Chip Conley is the New York Times Bestselling author of four books including Emotional Equations, and PEAK: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow. He is the Founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, and has created more boutique hotels than anyone in the world. Chip speaks around the world on how to find meaning at the intersection of business and psychology. He recently traveled to Bhutan to study its Gross National Happiness index, the country's unique method of measuring success and its citizens' quality of life.?
Ken: Chip, I?m delighted to interview you. Your life and your work have inspired so many of us. You are someone who struggles to make your life reflect your values?even when doing so is hard. Much of your audience Your concept of emotional equations is an extremely helpful tool for understanding the deeper workings of our emotional lives, and I?m very pleased to share it with my readers.
Can you explain emotional equations and tell us how you discovered them?
Chip: I was reading Man?s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl during a very difficult point in my life. Frankl?s perspective is that meaning is the fuel of life. He writes about getting to test that theory while he was in concentration camp: Can the idea of meaning actually keep people alive?
Well, I was going through a really tough time about four years ago. I was the CEO of a company with 3,500 employees. When you?re a CEO or any kind of leader, you?re the emotional thermostat of those whom you?re leading. At that time, I felt that my emotional thermostat was very low. A lot of things were going wrong in my life, and I was almost in a state of desperation. I felt like I needed to take the profound content of Man?s Search for Meaning and turn it into something that was actionable on a daily basis. Math is about relationships--the relationship of numbers--but I decided that maybe it could be about the relationship of emotions. Specifically, I wanted to find a meaning equation that was solution-driven, simple and concise. At the time I had no idea that there was going to be a book in it. I was just trying to fix my life.
This is the equation I started with: despair equals suffering minus meaning. Let me explain the ?sacred algebra.? If you?re going through a period of suffering, like Victor Frankl in a concentration camp, or me in my own mental prison, it?s as though everything is going wrong, as though you?re in a downward spiral. When you?re in that place in life, suffering does feel like a constant.
If you believe in Buddhist philosophy and thinking, the first noble truth of Buddhism is that suffering is ever present. So think of suffering as the constant. Think of meaning as the variable. If you remember back to algebra, there is often a constant and a variable in an equation. If suffering remains the constant, then when you increase meaning (the variable) despair goes down.
Despair equals suffering minus meaning.
Let me do the simple math so that it makes sense?. 8 = 10-2. Despair (8) equals suffering (10) minus meaning (2).
8=10-2.
So if meaning goes up from 2 to 3, the despair goes down from 8 to 7.
When meaning goes up, despair goes down. This equation helped me to see that meaning and despair are somewhat inversely proportional, so the more I could find meaning in my life, the more I would reduce my despair.
And so, when I came home from a really rough week at work, I began to do an emotional inventory. And of course 2008 was just a terrible year, and 2009 looked to be even worse. I would come home and ask myself ?So what emotions did I learn this week? It was like I was a kindergartener learning my emotions. Did I learn humility this week? Vulnerability? Authenticity? Courage? And then I?d make a list of each of those and then write three or four sentences about how I was going to use that emotion to serve me next week. I know this sounds almost like elementary school homework, but I considered it emotional boot camp and knew that I was starting to exercise emotional muscles. It?s like you go back to the gym in January, and when you start again, you realize you have physical muscles in your body that you didn?t know existed. When you?re going through a really difficult time, and going through emotional boot camp, you start realizing you have emotional muscles in your body. And that?s what I did. I actually focused on those muscles and asked ?how is humility serving me? How is vulnerability serving me? How are courage and resilience serving me?? I got to a place where I started feeling better about things, and as I felt better about myself, I started to teach emotional equations within my company to our leaders, particularly the equation I just described. Because as we went into 2009, it was very apparent that it was going to be a terrible year. And that?s how it all started.
Ken: Do you have any thoughts on how this same equation might apply to heartbreaks around relationships?
Chip: I have lots of thoughts on that. I had a relationship that ended three years ago in the worst time of my life; two or three years which were a ?dark night of the soul.? Initially, of course, all I felt was the suffering. But then, I started to look for the meaning within this ending. It was not my choice, frankly. The relationship was a bit of my life preserver. I see clearly today that this eight-year relationship was not a bad relationship, but it was not a soul-nourishing one. It was not one that helped me to live up to who I am as an individual. In fact, it was sort of holding me back. It was providing me comfort, I will tell you that--and at a time when I felt very uncomfortable. But I realized what a toll it was taking on me. You know, there are lots of ways to provide comfort to ourselves that can create a toll on us. We eat too much. That creates comfort, and it creates a toll as well. We watch too much TV. That creates comfort and then our brain goes dead. In my case, my relationship was giving me comfort, but it wasn?t nourishing me in ways that would take me to the next place in my life. So yes, I think that it?s very useful to be able to look and evaluate a breakup--especially when it?s not your choice--and think ?Okay, what?s the meaning of this? What?s the wisdom? What emotions am I feeling and how are those emotions going to serve me?? It really helped me get clarity about what I was looking for in my next relationship.
Ken: Are there any other emotional equations that relate specifically to our deepest intimate relationships?
Chip: This equation may seem very familiar to people who are familiar with the course in miracles, or abundance theory or even the law of attraction. The idea is that there are two primary motivators in life, and they get in a wrestling match every day. Love and fear. And here is the relationship between love and fear in an equation perspective: If you have love minus fear, you get joy.
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