Dr. Becky Kennedy: Overcoming Guilt & Building Tenacity in Kids & Adults

0:00:04 Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools
0:00:06 for everyday life.
0:00:14 I’m Andrew Huberman, and I’m a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford
0:00:15 School of Medicine.
0:00:18 My guest today is Dr. Becky Kennedy.
0:00:22 Dr. Becky Kennedy is a clinical psychologist and one of the world’s foremost experts in
0:00:24 parent-child relationships.
0:00:26 Now you may or may not have children.
0:00:29 If you do, today’s episode is absolutely for you.
0:00:34 If you don’t, well, you were once a child, perhaps you’re even still a child.
0:00:38 Today’s episode also will have valuable knowledge and tools that you can apply to your life.
0:00:44 Today, Dr. Becky Kennedy teaches us an immense number of extremely valuable tools for the
0:00:48 workplace, for romantic relationships, for family relationships of all types, not just
0:00:53 parent-child relationships, and of course also for parent-child relationships.
0:00:57 We discuss themes that have not been discussed previously on the Huberman Lab Podcast, topics
0:01:02 such as guilt, which Dr. Becky Kennedy offers a completely unique perspective on, one that
0:01:05 I’ve never heard before, and that frankly I don’t think anyone has heard before.
0:01:10 In fact, she distinguishes between what most people think is guilt and an entirely different
0:01:15 set of emotions, and offers you very useful practical tools for when you experience guilt
0:01:16 and how to work with guilt.
0:01:22 We also extensively discuss frustration, or what she calls frustration tolerance.
0:01:26 Frustration tolerance is an extremely important theme for everybody to understand and apply
0:01:31 in their lives, because frustration tolerance, as Dr. Becky Kennedy so aptly points out,
0:01:35 is central to the learning process of anything at every age.
0:01:39 If you can understand this concept and you apply some of the very simple rules and tools
0:01:44 that Dr. Kennedy explains during the podcast, I assure you you can learn many more things
0:01:49 much more quickly and with much greater satisfaction, if not during the process, certainly at the
0:01:51 end when you master that learning.
0:01:54 And those are just a few of the themes that we discussed during today’s episode.
0:01:58 Again, whether or not you have children, I assure you that today’s episode is going to
0:02:02 be immensely beneficial for all of your relationships.
0:02:06 You will notice during today’s episode that our studio backdrop is different.
0:02:10 You will notice that for once, I was not wearing this particular style of shirt.
0:02:15 The reason for that is that this episode was recorded during the LA Fires, what was initially
0:02:20 called the Palisades Fire, and then spread to multiple fires throughout LA County.
0:02:26 So we were not able to access our normal studio, so I want to express extreme gratitude to
0:02:31 Rich Roll, our good friend in the podcasting space, who allowed us to use his podcast studio,
0:02:35 which is where I’m seated now and where I held the discussion with Dr. Becky Kennedy.
0:02:39 First off, our entire team, our homes and our studio are fine.
0:02:44 I can assure you of that, but most importantly, our thoughts and our prayers go out to the
0:02:48 people who have lost their homes, lost pets, and sadly there have been fatalities during
0:02:49 the LA Fires.
0:02:54 So our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families and we hope everyone remains
0:02:55 safe.
0:02:58 Before we begin, I’d like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching
0:03:00 and research roles at Stanford.
0:03:04 It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information
0:03:07 about science and science-related tools to the general public.
0:03:10 In keeping with that theme, today’s episode does include sponsors.
0:03:13 And now for my discussion with Dr. Becky Kennedy.
0:03:16 Dr. Becky Kennedy, welcome back.
0:03:18 I’m so happy to be here.
0:03:25 Simple to rich role for lending us his studio under the duress of fires in Los Angeles.
0:03:27 I’m praying that his home is okay.
0:03:35 It’s unclear at this moment, but in any event, let’s talk about emotions, both theory and
0:03:37 practice.
0:03:41 And if we can place it in the context of parenting, that would be great, but I’m certain that
0:03:45 this has a broader theme that pertains to everybody.
0:03:50 So I love the theory of emotions or how we would theoretically respond to something,
0:03:52 but then there’s the reality.
0:03:59 So as a parent, let’s say you have a stance in your home and in your family that it’s
0:04:04 okay to be sad, like sadness is normal, it happens, it passes, et cetera.
0:04:10 But let’s say you’re feeling particularly sad about something.
0:04:13 Do you express that and show that in front of your kids?
0:04:19 Because I’ve also heard that young kids in particular, younger than eight or nine, perhaps
0:04:25 shouldn’t be aware that their parents are experiencing say extreme sadness because it can be scary
0:04:28 to them where they might feel like their world is destabilizing.
0:04:32 And then we also hear a lot about kids feeling like they had to parent the parents.
0:04:34 And then this whole thing becomes pretty complicated.
0:04:40 So while there’s no perfect world where one knows what to do every single time, how do
0:04:47 you look at this business of modeling emotions and also encouraging kids to be able to experience
0:04:48 and express their emotions?
0:04:49 Yeah.
0:04:53 And I think everything I’m about to share applies in the workplace, right?
0:04:58 Like kind of bossy, really upset in front of the person they manage, management, right?
0:04:59 So it’s all the same stuff.
0:05:09 So I guess zooming out as a start, emotions are normal, emotions are unstoppable.
0:05:14 You can’t not feel sad just because you have your five-year-old in the room, right?
0:05:20 And I think the other thing that kind of forms my perspective is it’s really hard to not
0:05:22 show someone that you’re sad.
0:05:28 Like you might think you’re doing that well, but kids are extra perceptive.
0:05:33 They are actually built to be more perceptive than we are because their survival depends
0:05:34 on adults.
0:05:38 So they have to always notice, is my adult around, is my adult okay?
0:05:42 So they really attune to what’s going on for us, right?
0:05:49 And so I think the kind of question is less, do I show my emotions to my kid or not?
0:05:56 And it’s more, okay, if I’m sad, my kid is going to notice, what do I do then?
0:06:00 And as a principal, one of the things I think about often is information doesn’t scare
0:06:06 kids as much as the absence of information scares kids.
0:06:09 So let’s say there’s something really awful.
0:06:13 I don’t know, as a parent, your family member, someone died of cancer.
0:06:17 I don’t know, there’s something really horrible that you just found out, right?
0:06:19 There’s wildfires right now.
0:06:26 Let’s say you evacuated and you found out your house burned down, you’re sad.
0:06:31 Your child is going to notice that and you want your child to notice that.
0:06:38 You don’t want your kid to be a teenager and adult who goes around the world unable to
0:06:41 pick up on emotional cues from other people.
0:06:43 That’s not adaptive.
0:06:49 And so the patterns we set with our kids when they’re young inform their view of the world
0:06:51 when they’re older.
0:06:55 And so here I am, let’s say it’s the situation of somebody dying and I’m upset.
0:07:01 First of all, as a parent, tell yourself, it’s not my kid seeing me sad.
0:07:04 That’s going to destabilize them.
0:07:11 It’s seeing me sad and me making up a bogus story or denying it because then my kid goes,
0:07:13 I’m pretty sure my mom was upset.
0:07:14 Oh, she’s not.
0:07:15 Oh, she’s pretending like nothing happened.
0:07:19 Oh, she looks sad, but she’s saying she’s not sad.
0:07:21 That is really upsetting.
0:07:26 It would be like hearing your boss say, “Oh yeah, 20% layoffs.
0:07:27 What are we doing?
0:07:28 I don’t know.
0:07:29 Oh, hi.
0:07:30 Everything’s great.
0:07:31 How are you?”
0:07:32 Like, what is happening?
0:07:33 Scary.
0:07:34 What you’d want is your boss say you just heard something.
0:07:37 You were right to hear that.
0:07:40 We are about to go through a really tough time.
0:07:41 I’m stressed about it.
0:07:42 That’s why I yelled.
0:07:43 You might be stressed.
0:07:44 Here’s what I know.
0:07:47 This is going to be hard and we’re going to get through it together.
0:07:52 Now, all of a sudden, that emotional experience has a container.
0:07:53 It has a story.
0:07:55 Humans need stories.
0:08:01 We like stories, and so often we think it’s the emotions that dysregulate a kid.
0:08:04 It’s the lack of a story to explain it.
0:08:06 So let’s say this really did happen.
0:08:09 People always say to me, “Okay, but Dr. Becky, my kid is four.
0:08:11 I’m going to say that their aunt died.
0:08:14 They don’t even know cancer, right?”
0:08:15 We don’t have a better alternative.
0:08:19 I can’t even tell you how many parents I’ve seen whose kids have all of these issues because
0:08:20 of the made-up stories.
0:08:23 I just said she went to sleep for a while.
0:08:26 Six months later, my kid has a lot of trouble sleeping through the night.
0:08:29 Yeah, they haven’t seen their aunt who went to sleep one time.
0:08:33 You know, it creates a huge issue, no matter what bogus story you make up.
0:08:39 Kids can handle the truth, and they can handle the truth when it’s told to them from a loving,
0:08:40 trusted adult.
0:08:42 It’s kind of like me and you.
0:08:46 You can tell it’s a hard truth, but it’s from someone you feel safe with and that you feel
0:08:52 like also believes in you and says that honestly, it might be hard, but it doesn’t feel awful.
0:08:57 So it’s about saying to your kid, “You saw me crying.”
0:09:01 One of my favorite kind of sentences to say to kids around this, because I think it really
0:09:07 builds their confidence, is just, “You were right to notice that I was crying, and I’m
0:09:08 feeling sad.”
0:09:13 And look, you saw that, I’m going to tell you why.
0:09:14 Making this up.
0:09:15 Aunt Sally died.
0:09:18 Do you know what dying means?
0:09:21 Dying is when someone’s body stops working.
0:09:24 Then I pause, all right, so I’m going to just be a monologue.
0:09:26 I’ll see how my kid responds.
0:09:30 I might add, “I’m not dying.”
0:09:32 Kids actually really need to hear that in hard times.
0:09:34 “I’m not dying.
0:09:36 No one else is dying.
0:09:37 I’m safe.”
0:09:45 And you know what, I’m sad, and I’m still your strong mom who can take care of you.
0:09:52 That sets the stage for such resilience and is kind of the opposite of, “Everything’s fine.
0:09:54 My kid keeps seeing me crying.
0:09:59 They keep hearing words they’re not used to hearing, die, cancer, Aunt Sally, funeral,”
0:10:00 whatever it is.
0:10:05 That situation is what makes kids feel really, really uncomfortable and unsafe.
0:10:11 So it’s the absence of information that causes the harm.
0:10:17 And it’s the lack of coherence between what they’re observing and feeling and kind of
0:10:23 this like open loop, if I kind of place it in neuroscience terms, I feel like the brain
0:10:26 does think in terms of stories.
0:10:29 Stories have a beginning, middle, and an end, and they kind of want to know where they are
0:10:31 in that story.
0:10:32 That’s exactly right.
0:10:37 The terms I would use to match your terms are coherent narrative.
0:10:38 What is therapy?
0:10:39 Why does therapy help people?
0:10:40 It’s interesting.
0:10:42 Therapy doesn’t change what happened to you.
0:10:43 Therapy doesn’t change your past.
0:10:49 Therapy does not take away the pain, but the pain was never the thing that really got in
0:10:51 our way.
0:10:55 It was the pain plus a lack of a coherent narrative and support.
0:11:00 And so early on, when kids have painful experiences from witnessing you or something else, giving
0:11:03 them a coherent narrative is what they need.
0:11:09 And without that, the way I think about it is they have what I call unformulated experience.
0:11:15 It’s just affect and experience that kind of free floats in their body, unformulated.
0:11:18 That tends to later show up as triggers, right?
0:11:20 And kind of other things in adulthood.
0:11:24 And so yeah, that’s what we want to try to avoid when we can.
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0:14:32 I can’t help but put this neuroscience lens on this because I find it so interesting that
0:14:37 what you’re basically saying, if I understand correctly, is that until we can place things
0:14:42 into a story, which is really a sense of beginning, middle, and end, a sense of time, it just
0:14:44 reverberates in us.
0:14:50 I think I can’t help myself, I don’t want to give the impression we’ve got fires burning
0:14:54 all around us in terms of this building, but with some distance between us and the fires,
0:14:55 that’s actually true.
0:15:00 I think one of the things that’s so destabilizing for kids and adults in this kind of circumstance
0:15:02 is that we don’t know how this is going to work out.
0:15:03 We just don’t.
0:15:05 Of course, none of us have a crystal ball.
0:15:10 We can’t peer into the future, but it’s the not knowing that really extends our brain
0:15:11 resources.
0:15:16 I can imagine that for a kid, seeing their parent upset and then hearing, “Well, no,
0:15:17 I’m okay.
0:15:23 I’m okay,” would create this open loop where then the kid has to worry about it.
0:15:26 When will this come to an end?
0:15:32 One question about expressing sadness in front of a child, and if, let’s say, somebody expresses
0:15:39 why they’re sad, is it okay to accept consolation from the kid?
0:15:42 Because we hear so much that we shouldn’t have to parent.
0:15:45 As children, we shouldn’t have to parent our parents.
0:15:48 This is a big theme, especially on social media nowadays.
0:15:50 Were you the parent to your parent?
0:15:53 Were you the one that took out the trash when someone else should have done it, and therefore
0:15:54 you took on more responsibilities?
0:15:59 I don’t want kids to think they shouldn’t take out the trash, but if you’re consoling
0:16:05 a parent about a lost job, if you’re the kid, rather, that is sort of the go-between between
0:16:09 the parents is sort of acting as therapists, we hear about this a lot, a lot.
0:16:15 I think a lot of people peer into their past and say, “Yeah, I grew up way too fast.”
0:16:22 On the other hand, I think we would all agree that being a empathic person, teaching our
0:16:26 kids that if somebody’s crying, you want to walk over to that person, perhaps, and just
0:16:30 say, “Do you want me to sit with you or maybe do nothing at all?
0:16:32 Maybe offer a solution, maybe not.”
0:16:34 But at least provide some sort of support.
0:16:40 That seems healthy, but the basic question is, should parents accept consolation from
0:16:45 children when the parent is sad, or experiencing some other negative emotion?
0:16:47 I think this is a great question.
0:16:49 There’s a couple things that are coming to mind.
0:16:52 First of all, all of this is a matter of extent and patterning.
0:16:59 Yes, we do not want our kids to feel like it is their job to take care of our emotions.
0:17:02 It’s not a good situation.
0:17:06 I think the difference here actually comes down to what the true definition of empathy
0:17:07 is.
0:17:12 To me, empathy is noticing someone’s feelings and caring about them.
0:17:16 It’s not taking care of them.
0:17:17 That’s a big difference.
0:17:21 So let’s say I’m crying and my kid comes over and this whole situation, maybe somebody
0:17:27 died and they’re like, “Oh my goodness, mom, can I give you a hug and do you want me to
0:17:28 get you a cup of water?
0:17:29 Okay.
0:17:30 I just want parents to know.”
0:17:33 You don’t have to say, “No, no, I do not want you to be a parentified child.”
0:17:37 Be like, “That is so, that is so kind.
0:17:39 Yes, that would feel great.
0:17:40 Okay.
0:17:41 That’s totally fine.”
0:17:45 I think the line is, and every parent just knows this for themself, where it might get
0:17:51 to, “Oh, you know what, I love that you’re noticing I’m sad, and I love that you care
0:17:54 about that, and I also want to let you know.
0:17:57 Those are my feelings, not yours.
0:18:04 I am really able to take care of them myself with whoever is a friend, and you’re still
0:18:10 really allowed to be a kid who can go play, who can go have fun, who can even not listen
0:18:13 to me once in a while when I say it’s bath time.
0:18:14 That’s actually your job.
0:18:17 So let’s go do our jobs well.”
0:18:22 To me, that comes down to what empathy is, the delineation of what is a parent’s job
0:18:24 and what is a kid’s job.
0:18:30 But also, I think all of this can get misrepresented in social media, and I don’t want parents to
0:18:34 think that they always have to chastise their kid for acting in a caring way.
0:18:39 I feel like kids are, as you said before, kids are so perceptive about what their parents
0:18:45 are experiencing, and they’ll create or move towards all sorts of emotional gymnastics
0:18:47 in order to work with that.
0:18:52 Years ago, I saw, I think it was a YouTube video with Jim Carrey, who basically revealed
0:18:59 that he became funny as a way to make his sick mom laugh, that he grew up with a very
0:19:03 sick mom, which is chronically ill, and so he would like throw himself down the stairs
0:19:10 and try and make her laugh, and he was an incredible world-class physical comic, among
0:19:15 other aspects of comedy, but that his whole career was born out of this childhood tendency
0:19:20 to notice that his mom was really hurting and try and basically make her laugh, make
0:19:23 her feel something good.
0:19:28 Now I’m thinking about this because it’s just incredible the way that kids can pick up on
0:19:31 something and then try and find a solution to it.
0:19:37 I could imagine that for kids who have a sick parent, it could be mental challenges or physical
0:19:42 challenges that they’ve got to notice, and in the case of Jim Carrey, one could argue
0:19:48 whether or not it was adaptive or not adaptive, he had this meteoric career, but eventually
0:19:52 just left it, decided that wasn’t what he wanted to do.
0:19:58 Leaving that extreme example aside, let’s say a parent is sick with the flu, or is grieving
0:20:06 the loss of, God forbid, a spouse or something really major.
0:20:14 At what point does the parent need to say, “Listen, I’m really hurting, this is bad,
0:20:19 and I can handle it,” when that might not actually be true.
0:20:26 The question is how much information to give kids, because you don’t want to lie to them,
0:20:31 on the other hand, you don’t want them to feel the burden of needing to worry about
0:20:32 a circumstance.
0:20:37 I’m framing this in the context of sick parent, but I’m also raising this thing of financial
0:20:47 worries, of a close friend who told me that growing up, their parent was constantly dealing
0:20:49 with moving from one job to the next.
0:20:52 This issue of whether or not we’re going to have enough resources to get through the
0:20:55 next year was a constant question.
0:21:00 This person is now in their mid-30s, and you can tell it still haunts them, and it’s completely
0:21:03 shaped their relationship to work and finances.
0:21:08 I think we can think about this compared to, “What would I want from my boss?”
0:21:13 I have a boss who’s going through a really hard time, or having a really hard time at
0:21:18 home, and I notice that I’d probably want my boss to level with me and say, “You’re
0:21:22 right to notice, I’m going through a hard time.”
0:21:28 But at what point would it feel like, “Oh, am I safe in this organization?”
0:21:32 I think we probably all have a point there, and I think it’s the same thing with kids.
0:21:36 Kids really do need to feel like they have sturdy parents.
0:21:41 Again, I always go back to pilots because I think airplane examples are so powerful because
0:21:46 there’s very few times in adulthood that we actually feel like our safety is truly dependent
0:21:49 on another adult, like 100%.
0:21:56 When you’re a passenger in an airplane, you are 100% dependent, so it’s the closest dynamic.
0:21:59 You can imagine what it would be like if the pilot was saying, “Going through a really
0:22:04 hard time, who wants to come in and tell me a nice story.”
0:22:09 He’s like, “Oh my goodness, I can’t, you’re going through a hard time, but this is really
0:22:11 not feeling great.”
0:22:17 What that means, which is even a larger point, is if you’re a pilot, you need to make sure
0:22:22 you’re really doing a lot of self-care more than the average person because of this outsized
0:22:25 responsibility you have.
0:22:30 This is what I think about parenting, and it’s why the bigger theme here is this is what
0:22:35 gets me out of bed every morning so motivated is not just to help parents understand tantrums
0:22:40 or emotions or the latest struggle in their house, although I actually love that.
0:22:45 It’s just like, hold on, we’ve been really sold an awful story about what it really means
0:22:52 to be a parent, and how parenting really, first and foremost, is a journey of self-care.
0:22:54 How can I be the sturdiest person possible?
0:23:02 Who do I need in my life when things go poorly so I don’t lean on my young children and give
0:23:05 them a responsibility that is not theirs?
0:23:11 I was just saying to someone the other day that when you have kids, all of the unhealed
0:23:17 parts of your childhood, come right before your eyes, they are just triggered over and
0:23:23 over and over with your own children, like, oh, my kid’s whining, I can’t deal with that.
0:23:28 Well, whining is probably triggering because it’s kind of representative of helplessness.
0:23:30 What was it like in my family if I kind of felt helpless?
0:23:31 Was that allowed?
0:23:36 Did I grow up in a, you know, if you don’t stop crying, I’ll give you something to cry
0:23:37 about family.
0:23:42 If I don’t resolve that, I’m going to act that all out on my children and pass that
0:23:43 along.
0:23:49 So all of kind of these situations where parents are feeling, all these different emotions
0:23:54 from a trigger, from something in their life, I think it goes to what I always tell parents,
0:24:01 you know, you have a first and foremost job of self-care and taking care of yourself.
0:24:04 That doesn’t mean traveling to Europe for the year and leaving your kids alone.
0:24:06 It means what is going on inside you.
0:24:08 What skills do you need?
0:24:10 What networks of support do you need?
0:24:14 What do you have around you to help you on the hardest journey of your life and the most
0:24:20 rewarding one of being a parent so that you don’t have to say to your kids, you know,
0:24:25 oh, you know, can you kind of take care of me?
0:24:30 Paul Conti, who came on this podcast to do a series about mental health, not just mental
0:24:36 challenges, but also mental health, which is an interesting concept in its own right,
0:24:40 has been quoted as saying that, you know, that if you were to list out the 100 most
0:24:46 important things for romantic relationships, it would be self-care and communication repeated
0:24:48 50 times.
0:24:53 And I’m thinking about that now because it sounds like a pretty good model for pretty
0:24:55 much every relationship.
0:24:56 Self-care, communication.
0:24:59 And I must say, the first time I heard him say that, it wasn’t on my podcast, it was
0:25:00 on a different podcast.
0:25:01 It’s a surprise.
0:25:04 I thought self-care first.
0:25:09 But the way you’re framing it seems to me that if self-care comes first or at least very
0:25:15 high on the list of what parents should do, it frees up the kids to live and experience
0:25:24 life with a lot more ease, a lot more peace, and to basically unburden them of about 50,000
0:25:25 jobs.
0:25:26 That’s exactly right.
0:25:31 Self-care has gotten, you know, misrepresented.
0:25:33 It doesn’t mean getting a manicure every week.
0:25:34 It could, if that does it for you.
0:25:38 But when I think about self-care, and I really think about the work we do with parents at
0:25:43 Good Inside, we always say Good Inside, and like our app, it’s not parenting.
0:25:44 It’s for parents.
0:25:46 It’s for the journey of what it means to be a parent.
0:25:47 It’s for your own stuff.
0:25:49 It’s for your triggers.
0:25:51 It’s for finally learning how to set boundaries.
0:25:56 It’s about finally learning that it’s okay to get your needs met, even when the inconvenience
0:25:57 is with others.
0:26:02 It’s learning that your relationships are strong enough that they can get through hard
0:26:05 moments where people are upset with you, right?
0:26:10 It’s about finally saying to, if you need to, your mother-in-law, we can’t have any visitors
0:26:11 on Saturday.
0:26:16 And the reason I’m finally able to do that is because I understand myself value and all
0:26:19 this stuff, this has nothing to do with the fact that your kid isn’t sleeping at night.
0:26:25 But that is the foundation for intervening in the way you’re proud of when your kid is
0:26:27 waking up at two in the morning, right?
0:26:28 So that is the self-care.
0:26:32 It’s really like a, not just self-care, it’s self-establishment.
0:26:35 It’s self-growth, really.
0:26:40 I don’t know the psychology literature or clinical literature around this, but I’m thinking
0:26:44 about speed of emotional shifts.
0:26:52 In my own experience of life, I’ve known moody people, and I’ve known not as moody people.
0:26:58 I define moody as people whose moods fluctuate quickly and sometimes spontaneously.
0:27:04 But this idea that some people are steady as a rock is a great concept, but we also know
0:27:08 that we need to feel our emotions, express them to some extent.
0:27:12 And yet there are people where, if we were to plot this, it would look like a high-frequency
0:27:15 wave, where some people are really upset, then they’re feeling better again.
0:27:16 They’re upset, then they’re feeling better again.
0:27:18 I’m not talking about extreme pathology here.
0:27:22 I’m talking about, you know, someone cuts them off in traffic and they’re pissed, but
0:27:23 then they’re fine.
0:27:28 They’re very, very happy about something they see, so it doesn’t always have to be negative.
0:27:31 But then they’re kind of like flat affect, and then they’re into something negative.
0:27:37 I think that experience of emotions is so far and away different from the experience of
0:27:43 emotions emitted from somebody who, you can kind of see the emotion coming, it’s like
0:27:44 a slow swell.
0:27:50 It’s like an expansion and then a contraction again, that you have time.
0:27:54 And I feel like, I keep coming back to this theme of time perception, but anytime we have
0:27:58 time or we hear about, like in all the Buddhist traditions, like space, like you’re trying
0:28:02 to create mental space, and you know, this gap between stimulus and response, it all
0:28:09 sounds great, but with some people, you have to really be on your toes or perhaps you disengage.
0:28:12 And so I’ve never heard a satisfying answer to this, probably because I’ve never asked
0:28:16 it out loud.
0:28:20 If you’re a kid or if you’re a parent and somebody is experiencing something, let’s
0:28:26 say they’re really angry or really happy, you can imagine riding that wave in with them.
0:28:28 You could also imagine sitting back from it.
0:28:33 And some of this is probably what we’d call temperament, but maybe you could talk about
0:28:37 this a little bit in the context of having one or both parents that’s kind of like a
0:28:43 high frequency shifts between emotions versus kind of a slow expansion and then settling
0:28:44 of emotions.
0:28:48 Because I feel like those are two completely different experiences of life.
0:28:49 Yeah.
0:28:53 I mean, I think you’re speaking to how differently we feel emotions.
0:28:58 I mean, you know, I think about one of my kids who I call a deeply feeling kid, right?
0:29:01 So my image is always she’s just more porous to the world.
0:29:06 And so if you think about someone who’s more porous, that their pores are literally wider,
0:29:08 a lot more is going to come in.
0:29:09 And guess what?
0:29:12 A lot more is going to come out, right?
0:29:18 And she’s a kid who, by the way, you’re in a certain area in New York City, I can’t
0:29:21 be here to smell for me.
0:29:22 I’m wired differently.
0:29:24 I was like, I literally don’t smell anything different.
0:29:26 No, does that mean she’s wrong?
0:29:31 No, I actually bet knowing her, she smells things and then she lets me know how awful
0:29:33 it is and she can’t stand on that corner.
0:29:37 And for me, in that moment at least, because we’re probably all volatile in different ways,
0:29:40 I look steady as a rock, right?
0:29:48 I have another kid who, yeah, is pretty steady until he feels like his authority and power
0:29:49 is threatened.
0:29:51 And then you better watch out, you know?
0:29:55 And so in one moment, someone might see him as, oh, wow, that kid’s really volatile.
0:30:00 But in probably 90% of other moments, he’s kind of cool as a cucumber.
0:30:06 So I also think it’s important to categorize kids not as like always one way or another,
0:30:08 but we all feel emotions differently.
0:30:10 None of them is wrong or right.
0:30:17 To me, the goal is to not be locked into any one thing.
0:30:20 That to me, rigidity is always the enemy.
0:30:23 That’s what holds us back in adulthood, if we’re always one way.
0:30:27 I can never handle someone cutting me off in traffic because the emotion takes me over
0:30:28 and I have road rage.
0:30:29 Yeah, that’s not good.
