Melody Wilding: How do you become fully confident and in control of your emotions and experience at work? It’s by mastering your own psychology and that of others. On this show, we decode the science of success, exploring how to get out of your own way and advance your career to new levels without becoming someone you’re not.

I’m Melody Wilding, bestselling author, human behavior professor and award winning executive coach. Get ready and let’s put psychology to work for you.

Have you ever felt like your emotions get the better of you at work? Maybe you have snapped at a colleague during a stressful project. Maybe you have felt overwhelmed to the point of tears after a tough meeting. We have all been there. I know I have at one point or another, yet most of us are never taught how to handle our emotions in a healthy way, let alone in a professional setting.

And today I have someone who is going to help us change that. I am excited to have my friend, my colleague, Jay Moon Fields here on the podcast. She is a leading embodiment educator and expert in emotion regulation. So whether you are someone who wants to be able to improve your emotional intelligence, build better relationships with your colleagues, or just Simply feel more in control of your emotions during the day.

Then we have a lot of great stuff in store for you today. So Jay, welcome. I am so excited to have you here.

Jay Moon Fields: Thank you, Melody. I’m so excited this is happening as well.

Melody Wilding: Yes. Yeah. It’s been a long time coming and I want to start with your title. Because you call yourself an Embodiment Educator. And I have to say you are the first Embodiment Educator we’ll have on the show.

And actually the first Embodiment Educator I have ever met. So I would love to hear from you, like what exactly does that mean?

Jay Moon Fields: Good question. I often also call myself a somatic coach. That’s a little coming into the vernacular a little bit more as well. So I’ll, go from there and then weave in embodiment.

So. Soma comes from the Greek word, body. So a somatic coach or an embodiment educator is someone who keeps the body as part of the conversation when I’m working with an individual or with a group. So, so much of the information that we get about, Our own experience comes through our body and if we’re only living from the neck up for only in our head spinning around or overthinking things as I know both of our clients share that or our clients share that in common with the overthinking, then we’re missing signals that give us really good information about, what the situation is, how we should respond, we’re missing connection with our resources. There’s so much about being able to be present in your experience is where you actually get access to things like courage and emotional regulation and the ability to empathize and connect with other people.

That’s all happening in our bodies. So an embodiment coach or educator is someone who helps other people have the sense of being present in their body to be able to start navigating how to, be with the difficult emotions that show up there, but also how to use the resources and the intelligence that’s in the body.

Melody Wilding: Yeah. And that’s, this is, great. Cause I am, one of those in my head people. I have a lot of trouble. listening to my body. I override a lot of what it tells me, even to the point where I started going to physical therapy for this injury I’ve had for a long time. And they ask you a lot of questions around well, where do you feel?

Does it feel like shooting or throbbing or? And I, it takes me so long to answer because I, truly, I don’t know. I’m so disconnected from my body. I’m so up in my head all of the time, and this is truly a skill. And so I completely understand why you need a coach. It really,

Jay Moon Fields: is. Yeah. One of the first places I always start on a discovery call is essentially asking the person, you know, what’s the most prominent sensation you can feel right now.

and just for me to get a sense of do they have access to a felt sense of themselves, you know, and sometimes it’s as simple as my hands are cold. oftentimes people will talk about, I can feel the waist of my pants, you know, like cutting into my stomach or something like that.

Something that we don’t think of as being embodied, awareness, but that is. Part of you, you know, right now, do you notice if your left legs is crossed over your right or your right over your left? Or, you know, you sitting more onto your, I always lean left, you know, just kind of noticing does the back, does your back touch the chair you’re sitting in?

Are you leaning forward? Simple things like, Just what do you, where do you feel pressure of things that aren’t your body touching your body is a place to start because like you said, so many people really don’t have access to things that are more subtle than that. you know, is it, tingling or is it, like pressure, that sort of thing?

People aren’t necessarily clued in on that level.

Melody Wilding: Yeah. And so why, does this matter? At work because you, your fellow LinkedIn learning instructor, you do, you work with a lot of professionals. You’ve done talks at big conferences and for companies. And so what’s the connection?

Jay Moon Fields: Well, I, mentioned it a little bit ago, but, research and neuroscience tells us that if you have embodied self awareness, which is different than conceptual self awareness.

