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Episode Transcript:

Scott Hershovitz 00:00:00  Sometimes being upset, being angry, feeling resentful is a way of defending yourself in the world and respecting yourself. And you know, we could tell a similar story about gratitude as a way of sort of respecting others and recognizing the sacrifices they might make on your behalf.

Chris Forbes 00:00:24  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Scott Herskovitz, the director of Law and Ethics program and professor of law and philosophy at the University of Michigan.

Chris Forbes 00:01:31  Scott holds degrees from University of Georgia, Yale Law School, and University of Oxford. He also served as a law clerk for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the US Supreme Court. Today, Eric and Scott discuss his new book, nasty, Brutish and Short Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:51  Hi, Scott, welcome to the show.

Scott Hershovitz 00:01:52  It’s really Tricia to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:54  Yeah, we are going to be discussing your book called nasty, brutish and short. Adventures in philosophy with my kids. But before we get into that, we’ll start like we always do with a parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with a grandchild, and they say, in life there are two souls inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparents, says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:29  So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you and your life and in the work that you do.

Scott Hershovitz 00:02:34  So it’s a really wonderful story, and it actually hadn’t heard it before, so it’s been fun to think it through a little bit. I want to give you two answers. So in my day job, I’m a philosopher who teaches at a law school, and I think a lot about philosophy, questions about law. I think especially about the rule of law, what it is and how we can sustain it. And one thing I think it’s really crucial to maintaining the rule of law is I think people need a kind of shared moral outlook. They need to agree that we’re going to abide by the decision making procedures that we’ve adopted around here, whether that’s elections or hearing to legislation or following decisions that courts make. And I think one of the things that I find concerning in our country at the moment is the kind of viciousness of our politics and the reluctance of some people, especially right now, you know, people on the right to accept the results of elections, to adhere to the rule of law, and just generally to talk about their opponents in ways that are mean spirited and vicious.

Scott Hershovitz 00:03:36  And so I think that one thing, this parable sort of brought up for me is I think all of us in our political activities need to think about feeding the kindness, even when we’re interacting with people that we disagree with. Right. So it’s one thing to think, hey, I have different policy ideas than you do, and I’m going to vote for my preferred policy preferences, but to demonize people on the other side, to treat them viciously is not going to be a way of sustaining a community over the long term. So that’s sort of like the the work life professional reaction I had to the parable. I also had a very personal reaction to it. You and I were just chatting a moment ago before you hit record. You said, I’m approaching the interesting years of parenthood of a child who’s reaching adolescence. My older son Rex, and we definitely butt heads more than we used to have more conflict than we did when he was little. And I’ve made a kind of intentional effort over the last few months to really try and orient my interactions with him more towards kindness than towards anger, to feed that aspect of our relationship, rather the other one that we so naturally fall into sometimes.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:38  Well, I think that’s a great place to sort of jump off in the book, which is about philosophy and children. I mean, I can only imagine you arguing or debating with your children. You have created some skillful adversaries In the way that you have been raising them all along, which is really to think for themselves and really think about their opinions. The book is really fun because you recount a lot of conversations from the children. You say every kid, every single one is a philosopher. They stop when they grow up. Indeed, it may be that part of what it is to grow up is to stop doing philosophy and start doing something more practical. Talk a little bit more about when you say that. What do you mean by philosophy?

Scott Hershovitz 00:05:27  That’s a really great question, actually, and it’s a question that I’ve struggled with ever since I first took a philosophy class and discovered I really liked this subject. My dad, when I went home from college, you know, said I was going to major in philosophy, asked the sensible question, he said, what’s philosophy? And I realized I just had no way of answering that question.

Scott Hershovitz 00:05:44  I started to stammer, you know, things that didn’t quite sound adequate. And then I thought, well, maybe I can’t tell them what philosophy is. I’ll show him. And I started talking about this idea that maybe we’re all just brains, and that’s kind of like the movie The Matrix. Like somebody removed our brains from our head and they’ll. Hook them up to electrodes, and they’re stimulating us. And so I said to my dad, maybe we think we’re at this restaurant having dinner, but actually, someone’s just deceiving us into thinking so. And he was like, can they do that? And I said, I don’t know. But the question is, how do we know they didn’t? And he said, that’s what you want to study. With a look on his face that was really not encouraging. And so I was kind of flummoxed ever since that moment to explain what philosophy is. And then actually, my older son Rex helped me figure it out in second grade, the first day of second grade, actually, and the teacher asked each kid what they wanted to be when they grew up, and she sent home a list.

Scott Hershovitz 00:06:35  Here are all the things that were firefighters. There were teachers, there were engineers. It wasn’t hard to pick Rex’s entry from the list. He wanted to be a math philosopher. And when he got home, I said, I said, hey, Rex, miss Kean says that you want to be a philosopher of math. What’s Philosophy. And just without even thinking about it, he said to me. Philosophy is the art of thinking. And I think that’s just a really lovely explanation of what. Philosophy is. I think a philosophical problem is one that we make progress on by thinking. Carefully about ourselves, about the world around us, in an effort to understand both of those things better. And so there’s philosophy about really every aspect of our lives, right? Questions that you can ask about us, that require us to think deeply in order to reach a better understanding? That’s what I mean by philosophy.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:23  Yeah. You quote David Hills, who describes philosophy as the ungainly attempt to tackle questions that come naturally to children using methods that come naturally to lawyers.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:35  That’s that’s great.

Scott Hershovitz 00:07:36  Yeah. So that really captures my career. Maybe my humanity in a nutshell, right? Which is to say, part of the pitch of this book is that kids are natural philosophers. They arrive in the world, and they’re confused by lots of things in it, and they don’t know what the standard of explanation of things are, and they’re trying to make sense out of it. So they’re asking really good questions, and they’re thinking really creatively about the answers to the questions that they ask. And then most people kind of leave that behind when they start to understand what the standard answers to things are, or when they start to learn that serious people don’t spend time on some of the questions that interest philosophers like. Am I dreaming my entire life? Or what is time, right? So as people age, they kind of leave those questions behind. A small group of us, the professional philosophers, get stuck in the endeavor, and we kind of use methods that come naturally to lawyers.

Scott Hershovitz 00:08:29  We, you know, make rigorous arguments and separate out our premises and don’t exactly trade briefs like lawyers do. But one person writes an article and another person replies, and on and on. But what I want to communicate is grown ups can get back to doing philosophy. They don’t have to do it like lawyers. They don’t have to do it like professional philosophers. In fact, it’s better if you do it like a kid.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:48  Yeah, I love that. And, you know, I think that there is an academic element of philosophy of which you’re involved in, and then there is very much the everyday aspect of philosophy. And if we really think about this idea of it, where it’s about thinking, you know, it’s about thinking better, we can all think better, think more clearly. And there’s something you say as you’re describing what philosophy is. And I love this line. You say the goal is to get in the habit of treating your own ideas as critically as you treat other peoples, and I really love that.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:23  Just that idea of like, if you bring an idea to me that I don’t like, I can just pick it apart all the time. But my own idea is that I believe and I’m believing them, probably very largely from conditioning and emotional reasons. I don’t bring that same degree of scrutiny to my own ideas. And I love this idea, and it really runs its way through the book Of just getting better at asking questions about things that we might be taking for granted, or assuming and looking just at life a little bit more critically. And when I say critically, I don’t mean it in the negative sense. I mean it very much in the constructive sense. Looking at life a little bit more critically and a little bit more deeply, because one of the things that we explore on this show so much is how when we live our lives on autopilot, they become very shallow, they become very unengaged. They start to feel empty and meaningless to us. Right. It’s when we engage more deeply, we go off autopilot and we really start asking ourselves what matters, what’s important to me.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:29  And those are core philosophical questions, for sure.

Scott Hershovitz 00:10:33  I think there’s really two important things in what you said. The first is like thinking critically about our own ideas. I picked this up from a professor of mine who said, hey, look, when somebody makes an argument and you’ve got an objection to it. I want you to imagine that they already thought of it, and that they thought it was so misguided that it wasn’t even worth mentioning, and try to figure out why they might have thought that. Where did they think that you had gone wrong? And if you get to the end of that endeavor and you can’t figure out where you’ve gone wrong, then it’s time to tell people about your idea. But often, you know, if you put yourself in the other person’s shoes, you can actually figure out, oh, here’s the weakness in this idea that I’ve got. And I try to instantiate that in parenting my kids, right. There’s a line early on in the book where I say, Americans like to say that they’re entitled to their opinion, and that’s not how my house works, right? You articulate an opinion and you should be prepared to defend it.

Scott Hershovitz 00:11:24  I’m going to ask you why. When you give me an explanation, I’m going to question that explanation over and over again. And so you’re right. I have raised kids that are really adept at arguing because they know that they’re going to have to to back up the claims that they make. But one thing I think is important. The second thing I heard in what you were saying, I think it’s important to remember that not all philosophy is adversarial in this way. It’s not just about having arguments with other people, and our lives are shot through with philosophical questions. If you’re trying to decide, how should I spend my life, right? Like, what’s a good life look like? What’s a good life for me look like? Which career is the right path? Or am I obligated to maintain a relationship with someone who’s not treating well, maybe that person’s my parents. Maybe that person’s a friendship. These are all just philosophical questions. So one thing I like to remind people is that you’re doing philosophy all the time.

Scott Hershovitz 00:12:20  You may not think of yourself as doing philosophy, but when you’re wondering how to be in the world, how to act in the world, those are some of the most central philosophical questions. And I do think you’re right that it helps a lot of times to just take a step back and to think about them that way, and to talk to other people about them rather than just move through on autopilot.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:40  Yeah. And, you know, you’ve got another line that I love. And you say you believe our humanity lies partly in our capacity to distinguish what we ought to do from what we want to do. Say more about that. That’s a really powerful idea.

Scott Hershovitz 00:12:54  Yeah. So this comes up in a conversation. There’s chapters about revenge and punishment in the book, since those are some of the kinds of issues that arise early on in parenting. You know, your kids might take revenge at somebody they think is wronging them or, you know, certainly parenting involves kind of pervasive questions about whether one should punish, how one should punish what you’re trying to accomplish.

Scott Hershovitz 00:13:16  When you punish. And it’s in the course of that punishment chapter that I say this line that our humanity lies partly in our ability to distinguish what we want to do from what we ought to do. And there I’m actually particularly interested in, like, what’s the difference between a person and another central character in the book is our dog, Bailey. And Bailey has once and she pursues her once in whatever she thinks is the most effective way. You know, she’s been trained, so she doesn’t just always do immediately what she wants to do. She knows that sometimes sitting and waiting for the treat is the way of getting the treat, not jumping for the treat. But she’s driven by her wants. And I think something that is maybe unique among human beings is that we don’t just have to be driven by our wants. We can see this distinction between what we want to do and what we should do, and we can act on it. Or at least I should say most of us can. I think that’s one of the tasks of parenthood, is to help your kids appreciate this distinction, right? To reflect on what they should do, to recognize that it may not be what they want to do, and to cultivate the habits of mind that will let them, as they get older, act on what they believe they should do rather than to satisfy their immediate ones.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:33  Yeah, I’m going to jump right to the chapter on Bailey. I could go a thousand directions in this book. This has been a difficult one to prepare for, but I can’t resist going here because you do bring up Bailey and you say, what is it like to be Bailey? We spend a lot of time talking about that in our house. You know, Bailey is your dog, and I love this because I do the exact same thing you say. Rex loves to narrate her life, but he doesn’t do it like a sportscaster. It’s not. Bailey is in hot pursuit of Sammy Squirrel. Rather, he talks as if he’s Bailey. You know, and my partner and I do this all the time with one of our dogs, Lola. Like one of our dogs, BNZ. She’s like a bat. I don’t have any idea what it’s like to be BNC. I can’t fathom. She’s so animal. Yeah, but the other dog seems so human in her way. And so, you know, Lola will facilitate conversations between us, you know.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:21  Oh, well, I’d.

Speaker 4 00:15:22  Really like to have, you know, this or.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:24  That. And so that part really struck me. But why I had to jump to this is a I love to talk about dogs, but B, there’s a fact in the book that made me stop and turn to my partner and go, you have got to hear this. And it’s the section where we’re talking about consciousness and we’re saying, what’s it like to be a bat or a dog and how we can’t really fundamentally know. Then you go on to talk about how bats echolocation, they put out sound to create a picture of the world around them. And then you go on to tell a story about a person who can do this. And it blew my mind. You want to share that?

Scott Hershovitz 00:16:01  Yeah. So this is a story about a guy named Daniel Kish who people sometimes call the real life Batman. And Kish is a young child, lost his sight, and he just started to make clicking noises and was clearly using them in something like the way a bat would use them, that they’d reflect off surfaces back to his ears, and he would develop a kind of understanding of what was around him that allowed him to move through the world in really astounding ways so he can, for instance, ride a bike and not just a little bit like, but like ride a bike around town.

Scott Hershovitz 00:16:37  He’s getting so much information through echolocation. And, you know, Kish is an interesting character in his own right because he thinks a lot of times folks that are disabled or held back by other people’s stereotypes about what they’re capable of, he thinks that, you know, many more people who lack sight would be capable of the things that he does if they were encouraged and given the training in an atmosphere that that didn’t take them to be as limited as we often take them to be. So I think Kish is really important to listen to for that reason. But also it connects up with this bigger question in philosophy that you were alluding to earlier that really interests me. It’s a question about the inaccessibility of our minds and the inaccessibility of other people’s minds, of other creatures minds. So one of the most famous essays in 20th century philosophy was by a professor named Thomas Nagel, called What is it Like to be a bat? And he was observing that bats have this ability that most human beings don’t have anything like, and observing the distance between our external understanding.

Scott Hershovitz 00:17:46  We know what a bat can do, but we don’t know what it’s like to be a bat doing it. We know what a dog can do, but we don’t know what it’s like to be a dog and to experience, say, the rich sense of smell that they have. And then what is really interesting for me is I think that’s just actually true of the people I live with, too. It was starker when my kids were younger, but we would look at, you know, our six month old or two year old and think like, what is going on in his head? Yeah, we don’t really know. Actually, I feel sometimes I feel like a better idea of what’s going on with the dog than I do with my children. And they’re older now, so they’re more like me. And I think I have a better guess. But I like to remind myself that there really are limitations to my ability to understand what it’s like to be inside of someone else.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:31  Yeah, I just had to get that fact about a guy who can ride a bike by echolocation because it’s just stunning.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:38  You also say that, like, not only that, but the scans of his brain suggest that he is processing visual information.

Scott Hershovitz 00:18:46  That’s right. So one question is, what’s it like to be Daniel Kish? Echolocation. And he says he’s having a visual experience. And when they put him in MRI machines, it seems like the visual cortex is active, which makes it plausible that his brain renders the information that it’s getting in something like the way that sighted people’s brains are rendering the light that their eyes are gathering still leaves open. The question, what’s it like to be a bat? Right? So like, we have a better idea what it’s like for Daniel Kish to be echolocation, because he can talk to us and tell us about it, and the bats can’t.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:23  Yeah. I often say, if I could have one wish. Maybe this is just thinking too small. I’m like, I would just like to be in my dog’s head for like an hour. I just yeah. Or an octopus’s, you know, like, what is it like to be an octopus? Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:37  I’ve got thousands of suckers that I can independently control, and I can change the color of my skin. And, I mean, yeah. Now, I might say they are not very useful questions. You, as a philosopher would probably say. Actually, they are.

Scott Hershovitz 00:19:51  So I think they’re really interesting questions. Actually, I quote a similar line from a famous developmental psychologist. I think his name is John Flavell, who said that, you know, he would trade all of his degrees and honours to experience just a few minutes inside a two year old, just to have the insider understanding of what it’s like, rather than the outsiders understanding that he’s spent years cultivating. One thing I think is actually really interesting about that is there was this famous British philosopher in the 20th century, A.J. Eyre, who was pondering this question of, you know, what’s it like to be other creatures and thought there’s a way in which it didn’t make sense, in part because he was trying to imagine what it would look like to fulfill your wish that you like to be an octopus, you’d have to give up yourself, right? You don’t want to be yourself inside an octopus.

Scott Hershovitz 00:20:40  Observing. That’s not what it’s like to be an octopus. That’s right. And so I thought, like, there’s actually just a limit. Even if a genie showed up to grant your wish, this is not a wish that really can be realized.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:50  Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense. I will say, back in my addiction days, someone once told my brother and I that if we drank a bottle of Robitussin cough syrup and I don’t know what else it was, we took with it like ten other type of cold medicine pills. They called this the lizard. And I will say it is what I imagine it might be like to be a lizard that I.

Scott Hershovitz 00:21:10  So you  ran this experiment.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:12  I’ve ran this experiment. I don’t recommend it. I don’t recommend it. All right. So I want to go to another area. I’m kind of going into the deep end of the pool here, obviously, but I want to talk a little bit about identity. I explore ideas of identity on this show a lot, and some of them from a pretty basic level, like, you know, can we identify less as, you know, these roles in our lives and all the way down to the really profound experiences I’ve had of sort of the dissolving of self through some of my different spiritual practices.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:41  And you talk about The Ship of Theseus, could you explore that real quick? And then I want to go from there to a really profound thing that I think you said that was really mind opening for me. So let’s start with Theseus.

Scott Hershovitz 00:21:54  The Ship of Theseus is a very famous philosophical puzzle that dates back thousands of years, really. So the original version of the story goes like this Theseus ship has been put into port in Athens, and over years people, you know, people come and they see it and they venerate it. But over the years it starts to fall into disrepair. And so when a board is rotting out, they remove that board, that plank, and they replace it with another one. And then, you know, they do that again and they do that again. And eventually on down the line, you know, maybe decades have gone by. They’ve replaced every single plank on Theseus ship. And then the question that people want to ask about this is, well, is it still Theseus ship if it doesn’t have any of the original wood? And.

well, let me ask you, what do you think? Is that still Theseus ship?

Eric Zimmer 00:22:41  I can’t answer that question without spoiling the payoff that we’re headed towards here. So I’m.

Scott Hershovitz 00:22:45  I’ve already persuaded you of the answer I want to give to this. It sounds like maybe a little bit. A little bit. Okay. Yeah. So. So here’s the thing. If you say yes, that’s not Theseus ship anymore, then. Then the next question is going to be, when did it stop being Theseus ship? When the first plank was replaced? Right. When there was just a slight deviation. That doesn’t seem like it could be true. Like, you know, if the tail light on your car gets knocked out, you get a new tail light, but you don’t think, oh, cool, I got a new car, you know, so you can change a little bit without changing the identity of the ship. Yeah, right. But is it when a majority of the planks were changed, people don’t think that sounds very plausible either, because it suggests that, like, you know, right up until the 49th percent plank, like we had the same ship, then when we tipped 50, we suddenly didn’t.

Scott Hershovitz 00:23:27  That doesn’t seem right. Yeah. So it doesn’t seem like we can identify easily a spot where it stopped being the same ship. And so some people say, well, okay, it’s still the same ship, right? Well, then enter Thomas Hobbes, the famous English philosopher. He added a little bit onto the puzzle. He’s like, well, just imagine that each time they replace one of these planks, somebody carries it away, put it in a storage garage, the original and, you know, stores it in case it ever needs to be used again. And then an industrious shipbuilder comes along, takes all the original planks, and reassembles them in just the way the original ship was built. Right. Well, that sort of sounds like it’s Theseus ship. It’s the original planks in the original pattern. So if that’s Theseus ship over in this storage yard, what’s the ship in the dock? Yeah. So, like, there’s, like, endless iterations of this puzzle, but it raises this question, you know, how much can you change something before you’ve changed its identity?

Eric Zimmer 00:24:25  Yeah. And this gets to very central questions about who we are. You know, what am I. And again these questions can be asked at different levels. And that was the insight that you said that I thought was really, really good. And you said answers to questions about identity, I think depend on the reasons we’re interested in them. Or I would add the context in which we’re asking the question. And people get hung up on this in spiritual circles between like on one hand, there’s a teaching that says, well, there is no self. And yet we know. Absolutely. Eric is sitting here talking to Scott, right. And so the context in which I ask that question has everything to do with the answer. If I’m asking about the ultimate core of life from a Buddhist perspective, perhaps the answer in that light is very different than the answer. When I’m standing at the DMV and they say, who are you?

Scott Hershovitz 00:25:18  Yeah. So let’s just back up one moment and think about, like how we apply this idea to ourselves because nobody actually cares about the Ship of Theseus.

Scott Hershovitz 00:25:25  Yeah, right. But we can ask the same kind of question about our own personal identity. Which is to say, what makes me the same person I was last week or last year? Or I tell stories about my childhood in this book. The same person I was when I was dropped off at kindergarten. And it’s a puzzle because I’m not made out of the same stuff. My planks have changed. Like, pretty much every cell in my body has turned over since I was in kindergarten. And it’s also not arranged the same way. Right. Like, my brain is wired up wholly differently than it was when I was in kindergarten. And I’m bigger. My body is different. So it raises this question like, how do we have continuity across time? Or do we have any sort of continuity across time? And as you say, I’m inclined to think that the answers to these questions are highly purpose dependent. And I like your addition to this highly context dependent. Right. We need to understand, like what’s at stake about our identity.

Scott Hershovitz 00:26:20  Why do we care? In what situation are we asking about it? And ultimately, I’m inclined to think that for some purposes, I’m the same person that my mother dropped off at kindergarten. Like, we kind of share a life story. That little kid in me. Right. For other purposes, I’m a wholly different person than that little kid, right? It wouldn’t make sense to be angry at me for things that five year old had done.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:44  But we do. Right. Like, no, nobody’s probably getting angry at the five year old, but we are getting angry at the person from two weeks ago. Right.

Scott Hershovitz 00:26:51  That’s right. And there’s a really interesting conversation among philosophers who think about punishment. John Locke actually had things to say about this. You know, if I’m punishing you today for something you did last week, last month, ten years ago, right? How can I be confident that I’m punishing the person who deserves it? Yes. Locke thought that when it comes to punishment, what matters is that you remember having done the thing right.

Scott Hershovitz 00:27:15  And I think that may be a necessary condition, actually. Sometimes people remember things they didn’t actually do.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:20  Except as a blackout drunk. There’s huge amounts that I don’t remember that I’m sure I did things that are, morally offensive.

Scott Hershovitz 00:27:29  That’s really excellent, because it suggests it’s not even a necessary condition. And as soon as you said that, I think that’s obviously right. We don’t give people a pass, say, if they commit some serious crime when they were blackout drunk. And the standard story we tell in the criminal law, as so long as the intoxication was voluntary, it was done knowing the risk of of this kind of misbehavior when one was blacked out. So I think that’s good. I’ll give you one more story, actually, which was kind of challenging for me in recent years. There was a kid in elementary school that I thought of as my nemesis. It was like a little bit, a little bit of a bully. And like five years ago, maybe I just got a Facebook message from him.

Scott Hershovitz 00:28:11  Had him been in touch with him since elementary school. And the Facebook message said, hey, you know, I know that I didn’t treat you very well and I feel bad about that. And I want you to know, like, you know, me and the other guys, like, we actually, we liked you, even though we didn’t treat you very nicely. And, you know, I was super appreciative of the message. I thought it was like, really like a courageous and kind thing to do for him to reach out and to say that. But I had kind of complicated feelings about that. One thing I said to him when I wrote back is, hey, I can tell you’re not that guy anymore. Like, I don’t feel like you need to apologize for what you did in elementary school. It’s just obvious that you’ve changed as a person. But the other thing I wanted to say, which I think was maybe a little more challenging, was I don’t need an apology either. Right? Like here.

Scott Hershovitz 00:28:55  My life is going fine. I don’t feel like you owe me an apology, but what I kind of left unsaid was that, you know, there was a person who did need an apology. There was a person who did need better treatment. He’s not around anymore. So I do think that these are really interesting. Like these questions of identity are really interesting. They arise in all sorts of ways. And sometimes the person to whom you owe your apology or your amends isn’t actually around any more to receive it.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:49  Going back to the ship of Theseus, if we assume that childhood being a formative part of our overall development, there is some part of you in some way that, as we’re saying, is still a kid who was bullied and that had some we don’t know what impact. We can’t say we can’t tell which plank was affected. Yeah, but we can say, you know, there’s something in there. And so I love these questions because they do get to the ways in which we define ourselves.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:21  Do I define myself as the kid who is bullied in school? And what does that say or mean about me? Do I define myself as a Republican or a Democrat? What comes along with that definition? I mean, all these identities shape who we are. And so I love your formulation, because the thing that I’ve arrived at with identity is it’s a useful tool. The more loosely we can hold it, though, the more flexible we can be with it, applying an identity when it’s useful. So, for example, there’s lots of studies that show someone who says, I’m not a smoker and takes that identity is less likely to smoke again than somebody who says, I’m not smoking right now. Right. Right. So there’s a positive use of an identity there. Yeah, but we know there’s negative uses of identity. I label myself a certain way and I start living into that. And so anytime I can slip the Ship of Theseus into this podcast, I do it. But secondly, I really thought your idea about the reasons that we use them and the context was a really helpful way to think about these ideas.

Scott Hershovitz 00:31:25  So I think that for me, like the really helpful thing in what you just said is this idea that we should be flexible about what we want to incorporate into our identity and think of it as a tool that sometimes appropriate to use and sometimes not. So I think you’re absolutely right. There’s a lot of discussion about this in the philosophical literature that, you know, say, if I see myself as an honest person, right. Like part of what it means to take that on board as a part of my identity is that I’m just going to see myself as set against dishonesty. I’m not going to, on each occasion, right, say, oh, look, is there a good reason to tell a lie here is they’re not like committing that this is how I see myself in the world is a way of structuring or forestalling deliberation that you may not want to get into. Yeah. And that, I think, could be really constructive. But then, as you say, I think that sometimes people often incorporate things into their identity and make themselves too rigid.

