Let's Talk - Big Feelings: How to Be Okay When Things Are Not Okay with Elisabeth Fosslien

We all experience unwieldy feelings. But between our emotion-phobic society and the debilitating uncertainty of modern times, we usually don't know how to talk about what we're going through, much less handle it. 

Over the past year, Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy’s online community has laughed and cried about productivity guilt, pandemic anxiety, and Zoom fatigue. 

Now, their book Big Feelings addresses anyone intimidated by oversized feelings they can't predict or control, offering the tools to understand what's really going on, find comfort, and face the future with a sense of newfound agency.   Weaving surprising science with personal stories and original illustrations, each chapter examines one uncomfortable feeling—like envy, burnout, and anxiety—and lays out strategies for turning big emotions into manageable ones. 

During this Let's Talk we'll cover:     

•  How to end the cycle of intrusive thoughts brought on by regret and instead use this feeling as a compass for making decisions   

•  How to identify what’s behind your anger and communicate it productively, without putting people on the defensive   

•  Why we might be suffering from perfectionism even if we feel far from perfect, and how to detach your self-worth from what you do   

Big Feelings helps us understand that difficult emotions are not abnormal, and that we can emerge from them with a deeper sense of meaning. We can’t stop emotions from bubbling up, but we can learn how to make peace with them.

Liz Fosslien is an expert on how to make work better and the co-author and illustrator of Big Feelings and the Wall Street Journal best-seller No Hard Feelings. She serves as the Head of Content and Communications at Humu, a company that makes it easy for leaders and their teams to improve, every single week.

Liz regularly leads interactive, scientifically-backed workshops about creating a culture of belonging, help remote workers avoid burnout, navigating different work styles, and effectively harnessing emotion as a leader. Her work has been featured by The New York Times, TED, The Economist, and NPR.

Let's Talk is a bi-weekly conversation with leading executives, thought leaders, and changemakers. There are no presentations or talking heads, just people having a conversation about career, family, and what matters the most to them.

It doesn't have to be lonely at the top.