So conceptual self awareness is you thinking about yourself and your experience. Which is what you do over thinkers do and thinkers in general, there’s nothing wrong about having conceptual self awareness, but embodied self awareness is you experiencing yourself. So it is those things like temperature pressure.

where do you feel your clothing, touch your skin, your breath, all those things that can tell you about a read on your body in the present moment. If you have access to that, what the research shows is that, you have more. Access to, your whole brain, like an integrated brain, you’re better at being able to regulate your nervous system.

And then from that, you have more access to those things that I was saying, like courage, empathy, the ability to connect with others, emotional regulation, creativity, like all these, All of these, the qualities of a really good human being and the qualities of a really good fill in the blank of whatever your role is, requires that kind of, those kinds of inner resources, like the things that make us truly great humans, aren’t just in our brain.

Melody Wilding: That’s so interesting. I would have, that’s something I would never have thought about before. Really? Things that make us truly great humans. Are not in our brains. Well, let me,

Jay Moon Fields: yeah, let me, well, I’ll give an example of it that I often give is this isn’t like a specific to work, but if you think of being around someone who you think of as being really embodied and that’s different than being mindful, like mindful as someone who’s present and we tend to think of that in like meditation, someone who’s mindful, we think they’re calm, but if you think of someone who’s really embodied and most of the time, it’s not a grownup, Like most people will go, Oh yeah, my, my kid or my niece or my nephew, like they’re just in their body and they’re present.

there is some life force that you feel when you’re around people who are embodied or I mean, do you have someone in mind that you think of who’s an embodied person?

Sometimes it’s difficult to come up with one.

Melody Wilding: Yeah, I’m trying, to think I, I don’t, the best, thing I can come up with is I’ve had great yoga instructors in the past.

Who you just, there was a different sense about them and I’m sure, and you’re also trained as a yoga instructor, right?

Jay Moon Fields: Yeah. For 20, 25 years now,

Melody Wilding: that’s, sort of the first person who comes.

Jay Moon Fields: Could you name it? what’s the sense, what do you feel when you’re around them?

Melody Wilding: Grounded, She safe.

also in, I don’t know, inspired or moved. Yeah. Like she had a way of kind of, how do I say this? talking in a way that would move the energy through the room. That’s I that’s so nonspecific, but that’s the best way I can describe it. But you just, she was, very captivating. She was very captivating.

I think because her, her being embodied in herself also to me had a big display of confidence, you know?

Jay Moon Fields: Yeah, yes. Yeah, I would. I’m, so glad that you had an experience of some of you could bring to mind because I think there’s confidence comes through when someone’s embodied. Warmth. you mentioned safety because there’s a sense of.

Of this person is here, this person can feel me. And I think this is one of the things I talk about with my clients a lot of the time, because my clients, they’ll, they come to me and they’re with their professional settings. And, a lot of my clients are also entrepreneurs, but a lot of the times we end up actually talking about their relationships across the board, whether it’s professional, personal with their families.

And one of the things I tell them is if you can’t feel you, no one else can feel you either. And there’s something to be said for, you know, showing up with the right answer and being a hard worker and all that, but there’s. Nothing like being able to truly feel someone and like to feel their commitment, to feel their groundedness, to feel their passion for something.

And so I think when we talk about feelings, we often are talking about emotions and you know, how do we, not show our emotions or how do we navigate them or how do we make sure that they don’t take over when we’re at work? But there’s the other side of things, which is. This feeling sense, you know, like when you talked about your yoga teacher, I could see it change you like your, face softened and you know, you got like softer in your chest and that sense of like you just thinking of her made you more embodied and that, that capacity to feel oneself rubs off on other people.

Melody Wilding: And I think, you know, certainly when we’re talking about our personal relationships, but also when we’re talking about our professional relationships, I think people want to be felt. Yeah. Well, especially now when we’re all so disconnected, whether it is, you know, you and I were talking about this before we started recording where we’re, recording this, it will air later, but we’re recording this the day after, well, the day the election results have come in.

And so there’s a lot of different feelings. There’s a lot of division happening right now. There’s a lot of disconnection in various ways. And for the most part, we’re all still working remotely distributed hybrid. And it is harder to connect. And so before we get into, cause I do want to talk about how, do you, connect more with yourself and get more of that felt sense of self?

But what are your thoughts on how do you use this tool in this environment we can’t be with people in real time or in person.

Jay Moon Fields: The tool of embodiment.

Melody Wilding: Yeah. Yeah.

