Is comparison the thief of joy? Most days I think I can confidently say that I’m content with where I’m at, happy even, excited to celebrate in the small, mundane moments of everyday life while holding space to celebrate others’ joys and successes. Then there are the days where I find myself falling into a spiral, comparing myself to the highlight reels of a stranger’s Instagram.
So how do we navigate these complicated feelings? I’ve been trying really hard to take out “better” from my vocab and remind myself that we’re all different humans just trying to figure it out one day at a time.
This week, I want to revisit my conversation with Liz Fosslien, co-author of Big Feelings. This book has been a gentle companion for the hard moments and hard feelings we might be going through, something to help us feel less alone.
Big Feelings walks us through 7 hard feelings (that I personally deal with) and gives practical strategies for moving through them. We talk about envy in this video.
A few quick takeaways if you don’t have time to listen:
You cannot change how you feel but you can change what you do.
Give yourself Grace. Liz defines grace - I like this practice.
The starting point to moving through emotions is admitting that you have feelings - sounds simple? I don’t know why I have a hard time with this.
As always, thanks so much for being here. I hope you enjoyed hearing about Liz’s book and feel a little less alone when big feelings surface.
Transcription:
00:00:00 Carissa
Hey everybody, this is Bad At Keeping Secrets. Today I have Liz from Liz and Mollie talking about her book, Big Feelings.
00:00:09 Carissa
Liz, will you give me a brief bio of, or kind of this is your second book, about how you got interested in exploring feelings and emotions and sort of helping people work through them.
00:00:23 Liz
Yeah, So I grew up, my parents are immigrants, very stoic. There was not a lot of emotional expression in my household growing up. In high school I had kind of a hard time and I remember at one point even mentioning therapy to my parents and the concept was totally foreign to them, like they were just like why? Why would you talk to a stranger? What is there to talk about? You know, you have a good life. We live in a nice house, things like that.
00:00:51 Liz
So those were the messages that I had and really internalized. And then I, after college, where I studied math and economics, because those were like solid quantitative fields to study, got a job as an economic consultant and just really hated it.
00:01:12 Liz
And it was surprising to me, which looking back seems obvious, but it was surprising to me how I couldn't just will myself to enjoy it and will myself to do it every day.
00:01:24 Liz
I started getting migraines like I think I was just repressing my emotions so much they started manifesting physically and so then I eventually just completely burnt out of that job and didn't know what I wanted to do next. And that was, I would call like a forced reckoning of “OK, I have feelings. I can't ignore them. It's just not going to let like. You can't work in a field that you fundamentally don't like.”
00:01:49 Liz
Especially for 40, 50 years and so that was how I was kind of forced into better understanding what was going on within me.
00:01:58 Carissa
I think in the Live we talked a little bit about trying to figure out what you did like or where the where the sort of loopholes of enjoyment were in your job in economics. But can you talk a little bit about the importance of maybe finding out or how you figured out what you what it was you didn't like?
00:02:16 Liz
Yeah, I'm actually really grateful for that experience. Now I can say that, like 10, 15 years later, at the time, it was horrible. But there's some, so psychologists sometimes differentiate or they say that we have multiple selves.
00:02:32 Liz
So there's this “ideal self” which is the version of you that is fulfilled, that is doing what you love to do and then there's the “ought self,” which is everything you ought to be doing.
00:02:42 Liz
And so at the time, and generally we're more happy when we live our ideal self life. And at the time, I was definitely living the ought life, like I should have a successful job. I should put on a Banana Republic pantsuit. And I should go into a tall building and, like, do all the traditional corporate stuff.
00:02:59 Liz
And and I'm actually really glad that I had that experience and hated it so much because I think it allows me, it allowed me to like, let go of that self much more easily than if I had never pursued it.
00:03:13 Liz
I think it would be more likely that I still sometimes would be like, “Maybe I should have been a lawyer. Or I should have pursued this path.” So, yeah, I think we underestimate the value in really clearly understanding where we don't want to invest our energy because it just makes your decisions that smaller and makes it easier to figure out where you do want to invest your time.
00:03:37 Carissa
Did you, was there something about the day-to-day of that that you remember thinking like just this is gut wrenching?
