Because feelings are a sensory system.

So when we create these memories, our feelings are a part of it.

So I'm going to say that our feelings drive, because we use our memories and our feelings are associated to them.

We use our feelings more to create the thought, more than the thought creates the emotion.

More often, you want to use like these great motivational speakers do, you want to use it to change your mood or to change your thoughts.

Like I use thoughts all the time to examine consciously like what is going on so that I'm reacting this way.

And that's the good part of thoughts.

But the majority of our non-consciously driven or unconsciously driven, the ones that come from the subconscious are a product more of emotion than thought, because the thoughts are product of emotion.

Does that make sense?

It does also especially because you tied it to the memory.

You know how a lot of the things we remember is because of how we felt at that moment.

If the emotion was very strong regarding that moment, be it a joyous one or a sad one, that's why the memory is so vivid.

Because it's how we felt that makes us remember, like I said, remember how things were, how they looked, everything, the smell, everything.

Because the emotion tied to it makes the memory so strong.

Yes.

And that's why it's so important.

And what I am very much about is being more proactive in the making of those memories.

I call them recipes because I talked about how all of these incoming sensory data is like ingredients.

And we have all these recipes in our head, these past experiences that the brain is going to use to launch our emotions.

And with that comes the thoughts, behaviors, and decisions.

And so when we're more proactive about examining what's going on, like take for instance, let's just say that we had a prior experience where our emotions were very high.

And so what that does, especially if it was a fear-based thing, because usually it is angry and underlying a lot of those quote unquote negative fears.

I'll talk about that in a minute.

But underlying those are fears, typically, the negative emotions.

Anger can be a fear of losing something or not having something, not everything, but I'm just saying a lot of it is.

And these emotions take our focus and narrow it on what we're angry at, on what we're fearful of, what is our pain point.

And that is the problem, because we lose sight of everything else that's going on around us.

And we are incapable of gathering it in that moment unless we consciously say, hey, I've got this feeling coming up and I'm angry at this person, but is there more to this story?

Is there more to this situation?

And I'm sure you've been in situations where someone's like, what did you just say?

I'm so mad at you for what you just said because they didn't hear you right.

And that's because of predictions of the brain.

They expected something from you or they see something and they're using their past experience to say, I don't like that.

Fill in the blank thinking what I'm saying is going a certain direction based on the past experience.

Right.

And so when you're more open and more curious about why am I feeling this way in this situation, it gives you the chance, the ability to bring in more of the current ingredients on the outside of this world.

And what's going on around you that might change that feeling.

It's just like getting more information.

It's really about learning because that's really what memories are.

It's what we've learned.

It's our experiences.

It's our belief systems.

It's what we've been taught.

And so I'm really about engaging more curiosity so that we can make better decisions so that we can maybe change our emotions in that moment, because it's like you tasted something and you thought it was spicy, and you tasted it again and you're like, oh, wait, it's not as hot.

And it's that kind of re-evaluation that a lot of us don't take up that moment to engage in.

Especially because we live in a world now where just express yourself, express yourself, whether we express ourselves in anger or whatever it is, that is good to a certain extent, but in the way that we articulate how we feel, we haven't mastered that art because we are just in this whole, just throw everything away and express yourself.

Well, and just have a few emotions, right?

It's like we go to anger.

I see that on the news all the time.

People go from zero to anger pretty quickly.

They don't realize that there's a whole array of emotions that fit into that.

Kind of, I like to use the example of a pepper.

So a pepper can be mild or sweet, like a red or yellow bell pepper, or it can be a habanero pepper that's so spicy your mouth melts.

And so we have problems now distinguishing our emotions because we just feel them without thinking, or we feel them and we don't realize that we can get them wrong.

I gave you the example earlier of if you saw somebody and you got mistaken it or you thought you heard someone say something and that's not what they said, or you tasted something and you expected it to be spicy, so that's what you tasted and then you taste it again and it's more mild.

Well, the same thing happens with our emotions.

We have expectations and we meet those expectations, but it's only when we can, like I said before, take a second taste of them, that we are able to get out of our emotional rut.

Because if we don't like how we feel, you have to educate your brain to feel differently.

It's like learning how to taste food and distinguish the differences in flavors.

If we can distinguish the differences in our emotions, then we have a much better ability to identify them, but also the long-term ramifications.

Because emotions filter, prioritize, they tell you what is important, what's not important, what's serious, what's trivial, and that plays into our decision-making.

Without those feelings, we would just be lost in a perpetual loop and never be able to get to a point where we could make a decision, unless we leaned into our feelings.

Because even the most logical of decisions, in the end, is the one that feels right.

Yes.

And we actually do say, hey, check how you feel.

If it really feels right, then that's the right decision for you.

Yeah.

Well, yeah.

And what are you using?

So the system inside of our body that is responsible for our ability to feel is called interoception.