Jay Moon Fields: Well, I think first and foremost, it’s about your relationship with yourself. You know, it’s about what you said, if you know, you’re going through your days and you can’t feel you, then it’s, a, there’s a quality of self abandonment to that.

and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way or, there’s something wrong with you for saying, well, I, I don’t, you know, I’m not that aware of my body, but there’s the sense of I think people feel alone a lot. And I think it’s partly because they’re also not connected to themselves. So even if you’re not around other people, you can be connected.

It’s just not the default setting for most of us. The default setting is production. And, you know, doing, and so how to begin accessing this tool is, simply to begin by wanting to make a felt connection with yourself in throughout your day. And so, you know, there’s, mindfulness practices that people think of in terms of, you know, meditation or breathing work.

And though in somatic experience or somatic coaching, we, do a little breath work and meditation and stuff. The foundation of the work that I teach is around, creating felt resources and felt resources are, they’re really simple. They’re things like it can be rubbing your hands together, you know, just when I do this.

There’s a sound that I hear there’s my super dry skin that I feel in my, you know, there’s the temperature of my hands that I’m aware of. And just this simple movement of rubbing my hands together suddenly reminds me. I have an actual body. And then sometimes I realized, Oh gosh, my bladder is really full.

Now I have to go pee, right? there’s the, things that we do throughout our day, that if we’re not in our body, we don’t realize we’re hungry. We’re thirsty. We have to pee that sort of thing. So felt resource is something really simple that helps you feel in the present moment, in a way that is neutral or pleasant.

I also have a little stone here. I often, when I’m, on zoom or in a recording like this, an interview, I often hold a little stone in my hand because there’s a really pleasing sensation to having this smooth stone and it feeling it heat up in my hand over time, you know, it’s cold when I first pick it up and it’s the temperature of my hand.

So a felt resource is. Are these little things that you can do in real time when you’re around people that don’t necessarily know that you’re doing it, but you know, when you’re doing it, it’s a, it’s an anchor for you to stay in your body. It could be wiggling your toes. It could be, you know, people get a bad rap in meetings and stuff for fidgeting with their pen.

but if you know that you’re doing it. And there’s something about it that’s pleasant for you, then it’s considered a felt resource. If you don’t know that you’re doing it, or I’m like, let me reach for my pen, or you’re doing it in such a way that it agitates you, you know, like sometimes you’re like, or the cookie, you know, if you don’t know that you’re doing it, or there’s something about doing it, that’s more agitating, then that’s not considered a felt resource.

Being, you know, consciously holding your pen in such a way that you’re feeling, Oh, this is the difference between the grippy part and the smooth plasticky part. You know, can you, see, as I’m doing that, or even just watching me do that, that all there’s a sense of sensation and having a body again.

Melody Wilding: And I do that too. I keep this little marker with me and I, like fidget with, I put the cap on and off and on and off. And it’s just like this ritual that. It just soothes me.

Jay Moon Fields: It soothes you.

Yeah, because we’re talking here at the level of the nervous system, really right, whether you would use that language or not, people typically have a sense of it soothes me or it agitates me.

And if you are consciously doing something to soothe you, it can even be like, sometimes the, like rocking. You know, I wouldn’t do it when I’m on a, on a call like this, but I oftentimes when I’m like writing or trying to think through what I want to say, I’ll notice myself just kind of rocking back and forth.

Cause there’s, I mean, there’s a reason we put babies in rocking chairs. It’s soothing.

Melody Wilding: And one thing you also talk about, you were mentioning the nervous system and I only know a little bit about this, but you talk about polyvagal theory. Yeah. Okay. And so it sounds like a really intimidating term. It does sound very science y.

Can you tell us more about what that is and how it connects to what we’re talking about managing your nervous system?

Jay Moon Fields: Yeah. on a super high level without getting into the super, science y things about it, what I will say about it is this. Polyvagal theory is. It a way, something that expands our understanding of the nervous system, because we used to think the nervous system really had the two kind of stress functions, the activation to go into fight or flight.

If we, felt that we were in threat threatened, or that more like freeze shut down, if we felt like we were truly in danger. That our life was in danger. and a guy named Stephen Porges came along and discovered that there is really a third function to the nervous system. And it’s the social engagement system.

So social engagement is, what happens in our nervous system when we do feel safe. You know, the fight, flight, or freeze, all those things are things that we, our nervous system does in response to threat or danger. But we’re not always in threat and danger. So the social engagement system is when our nervous system is considered regulated.