00:03:45 Liz
Yeah, so there were two things. There was one, which is, so the way economic consulting firms work is law firms hire them to calculate how much money big companies should pay each other.
00:03:56 Liz
And so, especially as a very junior person there, I would basically get to the office at 9:00 in the morning and then often be waiting till like 5 or 6 for whatever I needed to do to come in from the law firm and then I would have to be at the office till one or two doing that work, and so to me, it was like the fee..
00:04:15 Carissa
Wait one or two in the morning.?
00:04:18 Liz
Yeah, so it was like extreme hours. And then it was also it just felt so meaningless to have to be in the office when there wasn't work to do. Like it just you know, it's like it's almost worse. Anyone who's had a job where you literally are watching the time tick down and you're like, OK, it's 9:05, it's 9:06, it's 9:10. It's excruciating. So that was bad.
00:04:42 Liz
And then I started working there after the financial crisis and one of the cases we were working on was basically a lot of older people had lost all their pensions when a big bank went bankrupt and we were trying to make a case for why they shouldn't get any money back. So that's just like, fundamentally kind of soul sucking.
00:05:02 Carissa
Do you, so you kind of brushed on this a little bit. But can you talk a little bit about how sort of your enjoyment of charts and graphs, how you started the practice of this now you sort of use those, sort of subvert those mediums to kind of talk about this, talk about feelings and emotions. And Sort of these nebulous things that are floating around us, and it's really like an effective strategy and understanding them.
00:05:31 Carissa
Can you kind of talk about the process of how you think about how you think about making these sort of illustrations?
00:05:40 Liz
Yeah, I, so definitely started. Like I don't have any art or design background and so I just started with what I knew, which was charts.
00:05:50 Liz
I actually started creating. Like my very first, I don't even want to call them illustrations. Visual images. I made in MS Paint because that was what I had so they were. They were hideous.
00:06:04 Liz
But so yeah, I think one of the things is just like starting where you are with the tools that you're familiar with and then trying to use them in new ways and now I find. Yeah, it's just like a it's it helps me process my own emotions.
00:06:18 Liz
So people also often ask, like, where do you get inspiration? And it's usually just whatever I'm feeling and then somehow it's still most comfortable for me to express those in these like more quantitative ways that I have a background in. Just like it feels like safe and known and comes most naturally to me, so it's like a it's like a how it's like, I take whatever the left brain, creative brain, and then express it through the right brain.
00:06:52 Carissa
No, I, since I don't have that sort of area of expertise underpinning how to organize my thoughts, it's really, it's, I love the translations instead of that language.
00:07:06 Carissa
So the book, if we talk a little bit more about Big Feelings, wait, can we start with your first book, can you tell us a little bit about the first book?
00:07:15 Liz
Yeah. So the first book is called No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work, and came out in February 2019 and looked specifically at the workplace.
00:07:25 Liz
So how can we harness the motions to improve our leadership abilities to craft better teams, to improve communication? Things like that.
00:07:34 Liz
And then the second book, Big Feelings, is much more. It's much more personal and it looks at basically hard feelings.
00:07:44 Liz
So we wrote the first book, had experiences in our personal lives that were really difficult, but then also we're hearing from people like, you know, we, I think often people don't have an opportunity to talk about what they're feeling at work.
00:07:58 Liz
So we would do workshops and then afterwards that they became kind of therapy sessions. And it was this view into whoa, there's, there are really thorny situations.
00:08:07 Liz
People feel burnt out.
00:08:08 Liz
People struggle with perfectionism.
00:08:10 Liz
People have a lot of regrets in their personal and professional lives, and that all inspired the second book.
00:08:17 Carissa
Can we just rest really briefly on what, what, so what do you think the specific outcomes like I can project what I think the specific outcomes are for, like embracing feelings and emotions at work, but can you talk a little bit about sort of why that was important for you guys?
00:08:38 Liz
Yeah. So, some of it was we essentially set out to write the book that we both wished we had had when we entered the workforce.
00:08:46 Liz
So Mollie, my co-author, had a really similar experience where she got a job she thought she always wanted. She worked hard for it, and then it was like, just not a supportive work environment. And she also burnt out of it. And we both had so much guilt around not having succeeded in these roles, but then looking back. I don't mean, I don't think I would have ever been in my first job long term, but I also never knew that I could do something like go to my manager and say, hey, I actually like the writing parts of this job, can I take on more projects that have to do with writing.
