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is body language really that important yes for example when you change the posture of people who are depressed it
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reduces their symptoms tiny tweaks lead to big changes Dr Amy Cuddy expert on the Behavioral Science of power Harvard Professor coined the term power pose the second most watched Ted Talk of all time
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now posture can affect some of the biggest moments of Our Lives your body language is betraying you fifty percent
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of our first impression is based around body language so the way that we carry ourselves really affects your life
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because if people feel utterly powerless they see challenges as threats instead of opportunities they are less creative
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less authentic so that's my mission to help people feel more powerful and become more socially Brave and there's all kinds of ways in which we can fix it is there a relationship there as well
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between our body language and attractiveness yeah there's research showing that if you
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that body language and in dating situations how we tell our stories to ourselves matters as I've read through your story there was bullying in your life
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it's the worst thing that ever happened to me I had to leave my job after I'd worked so hard to get there I almost
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decided to die like I'm so afraid of them still um I think this is fascinating I looked at
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the back end of our YouTube channel and it says that since this channel started 69.9 percent of you that watch it
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frequently haven't yet hit the Subscribe button so I have a favor to ask you if you've ever watched this Channel and
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enjoyed the content if you're enjoying this episode right now please could I ask a small favor please hit the Subscribe button helps this channel more
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this show better and better and better and better and better that's the promise I'm willing to make you if you hit the
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Subscribe button do we have a deal [Music] Amy [Music] there's lots of um myths around body
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language and how important it is and you hear all these phrases about oh 80 of our communication is non-verbal or 90 I
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can't remember the numbers but you hear all of this stuff is body language really that important yes it is important absolutely and and
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it it is it probably affects you know about about half of our impression of others our first impression is based around body language
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I'm not maybe it's higher than that but I would say it's at least 50 body language isn't just us speaking to others we're also speaking to ourselves the way that we carry ourselves is
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sending messages back to our our brain about whether we're safe or unsafe are we threatened or not threatened are we you know confident or not confident and
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so how do we know that well the the sort of earliest studies looking at this idea
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about um Body Mind feedback we're focused on facial expressions and so we know that there are some mostly universal expressions of emotion
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that are facial and when I say mostly there is some debate about um you know whether they're entirely
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Universal to every single culture and exactly which emotions they are but you have things like happiness and smiling sadness and crying um you know widened eyes and surprise
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those things are Universal regardless of where you grew up and what you were exposed to so if they're Universal that indicates that they are hardwired that we're born with some
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Association in our brains so if they're hardwired can you reverse the direction of that wiring can you can
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you tell people to smile and will it make them happier and so the facial feedback studies showed that yes indeed
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you can uh that you you know and the first ones were were smiling and and mood uh so you know they had people some people hold a pencil between their teeth
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in a way that made them smile and others hold a pencil between their teeth in a way that didn't make them smile the
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people who were in this forced smile which did cause the contraction of the muscles around the eyes which which is a real smile even though it was a fake smile it's not just your mouth it's your
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mouth and your eyes they were in a better mood their mood lifted they liked the experimenter better they liked anything put in front of them better they felt happier than the people who
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were not in this forced smile it was then expanded to look at some of these other Universal facial expressions like
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crying and sadness and then people started to look at things like movement posture I would say the earliest work really was on breathing
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um you know when we get anxious we breathe quickly and shallowly and if you think about
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and I'm not sure that you ever had this experience but if you know you were called on in class say in high school
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and you weren't prepared or you had the first time you had to give a speech in front of class you know a lot of students speak very quickly and you can
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tell that their their breathing is shallow and they're they're breathing quickly that's that's a fight or flight
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response and so you know can you turn that around um and and so the the people who started studying this called this the relaxation response where they got people to change
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their breathing and I'm gonna I'm oversimplifying this but in essence you're breathing more slowly and deeply
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and that triggers a nervous system response that makes people feel much more relaxed and more confident and safe which impacts performance of their speech whatever they're doing yes or the
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context in which it was first studied was medicine and trying to get patients to feel calmer before stressful
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procedures her Benson at Harvard Medical School did some of that early work I think you know
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going back to the 60s and 70s so you know that was but it wasn't sort of linked quite to psychology because it was coming from medicine when you have a person who is suffering from major
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depressive disorder uh open up open their posture just for a couple of minutes and then have them fill out a depression scale afterwards they are less depressed
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when you treat people with PTSD by teaching them you know yoga poses that open them up it it reduces their PTSD symptoms so you
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know this is coming from all different fields of study not just from social psychology so there's a clear two-way relationship between my posture and how
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I'm feeling and then also how I'm feeling in my posture which communicates outwardly to the world about who I am
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and exactly I don't know if you know the answer to this question but it made me wonder as you were talking do you know
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how old language is I actually don't know the answer I don't know it's like how old is language
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between 150 to 200 000 years old and how old are humans okay so we have about 50 000 years of people not having
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sophisticated language and having to read each other's body language which a lot of non-human animals are doing all
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the time yeah exactly I mean you know it's it's funny we have these squirrels in our front yard um and they're really active and there are all kinds of body language signals
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but also these different kinds of chirps that they make and of course I was curious I looked this up you know is are they do these different chirps mean different things like certain bird calls
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really clearly mean certain things and the ethologists the animal behavior Specialists say that in with squirrels they don't mean specific things but it's
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it's still it's it's a body language signal so even it's not formal language but but they they still get the sense that there's something threatening
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happening or not or you know sometimes it's mating related but they're not as specific as