Scott Hershovitz 00:32:21  Right. Like, the tool can be overused. Right. So that, like, there might be occasions for making commitments in this way and there might be occasions for maintaining flexibility.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:31  Yep. As much as I want to segue into cleverly disguised donkeys, I’m not. Although I’m teasing that out for listeners, what you just said and what we’re talking about, I think leads really into the idea of us talking about relativism a little bit. Particularly, I want to talk about this idea of I’m not sure I’m going to say this word right. Epistemic bubbles and echo chambers, because I think this gets a little bit to how attached are we to our ideas, which are a form of identity. So let’s talk a little bit about relativism in general. And then epistemic bubbles and echo chambers.

Scott Hershovitz 00:33:07  Yeah. So conversations about relativism started in a really interesting way in my house. They started just after the attack on the Capitol on January 6th. And we were sitting around the dinner table and Rex said that Donald Trump is a bad president, sort of thinking about how he’d encouraged the attack.

Scott Hershovitz 00:33:24  And Hank, our younger son, said, well, Donald Trump is a bad president to us, but he’s a good president to the people that like him. And I said, Hank, do you mean that we think he’s a good president and they think he’s a bad president, but that one of us is right and the other is wrong? And he said, no, we think he’s a good president, and they think he’s a bad president. And there’s nothing in the middle that says who’s right, right. This was very much the idea he was articulating was we each get our own truth. Like, here’s a judgment. Is Donald Trump a good president? And he thought for some people’s truth, the answer is yes. And for other people’s truth, the answer is no. And I wanted to see how far I could push this with him. I said, hey, Hank, if I take you outside and I say, it’s raining, and you say it’s not, is one of us wrong? And the other one right.

Scott Hershovitz 00:34:12  And he said, it’s raining for you, but not for me. She thought it was just kind of wild, right? That he was like, I mean, he is. He’s a tough cookie sometime, right? Like he is, he’s willing to stick to his guns. Yeah. And, you know, I think most of us are not relativists about the rain, right? We think it’s either raining or it’s not. And, you know, we usually think there’s a reason somebody is mistaken if they disagree with us, maybe they just haven’t gotten drops or maybe they’re being difficult. Right. But a lot of people, I think, are inclined towards a kind of relativism about evaluative judgments. Like, was that a good or bad movie? Is Donald Trump a good or bad president? You know, is Mozart better than Beethoven? I’m not inclined towards relativism. I think there are truths to the matter about questions like this, or at least many questions like this. And even though the truth can sometimes be hard to find out, we should have some humility about whether we’ve identified the truth, and we should be open minded and listen to arguments.

Scott Hershovitz 00:35:04  And like we were talking about earlier, we should wonder whether we’ve got things wrong. But implicit in the idea of wondering whether you’ve got things wrong and being open minded to the evidence and listening to people that you disagree with you is the possibility of getting it right. Yeah. So the story is in the book report. Some of my attempts to argue Hank back into the idea that some things can just be true. But then one of the questions that I ask in the book is, well, if I’m right about that, if there’s truth of the matter about some of these questions, why is it that we disagree so much? Why do we have so much trouble settling on the truth? And I think especially in the media environment, we have now, two concepts that people find really helpful for thinking about this are epistemic bubbles and echo chambers.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:48  Let’s pause for a second before we jump off this point. I want to go back to a few things you said. And I also, hopefully we remember to work in how you broke Hank.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:56  Okay. But I want to explore this a little bit more because I am someone who probably is somewhat inclined towards relativism, but I’m not sure it’s a well thought out opinion. Okay, so except among our classical music aficionados, let’s take a less charged topic than abortion. Let’s start with is Bach better than Beethoven or Beethoven better than Bach? Yeah. You believe there’s a way to arrive at an answer to that? To me, that seems completely subjective.

Scott Hershovitz 00:36:25  Yeah, I should confess I have limited classical music knowledge. Right? So I’m not prepared to defend the view that Bach is better than Beethoven, or that Beethoven is better than Bach. And I’m not even actually committed to the idea that there’s necessarily an answer. I think one possibility is it’s indeterminate. There are good arguments on both sides, but let’s take arguments that people probably have with their friends all the time. Michael Jordan better than LeBron? Or is LeBron greater than Jordan? Or is Serena Williams the greatest women’s tennis player of all time? Or is it Steffi Graf or is it Martina Navratilova? These are the lifeblood of lots of drinking sessions.

Scott Hershovitz 00:37:03  Yeah, right. The things that people love to get together and argue about. And I think the fact that we have arguments and the fact that the arguments are passionate tells us that we all presuppose that there’s a right answer to this question, even if we right now disagree what it is because we’re treating it very differently, then we treat different kinds of conversations. If you and I go get ice cream, I might be like, hey, what kind of ice cream do you like? And what kind of ice cream do you like?

Eric Zimmer 00:37:30  Well, I like I like all kinds, but if I had to put it into a category, I’d say chocolate.

Scott Hershovitz 00:37:34  Okay, so you like chocolate ice cream? Actually, I like chocolate ice cream too. But I wouldn’t think that you and I are objectively right as against the people who prefer vanilla or the people who prefer salted caramel or whatever it is. I would just think, okay, like this is how taste works. Yeah, there’s the thing that tastes best to me, and there’s the thing that tastes best to you.

Scott Hershovitz 00:37:53  And this is not a disagreement, but when we’re having an argument about Jordan or LeBron or Serena Williams or Steffi Graf or Beethoven versus Bach, we’re not usually treating it that way. We’re not saying, hey, I like Beethoven, and you’re saying, hey, I like back. We’re thinking there’s some criteria of excellence here, whether it’s basketball excellence or tennis excellence or musical excellence. And we’re trying to evaluate these people’s bodies of work against those criteria of excellence. And I think that project assumes that it’s possible. There’s an answer. Here’s an answer. Was Beethoven better than Scott? Yes. Right. Beethoven is a lot better than me. And I suspect that Beethoven was a lot better than a lot of very famous pianists or composers. Was he better than Bach? I don’t know, we’d need somebody with some classical music knowledge to pop in and help us sort that out.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:43  Yeah, well, I think it’s interesting. The word you use there is taste. You know, what’s a matter of taste and what’s a matter of objective fact? And I think the reason that I would take art generally off the table as there being a objective answer.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:59  And this gets to how we define art. To me, art is about making people feel something. And that is extraordinarily subjective. Is Steve Vai a better guitar player than my friend Chris, who’s also the editor of this podcast? The answer to that, if anybody was looking at technical prowess, would be Steve Vai. Hands down. Sure. But I would argue that I would much, rather much rather hear my friend Chris play guitar than Steve Vai because it moves me.

Scott Hershovitz 00:39:25  You’re making Chris’s.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:26  Day. I am Chris knows I love his guitar playing. So let’s move away from art though. But I think now LeBron James versus Michael Jordan is good. We’re assuming a standard of excellence. So now let’s move into something slightly more emotionally charged, which is like all right, I’m going to I’m going to regret this, but let’s just wander right into the abortion debate that’s here. Because I often when I look at this, I’m like, okay, if I look at this from the perspective of someone who is anti-abortion and if what I believe is that an embryo is a fully formed human being, equal to what a five year old is in whatever my belief structure is.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:05  I’m going to argue fairly vehemently that we should not kill five year olds, right? If you came to me with that and you were like, you know what? Being a parent is a drag. If you know, if you got a five year old and you want to get rid of them, get rid of them, I’d be like, well, hang on. And I think most of us would. On the other hand, there are plenty of great arguments for why we should respect a woman’s right to choose. And it’s her body and there’s all these things. How do we get to right there? That’s where I get stuck. I’m like, well, I know what I believe, I know what my moral framework is, but that’s not everybody’s. And should it be everybody? So tell me how you think about that.

Scott Hershovitz 00:40:46  So I just taught a class here at the University of Michigan called life, death, love in the law. And it was some law students and some philosophy students, and it was really wonderful experience.

Scott Hershovitz 00:40:57  I had students across the political spectrum with differing views about the moral permissibility of abortion. I’m certain, though, you know, people didn’t share their personal stories, that some people in the room probably had personal experiences, you know, with making those choices, whichever way they might have made them. But I set up front that there’s places in the world where, you know, people shout at each other about these issues and they try and drown each other out, and they talk to each other in ways that are really nasty. And that’s not what we’re going to do in this seminar. Right. If you want to be in this seminar, we’re going to listen to each other really carefully. We’re going to share our own thoughts and our ideas, and we’re going to hear what other people have to say about them, or we’re going to display the sort of virtues of inquiry that we talked about earlier. Wondering how we might be wrong, right, and inviting other people to help us think about how we might be wrong.

Scott Hershovitz 00:41:47  And the students really rose to the occasion. We had really deep and insightful conversations about abortion, about euthanasia, about lots of these, sort of like beginning and end of life kinds of questions. And, you know, it’s not the case. I think that we arrive at agreement about what the truth is in the course of those conversations. But I think we all got a much deeper understanding of the issues. We saw that some arguments that we might have thought were good were actually not so good, and some arguments we hadn’t entertained before we felt attracted to. And so I think the question of like, how does one seek truth in these really fraught issues is right through this kind of shared inquiry, through this kind of shared deliberation, to kind of turn the temperature down in a way that our culture makes really hard. Yeah. If you only think about this stuff by watching cable news or by going on Twitter, you’re not going to think it through very carefully. You know, I like to recommend there’s a philosopher named Kate Grizzly who teaches at Oxford, who I think is the most thoughtful person writing about the morality of abortion today.

Scott Hershovitz 00:42:52  She has a book that she co-authored called Arguments About Abortion, which is a kind of accessible introduction. And then also, she was recently on the Ezra Klein podcast is actually a really great place to get her help in thinking through some of these issues. So podcasts actually this one. Others are a really great place to dive deep and think in a slower way than you can. But the point of all the thinking is that we think we might reach the answer, right? So you said, well, look, if you think that an embryo is just the same as a five year old, then of course you’re going to think abortion is impermissible. We don’t kill five year olds. We know that we shouldn’t. And I think that’s right. But then I want to put that view right, that an embryo is the same as a five year old under a microscope. And I want to find out whether you really think it. Right. And I’m going to present you with, you know, scenarios to consider.

Scott Hershovitz 00:43:42  And here’s one. You work in a hospital and there’s embryos that are frozen in the hospital. And there are, you know, five year old children around in the hospital. And the hurricane is on its way. Right. And you realize as you’re about to grab the embryos, that there’s one five year old who can’t walk themselves out. You know, that’s why they’re in the hospital. There’s one five year old that’s still in the hospital that didn’t get evacuated. And now you’ve got a choice. You can carry the five year old out, or you can carry a dozen embryos out. Which one are you going to take?

Eric Zimmer 00:44:17  That’s the trolley question framed up for abortion debate. I mean, I know what I would do. I’d grab the five year old.

Scott Hershovitz 00:44:24  I actually think I sort of first encountered this scenario through Kate Grizzly. And I think it’s a really great way, actually, of revealing to a lot of people that even if you care about the embryo, even if you value the embryo, even if you think God has made an investment in that embryo and we should protect it, most people actually don’t think it’s on a par morally with a five year old.

Scott Hershovitz 00:44:45  Given the choice, they’re probably going to save the five year old rather than than several embryos. And so I think it’s through this kind of reflection that we can start to get a deeper understanding of the issues and our own views about them and work towards views that we think we can defend as truth.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:23  Your whole approach here is really kind of what I wanted to get at, which is this idea of how do we talk to each other more civilly, but also more deeply inquiring, you know, how do we ask good questions of ourselves and of the people we see things differently with? And you’ve got a line I want to read because I love it. You basically said we should talk to people who think differently, and we should be open to revising our views in light of what we learned. But we shouldn’t give up on the idea of truth or the search for it. And I love that idea that again, we could debate which things you could come to objective truths on and what you couldn’t, but the search for it, you know, and the attempt to try and investigate.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:06  I would have loved to have sat through your course, and I wish that we could, you know, have you lead the national debate on all these things? Because more than any policy that I see happening, and there are plenty that concern me, it’s our structure of conversation that is just so disheartening to me these days.

Scott Hershovitz 00:46:22  Yeah. So I think that’s right. It’s the structure of our debates, you know, especially our public debates, you know, like it’s possible in a quiet seminar room to have conversations with goodwill. But we haven’t really created public spaces in which we’re accustomed to having those conversations. It’s actually one of the reasons that I suggest toward the end of the book, like, we should talk to our kids about philosophy at home, but it’s also something we should incorporate into their education that in other parts of the world, grade schools have a philosophy curriculum where high schools have a philosophy curriculum. And I think that those are really terrific ways of getting kids trained to have civil conversations with one another, to get them in the habit of listening to each other.

Scott Hershovitz 00:46:58  Thinking carefully about what other people are saying, hearing their objections, and thinking about where you might have gone wrong, I think that it would be wonderful. That was a more regular part of the way we taught children.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:09  Yeah. So let’s go back to how you broke Hank of his relativism.

Scott Hershovitz 00:47:13  Yeah. So remember, Hank’s relativism was super thoroughgoing. It applied not just to evaluative judgments, right? About which many people are tempted towards relativism, but it applied to, you know, matters of like, you know, is it raining outside? Yeah. So I was putting Hank to bed that night, and as I kissed him goodnight, I said, goodnight. Hank, you’re the sweetest six year old I know. And he said angrily, he’s like, I’m not six. I’m eight. And I said, well, maybe to you, but to me you’re six. And he lost it. He said, I’m eight. Some things are just true. so so even in the end. Right? Once I hit on the thing Hank cared about.

Scott Hershovitz 00:47:55  Right? He. He couldn’t handle my thinking differently about it.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:59  Yeah. Yeah. I’m trying to think of what I feel that strongly about. Chris versus Stevi. Definitely.

Scott Hershovitz 00:48:05  Excellent.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:05  Let’s pivot to an article that got a lot of press. It was called What Shamu Taught Me about a Happy Marriage by Amy Sutherland. Tell me a little bit about that. I think there’s a lot of great things to unpack underneath that.

Scott Hershovitz 00:48:19  Yeah. So this was an article that was, at the time, the most emailed article ever for The New York Times. Maybe it still is. Wow. It was an article written by Amy Sutherland. She was working on a book about animal trainers. Say, like the trainers at SeaWorld, and how they get these animals to do extraordinary things like balance a ball on their nose. And she’s telling the story in the New York Times. She says that she realized that maybe she could use these animal training techniques on her husband. His name was also Scott. She goes home and, you know, one of his problems, maybe also one of my problems is he leaves his clothes on the floor.

Scott Hershovitz 00:48:52  And so she says, well, I learned from the animal trainers that you don’t give negative feedback. When you get behavior you don’t like, you just ignore it entirely. You act like it didn’t even happen, right? So that’s called least reinforcing syndrome. But then when you get positive behavior, like the least little step in the right direction, you reward that wildly. So she stopped complaining about his clothes on the floor, but if he actually picks him up and put it in the hamper, she would praise him wildly, right? And then, you know, like he liked the praise. He maybe he’d put more clothes in the hamper and she’d praise him wildly again. And she reports that over time, his behavior started to improve, right? Like he was the sea lion balancing the ball on his nose. Right. This caused kind of some tension in our house. I saw the article and I knew that I had a problem, and so I kind of disappeared. Our copy of the paper one night, I thought, oh, wait a minute.

Scott Hershovitz 00:49:39  You know, Julie, my wife is like praising me for something I really ought to be doing anyway. Like putting my dishes in the sink. Did she see that article? And I asked her. I was like, is this about Shamu? And it turned out she had seen the article. She was trying to shampoo me. We made an agreement. We weren’t going to try and use these techniques on each other. And actually, you know, this arises in the book in the context of the chapter on punishment where I say, look, your little kids treat them like animals. Like when they’re two, when they’re three, they really can’t understand yet what they’re doing wrong or why they should be doing better. So all you can do with very little kids is adjust the incentives that they face so that you elicit the kind of behavior that you want. But I think the aspiration is actually to raise a person that you shouldn’t treat that way, to raise a person who’s a person and not an animal.

Scott Hershovitz 00:50:31  And what makes them a person is, as we were talking about earlier, that they can appreciate the difference between what they want to do and what they ought to do, and they can act on what they ought to do. And then it’s appropriate for us to feel grateful when they behave well and angry when they behave poorly. part of what it means to relate to each other as people and not to relate to each other as animals, is to have these kinds of reactive attitudes. Like, I get angry, I’m appreciative, and I think that that’s the way spouse’s friends really ought to be relating to one another. You shouldn’t be trying to train your friend in the way that you would train an animal.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:07  So there’s lots of interesting things in this. You talk about this as seeing a person rather than an object, right? And there’s a philosopher. I don’t remember her exact name or his name, but said, you know, to see a person as an object is to see them as something to be managed or handled or cured or trained.

Scott Hershovitz 00:51:28  Yeah. So this is a philosopher named Peter Strawson, who is a prominent English philosopher in the 20th century. And he distinguished two different ways of looking at human beings. One, he called the objective attitude is what you just described. You just see a person like an object in the world, subject to the laws of cause and effect. You know, if I push over here, this might happen. If I give them this incentive, it might change their behavior in that way. And he wanted to contrast that with what he called the participant attitude. Like you’re a participant in relationships with them, maybe as their spouse, maybe as their friend. Maybe you’re the teacher and somebody else is the student. And they’re right. He thought, we have these attitudes like gratitude and anger and resentment and love. And he thought that like, it’s not that these ways of looking at people, the objective attitude and the participant attitude are absolutely incompatible. We can take both. Right. I can look at my spouse objectively or look at my kids objectively and say, oh, look, you’re tired today.

Scott Hershovitz 00:52:26  I know that you don’t really mean what you say. I’m not going to get mad at you about it. Or I can hear what you’ve said, understand the way it’s insulting and I can get mad about it. Right? And Strawson thought there’s occasions to have both of these attitudes, but he thought it was a serious mistake to try and always look at other people objectively, because you lose touch with their humanity. You lose touch with the kinds of relationships that we really value in our lives. If you only treated other people like they were objects or animals.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:56  This is a really fascinating topic because my primary, I would say, both philosophical, psychological and spiritual orientation has largely been a lot of Buddhist thought. And Buddhist thought is very much about being non-reactive. Right? It praises a certain degree of objectivity. It praises a certain degree of seeing that what you’re doing is not necessarily personal, that it has its causes in the world and all that. And so it’s easy to see the benefits of that, right? But I love that you’re making a point that sometimes anger or gratitude is a better response than trying to think about, how could I get that person to behave in a way that doesn’t make me angry.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:47  Say a little bit more about that, because that’s a pretty fundamental.

Scott Hershovitz 00:53:50  Yeah, so I think anger is an emotion that needs some defenders. Actually, we don’t need more anger. Actually, there’s plenty of anger in the world, but the culture is constantly telling us to let it go, to not be angry. And I think it’s important to see that anger serves some important purposes. In particular, my getting angry is sometimes important to my respecting myself. So, you know, here’s a person who’s mistreated me, right? And they’ve done something, you know, like maybe they’ve exploited me. They’ve used me. Right. If I don’t react in any way right, then I’m in a way acquiescing in my own mistreatment. Right. You know, signaling to that person and others that it’s okay to treat me this way and maybe most disturbingly of all, possibly accepting for myself that it’s okay to treat me that way. And so I think anger can be justified as a kind of protest. It says, hey, look, it’s not okay for you to treat me that way.

Scott Hershovitz 00:54:49  I want you to know it. I want you to know that I know it right now. It’s important not to be consumed by one’s anger and for anger not to be the only thing that that one feels right. So I think that, like, the thing that people often have right is people take their anger too far. And so it’s important to be able to let your anger go and not let it take over your life. And I think, like the Buddhist kind of Buddhist practice that you’re talking about can be an incredible aid toward that. I just want to make a pitch for sometimes being upset, being angry, feeling resentful is a way of defending yourself in the world and respecting yourself. And you know, we could tell a similar story about gratitude as a way of sort of respecting others and recognizing the sacrifices they might make on your behalf.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:35  Yeah. Now, the line between shampooing somebody and being grateful is very thin, right? Because if I want you to pick up your clothes and put them in the basket, and you do, I could praise you because I’m like, I want more of that behavior.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:52  I could also say to you, thank you. I’m really happy that you did that. Yeah. Which they’re very close to each other. But you’re saying it’s the spirit?

Scott Hershovitz 00:56:01  Yeah, exactly. So may involve the same sentence that would be said either way. But we all know the difference between maybe we can always tell, but we all appreciate there’s a difference between the thank you that’s offered sincerely and the thank you that’s offered strategically. And actually, my wife wouldn’t thank me sincerely for putting my clothes in the laundry hamper. Right. Because it’s not it’s not like a situation where I’ve gone above and beyond. It’s like like I did the minimum. I did what I should do on that occasion. Right. Like, chances are that thank you is strategic. And if Sutherland’s husband had thought about it, he may have recognized that actually, she’s not as appreciative as she seems to be. She seems to be in the moment, but I guess I want to make a pitch for not feeling these emotions or expressing these emotions strategically, though sometimes.

Scott Hershovitz 00:56:48  Perhaps that’s helpful, but for being the kind of person and having the kinds of relationships where you feel and express these emotions sincerely without letting them take control of your life when they’re not constructive.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:03  Yeah, and I really love how you said that. We’re all going to do a little of both of these. Right? Context. We’re back to this idea of there being context. But I really love this line where you said she stopped reasoning with him. This is talking about the animal trainer and her husband. She stopped reasoning with him and started shaping him. And I love that distinction, right? That if I’m always trying to shape you into being somebody else, I am treating you more as an object versus reasoning with you. Now, I might be diving off the deep end again, but we’re talking about the belief that people are capable of reason. We talked about how you should shape a three year old because a three year old isn’t fully capable. I’m just going to do it. Seems like a terrible idea, but I’m just going to do it.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:49  Sure. Is there a case that says certain people aren’t intelligent enough to know, to figure out what’s right, to figure out, to reason, through to the right thing? What’s your response to that?

Scott Hershovitz 00:58:03  You know, I think I’m a little resistant in putting it in terms of intelligence, because I think it’s more complicated than that. But there’s a kind of question that is confronted constantly within the criminal justice system about who’s responsible for what they do and who’s not. Yeah, right. Because we think that many most people are responsible for the choices that they make and are appropriate objects of the condemnation that’s associated with punishment. But we also think that there are people in the world that are suffering from various sorts of disabilities that may inhibit their ability to understand the choices that they’re making or to control the choices that they’re making. And we have some doubt that these people are appropriate objects of punishment, in part because we have some doubt that they’re appropriate objects of of condemnation. We don’t think that we’re in a position to have demanded better than they did.

Scott Hershovitz 00:59:01  I’ll tell you a little bit about one of my favorite papers in philosophy I love to read with my students is by a philosopher named Gary Watson. He writes about one of the most heinous murders that you’ll ever read about, just tells the story of somebody who murders two teenagers in a way that’s shockingly callous. And you read this story and you have, like, as harsh a judgment of a human being who would do this as you would have of anybody. And so Watson kind of meditates on that reaction for a little bit, and then he says, well, let me tell you the story of this guy’s upbringing. And then he describes what his childhood was like. Yeah. And I shudder every time I think of it. You know, I won’t describe it here, but it’s the most abusive childhood I’ve ever heard described. Yeah. His mother kind of resented his existence, and his parents deeply mistreated him, physically and emotionally. And, you know, Watson gets to the end of that, and he says, well, well, now I think, of course, now I understand.

Scott Hershovitz 01:00:03  Right. Yeah. I don’t think how could it have been otherwise? Because I know some people survived that abuse and didn’t do these things. But I do think but I see why you had so little regard for other people, because the world showed you so little regard. Yeah. And what Watson ends up saying is something I feel very deeply he says at the end of these. It’s not like I can choose one or the other perspective. He says my anger at the man this person is now just sits alongside my empathy for the child that he was. I find it very hard to form an overall view of this human being, and to understand how I should react to them and how I should treat them in the world. And I think this is actually one of the deepest questions for the criminal justice system. As we learn more about causes of behavior and limitations that the people in different circumstances face. It’s to sort of straddle these two perspectives, the engage perspective of we’re really angry about what you did.

Scott Hershovitz 01:00:58  We expected better from you is tempered by this other perspective, where we think the world hasn’t treated you so well, and we understand maybe why you weren’t capable of better. Yeah. I don’t have full answers for you for how to reconcile this.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:11  Yeah, and I could go down this for hours and we have minutes left. But I do think that this is a really interesting topic. I think it’s going to become more interesting in the criminal justice system, as you say, as we begin to understand more about the effects of trauma on people’s responses. You know, a question I ask as a recovering Heroin addict and alcoholic is how much choice do people have? When it comes to these substances, right? And we do know that the data seems unequivocal that the more trauma you’ve suffered, the much higher incidences of substance abuse you have with substance abuse, I think it’s a little bit easier to be like, well, let’s not penalize an addiction, you know? But we do things as addicts that probably do need punishing.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:59  This gets very complicated. And I look at my own life and I think back to the degree of choice I feel today around these substances. And I feel like I have as much choice as anybody who’s never had a problem, more or less. Right. I probably have to do some things to maintain that, but more or less. But there was a day where the amount of choice I felt I had was just a hair’s breadth. You know, it’s interesting to have felt both those things in the same human being around the same thing at really different times. You know, I was transporting opiates for my mother recently with no problem, but I would have robbed you at gunpoint for those once upon a time. And so I think, you know, I agree with you. I don’t think there are easy answers to these questions because there is a compassion element of it. But there is also a fairness to the victims element of it. There’s also a protecting our society elements of it. And I think these things are really, really complicated.