00:09:24 Liz
And so very much was, it's also, I will say too like it just made sense to do a business book, our publisher was like you should start with a business book that's kind of like a nice safe, like lucrative entry point into book writing.
00:09:41 Liz
And I think that platform actually made it possible for us to write this second, more personal, more narrative book.
00:09:52 Carissa
So let's talk about the seven emotions, how you, how you came up with the seven emotions from the previous book.
00:10:00 Liz
Yeah so like I said, we published this book called No Hard Feelings and then I would say six months later, Mollie and I both had really hard experiences.
00:10:10 Liz
I was losing my father-in-law to cancer. I was also commuting 3 hours a day at the time like there was just a lot that was not good for my mental health and Molly was dealing with chronic pain issues that led her to feel a lot of despair.
00:10:25 Liz
I think the biggest thing we stumbled upon was suddenly changing what we did, didn't change how we felt like we had sort of hit these like, emotional points where it was like, I don't even know how to pull myself out of this.
00:10:39 Liz
And so we wrote down all the emotions we were experiencing at the time, and then surveyed people who had read our first book, who followed us on social media, and that allowed us, based on the responses there, allowed us to get it down to these seven emotions that we cover in the book, one thing that's interesting is people sometimes point out like, you know, comparison, which is one of the chapters is not an emotion, it's a behavior.
00:11:04 Liz
But when we ask people about envy, which is often what happens when you compare yourself to someone else, there was kind of a response, but when we said comparison, there was this overwhelming response and so it was interesting even to see that even though people could identify the behavior that they were engaging in, they still had somehow detached it like I think they were repressing the emotional response so much that the connection between like comparison and regret and envy wasn't obvious to them.
00:11:33 Liz
So in some cases we use the word that evoked the most response in people. So like perfectionism, uncertainty.
00:11:42 Liz
Whereas perfectionism is really about a fear of failure, and uncertainty is really about anxiety. But we wanted to meet people where they were. And it seemed like it was sometimes more the behavior versus the actual feeling.
00:11:54 Carissa
I did not notice that.
00:11:56 Liz
Yeah, some people are sticklers. So some people would be like “This is not an emotion.”
00:12:02 Carissa
Oh, I didn't even think about it. I mean. But can we talk a little bit about comparison because I think that's something I mean, all the emotions, basically. I personally feel like I try to rip or push down and have guilt for feeling, but I think all of my life I think that I've had issues with jealousy and it was. It's definitely something I feel like everyone when you tell them, like, oh, I struggle with comparison, it's hard not to imagine them judging you for it.
00:12:36 Carissa
And can you talk, you both talk about it pretty frankly, I think there's a story about Mollie and pregnancy I think that that you open with. But can you talk about comparison and why you think comparison maybe is something we struggle with.
00:12:55 Liz
Yeah, it's very natural. We're kind of hardwired to look around and see how we stack up to people. So humans are a relational species. The way that we know even, you know, sort of seemingly fundamental things about ourselves. Like how do you know you're tall? because you are taller than other people.
00:13:14 Liz
How do you know you're good at something? because you have more success metrics or whatever there's like, you've gotten more praise for it than someone else.
00:13:24 Liz
How do you know you're kind? Because you've seen people be not kind. So again, like, even these descriptors are based in comparison. So it's not, I think there's this common trope now that if you get off of Instagram you will be free of feeling bad because you're comparing yourself to others.
00:13:41 Liz
It can definitely help, but fundamentally, it's just something we do, but we do it in a, I think we often don't know of the common pitfalls.
00:13:52 Liz
So research shows that when we compare ourselves, we tend to compare our weaknesses to other people's strengths. And we also tend to compare ourselves to this like mish mash of 15 other people and so we create this fantasy person. So instead of saying, you know, my kitchen isn't as nice as my neighbor's kitchen, but you know, my living room is nicer.
00:14:17 Liz
It's just like my kitchen isn't as nice as my neighbor's kitchen. I'm not in Italy, like my friend who's posting on Instagram. I'm not as fast of a runner as my other friend from college, and so it's like you just take all these other things and mash them into one comparison as opposed to comparing yourself more in a more truthful way, which is like I've had, I have this sometimes where I'll see one of my friends gets like a promotion or one of my friends recently got a promotion and now manages a department of 200 people.