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bird calls which are closer to our language than say these squirrel chirps when you did that Ted Talk some 10 years ago I think from what I read it became the most viewed Ted Talk of all time in
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its moment it's it became second most viewed um and it has remained there for a long time so it it was never it was never the most
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viewed but it certainly went viral quickly why why do you think people care so much
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about this subject matter it's funny because you know it still gets five or ten thousand views a day
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and it that's it's 10 years old and I still get 10 emails a day from strangers who've just seen it for the first time thanking me
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saying they felt that I was speaking to them and so there must be something Timeless
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about it that I that I didn't know I was tapping into but I think there was some universal
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truth that resonated across people across cultures and a lot of it was about feeling like an imposter I mean that you know I talked about imposter syndrome
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and the feeling like you don't belong there and it turns out almost everyone has this imposter experience and in fact the women who who originally studied
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imposter syndrome says she wishes she had called it the Imposter experience because syndrome indicates that it's pathological and it's not it's just it's
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so common so what I found you know I I was getting emails from first generation you know um um uh black college students I was
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getting emails from white males literally Swiss Bankers all of these different people retired people um uh 12 year old kids who felt that
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they didn't belong there what I think resonated was first it's okay you're not the only one who feels that way it's normal but also there are some things that you can do to to to get out of
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feeling that way and so it very much is about to me um people feeling understood I feel like it's when you you know you love a song it speaks to
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you it it it evokes a certain emotional response because something about that song makes you feel connected and I think something about the talk did the
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same thing it made people feel understood um and not alone in their feelings of powerlessness and not belonging and it gave them a blueprint as such to
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to be more to feel more powerful yes and something that was you know didn't require technology that didn't really require much of anything
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um to to change the way they felt yes and what is that blueprint I feel like there's we know so much more now than we knew then
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then we we were having people adopt these expansive you know what we call power poses for a couple of minutes and
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looking at how it changed the way they felt um you know standing with their hands on their hips for example or in the victory
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pose with their arms up as if they had just crossed the finish line and won you know Usain Bolt for example and it
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changed the way they felt so that was the blueprint was was before you go into this stressful situation you know find a
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private space it's funny I said a bathroom stall I had not scripted that that's just what came out and so many
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people say I stood in a bathroom stall and um Power pose before the job interview or before pitching an idea or something like that uh and and it changed the way I felt
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and so that was the blueprint but I I feel like the idea of being expansive is so much more expansive than that
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um it's it's the way we walk it's taking longer strides um swinging our arms more it's uh it's
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talking more slowly it is which is taking up temporal space it's that breathing breathing more deeply and more slowly it's all there are all kinds of
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ways in which we can expand that will change our feeling of agency of power not power over others but power over ourselves or power too
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and when that happens it activates what psychologists call the behavioral approach system and the approach system causes us to see challenges not as
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threats but as opportunities it causes us to see other people not as potential Predators or competitors but as possible allies and Friends
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it makes us more creative because we're not feeling cognitively limited we have more of an abundance mindset than a scarcity mindset we don't feel as defensive we're more able to trust and I
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think maybe most important we're more likely to act so when we feel powerful we are more likely to take action not just on behalf of ourselves but also on behalf of others so when you look at
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research on say bystander intervention you know when do people step in and help in emergencies one of the best
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predictors is personal feeling personally powerful when people feel personally powerful they step in and
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help they go hey something's wrong they don't second guess themselves and think well maybe I'm not the right person to
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help they just do it they step in and help so you know it it has it has so that that feeling of power is linked to so many other uh feelings and and sort of aspects of
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our mindset that change how we approach life so as we expand and step forward the world expands so many people listening to this now
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will be unaware that they've been going through their lives signaling to themselves and
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to others a sense of they're in powerlessness yes um which is one of the first things that
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I I was thinking about when I had was reading through your work and watching the videos was that most people don't even know these are all unknown unknowns
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so they're feeling a certain way they're showing up in a certain way they're on stage hiding behind the lectern in a
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certain way and they have no idea the profundity of that signal that they're sending to themselves and others right
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what is how do I know that I'm signaling that to myself and to others what are the signs I think I ask people to do a kind of audit of their body of how
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they're holding themselves and it's funny when I when I'm giving a talk and speaking to a big group of people and I
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say you know now check your posture I can hear everyone immediately moving in their chairs even if the lights are low
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but I say no don't move yet check your posture because what you think you think that when you're not the one performing
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it your body language doesn't matter because you again we're thinking we think of body language as Just One
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Direction what we're saying to others but our body language is always speaking to us as well so I ask them to think to
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pay attention to what is their default even just seated position are they holding their shoulders up and forward collapsing their chest are they wrapping
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their hands or arms around their torso or powerlessness so like what's the it really is you know your your limbs are pulled in your shoulders are pulled
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forward your chest is collapsed um legs might be crossed and ankles wrapped I think the wrapping of the ankles matters more than the crossing of the legs if you watch sports and watch
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what's happening what what is the winning team doing versus the losing team you really see it I mean you see
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you know these big basketball players who are holding their heads in their hands and you know leaning forward and
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and they they look absolutely defeated um even though they're they're just as physically strong as they were five minutes earlier when things were going well so watching the body language of
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like athletes for example and then paying attention to what you're doing yourself I think helps us to become much
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more aware of how we're carrying ourselves but you can do little things like just when you get up in the morning
