Eric Potterat

If you think of the comfort zone as this, you know, circle in the middle, and then there's this buffer zone where that growth happens.

If you go too far out, then it's catastrophic failure, right?

And embarrassment.

And that's when people kind of...

kind of pull back into their shell and they're like, see, I told you, so I'll never try that as opposed to being very incremental and progressive about how you're trying to hone that craft, whatever it may be.

20 years in the military, 10 of those years, I was the head performance psychologist for the Navy SEALs.

I retired as a commander.

And one of the terms that the SEALs used, I'm not a SEAL, I was their psychologist, was calm is contagious.

And it's a very interesting term.

I went one step further related to your question.

I think emotion is contagious.

So I do think there's a time and place to emote and to have that, you know, as you say, cry or really get upset.

But keep in mind that if you're doing that around people.

around teammates, around coworkers.

It is literally a contagion.

I know when I'm around people who are irritated, I find myself getting more irritated.

When I'm around angry people, I find myself getting defensive and upset as well.

So it's a really interesting concept to think about emotions as a contagion.

Do the best performers in the world have emotion?

Of course they do.