It's kind of like the sense of taste, because taste uses multiple sensory systems.

Interoception is the product of the brain telling us how to feel based on multiple sensory systems, right?

All of this incoming data.

And so our ability to taste something, like we can improve our palate.

Well, we can improve our connection to this, I call it our internal palate, our emotional palate, to this feeling state, because emotions are a chemical.

It's literally, the neuron produces a peptide and it gets delivered to the body, and then we have the emotion.

But it's another step for us to feel it.

I'm going back to the pushing down, because in my life, I learned how to push emotions down.

And now that I'm able to connect to them better, I'm able to distinguish them and distinguish situations where it might be really similar, but it's not.

There's fine details that make it different.

Once again, using food just to make it relatable.

If you were to have three buckets of vanilla ice cream in front of you, and you tasted each one, they all have almost the exact same ingredients, but there's going to be fine differences.

One might have a higher quality cream, not quite as sweet.

The other one might have a stronger vanilla flavor, and the other one might be a little bit less quality cream, almost a little bit more icy.

And yet, they're all the same, but they're different.

And when we can recognize that in situations, that gives us what I think is lacking in the world, the ability to have critical thinking.

And just by recognizing your emotions with that much detail, with that much distinction, I should say.

Taking time to reflect.

You mentioned earlier when we started that you were in an abusive situation.

I'm sorry about that.

No, he wasn't abusive.

It was just a horrible divorce.

I mean, he cheated on me.

And in the process, we had two businesses together, which were tied to his practice.

He was a chiropractor.

So I lost a lot in one fell swoop.

Oh, that's so bad.

Would you say that the emotions tied to that experience, if you experience something similar after the divorce, do those triggers go back to that?

If it's something similar, because sometimes you say, I am triggered just because this experience reminds me of an emotion I felt when I had a similar experience.

Right.

And so this is where we go into that detail.

Because when you say you're triggered, I still have little triggers.

I'm married again, and I have a wonderful husband.

He's the salt of the earth.

I didn't think my last husband would cheat, but I know this one is just such a good soul.

He does some things sometimes that trigger me.

When I say it triggers me, it reminds me of a situation, but then I can distinguish that situation from my ex-husband, from him.

While the feeling can still come up because it's very deep, when it comes up, I'm able to notice it for what it is, and that it has everything to do about my past, and not about the present situation.

This has to do with lots of things because my mom was an alcoholic.

In certain situations, I have to be mindful when something comes up, because the brain is just trying to help you out, and I have less of these triggering situations because I have that distinction in my brain.

I have that remodeling or redoing of the recipe, or just like there's thousands of pasta dishes, but we can tell the difference between spaghetti and rigatoni, or spaghetti with marinara or a cream sauce, and so it's not treating every dish like it's the same pasta, is what I'm talking about.

So yeah, I do get triggered.

I have plenty of things in my past to trigger me on, but I have that now where I realize like, oh no, this is the past.

There's nothing really going on here that equates to that behavior, because it's not him, it's me.

I'm the one with the recipes.

He's providing the ingredients, but it's what I do with them.

And you've given us so many food metaphors in your latest book, Yucky Yummy Savory Sweet, Understanding The Flavors Of Emotions.

You share a process that helps us make sense of our feelings.

So in all of these, like you said, ingredients, all these recipes, what are some strategies in your book that you share that can help people once they look inward, reflect and say, hey, wait a minute, what's going on here?

Why am I feeling this way?

What are these emotions?

Like you just mentioned, you don't want the experiences with your ex-husband to now bring them into this marriage because this husband is a different person.

Yes.

What can we do to then not drag the baggage of emotions from the last experience and just keep repeating history?

Well, the first thing is you got to want to change them.

You want to have a different expectation with the world.

So what you felt yesterday in that situation, you're going to feel today and you're going to feel tomorrow unless you actively change it.

I know it's fantastic to blame other people, but it's up to us to do it.

The other thing is we have to realize that feelings aren't facts.

They are just a feeling that's coming up that might be similar to a prior situation where this existed.

The brain is just making its best guess.

I keep going back to if you see someone you think it's Joe and it's Steve or it's not Joe, it's some stranger, your brain got it wrong and it does a prediction correction.

And so it allows it then to use that for the future.

If we're not helping our brain to make better predictions, we're going to keep getting the same thing over and over again.

We're going to experience the same problem.

So wanting to do it is really important.

And then for a lot of people, connecting to how you feel inside.

And it's easy to do the big ones, like I said, because they get pent up, like your body needs to release.

It's talking to you and you're ignoring it.

So all of a sudden you get the big bursts of anger or you get the big bursts of you fall in love real easily.

You go from 0 to 100.

Well, connecting to how you feel on a more consistent basis, not when the body is just talking loud, but when it's whispering to you, when it's just saying, hey, you need to think about this or hey, look at this or here, feel me here because I'm trying to tell you something.