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you know if you wake up all curled up in the fetal position which is the most common sleeping position 40 of people sleep in the fetal position and we know that when people wake up in
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the fetal position they are more anxious than people who don't that is obviously correlational we
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don't know the the causal Direction because it might be that you're anxious and that's why you're sleeping in the
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fetal position nonetheless say you wake up in the fetal position stretch out you
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know into a starfish pose you know be Usain bold in bed before you put your feet on the ground on the ground one of my research assistants said that he would uh hold one of his hands on his
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hip while he brushed his teeth like little things that like that that sort of forced him to spend a little bit of time expanding really helped and I hear so many stories
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like this people rearrange their desks so that they have to stretch out a bit more when they're working instead of you
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know working like this over their phone you know how are you sitting in your car are you you know really close to the
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steering wheel and kind of collapsed or more open little things like that can really change the way you feel so I
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think it starts with just noticing how we carry ourselves how we carry ourselves physically how we speak how we breathe it's so interesting because I've got a
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a guy friend of mine who is um would be the first to say that he's very low self-esteem he's very disparaging of himself so when he walks into a room he'll
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insult himself so he'll say sorry I smile or sorry he'll apologize for himself take up very little room sit on
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the floor um all the time and all of these things which um we've always kind of noticed it but when you say all of these these things about people can Contracting when they're they
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feel powerless and taking up less space and being sort of self-disparaging I've always looked at that behavior in him
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and thought I I don't I don't know it's something deeper I don't know I don't know what we can do to or he can do to
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help himself what would you say to someone like that who's feels like a you know I mean like I was saying if you
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look at the clinical studies the research is pretty clear that you know sort of Body Mind feedback
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has significant benefits to people who are feeling because that sounds like sort of unusually low self-esteem right I would say that's several standard deviations
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below the mean if if that's how he carries himself and speaks about himself yes so everything you described was I
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just saw him I would say you know and again I'm not a clinical psychologist but if you look at
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the Clinical Psychology literature it very clearly shows that if you get people to change the way they carry
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themselves they feel better they feel different um I think you know I think to me some
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of the most compelling work is the work on combat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder who feel utterly broken
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and often feel that they their bodies betrayed them and you know are living at home are unable
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to keep a job or you know keep a relationship going and the research you know there are researchers who have worked with them and taught them these you know expansive
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yoga poses and the effects are dramatic it it just makes it restores their sense
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of personal power their sense of agency and you know these are self-reports when
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I talk about the behaviors they're self-reports but the researcher who did a lot of these studies Emma sepula who's
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at Yale says that she would hear from these people a year later saying I no longer live at home I have a job I'm so much happier I'm dating and it's because of this because of the
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expansive yoga poses yeah breathing the expansive breathing expensive yoga poses but getting into the practice of doing
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that changes their lives you know I feel strongly that encouraging people to open up even if it's when they're alone you know because
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sometimes people close up in social situations because they have you know complex PTSD they have experienced
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trauma and they've or they've been assaulted they've been harassed um and they feel that they're protecting
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themselves so I think you start at home alone you start in PRI the privacy of your own home where you don't feel threatened um and then maybe you build it into these more social situations so instead
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of worrying about the impression you're making on others you think about the impression you're making on yourself first that's what matters how we tell
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our stories to ourselves matters 100 agree I've been really compelled by this idea of what I've been calling the self story which is kind of what you're describing there which is
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um we all have this kind of story about who we are and how valuable we are and what we're good at and what we're capable of that governs Our Lives yes
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and it's written in every small thing we do that I sat here with um it's a bit of a different example but I
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sat here within a championship boxer and he was telling me that when he's on the treadmill at home it's a very different
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example when he's on the treadmill at home if he's told himself he's going to do seven miles and he gets to six and a
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half miles and gets cramped in his leg he will limp the remaining half a mile because he doesn't want to want to let
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in his own words the demons in and what he what he's really saying there is this idea that even though I'm alone and I'm
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No One's Gonna know or see I'm gonna know and I'm gonna write him to myself story just a new paragraph about who I
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am when things get tough yeah and that and I I thought so much about this because um lying kind of links to this in many
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ways because lying is this kind of decay of trust but also lying to yourself so like making a commitment to yourself
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that I'm going to do something and continually breaking the commitment to yourself even if nobody knows I think is just so detrimental to our our
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perception of ourselves like it's a downward spiral of the perception of ourselves absolutely I I I you know we
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we own our narratives and you know there's research even on looking at older people um and physical health outcomes I mean
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mortality and and the researchers found that older people who had more positive personal narratives about how they got to where they are in life lived significantly longer than people who had
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these negative narratives even if they had the same job the same kind of sort of on the surface they look the same they controlled for all those differences and still found that these
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the older people with these more positive personal narratives live longer again that's correlational but uh it's
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you know it's powerful and one of the things that happens when people feel powerless is uh that they are less able
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to be authentic right so when they when they present themselves say they are in a job interview they
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don't come across as authentic as somebody who feels more powerful and what's interesting is that the body language associated with sort of lower
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authenticity is sort of on the same Spectrum with the body language that's associated with
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outright deception right so when people are lying to somebody else I mean knowingly lying the body language that matters the most
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is not eye contact that's what people focus that they think eye contact is the most important signal it's not because
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people learn very different things in different households and cultures personality differences that change how