0:30:32 It’s a very rigid, limited way of living life.
0:30:37 But it’s probably also limiting to say, I’ve never really gotten riled up about anything.
0:30:38 Forget road rage.
0:30:41 But it’s kind of amazing to get riled up once in a while and to feel really passionately
0:30:45 about something and to feel something enough that you want to go do something about it.
0:30:47 So there’s no morality on it.
0:30:53 I think what’s tricky, I can even say as a parent of three kids, is each of my kids,
0:30:58 I always kind of imagine this, five of all these different parts of me, they each need
0:31:01 a different part of me to kind of lead.
0:31:04 They almost need different lead parents.
0:31:09 So my kid, who is my deeply feeling kid, I know what’s so important is that I believe
0:31:14 her experience and I better be ready with certain boundaries because she feels things
0:31:16 so intensely, especially when she was younger.
0:31:17 I have to step in more often.
0:31:19 There’s more difficult behavior.
0:31:25 My kid who’s really, really steady, I try to sometimes, even though it’s convenient
0:31:28 because he’s so easy, there’s definitely a lot going on in there.
0:31:34 Sometimes I wonder, does he almost feel like all the emotional space is taken up by his
0:31:38 siblings and the only thing left for him is kind of steady as a rock and that can lead
0:31:40 to her rigidity later in life.
0:31:43 So I think these are moving systems.
0:31:49 So much of how we experience emotions growing up is also dictated by the system and kind
0:31:52 of the roles our siblings play.
0:31:58 And so I don’t know if that kind of gives you enough of an answer, but I think that’s
0:31:59 informative.
0:32:02 Yeah, I think the thing I’d really want parents to know is I think we place a lot of morality
0:32:03 on it.
0:32:06 And if we’re honest with ourselves, we’re probably just comparing our kid to how we
0:32:07 do things.
0:32:10 So if you’re someone who’s pretty steady, you’re like, “My kid is crazy.
0:32:11 They’re dramatic.”
0:32:12 Right?
0:32:15 If you’re someone who’s a little more out there, you’re not as bothered by that kid
0:32:17 and then you have another kid, you’re like, “That kid’s kind of boring.”
0:32:18 Right?
0:32:19 Because they’re so flat.
0:32:21 So, I mean, I think this is true in couples too.
0:32:24 Whenever we’re fighting, we’re probably just saying, “Why can’t you be more like me?”
0:32:27 When we’re triggered by our kid, we’re like, “Why can’t you be more like me?”
0:32:28 Right?
0:32:31 That’s probably what we’re always saying to each other, going back to communication.
0:32:35 But if you take a little different perspective of, hold on a second, there’s no wrong or
0:32:37 right way to feel emotions.
0:32:41 Some behaviors are not allowed, but all the emotions have information.
0:32:48 And what might my kid need right now instead of, “Oh my goodness, is my kid messed up or
0:32:51 why is my kid not just a little bit more like me?”
0:32:56 How useful is it to talk to kids about emotions when they’re not happening?
0:33:01 I mean, to me, this is something, I always just say, I always phrase it as emotion talk.
0:33:02 Right?
0:33:09 Just knowing that emotions live within you, knowing that there’s names for them, that
0:33:15 they’re normal, that they make sense, to me, it’s like the ultimate leg up in life.
0:33:21 It gives your kids such resilience because we can’t beat our emotions.
0:33:24 I feel like we’ve been trying that for generations.
0:33:31 If I just only didn’t feel so angry or so jealous or so sad, our emotions are so primal
0:33:32 in our body.
0:33:35 And I really do believe emotions, they’re information.
0:33:37 That’s what they are.
0:33:42 Why would we ever want to not get the information our body is giving us?
0:33:46 And sometimes it’s almost dramatic what happens in an amazing way.
0:33:49 So many people, I think it was so many times I have people in a room for therapy, they
0:33:52 start crying, “I’m so sorry.
0:33:58 You’re feeling something so intensely that your body is producing water from your eyes
0:33:59 to get your attention?”
0:34:03 Like that must be really important information.
0:34:04 Why are we saying sorry?
0:34:10 And as far as we know, a uniquely human thing, I could be wrong about this, but a colleague
0:34:17 in mind at Stanford and psychiatrist called Diceroth talked about this, that humans are
0:34:24 the only species that we are aware of that sheds tears for sake of emotion.
0:34:28 Other animals, I have lacrimonial glands, they produce water, so to speak, salty water
0:34:34 that comes out of their eye region, but not as it relates to emotions, at least we don’t
0:34:35 think so.
0:34:36 So that’s a great example.
0:34:40 I even think about a conversation I have had with my kids and I like to just have these
0:34:41 moments here and there.
0:34:44 Whenever I talk about good conversations with my kids, I think people think I have these
0:34:47 45 minute, no, they’re usually 10 seconds.
0:34:49 I say one thing, my kids say, “Can I have a snack now?”
0:34:53 And I think that’s a great conversation because I know it gets in there.
0:34:57 Do you know that tears have really important information for us?
0:34:58 I could be like, “What?
0:34:59 What’d you say?”
0:35:00 I’m just thinking.
0:35:02 So many people think tears are bad.
0:35:03 Tears are kind of amazing.
0:35:08 It’s like our body is trying to stop us and it’s like asking us to pay attention to something
0:35:09 really powerful.
0:35:12 I just think it’s kind of an amazing thing.
0:35:13 Our body does.
0:35:14 My kid does.
0:35:15 Can I have pretzels?
0:35:16 Oh, sure.
0:35:17 I’ll get you pretzels.
0:35:18 That to me is a win.
0:35:19 I just want to tell everyone.
0:35:20 I love it.
0:35:21 That is a 10 out of 10.
0:35:22 I’m bragging to people about that.
0:35:31 I’m like, I had the best conversation because I know this is seeping in because in the moment
0:35:36 my kid is crying, you think it’s going to be helpful when my seven-year-old is crying.
0:35:37 Tears are amazing.
0:35:40 No one wants to hear that.
0:35:42 My reflex would be to tell them the biology of tears.
0:35:46 Noam Sobo, who was on the podcast, told us that tears contain hormones that signal to
0:35:50 other people, pheromones, excuse me, that literally change the biology of the people around you.
0:35:52 We can actually smell tears.
0:35:53 We don’t realize we’re doing it.
0:35:54 See, here I go.
0:35:59 So I realize I spend enough time with kids that if you tell them that, they’ll like,
0:36:00 “Whatever.”
0:36:03 But you know when that’s a great conversation, or on the dinner table, and again, your kids
0:36:04 will roll their eyes.
0:36:06 Kids roll their eyes about everything.
0:36:10 I always think rolling their eyes or stop is kind of a kid’s way of saying, “There’s
0:36:13 a lot coming at me on my own person.
0:36:19 I just need to push it away a little so that on my own time and under my own control, I
0:36:20 can take it in.”
0:36:23 And we take eye rolls or whatever it is so personally that then we end up getting into
0:36:24 a power struggle.
0:36:25 Why are you rolling my eyes?
0:36:27 And we missed this opportunity.
0:36:29 If we just say nothing then, our kid is going to take in what we just said.
0:36:31 Just walk away.
0:36:32 Let the whole process happen.
0:36:36 And it’s kind of like if your boss comes in and says something like, “Oh, look, that
0:36:40 project really wasn’t as good as it could have been, and I really need these things
0:36:41 done.”
0:36:44 And then imagine you’re rolling your eyes at me.
0:36:50 If your boss just leaves the room, you probably think, “I didn’t do that as well as I could.
0:36:52 I’m going to go work on it.”
0:36:56 So I feel like not taking the bait is a very important parenting tool.
0:37:02 I think those moments with our kids to talk about emotions and to talk about our own,
0:37:06 especially when it comes to struggle, right?
0:37:10 One of the things I think a lot about, I try to be intentional with my kids, especially
0:37:11 when they’re younger.
0:37:16 I just think kids are flooded by their parents’ capability.
0:37:23 And it is so hard to learn in environments where someone’s capability is so far beyond
0:37:24 your own.
0:37:30 Like, I’m not a good cook, but if I was really learning to cook, I would want to learn from
0:37:35 someone from here or there, you know, burn some garlic or messed up the broccoli.
0:37:39 And then I was like, “Okay, well, I guess I could do this next time.”
0:37:45 But if I’m learning to cook from someone who is whatever celebrity chef, I’m like,
0:37:47 “That person’s like way too far from me.”
0:37:49 And I almost feel shame.
0:37:53 So I think about this with our kids and how this relates to emotions, where when your kids
0:37:57 are younger, especially, if you just think about the first 10 minutes of their day,
0:38:00 like they’re trying to figure out maybe how to brush their teeth, how to go to the bathroom,
0:38:03 how to turn on the sink, how to wash their hands, they always put their shirt on the
0:38:04 wrong way.
0:38:05 They can’t get on their socks.
0:38:10 There’s so many things and you come out dressed perfectly and then I can’t get on my socks
0:38:11 and you go like this.
0:38:12 Okay.
0:38:13 One, two.
0:38:16 And kind of in those moments, I always think that I’m just kind of saying to my kid, “I
0:38:17 can do everything easily.”
0:38:19 And they don’t know our history.
0:38:21 They don’t know.
0:38:23 We struggled to put on socks for five years too.
0:38:27 I put on my shirt backward, you know, until college, they don’t know that.
0:38:32 And so I think again in these calm moments, you have this opportunity to say something
0:38:37 like, “I cannot finish this crossword puzzle.”
0:38:39 Or like, “I love New York Times games,” right?
0:38:44 And it’s so fun with my kids now that they’re older, but my connections was really hard
0:38:45 today.
0:38:47 I just, I really struggled with it and then I was like, “Oh, I can’t do it.
0:38:48 I can’t do it.”
0:38:54 Then I took a deep breath and I tried it a little more and maybe I said, “I did it.”
0:38:56 Or I didn’t do whatever it is.
0:38:59 And it gives my kid, first of all, it gives my kid an opportunity to just notice that
0:39:01 I struggle too.
0:39:07 It gives my kid again kind of an arc and a story of, “Oh, someone I admire so much.
0:39:08 Every kid admires their parents.
0:39:09 They’ve had hard times.
0:39:11 They still have hard times.
0:39:12 They work through things.
0:39:13 They burn garlic.
0:39:16 They can kind of talk themselves through it.”
0:39:23 What is such a more powerful kind of lesson in emotion regulation than teaching your kid
0:39:25 kind of directly?
0:39:31 It also seems that here we’re not defining the age of the kids, but if one presents themselves
0:39:39 as perfect or close to it in any kind of relationship, work, romantic, parenting, etc., sooner
0:39:44 or later, you’re going to fall from grace because they’re either going to be looking
0:39:48 for the mistake or the moment you make a mistake, it’s going to be this fracture in the picture
0:39:50 that people had of you.
0:39:57 And I have to say, and I think some people might get irritated or even, dare I say, triggered
0:40:04 by the language I’m about to use, but I feel like the real ninja move in all of this is
0:40:09 to acknowledge that there are power dynamics between parent and child, but then to try and
0:40:11 dissolve the power dynamics.
0:40:14 And I say this in the context of having run a lab for a long time, which is very different
0:40:18 than raising small children, but you have people who are coming into your laboratory,
0:40:22 they are, if they’re your graduate student or postdoc, they’re staking their whole career
0:40:27 on your ability to teach and mentor, and a lot is at stake.
0:40:28 Nothing is for certain.
0:40:29 They might not get a job.
0:40:35 The papers might not work out, and so there’s just so much tension around it.
0:40:38 And so as a PI, as a principal investigator in a lab, I remember feeling that pressure
0:40:40 of like, “It’s got to work out.”
0:40:45 And one of the best things that ever happened to me as a graduate student was that my first
0:40:50 paper took forever to get accepted, and we almost got in, and then it didn’t get in,
0:40:55 and then finally it got in, such that every paper after that felt like a breeze, because
0:40:57 it took so damn long the first time.
0:41:04 And I got to see that my advisor couldn’t like make magic happen, and fortunately that’s
0:41:06 the way the scientific process is supposed to work.
0:41:11 And I think about this in the context of parenting, like if you’re seen as invincible, you know,
0:41:14 we hear about this, like people say, “I thought my dad was Superman.
0:41:20 I thought my mom was Superwoman,” you know, and then, but you can imagine how disappointing
0:41:25 it must be when they discover anything about a lack of capacity or a break in emotional
0:41:27 stability, et cetera.
0:41:33 So how does one present themselves as both powerful in the positive sense of the word,
0:41:39 such a thorny word, but powerful in the positive sense of the word, but human and vulnerable
0:41:45 to making mistakes, in a way that you don’t give up the essential, let’s just call it
0:41:48 what it is, a power dynamic with your kids so that the kid then doesn’t feel they have
0:41:49 to parent you?
0:41:52 I love this topic because it’s so interesting right now.
0:41:57 It’s kind of review season at good and side, because I also am the CEO of a company.
0:42:02 And to me, the things I talk about with parenting and my kids, and for other people parenting
0:42:08 their kids, they are the exact same principles, exact as leading a team.
0:42:13 And so when I think about review season and the way we get feedback and the right and
0:42:16 back and forth, it brings us all together and I’ll explain.
0:42:21 So the other day, I said to my kids, “I love resolutions.
0:42:23 I actually do love resolutions, right?
0:42:27 Because I love just the opportunity to say, “What is one small thing?”
0:42:32 I’m like, “I value, and I’m going to hold myself accountable to do.”
0:42:37 What I said to my kids was, “I want you to come up with one thing.
0:42:38 Just one thing for now.
0:42:44 And it has to be something like manageable and real that I could do that would really
0:42:46 make me a better mom to you.”
0:42:47 You asked your kids this?
0:42:48 I asked my kids this.
0:42:50 I actually asked my kids this relatively frequently.
0:42:53 It’s like a review, right?
0:42:54 Because it’s something I do at work all the time.
0:42:59 And what I say at work is, because often my direct reports say nothing, I said, “I just
0:43:00 want to tell you something.
0:43:04 I need one thing from you by the end of the day.
0:43:05 I need it.”
0:43:12 Because I know, I know I can get hot, I know I can get a little reactive, right?
0:43:13 I know I’m always go, go, go.
0:43:16 And there probably is a moment that I need to pause.
0:43:18 I know, I know I have a lot of issues.
0:43:22 So if you don’t tell me one thing, I don’t trust you as much.
0:43:23 So here’s what happened with my kids.
0:43:25 At that point, it was only two of them.
0:43:26 It just happened the other day.
0:43:32 My son says, my seven-year-old son, “Sometimes when you’re trying to get some work done
0:43:38 at home, and I want to get your attention for something, this is what you do, mom.
0:43:43 One minute, one minute, one minute, and then you still don’t give me full attention.”
0:43:44 He’s clocking.
0:43:45 He’s clocking.
0:43:49 “I’d rather you tell me five minutes and then give me your full attention.”
0:43:51 That’s literally what I was going to say.
0:43:58 I was just like, that is a really good suggestion, and I really needed to hear that.
0:44:00 I can do that.
0:44:01 This is a couple days ago.
0:44:02 Okay.
0:44:09 I have to admit, two days ago, he was trying to show me something, and he just goes, “You’re
0:44:11 doing it.
0:44:13 You’re not really giving me your attention.”
0:44:15 And I said, “You’re right.
0:44:16 Thank you.
0:44:17 Change is hard.
0:44:20 I actually do need about two minutes.
0:44:21 Is that okay?
0:44:24 And then I’ll put my computer down, because I’ll sometimes look at him and kind of look
0:44:25 at you.”
0:44:26 And he goes, “Okay.”
0:44:27 It was kind of, it was so beautiful.
0:44:33 My daughter said, “At night,” she goes, “It’s so interesting when you give people this
0:44:36 opportunity how generous they can be with you.
0:44:37 I think it’s been true at work at home.”
0:44:40 My daughter goes, “I know when it’s my bedtime at night.
0:44:42 I always want to do one or two extra things.
0:44:43 I know.
0:44:45 I always have to get my water.
0:44:47 It’s just how I am,” that’s what she said.
0:44:51 And you get this rushing voice, and you go, “Come on.
0:44:56 It’s bedtime,” and that’s like the last voice I hear before bed.
0:44:58 And I really don’t like that voice.
0:45:02 And so can you just know that I always need to do those one or two extra things and not
0:45:05 use that voice?”
0:45:07 And again, I said, “You know what?
0:45:09 I wouldn’t want to hear that as the last voice.”
0:45:15 You know, and I think at night, especially as a little digression, I always feel like
0:45:16 I’m in a rush.
0:45:17 I don’t know.
0:45:18 I don’t know.
0:45:19 An extra two minutes with my kids.
0:45:20 My kids are getting older.
0:45:21 They’re not even in my house for that much longer.
0:45:24 I just have to remind myself, “I’m not in a rush.
0:45:27 This is the best use of my time,” and so I said, “And that one I’ve been really good
0:45:28 at.”
0:45:37 And so how do we show our kids that we’re fallible one way is actually asking for feedback, especially
0:45:38 when you have older kids.
0:45:43 When you have a teenager, this is the number one thing that can change things around.
0:45:45 You know what I’m thinking about?
0:45:47 It’s hard to be a teen.
0:45:50 And I’m definitely not a perfect parent of a teen.
0:45:57 I’m sure you have a long list, but for right now, can you name one thing that I could
0:45:59 do that would make me a better parent to you?
0:46:02 And I want to follow this through because what a lot of teens will do, our parents will
0:46:08 say, “My teenager tells me something ridiculous,” they’ll say, “Well, you know how you make
0:46:12 me charge my phone at 9 or 10 p.m. out of the room?
0:46:17 You could let me sleep with my phone,” or they’ll say, “You know what you could do?
0:46:21 You could give me $1,000 every week for an allowance,” right?
0:46:23 And so parents will say, “My kid doesn’t take it seriously.”
0:46:28 This is where, to me, one of the most important life skills, parenting, management, friendships,
0:46:34 it doesn’t matter, is differentiating someone’s words on the surface from their needs or their
0:46:41 feelings or their fears, whatever it is, underneath and not responding to the words but kind of
0:46:42 cutting under them.
0:46:48 Let’s even say I could say the phone thing.
0:46:49 What would be so great about having your phone?
0:46:50 Just help me understand it.
0:46:54 I know in my head I’m never going to do it, but we don’t realize just because we’re not
0:46:58 going to do something someone asks, it doesn’t mean we don’t owe that person the right to
0:47:00 try to understand why they want it, right?
0:47:04 So I might just ask questions and I probably end with, “Look, I actually hear what you’re
0:47:05 saying.
0:47:07 All of your friends are on Instagram until midnight.”
0:47:11 It sounds like you legitimately do miss out on conversations by the time you get to school
0:47:12 or you feel out of them.
0:47:14 Like, I’m not even joking.
0:47:17 I feel like if I was your age, I’d be like, “That’s basically the worst thing ever, I
0:47:19 believe you.”
0:47:23 Having your phone after X time is just one of my non-negotiables.
0:47:26 It’s actually just because I love you so much that I feel like my job is to protect you.
0:47:29 I wonder if there is some other way that we can figure that out.
0:47:30 Or my kid says $1,000.
0:47:33 I might say, “What would you do with $1,000?
0:47:34 Oh, you want to go to more concerts?
0:47:36 Oh, your friends all get more allowance.
0:47:37 Tell me more.”
0:47:39 No matter what your kid says to you, there’s information.
0:47:42 So I think feedback is one.
0:47:45 I think repair is another way.
0:47:49 Repair is the most important relationship strategy to get good at.
0:47:54 And I just hope everyone hears the duality in that and realizes what that means because
0:47:59 if you’re going to get good at repair, you have to mess up.
0:48:02 The only way to repair is to mess up.
0:48:07 And so if I’m telling you get good at repair, I am telling you you have to accomplish step
0:48:10 one, which is yelling at your kid, you have to.
0:48:11 And you’re going to do it anyway.
0:48:12 I do it.
0:48:16 But if you then tell yourself, “Wait, I’m getting good at repair.
0:48:17 Step one is messing up.
0:48:18 I crushed it.
0:48:19 Amazing.
0:48:20 I’m half the way there.”
0:48:25 Then when you repair, which is when you take ownership, “Hey, I’m sorry I yelled.”
0:48:26 Just like you.
0:48:28 I’m managing my emotions.
0:48:30 Emotions are really tricky.
0:48:31 Emotions are really hard.
0:48:33 And do you know what?
0:48:36 Even though you’re going to have a leg up on this compared to most people and their adults
0:48:40 because you’re learning how to regulate emotions, you’re still going to be practicing that when
0:48:41 you’re my age.
0:48:44 That is my responsibility to work on.
0:48:45 It’s not your fault.
0:48:47 And I love you.
0:48:49 So powerful.
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0:51:45 I love, love, love this thing about asking for a request.
0:51:49 It’s different than asking for feedback, which could quickly lead to a list of all the things
0:51:54 that one does wrong as opposed to a request for how one could do better.
0:51:58 There’s an important distinction there, and then it seems that the question that the parent
0:52:02 or who knows, the boss or whatever, maybe it’s with a romantic partner, needs to ask
0:52:08 themselves is what is this request really about?
0:52:10 What’s underneath it?
0:52:13 I’m just paraphrasing essentially what you said.
0:52:14 What’s it really about?
0:52:19 Is it a request for more autonomy, for more social connection with other people?
0:52:25 Then one starts to realize that certainly in this example that you gave of a child asking
0:52:29 for more time with their phone late at night, it actually has nothing to do with your relationship
0:52:30 to them.
0:52:32 It’s really about their relationship to their friends.
0:52:37 The fact that they might feel as if they’re missing out.
0:52:43 That leads me to another question, which is what if you as the parent, partner, boss,
0:52:48 etc., keep your phone close to you until midnight, and they know that.
0:52:54 So one of the worst things that I believe anyone can say is do as I say, not as I do.
0:53:00 It’s just such a blatantly arrogant stance of you’re supposed to do what I say because
0:53:04 I say so, but I’m not going to do it because I don’t want to.
0:53:08 And yet there are times like in parent-child relationships or boss-employee relationships
0:53:14 where you’re telling somebody to do something and you yourself are not going to do it or
0:53:19 no longer do it or choose not to do it and in reality you don’t have to and maybe there’s
0:53:22 a good reason why you don’t or don’t have to.
0:53:28 That’s why I use these words, power dynamics, which everyone hears and goes, “Oh boy, here
0:53:31 we go,” but it is an issue of power dynamics.
0:53:34 You have more power than the kid.
0:53:38 So what you’re doing is you’re giving the kid power to express where they want more
0:53:39 agency.
0:53:43 I like the word maybe agency more than power.
0:53:47 Did you grant your son the right to use his phone later into the evening?
0:53:48 My son has-
0:53:49 Not to pry into your personal person.
0:53:53 My son did not ask me that and he knows that our phone rules are non-negotiable.
0:53:56 No, I didn’t mean to pry into your family dynamics.
0:53:59 That kid, if that’s a rule, you would never give it to them, but I think so many times
0:54:05 and then it’ll go back to power, we shouldn’t be afraid to learn more.
0:54:08 I actually just think that’s what it is.
0:54:10 Our kid says, “All my friends get this.”
0:54:11 “That’s not true.
0:54:12 Why don’t you just learn more?”
0:54:18 If you do, it’s like learning more about what someone says doesn’t mean you ever have to
0:54:19 change your boundary.
0:54:22 Most of conflict is about a lack of understanding anyway.
0:54:28 When you learn more, you’re trying to understand, you understand your kid, understand someone
0:54:29 wants to raise and you think it’s ridiculous.
0:54:34 You can learn more, tell me what’s been going on, what have you been doing?
0:54:39 Learning more about someone’s position does not weaken your position.
0:54:43 And I think that’s really, really important in any form of leadership.
0:54:47 In terms of the power dynamics, there is something about the word power that like …
0:54:48 Is that weird?
0:54:49 Yeah.
0:54:52 I mean, I think the way I think about it and what we do at Good Insight a lot in terms
0:54:57 of our leadership and parenting style, I don’t use the word power, but I think it’s about
0:54:59 embodying your authority.
0:55:01 Parents have authority.
0:55:04 Pilots have authority.
0:55:09 Bosses have authority because they’re the ones who have the job of setting up the whole
0:55:11 system for success.
0:55:13 That’s their job, right?
0:55:15 My job isn’t to make my kid happy.
0:55:21 My job is to help create the conditions for my kid to be like a real functioning, confident
0:55:22 adult.
0:55:23 That’s what I believe, right?
0:55:27 A pilot’s job is definitely not to keep passengers happy, it’s to get everyone safely on the
0:55:28 ground.
0:55:32 A boss’s job is not to keep everyone happy, it’s to set up the conditions for health
0:55:33 and success of the business, right?
0:55:37 Now, if you know that’s your job, it’s no one else’s job, but the CEO, I mean, to some
0:55:42 degree, all the management, but that is their job, and so there’s a difference where if
0:55:47 the CEO believes a job needs to be done a certain way, it’s not that they have power,
0:55:52 it’s just their role involves having that authority, and if someone else disagrees,
0:55:58 it’s up to them to say you can keep the job or not, it’s just you have different roles.
0:56:02 And I actually think owning that very outright, it’s actually something I recently said at
0:56:08 work, in a review around something I really wanted and kind of owned like in my role as
0:56:15 a CEO, like that is under my role to decide this is important.
0:56:18 And now if you figure it out, let’s see, I would love some input on how we’re going
0:56:19 to get this done.
0:56:21 Same thing for a kid.
0:56:27 One of the lines I said over and over and over to my kid when they were younger, and
0:56:31 I see so many good inside parents tell me that their kids reflect back to them later, is
0:56:34 my number one job is to keep you safe.
0:56:35 So what does that mean?
0:56:36 That kind of relates to power.
0:56:42 It can mean why am I not letting my kid, I don’t know, jump up and down on our kitchen
0:56:43 counter?
0:56:46 It’s not because I’m pissed that my kid isn’t listening.
0:56:49 I’m not letting them jump up and down on my kitchen counter where there’s a light above
0:56:54 their head because my number one job is to keep my kid safe.
0:56:55 Is that power?
0:56:57 I mean, I guess I think it’s authority.
0:56:58 How would I embody that authority?
0:57:00 I would say it looks hard for you to get down.
0:57:07 I’m about to pick you up and put you on the floor, because I have authority, right?
0:57:11 We get to this phone discussion, let’s say, and I really do believe that the phone has
0:57:14 to be charged out of the room at a certain time.
0:57:15 I’m going to understand.
0:57:16 I’m going to understand.
0:57:17 I’m going to listen.
0:57:20 Hopefully I’m connected to my kid, and they feel respected by me in a million ways, and
0:57:26 it might lead to me saying, look, my number one job still is to keep you safe.
0:57:29 And that really means making decisions that I really believe are good for you.
0:57:35 More term and long term, even if you’re upset with me, this is one of those times.
0:57:36 And so I love you.
0:57:38 This might be a point of conflict.
0:57:40 I know we’re going to get through this.
0:57:46 And that is my role as a parent, and it comes from a place of wanting to protect you.
0:57:51 And I think when you embody your authority in that way, kids never say thank you, and
0:57:53 they will roll their eyes.
0:57:56 And kids always feel loved and protected.
0:57:57 They really do.
0:58:02 I hear it from my kids, and maybe this is so true.
0:58:04 Sometimes things happen with my kids, and I’m like, no one’s going to even believe this.
0:58:08 But I was walking with my seven-year-old the other day, and I said, what does it mean to
0:58:09 be a good parent?