So that, that means it’s, not in response to something to save our life, but, operating in its, they call it like the window of tolerance where you’re, in a, I’m safe. I’m okay. I don’t need to be in response here. And so polyvagal theory simply says that, we naturally move through these different states.

And that’s a good thing. we can’t always be in social engagement, but the idea is that, once you have to rev up to activate for something, let’s say that you have a big meeting in the afternoon, you have to present to the board or, you know, high stake stuff where you’re, I can imagine people are listening right now.

Just thinking about that, you start to feel the, you know, the tension in your chest, your breath wants to go shallow. You might feel your heartbeat. Heart rate increase. that is a stress response. That’s you’re activating to kind of, show up, step, step into it. You know how people sometimes say I can’t tell if I’m nervous or scared or excited or scared.

It’s the same kind of energy. So. Of course your nervous system responds to kind of activate you and to do that. But what you want is that then when you get home in the evening, you can come back down, you can go back to a place where you’re in that socially engaged state and you can have dinner with your family and, you know, laugh and ask your kids what their day was like.

And you don’t have to drink a bottle of wine or you don’t have to stay in that high rev where you’re, short and curt and cutting, cutting your, The husband off and telling your kids to be quiet. Cause you can’t stand it. You know, like all the things we do when we’re agitated. So what we’re looking for is this, I, this, you know, ability to come up and down and regulate ourselves back to that place where we can look around and say, you know what, in this moment, I am safe.

I’m okay. There’s no threat to respond to so that your nervous system can respond to that. And then you have access again, to that, all the things that make us great humans, you know, the ability to connect, the ability to be curious, the ability to be creative, all these things that we don’t have to be silly, to be playful, right?

Like silly and playfulness and laughter goes right out the door first. Anytime

we’re feeling stressed.

Melody Wilding: It’s true. It’s true. And I want to go back to what you were mentioning some of those just like really simple practices, like rubbing your hands together, you know, having the pen in your hands.

Like I said, you have a lot of really excellent LinkedIn learning courses, and I want to encourage everyone to check them out. And in one of those, you talk about different somatic approaches and I think it’s orienting, grounding, centering.

Jay Moon Fields: Yeah.

Melody Wilding: So can you walk us through that? And how we might apply it for ourselves.

Jay Moon Fields: Yeah, great. So grounding, centering, and orienting are all what I would call felt resources. So I was talking about the felt resources before. Those are things that help you to be in your body in the present moment in a way that’s either pleasant or neutral. Now, grounding, centering, and orienting. What’s grounding for me might not be grounding for you.

and the story I often share is one time I was, it was worth a group of people and I had them place their feet on the ground, which is typically a grounding exercise, right? Feel the soles of your feet on the ground. And then I said, imagine that it’s not just the ground underneath of you, but it’s the whole planet.

You know, and that there’s all this, there’s, the layers of dirt and there’s the layers of, you know, all the different magma and everything. And afterwards I asked people if they felt more grounded in this, every, you know, most people are like, Oh yes, it feels so good. And it feels so good to feel myself in, my mind’s eye against this giant planet.

And then one guy raised his hand and he said, I have a dirt phobia. And that made me really activated and super stressed out. And I was like, never thought about that one. Of course. Right. So what makes one person feel grounded might not make another person feel grounded. And similarly, what I might call grounding, you might call centering.

So the names themselves don’t really matter so much is what is your experience of it? So grounding, like I said, typically is things like feel, your feet on the ground, feel your, seat in the chair, put your hands on the ground, you know, sometimes just Reach bending over and placing my hands on the ground.

Helps this sitting on the ground, laying on your back on the ground. Those are all things that people would consider grounding centering. Again, it depends on the person. for me to center, the most basic piece is I put my hands. Stacked on top of each other on my chest. Some people like it hand one, one on belly, one on chest, both on belly, but this sense of coming back to your own center.

Another way to do that is hands pressed together, like in a prayer position and imagining that you really are meeting the two sides of your body right there in the center of you, breathing your arms overhead and bringing your hands back down through the center line of your body. All these things that might, and then orienting is actually one that most people, unless, you’ve done somatic stuff, haven’t necessarily heard about, but I love it because it’s super simple. And for those people who have a harder time kind of sensing more nuanced things. Orienting can be an easier practice to, to engage with.