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people choose to make eye contact in different situations what matters is the asynchrony between
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the emotions conveyed with the words and the emotions conveyed with the body language so if you're telling a happy
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story but you do not look happy your body language doesn't look happy you know you don't come across as authentic
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if you think about you know being a kid and maybe you lied to get out of going to school and you told your parents that
00:25:56
you were sick and you really weren't you're telling a story that's not true that's you know supposed to be sad so
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you're trying to get the the emotions right with your words but your body language is probably betraying you
00:26:11
um you know because you're actually excited that you're going to sit at home on the couch and eat chips and watch reruns or at night rerun is probably a
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word that nobody uses anymore but TV um uh YouTube Tick Tock whatever so that that those asynchranies are the same as the asynchronies that you see
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when people aren't able to be authentic and of course in those cases that's not that the intention is not bad they're
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not in any way trying to lie to the other person in a way they're kind of lying to themselves
00:26:45
um and then that spills over into not being able to show an honest expression of themselves to the other and people and and the funny thing is that people
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don't can't quite articulate so if you're an interviewer say in that situation it's very hard to articulate what was off but they know something was off and
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they'll say the person didn't seem authentic but they're not going to say oh well their words didn't match their
00:27:16
body language yeah they would no because we you know when people are lying they can choreograph they can script the words but it's very hard to choreograph all the body language to go along with
00:27:27
it it takes up too much cognitive bandwidth so but it does come across to other people I think one of the fun
00:27:33
places to watch for this is on Shark Tank um is to to watch the the sort of the body language of these people pitching and sometimes you have people who come across at first as like super confident
00:27:46
but the something about the way they tell their story does not match their body language and and the Sharks feel that you see them you see them almost
00:27:58
cringe there's something off and they don't get the money and then you might have somebody who is
00:28:05
you know let's say uh doesn't have a business school education uh doesn't have as much experience but really believes in what they're doing and and
00:28:17
knows what they're doing you know yes I'm not saying that you can be incompetent you have to be at a certain
00:28:23
level of confidence but they're able to convey their authentic conviction and passion about
00:28:29
this project about what they're doing and the Sharks warm toward them you see them lean in toward those people and those people are more likely to be to to
00:28:41
to to to find investors and the thing is those those signals aren't just short-term signals those people are also more likely to stick with it to inspire
00:28:53
other people to uh to be promoted to to be successful in the long run it's a real signal that you're picking up on that you just can't fake and it really starts with how you tell your story to
00:29:06
yourself is there a relationship there as well between our body language and our attractiveness I does my is there a
00:29:14
certain body language that's associated with me being attractive if I'm single and I'm like you know I wanna
00:29:20
I want to increase my chances of finding a mate yeah it's well it's interesting because you know people I think there
00:29:27
were skepticism about whether women would be punished for um using more dominant body language and which I thought was kind of sad because
00:29:38
it just reinforces The Stereotype but but there's Recent research showing that first of all they're not they're not and
00:29:46
I'm not talking about super Alpha body language I'm talking about body language that's confident and warm right that
00:29:53
that shows I feel good about myself and I want to be here and I'm interested in you that body language is is more more
00:30:01
effective both in the workplace and in dating situations so people there was a study that looked at dating
00:30:08
profile pictures on dating apps and both men and women with more open body language more confident body language were seen as more attractive so I I thought that was that that was
00:30:20
very reassuring and also suggested to me that we're making some progress if that was true for for for you know across
00:30:28
genders so yeah people want to be with somebody who is confident but not arrogant who is
00:30:37
comfortable in their skin and your body language conveys that even in a still picture it conveys that wow if I am the type of person that is
00:30:49
feels powerless inside of myself I'm suffering with a variety of a variety of different reasons
00:30:54
um I know I know that there's as you've described there's there's things that I can do to tell a different story to
00:31:02
myself publicly and privately is this is this a form of practice that one has to do is this like a yes is there a CIS
00:31:10
like a like I go to the gym and I do some of my favorite work in social psychology is on what's called
00:31:16
self-affirmation Theory when people think of self-affirmation they think of someone looking in a mirror saying I'm
00:31:23
awesome I'm you know I'm the best I'm gonna win I'm a winner we kind of know that when we feel bad about ourselves saying I'm great doesn't help because
00:31:34
now we just feel like we're lying to ourselves so we feel bad already and now we're like well I feel bad and I'm a
00:31:39
liar sounds exactly so so self-affirmation is not that self-affirmation is this what what these experiments and there are hundreds of
00:31:52
experiments now in self-affirmation they have people list the top two or three values or qualities that make them who they are like if I took that value or
00:32:05
quality away from you you would say I'm just no longer myself like you are just taking a piece of me away
00:32:12
they then have them kind of rank them and then take the top one and write a couple of paragraphs one paragraph about um you know a time when they expressed
00:32:22
it and another maybe about how it felt to express it that is it that's the exercise they then have them do do difficult things like take a difficult
00:32:34
math test for example or do a debate you know do it be in a debate competition or
00:32:40
or um whatever something challenging that's unrelated right so if say I said um I value music you know I if if you took
00:32:53
the experience of of Music away from me I just would not feel like myself and then I I did a math test I would do better on the math test
00:33:04
after doing that self-affirmation exercise I likely I would be likely to on average people perform better
00:33:12
they also even show decreases in levels of stress hormones like epinephrine so the idea is that you're anchoring yourself in who you are and what you're doing is reminding yourself that no
00:33:24
matter what happens on that math test you're still going to be that person when you walk out and so it that math
00:33:31
test becomes less important which ironically or paradoxically makes you do better on it and so I think that's a
00:33:39
really good start is to just spend time you know kind of journaling about who are you what do you value but really
00:33:46
what are those qualities that make you who you are to you not to others not how would others describe you what removes you like what really moves you
00:33:59
it's not so interesting I've never heard that before because a lot of the time you kind of have to have the two camps where one campus says look in the mirror
00:34:05
and tell yourself a bunch of lies and there's a whole industry about yeah I don't like it yeah and then there's
00:34:12
the other cam which is Maybe uh I don't know if this is the other Camp necessarily but it's probably the school of thought I've always lived in
00:34:18
which is you need to go and build evidence somehow new evidence about yourself right like counteracting the
00:34:24
evidence that the limiting evidence or the limiting beliefs that are standing in your way yeah it's like self-perception Theory right if you see
00:34:31
yourself doing it you you become it yeah and that's just a reflection on the areas in my life where I was like very
00:34:36
low confidence and how I got from that place to being higher confidence came from
00:34:43
straying outside of my comfort zone and going and doing nothing more um building evidence that I wasn't going
00:34:48
to die I feel and I that works too I'm not saying that that self-affirmation is the only way to do it I I'm much more by
00:34:56
the way in Europe I'm in your Camp I I get really frustrated with um it's all your mindset and you just got to tell yourself that you you you can create your life you know like how
00:35:09
yeah you know I just there's so much of that and I feel like it's so confusing and discouraging for people because they watch people who they think are doing that
00:35:22
in short clips and they're like well there they did it why can't I do it but but a lot of those people didn't get to where they are by doing that lots of
00:35:33
people helped them get to where they are yeah um or you know they did other work but
00:35:39
it's it's just or or maybe they're not where they aren't even where you believe they are they're actually really unhappy and just putting on this Brave face because simple cells right simple cells
00:35:52
simple cells and you know um simple inspiration cells so just just just to close off that
00:35:59