Eric Zimmer 01:02:55  And I would love to spend like four hours with you talking about these things because I think they’re fascinating. But we are out of time. And we didn’t even get to cleverly disguised donkeys. But my question for you is, do you have a few minutes for a post-show conversation?

Scott Hershovitz 01:03:11  Absolutely I do.

Eric Zimmer 01:03:12  And listeners, if you would like access to the post-show conversation and the joy of giving a gift to this podcast and its listeners, go to oneyoufeed.net/join. Again, Scott, thank you so much. The book is a true joy to read. It’s funny, it’s engaging, it’s deep. The notes I have on it are countless, so I encourage listeners to check it out. And again, thank you.

Scott Hershovitz 01:03:33  This was so much fun. Thanks for having me on.

Eric Zimmer 01:03:48  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.

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Episode Transcript:

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:00:00  When we go in with an expectation that change is easy, that it immediately results in us feeling a new way. I will always be the one to speak on the reality of why change is hard to begin with, how much it already adds to an already stressed system, making us more likely then to return to old habits. Which is why change right needs to happen, and we benefit more greatly from not trying to change the most difficult habit to break to begin with.

Chris Forbes 00:00:35  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. we think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit? But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:19  There are ways we learn to survive early in life that work really well. They help us stay safe. They help us belong. And over time they start to feel like who we are. But eventually, something starts to go wrong. In this conversation, Doctor Nikola Pera and I talk about what it actually means to parent yourself, the real process of understanding the patterns your nervous system picked up in childhood, and how often they’re still running the show today. We get into why so much of what we call personality is really just adaptation, and why real change doesn’t come from inside alone. It comes from small, repeated actions that slowly build trust with yourself. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Nicole. Welcome back.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:02:07  Thank you for having me back. Honored to be here.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:09  I don’t know how many times this is I think it’s it’s certainly the third, if not the fourth.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:15  I was asking you beforehand how many books you’ve had out. And this is your third full book with a workbook also in there. So I don’t know anybody curious enough to look. They can go find out. But this book is called Parenting the Inner Child The New Science of Our Oldest Wounds and How to Heal Them, and I’m looking forward to getting into it. But before that, we’ll start, like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with a grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:03:14  I think that power will very beautifully summarizes my own individual journey. And of course, this now work that I am speaking to, which is the wolf that wins, is the wolf that we’ve been feeding. Sometimes outside of our conscious awareness, many of us for a lifetime dating back into childhood. Because even right, the bad wolf, so to speak, that has all of these negative characteristics or qualities, some of which think that they mean or they reflect who we are truly, in my opinion at least, all of those are beautifully crafted, survival based adaptations that, again, many of us have been feeding outside of our awareness is our nervous system is try to find safety and security in moments where we didn’t have that and they became then our life force, our reliance for some of us, our identity. But again, my hope is to give listeners of any version of my work and understanding of the Wolf that they might be feeding outside of their awareness, and, of course, to give them some new tools to begin to better, to feed a more aligned wolf, so to speak.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:21  Excellent. So the title of the new book is the sort of thing that when I first got into recovery, this is a long time ago, and I started doing a therapy work, this phrase inner child caused me to cringe. I hated it, and even now, all these years later, all these podcasts, there’s still some part of me that’s like, so talk to me about why that’s the phrase that you use.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:04:53  So I think you’re having a very common experience or reaction, I should say, to. To this concept, which I think for a lot of us has felt to be a bit abstract or even felt to be a bit cringeworthy, right? This idea of I don’t want to, why do I have to? What role does my childhood even play in my current struggles? And so for me, truly understanding what the inner child was beyond right, this woo woo type abstract idea that maybe we can journal aloud to. I really began to map on conceptually what inner child is in terms of psychology.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:05:30  And the reality is, is that even if you do kind of feel very cringe or know that we don’t want to revisit a past because it was very painful or maybe even decades ago. And maybe you’re much like myself. We can’t recall much of it. The reality of it is, is that all of us carry this part with us. It was a part that formed very early in life where we learned how to cope, how to handle unpredictability, how to handle conflict, how to navigate unmet need. And so to really nail down what inner child is in psychological terms, it’s actually these memories. It’s these sensory based, reflex driven word. For it is implicit emotional memories that become stored in our body and then come alive somewhere later in life, in our relationships, in our daily life. And those are the moments where we are compelled right into a reaction, or maybe a daily habit, or again, an identity that doesn’t necessarily feel grounded in who we are. That might be disproportionate, right? We’re having huge reactions to maybe things that aren’t that big of a deal.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:06:35  And those are, I think, the daily moments where many of us, even if we don’t necessarily want to look back, we are clear that something else is driving those patterns at that time. And again, from a psychological perspective, it is it’s learning that is wired into us. that is becoming reactive again. Anytime a current moment resembles something from our past that we’ve experienced.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:58  Did you say implicit emotional memory?

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:07:01  Implicit emotional memory? Implicit meaning, right. Actions without words, often defying logic. Again wired in, often relived in big emotional reactions or even limited right where we’re not reacting in moments where we do need to assert or to defend ourselves.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:19  The way you describe that is similar to what my therapist told me all these years ago with Inner Child, and I believed her enough to really go into that work, and I did it. I did it a long time ago. And I mean, it’s hard to say when you’ve been in recovery and on sort of like a journey of healing or whatever.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:40  It’s very hard to unwind it and be like, well, it was this that did that, and then I did this and it helped with that. All I can say is it was a part of becoming the person that I am today, which I’m truly grateful for. And I’ve I do think that the work I did in that space was really valuable, and the work I continue to do in that space is really valuable.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:08:02  Absolutely. And I just want to be clear and speak to two, perhaps categories of listeners. So one of which is, well, what happens if, like me, I can’t recall much of what happened to me. And so the response to that is, of course, there’s usually a stress based or trauma based reason when life becomes overwhelming. I can even talk about the science of, you know, kind of impact it has on the area of our brain, the hippocampus, that helps create the ability to recall later in life. But for whatever reason, right. If we don’t remember, we can still, right, begin exactly where we’re at.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:08:36  And also, the other category I want to speak to is we don’t necessarily have to even trace back the timeline to say, well, this happened then, and this is what I did in response to that we really can look more from a bird’s eye view, right. And understand more global patterns. So for instance right. If in childhood staying quiet right helped us to stay out of conflict. Right. Something as general, as consistent as that habit in childhood, often then right translates to an adult habit of maybe shutting down, even in conversations or arguments or conflicts with someone who is interested now in understanding our perspective. Or we can understand a more general pattern, right, of hypervigilance. So if in childhood life was unpredictable or chaotic, right? By bracing ourselves, by always waiting for that other shoe to drop, or by controlling what could be controlled, can become a very beneficial pattern, which then translates into adulthood. Looking like social anxiety, overthinking interactions, feeling responsible for everyone else’s emotions. Continuing to try to grip tightly to plans over prepare struggling to delegate.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:09:48  So again, we don’t necessarily need to know because it isn’t just necessarily one moment in time. It’s consistent moments when we need it to shift or change ourselves, to create safety or belonging that then become the consistent patterns. And again, we don’t even have to go back to understand the story. We can start right now. Where am I stuck? Right? Where am I having a reaction that feels disproportionate or just misaligned to how I would responsibly want to show up in those moments? And that is then the place where we start, of course, to create change by beginning to make new choices or new actions again, ground it in our bodies.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:28  I think that what you’re talking about is really important, which is the inability to remember. I have almost zero memories from before about the age of 18. I seem to have a brain that does not hold on to memory. Well, I think I just think some of that is the way I am. But I was able to know general things, right? Like, I know that my father, rest in peace was very angry and very critical.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:56  My mom would tell me that both my brother and sister would tell me that his second wife would. Right. It was it was clear. And then I can see the ways in which I responded to that. And and I think sometimes the narrative is a little too tidy, like to say, like I get anxious because my dad was angry is a little like there’s there’s some truth in it and there’s probably a lot more in there than that. But that was enough for me to start to unravel different things. And I think the biggest thing for me was just this recognition that what happened back then had an impact on me, in the same way that if I was in a car accident today, it would impact me tomorrow. And we do know that children seem to be more imprinted. Than people my age are.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:11:46  And these moments of great adaptive learning are evolutionarily beneficial to us, right? And these moments of learning even predate us. What I mean when I say that is the learning that is now we understand epigenetics passed through generations, not necessarily changing our DNA, but changing how certain genes are expressed based on what earliest environments.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:12:12  So this learning. Right. If you just think about it from an adaptive standpoint makes sense, right. If you are assumedly going to be brought up in the same environment, which when we think about our ancestors, it wasn’t until recently where we could fly through the sky and end up geographically in a completely different place. So chances were right your lineage was more or less growing up in those same environments. So when there was a food scarcity, as there’s a ton of nanoscience that will show all of the different epigenetic changes that happen to. Again, I’m really going to simplify this, but to hold on to calories and fat storage to prepare for the next moment of food inconsistency or outright shortage, then that is a very beneficial adaptation for us to, quote unquote, make right and then passing those on, assuming that those same children are going to grow up in the same environment where food may or may not be present. Now, those offspring are more kind of biologically likely to survive the next food shortage.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:13:16  Shortage. So this is the circumstances that all of us humans, no matter how close geographically or not, or how much even awareness we have of what our ancestors past looked like, these are still changes that we’re carrying with us. And again, because biologically, those changes made sense. Those adaptations were protective at one time in one space. Though what has changed categorically for the large majority of us is our circumstances have changed, our relationships have changed. We have grown into a bigger body with more possible options. Yet in these moments, biologically, we’re not going to take the risk of trying to do something new in a moment. That’s stressful. We’re going to rely on exactly what worked. And according to our biology, what worked isn’t what created a healthy, emotionally grounded, you know, value driven response. What worked was the quickest way to ease discomfort, which for some of us means squashing it down, suppressing it, or ignoring it entirely. And for some of us, we can do so in a way that society praises.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:14:26  For me, it looked like overachieving and excelling and never giving myself a moment to rest. Because why in rest is where I felt the most uncomfortable. So when we understand right that I think the biology that again has been passed through generations, even if we don’t have the information. Like I don’t as well. A large part of my life, even until recently, is I can’t call it to mind, but I relive it right in those daily habits and patterns, in those moments, and even the identities and roles that I could sit here and say, I understand I’m worth so much more than how I perform. Yet there’s still an inner child inside of me that struggles to be seen in sharing my thoughts and ideas, and definitely struggles to hear anything that could possibly land, even if it’s not meant to be of negative feedback. Right. As possible negative feedback. Because. Right. Excelling to earn praise in childhood gave me attention. It gave me connection. It felt like love in my family. But now it’s kind of driven me on this endless, exhausting roller coaster.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:15:30  So again, even things that are societally celebrated often were grounded in our best opportunity or the best choice we could have made at one time, but then we keep relying on those same habits because they have become habitual reactions. And then we struggle to create change, even when we’ve become really clear that those habits don’t serve us anymore.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:17  Just for fun, let’s pretend. And this is not the case. But let’s just pretend that I said to you, Nicole, I’ve read a lot of books. This one’s really not very good. You have the insight that, you know, like, okay, I don’t handle that well. How would you work with yourself in that moment if it triggered you. Like, walk us through. Like what? Today and today may be different than somebody who’s newer in the journey, but today, what would you do?

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:16:44  Well, what I would do would begin, maybe even before I put myself in a position and or asked for feedback. Right. So me taking a moment to of course, we can always, you know, we might might see someone on the street and they might come up to me and say, your book sucked, right? So I can’t control maybe that because I put myself in public and I don’t want to say anything.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:17:05  Probably. But I’m meaning when I say this because some of us. Right. We feel like, oh, well, this just this negative feedback fell into my lap when really I went scrolling on reviews and found it. Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:17  So I mean, bad practice, right? You’re telling me don’t do it.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:17:21  So those are things to consider. Right. Is that we could know, right? Or even just asking, hey, you know, if you want, even from a loved one. Hey, what did you think of my new book? Right. I’m kind of laboring on this because some of us don’t even, like, hit that pause and say, can I handle? Yeah. If what you think of my new book isn’t going to be positive. Am I going to be okay to then do whatever I might now describe can come next? But emphasizing that first point, because there are a lot of moments where I don’t have the bandwidth to be able to do what could come next, and without that bandwidth, because again, I would be doing something new, which isn’t completely breaking down and determining that I’m never going to do the thing again.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:18:03  That elicited the negative feedback, which is what my inner child wants to do, right? Run away and say, okay, well, wasn’t good. I’m never going to put myself into a position where you could tell me anything I do isn’t good ever again. So we get very black and white, very extreme. And now. So I determine I’m never going to put out write a piece of work. That’s the way my solution is going to to avoid negative feedback. I won’t give you anything to give me feedback on. Right. So yeah, that is typically behind the scenes what would be happening. But making sure that I’m resourced enough that if you were to say, for whatever reason, you don’t like the book, that I would then be able to write. Pause. Kind of. Maybe here that cycle of negative criticism where my kind of internal critic is already saying, yes, exactly. Nicole, this is why I told you not to put yourself out there, because it’s safer back here when no one knows what you think to give you feedback on.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:18:54  Right. So all of that will still happen in those moments. There’s not a magical wand. That awareness kind of removes all of this wiring, all of even that voice is wired into us again, because keeping myself safe meant not saying anything. Because if I don’t say anything, then there’s nothing for you to give me negative feedback around. So the voice is there, intending to keep me safe by not putting myself out. There will still be there. In this moment of negative feedback, I get to determine, though, how much attention that I want to give to. Right. One possible version of what comes next, which is I stop putting my work out there, right? Or I could pause. I could acknowledge the role that this protective voice is played, which is to keep me safe, right? I could remind myself of a couple of things. What my intention is, right? Why do I put up put out work? What is the bigger, you know, kind of value for me in doing this? For me, it’s very much a passion of purpose.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:19:49  I want to impart people with something that helped me on my journey, to help them on their journey. And there could even be a pause where I hear what the negative feedback is saying, right? Because sometimes negative feedback can be very helpful. Right. It can point out a perspective or a reaction that I wasn’t anticipating that could actually be valuable for a future draft, my future work, whatever it is. But without pausing to make sure I’m resource, make sure I’m grounded, right? Not letting my body’s reaction where my heart will start to race, right? I’ll start to get sweaty. All of that fear of are you rejecting me because you’re saying something about my work, right? So much of that is tied to my identity. Right. If you give me negative feedback. That’s why it feels so intense. Because it doesn’t feel like you’re saying, hey, Nicole. Like, you know, this works pretty good, but you could have maybe, you know, worded it differently or covered some different topics.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:20:45  I’m hearing it as you are a horrible person, right? So all of that then makes us understand why the reaction feels so big, why I want to run away and say, well, okay, well, I won’t show you any of me anymore. But it’s in those moments of pause, right? Of maybe slowing down my breath, maybe kind of reorienting me to I am an adult in a room. I can hear feedback. I’m safe, maybe even reminding myself, right. You’re just you’re giving me feedback about my book, not about me. And then giving myself the opportunity to determine if I want to take the feedback or leave it. But again, all of that happens behind the scene, and often right after that most pivotal choice, which is sometimes we throw ourselves into situations that were not resourced for. And then we feel even more shameful when I spiral down the pit of despair and decide I’m going to quit the job entirely, when really I should have maybe paused on asking for the feedback or not.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:21:43  Right? On a bad day, gone into a negative comment section and spent too much time there.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:49  Not that I could be worried about anything like this happening in my own life, and I have to be explicit. That was an example. I had to don’t take any meaning the negativity bias or say like he did. He mean it? He did not mean it. He did not mean it. All right. Onward. So let’s talk about something you’ve created called the Individual Development model. And I’d love to just move through these five spheres relatively quickly, but tell me what the individual development model is. And then let’s kind of walk through the spheres.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:22:23  So individual development model I had been thinking about childhood development for a very long time. Likely when I was in school and we were presented with different theorist ideas about how development happens and more so what impacts the development of an individual being? And so I was very fascinated by that I love learning. You know, if there’s a way to, you know, see a pattern or an archetype in something or something developmentally that we can kind of track on that captures more people than not? I think those can be very helpful to learn from.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:22:58  So I dove right into a lot of them and continue to find that none of them seem to deal with two things that I was becoming aware was incredibly important in our development. The first thing being not just us, our relationships. And we now know from all of the extensive research and attachment theory and that relate and even biology and nervous system development, we understand that humans, while we are a being, right, a one entity, and you need an individual, so to speak. We need relationship. So the large majority of developmental models, we’re leaving out the fact that we are greatly impacted our development based on how others around us or how safe we feel relating to those around us. And another big piece that most developmental models left out is the body. Or how those environments, including our relationships, impact the wiring in our body, which then of course, impact our development. So for me, I wanted to think about right, is there kind of an easy way? Because I think this is a difficult question.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:24:01  We don’t even really know what development entails, what is needed, right. How much of it is natural and it just happens. Right? We have this idea to some extent that parenting and things like that just happen and think some others, right, are becoming, myself included, of the belief that, wait a minute, these things. Yeah, some things naturally have biological sequences. But again, they are then greatly impacted by the happenings around them like the people and the environment. So for that reason, I’m I put out again a model that I hope can allow the readers to generally understand what impacted, again, their earliest development. That might still be habits that are impacting them now, but also then as we enter the parenting stage of the book, mapping those really general spheres, as I call them, onto practices, to then begin to develop new habits for ourselves so quickly, speaking foundationally, without safety and security in our body, a nervous system that can become stressed when we need to accurately determine when to become stressed and then quickly be able to calm down.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:25:08  That would be the most foundational first fear. Of course, it happens in infancy. Hopefully, if we have an attuned caregiver who shows up when we’re upset, distressed, meets our need, calms us down over time. Our body then learns to do that with or without support of someone else. So on that then foundation, right now we get to begin to develop a little more uniquely who we are. With safety in a home base to return to, we can now explore boundaries, edges, discipline, right? The discipline to keep going in a certain direction or to come back when we need support. This is another huge area where few of us were parented with the boundaries and the discipline that we needed to keep ourselves, because this is another version of safety, I want to be able to venture out into the world where it might be unsafe, but to do that confidently, I have to know that I can return back to a safe home base, right? A person, a space where I can calm down, get support when I then need it right then following development along the lines once I’ve separated a bit with boundaries, with discipline.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:26:11  Right now, I’m starting to relate to other people, and now we can enter the world of very complicated emotions, right? And now we can start to develop tools to understand our emotions, regulate our emotions, attune to other individuals and their emotions from a safe distance. But understanding that there’s connective space there where intimacy right is born. So this is kind of sphere three is the language of emotions, which happened to be the language of relating. Then we can shift into, right, what I call authenticity, right? Really learning and discovering our unique voice, our unique purpose. Like what is it? How am I in the world? And what impact can I make on those around me? And then that expands us into the fifth sphere, which I call transcendence, or essentially connecting with the greater picture where we get to access or re access joy and playfulness and all of those emotional states that so many of us have again been closed up off to, because somewhere along our development, right, we’ve created habits that have kept us Disconnect it from those kind of foundational areas of development.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:24  So I’d like to move into some of this process of reprinting. Is there a way you could sort of present the broad strokes of what this looks like? You know, we’re going to start here. We’re going to do some of this, then we’re going to do some of that. And, you know, help me see the journey as a whole before we drill down into particular parts of it.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:27:45  So from the bird’s eye perspective, what parenting is, is learning how to show up as a safe, nurturing, connected, compassionate caregiver. Right. It’s to show up for our own selves in certain ways, right. That will help us. So the most foundational practices of any parenting journey, right, are going back to that first sphere, which really have everything to do with creating safety and security in our body, right. Being able for some of us to even reconnect with the fact that we are living in a physical human body. Saying this as someone who spent the large majority of my life away on my spaceship, kind of zoomed out in a disconnected or dissociated state so often, right? Those habits of distracting from a body of being disconnected or dissociate it are born out of the lack of safety and security in the body to begin with.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:28:41  So parenting looks like, again moments throughout the day where we’re just kind of tuning into assessing, right. Our the biggest, the three main areas that shift and change when our body is having either a stressful or an emotional reaction or our muscle tension, our breath and our heart rate. So those are great markers even throughout the day. Setting an alarm on our phone for a time or two, right? Taking a moment to pause, right. To refocus our attention on our body, away from our distracting thoughts, or away from the care that we’re given to someone else. Because that’s the role that we’ve learned and really just tuning into our selves, right. And creating safety. Slowing our breath if it’s starting to be quickened or if we’re holding our breath. Releasing some tension in our muscles right over time, helping our body downshift into that very grounded, connected state of our parasympathetic nervous system. And then on top of those habits, right, we can begin. If you’re someone who struggles with boundaries, right.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:29:43  The parenting journey will mean on a daily practice of reconnecting with our own boundaries in terms of physical space, emotional space, mental space, and then, of course, learning some emotional regulation tools. what do I do when I’m upset or overwhelmed? Right. Teaching ourselves some new habits. Because what parenting allows us to do through new daily choices is instead of just coping right in the way that we’ve learned how to cope with our discomfort, which many of us have gotten very savvy at it. Right. Some of us have become identified with how we cope, right? We become the caregiver because we’re always attuned to someone else or like me, the overachiever, because I’m always worried about how I’m being perceived by someone else. So that’s coping. We’ve all gotten very good at coping with our earliest circumstances in our continued distress, but parenting allows us to truly heal. Which means in those moments, right? Not just falling back into old reactive spaces or continuing to play old, outdated roles that no longer fit or allow me to feel fulfilled, it’s actually changing how we’re experiencing the current moment, experiencing it in a more grounded way, right where we can be more responsive in our choices, not just reactive.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:30:59  Doing what we always do in that moment and then feeling shameful after the fact, actually intentionally showing up. So parenting, in my opinion, is the most transformative journey that we can go on, because that’s quite literally what we’re doing. Those older habits aren’t working. I mean, they’re working to the extent that they’re sustaining life, right? That many of us are barely hanging on. We’re in survival mode, but they’re not changing, right. How we’re experiencing the current moment. So the next time, right, that you don’t get a text back as quickly as you want it. And to you, space or silence means rejection or abandonment. So you start spiraling and firing off text or, you know, rethinking everything you said and convincing yourself that they’re upset with you and probably leaving you. Right. The difference that parenting allows you to do is to pause in that moment, understand, not invalidate that part of you that is spiraling because that’s a part of you that again lived that experience before, probably where distance or silence did mean rejection or abandonment.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:32:02  So even if again, we don’t want to believe the inner child is alive and well and we don’t want to look back, that is the moment where we want to show up differently by not shaming, by not doing the things we always have done right, which is pursued close the distance by harassing your way to getting a response, or maybe doing the other end of the spectrum, which I often do. Oh, you’re not going to respond to me. Well, you don’t have a relationship to come home to you because I’ve left you already, right? So now we’re running away instead in the moment, right? Being with our self, all of our parts. The part that’s scared and convinced you’re being left right. Slowing our breath. Reminding ourselves that distance or silence right doesn’t mean rejection or abandonment as it once did, and maybe giving yourself the opportunity to hear back from that person and actually live that new experience where on the other end and reconnection, they’re not mad, right? Something probably very logical has happened with why they have not responded to you in a timely manner.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:33:00  But if we would have spiraled right and not allowed ourselves to show up differently, then we wouldn’t have been able to literally lay down a new experience, which is what we need to do to create the change that we want to.