And orienting is what it sounds like. It’s simply looking around the space you’re in. So it can be like, I have a window in front of me, so it could be turning to look. Look out the window. It could be moving your eyes around the room you’re in and looking for five things that are green or five things that are blue.

it can be noticing even without looking around, feeling where you are in relationship to the door of your room, feeling where you are in relationship to the person you love the most. Right? Like maybe they’re in the house with you, maybe they’re across town, maybe they’re in another country, but there’s a felt sense of you being able to orient yourself in space to something else.

So I’m curious as I describe those, did you feel anything as I was talking about those or?

Melody Wilding: Yeah, I was thinking through a lot of the examples and also how personally I might do some of those things. And not have connected why I was doing them. So even just realizing if you’re in a tense meeting and you might like, I don’t know, put, your hands like this or not, recognizing maybe I’m subconsciously, you know, maybe my subconscious is speaking to me and that’s how I’m grounding myself.

and I also, yeah, I mean, working from home and being on a computer all day, I have these moments where I’ll sort of gain awareness very quickly and realize I’ve been sitting in a very uncomfortable position and then I’ll have to melt my hips into the chair, make sure my back is flat against the chair instead of me up on the edge of it and my neck forward.

And it’s all right. It’s all of those moments that when you catch yourself and again, I don’t know if that those would be centering or grounding or orienting. but I think, what I’m taking away from this is it’s, a positive that I go to those naturally, but I, need to make them more of a regular thing.

Habit and be more conscious. I love that. Yeah. Of these are my resources. This is what’s available to me when I feel myself kind of internally spinning out or speeding up.

Jay Moon Fields: Right. Right. I love that. That it is, something like, yay, you get to pat yourself on the back that your body and your brain are already doing these things for you naturally.

And if you bring more attention to them, you do them consciously. You set a timer to go off once an hour to remind you like. Get up and shake your arm. I mean, it can, it, the thing is, none of these things are fancy, which I love about them. You know, it could be that you get up and you, shake another really great nervous system reset is to go and splash cold water on your face.

The mammalian dive response, it helps us like to kind of take a big reset breath. And, like all these little ways that throughout your day, you get the reminder of just being 30 seconds. Do something that you feel your body. I do it when I, like I, my husband makes fun of me cause I love to go get the mail.

my desk is sitting, I look out to the front, window of the house. And so I know when the mail comes and I get so excited cause it means I can get up from my damn desk and go breathe some fresh air, walk through the front yard, pick around in the garden a little bit. So those little things like making the more conscious that it’s not, it’s not just that it’s nice to get up and move away from your desk. It’s like there is actual science behind you becoming more embodied, helps you to regulate your emotions, helps you to gain perspective again, helps to, reintegrate your brain. So you’re not in that weird critter brain that we get into when we’re in stress.

and I wanted to say one more thing about the orienting piece, because I think this is really interesting when you were bringing up the, Polyvagal theory. And you said that sounds like a big, scary scientific word. So polyvagal comes, it’s referring to the vagus nerve. And, if your listeners Google the vagus nerve and look for a picture of it is huge.

It’s the biggest nerve in our body. And vagus comes from the same Latin word for vagabond. So the root means to wander. So the vagus nerve wanders all through, like from your neck down into your chest and all through your viscera and your guts and the. The part of your vagus nerve where it’s at its most thick, because it starts to branch off the part of where it says it most thick is in your neck.

And when this part of your vagus nerve gets stimulated, it is directly related to the social engagement system. Part of your nervous system, the part that helps us feel more regulated and engaged. So the reason I’m mentioning that is because turning your head to look around the room to take your gaze off of the room.

A computer or a screen. Actually, I mean, just turning your head can help stimulate, You just took a deep breath. Like that, like you, if you get a deep breath, a sigh, a swallow, a yawn, that’s all indication or gurgle in your tummy that your parasympathetic nervous system is coming on board and helping to, calm and relax you.

So anything like you can massage your neck, humming, singing. making sound. one of my favorites is wow. Wow. Wow. Allison, because you’re stretching your jaw. I’m a jaw clencher. So stretching your jaw, getting your neck, stimulated. So anything that’s going to stimulate in this area, whether it’s sound touch or movement, really helpful.

That’s why every, I think people love like, Oh, come by and rub my neck. You know, it’s like good reason.