point about because I feel like there's going to be people listening right now um that identify with feeling powerless
00:36:05
in their everyday lives and their working lives and relationships they uh they can spot all the symptoms you described of that sort of like
00:36:11
contracted posture the self-affirmation piece loved it never heard that before um what else to get me out of that situation I'm thinking in terms of things that I can like either practice
00:36:24
or you know how do I get from there to there well it's funny because I I talk a lot
00:36:30
about how tiny tweaks lead to big changes and I I called you know there was a whole
00:36:36
sort of nudge movement like how do you change people's behavior through these little nudges and I I talk about self-nudging you I'm
00:36:45
not a I'm not a big believer in New Year's resolutions because they're two they're grandiose they require a million
00:36:50
steps you're going to fail somewhere along the way and then quit I believe in just doing a little bit better the next time okay so the next time you go into
00:37:02
uh give a talk for example to anyone if somebody's afraid of public speaking but has to to do to lead team meetings for example
00:37:12
I want you to focus on changing one thing maybe it's your breathing you breathe more slowly and deeply maybe you make sure that you're not wrapping your hands around your body by holding a
00:37:24
bottle of water or a slide advance or something something that forces you to keep your hands away from your body each time you get a little bit better and
00:37:36
eventually you find that you're there and my advisor my grad school advisor Susan Fisk who I just adore
00:37:43
taught me that because I almost quit grad school the night before my first year talk
00:37:48
which is where you present the first year of research you've done just to the people in your department I was so
00:37:54
scared that I called her and I said I'm I can't do this I'm going to quit and she said
00:38:01
you're not quitting she said you're going to do it and even if it doesn't go perfectly which it
00:38:07
won't you will have done it and learned something and gotten a little better and
00:38:13
each time it's going to get better she said and I want you to give every talk you're asked to give take every
00:38:18
opportunity that you're that that's given to you to improve and eventually you won't notice the moment when you know suddenly you've gotten there you'll
00:38:30
just look back and go oh my gosh I'm here how did I get here through these tiny nudges so go easy on yourself focus
00:38:38
on only one change in that next challenge focus on the situations that you approached with Dread that you execute with anxiety and distraction and
00:38:50
that you tend to leave with a sense of regret each those challenges vary for different across people you know for some people
00:38:56
it's public speaking for some people it's giving negative feedback for some people it's
00:39:02
um having a difficult discussion with a family member whatever that challenge is for you
00:39:07
I want you to do change one little thing each time you go into it so that you can in the end approach it with confidence execute with this calm
00:39:19
confidence and leave it with a sense of satisfaction that you showed up that you
00:39:24
did what you could do a lot of things that you can't control but it's much easier to accept a
00:39:30
negative outcome if you controlled the things you could right if you know how often do people walk away from those situations and go I feel like they didn't see who I am
00:39:41
you want to walk away and say they saw who I am and now they get to make the decision and I can't control whether
00:39:48
they you know how how they evaluate me Beyond this I did I did my best that's where you want to get to I always think of um confidence and self-esteem and now powerlessness or powerfulness the
00:40:01
feeling of it as an upward or a downward spiral that we're all kind of on like a self-reinforcing upward or downward
00:40:07
spiral if that kind of I think it is so if I just to kind of I think that say something I'm confident at public speaking on stage for example I will show up better which means I'm likely to
00:40:19
get a better reaction I'm likely to feel better after which means next time I show up better which means and the Spiral goes up or conversely it can go
00:40:25
the opposite way downwards and the people that are on that downward so there's many areas of my life that I think come on and up would spiral I'm
00:40:31
like I'm building positive evidence it's all going well and everyone's black and then there's some areas of my life that I might be on a downward spiral um I
00:40:38
know I've got some good friends that I think are so far down that downward spiral that even telling them
00:40:45
what your lovely professor she was a my advice my yeah she was a professor my my
00:40:50
graduate school advisor they're so far down the bottom of that spiral that they would have quit yeah a lot of people are
00:40:57
living in a state of survival which I actually think of like self-preservation or defense yes they're like just remove all chance of threat from my life
00:41:05
and in that situation you never do get to go upwards on that spiral no oh God I just so many people are at the bottom of
00:41:11
that spiral in their lives I know and I don't know what to do about it I I it's you know it's my responsibility but I
00:41:18
just think no responsibility no it's not but but also I I do think that more people are in that state now than they than that compared to three and a half years ago how come I do I think the
00:41:29
pandemic really took a toll on people's mental sort of um stability their their sense of self and I think we're going to be grappling
00:41:41
with that for quite a while I mean people who we why did it why did it have that impact because we are wired to deal
00:41:51
with a crisis that lasts like a couple months not one that lasts three years and not one that is yanking us around back and forth like oh we're
00:42:04
emerging oh Delta we're emerging Omicron you know like it was just this constant back and forth and we so we were living in this liminal state where we had one foot on the safe side and one
00:42:18
foot on the threatened side we get through crises using what's called surge capacity which is you know it's called a
00:42:24
network of physical and and Psychological Resources that help us survive but that runs out pretty quickly
00:42:31
and a lot of people say for the first two months of the pandemic they felt very productive that was Surge capacity
00:42:37
and it's studied in the context often of um of of combat soldiers so like the first battle it's it's the emergency phase and they they are focused the goal
00:42:50
is clear it's shared teams operate at their best good leaders operated their best then they go into this regression
00:42:57
in between where they don't know what's going to happen next they lose a sense of purpose they become disconnected from
00:43:04
each other they withdraw then they're back in battle in that's how this is gone it's going to take a little while
00:43:11
to put the pieces back together again but I think I think that we we have to have some Grace
00:43:17
and I mean toward each other with each other with ourselves I don't think it's going to be fixed by if we're too hard ourselves I think we
00:43:29
do have to let ourselves off the hook a bit and go oh we've never lived through something like this earlier and we were
00:43:34
talking about the things that make you feel powerless in your body language and the way you conduct yourselves and all these things the things that make
00:43:40
someone look and feel powerful um I imagine it's the opposite in many respects but specifically if I if I want to and I want to because I really want
00:43:51
to leave people with actionable things that they can they can do in their lives if I want to
00:43:56
um become a better speaker present myself better show up better for my employees
00:44:04
um or be a better podcast host and I think about this people I've never said this before people I spend so long
00:44:09
thinking about how I'm sitting when I'm speaking to someone really yeah because because when I'm not thinking I might like fall into a certain posture I was
00:44:16
I've even been thinking about these bloody arms on this chair sometimes I'm like this and this is my
00:44:21
favorite situation to be in so like my body's open right and then sometimes I go like this and sometimes I crunch over
00:44:28
into a ball and stuff yeah and when I'm having these kind of conversations with people I think that the best approach to take is to be open with my body language
00:44:34
yes and then hopefully they'll open up with me yeah you know that's exactly right so I think
00:44:40
to really simplify it and again as I said I don't love like choreographing but the body language that is I think the the most uh effective is to be open
00:44:53
to be kind of leaning forward you know Palms up not wrapping yourself up not the whole time yeah but what what you want to be showing is I'm comfortable and relaxed with you I'm interested in
00:45:04
you yeah and so I think that's that's the posture that you want to take on and people will mirror that one thing that
00:45:11
people in general people mirror each other's body language right that's a way that we sync up but there's one
00:45:19
exception and that's when there's a power differential so if a powerful person is interacting with somebody
00:45:24
that's clearly less powerful the powerful person tends to become more dominant in their body language and the powerless person becomes more powerless and we call that complementarity so I
00:45:38
think it's very important for people in leadership positions to be aware that when one of their you know employees
00:45:45
comes to talk to them they're probably a little nervous and to be very mindful of their body language because you don't you don't want them to shut down you want them to
00:45:55
feel comfortable and tell you what's going on share their interests or their problem or their challenge
00:46:02
penguin arms I never had that expression until chapter nine of your book what's penguin arms it's when people people
00:46:09
don't know what to do with their head a lot of people don't know what to do with their hands when they're speaking and so