When you can hear more of the whispers, you're better off.

So that's why for people who have that trouble, I would say practice just feeling, noticing little things like what are the flavors in your food?

That's a use of multiple sensory systems, just like feelings are.

What does it feel like when it goes inside of your body?

How can you describe that?

Can you feel your heartbeat?

So just sit.

I was in an interview with someone else and he touched his heart.

It was so cute.

I'm like, no, no, no.

I said, just sit there and try and connect to your heart and see if you can feel it pounding.

Then once you start to feel it pounding for fun, time it, count how many you feel in 15 seconds, and then take your pulse or touch your heart and see how many times you feel it.

That's just getting the basic connection, kind of amping it up.

Then I call it an emotion chef progression, because these food metaphors make it really easy for people to relate to emotions.

As you progress, then you're able to notice your feeling in a situation, and then say, okay, well, what's going on and question the feeling.

Even if you don't question it at that point in time, if you can reflect on what was going on and kind of work that muscle, so to speak, just like a sommelier kind of tastes wine over and over again to get all those nuanced flavors, you just keep trying it over and over again, and then all of a sudden you recognize the feeling that at the same time, you start giving yourself different recipes.

You feel the big feeling, you notice it, and then you say, okay, I need to be curious about what's going on here.

And so that takes your field of vision from very narrow to much wider.

You know how sometimes something horrible happens and we feel bad or angry, whatever it is, and then somebody will say, looking back in five years, you will laugh at this.

So now it feels angering and frustrating, but then five years, which means my feelings in five years about the exact situation would be, oh man, remember how silly that was when you were saying that feelings are not facts.

So the situation hasn't changed, but why is it that five years later, I can look back at it and just have a good laugh about it?

Well, I think it would only be for those who have learned something from it, right?

And who maybe they were very upset and felt badly about it, like I used to beat myself up at clients if I made a mistake, and I would just go over it and over it and over it again.

But now I have a lot more grace for myself, and I'm like, gosh Kim, you're human.

I had a client once say, man, you're harder on yourself than you are on other people.

And it really took me back because I didn't think I was hard on anybody.

So I learned how to not take everything to heart.

And so when you learn from your mistakes or you learn from situations, then you can look back on it.

I can look back on my first marriage differently because I learned a lot from it.

And I'm certainly not going to put myself in that situation.

But how many people don't?

How many people look back and are still mad at their brother or sister because they got this or that?

You know what I mean?

It's like, they're still upset with the friend who did them wrong.

Like, they had no responsibility in the situation at all.

I talk about this in the book too.

I talk about a lot of stuff.

But one of the things that is really helpful in any situation, if you can look back and look at your responsibility in a situation, because that's where the real learning comes.

I looked back at my divorce and I was like, I didn't cheat, I didn't do this, I didn't do that, but I chose him.

When I chose him, what was behind that decision to choose him as my husband?

That made me want to examine more closely who I was picking in the future.

Being humble enough to say, hey, we make mistakes, my feelings aren't facts, I have a role in this, is what changes your past view of life.

If you don't change that, nothing changes.

Absolutely.

Words of wisdom from Kim Korte, the sensory perception and emotion management strategist, bestselling author of Yucky Yummy Savory Sweet, Understanding The Flavors Of Emotions.

Thank you so much, Kim, for helping us understand ourselves through taking the time to understanding our emotions, especially even with decision-making, we usually make decisions based on how we feel.

Yes, I know some people who would say, oh no, it was 100% logic.

And I'm like, I'm sorry, but not.

You believe that?

Thank you very much.

And before you go, please tell our listeners where they can find the book and where they can find you your website and your social media handles.

Gladly.

I have a podcast called Flavors Of Emotions.

And that is on all the podcast players, the major ones, and on YouTube.

And I can be found at kimkorte.com, kimkorte.com.

I'm probably most active on Instagram and LinkedIn and YouTube.

So at The Kim Korte, you can find me even on Facebook too, at The Kim Korte.

At The Kim Korte and kimkorte.com.

Please log on to Instagram and LinkedIn in order to get in touch with Kim.

Thank you very much.

This has been a very eye-opening conversation, especially when it comes to emotions, because there's a lot of discussion around them.

And I think that sometimes we really need to take a look at ourselves.

So thank you for being here today.

If we don't change the conversation, if we're not listening, no one else can help you.

Yes, especially as you said, take responsibility instead of blaming the other person as a, he made me angry, he made me do this, he did this.

And that's why I'm like, you know, usually we always feel justified to shift the blame, because at that moment, we feel a certain way.

Kim Korte, thank you so much.

Thank you for joining us on the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

Once again, please log on to Apple and Spotify, leave us a rating and a review and what you'd like for us to discuss on the show that will be of benefit to you.

We encourage you to continue to get communicating and let us know how communication skills continue to improve your life professionally and personally.

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