Emotional Equations.

March 20, 2020

I write books to make sense of my life. Ten years ago, when I was going through my most challenging era, I realized I wasn’t very fluent in my emotions. In the hospital, after having gone flatline that day, I was reading Viktor Frankl’s landmark book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” which was conveniently with me on this trip (I’d gone flatline on stage after giving a speech in St. Louis).

I wrote Despair = Suffering – Meaning on a small piece of paper and gave it to the nurse who had no idea what to do with this little mathematical mantra.

Over the next eighteen months, I explored a series of eighteen different emotions with the leading experts in the world on each emotion. What came out of that deep dive was my book “Emotional Equations,” in which I translated the cognitive processes which dictate our emotional responses into simplified formulas for understanding. I started to see that these otherwise concrete ways of thinking could magically transform into malleable processes. It was like a recipe for my emotions.

Hope you enjoy this new form of math as we’re definitely living in a new time when we need to be more fluent in the language of our emotions. Hope these help a little.