00:46:15
they kind of like pin they pin their wrist to their like around their hips and their hands kind
00:46:22
of stick out oh okay you're gonna look like a penguin yeah it's it's really common for people
00:46:28
who are afraid of public speaking you'll like they're like kind of moving their hands but they're afraid to move their
00:46:35
arms away from their body besides penguin arms let me just get I've got this correctly is this penguin arms you
00:46:41
mean this yeah but you're talking I'm like yeah exactly that's penguin arms okay
00:46:47
and it's again because I'm I'm I mean one of the this correlation between how much space you take up and
00:46:52
how powerful you feel right again that's me trying to take up less as little as space as possible right and I'm
00:46:57
signaling so I'm speaking to you by doing that even though regardless of what my mouth is saying and if I'm like
00:47:03
this yes I'm saying you're sending a completely different message exactly and people are remember the audience like
00:47:09
even a whole audience is responding to you so if there's this whole self-reinforce there's reinforcement
00:47:16
between you and the audience and within the self so if you're acting that way they might be mirroring you or feeling kind of uncomfortable because you're feeling anxious but you can make the
00:47:28
audience feel uncomfortable because you're so uncomfortable for sure and then and then you read that and you feel
00:47:34
more uncomfortable so it becomes you know kind of re reinforced through the interaction this is this interesting thing that happens to me once in a while where I'll be speaking
00:47:45
to someone and it's usually someone I'm gonna be honest right so it's usually someone where there's a lot of things about them but I
00:47:52
haven't told them and I find it hard to hold eye contact with them and I notice this about myself to
00:47:57
certain people in my life where there's like unaddressed things that haven't fully spoken about and when I speak to
00:48:02
them I tend to not look at them and I tend to just like be looking away or looking down and I I will occasionally
00:48:08
glance over and look at them but this broader point about eye contact and you mentioned it briefly earlier on
00:48:14
what significance does it have in our Communications and because I I find it the hardest thing I can kind of I think
00:48:20
I can feign the body language I wish I could make that I I can't give you a simple answer and I that because there are so many cultural differences oh really in in when you make eye contact
00:48:33
so kids learn such different rules about making eye contact UM you know a lot of kids are taught you don't make eye contact with an authority figure right so and then they're seen as
00:48:45
lying because they're not making eye contact uh you know um but but but seeing it as rude to make eye contact it
00:48:53
means you know in a lot of East Asian cultures eye contact you you don't hold eye contact for as long it's seen this
00:48:59
very aggressive um in the U.S you can hold eye contact for quite a while before people feel
00:49:05
uncomfortable but it's you know it so yeah it's I think it's one of the more culturally
00:49:11
constrained Expressions what am I in primates I mean if I've watched all these primate documentaries and it's
00:49:18
often the case that when primates kind of look at each other for too long it can it's often aggressive aggressive
00:49:23
yeah I I don't I and again I I would have to defer to something like Bob sapolski on that one but I think um I I
00:49:30
think that in non-human primates it you know great apes it is it is a sign of aggression it is like bring it on yeah and in certain contexts
00:49:42
yeah again it's so contextual and cultural because as we were saying before we start recording in the US if
00:49:48
someone stares at me in a lift I would imagine that they're about to say hello whereas in I don't know a rough part of
00:49:55
the UK if someone stares at me I would check where my wallet and my keys are and
00:50:00
assume that we had there's going to be a problem yeah so yeah yeah I mean and there are differences cultural differences within the U.S too is it possible to learn how to read people
00:50:11
better in terms of their body language is that also something you can play oh for sure I just think there's some really great books like I I love Joe
00:50:19
Navarro's work he's a former FBI agent he has a lot of images he really he's not a researcher but grounds in the research and has a lot of personal experience the book that I love is is
00:50:31
what everybody is saying um by Joe Navarro so I would recommend that as a great way to start I think there are some that are sort of like more like
00:50:41
how to pick up women yeah yeah and I don't like those this is just really understanding people and what's
00:50:48
happening in an interaction I'm gonna confess that when I was 18 I read one such book about pickup artistry
00:50:55
and um it actually it actually was very useful had this conversation with my husband
00:51:01
it's so funny and it's like the one thing he was like I did read that oh yeah I mean yeah so it
00:51:07
was it was useful because I love psychology I studied psychology at in in school as well and um I chose that for
00:51:14
one of my a levels and it was useful from that perspective I mean it's probably why I do this now I was so
00:51:19
compelled to understand why humans do what they do then I read this book which I didn't intend to buy I'm gonna be honest okay I've told the truth the
00:51:25
whole time so believe me when I say I didn't intend to buy this book about pickup Artistry my older brother ordered
00:51:31
it for home in the southwest of the UK when he'd gone he put the wrong address in when he was at University so it came
00:51:36
home and he goes I'll just keep it so I open it and I opened up my bedroom floor and I did not move until I'd finished the entire book the first book where
00:51:43
from the first page till the last I didn't move and it fascinated me because it was just it was like someone turned
00:51:48
the lights on to this whole other language that I'd been communicating my whole life without knowing someone one
00:51:54
of the really things I always talk about with my friends is this idea of pecking which is this kind of invasion of personal space that happens when you're
00:52:01
when you meet someone you're attracted to yeah the music style out you lean into their personal space
00:52:08
and how that signals like low value then they lean out um but all those things I found oh geez
00:52:13
I am the worst if I'm in a restaurant and I see it a first date yeah it is it can be so I want to slip a napkin to the woman sometimes and like
00:52:26
like the guy will get up to go to the bathroom and she is like you I'm I feel like slipping a napkin and saying run
00:52:33
you know like it's just you can it's so clear so quickly how it's going what are
00:52:40
the signs they are talking too much and not asking questions oh my god um I mean that that's I would say the most common
00:52:47
and and believing that they're very very interesting they are yeah so interesting
00:52:54
um and and it is leaning in and taking into too much taking up too much space and you can see the and I'm sorry I'm talking about straight couples and so because I I don't know enough about
00:53:08
um other dyads but I mean in this in the context of body language but you see the woman clearly tensing up she's making herself smaller to get away
00:53:22
she may not be literally leaning away she's closing herself up and she women were people in that situation when they want to get away they often do these lip presses like this
00:53:36
um and so you start to see the lip presses and then making themselves smaller and
00:53:43
you know and and leaning right in fact um we were watching a TV show last night that might be called The Bachelorette this happened and the the guy was holding her The Bachelorette like
00:53:55
hugging her and like she wasn't forcefully lean away but I was like oh it's too close she really does not like that but she was being very polite it was like painful to watch so in real
00:54:10
life well I've had to bite my tongue at times what's the opposite of that then when you look over in a restaurant
00:54:16
because me and my girlfriend do this I think everybody does this well not everybody clearly but just weirdos like
00:54:21
us that are into psychology who look over another couple and go they're getting on really really great they're into each other this is not because me
00:54:28
and my girlfriend we go to restaurants we always think like is this a first date how long have they been together are they married are they into each
00:54:33
other obviously the really bad examples is when they're both leaning out on their phones yes and I'm like oh my God
00:54:39
yeah so not picking up their phones leaning in toward each other yeah um yeah good eye contact about balance and in conversation expressions of genuine
00:54:52
curiosity where you can kind of see their face light up when they hear the person the other person say something
00:54:57
like they're really intrigued the other one always one of them gets up to go to the bathroom yeah and to me the the tell is what does the other person do when
00:55:10
that person this makes me look like I'm not watching you all on your dates I swear you learn so am I
00:55:17
we both are and that's fine but when the other person goes to the bathroom if the ones that at the table is like you can tell their smile like
00:55:28
they can't stop smiling um and maybe they're texting somebody and they're but their cheeks like almost
00:55:34
you can tell her cheeks almost hurt from smiling they're it's like they're letting the they're so excited they
00:55:40
don't want to act over the top with the person but when the person steps away they allow themselves to feel that joy
00:55:47
that to me is the talent that's exciting you're like oh that's so nice Something Beautiful is happening and the little
00:55:53
grooming signals as well like when you know they you know they might yeah that they smell well and things like right
00:56:00
I guess the I guess the last piece is about being able to fake body language can people do that can we fake it I mean you can try is it effective I usually