0:58:11 What does it really mean?
0:58:12 I’m curious.
0:58:19 I really thought, because it means you’re kind of strict.
0:58:23 And I said, what do you mean strict?
0:58:26 You have certain rules that you think matter.
0:58:31 And he goes, but it also means like you also have to be loving and fun.
0:58:37 And my heart like hurts hearing, like myself say this like in a good way, hurting me.
0:58:38 They know.
0:58:39 I think kids know.
0:58:41 And maybe he says that because that’s what we are, but I think kids know.
0:58:46 And I can’t even tell you how many kids I used to work with, and teens especially, the
0:58:54 pain of their parents not embodying their authority was so clear.
0:58:58 They knew that they shouldn’t be out at a certain time.
0:59:02 They knew that they were hanging out with kids who were like bad news, and their parents
0:59:03 had no idea.
0:59:08 And they felt unanchored, like they really, really knew not that their parents were an
0:59:09 exerting power.
0:59:14 That word isn’t, their parents weren’t embodying their appropriate authority to protect their
0:59:15 kids.
0:59:20 I had something come to mind, which is not a phrase that I’ve ever used before or heard
0:59:27 before, but what comes to mind is kind of statements of stance.
0:59:33 I feel like statements of stance in parent-child relationships, families, workplace, romantic
0:59:39 relationships, et cetera, are great when they’re about actions or about sort of overriding themes.
0:59:43 Like no matter what, I’m trying to keep you safe.
0:59:48 I might not get everything right, but like that is like non-negotiable internally, and
0:59:51 I’m going to try and make it non-negotiable externally.
0:59:57 It’s a statement of stance about actions, or keeping you healthy and safe is my number
0:59:58 one priority.
0:59:59 Those are facts.
1:00:04 Those are things that one can really say and believe and until the end of time be trying
1:00:07 to incorporate into one’s behavior.
1:00:13 But I feel like statements of stance about emotions are very dangerous.
1:00:19 We don’t yell in this house.
1:00:20 It’s okay to cry.
1:00:21 There’s always a caveat.
1:00:25 Of course, it’s okay to cry, but there are times when crying is less appropriate.
1:00:30 There’s times when yelling might be appropriate.
1:00:35 There’s times when emotions need to be expressed or not expressed in a particular way because
1:00:43 I look, I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that the kid tantrumming in a public environment
1:00:47 is an embarrassing thing for them, for their parent, for people around, and it’s not the
1:00:48 end of the world, right?
1:00:51 That’s a tantrum for goodness sake, right?
1:00:52 People will survive.
1:00:57 But I feel like statements of stance about emotions kind of hold us to this standard
1:00:59 that we’ll never be able to meet.
1:01:09 But that statements of stance about action are, you know, until we fail and hope we don’t,
1:01:12 we can say things like, you know, my job is always to keep you safe.
1:01:18 I’m always going to try and make the best decision for you and for your sister, for instance.
1:01:22 But I think that many people, I’m not just speaking from my own experience, but in talking
1:01:27 to friends and others that they grew up in homes where there were these philosophies,
1:01:31 these statements of stance, and the moment that things didn’t match that statement of
1:01:36 stance, like the whole concept of what parents and children are supposed to be about just
1:01:40 kind of started to dissolve, and it creates that underlying fear, like do they even really
1:01:45 know what they’re doing, or maybe they don’t know what they’re doing, but maybe they’re
1:01:46 trying.
1:01:50 So in any case, it’s just something that maybe we could talk about for a moment.
1:01:51 I have some reactions to that.
1:01:56 I think, I mean, I kind of think you’re talking about values and principles, right?
1:02:00 And so I think there are, in my house, to be honest, it’s not like we have some wall
1:02:04 of like, these are our family values that’s, I mean, some families might do this.
1:02:05 I’ve seen those in people’s homes.
1:02:08 Yeah, that’s not organized enough to do that.
1:02:13 But if I thought about a couple that come to mind, like my job is to keep my kids safe.
1:02:18 By the way, safe does not mean they’re never in a situation without risk.
1:02:19 That’s not what I mean.
1:02:20 But in general–
1:02:21 That’s its own form of danger.
1:02:22 Exactly.
1:02:25 The minimization of risk is also not safe, right?
1:02:27 So but in general, my job is to keep you safe.
1:02:30 I’m not going to let you do things that endanger yourself or others.
1:02:32 So that’s one.
1:02:39 Another principle I think about is, I will always tell you the truth, even if it’s uncomfortable.
1:02:41 Like you can always count on me for that.
1:02:44 We call that kind of, I call that truth to over comfort, right?
1:02:46 So if my kid says to me, “How are babies made?”
1:02:51 That value is useful, right?
1:02:53 Another thing is like, all feelings are allowed.
1:02:55 Not all behaviors are okay, right?
1:02:56 Stuff like that.
1:02:58 What about we don’t swear in this house?
1:02:59 So what I was about to say–
1:03:00 And then you’re on the phone and then you screw up–
1:03:01 What I was about to say is–
1:03:03 And then the kid goes, “You swore.”
1:03:09 To me, what’s very different is these kind of rigidities around behavior.
1:03:10 We don’t swear.
1:03:11 Swearing is a behavior.
1:03:13 We don’t cry in public behavior.
1:03:14 We don’t tantrum here.
1:03:15 That’s a behavior.
1:03:22 Behaviors all the time are a manifestation of feelings that overpower skills.
1:03:26 So saying we don’t do certain behaviors, to me, it doesn’t even make logical sense.
1:03:30 Well, what if I’m in a situation where I have a really intense emotion and don’t have the
1:03:33 skill to manage it?
1:03:36 The behavior is going to happen and then I feel like a bad person.
1:03:39 That’s very different than values around intention.
1:03:43 I want to be truthful with my kids, even if things are uncomfortable.
1:03:46 I might fumble around with the words, right?
1:03:49 I might even sometimes lie because I didn’t do that value in action.
1:03:55 But what I can come back to is, okay, nobody lives their values 100% of the time.
1:03:59 So I think we’re talking about actually something core to what we think about at Good Inside,
1:04:06 which is, I’m a good person with values who is totally imperfect and sometimes acts in
1:04:07 ways I’m not proud of.
1:04:08 Both are true.
1:04:13 When families have values that are very behavior-based, what ends up happening in the kids is they
1:04:17 start to equate certain behaviors with morality.
1:04:21 These are good behaviors that make me loved in my family.
1:04:25 And these are bad behaviors that kind of make me feel like I’m not the right part of my
1:04:26 family.
1:04:32 They make me wonder, am I lovable, am I good inside after all, am I worthy?
1:04:38 That’s not good, because whenever we tie behavior to identity, that’s shame.
1:04:44 And we’ve tried to motivate kids with shame for hundreds and hundreds of years, and it
1:04:46 does not work and causes a lot of problems.
1:04:48 I think another one, which is interesting, especially as my kids get older, I said this
1:04:52 to my teen recently, I said, this is really tricky.
1:04:57 One of my jobs, as always, has been to create guidelines and rules with you.
1:04:59 It’s always going to be kind of collaborative.
1:05:03 Some, because of my authority, will be directive that I believe are going to keep you safe.
1:05:05 And I think this really relates to a phone.
1:05:09 I want to tell you another part of my job that might sound contradictory, but I actually
1:05:11 think we just need to hold them both at once.
1:05:19 Another part of my job is to be there for you when you inevitably go against those guidelines.
1:05:20 And I want you to know that.
1:05:24 Really have rules around what can and cannot be done online.
1:05:30 And I’ll say this here, if you do kind of become part of a really inappropriate text
1:05:36 conversation, if there is bullying, if you do come across some images online that make
1:05:40 you feel really uncomfortable and you’re like, I shouldn’t have seen that, you’re not getting
1:05:41 in trouble with me.
1:05:43 I’m not going to throw you a party.
1:05:46 I will be there for you to help you through those moments.
1:05:50 Those things sound contradictory, and in our family, we know two things can be true, and
1:05:51 those are both true.
1:05:52 Right?
1:05:57 To me, that’s a really important thing for a teenager to know.
1:05:59 Let’s talk about guilt and shame.
1:06:00 Yes.
1:06:04 I’ve heard some kind of catchphrase stuff, not from you, but like, oh, guilt is about
1:06:07 the thing you did and shame is a feeling about who we are.
1:06:15 And while I’m not against those sort of 1990s, early 2000s kind of psychology isms, I feel
1:06:20 like they’re not very useful in the same way that hearing that there’s a gap between
1:06:21 stimulus and response.
1:06:25 And if you identify that gap, well, then goodness, you’re going to be the kind of person that
1:06:29 can feel stressed but not be reactive, you’re going to be responsive, not reactive.
1:06:33 That’s just a bunch of words that doesn’t, here I’m a biologist, so I’ll just say it
1:06:37 doesn’t take into account the fact that the biology of stress changes your perception
1:06:43 of time and a whole bunch of other things that basically make that gap between stimulus
1:06:45 and response much, much smaller.
1:06:50 And I think once people understand that, they go, oh, so like the kitchen refrigerator
1:06:54 magnet or the poster on the wall that says, you know, like, there’s a gap between stimulus
1:06:55 and response.
1:06:57 It was supposed to save me, but it didn’t, of course not.
1:07:01 Like, we’re just in different states of mind at different times.
1:07:09 So, how do you define, no pressure here, but how do you define guilt versus shame?
1:07:12 And what about guilt and shame?
1:07:13 Great.
1:07:14 Two of my favorite topics.
1:07:17 There are different ways of defining things.
1:07:22 I’m like you to me, I like defining things in ways that are very concrete and very usable.
1:07:23 That’s all.
1:07:25 And if there’s multiple ways of doing that, that’s great.
1:07:28 So the way I think about guilt, and this will probably set us off in a direction about
1:07:36 what is not guilt also, is guilt is a feeling I have when I act out of alignment with my
1:07:38 values.
1:07:44 And in that way, guilt is a really useful feeling, real useful because it makes me reflect
1:07:49 on, wait, I didn’t act in line with my values, I wonder why.
1:07:50 What would I have had to do differently?
1:07:51 What got in my way?
1:07:55 Well, I’m so glad I have that information from my body to have this deeply uncomfortable
1:07:58 feeling to set in that process, right?
1:08:02 So if I yell at my kid, I’m going to feel guilty, right?
1:08:07 I think about a time when my kid told me, you know, I lied to you.
1:08:11 I did take that eraser from that kid in school and I feel really guilty.
1:08:15 And I said, first of all, I’m so glad you told me that.
1:08:17 I’m so glad you’re feeling guilty.
1:08:18 That’s the right way to feel.
1:08:23 Now, there must have been something so hard about seeing something so shiny and fun that
1:08:24 you don’t have.
1:08:25 I totally get that.
1:08:26 And you’re right.
1:08:28 That’s not in your values to take it.
1:08:33 So that’s a useful feeling that feelings can help you not do something like that again.
1:08:37 Let’s figure out what you can do, not just to say sorry, this is what parents miss.
1:08:39 You know, it’s going to happen another time.
1:08:42 You’re going to see something else pretty cool, someone’s cubby.
1:08:46 And you know what most people think, you’re going to have fun again.
1:08:47 I would too.
1:08:50 What can you do the next time you have that thought, right?
1:08:53 All of this comes because of guilt, useful feeling.
1:08:57 Guilt is a feeling you have when you act out of alignment with your values.
1:09:03 Now, to me, guilt is one of the most misunderstood feelings because what you hear all the time
1:09:08 and you’ll hear how much it kind of conflicts with this definition is something like this.
1:09:11 I haven’t seen my friends in years.
1:09:18 There’s finally a dinner, but it would require me not to put my kid down to sleep, you know?
1:09:22 And I’m talking to someone I’d say, okay, well, I’m guessing you’re not leaving your
1:09:23 kid alone.
1:09:30 Now, again, my husband or my mom, someone who’s a totally safe adult, but Becky, I told
1:09:34 my kid and she was calling me to be like, no, mommy, I needed to be you, I need to be
1:09:35 you.
1:09:36 And so I’m not going to dinner.
1:09:39 Do you know what I’m going to say, Andrew?
1:09:42 Because I feel so guilty.
1:09:46 This is, right, oh, someone asked me to be in the PTA meeting.
1:09:47 I’m so busy.
1:09:51 I can’t, but I can’t do it because I feel so guilty.
1:09:52 Okay.
1:09:58 Again, I’m just curious, is it, well, it sounds like you really want to go to dinner with
1:09:59 your friends.
1:10:00 She’s like, oh, I do.
1:10:01 All I do is parent these days.
1:10:04 I literally haven’t seen these friends in years there in town and she’ll tell me about
1:10:05 your friendships.
1:10:06 That’s what I mean.
1:10:11 Do I value my, yes, I know that I’m kind of more than just someone who puts down my kid
1:10:13 for bed and I love doing that, but, but this matters too.
1:10:15 So I said, this is really interesting.
1:10:19 You really value your friendships.
1:10:23 Your life right now feels out of balance and that your friendships, that part of your burner
1:10:25 of your stove is like really low.
1:10:26 Okay.
1:10:27 And you’re not going because you feel guilty.
1:10:28 I just want to share an idea.
1:10:32 Guilt is a feeling you have when you act out of alignment with your values.
1:10:37 It seems like going to dinner would be in line with your values and almost, it’s like, yeah,
1:10:38 that’s true.
1:10:39 So what is this feeling?
1:10:42 And here’s what I think the feeling is.
1:10:46 I call it not guilt just cause I haven’t figured out a more sophisticated term, but here’s
1:10:48 what I think is happening.
1:10:55 A lot of us, especially women, when we were growing up, we learned to notice everyone’s
1:11:04 feelings around us and we learned that our value really, and our worth really, and we
1:11:07 were kind of best in good girls.
1:11:14 When we took care of everyone else’s feelings except for our own, I think so many young
1:11:23 girls, especially become expert at what people need of them by becoming distant from what
1:11:25 they need for themselves.
1:11:31 The picture I get in my mind is sort of like having antennae cast in every direction except
1:11:37 perhaps at the exclusion of paying attention to the antennae that are inward.
1:11:40 And we are, you know, attentional resources are finite.
1:11:45 I mean, we just don’t have the capacity to like respond to other people’s emotions and
1:11:49 feel at the same time to the same degree that we would if we just concentrated on theirs
1:11:50 or our emotions.
1:11:51 And kids are…
1:11:52 I mean, that’s just a fact of how humans work.
1:11:53 They are oriented by attachment.
1:11:58 They have to learn with their families, “How do I become the most lovable, safest version
1:11:59 of myself?”
1:12:00 So I have a friend who it’s true.
1:12:02 I remember her even in middle school.
1:12:03 I can’t come.
1:12:08 My dad’s traveling and my mom really needs me to stay home and watch a movie with her,
1:12:09 right?
1:12:10 And I know this mom.
1:12:11 Well, it’s like, “Oh, you don’t love me.
1:12:12 You don’t, right?”
1:12:18 I mean, this was so she became expert at always noticing other people’s emotions and not only
1:12:25 noticing them, taking the emotions from them, kind of like taking them into their body and
1:12:30 almost metabolizing them for them.
1:12:32 That’s not guilt.
1:12:40 That is taking someone else’s emotions and taking them into your body at the expense of
1:12:41 taking care of your own needs.
1:12:44 And so I have a visual for this because I think it’s really powerful where let’s say
1:12:48 it’s the situation where a mom is saying, “I really want to go out to dinner, but I feel
1:12:49 so guilty.”
1:12:51 First thing is just powerful to say, “That is not guilt.
1:12:56 It is something else and it is real and it is powerful, but it is not guilt.”
1:12:57 What is happening?
1:13:00 I’m on one side of a tennis court, like me and you, Andrew, but let’s say it’s a tennis
1:13:06 court and you’re on the other side or even like in between instead of a glass table.
1:13:13 Over here, I am here in my desire to go out with my friends because I do value my friendships.
1:13:14 Okay.
1:13:17 Over here is, you’re upset about it.
1:13:21 And let’s say instead you’re my daughter, you’re like, “No, no, don’t go.
1:13:22 No one else can put me to bed.”
1:13:27 That is definitely hard to deal with, but that is your daughter’s feelings.
1:13:28 Those are not your feelings.
1:13:32 Those are your daughter’s feelings and some of us/a lot of us have developed this tendency
1:13:36 where we’re on this court and all of a sudden all those feelings from your side somehow
1:13:41 go through that wall and they come to your side and you call it guilt.
1:13:42 It is not guilt.
1:13:49 And to me, one of the most liberating things, and this actually relates to empathy, is to
1:13:52 give that feeling back to its rightful owner.
1:13:57 Because what that means is if I really give it back, now I have a boundary.
1:13:59 That’s my kid’s feeling.
1:14:00 That’s not mine.
1:14:03 And I can now actually empathize.
1:14:04 People said, “No, I was empathizing.
1:14:05 I wasn’t going out.”
1:14:07 No, no, no, no.
1:14:08 That’s not empathy.
1:14:12 You weren’t going out with your friends because you couldn’t handle the distress in your body.
1:14:14 You just made your daughter’s feelings your own.
1:14:16 You just engaged in something almost selfish.
1:14:18 This has nothing to do with your daughter.
1:14:21 In those situations, that’s why we say weird things to our four-year-old.
1:14:23 Like, “Don’t you want mommy to have friends?”
1:14:25 I feel like Ford’s like, “Why are you asking me that question?”
1:14:29 It’s like a pilot being like, “Don’t you want me to make an emergency landing?
1:14:34 Like, if you need to make an emergency landing, don’t ask me for permission.
1:14:36 Because once I give it back to my daughter, I can do this.
1:14:39 I can say, “You really wish I would put you to bed tonight.
1:14:40 You’re right.
1:14:42 It’s different when grandma does it.”
1:14:44 “Oh, it does.
1:14:45 I’m going out.
1:14:48 It’s okay if you’re upset.
1:14:51 I’ll be back and I’ll kiss you, and I’ll see you in the morning.”
1:14:53 And then this next part is so important.
1:14:58 When you walk out, I don’t want any person having any illusion that the daughter’s going
1:15:02 to be like, “Yes, you go girl.
1:15:04 No, she is going to scream.
1:15:05 That’s okay.
1:15:07 Going back to the boundary.
1:15:14 You’re allowed to take care of your needs, and other people are allowed to be inconvenienced
1:15:16 and upset by it.
1:15:19 It doesn’t mean your needs are wrong.
1:15:26 It doesn’t mean their feelings are wrong, and it definitely doesn’t mean you feel guilty.
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1:18:24 Wow.
1:18:29 I say wow because I think the lens that you’re looking at guilt through and the way you’re
1:18:33 defining it is so very different than the way it’s been discussed ever, and I think this
1:18:41 is a super, super important topic, so I’d like to lathe into it a little bit more.
1:18:47 In some ways, the way that I think many people experience guilt, at least according to your
1:18:52 definition, which by the way, I love, it’s when we’ve act out of alignment with our
1:18:57 values, versus feeling pressure.
1:19:02 I think about, I mean, Lord knows I don’t have the best reputation as having a short
1:19:05 text response latency.
1:19:06 It’s variable.
1:19:10 Sometimes I’m quick on the draw, and other times I’m like, goodness, it’ll be days or
1:19:11 weeks.
1:19:12 I mean, over the holidays, I was spooling through it.
1:19:21 I would respond to people like a week later, and I do my best, but I do often feel quote-unquote
1:19:26 guilty about not being as responsive in text to a number of people because I care about
1:19:27 them.
1:19:32 I value them, but I get overwhelmed by text messaging very easily, to the point where
1:19:36 I have to put my phones out of the room when I work, et cetera.
1:19:43 The way I experience a bunch of text messages coming in is as pressure that then I feel
1:19:44 guilty.
1:19:45 I’m not trying to make this about me.
1:19:46 No, I want to.
1:19:47 Let’s go into this.
1:19:48 I have a lot to say.
1:19:53 I feel quote-unquote guilty, but what’s interesting is, I believe in cognitive dissonance, and
1:19:57 then what I notice is that then my brain tries to bridge that gap.
1:20:01 I come up with these justifications with like, well, when I text people and they don’t respond
1:20:05 of like two weeks, I don’t get upset, which is true unless it’s in a particular category
1:20:06 of circumstances.
1:20:12 How come the way they view this whole dynamic is not the same as the way I view this dynamic?
1:20:17 Maybe this is a more male-centric view as opposed to feeling porous, like I feel they’re upset.
1:20:24 But I will say, in fairness to all the chromosomes and their arrangements, I do feel bad.
1:20:25 It sucks.
1:20:29 I love these people, and they’re reaching out to say whatever, happy new year or something,
1:20:35 and I’m feeling pressure as opposed to feeling how wonderful it is to have people in my life.
1:20:40 So here, this is such a beautiful example where I’d ask myself or I’d ask you to ask
1:20:45 yourself, okay, you already named one of your values, which is interesting.
1:20:46 I really value my relationships.
1:20:47 You said that.
1:20:48 Okay.
1:20:49 That’s one value.
1:20:51 And I think this is, I’m going to ask you this question.
1:20:57 Do you value quick responses all the time from you on text message?
1:20:59 Is that a value of yours?
1:21:00 From me or to me?
1:21:01 From you.
1:21:04 Do I value always responding to people on text right away?
1:21:12 The truth is, if I’m really honest, I hate shallow exchange of any kind, except maybe
1:21:16 a fist bump to somebody you just kind of feel some kinship with on the street and you have
1:21:18 that connecting and you just give them the fist bump.
1:21:19 Great.
1:21:22 But I like more in-depth, lengthy connection.
1:21:24 Like three-hour-long conversations.
1:21:29 Three-hour-long conversations or drop, a friend came by the other day for New Year’s.
1:21:33 He was on my list of people that, and yes, I made a list of people that I want to deepen
1:21:34 my friendship with in the New Year.
1:21:41 He came by, we had a two-hour lunch, we chatted, and I feel like it was awesome and worth a
1:21:44 million single line text messages.
1:21:48 And I’m also the kind of person where like, I’m good to not see him for a while, not
1:21:51 because I’m tired of him, but because I also have other friends and things to do.
1:21:55 So I’m more of a depth, not breadth kind of guy.
1:21:57 This is to me, this is such a powerful process.
1:22:00 And then after this, I kind of want to link it back to how I’ve actually told my kids
1:22:05 about why I do go out to dinner with friends, right?
1:22:10 So I value deep relationships, I value relationships, I value deep relationships, and if I’m honest
1:22:14 with myself, responding to someone right away, that’s actually not my value.
1:22:16 But again, we can hold multiple things at once.
1:22:18 That doesn’t mean I don’t care about those people.
1:22:20 I just laid out all my values.
1:22:28 What I think is so powerful as a not-guilt diffuser is naming this directly to the people.
1:22:31 So it doesn’t have to be on text, but you’re seeing person X and you know, I’m never that
1:22:32 good.
1:22:34 I just want to tell you, I really value our friendship.
1:22:37 I really value these times we have together.
1:22:42 Something I just also want to get off my chest is going back and forth quickly on text.
1:22:46 That’s not something that’s easy for me that I do very often.
1:22:49 And so you might text me and it might take me a while.
1:22:51 And I just wanted to name that to you, right?
1:22:55 Now, look, someone else always has the right to say, well, that’s interesting.
1:22:56 That doesn’t work for me.
1:23:00 One of my top values with friends is someone who’s always getting back and forth.
1:23:01 To me, that’s actually great.
1:23:02 Great.
1:23:03 Now we know, okay, what are we going to do about that?
1:23:04 That’s fine.
1:23:05 You know where someone stands.
1:23:11 And the reason I relate this to the situation with going to dinner is I remember early on
1:23:15 when my daughter said, why do you have to go to dinner with friends or why do you and
1:23:16 dad?
1:23:17 This is it.
1:23:18 Why do you and dad go to dinner without us?
1:23:21 I know the couple you’re going out with, you both have kids.
1:23:22 Why can’t you bring us, right?
1:23:27 And this is where we say we feel guilt, but we don’t because I’m like time out.
1:23:30 She’s feeling this feeling, not me.
1:23:34 And also, I don’t need her permission or approval.
1:23:35 That’s the real parentified thing.
1:23:39 We go to our seven-year-old and we’re like, don’t you want me to have adult conversations
1:23:40 again?
1:23:42 It’s not an atypical response.
1:23:43 I’ve heard parents do that.
1:23:44 Say that.
1:23:45 Like, don’t you want me to have a social life?
1:23:47 But you know what it is?
1:23:50 It is asking your kid to do your job for you.
1:23:56 Again, can you imagine a pilot say, do you think we should make an emergency landing?
1:23:59 You’d be, that’s how a kid feels when they’re asked that.
1:24:01 They’re like, why are you asking me that?
1:24:03 Here’s what I said to my daughter in that situation.
1:24:04 I really did.
1:24:06 I want to tell you something.
1:24:07 I love being your mom.
1:24:09 I really do.
1:24:12 It’s one of the most important things in my life.
1:24:18 I also really like being married to dad and I really like the times we have when it’s
1:24:20 just us and other adults.
1:24:21 That’s really important.
1:24:24 I remember saying this, maybe I was really trying to double down.
1:24:28 We actually, we had that before you guys were here.
1:24:29 Like what?
1:24:31 Yeah.
1:24:36 And so one of the reasons I want to be honest with you, why do we go to dinner without you?
1:24:38 It’s not so much we go to dinner without you.
1:24:41 We think of it as going to dinner with each other and just adults.
1:24:43 Is that something we really enjoy?
1:24:45 It’s really important to us.
1:24:47 It’s a really important part of us.
1:24:56 And that’s why, like being really vocal about your values as opposed to looking to your
1:25:01 child unconsciously to give you permission to have those values.
1:25:05 If you want to use power, that’s a power, that’s a power move.
1:25:06 And it’s amazing.
1:25:08 This is true in any time in life.
1:25:13 The more you can locate someone, the more you respect their boundaries.
1:25:16 I use that word a lot and I’ll like locate.
1:25:18 I’m sure you know people in your life, like, can I locate them?
1:25:19 You kind of know who they are.
1:25:24 You know what they value and you respect them, right?
1:25:29 When you can’t locate someone, you feel very uneasy around them.
1:25:30 You’re kind of like, where are you?
1:25:31 Who are you?
1:25:32 What do you stand for?
1:25:36 And as you can see with my daughter, it wasn’t saying something mean.
1:25:38 I was saying something true.
1:25:41 And so I think with the friendships and when you say, is this guilty?
1:25:46 It’s like, well, maybe my step and my action is just actually being honest with this person.
1:25:48 I’m not very good at responding right away.
1:25:51 And I want to let you know I deeply care about our friendship.
1:25:56 I’m not very good at responding to kind of small talk over text.
1:25:58 And I just wanted to let you know that so you didn’t misinterpret it.
1:25:59 Like, I wonder what would happen.
1:26:04 I wonder if people would kind of respond really positively.
1:26:05 I love it.
1:26:10 And I can’t help but recall when I was a kid, after dinner, my dad would sometimes take
1:26:12 a walk by himself.
1:26:16 Now, granted, he’s a physicist and he was, he’s a theoretical physicist who is like
1:26:19 all his experiments were in his head and he did work on paper too.
1:26:24 But so he would take these walks and occasionally I’d see him coming back from these walks
1:26:28 and he’d be smoking a cigar, something he doesn’t do anymore, fortunately, I’m grateful
1:26:29 that he’s very robust.
1:26:35 He was actually a guest on the podcast recently, talked about science and life, etc.