00:14:49 Liz
And I had this moment of like, oh, that's really cool and prestigious. Like, why don't I manage a department of 200 people? And then I kind of talked myself down from it by saying: I hate being in meetings back to back, you know, like I think I would actually really be miserable in this job. And it's also in a field that I'm not interested in, and she works hours that are just like, you know, she doesn't have a lot of flexibility in her schedule. All of these things that I really value and so even though there was this initial like flare up of jealousy, it was useful for me to be like - I need to actually compare the nitty gritty as opposed to just be like I don't do this. I'm a terrible person.
00:15:30 Liz
It's like, no, I've made choices that have led me away from that, and I'm very happy with those choices.
00:15:34 Carissa
I think that there was something there's like, a surprising plot twist in the chapter about actually needing to compare yourself more. Can you talk a little bit about that and what you mean by that?
00:15:49 Liz
So it's part of what I just said, which is not stopping, like often there is a stigma around feeling envious of someone. I find this especially with women in the workplace, where it's like we should all be supporting each other. So if you are jealous of someone else just, you know, pretend like you're not. Pretend like you're just happy for them.
00:16:09 Liz
Which, yeah, you should be supportive, but it's also totally normal to envy someone who has something you want. In the case of my friend, it was comparing myself more was not just stopping at the like, she has this prestigious job. I want it. It was what gives the day-to-day of that job. What does her schedule look like? Do I actually want that? And the answer is no. There's also research that shows, there was a study researchers ran where they asked people to like how good of a runner are you.
00:16:39 Liz
And people said I'm not a good runner and what they found is that people were thinking of the very best runner they knew. And so then they said, well, why don't you first write down ten of your friends, write down their names and think about how good they are at running and then they said, now how good of a runner do you think they are?
00:16:57 Liz
People are like, oh, I'm a decent runner because they had actually compared themselves to a broader range of people. So I think often we just, yeah, it's like this one person who seems to be doing really well in a specific area and we don't actually take the time to look around more or to look at people who don't have it as good as we do.
00:17:17 Liz
And so we're just only looking like up in the sense of this person has more in this one domain and forgetting about the fact that, like you probably have more in some domain than a lot of other people, and that can help you feel better too about where you are.
00:17:33 Carissa
This sound this is going to sound really sneaky that I had, I had like a lot of issues with envy in Graduate School and particularly I'm thinking about, I would get, it was really difficult for me because I really wanted to be, like, very happy and supportive. I felt a lot of pressure and I really value that I wanted people in my life to support me too.
00:17:55 Carissa
It wasn't like I was just like blindly thinking about it, but I would always kind of like default to, “Why? Why can't I have that job where I manage 200 people?” Which I I'm with you. OK. I don't know. I have like, it's very hard for me to manage myself and my emotions, but 200 people seems like a lot of people.
00:18:17 Carissa
But somehow I have figured out a way and I don't know if this is helpful or works for people or something you do, Liz, where I take credit for other people's success.
00:18:29 Carissa
In the sense that if something really good happens to me somehow or something really good happens to somebody I'm close with, I just pretend that that we're both having the same success at the same time, and then in ways it's, I feel like, I don't know, maybe I shouldn't be admitting that I do this, But I'll. OK, I'll say this.
00:18:50 Carissa
This way, so one I can think of as a specific example. After Graduate School, a good friend of mine, Jenny Odell, do you know her?
00:19:01 Liz
Yeah, she wrote the How to Do Nothing.
00:19:04 Carissa
She had, like, a lot of, I think. I mean, she's had a lot of success just in, in general. But then when How to Do Nothing came out. And it was a bestseller. And then it was on Barack Obama's list. I was like, shit. I really want to be Jen.
00:19:24 Carissa
My life would be so much better, but I, if I thought about it as like sort of a network of people that we were connected with that her good fortune was also my good fortune. It helps me be a little less envious. And again there's no way Jenny watches these. But if she does. Jenny, I think you're great and I'm really proud you're my friend.
00:19:46 Carissa
But OK, so back to the book, can we. So we're totally out of time Liz, but I just wanted to kind of maybe touch back on the sort of conclusion or what you kind of again want people to feel when reading this book and sort of the main takeaways.