00:56:14
not it because you get those asynchranies right so it's too much think think about all of the non-verbal challenge channels you've got vocal cue
00:56:26
they call it the paralinguistic cues like tone of voice range of voice how quickly or slowly you speak you've got
00:56:33
your your fingers your hands your arms there's too much to do to fake it for you know uh
00:56:44
and and to make it consistent with what you're saying probably you know the greatest actors can
00:56:51
pretty well but I mean to me it's just it's it's so likely to fail that it's not even worth trying and I I don't think it's honest I
00:57:01
super interesting for me because between the age of I'm gonna say 14 and let's go for 21. I was in my view I think I was kind of rejected by every
00:57:13
um woman that I pursued and I think I was inherently low value and didn't realize it so when I read
00:57:18
these books about pickup Artistry and all this stuff I read all this work I tried to do what the book said and it
00:57:24
was unsuccessful like fundamentally unsuccessful my life changed when I actually changed like when my actual
00:57:31
opinion of myself changed and I was saying this to my friend the other day who's who's going through a bit of a process where
00:57:37
um they're struggling with that same thing I said you know what I wasn't able to lie to myself I tried waiting longer
00:57:42
to text back I tried this I tried all of these things and my conclusion from that chapter of my life is there's a thousand
00:57:49
little things that ways we communicate it's exactly what you just said I said to my friend the other day there's a thousand ways we can communicate and you
00:57:55
might think you can control three or four of them but as humans that have evolved over those 200 000 years were so
00:58:01
good at knowing what someone really thinks and feels and so I guess my question here is like
00:58:06
I came to the conclusion and then this was when I was giving my friends some advice through the days you can't fake it you have to actually go and change
00:58:12
yourself story like you can know the tips and tricks but that wasn't enough for me to actually get the you know
00:58:19
and it was honestly the thing that changed in my life was when my opinion of myself changed right and it's and I
00:58:25
it sounds so weird to say but I'm sure nobody's listening um the profunda the profundity of the
00:58:31
change I just can't I can't describe it not not even in the relationship being able to attract people but just in every context like I don't know what changed I don't know what I did all I know is that
00:58:42
something deep within me my story of who I am changed and that means that when I show up in places I stand differently
00:58:48
yeah your non-verbal sort of experts talk about Inside Out change yeah right as opposed to outside in yeah um because people have clicked this video right now click this podcast because they went outside in chain I
00:59:01
know they do I know and it's like I always feel like look I'm a body language person but that doesn't mean I'm going to give you a hat full of
00:59:07
tricks it just doesn't because it's not going to work that wouldn't be right and it's funny too because the quote that I'm
00:59:14
best known for is fake it till you become it and what I mean by that it is fake it till
00:59:22
you make it to me has always meant pretend that you know things you don't know for pretend that you are a person that you're not until you get the job but what do you do then you keep faking
00:59:36
it so fake it till you make it is fooling other people fake it till you become it is expand
00:59:43
allow yourself to feel powerful enough to really understand who you are to know what your story is to be to be more focused on the impression you're making on yourself than on others
00:59:56
um to grow to be less afraid of these challenges and eventually you know maybe you know standing in those big positions alone feels a little awkward at first
01:00:09
and you're faking it but eventually you become that person and you know that's what happened with my student who I talk about in the Ted Talk who had not participated at all the whole semester
01:00:21
and I I was gonna have to fail her and I said you have to participate and she finally raised her hand on the last class I said I'll call on you and first of all her comment was amazing and
01:00:32
people's head spun like they hadn't noticed her but she continued to use these ideas and she came back to me
01:00:38
later like six months or a year later and she said she said to me I want you to know I'm so happy now because she had come into my office and said I feel like an imposter I don't belong here I'm from
01:00:51
this small town I was like so am I if I belong here you do she came back to me after graduating and
01:00:58
finding and actually getting into education and not business and she said those things that we talked about I did and I realized I wasn't faking it till I
01:01:09
made it I was faking it till I became it and now I'm the person that I wanted to be
01:01:16
that makes so much sense so expand yourself so that you can get the evidence you need to become the thing that you exactly our parents and grandparents
01:01:27
told us to sit up straight as a show of respect to others and kids hate that it's kids you know to teach kids to sit up straight as a show of respect to
01:01:38
themselves and that allows you to be more open to to be less defensive to allow the truth of who you are in
01:01:51
it's hard to confront ourselves it takes courage so by adopting those powerful postures
01:02:00
by feeling personally powerful you are generating the courage to confront yourself to know yourself to introduce yourself to yourself ladies and gentlemen today is a very big
01:02:13
day for me because the Diary of a CEO book is finally out it's been published today the 33 laws of business and life
01:02:21
I've spent many years writing this book but I've spent even longer about a decade and a half compiling the
01:02:27
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01:02:45
understand how to tell great stories and maybe most importantly of all understand yourself then I believe this book is a
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know they're a sponsor of this podcast and I'm an investor in the company one of the things I've never really explained is how I came to have a
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relationship with huel one day in the office many years ago a guy walked past called Michael and he was wearing a
01:03:32
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what that word meant and why he was wearing that T-shirt and he said it's this brand called heal and they make
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food that is nutritionally complete and very very convenient and has the planet in mind and he the next day dropped off
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that falls by the wayside so if there was a really convenient reliable trustworthy way for me to be
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nutritionally complete in an affordable way I was all ears especially if it's a way that is conscious of the planet give
01:04:14
it a chance give it a shot let me know what you think as I've read through your story I came across this moment where there was some
01:04:22
academic bullying in your life and this appeared to me to be the a real pivotal um hurtful chapter of your life it's now the basis for some of the work that you're doing and
01:04:36
some of the things you're writing about what what do I need to know about what happened there to understand the lessons that you've taken from that um chapter
01:04:49
I I would rather endure any physical pain than go through that and I have interviewed I mean it went on for years I became
01:05:00
just fair game it was because the bullies had been so successfully diminished demeaned stigmatized me that anyone else who felt the need to
01:05:14
act out could act out against me it was okay so the mountain of you know social media
01:05:25
um uh evidence of of this bullying is overwhelming and I can't even look through it I have to have someone else sort through that I am not talking about Anonymous trolls this was other
01:05:38
academics this was about me it was personal they they they're they were not hiding behind anonymity every person I've interviewed for this book has been been bullied every adult has said
01:05:53
it's the worst thing that ever happened to me and I felt like I was dying or I wanted to
01:06:00
die for a long time because it is social death it is social death and without community we we are we are in a bad place I mean we we do need each other
01:06:13
the facts of my life were stolen from me my story was Rewritten so much so that I
01:06:21
could not do an interview without having to correct all kinds of disinformation about me
01:06:28
right so the whole you know telling the way you tell your story to yourself matters peace wow that was hard I had to
01:06:36
keep doing that to survive it because other people were telling a story that was a lie and that was deeply hurting me I mean emotionally professionally
01:06:50
um hurting my family I mean it was terrible I was I I almost died I almost decided to die and
01:07:02
um and that's very common for people who are bullied and I'm not through it it's those I mean I'm
01:07:16
I'm through the worst of it but it still it still comes up and and and there are
01:07:21
there are there's disinformation in news articles that that these bullies sort of
01:07:27
got out there that will always circulate I can never I can't get rid of all of that right it
01:07:33
will pop up every once in a while and people go but yeah but I heard you did this and you're like no
01:07:40
that's incorrect um and so every time that pops up it's it's just like a dagger again it it is an absolute theft of your life it is
01:07:52
it is absolutely it is absolutely devastating and in the workplace it's remarkably
01:08:04
common and the estimates by people who study workplace bullying are that oh more than 90 of people who become
01:08:16
targets of workplace bullying dis disappear from that job and when I say disappear I mean they're either fired because the bully flips it around and they're seen as the difficult person