1:26:40 And one of the things that I remember thinking and still to this day, think and feel is,
1:26:46 it’s kind of awesome how he takes this walk and he looked like so happy with the cigar
1:26:48 and his thoughts and he’d walk.
1:26:50 And I wanted to be on those walks with him.
1:26:51 He was very, very busy.
1:26:53 In fact, I wanted a lot more time from him than I got.
1:26:57 It’s kind of interesting because now it’s oftentimes that I’m the busier one.
1:26:59 The tables turn kids.
1:27:04 But in all seriousness, I didn’t think of it as self care, but it was so clear that
1:27:06 that was his time.
1:27:08 That was absolutely his time.
1:27:14 And I knew when I could and should join for things and when I didn’t.
1:27:18 So when you say the more you can locate someone, the more you respect their values.
1:27:22 I feel like bells go off, exactly that.
1:27:24 And there are other examples of my mom, etc.
1:27:30 But it’s kind of interesting when we see somebody, adult or child, really in their
1:27:32 element of their thing.
1:27:37 It’s almost like we love them for it and through it.
1:27:40 And it fills us, I think, with a healthy sense of safety.
1:27:41 Like they’re right there.
1:27:43 Kind of like the pilot flying the plane really well.
1:27:44 Yeah, that’s right.
1:27:46 Actually, we don’t really want to know about the pilot.
1:27:48 I want to hear the thing at the beginning, we’re about ready to take off.
1:27:52 I actually don’t like it when we’re landing and they say we’ll be on the ground in just
1:27:53 a few moments.
1:27:54 I’m like, we’re at 10,000 feet.
1:27:55 Can we make it a little bit longer than that?
1:28:00 But you get the point, which is that I don’t want to hear from the pilot.
1:28:02 I just want the pilot to fly the plane.
1:28:04 You want the pilot to do their job.
1:28:09 And again, I think I have so many pilot metaphors around sturdy leadership and I think it really
1:28:13 is such a metaphor for how we teach people the skills they need to parent.
1:28:19 Because, again, no one becomes a pilot overnight, no one becomes a CEO overnight, no one becomes
1:28:22 a lawyer overnight or a professional basketball player.
1:28:26 I think we actually laud CEOs these days who say, I don’t know how to do leadership as
1:28:29 well as I’d want to, I’m getting executive coach.
1:28:31 You all want to work for that person, right?
1:28:37 The amazing athletes in the world get amazing coaches and they go to amazing training camps
1:28:38 because they’re amazing, right?
1:28:44 And so I just somehow with parenting, it’s like the last area where people think I should
1:28:46 become an amazing parent overnight.
1:28:49 I shouldn’t have to invest in skills or education.
1:28:52 Even people who invest in skills and education for every other area of their life that they
1:28:56 probably care about less, there’s so much shame we’ve internalized that we should be
1:28:58 able to do it naturally.
1:28:59 And you do become a parent overnight.
1:29:00 You become a parent overnight.
1:29:01 You do.
1:29:02 Yes.
1:29:05 I’ll remember my graduate advisor had two kids while I was working in the lab saying
1:29:11 that there were all these books back then about pregnancy and she was like, it’s wild.
1:29:13 They’re all these things of what you should eat and shouldn’t eat and how you should,
1:29:16 you and your partner and how you should prepare for the birth and all this.
1:29:21 And then at the hospital, they’re like here and you’re like, uh, now granted that was
1:29:22 in the early 2000s.
1:29:23 That’s still what it is.
1:29:24 And they’re like, what do you need?
1:29:28 And they go, you need a car seat to leave the hospital, which by the way, you definitely
1:29:29 need.
1:29:31 It’s all, like just a car seat.
1:29:33 Like how am I supposed to manage this?
1:29:37 Because I think I want parents to know because again, there’s just so much shame and maybe
1:29:42 we should talk about shame, right is, um, the only thing that comes naturally when it
1:29:46 comes to parenting is how you were parented.
1:29:47 That comes naturally.
1:29:48 That lives in your bones.
1:29:52 That lives in your circuits and, and there might be some people who say, amazing, I have
1:29:54 the greatest privilege in the world.
1:29:58 Then what will come naturally is exactly what I value and what I want to do.
1:30:03 I would say more often people would say some version of definitely not what I want to do
1:30:06 or parts I’ll take parts I want to do differently.
1:30:11 And to me, it’s kind of like if you were brought up speaking English and you really want to
1:30:14 speak Mandarin or you want to speak Mandarin half the time to your kid.
1:30:17 And someone said, are you going to learn Mandarin now naturally?
1:30:21 I feel like someone’s like, how does one learn Mandarin naturally?
1:30:25 You would, I don’t know, you’d probably sign up for, you know, do a lingo, you’d find
1:30:31 an app or something or a course and you’d then practice and practice and you’d be able
1:30:36 to make progress because you actually learned something new.
1:30:44 And so I just think big picture, like parents are, they’re so under equipped and set up
1:30:49 to feel, and this is, I think has to do a shame that when my kids are struggling or when
1:30:53 I’m yelling a lot, it means something is wrong with me or something is wrong with my
1:30:55 kid.
1:31:01 I feel like these days in almost every area, if a CEO is saying, I feel like I’m struggling,
1:31:04 is it my fault or my employee’s fault?
1:31:07 They probably say, I don’t know, there’s probably people around, who can help me?
1:31:08 Who can teach me?
1:31:09 Why do I keep yelling?
1:31:10 Right?
1:31:12 And same thing with almost every other field.
1:31:18 And to me more than, like if there’s any legacy I get to leave in this world, it’s not even
1:31:22 the approach itself, even though I think our approach to parenting is very different.
1:31:30 I just want parents to know, like there is no shame in investing in learning and growing
1:31:33 in parenting and to look at that, like they probably look at every other area of their
1:31:34 life.
1:31:39 I assure you that your legacy extends far beyond that, but includes it as well.
1:31:45 You’ve had a tremendous impact and continue to, I mean, it wasn’t long ago that the power
1:31:49 dynamics of parent-child relationships where you do what I say and I’m the parent, you’re
1:31:51 the kid and like that kind of thing.
1:31:55 And I grew up in a different era, I’m 49 now and I’m wanting to say I’m 49 now so that
1:31:59 I can actually say something with having had some experience when things were truly very
1:32:00 different.
1:32:01 They were just so different.
1:32:05 It was like you took what you got and you worked with it and things are so different
1:32:08 thanks to your part in all of this.
1:32:15 And one thing I do want to return to because I realize I took us off track with it is this
1:32:24 idea of kids, but perhaps adults as well feeling or thinking they feel someone else’s feelings,
1:32:29 taking that on, this difference between real guilt and gosh, it’s really hard to come up
1:32:30 with a word for it.
1:32:33 At one moment I thought, well, maybe it’s faux guilt, but no, you’re not pretending.
1:32:38 You’re actually feeling something which feels like guilt, smells like guilt, tastes like
1:32:39 guilt.
1:32:40 Someone said co-dependence.
1:32:43 I don’t know that much about that word, but something like that.
1:32:44 Yeah.
1:32:45 Yeah.
1:32:46 It’s a whole landscape.
1:32:47 Yeah, exactly.
1:32:48 It’s a whole landscape.
1:32:54 But one practice that I’m familiar with that I know exists in a couple of different realms
1:33:01 of what’s called modern psychology tools is this idea of creating a frame separation.
1:33:06 So like after you come together with somebody, say to like do therapy or something or you’ve
1:33:13 had sort of an emotional bind or entanglement doesn’t have to be negative that one way
1:33:19 that you can learn over time to differentiate their needs and wants from your needs and
1:33:23 wants is this idea of in your head, I know it sounds kind of corny, but there’s a clear
1:33:28 neuroscientific basis for this, at least to my understanding of in your head, you say,
1:33:30 for instance, like if we had just done this, like we had some resonance around something,
1:33:31 maybe an argument.
1:33:32 Okay.
1:33:36 Like Dr. Becky and I got into a fight that in order to really be able to move away from
1:33:40 that and see it clearly, how much of that was yours, how much of that was mine, there’s
1:33:44 this idea that you tell yourself, okay, what are five ways in which you and I are clearly
1:33:45 distinct entities.
1:33:49 So you say, and I know this folks might chuckle at this, but you say like, okay, I’m a man,
1:33:50 you’re a woman.
1:33:56 I live in California, Dr. Becky lives in New York, could even make it like first person,
1:34:00 you say like a third person rather, you could say, I Andrew Heberman and wearing a black
1:34:05 shirt and a black over shirt and Dr. Becky is wearing black and white.
1:34:06 Okay.
1:34:09 So some people might think like, what’s the use of that?
1:34:13 But to me as a neuroscientist, whoever came up with that, and it wasn’t me, is nothing
1:34:18 short of brilliant because the brain organizes emotions in these broader schemas of physical
1:34:22 objects and physical distance and distance in time.
1:34:25 And that’s the way that we can differentiate between ourselves and everything around us.
1:34:31 And there’s a whole discussion to be had about this, but so it’s something that I’ve been
1:34:37 playing with a little bit because I don’t claim to be this ultra empath or anything.
1:34:46 But I think it’s clear that sometimes we take in our thoughts and feelings about what other
1:34:49 people are feeling, sometimes accurate, sometimes not.
1:34:53 And it can become very difficult whether or not someone’s a one of these, I guess you
1:34:58 call it deeply feeling, deeply feeling kids or not.
1:35:04 I mean, anytime you get into an emotional resonance, good or bad, I think it’s we’re
1:35:09 porous and that’s part of what makes humans so beautiful, but I’ve found that practice
1:35:10 to be very useful.
1:35:14 Even if it’s just in my own head, they’re over there and I’m over here, but not even
1:35:19 necessarily pushing off them, but thinking like, oh, I’m me and you’re you.
1:35:23 And there are a bunch of ways in which we differ in time and space.
1:35:30 And I think the nervous system comes to understand that as a felt thing, as opposed to just a
1:35:31 statement.
1:35:33 Like you own your emotions, all own mine.
1:35:34 That’s just a statement.
1:35:36 Is this any of this?
1:35:40 I’ve never heard of that, but I love that and it is in parallel, I think with so many
1:35:42 of the things I teach parents.
1:35:47 So even the idea of locating someone, to me, like my version of people in my life that
1:35:52 I know and love, even if I don’t agree with anything they say that I can locate.
1:35:55 They’re like an egg with a shell.
1:35:56 They have a shell.
1:35:57 There’s like a there’s a boundary.
1:36:00 We’re really talking about boundaries.
1:36:04 We all have different levels of porousness to the external world.
1:36:08 And I think if you know, and there’s pros and cons of both, like I really mean this,
1:36:12 I am not terribly porous to other people’s experiences.
1:36:14 I really have solid boundaries.
1:36:18 There are definitely moments in my closest relationships because what people will say
1:36:23 to me, okay, like, I know these are my feelings and not yours, like, we’re in a close relationship.
1:36:26 Like, can you be here a little bit more with me?
1:36:27 And that is true.
1:36:30 Like, that is what I want to do.
1:36:35 And sometimes it can be a little distancing and a little separate.
1:36:38 People on the other end of that spectrum, if they know, I’m very porous.
1:36:43 I tend to, to me, one of the ways of also thinking about it, I think I gaze in before
1:36:44 I gaze out.
1:36:47 And I think a lot of people gaze out before they gaze in.
1:36:51 They spend a lot of time in other people’s brains and lost time in their own.
1:36:53 What do they think of me?
1:36:55 What do they think?
1:37:03 If that’s what’s going on for you, then the shell to your egg isn’t always intact.
1:37:08 And so there’s a spillover, whose feelings are whose, whose thoughts are whose.
1:37:11 I’m spending so much time worried about what that person thinks of me.
1:37:14 I almost like, what am I, what do I, what do I think, right?
1:37:19 And so the exercise you’re naming is actually just a resetting of a boundary, right?
1:37:26 It is and things that are absurdly concrete are necessary for the most primal parts of
1:37:29 our brain to actually understand.
1:37:31 My name is Becky Kennedy.
1:37:37 To me, what I say, I don’t usually say that, I’ll say, my feet are on the ground.
1:37:42 When I do a grounding exercise, everyone in our community knows this as my hand is always
1:37:43 on my heart.
1:37:48 I think there’s some amount of having contact with your body, my hand is on my heart.
1:37:54 Because I used to do this with clients, especially after an emotional experience going like this.
1:37:57 Name five things in the room is probably another way.
1:38:00 There’s a red clock, I’m wearing a white shirt.
1:38:06 They’re very, very, very basic as a way of kind of coming back into your body.
1:38:13 Two mantras that I find help parents a lot actually make me think about this exercise.
1:38:17 One is I am the pilot, not the turbulence.
1:38:23 In our kids’ turbulent moments, when they are that turbulence, what so easily happens
1:38:26 is we merge into that with them.
1:38:31 Then it’s no wonder our kids can’t calm down or episodes last forever because we’re just
1:38:34 turbulence and turbulence together, right?
1:38:35 I’m the pilot, not the turbulence.
1:38:42 Also, one day I’m going to do a partnership with some airplane company because I feel like
1:38:46 airplanes are just so beautiful because the pilot gets a cockpit.
1:38:48 They get a boundary, right?
1:38:50 That’s what parents need.
1:38:51 So that’s one.
1:38:55 And the other one, when your kids are upset or after there’s an argument, some people
1:38:58 get very dysregulated just knowing someone’s upset with them, right?
1:39:01 Which is again kind of whose feelings are whose.
1:39:07 I find one of the most effective mantras and again, the sound cheesy is just I’m safe.
1:39:09 This isn’t an emergency.
1:39:16 I can cope with this because our body, if you tend to be porous, you get activated just
1:39:20 by other people being activated, even though it wasn’t your feeling in the first place.
1:39:26 And your body actually needs the reminder that you’re safe to not kind of add to that
1:39:27 turbulence.
1:39:29 I love it.
1:39:33 Can we talk about projection for a second?
1:39:40 One of the things that drives me insane, people close to me know this, because of this issue
1:39:46 of porousness versus non-porousness is when people tell me how I feel.
1:39:51 And so I’ve talked to a few very qualified psychiatrists about this and it’s called projection.
1:39:56 Sometimes if in anger, it’s a vacuum of projection, like you think I’m crazy.
1:40:00 Someone will say like, you think I’m crazy or you’re upset with me or something like
1:40:01 that.
1:40:08 I feel like projection is one of the kind of litmus tests of how porous we are because
1:40:13 in theory, somebody should be able to tell us that we feel whatever.
1:40:18 And if we first look inside, and by the way, I love this concept of do you first look inside
1:40:19 or outside?
1:40:25 Do you listen to what’s inside or outside first when something kind of arises emotionally
1:40:26 outside you?
1:40:27 Love, love, love that.
1:40:32 It’s something I’ll have to explore.
1:40:37 But if we don’t do that, then you could see how projection would be very effective.
1:40:40 And I’m not accusing anyone of using this in any kind of diabolical way.
1:40:43 I think people just do it because it worked and they’re doing it because they’ve always
1:40:45 done it.
1:40:51 But if somebody says, you don’t care about me as a friend or telling someone how they
1:40:57 feel is so very different than telling someone how we feel, it’s kind of obvious.
1:41:03 And yet, once you start watching for projection, you see it all the time, not just at you,
1:41:05 but in between people.
1:41:09 I know this stresses you out, but people start doing it all the time.
1:41:12 It’s very interesting to see how people kind of divide into a couple of different groups
1:41:16 on this, maybe two or more groups in terms of whether or not it affects them or if it
1:41:20 gets in their head or somehow they’re like, no, no, it’s ridiculous.
1:41:21 I don’t feel that way.
1:41:24 And for me, it’s very context specific.
1:41:32 But I love your thoughts on projection both towards kids and from kids.
1:41:36 So all right, I’m going to respond to that and you just cut me off if you’re like, Becky,
1:41:38 that’s not the direction I want you to go in.
1:41:46 Because I guess MGI, which is I called most generous interpretation, is to me the embodiment
1:41:47 of not what I do all the time.
1:41:51 Definitely not because I’m imperfect, but what I think is just a useful framework to
1:41:57 try to employ as much as possible because the idea of what is the most generous interpretation
1:42:02 of someone’s behavior like projection counteracts our very natural human tendency, which is
1:42:05 just what is the least generous interpretation, right?
1:42:09 We all come up with the least generous interpretation of people’s behavior all the time.
1:42:10 And it’s just quick.
1:42:11 It’s easy.
1:42:14 And I think it’s because in our brain, if we see something bad or annoying, it’s just
1:42:16 easy to think that that’s the whole, right?
1:42:21 So I can’t even tell you how many times every parent I know will say, my kid doesn’t listen.
1:42:23 They hit all the elevator buttons.
1:42:24 They hit other people.
1:42:26 And then I said, and I know what you’re thinking, they’re a sociopath.
1:42:27 They’re like, that’s literally what I’m thinking.
1:42:28 I was like, I know.
1:42:29 I have that thought too.
1:42:32 When I was a kid, I used to push every button in the elevator.
1:42:33 Right.
1:42:34 Does that mean I’m a sociopath?
1:42:35 No.
1:42:40 It means you are a good kid who has not yet learned the skills to regulate urges.
1:42:41 That’s all it means.
1:42:43 That would be the most generous interpretation.
1:42:44 You’re there.
1:42:45 You just want to, no, I’m kidding.
1:42:46 You just want to push them.
1:42:47 I’m joking.
1:42:48 I have a kid like that too.
1:42:52 He wants things for himself and he derives a lot of joy from things.
1:42:53 Those types of kids are going to do things.
1:42:54 Okay.
1:42:57 That’s a brilliant revel.
1:43:00 But projection, why am I bringing that up?
1:43:05 So what’s my most generous interpretation of why this projection would happen?
1:43:08 Why would a kid say, you’re mad at me?
1:43:10 Or I can see how mad you are at me.
1:43:15 Or why would someone even say in adulthood, you seem really, really stressed out.
1:43:16 Right.
1:43:21 Again, the gazing in versus gazing out, I think it comes back to in our childhoods.
1:43:25 I mean, that’s what often a lot comes back to.
1:43:32 Were we taught that we have an emotional life that lives inside of us?
1:43:36 Then were we taught how to understand that emotional life?
1:43:41 Then were we taught how to manage and cope with that whole emotional life?
1:43:43 Most people were not.
1:43:47 So it becomes this very, very complicated conundrum.
1:43:49 The emotional life is happening inside me again.
1:43:50 You can’t beat it.
1:43:51 It’s happening.
1:43:54 Our feelings can’t get rid of them, and they’re very powerful.
1:43:58 They’re sensations, but if your framework is, was always you’re getting punished, you’re
1:44:03 getting ridiculed, you’re being a baby, then you develop a very conflictual relationship
1:44:04 with your feelings.
1:44:05 Like they can’t be real.
1:44:07 They almost can’t be mine.
1:44:10 That’s really what they can’t be mine.
1:44:15 People like this often blame other people a lot for things they never did when they’re
1:44:19 really frustrated and upset because it’s almost like, this can’t be mine.
1:44:23 So like, who did this feeling to me?
1:44:24 You know?
1:44:25 There’s a lot of that in the world.
1:44:26 You see a lot of that in the world.
1:44:27 A lot of that in the world.
1:44:28 Who did this feeling to me?
1:44:32 Who put this in me, right?
1:44:40 It’s so fragile and so sad almost, and so toxic.
1:44:47 But projection in a way is the only way that I can understand my emotional life is by imagining
1:44:52 you having an emotional life.
1:44:53 I don’t know.
1:44:58 Like a lot of these things, I hear myself say this, I like Mel, I was like, what a vulnerable
1:44:59 way to go about the world.
1:45:12 What an awful way to live in your body that you’re so overwhelmed and almost so self-abandoning
1:45:17 of the information in your body that it must be someone else’s.
1:45:20 So that’s what projection is, right?
1:45:23 So what do we do when we see it, right?
1:45:24 I don’t know.
1:45:25 What’s an example, right?
1:45:29 Like you’re so stressed out, you’ve been so stressed and you’re thinking, maybe you’re
1:45:30 thinking of partnership.
1:45:34 Like, I feel like you’re the one who’s stressed, right?
1:45:37 Never helps in the heat of a moment to be right.
1:45:38 I’ve tried it a million times.
1:45:39 I don’t know about you.
1:45:40 To be right in an argument?
1:45:44 To be right in a heated moment when you’re like, I’m going to be right.
1:45:46 Not if you want an effective outcome.
1:45:47 No.
1:45:49 But it’s a very hard urge to resist.
1:45:54 It took me many years to learn, but someone taught it to me in one hour.
1:45:59 I feel very grateful that she taught me this, that she didn’t tell me to do it, but I just
1:46:05 realized if you just like, I don’t have any word other than just like soften, if you just
1:46:14 kind of like imagine becoming more like a noodle than like a rigid bar of iron.
1:46:21 I just like, oh, and I actually, I think of the way that like my, he always comes up,
1:46:23 but my, I had this bulldog mast of Costello and he was like super lazy.
1:46:27 The contract with him was he would protect me with his entire life.
1:46:31 But if my life wasn’t on the line, noodle.
1:46:37 And I remember just thinking like, if I just go there, then the basic contract of like,
1:46:40 I care about you, I’ll protect you with my life is still there.
1:46:43 So I guess I learned it from my bulldog, but it sort of played out in a romantic relationship
1:46:44 and it was just really beautiful.
1:46:51 It was one of the best things I learned that from the two of them is that I just like literally
1:46:56 like physically soften, then like everything becomes apparent.
1:47:02 Somehow for me, it allows me to get back into my own eggshell, but still have optics out.
1:47:03 Now that’s me.
1:47:05 I realize it’s, you know, and that doesn’t mean in the heat of the moment, I’m not like
1:47:12 feeling like I want to be reactive, but for me, a physical change to my body, self-directed
1:47:16 physical change to my body is what just kind of like changed everything.
1:47:17 Yeah.
1:47:22 And I think, you know, this is so true in relationships, definitely at work and definitely in parenting
1:47:30 is you don’t have to represent everything you believe in like a given moment, like we’re
1:47:34 not so fragile, like to be like, no, and you’re projecting, like, I have time.
1:47:36 Like this is, this is a heated moment.
1:47:39 I can kind of chill out.
1:47:40 You’re so stressed.
1:47:41 And I think I’m not.
1:47:42 I’m not in a good direction.
1:47:44 I’m like, oh, I am.
1:47:45 Who cares?
1:47:48 Just like get through the moment, right?
1:47:51 And then maybe after, if it feels important, I say, I feel like this thing happens sometimes
1:47:53 where when you’re stressed, you say, I’m stressed.
1:47:54 I don’t know.
1:47:56 Like, like let’s talk about this.
1:47:57 That’s when that happens.
1:48:02 I think this is really true with kids too, right?
1:48:03 This happened the other day.
1:48:08 And in some ways it’s the same strategy, which I jokingly on Instagram called do nothing
1:48:13 with a capital D and a capital N, because so many times in hard situations, especially
1:48:17 when you’re accused of something that’s not true, people will say to parents, oh, so you’re
1:48:19 just going to do nothing.
1:48:25 Well, I’m like, take away the just like doing nothing in a heated moment is a very sophisticated
1:48:29 technique because really what you’re saying is you’re doing nothing on the outside and
1:48:37 you’re being an adult and managing your feelings on the inside versus doing nothing on the
1:48:41 inside and just yelling or reacting on the outside.
1:48:46 So the other day my son came to me before school, my youngest, and he goes, my sweatshirt’s
1:48:47 still dirty.
1:48:53 And I was like, oh man, he goes, you promised me you would wash my sweatshirt before school.
1:48:58 Yeah, between us, he never, he never asked me that, okay?
1:48:59 And here’s my fork in the road.
1:49:04 It’s like, we all know what it would be easier, and what I, by the way, I wanted to say back
1:49:10 to him, 99% of me was about to go, you never asked me.
1:49:12 And then he’s like, I did, no, you didn’t.
1:49:13 And now you’re lying to me.
1:49:17 And all of a sudden it’s like, okay, you know what he was saying to me?
1:49:20 I wish my sweatshirt was clean.
1:49:21 That’s what he was saying.
1:49:23 That’s what we’re all saying.
1:49:25 And I’m so upset about it.
1:49:32 The feeling is so big that it’s like too overwhelming in this moment as a seven-year-old to be mine.
1:49:37 So like, I kind of have to make it your fault to try to make sense of it.
1:49:39 So what did I do in the moment?
1:49:44 I literally did nothing when I, you promised me you watch my sweatshirt.
1:49:50 And I went like this, I kind of was just like looking at him like I knew what it was like
1:49:53 to want something and not be able to have it.
1:50:01 And he’s like, you did in the moment, I did, oh, that sweatshirt is dirty.
1:50:03 I really wanted it to be clean.
1:50:05 It’s kind of, he’s like, I really did.
1:50:09 I was like, that’s the worst.
1:50:10 No joking.
1:50:14 And then he, by the end, by five minutes later, I didn’t say anything, he got another sweatshirt,
1:50:15 we moved on.
1:50:19 I didn’t say I wasn’t going to like ruin the moment by being like, see you could cope or
1:50:21 you never asked me.
1:50:25 But I think in both these moments, whether someone’s saying you’re stressed or my kids
1:50:31 accusing me, if I think about this a lot in parenting, I don’t have to prove my parenting
1:50:32 in a moment.
1:50:33 I don’t have to prove it to my kid.
1:50:39 I don’t have to prove it because my mother-in-law is watching, like, I trust myself way more
1:50:44 than I trust one single moment to represent everything about me.
1:50:48 And I think when we can gain a little bit of that confidence, we have a lot more freedom
1:50:54 to just be effective and to also know there’s a moment to do nothing.
1:50:58 And then if something’s a chronic issue, if my son’s chronically blaming me, when things
1:51:03 are less heated, I’m going to say to him, you know, something in, you know, a calm moment.
1:51:10 These are super important and novel approaches to things that I think everybody deals with,
1:51:14 kids in the picture or not.
1:51:19 My audience sometimes gets angry with me when I ask very long extended questions.
1:51:25 But could I just share with you something I learned about an experiment?
1:51:31 Because I think it blew my mind, I won’t take long.
1:51:33 There’s a imaging experiment, so you put people in a scanner.
1:51:38 They image their brain, see which areas are active, fMRI.
1:51:41 There’s a really wild experiment where they bring people in for the scan.
1:51:44 They don’t tell them why they’re there.
1:51:49 And they tell them they’re going to be paid $30 and they set out $3, $10 bills.
1:51:50 Maybe you know this experiment.
1:51:51 I don’t know.
1:51:55 They go into the scanner and then they come out and then the researcher leaves and there’s
1:51:57 a discussion, et cetera, et cetera.
1:52:01 At some point, one of the $10 bills is removed by the researcher.
1:52:08 And people are told at the end of the experiment, you took one of the $10 bills.
1:52:11 And they’re like, no, I didn’t because they didn’t.
1:52:14 Nobody says you’re right.
1:52:22 But then they reimage them and they compare that to a condition in other subjects where
1:52:26 people actually did a little sneaky steal during a money game.
1:52:33 And the same areas of the brain light up that we think are associated with guilt.
1:52:39 In other words, if somebody is told that they did something, even if they know they didn’t,
1:52:45 there are aspects of brain circuitry that reflect a quote unquote feeling of guilt.
1:52:48 It’s like it introduces this question about reality.
1:52:52 And so they can know with 100% certainty, you can know with 100% certainty that you did
1:52:53 not do something.
1:52:58 And yet it starts to introduce these questions about how you gauge reality, simply because
1:53:02 somebody you just met a few minutes earlier, yes, in a position of authority, they’re the
1:53:06 researcher, you’re the subject, et cetera, told you that you did it.