00:20:05 Liz
Yeah, I think it's honestly, I think one of the best outcomes of the book would be a conversation like we just had, like, people being like, cause I actually do the same thing where one of my friends came out of the book last year and then had, like, a New York Times article written about her. And there are these moments where it's, like, exactly what you said. Like shit, I want that.
00:20:24 Liz
But I'm also, it's cool that my, I feel like that's the kind of person that I'm so excited to have in my life. And so having that mentality does help with the sort of harder feelings.
00:20:38 Liz
So I think if people just feel more comfortable sharing that, I think that will continue to normalize that these are emotions we all have. There's nothing shameful, you don't need to beat yourself up for feeling them. And then I also hope that people see the book as a helpful guide to working through hard moments and recovering from them and maybe finding meaning in them later.
00:21:03 Liz
I think there's so much pressure and messaging in our society now that's like, you know, if you don't, if you do these five things you should feel better. And if you don't feel better, that's, you know, you failed in some way and that, you know, ignores structural forces. It ignores the fact that, like life is long. If you're lucky, you're kind of signing up for bad days like we're all going to lose someone we love. We're all going to just not get something we want, have someone else succeed in a place where we're not succeeding right away.
00:21:37 Liz
And so it's just useful to know how to move through that. And also just accept that like it's fine. Those are, you know, feelings come and go in waves. Success comes and goes in waves, too, in some sense.
00:21:52 Liz
So it's, I think it's just like less pressure to always be radiantly happy and feel like life is good and you're thriving.
00:21:59 Carissa
Can I throw you another, potentially, maybe not curveball, but tough question, maybe not tough. I don't know. How do you feel on, what's your stance on post traumatic growth and maybe I should define that or actually I think most people just the idea that like you, hard, hard things in life are worth it because there are opportunities for growth.
00:22:23 Liz
Yeah, I definitely think it can be helpful. I think fundamentally making meaning, I think they've even added it as the sixth stage of grief now is just looking back and finding something that you did gain from that experience.
00:22:39 Liz
I really, really don't like. I think it's. It just takes time. Like it's useful to keep that in mind as you're going through something hard that like maybe one day I will find this meaningful, but it shouldn't be used as a weapon to minimize what you're feeling in that moment.
00:22:55 Liz
And I think it's also true that. You know, like losing my father-in-law, definitely, it's part of like why I'm having a family now, because it was for me, it crystallized like, oh, this is what's really important to me is family and the people in my life.
00:23:11 Liz
And I probably should like, step back from work a little bit because I was being, I was huge workaholic at the time, but also like, I would have preferred to not go through that. You know like, I wouldn't do it again and so I think it can be comforting in those moments to be like there might be something on the other side of this that, like, helps me cope with it. But it's not. Yeah, I think there's a lot of things we go through in life where, yeah, I would not sign up for that for the post traumatic growth that it's going to give me afterwards.
00:23:43 Carissa
Can I ask a couple, I have a couple more questions for you because I can't stop myself.
00:23:50 Carissa
So, like right now, I think, I don't know if other people will relate to this, but what I would love to hear is something you're hopeful about for the future or something you're excited about, something to look forward to?
00:24:05 Liz
Yes, I, so I'm having a baby in like 3 weeks which I'm, I would say hopeful and terrified.
00:24:17 Liz
But yeah, I think it's. I'm kind of, I'm looking forward to just being very present in the moment, which sometimes I struggle with and I think, you know, for good or bad, a child sort of forces you to put some of your own anxieties to the side and just focus on what's going on in the moment, so excited and hopeful for that new experience.
00:24:43 Carissa
Well, thank you so much, Liz, for doing this with me and best of luck with the whole labor process and sort of the transition from being one being to sort of being two. I don't know when your nervous systems actually detach from each other.
00:25:03 Carissa
Again, Big Feelings, it's a practical companion to take with you to make you feel a little less alone, and to also work through some of the hard, hard moments the hard feelings that you might be going through at the moment, so take care.
00:25:22 Carissa
Thank you again. So thank you so much, Liz.
00:25:25 Liz
Yeah, it's so nice to chat with you.
00:25:27 Carissa
You too.
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