Welcome to the Articharm podcast where we break down the science of powerful communication and winning mindsets so you have the cheat code to succeed with people every episode is jam packed with actionable steps to unlock the hidden superpowers inside of you level up with us each week by listening to interviews with the best in business psychology and relationships we distilled thousands of hours of research in the most effective tools and the latest science so you can start winning today let's face it in order to be seen heard your communication needs to cut through the

noise and we're going to show you how I'm AJ successfully recovered introvert entrepreneur and self development junkie and I'm Johnny Zubak former touring musician promoter rock and roller and co founder here at the articharm and for the last 15 years we've trained thousands of top performers and teams from every background we have dedicated our lives to teaching men and women all they need to know about communication networking and relationships you shouldn't have to settle for anything less than extraordinary today we're talking to Dr. Aprilo

West she's a psychologist coach trainer and author with a very unique background her latest book is what you feel is not all there is free your choices and your life from the default world of the emotional matrix so of course we're going to be talking about this emotional matrix we're also going to learn how to increase your emotional efficacy to grow your EQ why you need to learn to surf your emotions to be more effective and how top performer

athletes and executives harness their emotions for success welcome to the show Dr. Aprilo West we will love to hear you share a bit of your incredible and diverse work that you do as well as your background with our audience you know I came to psychology actually a little later in life I've had a pretty diverse background started out in politics as a speech writer and a press secretary

and then actually transition from policy work to music and ended up being a staff songwriter at Warner Chapel music and an artist for a while and then from there moved into doing some nonprofit advocacy work around campaigns like the Darfur genocide and also some civic reform issues and got really interested in human psychology there which led me into getting trained as a mediator

and then once I got into mediation I was like whoa I want to go deeper with people I really want to be able to like understand conceptualize hold and work with anything that comes into the room and that's what led me into psychology

there is a lot of skills going on there and I just for my own curiosity I'm kind of wondering how did you go from writing speeches in the political sphere to writing music yeah well it's actually a more natural transition than it might sound like because in both spaces we're really figuring out how to evoke emotion in people right whether it's activating people around a certain cause or policy direction or whether it's

really bringing them into the deepest experience of heartbreak or new love or some of the other peak experiences that we have in life so for me it didn't feel it didn't feel like a strange transition the cultures are definitely different in politics and in the music industry but it felt natural

so it sounds like emotions played a big role in your career and that naturally leads to emotional efficacy and Johnny and I believe that emotional intelligence and communication are really key to building successful relationships but also your career so can you impact for audience what emotional efficacy is absolutely and by the way I think you just said it really well but emotion efficacy and it's simplest form is just being able to do what matters most even in the face of intense stress challenge or pain

now this is a lot more difficult than it sounds because as I outlined in my most recent book there's a glitch in our code our emotions tell us about everything from fake news to what really matters most to us and so if we don't have the skillfulness to decode what kind of messages we're getting from our emotions it's really hard to figure out how to choose wisely

I'm kind of curious on the emotional efficacy tip for myself I tend to find the music that most pushes my emotional buttons and it changes from my mood or what's going on in my life but the more emotional the better I mean it just it just drives me in so many ways but I listen to today's music I find it devoid of any emotion especially I mean it's not the same thing

that there aren't artists who are doing that, but on pop radio, it's empty, at least to me.

Did you find that in the same way or were you working in an area that was writing quite emotionally

stirring music? I'm not sure that I struggled because in order to write music, you have to tap into

something that is evocative for you. If you're bored, you're not going to write a good song.

You really have to find a subject, a topic, a moment, a person who brings out all the emotional stuff

to take advantage of that, to put that into music. Johnny's not being honest in his fandom of Taylor Swift

and actually are pop musicians who do know how to play those emotional buttons. Unfortunately,

a lot of it is with technology and EDM and other forms of evoking those emotions. But circling

back on what you were saying earlier, it just feels today like our emotions are being evoked

from so many different places on screens, friends, family, work, work from home, uncertainty,

the news, politics, everywhere we go, all of these emotions are at play and it feels like many of

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