Chris Forbes 00:33:28  Do.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:36  So that process is difficult. And part of what I think is most difficult about it is that the first time we often do it, we don’t feel necessarily that much better, right? Like and this is just from personal experience. But if I get into a hyper activated state and I try and it’s going to slow my breath down, I’m going to relax. I’m going to think maybe there’s probably a good reason, you know, that I might feel 5% better. How do I believe in the process enough to keep kind of doing that, because I think that’s what ends up happening in a lot of cases. Certainly was the case with me at different points in my life. I’m like, well, this isn’t really doing anything like, okay, it’s a great idea.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:23  But she says, I do it and I’ll suddenly feel connected and grounded and I don’t feel connected and grounded.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:34:30  What you’re describing is the lived experience of change, right? If we just think about kind of categorically or even amount quantitatively, I think is maybe the word I want quantitatively, how many moments have led to you feeling, generally speaking, that bad? Right. Whatever bad is for you in that moment? How many moments have led to that depth or degree or bigness of the feeling? So many moments that we can’t even remember. Even if we could recall them, we physically would not be able to. So just in terms of sheer quantity. Understandably, of course, we want to waive the mind while and do something new and categorically feel different in the next moment. Of course we want to, especially if how bad we’re feeling or the bigness of our suffering is that great. So I don’t want to kind of shame that very understandable, hopeful part that is so desperately wanting it to be different, though it is really important that you and I are both speaking very honestly here and going as far to say right, so many of us wait to change anything in general until we feel inspired in the new feeling state already, and that just simply isn’t the way change happens.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:35:51  Change happens right through the moments that you’re describing, where even when we just think about change in the most general sense, doing something new, making a new choice, however it is, you define change. We are already activating our nervous system Because the unknown. That’s why we prefer these habits and patterns, even the dysfunctional ones, because they’re predictable and our nervous system finds nothing safer than that which is predictable. Again, even if what is predicted is the negative outcome that we know is on the other side of every time this happens, this happens. We know. And so that already cuts down on the uncertainty. So the courageous ness and bravery that it takes to make one new choice is quite literally challenging. What for many of us is already an overtaxed, overwhelmed nervous system that doesn’t actually know how to write return to calm. So then we pour more fire, right? And more frustration, and even more shame on a system that’s already overwhelmed. When we go in with an expectation that change is easy, that it immediately results in us feeling a new way, I will always be the one to speak on the reality of why change is hard to begin with, how much it already adds to an already stressed system, making us more likely than to return to old habits.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:37:11  Which is why change right needs to happen, and we benefit more greatly from not trying to change the most difficult habit to break. To begin with, right? To create a little momentum and even rebuild a little trust in ourselves to even be able to create change in kind of like periphery type moments. Knowing, of course, that this is the really the area where I want to see impact happen eventually. But if I start to just create a little momentum, right, making new choices that are not fully pushing me into extreme stress, right? Because again, most of our hardest wired habits, for lack of a better way to describe them, are the ones that are protecting the greatest vulnerability within us. Right? So to then expect us to completely show up newly in this moment and feel so great about doing it and feel so differently, right? That’s just very unrealistic. But what happens when we change in other areas? Right. Creating momentum. We’re rebuilding trust, right? We’re showing ourselves that we can do slightly difficult things.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:38:18  Maybe not the hardest thing ever just yet, but once we show ourselves that we can work through resistance, right? All of our mind and body screaming and yelling and telling us no, not to do this thing right. Maybe not fully feeling differently, but showing us alignment and intention, right? That’s where we’re building trust in ourself and also capacity, because we’re doing hard things and we’re not falling back on old habits. And then the more we kind of sequence and consistently create change in other areas, right now, we have a confidence and also a greater bandwidth to begin to dive into the deeper, more kind of stuck habits. so but I think it’s important to have these conversations and speak to the honesty of it, because nothing stops a transformation journey right then in high expectation, then waiting to feel inspired or feel differently. And I share this often. If I wait it to be comfortable speaking publicly on these topics, there would be no books, there would be no holistic psychologist. Because even now, to this day, I have an inner child who, while I think I have some things that I might want to share with people, I’m convinced right then, unless I say it in the most polished, perfect way, right that you don’t want to hear from me.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:39:36  So being public and speaking right? If I wait it to be comfortable in doing all of this again, nothing. That is now what I feel like a guiding light, a passion, a purpose of my why that will continue with me well into the future. If not until I’m done here on this earthly journey. I would not be living into any of that if I was waiting for it to be easy, for me to be comfortable, for me to have confidence. But what I was building again behind the scenes is I was rebuilding a trust in myself that said, you can do something hard, you can do it publicly, you can hear people’s opinions. I have moments where, like, we’re both joking about, I do spiral. I do know where to find all of the things that right kind of validate, not the way I want to be seen or how I who I believe myself to be. All of that exist, but I am right able to navigate it a bit differently. And when I’m falling back into old habits, which I still do right, I have an awareness that I can grab on to.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:40:36  I have a reminder of how much, maybe better, I feel with, say, like boundaries and distance and and then I’m able to kind of return to habits that help me feel and operate and do the things that are important to me to do.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:49  So. One of the things I think a lot about is in our culture that has become very psychological. I think about where are we sort of pathologies using normal human emotion or how we actually are. So I want to give a couple of examples to lay out my point. So the first is in your book, you describe being a young person who was filled with energy. Just always go, go, go go go. And you filled up your schedule and you are always bouncing and jumping around. And there’s a way to view that as well. That was a response to something happening in your environment where you didn’t feel safe enough to sit still. There’s also a way of framing that, like that’s part of your essence a little bit to or to take a later example, you just mentioned showing yourself in public, putting it out there.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:43  I think most everybody is going to be somewhat nervous about taking something personal and putting it out to the world and saying, hey, what do you think about this now? Again, that’s a normal human one, but it may be Amplified by certain things that happened to us in the past. How do you think about that question?

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:42:03  I’m kind of shaking my head because I think what I’m hearing is a version of the chicken or the egg nature nurture type, right? Is there an intrinsic essence that an absence of out there environment, something that’s not me right expresses itself undeniably and or right? Is all of the influence coming from out there right to then impact or influence how one is expressed and right? I think we can kind of spin our wheels to date and kind of find our way back to what is the original state right out there in here. And I kind of believe it’s both. I’ve, I’ve come to believe based on, you know, science and research and what I’ve observed in my own self and other people’s patterns.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:42:53  Is that an epigenetics even. Right, which is the science of that connection, right. How individual genetics, so to speak, change based on environmental impact. So my response is that it’s a bit of both, right. We each have our own kind of if we want to talk in terms of energy or footprint or, you know, fingerprints like our unique signature. I of of the belief as science kind of affirms. Right. We live in an energetic universe. So the signature I’m always kind of landing on in my head is I’m a certain vibration and energy, right. That would impact the environment, the physical environment in a different way, though I am in interaction with that physical environment. So I do think and what confuses this question for a lot of us, meaning we see the patterns passed through our families, the cycles that many of us are now determined to break. We see a similarity that can confuse for inherent intrinsic right? Genetic. Because we see the same patterns in our family, we have the same personality characteristics, we have the same energetic expression.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:44:05  So it can seem on the surface, oh well, that’s because right, intrinsically we share the same percentage of genetics. So this is that genetics in expression. But as I’ve been hopefully kind of communicating and describing all along is we now understand that even that right familial energy that very much looks like the cycles that are genetically passed on were impacted again, epigenetics by the environment. So I think it’s we’re both we’re a walking interaction expression, whether we’re interacting with other human beings or whether we’re interacting with just the natural world around us. I do think that, right, we have kind of the things that make us us that have also been in connection or operation with the environments that have been unique to us or our families or even our cultures. Really.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:50  Right. I don’t think there’s any way to unwind it. I don’t think there’s any I mean, it’s that’s why I said earlier like tidy narratives of like, well, I’m this way because my dad was that way. I’m like, well, okay, hang on.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:59  There’s about a thousand other factors woven in there. I think what I’m pointing to more is how I choose to frame something says a lot about how I view it. So if I view my fear of public speaking as, you know what, everybody feels a little bit afraid. By public speaking, I’m like everybody else versus I say, oh, I am kind of effed up from this thing in the past. And now that’s why this is really hard for me. And again, I don’t think I’m not asking for clear answers here. I’m just asking for how you think about when it’s helpful to take on these ideas of what happened, impacted us, and when is it helpful to go? Well, that’s being human.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:45:41  That’s an interesting kind of lever. It’s kind of how I’m thinking, right? When is it that challenging and pushing our edge and growing into or seeing an opportunity is evolving or growing, versus when is it maybe pushing us into stress or miss misalignment? And I think that it’s kind of individual for for each of us, kind of determining how then am I experiencing the thing in which I’m doing what is driving it right? If it’s something that’s important, right? Like, so what’s driving, you know, me to continue to public speak or putting myself in an environment that’s slightly uncomfortable is what’s driving it for me, is the value of wanting to impart information to someone else that they could then gain benefit from it.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:46:27  Right. That’s not to say, though, and it’s not to say that I don’t do, which I do. I can try to right, manipulate and make an environment where I’m speaking publicly more comfortable. Right. So presentations with slides or conversations with another human versus keynote speaking. Right. Less less comfortable. So we can then curate our space. Not to say that there’s not some level of discomfort, but I can modify right what I’m doing individually, so I can do it in a way where the stress isn’t overwhelming or taking away, right or misaligned with me. Now, with the action I want to take or with the role I want to take. So I think it’s like the process of finding where our edge is, determining how comfortable we are with tolerating the discomfort of getting to our edge or stepping over our edge, and then getting really clear on what is compelling us into that, into starting or maintaining that action at all. You heard me right. It was. It was me. It was my desires.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:47:24  Right? What’s important to me? The right. I wasn’t saying, oh, well, I’m doing this for someone else or for prestige or for, you know, a perception how someone might view me and I think those then that is giving me the permission to say, okay, well, this is important enough to continue to push that edge. I’m not kind of putting a round peg in a square hole or square peg, round hole, whatever the statement is. But I think it’s our own kind of journey of reconnecting with ourselves, our values, our edges, resourcing ourselves so that if something is a bit uncomfortable for us now, but we want to grow into that space. So and similarly, I’m having the same thing, right? Because I can maybe speak publicly like what kind of speaking do I want to do? Is it important for me to push myself into the edge of learning how to do a keynote, or is that maybe just not me? Right in my energy is going to be expressed in in conversation or in more teaching moments.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:48:19  So it’s interesting you bring this question because I’m kind of feeling my way into. Right, or is that just a cop out? And really that’s who I am. And I’m kind of feeling like, no, I think what we’re talking about here is exactly what I’m feeling into, which is something about my energy. Love’s a what I’m calling a co-create, or what I experience as a co-creation, right where I’m teaching concepts or I’m communicating with someone else. And the thing takes on a life of its own because I’ve interacted with the ideas and the slides. Are you talking? Different then. So funny I’m living into. I think this decision. I’m kind of talking my way through, I guess, how I’m making it. Because it might come right where it’s like. That’s not. That’s just not an uncomfortable edge for me. That maybe isn’t how I am best expressed. And so that might not be then an edge you see me push into while I still could push into right the edges that come along with this version of public life.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:14  I love that whole description because it describes the fact that we just it’s hard to figure out, right? Like, you know, we do our best to try and go, all right. I think it’s it’s just not clear. And I love the fact that you’re, you’re honest about how it’s not that clear because it’s just very helpful for everyone to know that none of us really have it all figured out. Right? I’m a far more emotionally and mentally healthy person than I used to be. Far more. And life just keeps presenting new challenges. As soon as you’re like, okay, something else shows up. So I want to move on to something else here, which is shame. Shame is one of those things that I have seen in certain cases, be one of the most intractable, non-responsive. Like it? It seems like for some people it moves and I see other people where it just feels like it just still has them in their grip. And I’m curious what you think are some of the biggest things in helping us move forward with shame.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:27  And then I’d love to talk specifically about a practice you have in the book about stopping this shame cycle.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:50:33  So for me, shame was one of those immovable pieces because I simply was not fully aware of how baked in shame was to the identity. Me who I came to know I was right, I was not someone let me word it this way. Maybe it’s a bit clearer. I’m not someone who kind of like on the daily or weekly even was aware of traditionally. I think those shameful moments right where we feel embarrassed or we feel like, you know, left out or like shamed by someone or ashamed of ourselves when learning and hearing right about what shame is and could be. I didn’t relate to very many if, if, if any of those moments. So for a very long time, right. I would have never been like, oh gosh, shame is so foundational to who I am as I’ve come to discover that it is because for me, right? Shame, like I said, became baked.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:51:26  I got so good at determining, as we all do, right based on direct or indirect things that are said to us, ways that we were treated or not treated in childhood. We become very attuned to how others are experiencing us. And shame is a natural human emotion evolutionarily that we will all feel when we are getting sent signals that we are being rejected or excluded or abandoned or pushed out simply if we want to talk in evolutionary terms of the group. Right. So shame is a socially binding emotion and understanding that all of us humans, especially us in infants and in childhood, we need to be a part of the group. We are safest. Even adults are safest in a group of individuals. So shame, right? In those moments where we’re not feeling belonged or connected and we, you know, maybe we have kind of the somatic experience of our cheeks blush and we kind of like try to divert our eyes and kind of hide. Sometimes we make ourselves actually physically smaller because we feel ashamed. We want to, like, shrink back into the wall behind us.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:52:30  Right. Those moments are very valuable because they teach us right what we need to do more or less of to avoid being excluded or avoid or to keep ourselves connected with safety. And so, as we will all do, we’re very attuned in childhood. We learn. And some of us, like myself, I got so good at so quickly determining what granted me attention and validation from my parents and childhood, and I got very quickly clear on what did it right, things that they just weren’t traditionally interested in, you know, celebrating things that maybe I was interested in but didn’t map on to a more traditional version of success. Right. So that shame. And then I got very savvy. I only presented myself in the way that would maintain the accolades, the validation. So shame for a lot of us isn’t the moments where we’re like, oh, I feel ashamed sometimes. Shame was such a part of the construction of all of the parts that we hide or don’t show, even the emotions that are natural in human.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:53:34  But again, if in childhood any emotional displays or sadness were told not to be dramatic or anger is dangerous and, you know, so for all these reasons, we can become very shameful about natural aspects of our human experience. Because what shame does and the message that shame is sending, unlike guilt, which is I feel badly about something I’ve done. Shame gets attached to our identity. I feel badly about who I am. And again, shame forms in our childhood environment for most of us, because when a parent, for whatever reason, wasn’t physically present or emotionally, wasn’t able to be attuned when they weren’t able to show up to meet our needs. The only way that developmentally, our nervous system and our mind. Right? We couldn’t zoom out, understand all of the complexities about being an adult and all of the reasons why they weren’t able our parents to care for us in the way that we need it. We didn’t have the developmental understanding, and also in a childhood where we literally can’t pack a bag and leave and go to a new home, it is of great benefit to land on an explanation that involves us, meaning we become the cause of our unmet needs, meaning we begin to assign whatever it is us being.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:54:52  Too much or too little of whatever it was right becomes then the cause of our parents inability to meet our needs. So we become unworthy, unlovable, right? Whatever it is, we are the cause of the lack of connection, the lack of safety, the lack of support that we need. And then we write. We develop all of these based in the lived experience, real theories of why? Oh well, because I was too much showing emotions. Or for me, I didn’t get a straight A and then we try to hide all these shameful parts. Yet for many of us, they drive our identity. They drive our reactions. Shame keeps us disconnected from our self. It’s quite literally an emotional, a nervous system driven state of shut down where we become less and less connected to our body, to ourselves, to the energy that allows us to express ourselves or defend ourselves when we need it. So the consequences then of shame become very long lasting and pervasive. But again, oftentimes it grows in a childhood where there are unmet needs, where we didn’t have the ability to separate out the fact that we were never the cause of someone else’s actions.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:56:04  And again, for some of us, it’s so baked into just how we show up that we’re not even aware that for a lot of us, it’s shame that’s driving those habits.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:13  So how do we begin to unwind it?

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:56:17  So beginning right to unwind. Shame is beginning to acknowledge the moments where shame could be driving our actions right where we most often. Right where we become shameful of ourselves. Right where we begin to speak to our self in shaming ways to treat ourselves in shaming ways to shrink back in action as opposed to speak out. So all change will happen when first we see ourself in action of that old shame driven habit, right? So in real time, where I’m starting to spiral, shaming myself in my mind or right, I find myself wanting to speak up and say something, but I’m thinking about all the reasons, right? Why they’re going, I’m gonna be rejected or shamed if I, you know, share my feelings or share my real thought. And then pausing in action in those moments.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:57:10  Right. If our body is beginning to kind of spiral into shame as well, our heart is beginning to race, right? Maybe we’re starting to actually feel shut down. Feel numb. Right. We might want to shake some energy back into our system. And then we want to show up right in, in action. We want to express ourself, right. Do the thing that shame is essentially telling us to avoid doing. And then all of this though, happens when we become. Oftentimes outside of those acute moments. Right. Clear. Right. What is it that I have learned was bad, was unworthy not to express for some of us, right. It’s all feeling, certain feelings, some aspects of right. My self-expression when I’m too loud or when I’m, you know, so we can understand, I think, outside of those acute moments. And then in those moments, we really do want to tune in first to what’s happening in our body. Because if we go too far, right.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:58:07  Too stressed out, too overwhelmed, we’re going to rely back on those old shameful habits which end up only compounding then the shame we’re feeling.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:15  So how do we stop a shame cycle?

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:58:18  So the shame cycle is again, knowing the points of the cycle, right? Knowing those markers, those moments that activate our shame, the spiraling thoughts, the racing heart’s right, the desire to run away, kind of. All of those distancing things that often we will do when we are feeling shameful. Beginning to see right the pattern. Is it feedback? Is it even just self-expression? Sometimes it’s not even absence of someone saying anything to us. It’s a moment where we feel shameful about having a need, wanting to express a need, having an emotion, having an opinion. So right. Getting clear. Noticing in those moments where we’re becoming reactive. When the shame spiral begins. So that we can note. Right. If we’re going into a moment where feedback or self-expression is part of what we want to see happening, so we feel armed and ready that we could begin the spiral, then knowing again that the spiral will involve somatic actions, our body will begin to become stressed.

Dr. Nicole LePera 00:59:16  The quickening of our heart and the tension in our muscles and the quickening of our breath. We want to slow down, right? If we’re at the last stop, though, of shame and we’re not necessarily feeling a quickness, we’re feeling numb. We’re holding our breath. We don’t have any energy right then, as opposed to slowing movement, we want to begin to safely kind of re initiate or reengage movement so slowly, maybe doing some circles with our wrist or our feet. slow walking, slow stretching, kind of we need to get our body moving again safely so that for those of us right, who when we are shameful, we shut down. We don’t speak up when we need to say something in defense of ourself, or when we need to remove ourself. Right? To do that, we need to stimulate, safely stimulate the energy to do that. So again, when energy is moving quickly and tension is amplified, a great way to remind ourselves as we want to slow movement, slow energy, release tension.

Dr. Nicole LePera 01:00:22  If we’re on the other end again, we’re feeling cold, numb, detached out of body right then we want to. As opposed to slowing. We want to begin to slowly stimulate. Add action back. Right. Stop holding our breath. Begin to allow our our body to breathe. Right beginning to allow again movement and energy to safely activate. So that then, if what we need to do to interrupt the shame cycle is to say or do something in action, right? We have energy, but it begins with noticing the cycle in real time, then noticing when it’s starting to go into that shame spiral portion, pausing, slowing, or moving depending on what we need to have access to, and then showing up again in not shameful way.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:09  You end the book talking about resilience, and you say that resilience is not toughness, not the capacity to soldier through, not the absence of pain. It is our capacity to stay present in our emotions so we can adapt to our changing circumstances. Leave us with a couple of words about resilience.

Dr. Nicole LePera 01:01:30  Again, I think resilience is one of those words that thankfully it’s being talked a lot about. However, I think sometimes that there’s a little bit of misconception, perhaps hopeful, hopeful idea of what resilience really looks like and feels like, because sometimes I have the idea that some of us hopefully wish for resilience to mean life becomes easy breezy, never really having our feathers ruffled or having right emotional moments. And the reality is, resilience is actually expanding our capacity to feel more emotion, to feel more types of emotion. Right? Not cutting ourselves off and determining that some emotions just, you know, are too uncomfortable or too inappropriate to feel really allowing in the whole spectrum of human emotion, and also living in the reality that human emotions will always be a part of our lived experience. We need them to be there. What gives us life there? What sends us sometimes very important information about how we’re experiencing our current environment. So understanding first again what the expectation is, right? What is the point of doing all of this work? If you believe the point is to get to a place right where you’re never upset or bothered again, or where you only feel calm or okay, then that’s not going to be exactly where this journey takes you to.

Dr. Nicole LePera 01:03:01  The journey will take you to again, a life that still is uncomfortable, still has moments of conflict or disagreement. However, it has life in it, right? It has all of the different human emotions. It has the ability to process difficult human emotions, to hold space for different opinions, different emotions around a certain experience, to learn how to truly connect and collaborate and feel intimately close to other people. So that’s what resilience. And again, if that is not if it is not yet clear. Resilience isn’t something that we just wish for in our mind or affirm our way to resilience is quite literally all of the actions that we’ve been speaking about over the duration of this podcast. And of course, you’ll read about in the new book, as and or in all of the work that I talk about is the daily action of showing up in new ways, right? Not relying on those old ways that we’ve learned to cope, the quickest way to ease the discomfort as fast as possible, but to expand our capacity to be present to to discomfort because discomfort, the hormones, the energy, right.

Dr. Nicole LePera 01:04:11  Whatever it is that really makes up all of these emotional experiences, thankfully, it goes away. Our body always wants to go back into what we say homeostasis or balance. It wants to Stabilize neurochemicals and hormones, right? A nervous system that’s activated once to become deactivated and calmed down. Right. So we do. Eventually, our body always wants us to kind of be balanced and even. And we need to. Right. See what’s gotten in our way. What’s keeping us stuck, what’s keeping us not kind of completing our stress cycle cycle, or not being present to any of our emotions because we haven’t learned how or we feel that, or have been taught that emotions are to be avoided and to actually change our relationship with our whole body. Our emotions include it so that we can be more and more present, more and more able over time, more and more responsive again to emotions that will always be a part of our human experience.

Eric Zimmer 01:05:14  I think that is a beautiful place to wrap up. You and I are going to continue talking in the post-show conversation, where you’re going to lead us through a practice and imaginative practice where of of connecting to the inner child.

Eric Zimmer 01:05:28  Listeners, if you’d like access to that practice, you’d like ad free episodes. If you’d like to support the show, which is very important, you can get all of that by going to one you feed net. Nicole, thank you so much. It’s always a pleasure to have you on.

Dr. Nicole LePera 01:05:44  It’s always a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me back again, Eric.

Eric Zimmer 01:05:48  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.

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Episode Transcript:

Marisa 00:00:00  I don’t know that we ever reach a point in life where it’s like, okay, I’m healed. Period. All good. See you guys later. I think it’s more like the guy or girl who played sports in high school and, you know, got the bad knee injury. And when it rains, even though they’re 50, like, the knee still feels a little funny. Like, I think that’s what it is with the emotional stuff. And so if you can think about it like that, it makes it a little bit easier to see it coming because it’s coming.

Chris Forbes 00:00:37  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do, we think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

Chris Forbes 00:01:04  But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:21  Most of us can tolerate a lot if we believe it’s going to end soon, but some of the hardest seasons in life are the ones that don’t come with a clear diagnosis, a clean timeline, or any real sense of when things might get better. In this conversation, Marisa, Renee, Lee and I talk about what it means to live inside uncertainty without letting it swallow you. We talk about illness, grief, pain, and the emotional toll of not knowing what comes next. But we also talk about hope not as blind optimism, but as a practice as something you choose and build, even when life is not giving you much to work with. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. I’m Marisa. Welcome to the show.

Marisa 00:02:11  Hi, Eric. Thank you for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:13  I’m really happy to have you on to discuss your book called waiting for Dawn living with uncertainty. And I think uncertainty is a hot topic right now. There is a lot of it out there. So I think this is going to be a really beneficial episode. But before we get to that, we’ll start the way we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you and your life, and in the work that you do.

Marisa 00:03:07  Oh, I love that. When you started, I was like, what? Where is this parable going? And before you even got through it, the word that popped into my mind was love, my son. He’s four and a half. He has this habit of asking about your favorite things. You know, what’s your favorite color? What’s your favorite place to go? What’s your favorite food? And lately he started asking like, what are some of your favorite words? Very, very specific question. And I’ve told him, you know, my favorite word is love. Because if we can, you know, stay focused on love, you know, loving ourselves, loving each other, loving strangers out in the world. It just makes it a lot easier to make decisions, which is a long answer for a four and a half year old. But that is that is the truth. So when I think about what I feed, it is all rooted in love. Like across my family, my friends, community, career that is my central core value and the wolf that I always want to win.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:05  That’s a beautiful answer. And what a great thing to have somebody asking you about your favorite things all the time. Like, we should do more of that. Like maybe you and I should just do favorites back and forth for the rest of this episode. There’s a poem out there I think it’s by Rosemarie Hautala. Trauma. I don’t know if you know her, but you would love her poetry. It’s something like, is this the path of love? And it’s a great poem about, like, every day. How do we, you know, am I on the path of love? You know, it’s very good.

Marisa 00:04:33  So I’ll have to check that out. Okay.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:35  She’s a great poet. She’s been a guest a couple of times. And I think you would really like her work. Based on what I know of you, what you do, like. And your book, which let’s jump into. So your book is, as I said, waiting for dawn, living with uncertainty. And in it you walk through a season in your life where a lot changes.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:55  Tell me about it.

Marisa 00:04:56  Yeah. And I, I should share that I’m technically still in this season a little bit. I had a book come out in 2022 called Grief is Love. And immediately after Grief is Love came out. You know, I sort of thought I was gonna ride off into the sunset with our newly adopted baby and, you know, successful best selling book and all would be well. And instead, my mother in law, who we have a complicated relationship with, was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. And we found ourselves, you know, navigating caretaking from a distance. And it was also just traumatizing for me because it was the same thing that I lost my mom to as my mother in law was dying. One of my cousins went missing and was later found murdered by her husband. And a couple of months after that, I got Covid for the first time and I should share, you know, I was I was out in the world. I had done book tours, I traveled, I went to the Beyonce concert.

Marisa 00:05:59  My kid was in school, you know, I wasn’t, of course, like I didn’t want to get Covid, but I wasn’t like trying to avoid it in any significant sort of way and managed to not get it until 2024. And it never left. I got sick and actually got sicker over the course of the following six months. You know, asthma for the first time in my life at 41. At one point, my larynx was over 70% blocked. And so like, air just was not circulating properly in my body at all. I had to, like, very carefully calculate the amount of steps that I would take around my house, you know, upstairs and downstairs. It was it was too much for me to just walk comfortably through my own home. Some days all I would do was get my son ready for school, get him to school, come home, spend hours in bed before I could even think about taking a shower. That’s how limited my energy was. Super low blood pressure and just all sorts of pain and dysfunction throughout my body as a result of that virus.