1:53:11 I think this has huge implications for parent-child relationships, for romantic relationships,
1:53:16 workplace relationships, for real bias in the outside world.
1:53:18 You can imagine if you’re told your whole life that you’re a piece of garbage or that
1:53:22 you’re part of a bad group or something like this, I’m not trying to get political here.
1:53:28 You could come to believe that at a level that is biological even if cognitively doesn’t
1:53:29 make sense.
1:53:36 So this is where I think about this challenging boundary between knowing what we know, being
1:53:42 a container, staying in our frame, pick your favorite lingo around this, and the fact that
1:53:51 words and the emotions of other people really do have the capacity to rewire us on the inside.
1:53:57 You know, a question I’d have about that study, I’d be really curious if there was variation
1:54:00 among subjects where some people that guilt part lit up a lot more.
1:54:03 Okay, so you reminded me, so this is the wild part.
1:54:10 The distribution of kind of like people who have this, by the way folks, there aren’t single
1:54:15 brain areas for whole emotions, but let’s just for sake of simplicity here, that have
1:54:18 the guilt area activated even when they didn’t take the money.
1:54:21 The entire population of subjects doesn’t experience that to the same degree.
1:54:27 You have these people for whom it’s very high amplitude response and others who aren’t.
1:54:30 Now I don’t recall, and I need to go back and look at the study if it divided according
1:54:34 to male-female, because earlier you said that this tendency-
1:54:39 I would bet a million dollars that if I got to know those people, the people who really
1:54:45 light up have a lot of focus on gazing out and determining their inner reality by what
1:54:49 other people think about them, and the people who did not light up as much are the people
1:54:58 who gaze in and have a deep sense of themselves even in the face of kind of a lack of validation
1:55:00 or even in the face of criticism.
1:55:05 I would bet my money on that psychological kind of, is that a moderator or a mediator?
1:55:06 I don’t know.
1:55:07 You would tell me.
1:55:08 So I’d be very curious about that.
1:55:09 Great.
1:55:10 Well, I have no skin in the game.
1:55:13 Like I didn’t run this study and I’ll go back and check it out.
1:55:15 It’s a collection of studies and I hadn’t known about this.
1:55:18 I mean, I read the neuroscience literature, but I hadn’t known about this.
1:55:25 I find it like a complete yes, of course, on the one hand, and also super surprising
1:55:31 on the other and just oh, so cool in the sense that it’s informative and it’s making me
1:55:35 think that some people really need to do the work of paying more attention to other people’s
1:55:40 emotions and feeling them a little bit more and other people probably need to do the exact
1:55:41 opposite.
1:55:42 That’s exactly right.
1:55:47 And to me, like I always, I say this, people I manage, I say, like I think about this in
1:55:52 general with adults, like I think such an empowering thing as an adult is just to know
1:55:56 where you are in any given scale.
1:55:58 So for me, as a leader, I’m always gas.
1:55:59 I’m like, go, go, go.
1:56:00 We can do this.
1:56:01 We can get this accomplished.
1:56:04 I’m probably like pretty far in that.
1:56:08 And given that, I know it’s really important for me to have people around me who sometimes
1:56:12 say like, well, let’s look at this first, right?
1:56:17 I also know that sometimes if I do have a like, maybe I should slow this down.
1:56:20 I should like really listen to that because that’s like not right.
1:56:23 But knowing where I am on a scale is important.
1:56:28 I talk about someone that I manage who she really needs to be more direct with the people
1:56:29 she manages.
1:56:33 Just like, you know, like sometimes ask questions when she really wants statements and can have
1:56:35 a little higher standard.
1:56:39 And I think it’s helpful to know where she is in that scale because I remember saying
1:56:43 like, I want you to go as far as you can toward the other direction without being disrespectful
1:56:47 because it’s almost impossible to do that, right?
1:56:52 And so I think for adults to know, let’s say I gaze in or I more gaze out, neither is
1:56:53 better or worse.
1:56:59 Probably again, mental health and resilience is about having just a lack of rigidity.
1:57:00 And so to say, what is my starting point?
1:57:03 Like anyone listening, what is my starting point?
1:57:04 There’s no morality.
1:57:06 It’s literally not better or worse.
1:57:11 It just gives me information about which direction to experiment with.
1:57:14 And I like to make this a concrete experiment, right?
1:57:19 So let’s say you are someone who tends to gaze out before you gaze in.
1:57:22 And you’re always like, I can’t do this thing I want to do because it would inconvenience
1:57:23 someone.
1:57:27 I told this story the other day on my Instagram and people went bananas about it.
1:57:32 I was at the airport and I got a cup of coffee in the morning.
1:57:35 And I like my coffee just like a really little bit of milk, right?
1:57:37 And I know to specify it if I’m asking someone else.
1:57:42 So I went to the counter and I said, hey, can I get a medium coffee, not black, just a little
1:57:43 bit of milk, pretty close to black.
1:57:44 Sure, no problem.
1:57:48 I go, I went in the line, then it’s on the counter, I pick it up, Becky.
1:57:52 And it’s like light as can be.
1:57:59 I got back online, I brought the coffee and I said, hey, ugh, I asked for this.
1:58:03 I know there’s a lot of people probably got lost, could I ask for this, you know, darker,
1:58:07 could you pour out a good amount of this and then refill it with coffee?
1:58:10 The person, you know, who knows if it could have gone differently in different days.
1:58:11 Oh, right.
1:58:12 No problem.
1:58:14 There we go.
1:58:17 This happens with things that are so much bigger than coffee, but the coffee example
1:58:23 is such a good one, because what I’m doing in that moment is I’m saying, I’m allowed
1:58:30 to have my coffee the way I wanted it and ask for it, even if it’s awkward or inconvenience
1:58:32 is the other person.
1:58:35 Now can people be on the opposite extreme?
1:58:41 And can someone hear this and be like, I probably need to do a little bit less of my own needs.
1:58:42 That’s what I’m saying.
1:58:43 You have to know you are.
1:58:52 But what I have found at least with moms is the idea of, oh, you know, I asked for almond
1:58:57 milk and this is whole milk or I always, I used to give my clients this experiment who
1:58:58 had this struggle.
1:59:06 I said, I want you at the grocery store, basically done checking out to say, oh, you know what,
1:59:16 I actually don’t need those paper towels.
1:59:20 The panic feeling is that would be a completely new circuit.
1:59:25 That would be me saying I’m willing to do something to meet my own needs.
1:59:33 I actually don’t need that paper towel, even though it could get an eye roll or inconvenience
1:59:35 temporarily someone else.
1:59:38 Those little experiments and it might be the opposite.
1:59:42 It might be saying to my partner tonight, you know what, we always sit down and talk
1:59:43 about my work.
1:59:49 And I actually did have a stressful day, but you know what, I want to hear about your day.
1:59:50 You go first.
1:59:51 That’s also an experiment.
1:59:54 And for someone who’s on that extreme, they’re going to also have a panic attack.
1:59:56 They’re going to be like, this is deeply uncomfortable.
2:00:01 But just knowing where you are in the spectrum gives you the information you need to get
2:00:02 a little bit of balance.
2:00:08 Yeah, I think there’s clearly a distribution and whether or not it’s a binary distribution
2:00:12 or it’s kind of like a normal distribution, I don’t know, but there’s clearly variants
2:00:17 here from one person to the next and probably even depending on how well rested we are and
2:00:18 all the rest.
2:00:24 But I do think that we do kind of fall into phenotypes of prone to reacting to other people’s
2:00:30 emotions without hearing and listening to and responding to hours first, like truly hours
2:00:35 first versus people who are just really out there.
2:00:38 I realized it’s very different than any other kind of relationship, but when I first went
2:00:42 from being a postdoc to having my own laboratory, the chair in my department, my chairman in
2:00:46 one department anyway, he said, you know, you should get a great big desk that’s like
2:00:47 really thick.
2:00:49 I was like, yeah, like, why?
2:00:50 I mean, I get it.
2:00:53 You don’t want to be sitting like right next to your employees or something, but like,
2:00:57 why so that and he goes so that when they cry, you won’t feel like you need to cry or
2:00:59 take care of them.
2:01:04 You’ll just slide the Kleenex across the desk and I was like, are you kidding?
2:01:11 And he was like, no, and then years later, I looked back and I realized I understood
2:01:12 what he was saying.
2:01:15 I mean, he didn’t know me at all, but he was just saying probably something about himself,
2:01:17 which is people are going to come into your office.
2:01:18 They’re going to cry.
2:01:25 It does happen and you’re going to need to be the boss, which is to be supportive and
2:01:29 empathic, but like you can’t get pulled into it because they might be crying about something
2:01:32 they don’t like about the lab or about something not happening the way they want it.
2:01:36 I mean, who could imagine any other reason to cry in your boss’s office, but maybe they
2:01:41 have a family issue and you know, so you have to remember you’re the boss.
2:01:43 And I thought, oh, that’s interesting.
2:01:48 I ended up with a desk that was kind of medium in width, but I think that nowadays there’s
2:01:56 a lot more kind of bleeding of roles and you know, it used to be that everyone got really
2:02:01 dressed up for work now dressing down as like common in certain circumstances and not others.
2:02:09 I think that there’s a lot of kind of lack of clarity about here we go again, you know,
2:02:14 power and authority and but also kind of staying in our own frame versus taking on someone
2:02:15 else’s frame.
2:02:16 Yeah.
2:02:20 It’s a friend who runs a pretty large business and he did the same experiment that you did
2:02:23 of asking people, you know, how he could do better.
2:02:28 But first he unfortunately made the mistake of asking people how they felt about being
2:02:29 there.
2:02:33 And they ended up making one of these emotion clouds where they took everyone filled out
2:02:36 a thing and wrote what the most dominant emotions were.
2:02:40 And then he told this story like call me late at night, he sits down and they’re going to
2:02:45 present this as data in front of everybody and this emotion cloud comes up in the biggest
2:02:51 bubble in the middle just says stress and he was mortified, right?
2:02:54 But he learned that they all feel really, really, really stressed.
2:03:00 That sort of exercise would never have happened 10, 15 years ago.
2:03:05 It’s like, yeah, like I won’t say what profession he’s in for sake of privacy, but like it’s
2:03:10 a profession where stress is part of the process and you don’t kind of get the certificate
2:03:13 at the end, so to speak, if you don’t experience stress.
2:03:15 So this actually relates to what we started with in a way.
2:03:21 I’m going to circle a fact there, which is, and because I hear this a lot, you know, kind
2:03:27 of some kids these days, they don’t know how to tolerate stress or they’re always overwhelmed.
2:03:32 But part of it is, again, maybe this is my MGI, maybe they haven’t been told the right
2:03:36 story about stress or anxiety.
2:03:38 This came up with my kids the other day.
2:03:42 My older son had his first basketball game of the season and he goes, oh, I’m really
2:03:43 nervous.
2:03:44 I’m feeling a little anxious.
2:03:47 And it’s just so interesting, like the way we respond, we respond in little ways to our
2:03:53 kids in these moments form, like the way they end up thinking about those feelings later
2:03:54 on.
2:03:55 I said, well, of course you’re nervous.
2:03:57 Being nervous means you care.
2:03:59 You really care about basketball, right?
2:04:02 And obviously we’ve had many conversations about what feelings mean, but it was so interesting.
2:04:10 I watched him go, yeah, yeah, I do care, kind of in that little sentence, being nervous
2:04:11 means you care.
2:04:15 You’re never nervous about anything you don’t care about, right?
2:04:21 If being nervous means I care, I have a story to understand it, I now inherently feel like
2:04:22 the feeling is normal.
2:04:27 I’m almost, I’m almost like proud, you know, like, yeah, I do care, right?
2:04:32 My relationship with that feeling is going to be so different than if my parents are
2:04:33 like, why are you nervous?
2:04:34 There’s nothing to be nervous about.
2:04:35 Or, oh, you’re nervous?
2:04:36 Oh, does that mean you’re not going to play well?
2:04:38 Oh my goodness, are you going to miss your foul shots?
2:04:40 Like, I mean, so in the first, right?
2:04:42 My kid feels like being nervous is wrong.
2:04:46 So I just set them up to feel like they’re feeling the wrong feeling when they’re feeling
2:04:48 nervous going on.
2:04:51 In the second, I’m lingering on my anxiety to their nervousness.
2:04:52 Not a great combo.
2:04:54 But the stories we tell matter.
2:04:56 So in the workplace, you’re stressed.
2:05:00 Yeah, you know, actually this makes me think, maybe not right now, when we do more time.
2:05:03 And we’re really helpful to talk about what, what is stress?
2:05:06 Why do we feel stress?
2:05:08 How do we talk to ourselves when we feel stressed?
2:05:13 Does anyone here know the way you talk to yourself when you’re stressed?
2:05:18 Has the power to make stress feel a little smaller or a little bigger?
2:05:19 That’s really interesting.
2:05:21 I wonder, does anyone here use a session?
2:05:25 Should we do something in the workplace about how to deal with stress?
2:05:27 Because you’re right.
2:05:29 This is a stressful job.
2:05:32 And this is where I don’t think about power, but authority.
2:05:37 And I want to own that and let you know that stress comes along with this type of job.
2:05:38 I’m making this up.
2:05:40 And this is why you get paid pretty well.
2:05:43 And this is why, you know, whatever else could be true.
2:05:47 But one of my jobs is not just being honest, but actually helping everyone develop the
2:05:51 best skills that maybe no one ever taught them before to manage stress.
2:05:52 Let me know if that’s of interest.
2:05:55 I just think about the whole mood just changed.
2:05:59 You kind of own your authority and you own the story.
2:06:03 And I think whether you’re talking about being a CEO or being a parent, it’s actually all
2:06:04 the same.
2:06:06 That makes sense.
2:06:12 I have a rule, which is if my pulse rate goes above a certain limit, my thumbs stop working,
2:06:14 meaning I won’t allow myself to text.
2:06:16 I don’t talk on the phone.
2:06:20 I’ll just go in the bathroom and just sit for a second if I have to.
2:06:21 But that’s rare.
2:06:22 Typically, I just am like, I have a rule.
2:06:23 My heart rate goes up.
2:06:24 My thumbs don’t work.
2:06:25 What do you do?
2:06:26 I just do nothing.
2:06:28 I follow the do nothing thing.
2:06:29 I just wait.
2:06:33 I mean, I also have a rule, which is unless somebody’s hemorrhaging right in front of me,
2:06:35 it usually can wait.
2:06:38 Sometimes people crazy, but they thank me later.
2:06:45 Unless somebody’s literally hemorrhaging, I can pause my response because I’m a kind
2:06:48 of like move fast, get things done, kind of person.
2:06:53 And actually it was taught to me by a chairman of a major university in New York, home city
2:06:54 of New York City.
2:06:56 He said, “There’s always more time.”
2:06:57 And I said, “That’s ridiculous.”
2:07:00 He said, “Unless somebody’s hemorrhaging right in front of you, there’s always more
2:07:01 time.”
2:07:04 Going back to my daughter, it’s one of the mantras that’s been really helpful for me
2:07:08 as someone who, again, just knowing myself, I always like to go, go, go.
2:07:14 I get so much pleasure, probably identity, value from doing things.
2:07:19 And so a byproduct of that is I always kind of feel like I’m in a rush because my body
2:07:22 craves movement and checking things off.
2:07:27 But being in a rush is never terribly helpful in close relationships.
2:07:30 No one likes to feel like, “Come on, can you get to the end of the story?”
2:07:31 It’s not good.
2:07:37 So sometimes I think efficiency in relationship building are like antithetical.
2:07:38 Amen.
2:07:40 A thousand times over.
2:07:44 No, I don’t think we can be efficient in relationships.
2:07:46 It’s like efficiency in other things is beautiful.
2:07:50 Well, it’s a unitary experience being efficient in relation.
2:07:55 And so when I can be in efficiency a lot, mode a lot, and it’s something that I have
2:07:59 to really think when I’m going home to my closest relationships, and it’s interesting
2:08:01 now that I work so much more than I used to.
2:08:03 It’s almost reinforcing the efficiency mode.
2:08:08 So I really know I have to, you know, my own therapy, like really work on, like that’s
2:08:11 not a value of mine all the time at work.
2:08:15 Maybe sometimes even there, sometimes you got to get out of it to connect to people.
2:08:16 Right?
2:08:23 And so that is something again, where like knowing where I am on that scale, asking people
2:08:27 to call me out, “Oh, Mom, you’re rushing me at night, Becky.
2:08:28 I want to tell you the whole story.
2:08:30 I’m not just trying to give you the TLDR.
2:08:33 I want the experience of telling you the story.”
2:08:35 I’m like, “Right, I’m doing that thing.”
2:08:38 Yeah, slowing down is rarely a mistake.
2:08:42 I guess occasionally, but rarely a mistake.
2:08:43 Really true.
2:08:45 I’d like to talk a little bit about technology.
2:08:48 I know this is a growing interest of yours.
2:08:54 I’ve been thinking a little bit based on our earlier discussion about people who are in
2:09:00 their own container or sensing what’s going on inside them prior to paying attention to
2:09:03 and sensing what’s going on in other people because clearly both are important.
2:09:08 I don’t like this idea that it’s like one or the other.
2:09:12 But with the advent of text messaging, so here I’m not going to talk about social media.
2:09:14 This is not about social media.
2:09:19 With text messaging, first of all, this is the first time in human evolution that humans
2:09:21 have written with their thumbs.
2:09:26 That’s weird and kind of quirky reflection, but the other one is this is the first time
2:09:30 in human evolution, meaning very recently that we are aware of what’s going on with
2:09:35 so many other people and we’re expected to at least know it and perhaps even respond to
2:09:36 it.
2:09:41 I know people younger than 30 are probably going, “Wait, no, it’s always been this way.”
2:09:43 But it wasn’t always this way.
2:09:48 Clearly our brain has adapted to this new format, but it did not evolve in this format,
2:09:52 whereby you’re getting on a plane and you look at your phone and you are aware of the
2:09:58 movements and requests and maybe kind statements, et cetera, from other people.
2:10:04 We’re tethered in so many ways and that means that our brain is really tethered to the states
2:10:08 of others, their emotional states, their physical states, where they are.
2:10:11 You said, and I’ll keep repeating it because I love it so much, the more you can locate
2:10:15 somebody, the more it reflects their values.
2:10:19 So being able to locate somebody in space and time and understand how bounded they are
2:10:24 or not to their own emotions or yours is fantastic, but the fact that you have 10 people in your
2:10:29 phone that you’re aware of, you’re not even supposed to be aware of 10 people at once,
2:10:34 except the 10 people perhaps around you on the boarding a plane.
2:10:39 So we’re being forced to navigate a new landscape with all this.
2:10:43 After this conversation falls, we’ll look at our phones.
2:10:47 You couldn’t have that many, I guarantee you one thing, no matter how many text messages
2:10:52 or few text messages you have, it’s far more conversations, if you will, than you could
2:10:55 possibly have by phone at once.
2:11:00 So in the old days, you left messages and you’d get on the phone when you could.
2:11:04 Not saying we go back to that, but I think we might be asking ourselves to do something
2:11:09 that is impossibly hard and maybe even bad for us.
2:11:16 Yeah, I don’t know how apocalyptic you want me to get about this.
2:11:24 But I think I actually, my husband and I were talking about phones and text and social media
2:11:29 and AI and I brought up so many of him, I don’t think all the arguments I’ve heard
2:11:37 haven’t heard that, where I feel like we’re changing in a dramatic way our basic evolutionary
2:11:45 drive around attachment in a way where attachment has always been the primary evolutionary drive
2:11:46 of humans.
2:11:51 And with all the different technological shifts there have been, because people say, “Oh,
2:11:57 there’s been this, there’s been this,” what’s never been shifted is kind of the nature really
2:12:02 of one-to-one human attachment.
2:12:06 We’re entering into something really new, where let’s even say text messages, 20 at
2:12:09 once, 10 at once.
2:12:15 Our bodies will always crave what’s immediately gratifying over what is long-term good for
2:12:16 us.
2:12:21 Another way I think about it is our bodies will always choose convenience and ease and
2:12:24 gratification over what’s good for us long-term.
2:12:26 So you think about all these pings coming in.
2:12:30 It’s a lot of information, this text, that text, this text, this text.
2:12:34 And what you’re doing in your circuitry, and over time evolutionarily, is getting used
2:12:37 to the multiplicity of relationships, the multiplicity of information.
2:12:41 It’s just more gratifying than one-on-one.
2:12:48 To the point that one-on-one conversation over text or even in person is going to have so
2:12:58 much more of a gap than it ever has been in terms of how slow, how low-stim, and how boring
2:13:04 and awkward it is, compared to, especially for kids who get this early, the constant
2:13:08 information flow and gratification and stimulation.
2:13:11 I think that’s going to have a profound impact, not right away, but over time.
2:13:17 And then if you add in social media, and then if you add in AI, I mean, on the way humans
2:13:20 just are even able to relate to each other.
2:13:27 So yes, I think this advancement in technology and what’s happening, I think there’s always
2:13:32 been a trade-off always between how short-term gratifying something is and how long-term
2:13:37 good something is for us, because the things that are really good for humans long-term
2:13:40 are the things that involve humans to tolerate frustration.
2:13:44 I would say that is the most important skill, I think, for kids to learn.
2:13:50 But the world more than ever is built now with insanely low frustration tolerance because
2:13:55 we’re built for so much information, so much consumption, and so much media gratification.
2:13:58 This is actually, I think, the thing that isn’t talked about with technology.
2:13:59 It’s why parenting has changed.
2:14:03 It’s why so much of parenting is about making kids happy in their lives easy, because there’s
2:14:09 never been a generation of parents, like my generation, where our lives are just so much
2:14:10 easier.
2:14:15 We have so much less tolerance for our kids’ tantrums, because we’re on our phones wanting
2:14:18 our life to be easier, so we stop the tantrum.
2:14:19 We make their life easier.
2:14:20 We make them anxious.
2:14:23 We make them fragile because of our lower frustration tolerance.
2:14:28 So I don’t know where we’re landing here, but, and by the way, I text.
2:14:30 I’m not like a purist here, you know?
2:14:31 I am a realist.
2:14:32 I live in the world.
2:14:39 You know, but I think it’s profound how it’s changing human interaction and expectations
2:14:41 and gratification.
2:14:47 My colleague Anna Lemke wrote Dopamine Nation, cited some data that humans have more free
2:14:54 time now, across socioeconomic groups, more free time for everybody than ever before.
2:15:00 More expectation of immediate gratification, and it’s not just the text that we’re getting.
2:15:03 It’s for some people, the text that they’re not getting.
2:15:06 They’re thinking about the people that they haven’t heard back from, et cetera.
2:15:15 The number of tethers is just astonishing.
2:15:20 I had a conversation with somebody recently that popped to mind where it was a little bit,
2:15:25 it was like a low friction one that ended in a really good place, where I said, you know,
2:15:29 the problem is, you know, I was talking about, there’s a little bit of an age gap, and I said,
2:15:31 you know, the problem is you think slow is low.
2:15:34 Like what I was saying was, I like to just chill.
2:15:38 This is something I haven’t done enough of in my life, because I’m pretty ambitious person
2:15:42 and always have been since I was little about everything.
2:15:45 But I’ve learned that like, slow isn’t low.
2:15:53 Like I love just like sitting down and like hanging out with the dog or just like slowing
2:15:54 down.
2:15:56 And it used to feel like slow was low.
2:16:00 It used to feel like nothing’s happening or this is depressing or it’s boring.
2:16:04 And I think in recent years, that became more and more the case as I got more and more pulled
2:16:06 into technology.
2:16:10 And then I did a little bit of a technology distancing experiment, if you will, have this
2:16:14 wooden box that someone made for me and I put my phones in there and it’s so amazing how
2:16:19 once you put the phone in a different container, it like completely changes the relationship
2:16:20 to it.
2:16:21 I don’t get it.
2:16:24 But anyway, again, physical barriers to make, to take emotional steps.
2:16:27 Is a good idea.
2:16:31 And I just realized like slow isn’t low, like slow is awesome.
2:16:36 So I totally agree that the circuits of our brain have now adapted to expect immediate gratification.
2:16:44 I like to think, and maybe this is a false wish, but I like to think that there are components
2:16:49 of our brain that are hardwired enough through tens or hundreds of thousands of years of
2:16:55 evolution that might be able to recognize and appreciate the slow moments and not feel
2:16:59 like slow is low, meaning slow is depressing.
2:17:05 But I do think that if one is weaned in, raised in an environment where you expect things
2:17:10 quickly, well then it’s going to feel like the horse and cart compared to the car at
2:17:11 some level.
2:17:12 I do agree.
2:17:13 I think that’s right.
2:17:18 And I think for parents who have young kids, I think these are such powerful and empowering
2:17:22 things to think about when your kids are young because I think it’s easy to think, okay,
2:17:27 so I’ll deal with this when my kid gets a phone.
2:17:31 It’s the circuits around even how your kid will use the phone, how much you’re going
2:17:34 to be able to set boundaries with your kid when they get a phone.
2:17:37 All these have to do with the patterns early on, right?
2:17:44 So if we go back to slow is good, frustration and frustration tolerance is the name of the
2:17:46 game.
2:17:53 It requires a lot of inconvenient moments that matter so much for how not only your
2:17:58 kid learns to tolerate the frustration inherent in life, but I think this is really important.
2:18:01 How your kid learns to feel capable.
2:18:07 Kids only develop capability from watching themselves get through hard things.
2:18:10 They don’t develop capability by being successful ever.
2:18:14 In some ways, it builds up this pressure and a fragility if that’s been the only thing
2:18:15 they have.
2:18:20 And when we think about this whole generation who’s so anxious, kind of so fragile, I really
2:18:24 believe the antidote to anxiety is capability.
2:18:29 And I’ll give an example, like we steal our kid’s capability all the time when they’re
2:18:33 young in the name of short-term convenience for everyone.
2:18:37 So here’s an example, like I remember this day, my oldest who’s now 13, he was like
2:18:41 three and he was really into puzzles when he was three.
2:18:43 Puzzles are like really hard, right?
2:18:48 He was working on it, something like, “I can’t do it,” you know, the classic wine,
2:18:52 which I just want everyone to know, like no part of me is like, “I love that sound.”
2:18:57 No, like nobody likes whining, okay?
2:19:02 But to me, those are our like bang for our buck moments, you know, they’re not our easy
2:19:03 moments.
2:19:04 They’re our bang for our buck.
2:19:08 My kid is going to learn something about how to deal with situations they don’t think
2:19:10 they’re capable of completing.
2:19:13 That is such an important lesson.
2:19:17 And I have a fork in the road, I can either do the puzzle for him, which gives me short-term
2:19:24 convenience, stops the meltdown, but beyond frustration, tolerance, like one of the things
2:19:32 I really remember thinking when my kid was young is if I do it for him, I’m stealing
2:19:38 his capability because if he can get through this and kind of get to the point where he
2:19:43 says, “I did a puzzle, I didn’t think I could do,” that’s incredible.
2:19:49 So I remember this because it felt so, he’s still wine, but there are these moments as
2:19:52 a parent, and this is what I like to help parents with.
2:19:54 Our wins are not based on our kid’s reactions.
2:19:58 Our wins happen when you just know there’s this amazing feeling you have of a parent.
2:19:59 I know that was important.
2:20:01 I know it.
2:20:05 And I remember saying to him with this puzzle situation, “Sweetie, I’m not going to do
2:20:06 the puzzle for you.”
