Nancy says she celebrated New Year’s Eve with friends and made it to the East Coast ball drop. Linny said, in that case, they celebrated together since she made it to the ball drop, too. Nancy says she enjoyed making a last-minute outfit to wear that was sparkly. Linny recounts that she had a good holiday, even without the presence of her son. She visited their brother’s home with their parents. Nancy says that we’ll get into this strategy of changing locale, because that is part of the January book! Linny agrees it was a positive step. She knew she had to make it different In January, we always like to do a self-help book, self-improvement, goal setting, those kinds of things. And so, we decided to keep that the same this year and pick this feelings book. It's called Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You by Ethan Kross. Linny says emotions are important and feelings are important. And, as a therapist, we like to explore feelings and we'd like to validate feelings. But this book goes into a different direction as far as what are feelings? Are they good? Are there good feelings, bad feelings? What do we have? What do we do if feelings overwhelm us? What do we do if we don't like the feelings that we're having or they're persistent and they're not making you happy? The book was published just last year in February of 2025, and it was an instant national bestseller. It was one of Oprah's daily best self-help books for personal growth in 2025. And it was a Publishers Weekly best book of the year. Ethan Kross is one of the world's leading experts on emotional regulation. He's an award-winning professor at the University of Michigan's top-ranked psychology department, and its Ross School of Business, and he's the director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory there at the University of Michigan. What Linny appreciated about this book were all the stories. He has a lot of good stories about people who apply the principles that he is talking about and how they apply them and the outcomes of that. While the and what he was talking about are very familiar to Linny, he backs every statement up with so much research. Nancy also liked that it was science-backed because, you know, while books that are by people who think, well, this is a pretty good idea or it worked for me, can be entertaining, but they're not always generalizable to other people. And maybe they're not even specifically all that helpful to the individual who's writing the book either. Nancy offered Linny four or five different kinds of self-help books Nancy was glad she selected this one because Nancy had read good reviews about it. Emotions are something that Nancy has been thinking more about and something that I have been wanting to explore kind of pulling the levers of her emotions so she feels a little more in control of them. What Nancy liked from the very beginning of this book is that Kross tells us what emotions are and he says, right up front, we have the ability to regulate our emotions. We do not have to be just victims of emotions coming and going. You can lead your life feeling very in control of your emotions and regulating them. And that doesn't mean being a robot. It doesn't mean repressing feelings. It doesn't mean wallowing in feelings. And it doesn't even mean, and this was important to me, that there are bad emotions and good emotions. Rather, he says, emotions are data for us to use and regulation is about experiencing them in the proportion that you want to experience them. And I just thought even that setup was very helpful. She also liked the concept that leading a happy life is not only experiencing happy emotions. Leading a happy life is understanding that there's room for grief and anger and sad. A happy life incorporates the range of human emotions, but it is about regulating them. It's about understanding what it is they are telling us. And he even talks about the wisdom of emotions. This is wisdom coming to me about where I am, the context that I'm in, what is happening to me. And now I get to choose: how I'm going to move forward. I am not a prisoner to my emotions that there are these levers or shifters, the book is called Shift. There are shifters that we have that can be very useful. Linny noted that a lot of his terminology is different than the terminology that she uses. However, emotional regulation and some fashion, whether it's called coping skills or whatever is a part of every treatment plan. A lot of it is like cognitive behavioral therapy too. He takes really good and behavioral approaches. Kross brings you through all of these different therapeutic approaches in a way that people can understand them. It almost does like a workbook work through and say, okay, so these are my tools and my toolkit. So, when I'm feeling this way, let me look at these things. And when I'm this way, let me look at these things and wraps it all up in a package for people to take with them. Nancy wondered if there was anything new for Linny or this was more for you a good way to present it. Was it more that experience for you probably. Linny says she was familiar with the strategies. She thinks this would be a good book to give to somebody who wanted to know what therapy is like, but it's more in the behavioral and cognitive approaches of “my feelings are overwhelmed. So now I've got to deal with this.” All of the clinical stuff is right there. Nancy liked that Kross gives us is a menu of ways that people can use for emotional regulation. He starts off from regulating from within. And the three main strategies that she picked up were: 1) activating your senses; 2) being very flexible with your attention or avoidance; and 3) ABC: the idea that there's an adverse event A, then you have a belief about the event B, and then there are the consequences, and that's the C. Linny reviews the external strategies Kross presents: 1) changing your geography or your surroundings; 2) intentionally organizing your environment to remove temptation or distractions or add resilience, but your environment can obviously be a trigger or it can be calming; 3) opportunities for emotional refilling; 4) people influence you and emotions are contagious; 5) Identify your emotional advisory board of people who are able to balance validation of what you’re feeling with perspective about how to move forward; 6) recognize the social comparison is baked into us, but we can use it to motivate ourselves and also be grateful for what we have; and 7) pro-social behavior - It's good for the world and reliability makes us feel better. Nancy liked the idea of an emotional advisory board because it not only provides guidance on who you can safely and effectively go to for assistance, but also about how to be a better friend Linny liked the idea of selecting who among your friends will address what sort of support you are seeking. Linny talks about how a VR headset that puts her in Ocean City, New Jersey regulate her! Nancy likes how Kross concludes with talking about the role of emotions in goal attainment. It brought to mind our book last January, ATOMIC HABITS. Kross writes, “goal achievement is tightly intertwined with our emotional lives.” He describes the WOOP approach, which is again, scientifically validated approach: 1) Visualize your wish; 2) Visualize the outcome and how you’ll feel when you attain your wish; 3) Visualize the obstacles within yourself; and 4) Plan for each obstacle using, perhaps, the shifts for emotional regulation. He suggests IF/THEN planning. IF x obstacle happens, THEN, I will do y to regulate myself. Linny says she might use WOOP with some of her kid clients. Speaking of ATOMIC HABITS, Nancy reminds Linny one of her goals last year was to learn the video board at church. Linny reports that she’s on the board and can do it independently and likes it. When she went to New York city at Christmas a couple of weeks ago, she went to the Broadway Museum and they had a similar console. Linny says she had to change her mindset from not thinking of herself as a technical person. She knew she put that label on herself. Learning the technology was stressful. It was really a stretching, painful situation. And there were times she had to walk away. She talked to somebody who was a support person. Not about what she was experiencing, just distraction. Nancy reports that she feels good about her extensive ATOMIC HABITS goals. She’s going to keep them up. Some have become very habitual. Nancy thinks SHIFT is a very good companion to ATOMIC HABITS. If someone was really interested in goal setting, she’d suggest ATOMIC HABITS and then SHIFT. With those two books, you're going to have a lot of tools. It's not magic. It's not a formula. It's like tools. You will have a lot of tools to choose from to figure out and play with and experiment what works with you. Nancy recently read Psalms 147:14 – “The Lord grants peace within your borders.” Nancy wondered whether emotional regulation leads to peace. For Linny, no, peace is a different construct because it is calmness. For Nancy, peace is more surrendering to. Linny and Nancy agree that Kross’s next book should be PEACE.