Marisa 00:07:08  And a couple months in, I decided I was going to write about it and share what it’s like going from and I might even say overly able person to someone who is dealing with a disability and a lot of uncertainty. And through that process, waiting for Dawn was born. I would say it’s it’s not a book about long Covid. It’s really a book about, you know, how you can live well in the midst of uncertainty of any kind. And so the biggest theme in it is actually hope.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:43  Yeah, I think uncertainty is a really important topic and I found a lot in it valuable. I was hired to work with a group of people who have something called SIDs. It is a nerve condition where the myelin sheathing on your nerves basically erodes. Oh, but there are people that are facing similar to what you did, just a sudden amount of uncertainty. They don’t know day to day what their symptoms are going to be like. They don’t know what the progression is going to be. They live in uncertainty all of the time.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:12  And so reading your book definitely also has helped me with the way I want to work with those people as well.

Marisa 00:08:19  So glad.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:20  Yeah. Talk about the uncertainty element of it in particular. Like so we know it it sucks level, right? Yeah. There’s all the physical discomfort and all that. But talk about the toll that the uncertainty of it takes and what that feels like.

Marisa 00:08:35  Yeah. So I mean, I’ll be honest, for the first few months I was I was so deep in the land of denial, Erik, because the last thing that I wanted wasn’t to have something wrong with my body. You know, I knew there was something wrong with my body. I wasn’t completely delusional, but the last thing that I wanted was to have something wrong with my body, that there was no clear sort of treatment plan around, no, like specific guidelines or timelines or next steps or anything, you know, to have this thing that is wrong, that, you know, even now, a few years later, a lot of doctors still don’t know what to do with patients when they show up with all of these symptoms that fall into the category of long Covid.

Marisa 00:09:17  And so I tried to act like I didn’t have long Covid, you know, like, oh, it’s just a bad headache. Or, you know, it’s just this it’s just that until I got so sick and, you know, was overseas teaching, writing retreat in Greece and I couldn’t breathe. And, you know, being on the other side of the world, away from my family and incredibly sick and unable to take care of myself like that was the wake up call. And I realized when I came home that like, yes, what I was dealing with was riddled with uncertainty, which in the book I define uncertainty as a period of stress and or overwhelm related to the unknown. But the only way that we make our way through uncertainty is by being honest about what it is. And it was super stressful to have to say, you know, I don’t know what medications I need. I don’t even know what treatments are available out there, if any exist. You know, I don’t know how long I’m going to be in pain.

Marisa 00:10:17  I don’t know how long my mind is going to continue to function in this way, and that the mental and the cognitive pieces of it were probably some of the hardest for me. Like, I am someone who my entire life I took for granted my ability to be a fast processor, to be able to synthesize and, you know, regurgitate information and make decisions quickly and speak in front of people and, you know, just do all of these things that, thankfully, had always come naturally to me. And suddenly they were gone, you know, like, I would leave my car door open overnight, I’d be in a presentation with a client and say, you know, I want to talk to you about three things. And in the middle of things, one thing, two would just disappear. I would look for random like kitchen items in just the wrong places, like sugar and the refrigerator. Like, who keeps sugar in the refrigerator? That’s actually not a thing. and so it takes a toll.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:13  I seem to keep lots of things in the freezer that don’t belong there. I’m like.

Marisa 00:11:17  Like what? Now I want to know.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:18  The biggest one is like, this cup. I have this cup. And I love to put iced tea in it. And you’d think I would catch on after about the first time, but I’ll be like, where is the lid? I’ll go wandering around the house looking for the lid. Well, the lid is in the freezer because I took it off to to put it in.

Marisa 00:11:32  There, putting ice in there or whatever.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:34  Yeah, but to be honest, there are there are other things that end up in the freezer. It’s one of my now I’m like, if I can’t find something, it’s like, check this thing. Yeah, check the freezer. So talk to me now about where you are with long Covid. You and I have. We had a little conversation ahead of time. You’re in a slightly different place, but what I’d love to know is have you described that but also describe the uncertainty aspect of it and how that feels today? Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:02  Given where you are.

Marisa 00:12:03  So the uncertainty aspect of it, I’ll say, feels a lot less overwhelming. when I came back from Greece in the fall of 2024, the only thing that I had was a commitment to myself that I would not be this sick and in this much pain forever. But I had no I had no plan. I had no strategy beyond, you know, you need to put your client strategist hat on and, like, figure this out and leverage every available resource at your disposal. But I didn’t really have a plan because like most people, I didn’t know anything about long Covid. Whereas today, you know, two years later, I have been the entire time working with this Amazing specialist out of Mount Sinai who is a virus specialist. Like that is like what she does. And she learned a lot about long Covid from her work with HIV and Aids, actually. And so she has been a phenomenal partner. And because of her and all of the things that she has had me do, you know, I’m still taking handfuls of pills twice a day.

Marisa 00:13:13  I still have to get a lot of rest. I have not been able to exercise properly in two years, but I’m like starting to do a little bit of strengthening and walking more, which is great breathwork every single day, which cured the asthma, thankfully. And the biggest thing that has changed just in the last 4 to 6 weeks, she has been following the research around GLP one and long Covid and she put me on just like a very, very low dose. You know, you can barely see the medicine in the syringe of compound and within 48 hours, I noticed a difference. Like, my brain was more clear. I felt like, you know, my sharpness had returned. I had more energy. I was sleeping better. Like, everything improved that quickly. And that has been, like, such a good reminder that if you just if you commit to believing that things will get better, and then you take steps to get there, like it will come together. And that’s one of the big messages that I want people to take away from this book.

Marisa 00:14:19  Like when you don’t know what’s next. You just have to be committed to figuring it out and doing whatever you have to do to get to where you’re trying to go.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:48  Did you feel that way before you started seeing significant improvement?

Marisa 00:14:53  No. You know what I was doing before I started seeing significant improvement? I was doing a thing that in my grief work, I would always tell people not to do, but I hadn’t related it to this period of uncertainty. And that’s, you know, after somebody loses someone they love, they often talk about like, I just want to get myself back. You know, like, I just want to feel like Marisa again. I just want to feel like Eric again, you know, before this defining loss. Right? And you’re not going back. Marisa is different. Like the day that my mom died. February 28th, 2008. 5:37 p.m.. Like, I became a different person, like it or not. And I kept actively comparing my long Covid sickest.

Marisa 00:15:36  Can barely walk around my house self to old Marisa, who you know, could run around the house with like a two year old attached to her limbs on a work call, making dinner all at the same time. You know, like. And it’s like. No. Like you’re a different person. And there are a lot of differences and changes that I’m super grateful for that I can see now. You know, I am more patient. I am more self compassionate. I am more hopeful and even more joyful in a lot of ways. But I only am able to see those things because I know that I shouldn’t be comparing myself to, you know, healthy. Marisa, I should be saying, what can I do this month that I couldn’t do a month ago? And looking at progress that way, and once I made that switch, and that switch was thanks to a woman who I became friends with, she was following me on Instagram because she had long Covid and my grief work had been helping her.

Marisa 00:16:33  And so when I shared that, you know, I was diagnosed with long Covid, she reached out. She was the person who connected me to my doctor, and she’s been like my long Covid Sherpa mentor type person. And she was like, you need to stop. And I was like, oh, right, I know better. Why am I doing this?

Eric Zimmer 00:16:50  And how when you’re in the midst of an uncertainty like that, do you stop from telling yourself the worst case stories? Because that tends to be what we do, right? If you add uncertainty with physically feeling bad, like that is a concoction that it will stir up the worst case scenario. So how did you work with that?

Marisa 00:17:12  Well, first of all, it took me a while. And I will add, in retrospect, I should have probably been on some low dose antidepressant. You know, that period from like August of 2024 until January, February of 2025 was just I mean, it was just awful. Like I was so sick.

Marisa 00:17:34  You know, I live in the Hudson Valley. It was dark and winter and cold, and I just I felt like I had nothing, you know, like no life. And it was so miserable. And I was in pain. And in my case, in addition to, like recognizing that there are people who have long Covid in an even more debilitating way than how I was feeling, I also had this story in the back of my mind from my own childhood. When I was 13, my mom got sick. She was 37. She never got better. She just progressively got worse. Three and a half years later, we learned she had multiple sclerosis, at which point the disease had already done damage to her brain. And then, you know, it was probably like 7 or 8 years after that, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she was dead at 49. And so, you know, like when that’s your childhood story, you can’t help but feel like, oh, well, maybe that’s where this is all headed.

Marisa 00:18:30  And I just had to be really disciplined and say, like, you’re not going to plant those seeds. You have to believe that, yes, your story and her story are intricately connected, of course, but your story is not her story like you have to commit to writing whatever your story is meant to be, and then getting whatever help you need to make it happen. It’s not easy.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:54  And in the case of your mom, write with a condition that looks progressive in a certain direction. Did you see your mom do anything, or did you observe anything that helps in that case, because you’re describing hope as like things are going to get better, but there’s a lot of things in life that don’t get better. They get worse, you know? Yeah. And so within that context, how would you think about that? Like you had the ability, like you kept hoping that it would you would find a way. And I think hope is powerful. But for example, we spent six years with my wife’s mother who had dementia and there was no yeah, there was no like, well, we believe it’s going to get better.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:35  We had hope in certain things, but it wasn’t that.

Marisa 00:19:38  Yeah, yeah. No, that’s a really great, great question. with my mom. The thing that she always held on to was finding a way to live as well as possible. No matter what the circumstances were. And so she and I’m very grateful for this. She was never like, you know, praying for a miracle. I come from a very religious family, but like she was, she was going to keep it real, at least with me. And that was my way of coping as well. And so, you know, we could have really hard, honest conversations. And the way that hope manifested for her was more in terms of like, you know, I want to make sure that I die at home. Like, I don’t want to die in a hospital, hooked up to a bunch of machines. I don’t want you guys to have to make those types of decisions around my end of life. And like, my hope is that when the time comes and like, I can’t speak for myself, that like you will speak for me and like I was able to do that for her on the day that she died in my childhood home that my dad still lives in.

Marisa 00:20:40  And it was around things like we’re going to have as much fun as possible for however much time is left. So the year that she died, I turned 25 and my dad turned 50, and our birthdays are a couple of days apart. And so she had been planning like a joint surprise birthday party for us. It didn’t end up happening because she was septic and in the hospital like.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:03  Come on, mom, pull it together. I mean, she.

Speaker 4 00:21:06  Just like she was so determined.

Marisa 00:21:08  I have to.

Speaker 4 00:21:09  Tell you, I still.

Marisa 00:21:10  Have somewhere in this house today. She had these, like, custom candy bars made, with like, little snippets of information about me and my dad on them because she was like, oh, yeah, we’re definitely having this party. And I finally had to be like, mom. Like, look, look around. Like, we’re in the ICU. We’re not having this party.

Speaker 4 00:21:28  Like. But a couple.

Marisa 00:21:30  Weeks later, we did have a party for her 49th birthday.

Marisa 00:21:33  And let me tell you, all those church ladies that said they didn’t drink, they did drink, they did drink. They drank a lot. It was a brunch too, and I ran out of booze. I’ve never run out of booze at a party before, but when church ladies lie like it just it is what it is.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:47  Well, that’s very good to know. You know, something that makes me think along those lines is it’s something you talk about very early in the book. You talk about two layers of self, right? Identity and essence. And it sounds to me like maybe your mother found the way to to hold on to her essence. Say more about that. Yeah.

Marisa 00:22:07  So I really struggled with long Covid in regard to the loss of my like, intelligence and quick thinking. You know, like I said, it was something that I’ve taken for granted and I didn’t realize I took it for granted until it just disappeared one day. And, you know, it’s also what I’ve built my career around.

Marisa 00:22:30  And so I had a really hard time when suddenly my brain just didn’t work the way I was used to working for my entire life. And I. struggled with the idea that like, oh, I’m like, not super smart right now. And that feels uncomfortable to me because I’ve never had that happen before. I didn’t like that. I was so attached to intelligence and like, you know, it also took the loss of it to realize the attachment. And so I started thinking about, you know, what? What really is identity like? What is it all about? And so, yes, it is how we see ourselves in a bit of a more superficial sense, like smart, thin, pretty, whatever. But what really matters to me, and I know part of why this matters to me is because I saw, you know, my mom at her end of life. And like, what was really important. I care about what people are going to say at my funeral. Like, like the words that people use to describe you in your eulogy like that is your essence.

Marisa 00:23:36  Like they are the things about you that will not change. Like my mom was a joyful person. The day that we ended up having her funeral, it was supposed to be just like a random ice cream party at our house because she loves ice cream. And so, you know, some of these other ladies were like, oh, you know, your birthday was two weeks ago, but we’re gonna throw you this ice cream party just for fun. Because, like, that’s just that’s who she was. She was incredibly, incredibly generous. She would give and do anything for anyone all the time. You know, again, the birthday party that she thought she was going to throw and she was like, literally on her deathbed. and I want people to think more about essence and, like, character over these kind of more external markers of identity, because when life just completely falls apart, it is those like those deeper things that are going to get you through.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:31  It’s interesting you bring up the funeral piece in my book.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:35  I have a whole section on like working with values, and that’s one great way of figuring those out, is to imagine people at your funeral. What would you want them to be saying about you as a as a way of orienting towards what’s most important?

Marisa 00:24:49  Yeah, for me, like that is how you get at what really matters. I think it makes it easier to make decisions in day to day life, but it especially makes it easier to make decisions and figure out like how to move forward when life is really hard.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:26  Let’s talk about pain. You’ve got a chapter in the book on pain. Share whatever you would like about that section. You talk about suffering versus pain. You bring up a few different things.

Marisa 00:25:38  So I had a mom who was sick from the time I was 13, and I felt like that meant I had an understanding for, you know, what it must be like to live in pain, to live with a disability, all of these different things. And I was wrong.

Marisa 00:25:53  And I didn’t realize I was wrong until I found myself in this place where I was in horrible pain every single day. Like I, I have yet to experience a day in the last two years where I haven’t woken up in pain at some level, sometimes excruciating, sometimes more moderate. Which is the case right now, thankfully. And it changes. You like having to figure out how to function and be in the world. And, you know, ideally I also care about like being a good, useful person in the world and being a good mom. And, you know, being a mostly patient spouse, you know, all the things. but it’s really hard because it changes you like it changes your personality. It changes your capacity for patience, your capacity for thinking like for empathy sometimes, like it’s it’s a really hard way to live. And what I realized and I, I had reflected on this parable previously, it’s the Buddhist parable of like suffering as like the two arrows, you know, the first arrow that hits like that, that’s pain, you know? And we’re all going to encounter pain in this life, that just statement of fact.

Marisa 00:27:10  Unfortunately, the second arrow is you deciding you’re not going to do anything about that first arrow. You’re just going to keep walking around with an arrow in your chest that is suffering. And I knew that I had to find as many avenues as possible to pain management in order to live as well as possible. With long Covid like, I had to get creative. I had to get strategic patient, you know, more open to trying different types of things because I didn’t want to choose suffering. Like I knew I wasn’t going to just completely erase the pain overnight. And I still haven’t completely erase the pain, but by, you know, being open to all the different things that could help me. And I’m talking everything from there is a drug called low dose naltrexone that’s like technically a super, super, super low dose form of Narcan, which sounded scary. And I was like, I don’t know if I want to take that, but I don’t want to be in pain unnecessarily. So you know what? You take it.

Marisa 00:28:09  I don’t like needles. My husband gives me a shot once a week now and I just whatever like it helps. And so I do it eMDR therapy because I had and I still have some probably concerns just the right word that just decades of dealing with traumatic life events and that stress on the body. I think that probably contributed to me getting long Covid. And so, you know, I want to make sure that I deal with those things as well. And once I was strong enough to do therapy, I started doing that. I think people, when they are in pain, you know, if you’re in pain and you’re listening to this, I want to encourage you to be patient with yourself and to also be just so incredibly compassionate with yourself, because if you are able to access that compassion, it will allow you to consider things that previously would have been like, oh yeah, no, I don’t want to take that. I don’t want to do that or whatever.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:06  With the pain. There were things that you did that helped modulate the pain down, but as you said, you still have some amount of it.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:14  You just mentioned being compassionate to yourself. What other things did you find you could say to yourself that made it? I’m not going to say better, because that’s not the right word. That made it more manageable.

Marisa 00:29:27  So one of the biggest things for me, and this sort of connects to the, you know, constant comparisons to prior. Marisa while I was sick with long Covid. You know, I’m on deadline for a book. I am also a primary breadwinner in our house. Like there’s a mortgage that needs to be paid and school fees and all the things. And I felt a lot of pressure around productivity and really like the absence of productivity, especially on days when like the pain was really bad, you know, like there were days when I just could not even open up my computer because looking at the screen hurt my eyes too much. And that would create an even worse headache than whatever I was dealing with. And so one of the things that was helpful for me, I have a friend who I forget the technical term for the diagnosis, but she also uses little person and she is a disability justice advocate.

Marisa 00:30:23  And when she learned about my long Covid, she called and she basically lectured me for an hour and was like, these are the things that you need to do. And one of the things that she said was, you have to just let a bad day be a bad day, and you have to figure out what is going to go into your like, bad day toolkit so that when the bad days come, like you are prepared, you do whatever you need to do to take care of yourself, and you let go of all the expectations. And once she said that, I was like, okay. And I think part of why I was willing to listen to her versus someone else was because, you know, she’s lived in pain for most of her life. Both of her parents had disabilities as well. And yet she is one of the most accomplished people I know. And so it was one of those things where I was like, oh, okay. Like, if you’re saying this, you know, my former white House colleague who’s this, like, famous woman in the disability justice space, like, I should listen to you because clearly you’ve figured some stuff out here.

Marisa 00:31:24  Yeah. And so that’s what I did. I just said, you just have to let a bad day be a bad day and not fight it.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:28  It’s very wise. I want to go to a chapter called marathon where you say navigating uncertainty is not a sprint, but a marathon and endurance. Emotional endurance is not a quality you either have or don’t have. So what are ways of developing this emotional endurance?

Marisa 00:31:47  That’s a good question. I think one of the most important aspects of cultivating emotional endurance is being honest about whatever it is you’re facing and or dealing with, you know, whether it is a personal, physical or mental health challenge or a challenge in the context of a relationship or even, you know, frankly, right now, just feeling a lot of stress and grief and overwhelmed by the state of the world. Because what I learned by initially ignoring the fact that I had long Covid and hanging out in the space of denial, is that that only makes things worse. And one of the things that I’ve been thinking about recently, that also is a reminder for me that ignoring as opposed to acknowledging, will make things worse and make it harder for you to cultivate that kind of endurance.

Marisa 00:32:48  Is racism. I think one of the big challenges in our country as it pertains to racism, racial equity, etc. we have never really fully acknowledged the stain of racism and systemic racism, in particular in America. And without that full acknowledgement, you miss out on the space for healing and with emotional endurance. It’s like as we go through life, obviously, you know this. I know you’ve experienced this. Like there’s always going to be something else. Unfortunately, it’s not like, oh, Marisa lost her mom when she was young, and now she’s good and there will be no more hard things. Like. That’s just. That’s just not how it works. And so figuring out what you need to acknowledge in order to heal throughout the different things that come up, is part of what allows you to continue to cultivate and build that muscle. I know as hard as it has been, this experience forced me to increase my own emotional endurance by forcing me to deal with some of the stuff that I was still carrying around related to my mom and my childhood, and the impact that it had on my early life.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:03  Yeah, you have a whole chapter on that basic idea, that prolonged uncertainty or even we could say pain. New pain doesn’t just create new pain. It surfaces all this old pain. Yeah, yeah. And so when we are under stress, when we are not feeling good, when we are in pain, when we are in periods of great doubt, it tends to be that all of our old demons. Yeah, come right up to the surface, which, as you’ve said, is an opportunity to work on healing them, but also kind of inconvenient.

Marisa 00:34:39  Oh, it’s super inconvenient. I was oh, my goodness, I was so mad. And I want people to know, like it is okay to be mad. I am a big supporter of rage. Like, I just, I’m all about, like, be mad and get it out. Like, you are absolutely entitled to that because, you know, like, I’m super sick. I had to leave this amazing professional experience early because I couldn’t fucking breathe.

Marisa 00:35:04  And now I’m realizing I have all of this, like, icky stuff that I have to deal with from almost 30 years ago. I was like, is this a joke? Like, I’ve already written an entire book about my mom. Like, how are we still here? but there we were. So, Yeah, I had to. I had to deal with it. I think it’s something that I’ll like continue to deal with in different ways for the rest of my life, but I have less fear around it. I think that and that’s what I think you ultimately want to get to. I don’t know that we ever reach a point in life where it’s like, okay, I’m healed, period. All good. Like, see you guys later. I think it’s more like the guy who or girl who played sports in high school and, you know, got the bad knee injury. And when it rains, even though they’re 50, like, the knee still feels a little funny. Like I think that’s what it is with the emotional stuff.

Marisa 00:35:58  And so if you can think about it like that, it makes it a little bit easier to see it coming because it’s coming.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:04  I agree, I had a few years ago, I had something happen in my life that was extraordinarily unexpected and extremely emotionally painful, and it threw me for a loop how much I was struggling. And I had this moment where I was like, the last 25 years I’ve been on this journey of healing. Like, what? Has nothing done any good.

Marisa 00:36:28  Am I good? Like what’s good?

Eric Zimmer 00:36:30  Like what? What happened? And I came out of that with a couple of things. One was a therapist said something to me. I thought it was really good. He’s like, look, you have gone from that stuff bothering you 95% of the time to like that stuff bothering you in like the 1% of your worst moments. And that was really helpful. I was like, okay, you know, look, this used to run my life. Yeah, now I’m healed enough.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:57  But he said, look, everybody will have a point at which the stress or whatever becomes too much. You’ll be outside your window of what you can handle and you’re going to feel that way again. And then the other analogy that I found really helpful with that is to think of also like a spiral staircase that has like pictures on the wall and like as you go around, like you see the it’s like there’s that picture again. And then you come back around and you’re like, there’s that picture again, but ideally you’re a little bit higher up. Yeah. Than the last time right? Yes. You can see something in the picture. The light’s a little bit different, and I think that’s kind of the way it is to I think some of these things that are deeply embedded in us are going to be scenery at parts of our lives. Yes, yes. But ideally each time I see them I’m a little bit different. And that’s true. I was definitely different dealing with that stuff this time than I was maybe, say, the time before.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:53  It’s still it didn’t make it not hurt like hell. I mean, you know.

Marisa 00:37:57  It is still brutal.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:00  Still it is still definitely, definitely brutal. I want to talk about help. You talk about asking for help, and you talk about how for some people, it’s very, very hard to ask for help. So I’d like to have you talk about that. But you also go into how to ask for help. And I think that’s really practical and useful. So talk about the first part.

Marisa 00:38:22  Yeah. So in terms of it being hard to ask for help, I think for some people and this has happened to some people who I know and love. You know, they grew up in environments where they didn’t have people they could rely on. You know, even people that they absolutely should have been able to rely on, like parents and, you know, aunts and uncles, things of that nature. They couldn’t actually rely on those people. When that is your environment as a child, why would you think that people want to help you? Which is I mean, it’s devastating, but truly, like, why would you think that you should be entitled, asking for help, that you should feel comfortable asking for help and that people want to show up for you? Like, you just you don’t.

Marisa 00:39:05  That’s one piece of it. I think another piece of it is our culture is so committed to individualism and, you know, pull yourself up from your bootstraps. And I did it so you can do it, too. And just this idea, this myth, actually, of people being self-made and doing all of these things on their own. And I think that I know that there are a number of people who feel some degree of shame around asking for help. And so I think it’s important to remember a few things. Like one, human beings evolved in community for a reason. If we hadn’t, we would have just we would never would have evolved. We would have just gone extinct like a long, long time ago. and so we are meant to be together like we are meant to show up for and support one another. And this isn’t even just in, you know, these, like, really big, challenging moments that we go through, even in day to day life. Like I think about when community feels good and, you know, you’re taking turns with another mom doing pick ups and drop offs or, you know, collaborating with friends on Friendsgiving and, you know, like doing those kinds of things, like, it feels good to give and it feels good to receive when we let ourselves do that.

Marisa 00:40:21  And when it comes to asking for the help, I want to encourage people to be as specific as possible while also being somewhat flexible. And I’ll just give a quick example of this. where we live. My dad lives about 20 minutes from us. My son is the only grandchild in the family. My father is obsessed with him. My son is obsessed with my dad. It’s great. Except my dad, even though he’s like 68 years old, he’s like a 17 year old boy. Like, that’s just who he is. That’s who he probably always was. But my mom kept him in check for a long time. She’s no longer with us. And so, you know, we have like, we. Yeah, we’ve got like a 17 year old boy in the family. And so my dad, my dad took my son once Saturday afternoon. And this was when I was like early stages of illness. And I am I’m sure this will come as a big surprise to you, Eric. Like I am the parent that sleep trained like right as soon as you could.