2:20:10 And I want to tell you why.
2:20:15 The feeling you get when you think you can’t do something, kind of take a deep breath,
2:20:23 maybe take a break, maybe even the next day, watch yourself do that thing is literally
2:20:24 the best feeling in the world.
2:20:30 It is the best feeling, it becomes addictive, and I will not take that feeling away from
2:20:33 you because I believe you’re going to get it.
2:20:34 I could cry.
2:20:40 And one of the things, I feel people hear the story like, “Okay, that’d be great.”
2:20:41 I do not do that all the time.
2:20:45 Sometimes I finish the puzzle, but when we think about what we want for our kids later
2:20:49 in life, it might be, “No, I’m not getting you a phone yet.”
2:20:54 How a kid reacts to that situation, it’s not just about a phone.
2:20:57 It’s kind of, “Well, have you always just done the thing for me?
2:20:59 Have you always just given me what I want?
2:21:04 Do I have any ability to feel like I can tolerate frustration and wait and figure
2:21:05 things out?”
2:21:11 That all layers into how kids react to not getting a phone, how kids approach hard math
2:21:16 problems, how kids do or do not sit down to start their English essay, that is difficult
2:21:17 to do.
2:21:21 And all that stuff, you can start building those skills in the teenage years, don’t
2:21:22 get me wrong.
2:21:29 But the leg up your kid has at 14, when they’ve been basically building those life and academic
2:21:33 skills from the start and they’ve built their identity around capability.
2:21:39 Like, that’s what I want to give every parent and every kid in the world.
2:21:40 Yeah, it’s awesome.
2:21:43 You know, I said it last time we spoke, I’ll say it again, you know, if you’re thinking
2:21:46 of adopting, I’d be happy to put myself up for adoption.
2:21:51 It’s such a beautiful philosophy and stance to take around effort and frustration.
2:21:56 I mean, again, this isn’t about my life, but I feel so blessed that I came up in science
2:21:58 where things take forever.
2:22:02 You can work two years on a project and then discover you do the right control experiment
2:22:04 and, you know, like, we got nothing.
2:22:07 Like, literally we have nothing.
2:22:11 There wasn’t, and there still isn’t a tendency to publish what are called negative results,
2:22:15 which aren’t bad results, but where you basically got nothing, you can find a flaw in the reagents
2:22:18 you’re using, you get nothing, you’re starting again.
2:22:23 And to have that, you know, a few times and to have some papers take two, three, four years
2:22:27 to get accepted, other papers, six months, I’ll tell you, the six months feels really
2:22:28 short.
2:22:31 So these days we get so much immediate gratification.
2:22:32 Yes.
2:22:36 The other day I was staying at a hotel and I ordered food in.
2:22:37 I don’t do it that often.
2:22:40 I was like, I really want like a poke bowl.
2:22:41 There’s that poke bowl place.
2:22:42 I ordered it.
2:22:43 It was there in 11 minutes.
2:22:47 And I was like, whoa, like, this is so wild, I was like, I got to be careful, not because
2:22:53 I’ll overeat poke bowls, you can only have so many poke bowls, but it’s like, you just,
2:22:54 it’s there.
2:22:55 Convenience.
2:22:56 Yeah.
2:22:57 It’s so, you know.
2:23:01 And sad and scary and exciting and all the things, you know.
2:23:08 So I think having variable durations of effort, reward in one’s life and being able to see
2:23:11 where like the latency is very short.
2:23:12 Yes.
2:23:15 Social media, but you know, other things that where you have longer duration, effort to
2:23:20 reward contingencies, I’m sounding kind of, there’s like nerd speak, but I’ve gone on
2:23:24 record saying before and I’ll say again that, you know, dopamine that is achieved without
2:23:27 effort preceding it is just be really careful.
2:23:34 It doesn’t matter if it’s amphetamine, cocaine, social media or anything else.
2:23:36 You get used to the schedule.
2:23:37 That’s right.
2:23:42 And I think we need to be able to tolerate and enjoy and lean into and savor variable
2:23:45 schedules of effort and reward.
2:23:46 It’s so interesting you say that.
2:23:49 I have two thoughts that number one, when I think about the puzzle situation, that’s
2:23:55 like effort, because effort, effort, effort, struggle, deep breath, effort, effort, nope,
2:23:56 that’s not it, effort, effort.
2:23:58 And then you get the dopamine that circuit.
2:24:04 I just always think that is such a benefit to my kid later in life.
2:24:08 It’s kind of the opposite of, you know, which we all do sometimes, but if it’s the only
2:24:14 circuit, being on your iPad all the time as a little kid and the no effort, all the dopamine.
2:24:18 Well, I think about it as a friend used to call it years ago, birthday money.
2:24:21 There’s one time each year, okay, maybe a couple because of the holidays, when you’re
2:24:27 supposed to get presents just for being you, it’s called your birthday, right?
2:24:30 Or if you’re a kid, you know, or whatever holidays or where we celebrate kids by giving
2:24:32 presents or we celebrate each other.
2:24:36 But every other day, you’re not supposed to get rewards necessarily just because, not
2:24:37 just for being you.
2:24:40 The rewards are out there in life and appreciating things.
2:24:45 I’m not trying to be too stoic here, but there’s only one day each year where you get literally
2:24:46 presents just for being you.
2:24:49 The other stuff is supposed to require effort.
2:24:50 Yeah.
2:24:51 And struggle.
2:24:52 I think, you know, it’s really interesting.
2:24:57 My second had a lot of speech issues and she was younger and I kind of noticed it like
2:25:01 at a certain age, you’re supposed to be building sounds and words and she was replacing like
2:25:05 as soon as she had a new sound, she lost one and just had a sense of things going on.
2:25:07 She had a pretty serious speech apraxia.
2:25:12 She had to go to speech therapy three days a week, right, for probably a year.
2:25:13 She now, you wouldn’t know.
2:25:14 But it was interesting.
2:25:19 I remember that time, my older one, five, maybe she was two or three and six.
2:25:23 And I remember someone saying to me like, Oh, but my daughter like, Oh, poor her kind
2:25:25 of, you know, it’s like a lot.
2:25:28 And I don’t think I said this, but it’s so interesting.
2:25:32 I remember thinking she’s way better off than my son.
2:25:35 If I’m going to worry about one of my kids right now, which I’m not worried about either,
2:25:43 I remember my son, his early years were so linear, so without struggle, like she’s going
2:25:48 to have an early experience of struggling, working hard.
2:25:53 She won’t remember it with her words, but that circuitry, which are important memories,
2:25:57 ones we don’t remember with our words, ones that our bodies remember, she has such an
2:26:02 early experience with watching herself struggle and get to the other side.
2:26:06 Like I would wish that for every child.
2:26:10 And so I also think I want to also share that story because I think parents who have kids
2:26:12 who have those early issues.
2:26:13 It’s so easy.
2:26:17 Oh, I actually think it’s really empowering to do a complete 180 to be like, wait, I’m
2:26:19 not going to fix this right away.
2:26:20 I’m going to support my child.
2:26:21 I’m going to let them know.
2:26:22 I believe in them.
2:26:23 I’m going to let them know.
2:26:25 I see a version of them that’s going to get through this.
2:26:26 They’re going to still struggle.
2:26:31 And that is actually going to be like the best foundation and almost like the best leg up.
2:26:37 Now, I have a friend very, very successful who told me that he wasn’t until, you know,
2:26:43 until he was in his forties that he had like kind of a major difficult life, a major business
2:26:44 disappointment.
2:26:46 And it almost crushed him.
2:26:47 Okay.
2:26:48 You know, but he had never had that before.
2:26:49 Yeah.
2:26:51 He had been so successful over and over again.
2:26:52 Yeah.
2:26:56 You know, it was fun for me to talk to my dad recently on the podcast because we haven’t
2:26:59 had a conversation like that ever.
2:27:04 And we were talking about sort of mistakes that one makes and in the context of, you know,
2:27:05 work, et cetera.
2:27:07 And he said, I’m still bringing my ears.
2:27:10 He said, well, you know, those, those humiliations are actually good for us.
2:27:11 He called them humiliations.
2:27:12 I was like, really?
2:27:17 And he was like, yeah, you know, they, they pummel us and they keep us thoughtful about
2:27:18 what we’re doing next.
2:27:21 And I was like, yeah, but it was kind of wild to hear that.
2:27:24 I don’t know why I need to hear it externally because I know it’s true.
2:27:25 I knew it was true.
2:27:27 But yeah, it’s not just making mistakes.
2:27:33 Like sometimes, listen, I’m fully against bullying where I understand how that can be
2:27:38 very destructive, but like there are going to be times when we’re going to feel humiliated
2:27:42 and to be able to bounce back from that is pretty awesome.
2:27:44 I actually think that builds character strength.
2:27:45 I do.
2:27:46 Yeah.
2:27:49 And I think, you know, this is like a great lead into parenting.
2:27:53 I hear this all the time where someone will say, I don’t know if my kid’s being bullied,
2:27:56 but like they’re, you know, they were told, you can’t play basketball with us.
2:28:00 You’re the worst basketball player in the grade, something like that, right?
2:28:05 Or the way I work with parents, right, is again, assuming this isn’t chronic, I don’t
2:28:07 think step one is calling the school.
2:28:11 I don’t think step one is calling the other parent, right?
2:28:12 If you zoom out, you’re right.
2:28:16 Like I don’t think a kid’s going to be called the worst basketball player, you know, over
2:28:20 and over in the course of the next couple of decades, but they will be called something.
2:28:21 They’ll be left out.
2:28:24 Or even if nothing happens, you know what’s going to happen?
2:28:27 They’re going to feel less than in a group, like probably a million times.
2:28:28 I do.
2:28:29 Right?
2:28:30 Still.
2:28:34 So we have this almost opportunity of like, okay, well, what skills would be useful when
2:28:36 my kid is 18 and 30?
2:28:40 And actually the struggle, again, is my opportunity.
2:28:43 I always think my kids are in my home for 18 years.
2:28:48 I, it sounds like sick and I don’t know if I really mean this, but I’m going to say it.
2:28:54 I almost hope they have all the variations of struggles they’re going to have later on.
2:28:59 Cause then at least I can kind of get in it with them and like build some skills and help
2:29:02 them see that they can manage.
2:29:04 And then I feel like those bumps are going to happen.
2:29:05 Right?
2:29:07 I guess it is like pilots, don’t they?
2:29:11 When they have simulations, there’s no way they simulate perfect flights and say, you’re
2:29:12 ready to fly.
2:29:19 They simulate all the issues so that a pilot can learn the right controls and then they’re
2:29:20 really prepared.
2:29:22 They don’t take away the issues.
2:29:23 Right.
2:29:24 You know why?
2:29:28 I love the analogy of flying cause I, you know, I’ll never forget driving in the really
2:29:29 thick fog for the first time.
2:29:31 This happens if you grow up in the Bay Area.
2:29:34 Just being able to see one reflector at a time and being terrified.
2:29:40 Now like driving in fog never feels great, but I’ve been there.
2:29:45 It’s a familiar feeling and yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot these days about this whole
2:29:52 thing about proficiency and our expectation of kids nowadays, you know, that we have been
2:29:57 told for a long time that we need to guard against kids feeling terrible about themselves.
2:29:59 On the other hand, we want them to be proficient.
2:30:03 And what you’re really talking about here, if I understand correctly is proficiency at
2:30:07 being human, at being really good at certain things, less good at others.
2:30:11 I can also tell, you know, any, any kid, cause I was this kid, like in a group of musicians,
2:30:12 I’m the least proficient.
2:30:16 I mean, you really just talk about wanting someone to do nothing and best off not even
2:30:17 playing the triangle.
2:30:18 Okay.
2:30:23 And just doing nothing would be the best thing I could do to any musical effort is just,
2:30:28 but I realized that at some point, even though every kid in my school played an instrument,
2:30:32 they had like the youth symphony and all that kind of stuff, because it was also a time
2:30:34 when I could just kind of relax.
2:30:40 You don’t have to be certainly best at everything, but I also believe that in order to really
2:30:44 find what you’re kind of quote unquote meant for, you have to try a bunch of things and
2:30:49 find out what you’re never going to even approach partially skilled at, but you still
2:30:50 have to try.
2:30:51 Yeah.
2:30:52 I guess that’s the point.
2:30:53 So on the one hand, I guess I’m saying do nothing.
2:30:54 On the other hand, I’m saying you still have to try.
2:30:57 I guess you have to try to find out that you’re really as bad at music as I found out.
2:30:58 I am.
2:30:59 Maybe or I think we’re also talking.
2:31:00 I’m good with it.
2:31:01 I’m good with it.
2:31:02 I love music, but I don’t need to play it.
2:31:08 But I think then what you’re saying is you’re able to separate your identity from any behavior.
2:31:10 Being bad at music doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.
2:31:14 And I think anyone hears that and they’re like, obviously, but we conflate those two
2:31:18 things 90% of the time, right?
2:31:22 That’s why we really care about winning at Scrabble is like to some degree we think it
2:31:26 means we’re smart and everyone’s like, you know, versus I’m probably the same level of
2:31:29 smart whether I win at Scrabble or lose at Scrabble, right?
2:31:31 And to me, that’s what confidence is.
2:31:34 It’s not feeling like you’re the best at something.
2:31:38 It’s feeling like it’s okay to be you when you’re not the best at something, right?
2:31:41 It’s feeling at home with yourself.
2:31:45 And to me, feeling at home with yourself is, first of all, it’s an amazing internal motivator
2:31:50 because you get to also figure out what you’re really passionate about, right?
2:31:54 And yeah, learning to participate in things and even have joy in things that you’re not
2:31:55 great at.
2:32:00 Again, these are things I think our kids really can learn not from lessons, not from a textbook,
2:32:03 not really from a teacher.
2:32:04 They learn it from what we model.
2:32:05 It’s actually interesting.
2:32:09 A lot of board games in my family, and I’m just, I think they’re like the antidote to
2:32:10 everything on the screen.
2:32:12 So we have a million board games.
2:32:13 I’m the resident.
2:32:17 If anyone ever needs a recommendation, what’s your favorite board game to play as a family?
2:32:18 Okay.
2:32:19 I love Sushi Go.
2:32:20 Okay.
2:32:21 I don’t know it, but I’ll check it out.
2:32:22 Sushi Go Party is the better version.
2:32:23 It’s actually a really great adult game, too.
2:32:24 It’s very strategic.
2:32:26 We play code names.
2:32:28 We play a lot of board games.
2:32:29 We play Boggle.
2:32:30 We play Ghost.
2:32:31 We play Scrabble.
2:32:33 We play Rummy Q.
2:32:37 But the game I was going to say that we also play a lot of that I love is Scategories.
2:32:38 Okay.
2:32:39 So have you ever played that?
2:32:40 Yeah.
2:32:41 That’s a fun game.
2:32:45 I, whatever part of the brain is good at generating a lot of different things from a single letter,
2:32:47 must be very small in my brain.
2:32:49 I am so bad at Scategories.
2:32:51 I mean, my kids are all pretty quick.
2:32:52 I lose to everyone.
2:32:53 My seven-year-old included.
2:32:54 I’m horrible.
2:32:57 It actually is a game I suggest often.
2:32:59 I’m like, let’s play Scategories.
2:33:03 And I think that’s actually so powerful for our kids.
2:33:07 I mean, I think a lot of us, if we look back, I think like, is one of the reasons my parents
2:33:11 didn’t really play with me or do things, they felt like they weren’t good at it.
2:33:13 You know, like probably, right?
2:33:17 To demonstrate to your kid, I can choose something.
2:33:18 I can have joy in something.
2:33:24 I can want to do something that I’m not good at that is, again, going to be more powerful
2:33:28 to your kid than sitting down and saying, this is what we think is going to help kids.
2:33:31 It’s okay to do things that you’re not good at.
2:33:34 I know that’s like logical words in the brain.
2:33:37 That’s not an experience they’re building or internalizing.
2:33:40 Kids learn from stories, from experiences.
2:33:47 And so I think that’s one way in terms of how do I help my kids be confident, but also
2:33:51 just be at home with themselves and do things they’re not best at.
2:33:55 Probably the best way to do that is to model it over and over to your kids.
2:33:56 I love it.
2:33:58 We’re back to theory versus practice.
2:33:59 Yes.
2:34:00 I’m big on practice.
2:34:01 I’m big on both.
2:34:08 I feel like as long as there are kids and adults that seem, I want to emphasize seem, to do
2:34:18 everything well, the athlete, academic, musician, good dancer, like as long as, you know, charming
2:34:25 with other people, as long as those people exist or seem to exist, we’re going to have
2:34:32 to all overcome our sense that we should be at least partially good at a wide variety
2:34:33 of things.
2:34:34 Maybe not everything.
2:34:35 Do you think those people exist?
2:34:36 No.
2:34:37 I know they don’t exist.
2:34:39 I know that there are people that apparently are like that.
2:34:41 They’re fakers.
2:34:49 Well, I will say that, and this is, I don’t get paid to say positive things about the university
2:34:58 I work for or not, but the, I will say occasionally I’ll meet a student from Stanford and like,
2:35:05 goodness gracious, like this kid, right, can apparently do everything like they’re an athlete
2:35:06 and they’re a musician.
2:35:09 They have all these things that they, there are those people.
2:35:18 And I will say, but this is important, the pressure that the perception of those people
2:35:25 creates on them without fail brings them to immense challenge in their life, if not then
2:35:26 later.
2:35:27 I’ve seen it every single time.
2:35:32 I know because I grew up in the town where I’m now a professor and I went to school with
2:35:36 many people who ended up there or, you know, other places like that.
2:35:39 And of course there are people like that in every environment.
2:35:40 They are outliers.
2:35:42 They tend to be very salient.
2:35:48 We tend to notice them and they create this, you know, false internal pressure.
2:35:50 This is the reason I raise it.
2:35:54 And I want to say it’s not like they eventually, you know, fail and dissolve into a puddle of
2:35:58 their own tears, like hopefully they’re resilient and they push forward in life and some of
2:36:01 them do amazing things and some of them do less amazing things.
2:36:06 But the point is that there are people among our species that seem to do many, many things
2:36:07 very, very well.
2:36:14 And I think when we hold ourselves to that standard we suffer and we hold ourselves back.
2:36:19 I think that I believe, I just have a central belief that we all do have some unique gifts
2:36:23 that we’re meant to bring to our life and to the world and it shows up in different
2:36:24 forms.
2:36:28 And one of the worst things we can do in trying to find that and express it is trying to be
2:36:30 really good at everything.
2:36:36 I just think that’s the most poisonous idea in the American mindset that we’re supposed
2:36:38 to be really good at everything.
2:36:42 On the other hand, I personally believe that we should try a variety of things so that
2:36:47 we experience frustration and fail and eventually find what it is that is, you know, we’re
2:36:49 quote unquote meant to do.
2:36:53 I do, but I feel also very fortunate that I was never really pushed to be excellent at
2:36:54 everything.
2:36:57 I have terrible hand-to-eye coordination, but I’m pretty good at sports with my feet.
2:37:00 But when I say pretty good, I mean passable.
2:37:03 So I gave up on the idea of becoming a professional athlete, very, very young.
2:37:06 So I think we have to know that we have to play games with our hands and our feet in order
2:37:07 to figure that out.
2:37:08 Yeah.
2:37:14 And I guess, you know, we were talking about this maybe before we started, but I don’t
2:37:15 know.
2:37:20 I’m trying to think why this is, but I tend not to put anyone on a pedestal.
2:37:26 I feel like, and maybe part of it is in part of my private practice for years, I saw, maybe
2:37:29 I saw the Stanford grads who were then living in New York.
2:37:35 And they weren’t literally from Stanford, but I have all these late 20-year-olds and
2:37:41 their pedigree, like all look the same, top of their class, Ivy League, Goldman Sachs,
2:37:52 this NBA, and like so many of them had the same like insane anxiety and emptiness.
2:37:57 I still remember the way one of them described how they felt and she was brilliant with her
2:38:03 words and she said, “I walk around and this like when I’m with people and doing things
2:38:05 and at work, it’s like there’s a ton of color.
2:38:10 When I’m alone, I feel like I am an empty room with white walls.”
2:38:11 Oh, goodness.
2:38:12 That’s very sad.
2:38:13 Very sad.
2:38:14 Very sad.
2:38:19 It actually has a happy ending, which is really, there has a nuance ending, but happy ending
2:38:27 where she, feeling, it’s actually, I was actually saying this to a friend, because it actually
2:38:28 relates to my own childhood.
2:38:36 I feel like I’ve grown a lot, had my therapy, and I feel like when I was younger, I was
2:38:42 really hard driving and really like somewhat people pleasing.
2:38:47 And me and my friend who are both like that, were like that, have kids who aren’t really
2:38:48 like that.
2:38:51 And they’re amazing kids and they do so well and they have this internal confidence, but
2:38:56 sometimes we joke, we’re like, “But there’s nothing that will drive you like feeling not
2:38:57 good enough.”
2:39:04 There’s nothing that drives you like feeling like every test score defines your self-worth.
2:39:06 And it’s so sick, right?
2:39:09 Because we’re almost like conflicted with our kids.
2:39:10 They’re all great kids.
2:39:16 They’re responsible, but they almost have a little bit more inner contentment, right?
2:39:24 But I think about that young woman I saw and how at work she felt amazing until it didn’t
2:39:27 happen until she was 28.
2:39:30 She didn’t get the promotion she thought she was getting.
2:39:34 And then, I mean, she had never failed before.
2:39:40 And it’s not only the never failure, when your internal sense of self is built outside
2:39:46 in, which you actually can do if you have a lot of accomplishments.
2:39:54 It works for a while, but as soon as that stops working, if you have nothing, you feel
2:40:01 like in an empty room with white walls, what’s really compelling about the therapy over the
2:40:07 course of a number of years is I still remember over COVID, we were then zooming and she’d
2:40:09 had her own place.
2:40:13 And she actually went through this process and she was very artistic of painting the
2:40:18 walls in her actual room, talking about making something concrete, and kind of in the way
2:40:23 that she was feeling a lot more lit up inside out instead of outside in.
2:40:25 That’s great.
2:40:29 But I just think, I guess I know myself too, and maybe this is part of why I try to put
2:40:32 people on a pedestal, maybe it’s as I’m talking, people are like, “Oh, Becky gets it right
2:40:38 with her kids, and she’s doing this,” and whatever I can share, that is part of my story.
2:40:43 I also yell at my kids, I also feel like sometimes I’m on my phone too much, I feel like my life
2:40:46 is at a balance, I don’t get to see my friends nearly the way I used to, they probably often
2:40:48 are like, “Where’s Becky?
2:40:52 Why is she not, you know, not only responding to texts, but remembering my birthday or whatever
2:40:53 I forget?”
2:40:58 And that doesn’t feel good to me because I used to do more of that, and so no one has
2:40:59 it all figured out.
2:41:05 Like humans, I think it’s a remarkably complicated, remarkably imperfect, we all have parts of
2:41:10 us that feel really good, and we maybe some of us play up those parts more than others,
2:41:20 and we all have parts of us that feel confusing, maybe have some shame, feel, you know, I don’t
2:41:26 know, just more complicated, and so I at least want to get that out there about myself.
2:41:32 Oh, I really appreciate you sharing, and I want to be clear, if I was at all unclear
2:41:38 that I certainly don’t hold up these ultra performers in all domains on a pedestal.
2:41:42 I think they’re in a very precarious place inside and outside.
2:41:47 They’ve essentially given up all their power and agency to one incoming failure, and maybe
2:41:49 they never experience it, and they get to the end without having done it, but what a
2:41:50 terrible way to live.
2:41:51 Yeah.
2:41:56 Anyway, I’ve always looked up, since I was little, to people that really took a unique
2:41:57 path.
2:42:03 I’ve always found that they, yes, accomplished tremendous things, and they have interesting,
2:42:05 sometimes painful flaws.
2:42:11 Like I’m a huge fan of the late neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, very incredible man,
2:42:12 very complicated life.
2:42:13 Incredible.
2:42:17 You know, if you read his books, his autobiography, which I highly recommend everybody do, if
2:42:24 you’re interested in science, and just animals, and a life uniquely lived, he’s a really
2:42:25 good example.
2:42:27 And there are a bunch of other examples that are meaningful to me.
2:42:31 Certainly not somebody who, you know, he couldn’t do an experiment to save his life.
2:42:36 He was moved out of multiple universities and places, you know, a very, very complicated
2:42:37 character.
2:42:42 Had a methamphetamine addiction, was a closet homosexual, came out later in life, and was
2:42:47 then long periods of time on his own, and anyway, I’ve had a great relationship later
2:42:49 in life.
2:42:56 Very interesting person became that way and found his passion by realizing how terrible
2:43:00 he was at certain things, including certain branches of medicine.
2:43:06 So I think that trying many things and being really realistic about whether or not something’s
2:43:11 for us or not, but is the key, but then I guess the question becomes, and this must
2:43:14 be so hard from the perspective of parenting, but also just in terms of guiding ourselves
2:43:19 through life is, you know, how much friction do we experience before we say, you know what,
2:43:21 like, I’m not a musician.
2:43:22 And I’m cool with that.
2:43:23 I love music.
2:43:27 But I’m going to put my efforts into these other things, and you know, this thing comes
2:43:28 more easily for me.
2:43:31 You know, I do think we have a lot of natural tendencies, and I feel like, especially in
2:43:35 the United States, there’s been this complicated relationship with parenting and education
2:43:41 whereby we don’t want to push people to their own, you know, like suffering and demise,
2:43:45 but we also have to avoid not pushing them because then they don’t ever find what they
2:43:50 are proficient in, and they don’t learn that overcoming friction thing.
2:43:52 So it’s tricky.
2:43:56 I do believe everyone has a unique expression of themselves in life, whatever that is, doesn’t
2:43:59 have to be in professional life, but to try a lot of different things.
2:44:02 And you know, how, at what point you bail out?
2:44:07 I mean, I’ve had a few in my lab, but I’ve spoken to graduate students in postdocs where
2:44:10 I had to say, you know what, I actually had this conversation with the postdocs, like,
2:44:14 you know what, you’re a really good scientist, you’re never going to be a professor.
2:44:16 Let’s get you a job in biotech.
2:44:19 And they’re like, oh, they thought their whole life they were going to be a professor.
2:44:20 I’m like, you’re not.
2:44:23 And the data are the following, which point to that.
2:44:27 And it’s kind of devastating, but then years later, they thanked me, or they thanked me
2:44:28 in that case.
2:44:29 Yeah.
2:44:30 A few others probably cursed me.
2:44:38 So, how do you know when to keep pushing your kid to even engage in something?
2:44:43 Like, maybe they’re the kid that always is picked last for the team, but you know they
2:44:44 should play sports.
2:44:50 So I guess my first reaction is I’m reacting toward pushing, because I’m not sure that’s
2:44:54 the, like, the verb I would think about.
2:44:59 Because I think the idea of pushing your kid, even like, how much do I push, there’s a lot
2:45:00 about us there.
2:45:01 Is that my desire?
2:45:03 I guess I grew up in a town where a lot of kids got pushed.
2:45:07 Oh, I mean, I grew up in a town where every kid got pushed, so maybe that’s why I know
2:45:08 something about it.
2:45:09 Right?
2:45:10 I mean, I think we see this all the time.
2:45:13 And it goes back to actually what side of the tennis court, like, whose feelings are
2:45:14 whose.
2:45:19 Like, is this my unlived dreams as an athlete in my youth?
2:45:22 Or is this actually about my kid’s soccer skills?