Melody Wilding: Yeah. And again, just going back to what you said before that none of these require you to take a 20 minute timeout meditation or nap or. Buy something fancy. these are really, simple micro things you can do.

Right. And you said the there’s disproportionate gain from that, which is, yeah, I mean, it, it really is the, psychology and the neuroscience behind it is just, what

Jay Moon Fields: I love about them too, is you can do them with your eyes open in real time around other people. Like when I get nervous, I wiggle my toes.

You can’t tell if I’m wiggling my toes. But I know I’m wiggling my toes and part of me is doing that because I’m trying to ground myself and feeling my feet reminds me Oh, yeah There’s a me between here in the soles of my feet and I’m in like I often Will talk to my clients about being the one behind your own eyes like there’s a going back to like confidence connection all these things that are possible when you can feel yourself with yourself, being behind your own eyes. And it doesn’t like automatically make life stressors go away and it doesn’t make your emotions suddenly oh, I’m always calm.

But what it does is it makes it so that you’re not alone with it and that you do have, you are plugged into the very aspects of you that could help you in those moments, as opposed to just like holding your breath and waiting till you get home from work and hoping it goes away.

Melody Wilding: Right. Or feeling just out of control in a situation.

Like everything is happening to me and I have no agency or control in this situation versus when you can feel yourself and you’re regulating things in your body, you have a bit of that agency and, almost like personal power in that situation, however small, yeah, however small it might be. But that’s important when you feel like there’s just chaos.

Jay Moon Fields: Right. Cause the not feeling like you have control over that experience is trauma. That’s trauma. The, feeling that you could bring yourself, if you were activated at a level five, if you could, hold a smooth stone or go splash water in your face and feel that you’re a 4. 7. That counts. That gives your brain the message.

Oh, wait, I do have some agency here. I do have some power over how I feel and what my experience is because so many of us, especially sensitive people go through the world feeling like the world is happening to us. And then we don’t have a say in our own experience and all of this stuff. I know we don’t have time, but all of this stuff is important.

the somatic approach is so, so, so powerful for people who identify as being, highly sensitive or emotionally sensitive, because you have superpowers in that. I know, you just wrote a post about that sensitivity is a necessary superpower, but your capacity to feel will help you in a somatic approach.

And then if you know how to find feeling resources, that’s Huge for people who are sensitive.

Melody Wilding: But that you, hit the nail on the head, that the key is you have the capacity. It’s how you choose to manage and use it. Yes. And that’s what’s so powerful about this is you’re giving us keys and you’re giving us strategies.

For better managing and channeling that capacity. We do have, yeah. And so Jay, you have a program called yours truly. Can you tell us a little bit more about it? Cause I know you have poured your heart and soul into this program and it’s so relevant to everything we’ve also just been talking about today.

Jay Moon Fields: Yeah, it’s completely relevant. And we’ve been kind of talking about one. Of the three pillars in it, I would say. So yours truly is my, signature course. The 20 plus years of my work has gone into creating it as a DIY course. You can take it on your own and it really is to help people have the skillset they need to become a, become an ally to themselves and, I’m like, I get so excited. I don’t even know where to start. we, it starts by looking at how do you grow more of an embodied sense of awareness. How do you find the resources that work for you? And then we use that foundation of what your nervous system, how your nervous system can be your ally instead of trip you up to look at what was the conditioning you got around being a good person in relationships.

Cause our clients, we have very similar clients are smart people who are sensitive and they do really, well at what they’ve been trained at. And you, if you got trained to be a people pleaser or you got trained to not put yourself first or all these different, you know, if you got trained to not feel your feelings, if you got trained to be smart instead of showing Your whole self and your heart, then that’s going to come through in your work and your relationship.

So we use understanding how to regulate your nervous system, have resources to then go in and look at how do you change to healthier sets of behaviors that are in alignment with your values as a grown person, not what you got trained to be in your family setting and your community. Growing up.

So it’s really like we, we look at the nervous system embodiment. We look at what did you get trained to do and what’s the healthy thing. And then the third part of it is, skill building and language because the language that you learned as a people pleaser or the language that you learned in the conditioning, you got sounds different than the language that you would speak as a person who is your own ally and on your own side and embodied way and in a relational way.

so that’s a very long way to say. It’s about helping you be true to yourself.

Melody Wilding: Yeah. Well, and the name is perfect. Just going back to the last thing you said, is there an example, just a quick example, a common example you come across where the language we use as people pleasers is different than when we are being an ally to ourselves.