Marisa 00:41:18  Like I keep the schedule because mom needs her sleep. This predates long Covid. Like, I was just like, I cannot have one of these kids that’s up all night. Like, I’ll completely lose it. And so my dad kept him out too long. He missed his nap. You know, he delivers back, like this sort of crabby, annoying toddler. And I was just like, oh, like, are you kidding me? But I follow this thing that my therapist Emily shared that I think is common in the cognitive behavioral therapy space called the Rule of six. Like, whatever you’re upset about right now, is it going to matter in six days, six weeks or six months? A two and a half year old missing his nap? It’s not even going to matter tomorrow. Like, let’s be honest. And so I realized, like, it’s better to have had the free childcare help on a day when my head felt like it was going to explode, then to have it be like the most perfect childcare, like it was better than nothing.

Marisa 00:42:18  And so you just have to get over it. And then when when you ask someone for help and they don’t respond in the way that you want them to. I want you to take a step back and ask yourself a couple of questions, like, did you ask your friend who is notoriously flaky? Like, you love her, she loves you. But like, she’s just, you know, usually there’s kind of a flake. You probably didn’t ask the right person. In that case, could this person be going through something in their life that you don’t know about, that you know they’re just consumed by? And so should you consider extending them some grace and maybe asking again at a different point, because we all have so much going on that doesn’t show up necessarily on like the zoom call or social media app or whatever, but that is real and hard. And so, you know, be a little bit thoughtful and strategic about it, I would say, and don’t take anything personally outside of the fact that you are worthy of asking for and accepting help.

Marisa 00:43:15  Like, I want you to take that very personally because it’s true.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:19  It’s a different kind of asking for help. But since your book is a week out and my book is a day out as we record this, Holy mackerel! I feel like all I’ve been doing is asking for help and saying that don’t take anything personal is really important.

Marisa 00:43:36  Yeah, yeah. I’m wondering. So it’s so funny. I wrote something on, on social media the other day. You know, I was like, I want people to know you’re going to see, like, interview clips and, like, fancy events and all of these things in the next couple of weeks. Like, I need you to know that this process is also filled with rejection. Some is spoken, a lot of it is just silent, like the people who don’t respond to your emails or your texts or whatever. And like you just have to keep going.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:05  It’s so funny the way perspective plays a role, because I can get into the nose or the complete indifference being ignored, and that’s where I spend a lot of attention.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:16  And then I had a friend said to me, like, what? What? What sort of things have you got, you know, going for your book? And I listed, I was like, you are killing it. I know. And I’m like, well, okay. Which you know. it’s hard. Yeah. That is the part I’m most ready to be over. Yeah. Is this constant asking to move back into a normal, more normal balance of like, yes, I’ll ask for some things and I’ll give a bunch of things and I’ll ask for some things and. Whew.

Marisa 00:44:44  It’s relentless. It’s relentless. And the thing about books is, like what you have created, like it is something that like, came from within you. Like I view my books as like a piece of my soul. Yeah. And so when people don’t respond to that email, like, yeah, I get a little salty.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:01  Yeah. And they have this window of sort of like, you know, not that books don’t continue to sell over time, but that initial, you know, launch part is important and not even just to hit like a bestseller list, but to show retailers and show Amazon and get that symptom guide.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:18  Yeah. Yeah.

Marisa 00:45:19  It’s exhausting. It’s exhausting. It is not fun.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:23  Keep trying to focus on the fun parts and focus on the like. This is a really good problem to have. I mean, this is a really good problem to have that I’ve created a book that I feel really good about and I want people to know about and and get something from is definitely in the better quality of problems it is.

Marisa 00:45:44  But, you know, knowing that it is, it’s hard to like stay in that headspace when you’re in the constant grind. The other thing that I’m trying to do, and I haven’t fully figured this out yet, but I’ll just plant this seed in your head as well, is figure out where are the moments when I am going to press pause and just take time for like celebration and or reflection? Yeah, because, you know, even if you’re a constant writer, like you only have a book come out every three years, maybe, you know, like it’s it’s still a really big deal.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:18  it is. So this is my first.

Marisa 00:46:20  Okay. So you really have to celebrate.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:22  Like you have a dinner plan. Okay. Tomorrow night, my partners organized a little party of some of my favorite people, and we’re going to go out to dinner. And so. Yeah.

Marisa 00:46:32  Yes, I’m happy.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:33  There’s some celebration in there. Yes. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s such a pleasure to talk with you. I think the book is really, really valuable and I’ve enjoyed this conversation.

Marisa 00:46:43  Thank you. This is super fun.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:45  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it.

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Episode Transcript:

Jefferson Fisher 00:00:00  Time is a great sifter of things like what matters right now rarely matters tomorrow. You think about what you were stressed about three days ago. You probably can’t remember, but in that moment, it was everything you had to get this done. And a great test for that is thinking of a time where you wanted to respond to somebody over email because you thought their email was snarky, and you type out a response and instead of sending it, you don’t and you wait. And then the next day you read it again. You go, I don’t really need to send this.

Chris Forbes 00:00:39  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

Chris Forbes 00:01:06  But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:24  There are certain conversations we all postpone not because we don’t know they matter, but because we know they do. And so we wait for the perfect moment, which usually never comes in this conversation. Jefferson Fisher and I talk about when to speak up, when to wait, and how to know the difference. And one of my favorite ideas from this conversation that if something is still bothering you after time has done its sifting, it probably needs to be said. I also loved thinking of arguments as not things to be won, but knots to be untangled. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Jefferson. Welcome to the show.

Jefferson Fisher 00:02:07  Hey, Eric. Thanks for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:09  I’m excited to talk with you about your work book that just came out called The Next Conversation Practical Exercises for Arguing Less and Talking More.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:19  But before we get into that, I’d like to start, like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. Think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Jefferson Fisher 00:03:00  It tells me there’s two choices. You can either do things to improve your life, or you can do things to ruin your life. And either way, you could say they lead to the same destination and that that would be the end of our existence here.

Jefferson Fisher 00:03:16  But the difference is that what do we do at the time that we have to me? When I hear that, I kind of turn in my head to say, well, what I believe in, in my faith is what do you do when you’re born to be the wolf that does a lot of bad, and yet you strive to be the wolf that does a lot of good. And so it’s making it’s making the hard decision of, though you were born a bad wolf, how do you live a life of doing all the good that you can? And so to me, that’s a it’s a challenge of both, a joy when when trials are in front of you. Yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:50  It is certainly a challenge because that bad wolf can be particularly loud in a lot of circumstances. Yeah. So I want to start with an idea from your work that says never win an argument. Talk to me about that.

Jefferson Fisher 00:04:08  A lot of people think that you have to get into an argument in order to win it.

Jefferson Fisher 00:04:13  You want to win. You see lots of books. You see lots of articles on when every argument, how to win everything that you do. I, even though I’m an attorney, I’ll be the first to tell you winning an argument is not something you want to do. Winning an argument is a losing game, Eric. You lose relationships. You lose friendships. And really, all you’ve won is contempt. You’ve won that awkward silence between you. And you haven’t spoken for months because you were so set out on having the last word. So set out on saying no. They have to agree with me to win that element, to poke in their eye. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to people who’ve, you know, if they’ve been estranged from a brother or a sibling or a child that they have. And it’s usually because there was a conversation that turned into an argument and somebody decided they had to win it, and what they did was lose a lot more.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:11  So usually when we’re in an argument, a lot of times we get into arguments that you look back on and you’re like, what were we even arguing about? But often there’s something there that matters to us.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:22  We want a certain outcome. There’s something we want to be different about the situation that we’re in. So what’s a good way to reframe that? So if I’m not aiming to win an argument, what am I trying to do when I’m in a conversation where me and the other person have a disagreement and it’s a disagreement that needs some kind of resolution, it’s not like I disagree with you about politics. I mean, it doesn’t matter, right? You could just let that go. But if we disagree about how we’re doing something with, say, one of our children. That is a discussion that, you know, we may not want to win, but we do have a point of view.

Jefferson Fisher 00:06:00  There’s a difference between arguing to be simply understood versus arguing on behalf of a certain action that you’re wanting to move for. So what I teach is you don’t want to see arguments as something to win. You want to see arguments as something to unravel. Meaning there’s a knot in the conversation between the two of you.

Jefferson Fisher 00:06:20  There’s something that is a kink in the water hose. There’s a reason why water’s not flowing. It’s because we got a kink in it. And most of the time I’d say when, like vast majority of the arguments that happen, let’s say, Eric, you and I are talking about, it could be politics, it could be the state of our world or what people should be doing. I’m not arguing against you. I’m arguing to be understood by you. I’m not fighting you. I’m fighting to be understood by you, and so much of it goes away when you actually stop a firm acknowledge that you can actually understand where they’re coming from, rather than fighting and saying no, your perspective has no merit. It counts for zero. If you just acknowledge this a little bit, there’s a lot more good that can be done. So the right frame of mind would be this. When you go into that next difficult conversation, have something to learn, not something to prove. When you go into the conversation with what can I learn from this? What can I get out of this? Rather than they have to agree with me, better things are going to happen in your life in general.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:34  You talked about conversations to be understood, in conversations to solve an issue. Does it make sense to usually orient around the understood part before you get to that second part of solving the issue?

Jefferson Fisher 00:07:48  Yes. So let’s say we’re in a meeting together And you throw out an idea. If I automatically just shoot it down. No, no, that’s the stupidest idea. Why would you even pose that? Is that going to give any good feelings from you towards me?

Eric Zimmer 00:08:05  Of course not.

Jefferson Fisher 00:08:06  Yeah, of course not. And that’s what we do with our spouse. That’s what we do with a lot of things. When somebody says, hey, I’m gonna do the thing. I know I don’t want to do that. We only like it if it’s our idea. It’s what I want to do. It’s what I want to initiate. And so it’s it’s like in a business meeting people, they will find ways to shoot down every idea you have, and yet find every way to try and uplift every idea they have.

Jefferson Fisher 00:08:30  I don’t like it because it’s not their idea. It’s like like in a husband and wife context. It could be the wife suggests something and the husband goes, no, no, no, no, I don’t want to do that, you know? And then all of a sudden he’s like, you know, it’s a good idea. We should do that. Like the very same thing that the wife said. It’s like, we just don’t like it if it’s if it’s not our idea. So what do you start with? You start at that element of acknowledging and understanding. It sounds basic, but so many people just don’t. Just don’t do it for me to sit down and say, hey, I hear you, that makes a lot of sense. I can imagine I’d feel the same way if I were you. Yeah, of course you would feel that way. Rather than me telling them that what they’re feeling isn’t true, or telling them why they shouldn’t feel that way.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:14  So I’m going to jump to slightly difficult situations here, and maybe we should be doing more of your framework to start.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:21  But I’m just going to kind of go there, which is a lot of times, let’s take a marriage dynamic. I could take an old marriage of mine as a dynamic. Things are so fractured that conversational repair can take a long time. So here’s what would happen with me. I would be like, all right, I’m just we’re not communicating. Well. I’m going to learn to communicate better. I would read a book on communication or something about couples, and I would come back with the general thing. You’re saying sort of the acknowledge the try and understand. And it was still just then the same attack would come and I would then go, well, this isn’t going to work like I tried. I’d get more mad, right? Like, well, I tried to be understanding. I tried to acknowledge their side of it, but they’re not doing that for me. So how would you counsel people to be patient with the process?

Jefferson Fisher 00:10:15  Let me ask, was this something that you ended up you said in a prior marriage, right?

Eric Zimmer 00:10:20  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:20  We did not work it out.

Jefferson Fisher 00:10:21  Okay. That’s what I’m saying. So that’s also an option. Yeah, right. We just have to find our reasonable. Like there’s certain people that you mix with. And this person is not reasonable to me, and I’m not reasonable to her. And. Right. But then they end up marrying somebody else. You know that. It’s like I found my. I found my reasonable person. we are not always going to be fitting like Legos. So that’s an option. There’s an option that how do you be patient with the process of knowing that most of the time big changes, personality changes, issues that you have to talk about are not things that are going to be solved in one conversation. We think that if I just talk to you once, you know, right in between all the busy things we have during the day, right after the kids get picked up from school, right when we’re tired and exhausted at the end of the day, and this is when I choose to have this conversation with you, that it should be as easy as flipping on a light switch in my brain, and usually big conversations.

Jefferson Fisher 00:11:16  What I like to say is, the bigger the topic, the longer of a conversation it’s going to have meaning. Feel the difference, Eric, of this of me saying, hey, okay, I need to decide something right now with you, right in this very moment, versus me saying, hey, Eric, I want to have a conversation with you. That’s important to me. I really want to have the conversation, you know, throughout this month or over the next few weeks where it’s okay. Now we have time to actually let it breathe. Now, we don’t have to force this. Now it’s we get to talk in perspectives rather than talking about Running against a brick wall. And usually it’s your head, you know, just hitting against it. So whenever you are able to draw it out, the better that conversation is going to be. So you take like a very hard impact issue and you kind of like you tease it. Like, I, my daughter who’s six, when her hair is getting long as a baby, you know, they get tangles, right? And it’s not like I can just grab a brush and just rip it out.

Jefferson Fisher 00:12:17  I can’t. That’d be. That’d be terrible. That’d be horrible. What do you have to do? You have to, like, grab each strand and, like, slowly tease it out to see how it takes time. It takes effort. You can’t do it by brute force. And so that’s the metaphor there in the conversation. If you’re able to leave enough time to go granular and go, okay, let’s look at the breakdown. Like what am I missing when you say that? What my brain says is give the time to show that kind of patience.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:45  That’s such a great line. Like, what am I missing if I assume that the person has a point? At least that makes sense in their mind. So there’s something I’m not seeing. It just means they have a perspective and I’m not really seeing it. So I love that question. You know, what am I missing? Or tell me more or what else? Another question would be not just how to have a conversation which will spend more time on, but when to have a conversation.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:16  Talk to me about how we think through when I in some cases, even if we should have a conversation.

Jefferson Fisher 00:13:24  There’s really a really three that I stand by when you have these kind of questions. And number one is does it need to be said that really need to be said number two. Did it need to be said now. And three the most important. Am I the one to say it? Because there are certain things in life that people just have to learn on their own. Like, as my grandfather would say, he’d said, look, I can only tell it to you. I can’t understand it for you. And there’s a lot of that. Well, you see, like on social media, people just go and type whatever posts and they think that they are really changing the world by just having some anger. Post up just what the world’s coming to. Yeah. And all they’re doing is just stealing their own joy when they could be probably going and playing with their grandkids. You know what I mean? When it comes to like, when to have a conversation, it needs to be on a time frame.

Jefferson Fisher 00:14:35  Most importantly, that is not theirs alone. Meaning you might have somebody let me give you an example. I had a guy who was picking his daughter up from school and why he was walking to go pick her up. One of the assistant principals or counselors came out and just started railing on him of an issue that it doesn’t matter, but just almost verbally attacking him. And he got sucked in and started giving it right back at that moment versus saying, I’ll schedule a time with you when it’s right for me. Instead of having that, you know, step into now, I’ll get to choose when I’m into this conversation. And it’s not going to be right now. So we get into the the vortex a lot of time, especially when people are saying stuff that ignites us, gets us aggravated, that we follow their time frame. When I haven’t at all asked myself, am I ready for this conversation? As an attorney, I imagine if I went into trial and I didn’t really know what the case was about, I just somebody said something and I didn’t have my evidence.

Jefferson Fisher 00:15:45  I didn’t have my documents. I didn’t have my exhibits. I didn’t have excerpts that I wanted, like I hadn’t had time to sift out how I feel about it and what they need to understand from it. And that’s what happens. We get up and we just decide to do it on the fly without really having a basis for it. And it’s that own time that you have to make sure that you, you speak on, on your time frame. Now you got to make sure that you’re also not doing it the other way. It’s a balance when you’re trying to push a conversation and the kids are in the middle of their bath and you’re trying to get dinner ready and okay, now. So half the time, the conversation about the budget, you know, that’s that’s that’s not going to happen. You know, for me, in my world, we’ll be in bed and I’m ready to just sleep and my wife will roll over and say something of like, okay, so I’ve been thinking, and it’s something very important.

Jefferson Fisher 00:16:36  And I’m like, this is why, what did you say? And I like barely one eye open. I’m ready to clock out. Yep. That’s not what her brain is. And so how do you how do you gauge that? Like, there’s I always have to say, like I want to talk about this. I will be much better to talk about this if we move it to tomorrow or this afternoon or later. And so how do you deal with that at a time where somebody puts you the conversation? That’s not a good time. Number one is to know when you’re ready. If you’re not ready for it, you need to voice that. And I say you voice that with I can tell. So number two would be I can tell, I can tell I’m not ready for this conversation. I can tell I’m not myself right now. I can tell I’m getting defensive. I can tell I that’s a way of having self-awareness in it. And number three, just you need to say, I want to talk about this, even if it’s something you disagree with, even if maybe you don’t want to talk about it, it’s still going to need to be addressed.

Jefferson Fisher 00:17:32  So it’s I want to address this. I need to address this later. I want to talk about this. I will be much better engaged. I’ll be a better person. I’ll be ready to, you know, get into this with you at a later time.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:13  It’s amazing how much of good conversation is saying some of the things that you just said, where it’s like we acknowledge what’s going on inside of us, or we acknowledge the dynamic or we acknowledge the challenge. And I just think that takes so many things that are happening inside of us and puts them out so people know where we are.

Jefferson Fisher 00:18:41  Yeah. I say that when you claim it, you control it. Meaning when I say how I’m feeling in the conversation, that signals why I’m responding that way. And it’s. It’s a sense of vulnerability. What does that mean? It’s a sense of connection to the other person. Not that we grow closer together, but that they understand me better. So if I’m talking to you and I get on this podcast and I say, Eric, I can tell I’m a little bit grumpy because my daughter woke me up at 430 and I’m a little sleepy, you know, like that’s wouldn’t you rather know that than you go? Why is he.

Jefferson Fisher 00:19:16  He’s just a grumpy person.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:17  He just doesn’t like me.

Jefferson Fisher 00:19:19  Yeah, yeah, that’s a perfect example. All of a sudden, you might start taking that personally. Yeah. Oh, well, they just don’t like me. And now I’m gonna. In fact, you know what? And now, because they don’t like me, I don’t think I like them. And now I’m gonna act a little bit different, and now I’m gonna have different thoughts. And I’m going to talk about them differently to other people. All because I didn’t voice that, that sense of awareness. So I can’t tell you how many times it’s helped me and helped other people in arguments. If I can just get to them and say, look, I can tell that I’m getting defensive or I can tell I’m getting defensive defensive here. Or let me rephrase that, I can I can tell that what you just said is getting me defensive, or I can tell hearing that is making me defensive. I’ll tell you, it is a strength into me.

Jefferson Fisher 00:20:05  Such a sign of a good communicator and attractive relaying conversation. When somebody can acknowledge that they’re getting defensive, that signals to me that that person is emotionally intelligent. And if you’re in it with him, you can have a really good conversation, even even when because I’ve had it where the other person goes. I don’t know if I’m saying this because I’m defensive or I’m saying this because I’m insecure. And I mean, I was just floored by that response because I’m like, that’s the kind of awareness of regardless of what you say, I’m going to believe you. I am going to be more engaged with you now because you’re not keeping your cards close to the vest, right? You’re putting them out there, and then I can put them out there rather than us. That’s. It’s kicking the water hose.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:51  I shut down in conflict. Like, I just kind of. It’s like I kind of go offline. You feel.

Jefferson Fisher 00:20:56  Like.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:56  You avoid it, I avoid it, but it’s even more than that.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:00  It’s like my brain goes blank, ecstatic. Yeah, I’m having a hard time knowing what to think. I’m just. It feels like sort of like the power is shutting down inside me a little bit. And I didn’t for a long time know how to say that. So it would drive some conversational dynamics that were not great because the person is coming to me with a problem or an issue, and I’m not saying anything, I’m not responding. And I just have found it much better to say, oh, I’m kind of having a problem where I’m shutting down a little bit. Give me just a second here Or I’m also someone who likes to think before I respond. Like I really want to take a moment and process, particularly in emotional moments. And I have also found that that is helpful for me to say, like, I heard you and I’m just processing everything you said is a way for me of the other person, then doesn’t take my quietness or my silence as I don’t care.

Jefferson Fisher 00:22:05  Correct.

Jefferson Fisher 00:22:06  You said some important things. One is it’s very important that when you don’t want to respond and you don’t really have a response, you got to acknowledge what they said. There’s a difference between saying nothing at all, but she’s only going to upset them more, you know, versus you saying, I hear you. I need to take some time thinking about my response to that. Like, oof, that sounds pretty strong to me to say, I’m going to choose my timing here. I’m going to think about what you said. I need some time to think about what you said before I say something. That, to me, is a sign of big strength. And I’ll tell you in my my own marriage, when it gets to a point where I’m not in a good place. I what we say is, I’ll say I’m in the red, meaning like a like a battery. Like, it’s it’s typically I mean, it’s I’m 20% or below right now of just how I’m feeling. And if I say I’m in the red, she knows that.

Jefferson Fisher 00:23:12  Okay, well, we’re going to time out. We got to stop. We got to recharge. That means, you we we’re going to have this conversation tomorrow. We’re going to take some time. We got to take a breather. And so as soon as I can say, I could tell I’m in the red. But, I mean, we’ve been very long enough. She knows when I’m in the red. So she she’ll sometimes pre-emptively go, I can tell you’re in the red right now. We’ll, we’ll talk about this this evening. And so yeah, but what I’m saying is damage, real damage is done.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:38  Yes.

Jefferson Fisher 00:23:39  When you don’t voice that, you’re in the red. And more so when the other person knows you’re in the red and they keep pushing anyway, that creates like irrevocable damage to a relationship because that breeds contempt, that breeds resentment. I was crying, uncle. And you still didn’t let go. Like, that’s the kind of stuff that you will hold against them for a very long time, because now that’s separate from the actual issue of the conversation.

Jefferson Fisher 00:24:12  It’s not about the thing anymore.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:14  The thing it’s about how you were treated.

Jefferson Fisher 00:24:17  Exactly.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:18  Or how you treated someone else.

Jefferson Fisher 00:24:19  Yeah. Now, now it’s a different level.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:21  I agree, the art of knowing when nothing good can come from continuing the conversation is so important. Like, I’ve just realizing, like, okay, I’m in the red, she’s in the red, however you want to call it. We are beyond the point that anything constructive can happen, and anything that we continue to talk about is likely going to be destructive. And knowing that, I think is so important.

Jefferson Fisher 00:24:47  It’s a difference between having a relationship and ending your relationship. I mean, it’s it’s where you have so much animosity that it’s not from the actual thing. It’s that you talked about or argue. It’s about something much deeper. That’s like where you could have solved it. You really could have made everything better. Have you just addressed that little? Not like if you had just taken the time, maybe you needed to use some tweezers and just, you know, tease it out, but instead it’s just making it’s it’s just a big jumble of like an open faced fishing rod, like you just it’s so much, so tangled that you go.

Jefferson Fisher 00:25:36  I would rather throw this away than put through the effort of going through every single string to do this. And so that’s what happens when people say, I can’t. It’s not worth it to me. I am tired, I don’t want this anymore because I’m just in so much of a knot and it is incredibly easy to do. Yep, yep.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:01  It is very, very easy. So I want to go back to when to have a conversation, and I want to flip it to me, deciding when I should have a difficult conversation with someone else. Like, how do I know that I should speak up? And then how do I know when the right time to speak up is?

Jefferson Fisher 00:26:22  The time is a great sifter of things like what matters right now rarely matters. Tomorrow. You think about what you were stressed about three days ago. You probably can’t remember, but in that moment it was everything you had to get this done. And a great test for that is thinking of a time where you wanted to respond to somebody over email because you thought their email was snarky, and you type out a response and instead of sending it, you don’t and you wait.

Jefferson Fisher 00:26:50  And then the next day you read it again. You go, I don’t really need to send this doesn’t really it’s not going to matter. Yeah, I can tell you that. Somebody was me many times as an attorney where you have I have the sharpest email you’ve ever said that. I’m just it’s full of things that I know. I’m getting it off my chest. And then I read it the next morning, and I almost laugh at of like, what? What was I going to do? Sending that?

Eric Zimmer 00:27:14  I had to set a rule for myself. I can’t send any emails after 4 p.m..

Jefferson Fisher 00:27:18  That’s like.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:19  Because what would happen if I get through all my meetings for the day? I’m tired. I’m trying to get out the door, I’m in a hurry, I’m a little agitated and so on, and I’m flying through emails and I just had to learn, Like particularly. Like anything. That is it all sticky. I can draft it, but I just shouldn’t send it correct. And to your point, I would come in the next day and almost always be like, hang on, I want to do that differently.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:43  Even if it was just because I was rushing, even if it was just because I was in a hurry, you know, taking a little bit longer on an email that like, there’s some emotional content too. Yeah. I have found again and again to be one of the most helpful things I did back in my previous career.

Jefferson Fisher 00:28:01  I think about like when, let’s just say 1800s, like you sent letters, like you spent time thinking about what you wanted in that letter, you know, and you.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:13  Don’t have to go back to the 1800s. I mean, I’m old enough that I used to communicate with people to me.

Jefferson Fisher 00:28:18  I was thinking like, oh, I just went on like a Civil War tour, and I was thinking of, like, a stagecoach. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of, like, you know, you get the letter from your your love. Who’s a they like, hang on to this letter. You know, that’s like five sentences. And it really, really doesn’t give much.

Jefferson Fisher 00:28:35  But that’s not the world we live in now. So it’s not something to.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:40  No, it is not.