2:45:28 You know, I think parents watching their kids playing sports is a prime example of am
2:45:34 I living out my unfulfilled dreams and projecting that onto my daughter?
2:45:36 Or does my daughter like soccer?
2:45:40 And like, how can I really differentiate those, right?
2:45:43 I think actually, though, making it back to that, a lot of this actually goes back to
2:45:48 frustration tolerance and why it matters so much to me.
2:45:53 Like my approach to teaching frustration tolerance, which is like a hidden gem we have here at
2:45:58 the foot of a kid inside, I really want, I want to be in every school.
2:46:02 I think it needs to be in every school and I want to describe it to you, okay?
2:46:03 So I literally have this graph.
2:46:04 It’s helpful.
2:46:08 And I know you like to write things down too to make it concrete where like, point one
2:46:11 is not knowing how to do something, okay?
2:46:17 And point two, which is very far away is let’s say knowing how to do it or being very proficient.
2:46:18 This could be soccer.
2:46:21 I think a good example is reading, okay?
2:46:24 Like you, everybody starts out not knowing how to read.
2:46:31 And let’s say not everybody, but a lot of people learn how to read.
2:46:36 The space between not knowing and knowing, I call the learning space.
2:46:37 It has a name.
2:46:39 And it’s helpful to know where you are in a map.
2:46:47 And the learning space has one feeling that you’re supposed to have, frustration.
2:46:50 That is the feeling you’re supposed to have.
2:46:57 And we have this idea that we share it from not knowing to knowing, like this.
2:46:59 It’s because of those damn Star Wars movies.
2:47:03 And oh, and actually Star Wars incorporated some frustration, but it’s because of movies.
2:47:04 Boom.
2:47:08 You’re supposed to just have the skill because you picked up the rock or the sword or the
2:47:09 pen or the wand.
2:47:14 Well, and now it’s because if you think about the circuitry that kids get used to with dopamine
2:47:20 and the space between wanting and having in general is low.
2:47:23 Because when you don’t know something, you want to know it.
2:47:26 Here you do know it.
2:47:34 Our tolerance and our kids tolerance for wanting and not having is so low that what’s so sad
2:47:39 is the learning space has gotten massively compressed and people fear frustration.
2:47:42 This image when I’ve gone over this with kids and even teachers, I know teachers who teach
2:47:43 this in their class.
2:47:44 Okay.
2:47:45 Today, we’re going to learn this new thing.
2:47:50 We’re going to learn whatever it is that, you know, how to read a short word.
2:47:56 Everybody in this class is here, not knowing everybody in this class is going to get here.
2:48:01 And probably today, most of us, and you can actually do it, are going to be right here.
2:48:02 What does this say?
2:48:04 The learning space.
2:48:07 How are we supposed to feel when we’re in the learning space?
2:48:12 The class can say frustrated, okay, here’s an interesting assignment different than you
2:48:13 think.
2:48:18 The goal today is not to tell me if you can read the letters that are in front of you.
2:48:22 I want you to raise your hand when you feel frustrated, which feels like this.
2:48:25 Oh, I can’t do it because I’m going to come up to you and I’m going to give you a high
2:48:28 five and I’m going to say, you are in the learning space.
2:48:29 You are learning.
2:48:30 How amazing is that?
2:48:35 Like, Andrew, I really believe this has like the power to change learning.
2:48:39 Because then when we talk about proficiency or when we talk about years from now, my kid
2:48:40 is saying this happens all the time.
2:48:42 I get questions about this all the time.
2:48:46 My kid says they want to do whatever is, it’s going to be a coding class.
2:48:50 It could be a lacrosse class and they do it once and then they always come home and they
2:48:51 say, I want to do it.
2:48:52 I quit.
2:48:55 Or maybe they’re on a swim team and they want to quit.
2:48:57 Do I let my kid quit?
2:48:58 Right?
2:49:04 To me, the question is actually like most likely none of our kids are going to be Olympic
2:49:06 swimmers or like professional basketball players.
2:49:10 I think about this a lot with youth sports, the whole goal in my mind for most people with
2:49:11 youth sports.
2:49:16 But most is learning how to deal with frustration, learning how to do things you thought you
2:49:22 couldn’t do, character, sharing, being a good teammate, sportsmanship, right?
2:49:23 All those things are hard skills to learn.
2:49:27 So the reason I’m signing my kid up for basketball is actually just because it’s like a good
2:49:29 medium for all those things.
2:49:35 And so I want to be sure that if my kid is quitting, it’s not because they’re escaping
2:49:42 the very, very natural learning space that is so important to being in life.
2:49:43 And this happened.
2:49:44 Actually, my oldest wanted to quit baseball.
2:49:50 He’d played for years and he wanted to quit in, in the conversation we ended up having
2:49:55 was look, let’s wait till the end of the season, like, and this goes back to values.
2:50:01 It’s not we don’t quit, but like in our family, we, we really value and try as much as we
2:50:06 can to keep our commitments and not just to ourselves, to each other.
2:50:10 And so the rest of the season, you might be thinking all the time, I don’t want to be
2:50:11 doing this.
2:50:14 And again, in my head, I’m thinking, good, that’s like a good life experience to watch
2:50:17 yourself go through that as long as it’s not toxic.
2:50:19 And at the end, you know, we’ll talk about it.
2:50:22 Interestingly enough, he had the best baseball season he’d ever had.
2:50:25 He had a grand slam, which no shade to baseball.
2:50:28 That’s as exciting as youth baseball ever gets, right?
2:50:31 And still he was like, they come done.
2:50:34 I just want to, and I felt really good about that.
2:50:38 I was like, look, you, you, you ended on like, you’re playing really well.
2:50:41 It wasn’t just because you got moved down in the batting order.
2:50:44 Like, if that’s the reason why I could get moved down to the batting order, they’re not
2:50:45 starting on basketball.
2:50:46 I hear this all the time.
2:50:47 Now they want to quit.
2:50:55 I don’t have any rigid rules, but if that becomes a pattern that worries me or not worries
2:50:58 me, but forget youth sports.
2:51:04 That’s just not a great circuitry that would be conducive with kind of resilience and confidence
2:51:06 in adulthood.
2:51:14 I love, love, love this concept, which I believe to be entirely true, that the learning space
2:51:20 between unskilled and skilled, if you will, is characterized by the feeling of frustration
2:51:22 in mind and body.
2:51:26 I don’t want to rattle off another experiment, but there is just, oh, so much data.
2:51:32 I’ll share this with you offline, the papers that is showing that brain plasticity changes
2:51:38 in neural circuitry only occur when the chemical milieu of the brain is different than it normally
2:51:39 is.
2:51:41 Otherwise, how would the brain know it should change?
2:51:47 So what sets the context for massive change in our neural circuitry is when there’s a
2:51:48 lot of adrenaline in the body.
2:51:49 Sorry, folks.
2:51:50 That’s true.
2:51:53 Adrenaline, also called epinephrine, and norepinephrine released in the brain.
2:51:59 Now, you don’t want to be in a state of panic or stress to the point where you’re debilitated,
2:52:06 but that shift in the chemical milieu sets the stage for rewiring of connections between
2:52:07 neurons.
2:52:08 I mean, this is known at the molecular level.
2:52:10 It’s known at the cellular level.
2:52:11 It’s known at the circuit level.
2:52:15 And I’m excited to share that literature with you because it just basically is a bunch of
2:52:22 nerdspeak and numbers to support the fact that you’re nailing it right in the bullseye,
2:52:26 which is without frustration, there is no rewiring of the neural circuits.
2:52:28 And if you think about it, it had to be that way.
2:52:34 Otherwise, why would the circuits change so that the error signal is what sets plasticity
2:52:35 in motion?
2:52:37 Now, the actual rewiring occurs during sleep.
2:52:39 So this is my reminder to make sure that your kids get enough sleep because that’s when
2:52:42 the actual — this is the phenomenon of not being able to do something coming back a few
2:52:43 days or weeks later.
2:52:44 And you’re like, “I can do it.”
2:52:47 It’s because it happened in sleep, the final portion of the rewiring.
2:52:50 That’s why phones shouldn’t be in the bedroom for kids.
2:52:58 I think 75% of people between the age of seven and 18 are massively sleep deprived.
2:53:04 And the neural rewiring deficits associated with that are serious.
2:53:06 And these are what we call sensitive periods.
2:53:09 I like sensitive periods more than critical periods because critical periods imply an
2:53:10 open and shut.
2:53:13 Sensitive is — there’s a tapering, but it does taper.
2:53:20 So this unskilled to skilled and frustration in the learning space model, this is part
2:53:21 of something that you’re putting together now.
2:53:22 Could you expand on that?
2:53:23 I already have it.
2:53:29 I mean, our Frustration Tolerance Program, it’s a workshop, it’s within our membership.
2:53:32 So it’s one of 30 workshops.
2:53:37 To me, it’s one where the thing is, no parents say, “Dr. Becky, what I’m really dealing
2:53:38 with is low frustration tolerance.”
2:53:43 They’ll say, “My kid is having tantrums or they won’t do their homework.”
2:53:47 Or kids with ADHD tend to have low frustration tolerance, right?
2:53:53 So to me, it’s like one of the first things I recommend to new members, where I say, “Okay,
2:53:58 this is the thing, this is like the key thing that underlies a lot of tantrums, it underlies
2:54:03 entitlement, it underlies not sharing, it underlies why you throw the board game when
2:54:07 you’re about to lose, it underlies quitting, it’s not homework.”
2:54:13 And again, the MGI, the most generous interpretation is, “Wait, the commonality in all those situations
2:54:16 is my kid is frustrated.”
2:54:21 And if what they’re learning or what they’ve practiced is when I feel frustrated, it’s
2:54:27 so intense that sometimes I think like, do our kids learn that their emotions operate
2:54:30 on a dimmer switch or on off switch?
2:54:32 We want our kids to operate on a dimmer.
2:54:36 Like you said, if you’re at a 10 out of 10, nothing, you can’t operate.
2:54:39 But if every time, and I’m so interested in this literature you mentioned because I was
2:54:43 thinking, what would happen in the first number of years of a kid’s life if every time they’re
2:54:50 frustrated, well-intentioned, but again, just under-resourced parents, turn it off?
2:54:56 Then what I think would happen, and I’m wondering, is then something that could be like a 5 out
2:55:02 of 10, I feel like would feel like a 10 out of 10, because you never had a dimmer, right?
2:55:07 Because if you only operated when a light went on with always going off, then even if
2:55:13 over time years later, the light was at a 5, it’s still going to feel blinding, right?
2:55:17 And so this idea of a dimmer, you want your kids when they’re frustrated, that’s what
2:55:20 frustration tolerance is.
2:55:24 Nobody says I’m frustrated, I can’t read, yay, no one says that.
2:55:27 But if it kind of comes up, oh, there’s that light.
2:55:32 We want their bodies to think, okay, all I need to do, and I have skills, to get my nine
2:55:39 out of 10 to an eight, an eight to a seven, and when I’m at a seven, that’s where learning
2:55:40 happens.
2:55:45 That’s very different than it’s at a nine, and kind of like, who’s going to turn it
2:55:46 off for me?
2:55:50 Or the reason in those situations, because I’m not doing my homework, is they don’t
2:55:52 have the skills to bring it to a seven.
2:55:56 And so their choice is to stay at a nine or 10 out of 10, which no human can do, or walk
2:55:58 away and bring it to a zero.
2:56:01 And so what I’m saying is our frustration tolerance workshop, which I want every parent
2:56:07 to take, but I also just want to get into schools, is literally the thing that helps
2:56:11 you teach your kids how to get frustration tolerance.
2:56:16 How do, you really can do this, it sounds sick, but like, you can get your kids to like
2:56:21 being in the learning space, to be like, I’m going to thrive here, the good feeling is
2:56:23 eventually going to come.
2:56:28 I’m relatively comfortable here, because I just have watched myself survive it that
2:56:29 many times.
2:56:35 And so the benefits of that workshop, and just the program is not only tantrums, but
2:56:41 actually it is a lot in academics, because that, so many times when kids have issues
2:56:46 in school, ADHD is real, dyslexia is real, that definitely can be a component.
2:56:53 But so many times, it’s actually an issue of frustration, tolerance, and that’s often
2:56:56 not kind of labeled for parents.
2:57:02 I’m realizing as you’re saying this, that the literature that I’m aware of about stress
2:57:07 and trauma is actually relevant here in an interesting and perhaps surprising way, whereby
2:57:12 this thing that I said earlier, the brain only changes under conditions where norepinephrine
2:57:18 and epinephrine are released, there is such a thing as one trial learning, and it’s associated
2:57:20 with negative experiences.
2:57:24 And the reason negative experiences create such a robust learning in only one trial is
2:57:28 because there’s a massive amount of epinephrine in norepinephrine, and other neurochemicals
2:57:29 released.
2:57:31 So it’s stamped into the nervous system.
2:57:36 But learning of things we want to learn relies on the same neurochemicals.
2:57:42 I mean, there’s a wild and really cool literature from a guy named James McGaw, who showed that
2:57:46 if you spike adrenaline before learning, the learning is much faster and much more durable.
2:57:52 If you spike adrenaline after learning, it turns out the learning is more durable.
2:57:58 Now, we can’t start getting into biohacking experiments on kids or themselves, but the
2:58:02 adrenaline is supposed to come during the learning itself, which is what you’re saying.
2:58:10 But the problem is, if we stop once we’re frustrated, we get the increase in adrenaline
2:58:13 and norepinephrine, and again, other neurochemicals as well.
2:58:17 But then the perception is that the plasticity loop is closed there.
2:58:18 So what did you learn?
2:58:19 I do hard things.
2:58:20 I get frustrated.
2:58:23 When I stop, the frustration goes away.
2:58:24 That’s all you learn.
2:58:28 In the same way that somebody exposed to trauma, this underlies the basis of almost all modern
2:58:34 trauma therapies, is that in the right setting, take people back through it sequentially,
2:58:39 let them experience that and start to desensitize to it so they can complete that loop.
2:58:40 Yeah.
2:58:41 That’s exactly right.
2:58:44 And so I think it’s so important to push through frustration.
2:58:50 And I think it’s so important, I’m just agreeing with you here clearly, but that oftentimes
2:58:53 that frustration can last more than just the learning session.
2:59:00 It can be weeks or months, or in some cases, a year of a really challenging course or a
2:59:01 sports participation.
2:59:05 And so that’s where it gets tough, because as empathic creatures, one hopes, we hate
2:59:10 to see members of our own species suffer, especially our kids.
2:59:14 And so it becomes this thing of, do you let them opt out?
2:59:16 What did they learn by opting out?
2:59:19 And that’s where it gets really complicated, because we also got a forebrain, which can
2:59:20 set all these different rules.
2:59:21 And so …
2:59:24 But I don’t know about frustration for a year.
2:59:30 I guess I always think how we experience a feeling is the feeling plus the story we
2:59:33 tell ourselves about the feeling.
2:59:39 And the feeling is at a certain level, but the story we tell ourselves about the feeling
2:59:44 and what it means about us, or how capable we are of coping with it, that can make a
2:59:47 feeling that was here go to here.
2:59:51 Something about frustration over a year.
2:59:53 It’s interesting, we’re talking so much about stories.
2:59:59 But again, if one of the things I try as a parent is when my kid is saying, I don’t know
3:00:08 what would it be to quit, I hate gymnastics, and you’re thinking, okay, first of all, quitting
3:00:10 is not always weak or wrong.
3:00:13 Sometimes quitting is a very brave, awesome, great thing to do.
3:00:15 Definitely sometimes the absolute best thing to do.
3:00:16 100%.
3:00:19 But as a parent sometimes, and I get this a lot, like I’m conflicted, like I don’t know
3:00:20 what’s right.
3:00:22 First of all, there’s probably not a right.
3:00:27 And again, our parenting never hangs on one decision, so just let that go.
3:00:32 But I think what I would be curious to just experiment with, again, maybe it’s because
3:00:37 I’m so obsessed with frustration tolerance, especially in this world, that is so working
3:00:42 against frustration tolerance, I feel like it’s even more my duty as a parent to help.
3:00:46 Okay, let’s just have an experiment where I would say, okay, talk to me about why you
3:00:47 want to quit gymnastics.
3:00:52 And I might know in the back of my head, maybe they’re not as good as everyone anymore.
3:00:55 Or maybe they just don’t like it, who knows?
3:00:58 But I might say, you know, look, maybe this isn’t relevant.
3:01:05 I’m thinking about when I did, you know, I’m thinking about a different sport, when I did
3:01:09 a track growing up, and there were like, whole years where I was like, I love track, I love
3:01:10 track.
3:01:15 And I don’t know if I ever told you this, but when I was 11, I hate a track.
3:01:18 I went from love to hate it.
3:01:23 And part of it was, and again, say something kind of relevant to your kid, part of it was
3:01:27 there was a new kid at school and I was kind of the track star until she came in and then
3:01:32 I was like second and that just kind of stunk and no, I didn’t tell myself it’s okay.
3:01:36 I kind of told myself this stinks every day and part of it was all my friends were doing
3:01:38 soccer and I kind of felt left out.
3:01:42 But I finished the year and the next year or something interesting happened.
3:01:47 And this is what a kid will say, I’ll go, oh, what, you love track again.
3:01:48 You know?
3:01:53 And it’s this amazing moment because they’re always going to say that to be like, no, no.
3:01:59 I ended up deciding that next year is my last year at track and I stopped after that.
3:02:04 But I can’t explain it, it just, it felt like it came from like a different place and almost
3:02:08 like I felt more settled I think after like I really knew.
3:02:12 And I don’t know if that’s relevant to gymnastics, I do know you’ve loved it for a while.
3:02:15 It’s kind of new to not like it.
3:02:18 And sometimes when something’s new and you don’t like it, you just got to go.
3:02:22 But other times when something’s new and you don’t like it, you want to like figure it
3:02:23 out.
3:02:27 And I don’t know, I’m wondering if we should give it a few more weeks to try the figuring
3:02:29 it out thing.
3:02:33 And again, maybe your kid says, no, I want to quit and you’re like, fine.
3:02:37 And in some ways you’ve already had the experience, but no matter what they do.
3:02:43 But I think that’s, that’s what I think about playing around with with kids way more than
3:02:46 I think what parents say is, so should they quit or not?
3:02:49 It’s so binary, it’s so rigid.
3:02:54 And I think we’re missing the nuance of the story and the process that matters more than
3:02:56 the eventual decision.
3:03:03 I love your use of story in narrative with your kids.
3:03:04 It seems like you use that a lot.
3:03:05 I do.
3:03:10 Instead of saying, you know, and forgive me for, I’m not, I’m not an analyst, but I feel
3:03:14 like it starts with an observation, like, okay, you’re behaving this way, maybe what’s
3:03:17 behind the behavior or you’re expressing this, what’s maybe deeper to that.
3:03:22 But when talking about your own experiences towards your kids as you’ve been doing here
3:03:26 in these pseudo hypotheticals, I’m sure some of them is this will interview your kids
3:03:30 later and find out, no, I’m kidding.
3:03:36 It’s clear that you use story as a way to kind of share genuinely, but also probe for
3:03:38 what might be going on with them.
3:03:48 And I have to say I find it really delightful because it raises lots of questions that I
3:03:50 think anyone would have.
3:03:58 And I think it’s part of your gift, clearly, because so many people follow your advice.
3:04:02 But the advice you give is also, it’s interesting, it’s like an observation, like frustration
3:04:03 is key.
3:04:07 I want to increase frustration tolerance, but then you’re not like, okay, you’re going
3:04:11 to hammer down their throats, frustration tolerance in the following way.
3:04:15 It sort of becomes a question, like, where is there frustration in your life?
3:04:20 And then you put it into your own narrative as opposed to necessarily asking them questions.
3:04:23 I think asking kids questions or asking people questions generally is great.
3:04:27 Like, hey, how can I do better as you pointed out earlier?
3:04:33 But it’s really, I don’t know if the word is disarming, but it’s really in an entirely
3:04:34 positive way.
3:04:39 You use your own narrative to allow people to start going, oh yeah, like, where am I
3:04:40 experiencing frustration?
3:04:42 Where could I tolerate that better?
3:04:48 And so I think that there’s this incredible triad of, like, or tripartite thing of like
3:04:55 observe, consider, like the deeper layer, and then offering a narrative that’s really
3:05:00 a bunch of questions where you’re speaking from your real truth.
3:05:01 It’s really elegant, I have to say.
3:05:02 Thank you.
3:05:03 It’s spectacular.
3:05:04 I hadn’t realized it until right now.
3:05:09 I don’t know if I realize those parts, but you know what is interesting is it brings up
3:05:12 the word we kind of mentioned before, but didn’t talk about, and maybe it’ll be surprising
3:05:15 that I say this, is shame.
3:05:21 And I think shame is the biggest blocker to learning, and shame, I think, could be defined
3:05:26 like a lot of things in many ways, but it’s the experience of aloneness.
3:05:30 I think shame is the feeling you have when you kind of feel like a part of you is not
3:05:31 attachable.
3:05:36 So for a kid, that’s an existential threat to not be in attachment with someone.
3:05:40 And in that way, when you’re not attachable, you’re alone, you’re alone.
3:05:44 And so, so many of the things that happen with our kids, because I’ll model another story
3:05:50 and maybe I’ll get some flack for this, because it’s probably counterintuitive, but I think
3:05:56 about like one of my kids, my resilient rebel, who was in a hitting stage when he was younger.
3:06:02 Hitting, and he was just also in like a couple weeks, he was hitting, and then there was
3:06:06 this one, there was this one time where we were doing a family puzzle, and he was younger.
3:06:11 He was probably like three, he was really hard, he was more familiar with our kids.
3:06:12 He was kind of doing his own thing.
3:06:13 I think he was playing with blocks on the side.
3:06:19 We leave, we come back, and like a couple of the puzzle pieces were missing that we’re
3:06:20 in.
3:06:21 And I just knew, I knew it.
3:06:22 He saw it.
3:06:24 I know most generous interpretation.
3:06:29 He felt like, oh my God, I can’t participate what the rest of the family is doing.
3:06:33 And so, you know what I’m going to do, because I’m a smart kid, I’m just going to stop them
3:06:37 from participating, and so I’m going to take the puzzle pieces and hide them.
3:06:38 I knew it.
3:06:39 I know them.
3:06:41 So we come back, and we worked really hard on this puzzle.
3:06:46 Of course, you’re angry, but again, I can either do nothing on the outside or do nothing
3:06:50 on the inside in that moment, not always, but just to be an adult.
3:06:52 And I was just like, I know you took the puzzle pieces.
3:06:55 I just went, you know, and he’s like, what are you talking, no, I didn’t, maybe he’s
3:06:56 four.
3:06:57 No, I didn’t.
3:06:59 We’re working on this puzzle.
3:07:04 I get that is probably frustrating, but like you need, I’m not, I didn’t have the puzzle
3:07:05 pieces.
3:07:07 That was not working.
3:07:11 And then this is truly going back to stories and going back to shame.
3:07:18 If you feel like you’re the bad kid who’s doing bad things, and you’re the only one
3:07:24 who’s like that, you are shut down from learning.
3:07:29 So I went up to him on the couch and my husband, I remember watching me, and this is how I
3:07:30 started.
3:07:35 I go, I don’t know if I can tell you this, which any kids, I don’t know if I can tell
3:07:44 you this when I was probably about seven, I did something really bad.
3:07:49 That’s when I said, and he was like, I can’t even tell you, he was like, he like every
3:07:52 part of his anger like it diffused.
3:07:56 And you can really draw a kid in by just saying to them, I can’t tell you, I’ve never told
3:07:57 him.
3:07:59 I go, okay, and this, this is true.
3:08:07 I go, my sister was too, and she had these like oily stickers, and I really wanted them.
3:08:11 And I asked my mom, and she said, no, we couldn’t go to the store.
3:08:18 No, those are, you know, my sister’s stickers, and you’re never going to guess what I did.
3:08:22 And he was like, I don’t know.
3:08:23 You asked her for them.
3:08:31 You waited, you know, and I was like, no, I took them, but that’s not the worst part.
3:08:33 He said, what?
3:08:38 And I go, my mom asked me if I took them.
3:08:39 I knew I did.
3:08:46 So you know what I told her, and he said, you told her, yes, and I go, no, I told her,
3:08:52 yes, and he literally goes.
3:08:57 And I feel like in that moment, what’s happening is he’s saying like so many things that you
3:09:03 can never say didactically, like, mom, like, you’re my mom, I love you, I hold you on a
3:09:09 pedestal and like, even you did something that wasn’t so great.
3:09:12 There’s like so much hope and goodness.
3:09:17 And then I didn’t, in that moment, I did not say, and you cannot say in these situations.
3:09:25 So now you can tell me that you just have to like trust because I think the shame of
3:09:27 the badness, shame freezes you, right?
3:09:29 As an animal defense state, right?
3:09:30 Shame freezes you.
3:09:34 So a kid who’s lying to you is always in shame.
3:09:41 And you can’t get a kid to unfreeze and move to a different place of telling you the truth
3:09:46 if you’re adding more shame through fear, like the math doesn’t work, but you can through
3:09:47 stories.
3:09:54 Now, true story, he did not right after that, say, you know, I was just like, I remember
3:09:59 my husband, okay, let me say this, he was like, we have to punish him, we have to punish
3:10:00 him.
3:10:03 I was like, in the moment, that’s going to feel very cathartic to us.
3:10:04 That’s what punishment does.
3:10:05 It makes you feel very powerful.
3:10:07 It makes you feel very cathartic.
3:10:08 It doesn’t work.
3:10:09 It just doesn’t.
3:10:11 It’s literally not with kids who are strong willed.
3:10:13 I was like, just give it a couple of days.
3:10:17 It’s probably a good three days later.
3:10:25 And he brought me the puzzle pieces in a bag and he just said, I took them.
3:10:28 And he truly started crying.
3:10:30 And I did not lecture him.
3:10:37 I feel like the whole arc, the whole lesson had basically already happened, honestly,
3:10:41 like the day after or so, again, and this is what I think we miss as parents and like,
3:10:44 we’re almost afraid to like, just name the humanness of it.
3:10:46 And I kind of gave an example earlier.
3:10:48 He’s going to want to do something bad again.
3:10:50 We all want to do bad things.
3:10:51 That’s not a bad urge.
3:10:55 It’s just about having the skills to do something differently when you have the urge.
3:10:59 So I think a couple of days later, and I do this, I do this little like role plays.
3:11:00 They take like 20 seconds.
3:11:05 I was like, oh my goodness, look at the puzzle because we’d still been working on it.
3:11:06 What if you want to take it again?
3:11:07 He goes, I won’t.
3:11:12 I go, I know, but I think you might want to remember how I took the oilies.
3:11:16 So you’re acknowledging that inside him there might be a piece that still wants to do the
3:11:17 wrong thing.
3:11:18 Feelings.
3:11:19 And that’s an urge.
3:11:21 I teach my kids an urge means you want to do something.
3:11:24 My kids will say an urge is not a behavior.
3:11:25 Behavior is doing the thing.
3:11:26 That’s not okay.
3:11:30 But the only reason your urge doesn’t convert into behavior is because you have a skill
3:11:34 to manage the urge and you can’t build skills if no one teaches you them.
3:11:37 So I said, what could you do instead?
3:11:39 Could you run to me and say, I really want to take the pieces?
3:11:41 Can you say I need time with you?
3:11:44 Because at the end of the day, I think he fell left out.
3:11:45 And we did.
3:11:46 And by the way, this kid, is he like, perfect now?
3:11:54 No, you know, but like it brings together so many things.