Jay Moon Fields: well, yes, the first thing that comes to mind is you said that isn’t necessarily specific to a people pleaser, but it might be in the sense of so one very key example is as a people pleaser. When someone you let people kind of step on your toes or, you know, you, you let other people, you know.

Behave badly until you just can’t take it anymore. And then typically what we do is we tell them what they did. You, just did this to me and you made me feel this way. And you know, your behavior meant X, Y, Z. Well, that’s different than saying to that person who stepped on your toes in whatever way they did.

Can you understand how I might feel? And then you tell them how you feel and what you’re doing there is you’re not Telling them about their own experience. You’re asking them to consider your experience because one of the greatest things that people pleasers didn’t get conditioned in is they didn’t get conditioned to believe that anybody else would care about their experience.

So we only talk about other people’s experiences and we try to teach them. We try to lift them up. We try to. If you just read this book or you just knew this thing, you could be a better person as opposed to simply standing in your own body and, saying, Hey, Melody, can you understand how, when you were 20 minutes late and didn’t text me to tell me, can you understand how I was frustrated with that?

And it’s really hard for you to evade that in a way that doesn’t actually acknowledge my experience.

Can you feel the difference there?

Melody Wilding: I can. And I never realized that subtly because subtlety rather. And I’m a person that does that for sure. And I never realized that never, yeah, never realized that.

And, you know, I would love your take on this real fast. I was talking with someone else today and talking about the idea, how, sometimes in conversations, when we’re like meeting someone new, especially the, people pleaser in us will be like, oh, thank you so much. I know you’re so busy. So I really appreciate you taking the time.

And it’s almost like you put yourself in a one down position by doing that. Like this other person is doing you a favor by taking time to meet with you versus having more of that language of equality. That’s I’m both glad we could find time for this conversation today is totally different. Then, Oh, I’m just, I’m so happy you could fit me into your schedule.

And it’s just, it’s one of those subtleties where yes, language matters.

Jay Moon Fields: Language matters. And I think the subtlety isn’t in the embodiment of it. Right? if I imagine saying, Oh my gosh, thank you so much for being here. It means and you did it too. Like you lean forward, talk about centering, right?

Like leaning out of yourself is the experience energetically, if not physically, that most people, pleasers have all the time. So, but the feeling tone of saying it is so good to be with. you today. And I’m so glad we were able to make this happen. I feel like I can rest into my back body. I can be in the center of my spine.

Like I can straighten my spine. So I think that’s the, fun part of once you start to feel in your body, you can tell by what your body does and what the energy of it is, whether you’re coming from conditioning or whether you’re coming from your true grown ass self. Right. That’s that has. Has a different set of, values that most of us are showing in our work because of the work that we’ve chosen, but we don’t necessarily embody it fully because of the crappy conditioning.

Melody Wilding: Jay, this has been really enlightening. I feel like I learned A lot about myself as well. so where can people connect with you? Where can they find out more information about yours? Truly? Yeah. All the

Jay Moon Fields: things they can find out about on my website, which is my name, JayMoonFields.com. And I wanted to mention too, on my website, I have a quiz called, What Kind of Overthinker Are You?

cause right. cause many of us are overthinkers and when you take the quiz, it will give you your results, and within those results, there’ll be specific practices just for your flavor of overthinking. so that’s a fun, fun thing that people can do when they come to JayMoonFields.com.

Melody Wilding: Everyone’s going to love that.

Can you be all of them?

Jay Moon Fields: Yes. Actually, when I was writing it, I was like, Oh, someone asked me like, Oh my gosh, how did you do this? And I was like, I studied myself and my clients. So yes, you can be all of them, but you will find that one floats to the top.

Melody Wilding: Dominant type.

Jay Moon Fields: Yes. Yeah. Jay.

Melody Wilding: Thank you so much. I knew this would be fun.

Jay Moon Fields: I know. It’s so good.

Melody Wilding: You just brought so much wisdom. So thank you.

Thank you for having me, Melody. Thanks for tuning in to today’s episode of psychology at work. If you enjoyed the show, I’d be so grateful if you could take just a minute to rate and review wherever you are listening. It’s how we reach more professionals just like you. And if you’d like to see even more content on how to feel more self assured, grounded, and in control of your emotions and reactions at work, follow me on LinkedIn or head to the links in the show notes.