Jefferson Fisher 00:28:40  Yeah. It’s not like we’re going to go back. We’re not. We live in a different age. And that just means we got to be careful about how fast. How quick. Like, you don’t get points for the quick draw response. You don’t get an extra sticker. You don’t get a gold medal. There’s not a stopwatch where people goes. And yes, we now have a broken world record for the fastest text response, you know, email response in the world. There’s no award that’s given for that. And rarely does. The thing that is said fast. Rarely is the thing that is said fast excepted. Well, that’s the whole point of when I teach. Let your first word be your breath. When I when I can breathe and actually hear the question and show you in signaling that I am listening and that I’m analyzing and that I want intention, I want to show you that what I am about to say is something I’ve thought about, that I’ve given my precious time to think.

Jefferson Fisher 00:29:34  It’s easier said than done, for sure. But. But time is a great sifter. And so how do you do that? Like you said, that rule of nothing after 4 p.m.. That’s great. You get a text message. It’s okay to leave some time. What I’ll do if I get a text message in the morning, and I know it’s in the middle of doing stuff with kids, I’m already. I’m in kind of a work mode. I will read it, then I swipe and I mark it unread again. So like so I can remind myself I’m going to look at this with fresh eyes later, because otherwise I read it and then life happens. And it’s been 30 days before I’ve ever responded to it disappears.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:33  I still am figuring out how to manage my text inbox. Like, I’m really good with email. I kind of got that all figured out. But like you said, it’s that text. It’s the ones that get me are the ones where I’m like, okay, this deserves a thoughtful response more than what I can just type out.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:49  So I want to give this the time it deserves. And then, like you said, if I’m not careful, it just it disappears. Buried under 15 other texts. And I look back, like you said a month later, I’m like, I cannot believe I did not respond to that.

Jefferson Fisher 00:31:03  Yep, that’s exactly right. And so it’s how do you how do you find your own system? And each everybody does. Everybody has to find their own system of how you want to communicate to the people, people around you. Because the sad thing is, it’s not just text to strangers. Like it could be a text to your mom, your dad, a grandparent. Like it’s hard to make sure you’re devoting time to distinguish between what requires an actual sitting down for a thoughtful response. So how do you make sure that you know when to have a conversation is when you’ve been able to inject enough time into the conversation to slow it down and be able to respond thoughtfully?

Eric Zimmer 00:31:43  I get emails from listeners who often have.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:46  I mean, they’re in the middle of a really difficult situation, and they’ll honor me by sharing that with me. And I’m always in this. I’m trying to sort of balance like, well, I don’t I don’t want to reply to them in a month and I don’t have a quick answer. Right. Like, I really sometimes I am, I’m like, yeah, you know, I kind of recognize the pattern and but a lot of times I’m like, whoa, all right, that’s heavy. Let me, let me give that some time. So I’m going to keep coming back to when because I have the tendency to say, nah, now’s not the right time and now’s not the right time. My problem is not often that I pick the right time and I’m thoughtful. My problem is I convince myself that it’s never the right time because I don’t want to do it.

Jefferson Fisher 00:32:34  Yeah. Yeah, that’s I, we we can all relate to that when it comes to the hard conversations, the really difficult conversations, the longer they sit, the more they fester.

Jefferson Fisher 00:32:47  Let’s put it in terms of the truth. Telling somebody the truth, the shorter you can make the distance between the truth and verbalizing the truth and giving somebody that truth. The shorter you make the distance, the better it’s going to be. But the longer you wait to share that truth, the worse it becomes to where all of a sudden, now you’re living the lie because you were uncomfortable enough to tell the truth in the shorter time period. Maybe it’s somebody who you knew that you were going to let go from their job. Maybe it’s news you didn’t want to share with your company. Maybe it’s something that happened that you didn’t want to tell your spouse. They will find out eventually. It’s going to happen whether you’re alive or not, and it’s going to be the rare chance that people don’t find out the truth. And the longer you wait, the more painful it is. And so the faster you can have the hard conversation, the better people appreciate it. And I’ll tell you, when you proactively tell people the hard thing, the easier it is for them to take in, the better your relationship becomes.

Jefferson Fisher 00:34:05  Like when you and you can forecast the problem spots. That’s the difference between, let’s say, with your spouse or somebody at work or a business partner. You got a bad report on something and you don’t really want to share with, you know, the other coworker that you have. The longer you wait and then they find out later and you could have told them, but you didn’t. That doesn’t help your relationship. That hurts your relationship. So that’s what I would say. It’s going to hurt, but the faster it goes, the easier it feels. It doesn’t. It’s it’s contradictory to think that way. But usually the more painful of a topic it is, the faster you say it, the better it feels. Really?

Eric Zimmer 00:34:47  Yeah. I mean, I think what you said, there’s really important because the more distance you put in there, that distance itself becomes part of the problem. When you eventually get to talking about it, there is the thing itself. And then there’s the why did you let it go on this long before you said something? Exactly right.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:05  So now we have two problems in the conversation. The news we didn’t want to share, the thing we didn’t want to do. And now also the frustration from the other person. The other sort of rule I have for myself. I don’t follow this one perfectly. I don’t follow any of them perfectly. But is that I ask myself, am I ever going to want to have this conversation honestly? Like, because we can be like, I’ll do it when I feel this, or I’ll do it and I’m like, am I ever going to want to do it? And if the answer is no, then the sooner I do it, the better for the reasons you just stated, but also the amount of time I have to spend dreading it reduces dramatically. Yeah, yeah yeah. Because if I’m like, I know I should say something, but I’m not gonna do it right now. I’m not going to do it right now. Then I’m carrying that dread around. And so if I’m like, I’ll never want to have this conversation or there’s never a good time for it.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:58  Yeah, I probably should just try and do it as soon as I can.

Jefferson Fisher 00:36:01  It’s like, yeah, having to tell somebody, no, somebody’s invited you to a party and you really want to say no. Instead you just kick it. You’re like, let me see. I don’t know, I’m just wanting to see my schedule opens up. You use that excuse knowing full well you don’t want to go. Yeah. And it ends up that you’re the one who, like you said, has to carry that anxiety. Or that thought is now living in your head rent free. when you could have been done with it. Yeah. Weeks before.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:29  This is a really dumb example. I was on a sales call where somebody was trying to sell me something this morning. It was something I was interested in, and I wanted to get on the call. I mean, I’m not saying, like, I got a spam call. This was something I entered into voluntarily, and I liked the product and I’m interested in it, and it’s more than I will spend right now.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:46  And so as we were going on, I was in the sort of like, well, I’ll just let her continue to demo the thing and then I’ll get off the call and be like, oh yeah, let me think about it. And I just thought, you know, maybe it’s because I’ve listened to some of your stuff recently. I just thought the kind thing to do is just to tell this woman right now, I’m not going to be able to afford that. I’ve saved her 20 more minutes of demo. I’ve saved emails back and forth. Oh yeah, I’m thinking about all because I’m uncomfortable saying that. And I just was like, I’m just going to give her the gift of just saying no.

Jefferson Fisher 00:37:22  Yes. They just want you to. They want you to choose. I mean, but it’s also, like you said, it’s kind for me to say. If you had said, oh, let me think about it. I’ll get back to you. Let me. And then what does she do? She follows up two weeks later.

Jefferson Fisher 00:37:34  She has to make sure she’s tracking you in her CRM, you know, and like.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:39  It’s in her pipeline.

Jefferson Fisher 00:37:40  She’s.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:41  Gone predicting one.

Jefferson Fisher 00:37:42  Yeah, exactly. All that stuff. Or you could just cut it and say, hey, look, you’ve done a great job with the presentation. Really like the product. It’s not the right time for me right now. So you can go ahead and put me on the the no list. I really, you know, appreciate your time. Hope you have a great day. Like that’s much better.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:58  Yeah. So I did that today and it was good. And again, I think some of it was probably immersing myself into your framework. I want to ask another question. I seem to be making this entire thing about when to have a comment.

Jefferson Fisher 00:38:15  It’s a good question.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:15  To have a conversation, but but I’m going to come back to another element of it. This is a very difficult question to answer. I’m more interested in how you would think about it.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:25  There are certain things in relationships that do not get resolved. You don’t get what you want or you. You realize that this is just part of the relationship that is maybe not going to change. It’s something you’re going to accept and it bothers you. And so there’s this balance of every time I’m bothered by it, I would feel like, well, I guess this is this is pertinent to experiences in my life that I’ve had. I would feel like, well, I just don’t want to bring it up all the time. We’ve already talked about this. We sort of hit a place where we’ve said, like, this is something we’re going to live with. But not saying anything is also problematic because there are times that that’s what’s operating in my brain. I’m feeling frustrated by that situation again. So how would you think through in those kind of situations, finding that balance where you’re not constantly being, you know, just sort of beating your head against a wall versus ignoring how you feel.

Jefferson Fisher 00:39:25  Well, we definitely don’t want to ignore how we feel if that is truly how we feel.

Jefferson Fisher 00:39:29  That’s the first thing that goes into my head. Second is when you feel bothered by something. That’s one. That’s one way of knowing. If it’s a conversation that needs to be had, that it continues to bother you. You reach into your pocket and it’s still there. It’s hanging over your thoughts.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:47  You let time do the sifting, and even after the sifting, it’s still there.

Jefferson Fisher 00:39:52  It’s still right. That’s right. And you go, okay. That, to me, is a clue that I need to say. So this is this is what it’s going to be. I think from a framework standpoint, an approach, it’s much better to say, hey, look, I, I’ve been thinking about this. You’re something you said like two weeks ago and it’s still bothering me. That’s why I need to tell you that is a lot better than this snippy little, you know, response that you might have had right in that at that moment, is it sitting and still? Something doesn’t sit well with me.

Jefferson Fisher 00:40:24  You have to say it. If you don’t, it will hover and stay in your pocket till the end of time. You’ll still be probably 60 years old, 70, 80, 9000 years old and go, I should have said this, you know, because it’s you’re not going to forget that kind of stuff. You’ll forget the little things, but you won’t forget that kind of stuff. And the closer they are to you, the longer you’re gonna remember it. Think about it this way. Everybody remembers when they were on the playground at school, and there was somebody who said something to you that wasn’t very nice. They made fun of your hair, your looks, your weight, how fast you were, whatever. And they gave you an insecurity at like age six. And you probably know that and can point it out and remember it for the end of time. I will never forget the time that I was eight. I just got new glasses and a girl came up to me and called me four eyes.

Jefferson Fisher 00:41:26  I was crushed all right, because I was. So it’s the first time I’d ever had glasses. And, it’s like you, you remember that kind of stuff. So the point is, when you have those moments where it’s really bothering you, you gotta voice it because it’s not going to go away, or there’s certain things in life that we’re going to just carry with us. So what do you do with that? Whenever you feel like you are in a place where I need to say something, that’s when you approach them with exactly what you need to say. Because if if it’s just left unsaid, I don’t think that’s the kind of life we want to have. You want to travel light y y, carry a bunch of baggage that is gonna always hover. And I feel like a lot of people go through life with a lot of baggage that they could have let go a long time ago, but rather than doing this and open up their hand. Yeah, they clench it.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:17  Travel light, I like that, yeah.

Jefferson Fisher 00:42:19  In your conversations for sure. In your communication. Travel, travel light. The more you start getting in your head about other people. And there’s a lot of people I know who kind of get neurotic. So distance after like conversations, they’ll be, oh, I shouldn’t have said that. Oh, why did I say this? And they like over explain and they overthink and then they I think that’s that’s always that’s too much baggage. Need to travel light. Carry on. You need to bring a carry on.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:44  Speaking of what you just said there, talk to me about over explaining what it is, what it sounds like and how to stop doing it, or why to stop doing well, both how and why to stop doing it.

Jefferson Fisher 00:42:56  Over explaining is exactly what it’s I mean, it’s self describing. It’s saying too much more than what the situation in normal social society would say. It’s called for. I have people well, let’s put put it in a term of an example of us. If you ask me a question of what did I do yesterday? And all of a sudden I start talking about a mental breakdown I had at the age of 14 or something like that.

Jefferson Fisher 00:43:24  I don’t know, I’m making it up that you’d be like, oh, that’s a little, that’s a little much. That’s that’s not what we’re going for. You know, there’s people who I’ve heard that they’ll have like a pizza delivery or somebody, and then next thing you know, the pizza delivery guy is just there and he’s like, ma’am, I gotta go back to the car because they’re just wanting to, like, use them as their therapist.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:46  Yeah. Do you ever see the movie airplane?

Jefferson Fisher 00:43:47  Yeah, I know.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:48  The scene I always think about is anybody who sits next to the pilot because he just won’t stop talking. Like there’s one scene where, like, the guy next to him is trying to light himself on fire. And there’s another where you see, like, somebody hanging themselves because they’re sitting next to him.

Jefferson Fisher 00:44:02  They can’t, they can’t, they can’t. They can’t deal with it.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:05  They just can’t do it.

Jefferson Fisher 00:44:06  Yeah. So over explaining to natural, it’s normal. And the reason why we do it is really more of an insecurity.

Jefferson Fisher 00:44:13  We feel that the more we say, the more will be liked, the more we will be believed. So we have this tendency to give more because we feel like what we said wasn’t enough. And it’s the same thing with even. I mean, you could make the metaphor a lot of different ways in life, but that’s really what it comes down to. If I’m new at the office or I’m new at work and or I’m leading a team, there’s a tendency to kind of over explain because you’re afraid that you’ll sound like you don’t know enough of what you know about, but that the weird thing about it is, the more words it takes to tell the truth, the more it sounds like a lie. The more words it takes for you to answer, the more it sounds like you really don’t really know what you’re talking about. It’s a balance of things. And so what I teach is instead of being a waterfall of information and let your message just gets swept away. Instead, I want you to be a well, ride to where people can come to you and draw the knowledge and take exactly what they need.

Jefferson Fisher 00:45:19  It’s not too much, it’s not too little. They’re able to come to you and ask, and you’re able to provide without feeling like you are over explaining, because deep down it’s it’s really an insecurity.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:33  Yeah. I think so much over explaining that I’ve done in my life, and I still have some of it. It’s one of the things I notice about you in the content you do, and in this conversation. You say something and then you’re done. Probably right? Yeah. Which is really good. I will find I’ll explain something and then often I’m scanning the other person or people and I’m not getting quite the response I want. So then I’ll try and say it a slightly different way. And like you said, you end up sounding like you don’t know what you’re talking about and confused. And often, if it goes on too long, like people who had to sit next to the guy in airplane. So how did you learn to do that?

Jefferson Fisher 00:46:12  Yeah, you can definitely sound like you’re floundering.

Jefferson Fisher 00:46:14  You know, if you if you kind of get in that. Yeah. It’s because, Eric, we’re terrible judges. We’re terrible subjective judges of our objective words. We are our own worst critic. And so we feel like I didn’t get the reaction I wanted, just like you said. So let me let me approach it a different way. When they probably thought how you first said it was just fine, and most likely they’re not even thinking about you to begin with. Right. They’re they’re thinking of in their head of like, do I look like I’m engaged or what am I having for lunch today? Like, we’re our brains are always going around, you know? I mean, how many people, when they listen to a church sermon, they might listen to that sermon. I bet you 30%. The 70% is all the other things that they think they have going on in the week. What’s happening? Where are they eating for lunch? Oh, we got family coming over. I mean, it’s hard.

Jefferson Fisher 00:47:05  It’s hard. And that’s when you’re sitting down and being still and being quiet. All right. it’s not like everything else gets better. So a lot of it for me was it’s hereditary. My dad very much his way. My grandfather’s. There’s a lot that I was raised around in the courtroom I’ve seen. I mean, I trained people on how to take depositions. And so I teach on being very succinct in only answering the question. And here’s the thing. I trust you, Eric, that if you wanted to know more, you’d ask more. I teach my witnesses. I’d say, don’t do their work for them. Don’t try and guess and say, oh, I see where you’re going. Let me continue to give you more information. Trust that if they want to know, they will ask. I just give them that. You don’t have to be the curator of the entire experience. It’s not going to be that way. And so if they want to know, they’ll ask, you know, people who over explain because they feel like I didn’t say enough in my head.

Jefferson Fisher 00:48:10  So now I have to give more. And usually it ends up being in a bad place. But when you say something very concisely and very clean, has kind of a clean edge to it, it doesn’t just, you know, dribble out. It sounds better, it sounds more confident, it sounds more controlled. Doing this whole process of the videos, I make this whole different world from being a an attorney. It was hard for me to talk more often on the first few podcasts that I was on a few years ago, because I didn’t give enough, because it was like some people would want you to continue to kind of talk and rolling, then you kind of get the rhythm of it, but otherwise you have to believe in the words that you give.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:51  In the workbook and in the book that spawned the workbook, you talk about saying it. You have three rules. Say it with control. Say it with confidence. Say it to connect. Do I have those right?

Jefferson Fisher 00:49:05  Yeah. You got all of them right? Yeah.

Jefferson Fisher 00:49:06  Those are the I was trying to put it into a framework that I could. I could teach the people. What’s the best way to try and communicate?

Eric Zimmer 00:49:14  You talk about framing conversations. What is a frame for a conversation, and how do we create one?

Jefferson Fisher 00:49:21  When you look at a picture, most of the time there’s a frame around it and a painting will actually look different depending on the frame that is on a frame enhances that imagery more than you think. It’s in a good. And a lot.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:37  Of times makes it.

Jefferson Fisher 00:49:38  Worse or makes it worse. Exactly right. But yeah, you know, at museums, most of the time we don’t even notice the frame because it’s doing its job. It’s it’s enhancing the picture. A frame is a way of structuring a conversation to make sure that the ultimate destination is where I want to take it. It’s not manipulating. That’s not being pushy. That is setting up a world that provides safety and provides certainty for both you and me. If I can eliminate the variables of where the conversation is going to go.

Jefferson Fisher 00:50:15  The safer you are and the more certain you’re going to be of. Okay. I’m good with talking about this. Imagine being, you know, of what they call those spaghetti bowls, like at a traffic huge metropolitan city. It’s everybody’s going everywhere. Like, that’s incredibly stressful just to look at. But if I no go, no, no, no, we’re going to go straight shot from A to B. You want to come with me. It’s like, okay I can do that. I know, like I like to say is you have those meetings where people go, alright guys, we got a whole lot to talk about. And everybody kind of groans because nobody feels like you talked about all that. You talked, but you didn’t really get anywhere. So when you have everything to say, you have nothing to say at the end of it. So what what does a frame sound like? I break it down into three things. Number one is I tell the person where I want to go, what I want to talk about.

Jefferson Fisher 00:51:04  That’s it. Just what I want to talk about. two. I tell them the end. I mean, I tell them what I want to walk away from. That’s what I like. That’s the phrase I like to use. What I want to walk away from. Take away from the conversation. I mean, what’s the one nugget of my purpose and what I need from this conversation? What am I taking with me? What am I putting in my pocket, underneath my arm and taking it with me? Three I get your buy in into the conversation. Make sure you feel good about it. So what does that sound like? It could be as simple as, hey Eric, I like to talk to you about what you said last Wednesday, and I want to walk away from that conversation feeling like you and I are on the same page. Can we do that? And now, you know, Eric, I’m not trying to talk to you about X, Y, and Z. You don’t have all this anxiety.

Jefferson Fisher 00:51:51  Imagine me saying, hey, can I talk to you about some stuff on like later today? I just got some stuff on my mind. It’s you’re like stuff. What are you talking about? That’s like me texting you and go, we need to talk.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:03  Exactly. I was going to. That’s what I was saying. That phrase that causes dread. Yeah. We need to talk. Nobody like, oh my God.

Jefferson Fisher 00:52:10  Nobody gets that and goes, yes, this is the best news ever. Eric wants to talk. This is.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:15  So.

Jefferson Fisher 00:52:15  Great. Yeah, like nobody high fives about that. They go, okay, something’s something’s terribly wrong is what we do. And because usually it doesn’t mean anything good. So if I can eliminate that anxiety, the uncertainty we want to know, is there a bear in the bush, like, what’s what’s why do you want to talk? Yeah. If I can put that out front, the better of a conversation we’re going to have. So it can be positive.

Jefferson Fisher 00:52:44  It can also address things that are more negative. Hey, Eric. Something that’s really on my mind that’s been bothering me. And I want to talk to you about. It’s. It’s about the comment you made about two weeks ago at the, at that meeting. And what I want to walk away from is you knowing that I, I didn’t appreciate that and I really want to talk about it. Can we do that? You’re not going to say no. I’ve never had any time. Say, can we do that? Can we do that? Like, everybody just kind of nods. And now you know exactly what the conversation is going to be about and exactly what the point is. What’s how do we know when the conversation is done, when we’ve checked the box of that understanding or whatever it is? It’s it’s setting the goalpost.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:27  What would be one takeaway from this conversation that people could do today that would improve their communication?

Jefferson Fisher 00:53:35  Well, people can learn from our conversation today is that timing is everything when it comes to conversation.

Jefferson Fisher 00:53:43  Well, you can really nail down when to have a conversation, not just when you want to have it or when they want to have it. But there’s a balance that we have been able to talk about here that’s going to give really practical tips and help a lot of people. And the good news is, it doesn’t matter when they hear the podcast, it’s going to apply no matter what.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:03  Beautiful. Well, thank you so much. You and I are going to continue in the post-show conversation where we’re going to talk about your three rules that you give in your book about having better conversations. Listeners, if you’d like access to that and add free episodes and the joy of supporting the show, go to one you feed net. Jefferson, thanks so much. It’s been a real pleasure.

Jefferson Fisher 00:54:27  Thanks for having me, Eric.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:28  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do.

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Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer  00:00

The inner critic is usually, though not always, inhibitory. It’s trying to stop you from doing something. When my inner critic whispers that I’m not good enough to write this book, the action that naturally follows from that belief is not to write at all. A wise response is to take the action that aligns with what you believe in and know is good for you, regardless of what the critic is saying.

Chris Forbes  00:34

Welcome to the one you feed throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true, and yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer  01:18

Hello, everyone. This is a special book edition of the one you feed. And we’re going to do something different here, something I have not done in a long time, which is going to be a solo episode for those of you who’ve been around with us for way back when, I used to do these more often, and I don’t quite know why I fully got away from them, but I haven’t done one in a while, but I’m just going to talk for the next period of time about ideas from my book. Now, one thing I will say about my book is that it is packed full of ideas. For better and worse, lots of people advise me that I’m trying to say too much in one book that I should make it about one simple little thing and do that. And my experience is, I’ve read a lot of books like that, and I’ve come across a lot of these. They are books that could have been said in an essay. There’s no reason for them to be all the pages they are. I think this book is very different than that, and I think that that is good for the type of person listening to this show, someone who cares about ideas, who cares about nuance, who doesn’t believe in easy answers and cliches, because life does not reduce down to those and this book does not do that either. It resists tidy and easy answers, which is part of what I think makes it such a good book. And again, my friends who told me the thing to do probably sell more books because it’s easier to market, as you can tell by the way I’m talking about this. But what I wanted to do here is highlight five insights that come out of the book. I think there are a whole lot more. There’s a whole lot of subtlety in here, but these are five, let’s call them things I could just pluck out and talk about in isolation. So I thought I would do that these ideas I had to really think about because the book was chosen as part of the next big idea club, Book Club, which is something that Susan Cain Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Grant do, where they select books each month that they

Eric Zimmer  03:30

think are valuable. And they chose my book, and I had to create a little something for them about some of the insights from the book. And so this is that, but a lot more casual. Me just kind of talking about it. And the first insight is that little by little, a little becomes a lot. You’ve heard me say that so many times, the title of the book is obviously how a little becomes a lot. And that makes this the first idea. Now you’ve heard some version of this idea, probably from me, but we hear it in popular culture all the time. Rome wasn’t built in the day. Slow and steady wins the race. You eat an elephant one bite at a time. And yet, when we try and make change in our own lives, we can’t help but hope for faster results. But the good news is that meaningful, lasting transformation doesn’t take a lightning strike miracle or a willpower of steel or some huge epiphany. It takes the simple idea above. But when I say little by little, I do mean something very specific. I mean low resistance, actions done consistently over time in the same direction. Low resistance is about choosing something that we will actually do. Consistency is about repetition. And in the same direction means that all the little steps are headed towards the same thing. So I want to talk. Talk about each of those aspects, because I think they’re important. Low resistance actions. These are actions that you can get yourself to do. They’re going to be different person to person. So this is not a repeat of bj fogg’s idea of tiny habits or get 1% better. What it means is we’ve got to find the behaviors that we are able to get ourselves to do consistently. An example I often give of this is meditation. When I started trying to meditate, it was really hard for me. I was trying to do it for 30 minutes, because that’s what all the books I was reading said you need to do 30 minutes or 45 minutes or an hour, there was no internet. There was some weird guy who taught TM. That’s a fun story. Actually, on my way to my first transcendental meditation class when I was 18, we had to bring white handkerchiefs. And I have, I mean, I’m an 18 year old kid in 1988 it’s not like I’m carrying around handkerchiefs in my sport coat. So I went to a department store that if you are old enough and you lived in the Midwest, is a name you will not have heard in a while, which is gold circle. And I went to gold circle, and I did what I was prone to do in those days, which was shoplift. So I shoplifted my white handkerchiefs on my way to my great spiritual awakening. And I got arrested. Luckily, they let me go, and I still made it to Transcendental Meditation, where we put some fruit and flowers on my white handkerchief, and I was given the secrets of the universe.