3:11:59 One number one, when we trust ourselves that we have time, when we realize shame, the fear
3:12:04 of being the only one, being bad, being unlovable, being alone is often the biggest blocker for
3:12:05 kids.
3:12:12 When you really realize that punishment and sending your kid away makes no sense at all.
3:12:16 And you can kind of give yourself freedom to tell stories, right?
3:12:20 Because when we’re really struggling with something, you don’t want to look at someone,
3:12:22 especially someone who’s perfect.
3:12:23 Right?
3:12:26 It’s like when you really have a bad experience as an adult, the only thing you want to hear
3:12:32 is your friend who I don’t like, you know, I’m mortified, I sent this email to my boss.
3:12:36 The only thing that would make me feel better is someone like, let me show you the email
3:12:37 I sent.
3:12:38 I’m like, oh, wow, that’s worse.
3:12:39 That’s the only thing that makes me feel better.
3:12:43 Not because I wish bad upon other people, but because you want to know you’re not alone.
3:12:48 And other people’s stories do that like vulnerability.
3:12:54 It’s kind of like, it’s like this magic, this magic trick, I mean, is pretty far away from
3:13:03 the parenting dynamic, but the understanding and actual data from like 12 step programs
3:13:10 and group therapy generally, including trauma therapy, that is of a group therapy nature,
3:13:16 fully supports everything you said, hearing the terrible or and or humiliating things
3:13:21 that people have done or have done to them as awful as that sounds, you know, as often
3:13:25 what underlies people’s willingness to recover, ability to recover.
3:13:30 And then they become the teachers over time, like you said, I think you said so many incredible
3:13:31 things there.
3:13:36 But right at the end, you said something that I hope everyone internalizes that when you
3:13:42 do something embarrassing, maybe even humiliating, the last thing you want to hear is look, it’s
3:13:43 all going to be fine.
3:13:48 The thing that actually helps is somebody who has experienced something similar and is
3:13:49 doing fine.
3:13:50 Yeah.
3:13:54 Like management all like we had someone do a presentation at work and it was for a bunch
3:13:56 of people and it did not go well.
3:13:59 And I met with her and she knew kind of didn’t go well.
3:14:01 And honestly, the only thing I said to her, I don’t even manage her directly.
3:14:03 She’s more junior.
3:14:04 And I really mean this.
3:14:08 We had in clinical psychology grad school, like it’s intense, you do a session when you’re
3:14:12 first doing sessions and like everyone’s watching you, they’re like watching you do
3:14:17 therapy, which is helpful, you know, but I remember my first one and I felt like pretty
3:14:18 okay about it.
3:14:21 And I was like, this is my first one, I was okay.
3:14:22 I got torn to shreds.
3:14:27 They were like, that was not good, you know, and now obviously I’m on the, I feel good
3:14:29 about my clinical abilities.
3:14:34 But the only thing I said to her as I was like, look, and I shared it with her.
3:14:42 And I said, like, I’ve been there, like, eventually I look back on that helped me learn that day.
3:14:43 I just fell awful.
3:14:47 I wasn’t like, this is my learning space moment, you know, and so if you’re feeling
3:14:51 like that, I just want to let you know, like, I’ve been there too.
3:14:53 This is the starting point to getting better.
3:14:54 This is going to like make you stronger.
3:14:56 I know that I’ve lived that.
3:15:01 And I think storytelling in that way is probably like a really underutilized kind of quote
3:15:07 tool, almost dehumanizes it to call it that in management and any relationship.
3:15:08 Love it.
3:15:14 And I feel like the story of your son bringing those puzzle pieces back is like, there’s so
3:15:15 much there.
3:15:16 So much.
3:15:21 And I feel like that there was a delay and then he brought it back on his own accord and
3:15:24 that you had already kind of let it go.
3:15:29 That’s I feel like a really interesting piece that it wasn’t to like appease you is really
3:15:30 something internal for him.
3:15:34 Like he got the lesson for him.
3:15:37 It wasn’t just about like making mom feel okay about him.
3:15:41 Like he clearly understood you still love him, but it wasn’t about like fixing something
3:15:46 externally as much as it was about fixing something internally, which I think is the
3:15:48 addressing and overcoming the shame piece.
3:15:49 I think that’s right.
3:15:50 And that’s the thing.
3:15:56 I think sometimes it’s like, are we teaching kids what to think or how to think like after
3:16:00 they’re gone from our house, like it’s the how to think and you said questions.
3:16:06 I love kind of Socratic questions for kids like, oh, if again, a different version of
3:16:10 a story would be like, oh, okay, I know you didn’t take the puzzle pieces, but I’m just
3:16:15 thinking for me, like, what would make me take puzzle pieces?
3:16:20 Oh, I wonder if I felt left out or I wonder if I was just really trying to get my parents
3:16:21 attention for a while.
3:16:22 And this was the only way to do it.
3:16:28 And what would I do after and what would I need now I’m going to get emotional.
3:16:34 What would I need to know about myself or from my parent for me to share that I did
3:16:35 take it?
3:16:40 Maybe I would need to know that my parents knew I was a good kid.
3:16:41 Hmm.
3:16:42 Anyway, sorry.
3:16:43 What were we talking about?
3:16:48 Like, because your kids eventually make a decision, adults make good decisions for themselves
3:16:54 because they ask themselves the right questions, not because they’ve heard their parents specific
3:16:58 lesson, right, because they’re able to say to themselves, like, what am I feeling right
3:16:59 now?
3:17:00 What am I really looking for?
3:17:01 Why did I do that?
3:17:05 So, like, asking questions, telling stories, asking questions without even answering them
3:17:11 actually provokes a much more sophisticated developmental process in your kid than the
3:17:16 lectures we all me included, trust me, plenty of times at my kid that I’ve just lectured
3:17:17 them.
3:17:18 But again, they’re just catharsis.
3:17:20 They’re not actually terribly effective.
3:17:21 Yeah.
3:17:29 If ever there was some core truths about brain plasticity, it’s that frustration is associated
3:17:32 with the chemicals that foster brain change.
3:17:38 We know that, and that questions have a really interesting impact on learning, which sounds
3:17:39 kind of like a duh.
3:17:40 Well, of course they do.
3:17:43 But when we ask questions, it creates this open loop in the brain that the brain wants
3:17:46 to solve as opposed to hearing a statement.
3:17:51 That’s why I always felt like those pictures on office walls, like motivation, when you
3:17:57 blah, blah, blah, like the motivational statements don’t mean much in terms of, because they’re
3:17:59 not about verb states.
3:18:03 When we ask questions, we put our brain into kind of a process of verb states of asking
3:18:06 what behaviors are going to lead to which outcomes.
3:18:10 There’s an interesting literature about this that probably isn’t fully relevant here.
3:18:13 But it gets back to trying to learn basic motor tasks and the same things are applied
3:18:16 to basic cognitive tasks of like, how do I solve this?
3:18:22 And a puzzle is a great example because it’s both cognitive and motor, like you’re fixing
3:18:23 these pieces in different ways.
3:18:26 I have to get back to doing some puzzles, I’m realizing.
3:18:27 It’s unemotional.
3:18:31 I can really embarrass myself, but one of my favorite things that, again, I’ve just noticed
3:18:34 my kids extending for puzzles because they all did a lot of puzzles when they were young
3:18:35 is so funny.
3:18:39 I remember my kid doing like this puzzle and getting some frustration.
3:18:45 What I did is I did a puzzle to the side of him, instead of doing it perfectly, I kind
3:18:46 of like mimicked.
3:18:47 I was like, “Oh, this doesn’t fit.
3:18:49 Oh, it’s not that piece.”
3:18:50 Okay?
3:18:54 And one of the things I noticed as someone who wanted my kid was really young is kids
3:18:57 have a really hard time with puzzles and it’s kind of a metaphor for life.
3:19:03 For when a piece doesn’t fit, they keep trying it when what they really need to do is such
3:19:09 a metaphor is put it down and pick up another piece, right?
3:19:12 But I could tell my kid that, but I’m not, I always feel like just telling doesn’t really
3:19:13 work.
3:19:14 So this is what I did.
3:19:15 I’m not joking.
3:19:16 I’m going to sing.
3:19:17 Get ready, okay?
3:19:19 So I was doing it over here and I just go, “Oh, it’s not fitting.
3:19:20 It’s not fitting here.
3:19:21 It’s not fitting here.”
3:19:29 And I go, “If it doesn’t fit, put it to the side and try another piece.”
3:19:35 And then I was like, “Oh, right, I can put it this side.
3:19:37 Okay, I’ll get this one.”
3:19:45 And I didn’t make it for her, but I was like, “Oh, oh, oh, that one fits there, right?”
3:19:49 I have heard not anymore of my kids are too old, but there was a time, I remember me and
3:19:55 my husband were outside the playroom and we heard our son singing the song.
3:19:56 It’s just, it’s a mantra.
3:20:00 It’s self-regulation because is it cognitive?
3:20:01 Is it physical?
3:20:02 It’s also emotional.
3:20:06 It goes back to frustration, tolerance where our kids need, they need mantras.
3:20:07 They need skills.
3:20:15 They need songs to actually up-level their skills to regulate the emotions that get in
3:20:19 their way of doing great things, right?
3:20:21 That kid is interesting, not really anymore.
3:20:23 Now that I think about it, I want to revive it.
3:20:26 He makes up songs through situations.
3:20:28 What an amazing skill, right?
3:20:33 But this stuff can, and if anyone’s hearing this and I call that unrealistic, it’s amazing.
3:20:36 You do it one time, one time.
3:20:42 Make up a silly song, model the frustration yourself, make up a song, struggle again,
3:20:46 and then get success, whatever it is, if he went reading, with the puzzle, with putting
3:20:50 on your sock, it could be, “Oh, it doesn’t fit.
3:20:54 I’m taking a deep breath and trying it again.”
3:20:58 It could literally be anything because that’s a little play and joy, and you probably know
3:21:02 what song does in the brain better than I do, but probably regulating.
3:21:05 I would put money, a parent would be like, “That’s so weird.
3:21:06 Becky, you’re right.
3:21:07 I didn’t take that much time.
3:21:10 I did it one time and my kids started singing the song and now they put their socks on by
3:21:11 themselves.”
3:21:12 I love it.
3:21:17 You taught a process through song and there actually is a lot of data on music in the
3:21:21 brain and how it organizes things, mostly in the form of a story of a beginning, middle,
3:21:22 and end.
3:21:29 Just the quickest example I can give is when we learn our ABCs, we learn them in song.
3:21:32 You never forget that.
3:21:40 It’s much easier to learn things through rhythmic song, motifs, than it is through a list of
3:21:41 letters or numbers.
3:21:43 Does the brain encode it differently?
3:21:47 It fragments it into a beginning, middle, and end, and then there’s an underlying repetitive
3:21:51 sort of wave, “A, B, C, D, N, G, Z,” okay, here I’m now.
3:21:59 I’m singing at risk of inducing all sorts of bad neural responses in listeners.
3:22:00 You get the point.
3:22:02 It’s a waveform that the brain can recognize.
3:22:07 I actually have a friend who’s a very accomplished musician and I know the lyrics to his songs
3:22:08 very well.
3:22:09 Remember that song?
3:22:13 He goes, “Well, I have to hear the underlying melody,” and then he can remember all the
3:22:14 words.
3:22:15 He’s a singer.
3:22:16 He’s a lead singer in a very, very well-known band.
3:22:19 He doesn’t even know the words to his own songs if you just ask them for him, but you
3:22:24 give him the music and he’s just out the gate, and he can do this in front of tens of thousands
3:22:25 of people.
3:22:28 Then it is a cheat code for coping skills if you put it to song.
3:22:29 It becomes a verb process.
3:22:31 Sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off there.
3:22:35 It’s almost like saying, “Oh, the mechanics of writing are you pick up, you put the pen
3:22:36 between you.”
3:22:39 There’s a whole rhythm to writing.
3:22:43 There’s a whole sequence of a motor sequence that we learn, or eating, or anything for
3:22:45 that matter.
3:22:48 No one who’s an expert piano player thinks about playing the individual keys at the point
3:22:50 where they’ve learned it.
3:22:55 They’ve batched it into, it’s like chunking, but it has an underlying rhythm that’s carried
3:22:59 by a neural circuit that allows the expression of the movements of the fingers or the words
3:23:03 out the mouth, or in this case, overcoming frustration to just kind of ride on top of
3:23:05 all of it.
3:23:11 There’s an unconscious genius to what you did, and I love it, maybe as long as nobody
3:23:18 hears me saying, “I’ll need to sing more to get through frustration.”
3:23:22 I have a question about Ms. Edson.
3:23:23 Yes.
3:23:25 People are going to be like, “What?”
3:23:29 Before we started recording, you shared with us something I think is entirely appropriate
3:23:34 to what we’re talking about now, which is learning and learning hard things and frustration
3:23:40 tolerance, and you’ve evolved these concepts in the course of your work and through your
3:23:46 own parenting and child relationships, clearly your own, and then yours with your kids.
3:23:48 Who was Ms. Edson and what did she teach you?
3:23:52 Because when you told me this, I was like, “Whoa, that’s super valuable.
3:23:53 We all need to know about this.”
3:23:54 Yes.
3:23:57 Ms. Edson was my second grade teacher.
3:24:01 I remember writing in her class.
3:24:05 I remember something she told us, and it’s truly something that shapes me every day.
3:24:13 She said, “If something feels too hard to start, it just means that the first step isn’t
3:24:15 small enough.”
3:24:22 Then she really made this even more concrete, because what I remember in her class writing,
3:24:27 and I still use this in writing today, is if something feels too hard to do, the implication
3:24:29 is it doesn’t mean it’s my fault.
3:24:30 It doesn’t mean I can’t.
3:24:32 It doesn’t mean I’m stupid.
3:24:35 It literally just means the first step isn’t small enough.
3:24:38 That’s very actionable.
3:24:44 The way I play around with it now, even in my own writing, is I have to write a new article,
3:24:46 and I’m like, “I can’t do that.”
3:24:47 I’m in “I can’t” mode.
3:24:51 If something is in “I can’t” mode, if it feels too hard, I hear her voice.
3:24:55 It just means the first step isn’t small enough, so I’ll make it, literally, I’ll just make
3:24:56 it smaller.
3:24:59 I’m going to write a page today, and then often I’m like, “I can’t do that.”
3:25:00 Okay.
3:25:01 Smaller.
3:25:02 A paragraph.
3:25:03 No.
3:25:08 I literally do it until, and some days, it’s a word, and I go, “Oh, you know what, I can
3:25:09 write a word.”
3:25:10 Okay.
3:25:11 Now I’m not.
3:25:12 Okay.
3:25:16 I really think Ms. Edson was ahead of her time.
3:25:21 Obviously, now we talk a lot about frustration, tolerance, growth, mindset, but this really
3:25:26 is a way of saying, when things are hard, it’s not your fault, and there’s something
3:25:31 you can do to build the circuit of capability, because I think when we’re trying to do something
3:25:35 hard, there are, like, if you think about it, I don’t know, you’re on the top of a ski
3:25:43 mountain, and on the one side is that I can’t, it’s too hard, and the other side is I can.
3:25:45 We all have natural capability.
3:25:48 I really believe this, every person.
3:25:53 But it’s just about figuring out how to get your skis, like, to the beginning of the ski
3:25:54 slope.
3:25:58 And then maybe if we’ve practiced being on the I can’t do hard things slope, our skis
3:26:02 keep trying to turn, but we just have to keep getting them back.
3:26:06 And so, if we tell ourselves, “I can’t do this,” and we just stay there, stagnant,
3:26:13 but if you say, “Wait, smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller,” like, “I used this with
3:26:14 a client a while ago.
3:26:15 I can’t ask my boss for a raise.
3:26:16 I know I deserve it.”
3:26:17 Cool.
3:26:18 I’ll give them.
3:26:19 Let’s make it smaller.
3:26:20 Okay.
3:26:21 What would be smaller?
3:26:22 I don’t know.
3:26:23 Let’s get creative.
3:26:25 Could you write down what you would say?
3:26:26 Okay.
3:26:27 No.
3:26:32 Could you say the word to me five times out loud, raise, raise, raise, raise, raise?
3:26:33 I remember she laughed.
3:26:34 She goes, “I can do that.
3:26:35 Cool.
3:26:36 Let’s start there.”
3:26:37 Okay.
3:26:38 She literally did that.
3:26:43 What I think is so powerful about Ms. Edson’s advice is as soon as we get even our skis a
3:26:49 tiny bit into the “I can” circuit, the “I can” slope, we’re actually just a lot more
3:26:55 likely to stay there, or at least that becomes a bigger part of our identity, right?
3:26:59 So with this woman that I was working on this with, one of the things we were working on,
3:27:00 it was just, “Okay.
3:27:01 So you did that.
3:27:02 Amazing.”
3:27:04 The next thing I even just had her play around with things saying to me, “Can you say to
3:27:06 me, ‘I deserve a raise?'”
3:27:07 It was very interesting.
3:27:11 I think this was one of the reasons she had trouble speaking up for it.
3:27:13 It was really hard for her to embody that.
3:27:14 We said that.
3:27:17 I remember a week she said, “I’m going to write it down and bring it.”
3:27:18 She didn’t.
3:27:19 Again, I like parenting.
3:27:20 I didn’t punish her.
3:27:22 I didn’t send her to her room.
3:27:23 I said, “Okay.
3:27:24 That was just too big.
3:27:25 Let’s make it smaller.
3:27:26 Let’s write it together.”
3:27:28 We wrote some things down there, right?
3:27:34 I then had her write it as an email and send it to me, and I then had her practice it with
3:27:37 her best friend.
3:27:41 And then she asked her boss for a raise.
3:27:42 Probably no one’s surprised.
3:27:43 Yeah.
3:27:44 That makes sense.
3:27:45 She’d gotten through a lot of steps.
3:27:47 But it’s just applicable in every area of your life.
3:27:51 So even anyone listening, we all have something in our “I can’t” category.
3:27:55 This is too hard, or I can’t, and we just stay there.
3:28:02 If you hear Miss Edson saying, “Wait, if something feels too hard to do, it only means
3:28:04 that the first step isn’t small enough.
3:28:09 If then the next smallest step feels too hard, no biggie, like no judgment.
3:28:12 Make it smaller, make it smaller, make it smaller.”
3:28:15 And then allow yourself to eventually build up from there.
3:28:16 Love it.
3:28:17 Love Miss Edson.
3:28:20 I’m going to thank you and Miss Edson.
3:28:21 Yes.
3:28:22 Thank you, Miss Edson.
3:28:29 I think the idea of lowering the stakes to be able to move forward is just spectacular
3:28:31 and in everything.
3:28:36 And I notice you do that, by the way, I’m not analyzing, I’m just saying you do that
3:28:38 with parenting.
3:28:43 I think there’s so much tension around this notion of creating healthy, productive, functional
3:28:44 kids.
3:28:49 And I think there is a lot of shame for parents that when things aren’t going great and people
3:28:57 know it or they know it, and the idea of creating lower stakes in order to be able to make pretty
3:29:03 big moves over time where they’re required or just do nothing when sometimes that’s
3:29:04 what’s required.
3:29:05 Yeah.
3:29:06 And the similarity is so interesting.
3:29:11 What I think that the powerful thing about Miss Edson’s advice is, she’s almost saying,
3:29:14 make something small enough so you can get your first win.
3:29:16 Having a win is really powerful.
3:29:17 It’s kind of addicting.
3:29:18 Like, what’s my next win?
3:29:19 Right?
3:29:20 You’re on the win circuit.
3:29:26 You know, one of the reasons we want to create so many more resources for parents and when
3:29:31 parents come to us and even say, this is a problem, this is a problem, this is a problem,
3:29:36 I often just start, I would say, okay, what is the smallest thing would change that would
3:29:37 make you when you go to bed at night?
3:29:40 You’re like, today was a better day.
3:29:41 There’s some bigger stuff.
3:29:42 I hear you.
3:29:43 Probably not going to tackle that.
3:29:44 We’ll tackle that in time.
3:29:47 But like, I want to get you a win today.
3:29:52 And then all of a sudden when a parent starts to build, it’s kind of their own self-efficacy,
3:29:55 their own like, oh, wait, I did feel good about that one moment.
3:29:57 I did feel more connected to my kid.
3:30:03 I said this one thing, it’s momentum, you know, and we have to give ourselves the opportunity
3:30:11 to build momentum, which really usually only starts by taking the smallest step anyway.
3:30:14 I think it’s spectacular.
3:30:18 I was going to ask you, and I never do this, but I was going to ask you, you know, if there
3:30:22 were one thing that people could start the process of trying to be a better parent, better
3:30:28 to themselves, you know, if it’s more about emotional containment, etc., maybe it’s this
3:30:32 thing of, you know, asking, you know, at the end of today, like, what would be one thing
3:30:34 that would allow me to have said it was a better day?
3:30:35 Would that be it?
3:30:36 And certainly that’s powerful.
3:30:37 I’m going to give you two things.
3:30:42 One is kind of a one small thing, but it’s kind of a bigger theoretical thing.
3:30:46 And one thing is very, very, very concrete.
3:30:47 So the bigger thing.
3:30:53 I really believe that the single biggest thing that gets in our way of feeling more empowered
3:30:59 and capable as parents is that as much as we say we value parenting, and I think parents,
3:31:02 people do or parents are like, yeah, what do I care about more than parenting?
3:31:08 It’s kind of the lowest on our list in terms of what we invest in, you know, people invest
3:31:09 in all types of things.
3:31:15 And I want to be clear, yes, like, we have an offering at good inside in our membership,
3:31:16 but that’s not what I mean.
3:31:19 For someone listening, they might be like, there is that parent coach in my town who
3:31:23 I’ve been like saying I’m going to call, or maybe it’s a therapist, or maybe it’s a parenting
3:31:28 group at your school, or maybe someone listens to me and they’re like, no offense, Dr. Becky,
3:31:32 there’s someone else I follow on Instagram and they have a course and I like them better.
3:31:34 I’d be like, do that today.
3:31:44 And they align your even purchasing decisions with your values, because we’re not expected
3:31:45 to know this naturally.
3:31:46 We’re not.
3:31:51 And as long as we don’t have the resources around us, a little kind of someone described
3:31:57 it to me as like a onesie twosie thing, like, it’s just not giving ourselves what we deserve.
3:32:01 It is like a surgeon saying you’re not good at surgery when you find out they never went
3:32:06 to medical school or residency, and be like, well, I just didn’t really get resourced in
3:32:08 the way you deserve for this very challenging job.
3:32:11 So that would really be the thing if I’m really honest, because I’m not as much as I’m about
3:32:12 a quick win.
3:32:13 I’m not about a quick fix.
3:32:18 I think that just sets us up for more like a bandaid.
3:32:20 Having said that, I love a quick thing.
3:32:24 So a couple of things I think people can do with their kids.
3:32:28 Telling your kid at night, and I’ll model how I’d say it, like, I think most people,
3:32:31 it’s not just me, when you put your kid to bed, it’s like, okay, I just want to be on
3:32:35 the couch, but it’s when your kid’s willing to spend five extra minutes with you, because
3:32:37 it’s the cruel irony at night.
3:32:40 You want time without your kids and they just want a little bit more time with you.
3:32:44 If you want yourself to lean in, and you can just say to your kid, I’m also going to whisper.
3:32:49 I think whispering to your kid is one of the most underutilized simplest strategies.
3:32:50 Whispers are so sacred.
3:32:51 They feel sacred.
3:32:53 They feel like they know they’re just for you.
3:32:59 Whispering to your kid, like, I just want to tell you, there’s nothing you could ever
3:33:04 do that would make me stop loving you.
3:33:13 Or I just want to tell you, you’re a really good kid, we’re in a hard stage, but I will
3:33:17 never, ever, ever think of you as anything but a really good kid.
3:33:23 Don’t expect your kid to say anything, but just that takes 10 seconds.
3:33:27 And if you’re like, whispering feels awkward, don’t whisper.
3:33:28 Just say it.
3:33:31 It doesn’t matter if you’re thinking you don’t know my kid, they’re a teenager.
3:33:32 Text them.
3:33:33 Text them.
3:33:38 Sometimes a text to a teen can feel like an unexpected whisper from a parent, you know?
3:33:40 And that’s it.
3:33:42 And that’s the single thing today.
3:33:45 And then maybe I’m going to add a third.
3:33:46 Just do something like that for yourself.
3:33:47 Give yourself credit.
3:33:48 Put your hand on your heart.
3:33:49 Tell yourself.
3:33:51 Experiencing things really hard.
3:33:54 Like, I’m doing enough.
3:33:55 I’m not messing up my kid forever.
3:33:56 That’s not a thing.
3:33:59 I’m like, and I’ve got this.
3:34:00 Awesome.
3:34:08 Well, this whole thing that you’ve attempted to take on is also really hard and you’re
3:34:12 doing incredible work educating people on how to parent.
3:34:15 There’s so many things that you’ve said today, I’m not going to recap them all.
3:34:17 We do timestamps and all that so people can find them.
3:34:24 But in no particular order, I mean, you know, this concept of telling your kid your right
3:34:31 to notice when they when they notice something important in you or in others or in themselves,
3:34:35 that rigidity is the enemy.
3:34:39 Asking like, what’s this really about when they’re doing or saying something or expressing
3:34:47 themselves in a way that feels confusing or maybe especially when it’s irritating.
3:34:52 Encouraging frustration as a route to learning, like incredible.
3:34:58 And then you said, the more that you can locate somebody, the more you respect their values,
3:35:01 which I think is incredible.
3:35:06 And on and on, I mean, there’s so many gems in today’s conversation and so many actionable
3:35:14 gems that you provide on social media through your courses, through conversations like this
3:35:17 and others that you’re holding in other podcasts.
3:35:20 And I just want to thank you so much.
3:35:25 You’re teaching people how to parent others, how to think about their own parenting.
3:35:26 Oh, yes, that’s the other one.
3:35:31 You said the only kind of parenting that we do reflexively is the one that was done for
3:35:38 us, which will evoke feelings of relaxation in some people and feelings of dread in others.
3:35:42 But it all just speaks to the importance of paying attention to this thing that we call
3:35:43 parenting.
3:35:48 I think the way that you’re merging this with a thoughtful eye on technology, where it’s
3:35:53 taking us and where there are concerns, as well as where it can be utilized, it’s just
3:35:54 fantastic.
3:35:58 I can’t say enough good things about the work that you’re doing and I’m just so grateful
3:36:00 that you’re doing it.
3:36:03 And I’m saying that on behalf of myself and everyone else that you’re making the world
3:36:04 a better place.
3:36:10 So thank you so much for joining today and for sharing so much.
3:36:14 So we’ll, of course, point out where people can find you, but just keep going.
3:36:15 It’s awesome.
3:36:16 I’ve learned a ton.
3:36:17 I know everyone else has as well.
3:36:18 Thank you.
3:36:20 I’m honored to be back here a second time.
3:36:22 I love speaking with you and look forward to the next time.
3:36:25 Likewise, we’ll do it again.
3:36:28 Thank you for listening to today’s episode with Dr. Becky Kennedy.
3:36:32 I hope you found it to be as informative and as actionable as I did.
3:36:37 Right now, Dr. Becky has a 20% promotion going for her fantastic online program on parenting.
3:36:43 Becky was kind enough to extend this discount until this Friday, January 17, 2025 for Huberman
3:36:44 Lab listeners.
3:36:48 You can find more on that along with links to Dr. Becky’s book, her terrific social
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3:38:31 [MUSIC]