Eric Zimmer  06:36

Not not actually I was taught to do TM, but meditation was really hard for me, and doing it for 30 minutes or 45 minutes or an hour was incredibly difficult because it was like pandemonium in my brain. I’ve joked before on the show, it was like the dark circus came to town. I would sit down to try and do it, and it was so hard to do, and I could only stay with it for a few days or maybe a week or maybe a month at the longest, but then it was too hard and I would give up. Now there are other people who sit down to meditate and find it to be a somewhat peaceful experience. So for them, sitting for 30 minutes in meditation might not have been that hard, but it was incredibly hard for me, so low resistance is going to look really different for me versus them. Same with you, depending on the thing you’re doing, low resistance might look very different from you, from your neighbor, from someone else. We have to find what is low resistance for us, done consistently over time, means we just keep doing it. That’s how a little becomes a lot. These things accumulate and then in the same direction is really important, because I believe that we are in a world right now where we are given more ideas about the way we should change our life in an hour than most people would have encountered in five years before get on Instagram, if you follow this kind of stuff, and you’re gonna see a load of them, you should be meditating. You should be doing yoga. You should be doing strength training. You should also be getting enough protein cold plunging. You should be journaling, doing morning pages. The list goes on and on, and I’m not even naming all the weird stuff, right? That’s just the common stuff. It’s a massive list. And the problem for a lot of us is that we try one of these things for a very short period of time, and then we quit, and then we do something else, and then we stop doing that, and then we do something else, and we’re all over the place that does not work. Lots of little things scattered. All over does not lead to a lot. It leads to feeling scattered and feeling like you failed at 50 things instead of just one thing. So going in the same direction is important. Now there’s a reason that little by little works, and I want to explain it in a little bit more detail. The harder something is to do, the more motivation we need to do it, the easier it is, the less motivation we need. So we can think of the challenge of difficulty and motivation as sort of an overall resistance to a given action. Right? The more hard it is, and the less we’re motivated, the more resistance we face. So there are two ways we could lower that resistance. The first is we can raise our motivation level, which is a little bit easier to say than it is to do. Motivation is more a feeling than it is anything else, and feelings don’t have levers that we can pull. The other way we can do is make the behavior easier, to make it smaller is often the way to do that. And then an interesting thing happens when we do this and when we succeed at doing it. So we pick our little thing, we do it for a few days in a row, something happens. And what happens is that our motivation goes up. Because motivation goes up when we feel good about. Ourselves and our chances of success, and it goes down when we feel bad about ourselves and when we think we can’t do something. So by doing something low resistance that we’re able to do, we get more motivated. The other thing that happens is that we get better at doing the thing, so we can do more of it with the same level of difficulty as I got used to meditating for just a couple minutes a day. I got better at it, and it became less hard. So now I could do five minutes instead of the three I started at. And then over time, I could do 10 minutes, and it still felt about the same level of difficult, because I was getting better, and that’s really the key here. That’s why this works. The success that we have of Little by little, leads to us feeling better about ourselves, which drives up our motivation, and we get better so we’re able to do more difficult things, which makes us feel better. It’s an upward spiral versus the normal downward spiral, which is, we say we’re going to do something. We do it some of the time, but we don’t do it all the time, and we end up feeling bad about ourselves that we’re not doing it more often. And then we give up, and we start to tell ourselves stories about why we can’t make change, which drives our motivation down further. And so that’s why little by little actually works. It’s not a cute saying. There’s real, tangible reasons that emerge from behavioral science about why this works. So that’s insight, one you

Eric Zimmer  11:40

an insight too, is that change is a skill that you can learn, and this is really, really important. We think when we are unable to make a change, whether it’s adding a positive behavior to our life, or to stop doing a negative behavior, we think it’s because there’s something wrong with us. We think that we are lazy, that we are undisciplined, that we don’t have motivation, that we have some other character flaw that is at the heart of it, and when we treat change like it’s a character issue, we’re already halfway to quitting. As a coach, I heard that sort of thing all the time. I’m just the kind of person who can’t stick with anything, or I’m the kind of person who has no willpower, or I’m the kind of person who never finishes what I start. And those beliefs get ingrained, and they start to feel like facts, and once they feel like facts, we behave like they’re true. This reframe makes it not a character issue, not something that you either do or don’t have that’s inside you, but it’s about skills, and we all know that we can learn skills in many ways. Getting sober, for me was a matter of getting the right skills aligned. I didn’t know how to not pick up a drink and do it. It’s not like I suddenly became a different person overnight, and suddenly I could do it. It was that I started to learn the skills. Oh, when I go to meetings, this becomes easier. Oh, if I call my sponsor, this becomes better. Oh, if I don’t walk past the bar on my way home. This is a little bit easier. It’s skill acquisition, and that’s really, really important. So what do we do with this? How do we orient? And one way of orienting towards it is we shift how we label obstacles. AJ Jacobs once told me that he loved a quote he heard from Quincy Jones, which is, I don’t have problems. I have puzzles. A problem feels heavy. It feels final. A puzzle is an invitation. You assume there’s a way through, even if you just don’t see it yet. And that’s what I used to say to coaching clients all the time. This is a puzzle. We’re going to get the right pieces gathered, then we’re going to put them in the right order, and this will then work. We are solving a puzzle. We’re not solving a problem being you as a person. When I was writing this book, I faced levels of self doubt I had not faced in a long, long time. With each new page, my brain would basically say to me, either Who are you to offer wisdom to anyone? Or could you write a more boring sentence? That is the most boring sentence outside of an accounting textbook that I’ve ever read, and that’s hard to work with. So what did I do with that? Well, first, I learned to work with negative self talk, not against it. A lot of self help veers into positive thinking, but this full cheerleader mode has never worked for me. I find it easier and almost just as effective to aim for neutral. So instead of saying to myself, I can write a great book, I know I. Can, you know, I’m the next John Steinbeck, you know, look out. Hemingway. Here comes Zimmer, which is BS, I wouldn’t have believed it. I could get to something like, you know, do I know that I can’t do this? And my most pessimistic self has to admit that the answer is no. I don’t know that. I might not yet believe I fully can, but I no longer believe I can’t. Which is a place to start. The other thing was also to really think about the fact that it’s not that I either can write well or I can’t write well. It’s a question of me being able to get better at writing. So I could say, well, I don’t know how to make this chapter good. Yet, I’m back to a puzzle. How do I make this better? What things can I do that are going to make me a better writer? And I kept the door open to keep trying, which is what really matters. So if you’ve struggled to change, the most accurate conclusion isn’t something is wrong with me. It’s I’ve been using the wrong strategy. I’m missing a few skills, and as I said before, we can always learn new skills. Insight number three is a question that I come back to again and again, and it’s a question of, what do I want now versus what do I want most? And for many of us, what we are doing on a regular basis is we are trading what we want most for what we want now. Or to say it slightly differently, we’re trading what we value, what’s really important for us for what we want right now. And in the book, I talk a lot about values. I define values as the thing that our wisest, truest self thinks is worth wanting, and our desires are what just show up whether we want them or not, and the gap between them is where a lot of our struggle lives. In the book, I make a point that change comes down to sort of two fundamental things we need to figure out how to do. The first are structural. It’s knowing what we want. It’s knowing exactly what we’re doing, when we’re doing it, how we’re doing it, where we’re doing it. It’s setting up our environment to support us. It’s enlisting people to help support us. It’s all these things that we do that make it more likely that when the moment comes, we make the right choice, and by doing the structural things we find ourselves at clear choice points. And a clear choice point is where we are choosing to either go right or go left, to go in the direction of what we want most, or to go in the direction of what we want now. And in the book, I identified what I call six saboteurs of self control that are these things that show up at those choice points. Some of you may have seen it’s a lead magnet that was out there and is still available on the website that identifies these. And I want to talk about one of them right now. There’s six of them, and I lay out what they are and strategies for working with all of them in the book, but the one right now is what I call the short sighted stumble, and it means that all we see is what we want. Now researchers call this delay discounting, which is a fancy way of saying we value what’s present over what’s in the future. We’re not very good at seeing the future versus the present. In the book, I talk about an episode of The Simpsons where Marge is talking to Homer, and she says, someday you’re going to regret not spending more time with the kids. Homer replies, that’s a problem for future Homer boy, I don’t envy that guy. Before he pours vodka into a mayonnaise jar, shakes it up and slugs it down. And I have to say, that’s disgusting. Now I drank some of the worst shit out there. Chris and I used to drink this bargain basement whiskey that you could buy at a convenience store that was called Old Dan Tucker. We called it old Dan fucker because it was

Eric Zimmer  19:17

truly disgusting. But I drank it wild Irish rose Mad Dog, Alabama, Alabama, slammer. I mean, this is the bottom shelf rot gut stuff, and I am still, I feel confident in this. I’m wary of saying never to things, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say I am not ever pouring vodka into a mayonnaise jar and shaking it up and drinking it. Homer promptly collapses after he does it, which is all we need to know. It’s not a good idea. But the scene gets to the core of the pitfall. He’s not even thinking of his future self, or really of the future at all. The technique from recovery is called playing the tape all the way through. We can’t stop a. The first frame, you know how good it would feel to do the easy thing. We have to keep going. So if I, in the early days, had a craving to get high, I couldn’t just think about how good it would feel. My brain was very good at doing that. Just focused on that. I had to say, like, what comes after? Well, in my case, what comes after is I feel good for a very short bit, and then I know that despair is going to come rushing in. I know a crushing sense of shame is going to come rushing in, and I know that I’m going to want to use even worse than I did, and I didn’t have any money, which means I would have to steal, and I had all sorts of prison time hanging over my head, right? I played it through. Now, most of our situations are not that dramatic, but there are consequences, and we want to find a way to make those feel real. We have to pause long enough and envision, try and see it in your mind, try and feel the feeling. If you have a problem where you stay up too late at night, you have to put yourself in the morning. What does that feel like in the morning? How lousy do you feel, and how bad do you feel about yourself? You’re just like, Oh, I did it again. What’s wrong with me? All of that. That is how we make the future seem more present, and it allows us to then say, Okay, well, what do I want Most, versus what do I want now?

Eric Zimmer  21:42

The next insight is that we are meaning making machines. I think if there is any one thing I would instill in people, if I could give one gift to people who didn’t have it, it would be this. It would be recognizing that we do not see things as they are, we see them as we are. Niacin said that it comes from a Talmud phrase. Stephen Covey quotes it in his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. We don’t see things as they are. We see them as they are. Now I am not saying there’s no reality out there. I actually think we co create reality, and there’s two parts of that, there’s what actually happens, there are facts, and then there’s interpretation. And a lot of what we would call a fact is really, indeed interpretation. A fact is something that you could almost capture on a video camera or on an audio camera. Somebody actually said X, Y and Z. That’s a fact, somebody actually did X, Y and Z, but then everything after that becomes interpretation, and one of the most dangerous interpretations we do is that we say we know why they did it. This gets us into all kinds of trouble, but there is simply no such thing as a truly objective view of reality. Even when we think we’re seeing all the facts, we are always seeing them through the colored lens of our own perspective. I say often there is no view from nowhere, meaning there is no perfectly removed perch from which we can see all angles at once, and when we forget that, when we assume the way we’re seeing the world is just the way it is, rather than the way it looks to us, we cause ourselves and others a lot of needless suffering. And that part about we see it as we are is really important, because we are projecting a story whose Plot Characters, even the genre, are shaped by our past experiences, our cultural backgrounds, our emotional state, our personality traits, how well we slept last night, so many things someone else watching the same screen might see a completely different movie. And I wish it was possible to just take those glasses off completely. Sometimes I think that that’s what enlightenment is. My moments where I’ve experienced what I would call enlightenment moments, Satori moments, feel a little bit like that, where I see things without so many of the filters. But again, even then, I’m sure I’m still seeing through filters. I don’t think we take them off, but what we can do is we can sort of imagine, like, if we’re looking through tinted sunglasses, we can slide the sunglasses down our nose a little ways, just so that we can go, oh yeah, the whole world isn’t slightly green. You know, there’s other stuff out there we see around the edges, sometimes I think that’s the best we can do. But there are three questions that I think are enormously valuable and useful. And the first one is, what am I making this mean? And this is so important because it makes us aware that we’re actively creating meaning, because it happens automatically. And subconsciously. So this question makes us recognize we’re doing it and think about it. And sometimes that question alone is enough to make us reconsider our conclusions, but then we want to go on to like, what else could it mean? And the could is key. The goal isn’t to necessarily replace your interpretation. It’s to recognize that other interpretations are possible. And then finally, which meaning is most useful. We have to act. Life requires us to act without having all the facts, and we never have all the facts. But if I’m creating the meaning and several meanings could fit, why not choose the one that empowers me and reduces suffering? I talked with Nir Eyal about his recent book beyond belief, and he says something in there, I think that’s really important. He says that beliefs are tools. And he’s getting at the same thing here. He’s saying that the things that we believe about reality are tools, and that we can be conscious about what tools we pull out and what we use again. This is not denying facts, but when you really get into it, when I really get into it, and I realize how much of every day what’s swirling around my brain is meaning making. It’s pretty sobering. I’ve got a lot of meaning making going on as I get ready to launch this book. As I’m recording this, the book is not out yet. By the time you hear it, the book will have been out, and there’s a lot of meaning making happening. There are people that I thought for sure

Eric Zimmer  26:39

would support me, and they don’t. There are people that I didn’t expect to support me who are stepping up in big ways. There’s a ton of people that are buying the book and telling me about it. There’s a lot of people that are not saying anything, that are indifferent. I have no idea what’s going on out there, right? I don’t know what’s going to happen with this book, but I can start to tell myself a story about it, the colors my thing. I was having a day recently where I thought I’m just not getting, you know, the kind of publicity that I want for this book. And then I talked to a friend. He’s in this space. He’s written books, he’s he knows all this stuff. He goes, I cannot believe all the amazing things that you got lined up. Which of us is right? I don’t know, because we’re both interpreting this. We’re making a meaning out of a certain amount of facts. Here are the places I’ve been booked. Is that good? Is that bad? I don’t know, but I do know that when I think I’m doing good and that I’ve made progress, it encourages me to want to do more, versus me feeling like nobody pays any attention. Nobody cares. Why am I wasting my time? Right? You can see how the fact, which is unequivocal, like here’s who booked me to talk on their show. There’s the fact the meaning that I made and he made are very different, and it turns out his meaning for me is a lot more useful. So this is a profound and deep truth that I live into all the time, even quote, unquote, knowing this, I’m still always having to question meaning, because the mind just does it. And it seems true. All right. The last one is extreme language produces extreme emotions and behavior. I’ve mentioned on the show many times. I have back pain, and I had it this morning. I woke up, and as I was walking through the kitchen, getting my coffee ready, getting ready to unload the dishwasher, my brain is saying what it always says in these situations, which is my back is killing me. And then I don’t question it, just says that. And then I go about the next thing, and I bend over to get a dish out of the dishwasher. Oh, my back is killing me. I’m going about my morning doing this. Well, if I pause and I actually pay attention to my back, I notice, oh, my left hip is a little bit tight, and there’s a small ache radiating from it that is a far cry from my back is killing me. I’m not denying that my back hurts. I’m just trying to be a little more nuanced in how I talk about it. And we might not think this matters, but my experience is it matters a lot. There’s all sorts of ways we can apply this. We describe things in extremes. If you want to start a fight, the best way to do it this is a guaranteed walk up to someone and accuse them of always or never doing something. It works like a charm. The minute I say, Chris, you never do X, Y and Z, Chris is going to immediately say, that’s not true. Sometimes I do that thing and we’re going to be arguing. So this works in our external conversations also, but internally. If I’m saying to myself, Ginny always does x, that is going to cause me to feel very strong about something that I might feel less strong about if I were to say to myself, Oh, sometimes Ginny. He does. Why? Let’s pretend I’m like, Ginny never listens to me, which is not true, by the way, but let’s just pretend Jenny never listens to me. That would be very different than me saying something like, sometimes I feel like Jenny’s not hearing what I say. You can feel the difference there. I tease my mom about this, because my mom says about everything, it’s horrible, it’s horrible, and the truth is, not everything is horrible, but the way she describes it creates her reality. There are some other ones. This is one I love. I can’t believe they did that. Now let’s examine that really. Can you really not believe it? Or you just wish they would have chosen to do something different. If we try and rephrase it to something like, I wish they hadn’t done that. That’s different than I can’t believe they did that. Now, if you’re auditioning for The Real Housewives, stick with the original but since you listen to this podcast, I’m assuming you want a calmer existence. You’re going to do better with a more subtle reframe. There’s some other ones, horrible. Disastrous is a good one. This is disastrous. This is unbearable. I can’t, you know, I can’t take it pronouns and absolutes like everyone and no one, no one loves me. Everybody thinks I’m stupid. After you gave a presentation at work to five people that didn’t go quite as well as what you wanted. The goal is not to gloss over what’s hard. It’s to remind ourselves that reality is rarely black and white, and that there are real benefits to seeing things in more color and in more nuance. You

Eric Zimmer  31:54

all right, the next thing I would like to do here is just read you a section of the book. And this comes from the chapter on, be a friend to ourselves. It’s about self compassion. It’s about an inner critic. And so I come up with a method in here of a better way of engaging with our inner critic. I’m going to offer you a three step guide for engaging with your inner critic in any situation, just like you would with a friend in pain, you’re first going to greet your critic by name and make space and time for a heart to heart. Next, you’ll listen to what they’re saying from a healthy distance underneath their monolog of complaints. What are their real fears and desires going on? What’s holding them you back. What’s keeping them stuck? Finally, you’re going to respond wisely, interrupting the cycle of self loathing, with a response that combines love, loyalty and your best guidance for moving forward. Greeting your critic. Naming your inner critic is a simple way to take away some of their power when that list of your supposed failing starts playing in your mind, picture this newly ideaed character as the one talking if the image is kind of ridiculous, all the better. My inner critic these days is less angry. Tom Zimmer, that’s referring to my father, and the chapter starts with my father and I on the golf course, and sort of how I learned to be my own worst critic. My inner critic these days is less angry Tom Zimmer than Eeyore from the Winnie the Pooh books known for his chronic pessimism and air of gloom. He’s a gray stuffed donkey with a pink bow on his detachable tail in a scene from pooh’s grand adventure the search for Christopher Robin Eeyore says, as he puts the finishing touches on a house he has been building, not much of a house just right for not much of a donkey. By hearing my most morose thoughts in Eeyore’s voice, I suddenly see them as simply that, a cartoonishly glum voice, not the truth, not reality. As a bonus, I very often make myself laugh. Ginny named her critic, the Evil Queen from Snow White, not the queen in all her mirror obsessed splendor, specifically the old hag she becomes to tempt Snow White, imagining her anxieties in the voice of a gnarled wart nosed crone brandishing a suspiciously shiny apple makes Ginny laugh too. Her critic thinks she’s so intimidating when she’s really just so extra. Identifying your critic as a separate entity is key in getting the distance necessary to engage with it in a healthy way. We need to be willing to turn toward our pain to look at it and say, Yes, I see you there. But we also need to avoid falling into its gravitational pull, becoming so consumed that we lose all perspective. Dr Kristin Neff, a researcher of Psychology at the University of Texas, who is going to, I believe, come to my. Book event in Austin on April 23 which, if you are hearing this, I would be thrilled to see you there as well. Anyway, she refers to this safely distanced awareness as mindfulness. It’s the type of consciousness that doesn’t shy away from discomfort, but also doesn’t blow it out of proportion without it. She argues, self compassion becomes a Herculean task. How can we be a friend to ourselves if we’re in denial about our suffering? On the other hand, if we’re so entangled in our pain that we can’t see beyond it, how can we step back and offer ourselves the care we need mindfulness, which we can prompt by saying, hey, Eeyore, or whoever allows us to recognize our thoughts and feelings for what they are. Thoughts and feelings, not irrefutable facts, not permanent states of being, but the day’s grumbles from an animated donkey next step, listening with distance. Once we’ve identified our inner party pooper, our interactions with them still tend to go one of two less than compassionate ways. We either argue or we agree. I’m standing in front of Amir rehearsing a presentation. It’s a TEDx talk in front of more than 1000 people. My reflection stares back at me a mix of hope and fear in his eyes, right on cue, that familiar voice pipes up in my head, your presentation sucks, and so do you? My response is a dejected sigh followed

Eric Zimmer  36:29

by a mumbled Yeah, you’re right. Who am I kidding? To try this? It’s terrible. It’s funny to see it written out like that. This toxic Oracle suddenly gets treated as if he has profound, exclusive insight into the situation, I don’t like what he has to say, which must mean he’s dishing hard facts. You could replace my presentation with any challenge you’re facing right now. Maybe it’s a job interview, a first date, or your attempt to kick a bad habit. The critic’s script changes, but the essence remains the same. Critic, you’re not good enough us. Makes sense. No further questions. If we ever want to get on that stage, go on that date or create a better habit cycle, we can’t blindly agree with the critic. Maybe we should argue with it then, hey, now that’s not true. I told my inner heckler that day pacing the green room. I’m intelligent and articulate. My speech is clear and effective. It’s gonna be great. So far so good. According to plenty of cognitive behavioral therapy I’ve encountered, I’d used positive self talk and given a rational response to the biased distortions of my critic. Undeterred, he came back swinging. How do you know that? Are you sure? Okay, maybe you’re not a total disaster, but let’s be real. Everyone else here is great. You need to be better than you are for anyone to even notice you with a thought loop like this, it’s like trying to reason with a toddler having a tantrum. You can present all the logical arguments you want, but the toddler is still going to scream and throw their toys. So what’s the alternative? Remember, the best way to be a friend to ourselves is to treat our inner critic like someone else we care about. If you’re sitting down with a loved one in distress, your first instinct probably isn’t going to be to shut them up, nor is it going to be to tell them they’re not making any sense. Your first move is going to be to listen to what’s wrong. The same thing applies with our self talk. The goal should not be to immediately silence the critic or win arguments against it. The goal is to change our relationship with it entirely. We need to recognize it for what it is, a part of us that feels threatened, to find the fears behind the flailing, we need to listen with genuine curiosity. What is the propaganda campaign of your critic asked Dr Aziz gazaporo, author of the wonderful book on my own side, in a conversation on my podcast, what is it steering you toward? It’s telling you you can’t do that. You’re not attractive enough. You mess that up, what’s wrong with you? And usually it’s steering you toward something by getting curious about what that something is. Gezipura says we can start to notice patterns. Maybe your critic is trying to keep you safe by lowering your expectations before anyone else can disappoint you, or maybe by convincing you that everything is your fault. It’s preserving the fantasy that if you just stopped messing up, you’d be free from all emotional complications, whatever your critic’s emphasis argues gazipura. Its function is to primarily keep you safe from harm, safe from pain, safe from emotion. The critic is just trying to stop it all. All this often means discouraging you from taking action entirely, because why risk something you’ll

Eric Zimmer  40:07

just mess up? In case you haven’t spotted the flaw in this logic, your critic is trying to shut down the whole experience of having a life not ideal, but by understanding where it’s coming from, we can put ourselves in a better position to work with the underlying negative emotions with my TEDx speech. I could have chosen to acknowledge my critics presence without either buying into its story or shouting it down with affirmations. I could have said, I hear you’re worried about the presentation. Thanks for trying to protect me, but I’ve got this that might have averted at least a little bit of angsty pacing. Turning down the volume of your critic is ultimately not about positive thinking or about rational responses. It’s about empathy. Third step, respond wisely once you understand the hurt and rationale beneath your critics nagging voice, it’s time to make a game plan for feeling and doing better. This could mean prompting a behavioral habit. Hey, I know you’re feeling depressed, and I love you regardless, and I promise exercise is going to make you feel better than sleeping until noon would. Or it could be merely in the realm of thought letting some mental daylight into a spiral of negativity. It’s here, in the role of self advisor, that all your previous introspective work, identifying your values, making plans about what you want to do, will act as your compass. The inner critic is usually, though not always inhibitory. It’s trying to stop you from doing something. When my inner critic whispers that I’m not good enough to write this book, the action that naturally follows from that belief is not to write at all. A wise response is to take the action that aligns with what you believe in and know is good for you regardless of what the critic is saying. So for me, that means keep writing wise responding may at times consist of correcting distorted thinking. I’m not failing at everything. I’m struggling with this one thing right now, at other times, it means acknowledging the fear behind the criticism I hear that you’re worried I’ll get hurt by putting myself out there, but I’m strong enough to handle whatever comes my way. The beauty of responding wisely is it doesn’t silence your inner critic. It changes your relationship with it. Over time, that voice becomes less of a demon and more of a nervous companion that you’ve learned to reassure it might never fully disappear, but it no longer has the power to thwart you from living the life you want to live. All right, friends, that is going to be a wrap on this episode. I have taught you some important things from the book, but a very, very far cry from everything that is in the book, which, as I mentioned earlier, is stacked with great ideas and insights, and I think is also a really good read. So I would be thrilled if you would check it out by buying it, Amazon, your local bookstore, wherever you want, or literally checking it out. Go to your local library, check it out or put a holder request on it. It all matters. What I want is people to read the book. So whatever way will get you involved with reading it is wonderful, and then I would love to hear what you think about it, honest, true reviews, the kind I actually love also are when people write me and say, Yeah, but this because that’s really helpful, because then I can say, Oh yes, well, I’ve worked with people, and here’s how we overcame that. Or you might be making a really valid point that’s going to help me refine how I think about something. Because what I want is my ideas to prove actionable in the real world. I want them to make real difference to real people, and the way I do that is by hearing from you. So thank you, as always, for listening. Thank you for your support, and until next time, take care. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better, and that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together, we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one you feed community you.