01:08:30
or their move to a different department or they quit because they can't endure it
01:08:35
or they die of a stress related illness or they take their own lives um suicide rates are very high for for adults for children and adult bullying
01:08:45
targets if I was in your household around that time what would I have seen and I asked
01:08:51
that question because people never get to see that right they get to see either silence or they might
01:08:57
get to see a statement but um you know what I'm thinking right now is that my boys are going to hear this and they're gonna be laughing and they're
01:09:19
gonna be they're gonna be saying that I'm exaggerating you know like but who cares why if they say that but I it's still like I'm so afraid of them still
01:09:31
um I was you know Raising a Son who is just a lovely remarkable person I'm like I can't believe that he grew up to be such a wonderful person
01:09:53
because for so much of his teenage life I was going through this and it was so hard to be present but I had to be
01:10:04
like I need there was this constant conflict that I had how much do I tell him about
01:10:13
um how much do I Shield him from it can I Shield him from it because you know my God my husband who
01:10:27
was just like wanted so desperately to fix it for me and he he's a scientist and he understood very well the statistical arguments as better than than most people in my field do and he
01:10:41
would engage with these bullies and that would escalate he was he was for sure traumatized by it
01:10:48
um I was just curled up in a ball and then amazingly I was still able to go out and speak and for that hour
01:10:59
I was safe and and then I would I would hide again and I was just so afraid uh I just felt like I was dying I would just I think almost every day I said I
01:11:15
feel like I'm dying uh it was it was I it just the darkest of dark um they like I'm grieving still the loss
01:11:34
of again the facts of my life and a future that I thought I was going to have even though I and this is that whole Silver Lining thing I'm actually happier now
01:11:48
in the life that I'm in I had to leave my job I wasn't forced out at all and in fact I want to be clear because this isn't the bullies love to say that I was denied tenure I
01:12:00
was not denied tenure I chose to leave my Dean was incredibly supportive of me I could not live in that toxic house anymore it was filled with fumes it was
01:12:11
I I I would have died if I had stayed so in Academia period you left your job yes
01:12:19
my my full-time you know tenure track position and that's after I had been promoted twice like I had worked so hard to get there I had an excellent record of research
01:12:34
um I wanted to stay there I I wanted to continue to do work around sexism and racism I I thought maybe I would eventually get
01:12:45
into the administration I wanted to like that was the life that I thought I hadn't and they made it impossible for me to stay
01:12:59
yes it was my choice and no it wasn't my choice um they sold my future now I have a different one maybe that's maybe that's better but it doesn't take away the pain of that loss it's sort of
01:13:13
like it's like losing a spouse a spouse dying Young and then you get remarried a few years later and you're happy in your new marriage and maybe you're even happier
01:13:28
but you'll never stop grieving the loss of that first person right it's that's how this feels um and that's why it's taking me like four
01:13:41
years to write this book because it's a lot it's a it's a lot to tell my own story I'm scared and it's a
01:13:49
lot to hold other people's stories because I know how they feel I know how hard it is
01:13:55
I mean I've interviewed people whose adult children have taken their own lives because they were so badly bullied in the workplace
01:14:07
it was it was just torture my collaborators were tortured and lost so much fighting this disinformation and just this this
01:14:30
meanness my son in the last six months has had two friends who were taking psychology
01:14:37
courses learn this disinformation about me in their psychology courses because again it just sort of lives on and so now he's
01:14:48
coming going I don't understand can I ask you everyone's question here because I
01:14:54
did lots of research on you didn't really come across any of that it's amazing I didn't so I don't know
01:15:01
the details of it um what I what I've have inferred from what you're saying is that people try to discredit you yes and
01:15:06
your intentions yes is that accurate yes okay so they try to discredit you me my
01:15:12
intentions my my actions um and to prevent me from doing more work doing more work right makes sense yes
01:15:26
what do you think their motivations were I can tell you that a small percentage of people I believe are what I call primary bullies like
01:15:38
they are the ones who get the ball rolling if they're alone and I you know we chatted about this earlier but if they're alone they're just yeah
01:15:49
but when they recruit people then they become bullies and they tend to be repeat offenders what they want is status and recognition
01:16:03
they feel that they have not gotten as much as they deserve and they resent people who they perceive as getting more than they deserved
01:16:16
and so when they perceive that they'll start to go after that person in little ways and I call that the bully test the bullies testing to see if
01:16:28
people will allow that to happen and if people don't push back and this is where bystanders
01:16:36
could get involved right away and say that's not okay I so wish more people had done that in
01:16:42
my case then they escalate very quickly and they are basically they are gaining status by taking away your status it's I don't think it's about
01:16:54
power as much as it is about status there are people who are very powerful but still feel like they're not getting
01:17:02
the recognition and status that they deserve and their bullies it is motivated I believe in general again I
01:17:10
don't know what motivated my bullies by a need for status and one of the commonalities across bullies is that they tend to have a scarcity
01:17:22
mindset they see the world as everything is zero sum everything's affixed buy and that
01:17:31
means if if somebody else is getting status or success it's somehow taking away from their from them you know Einstein once said the most important question that you'll answer
01:17:43
for yourself is sort of is the universe fundamentally hostile or friendly because the way you answer that will affect the way you do your work and how you interact with people and
01:17:58
what what you aspire to these are people who would say the world is fundamentally hostile the bullies are yes and that's the commonality across
01:18:12
bullies I think there are some myths about bullies like the idea that bullied people become bullies
01:18:18
some do and most don't in fact a lot of the people who I call bravehearts who stand up against bullies were bullied so it's it's not that bullied people
01:18:31
become bullies it's not that you know you know it's not that they're they have such low self-esteem and they can't sleep at night they actually they can sleep at night they're okay with what
01:18:43
they're doing they think they're right um yeah but we there are way there's so many ways and I I this is maybe another conversation for next year
01:18:55
there's so many opportunities for bystanders to get involved early so that it doesn't escalate to this full-blown bullying campaign because once you're there the person is is is is is is
01:19:08
socially killed do you think this is an inevitable byproduct of being successful
01:19:14
because you talk those primary bullies they see status as the the game so you become really successful in your industry you get a TED Talk which becomes one of the most watched ever you know your podcast becomes big those
01:19:27
Primary people are going to say he or she is getting too much credit what can I do to tear them down give me
01:19:35
a little bit of credit take back some of that zero some status um so you know so is it a inevitable
01:19:42
what do they call it um occupational hazardous yeah so I don't think I think it's common for you for successful people to have haters
01:19:53
that doesn't always turn into bullying also the people who tend to be targets tend to be people who have okay so if you if you think about the kind of the
01:20:07
workplace or the profession and then the rest of the world they have lower status in their profession than they do with the rest of the world and so I was a junior researcher I
01:20:22
wasn't you know supposed to get this much attention and I just gave a TED talk like that you know I I wasn't going out looking for status
01:20:33
that's what happened it happened to go viral but the targets tend to be people who are below the average on status in with with the in-group and then cross
01:20:48
what some researchers have called the line of resentment and then they become targets or they're viable targets they
01:20:55
don't necessarily become targets but they're viable targets so people who have very high status in inside and get
01:21:02
high status outside they're much less likely to be bullied interesting so to sort of clarify that
01:21:09
in words that I just make sure I understand if I am in a school yeah and I am maybe in the
01:21:18
lower quartile of popularity I'm not so popular but then something happens which
01:21:25
means outside of school I become super famous yes you know I blow up in the news outside of school and everyone's
01:21:30
talking about me and they love me the people in school yeah there's going to be a group of people in school that go we need to Reign this guy back in
01:21:36
there's going to be a couple of people and you hear those stories and you've interviewed a lot of celebrities and you
01:21:43
know when you talk to celebrities like people who who got famous as kids a lot of them were bullied and people are shocked they're like but you but everyone else loved you yeah yeah but
01:21:54
that's exactly why they got bullied in their schools yeah because they weren't supposed to
01:22:00
succeed I I've heard this story many times on this podcast Amy I you know like as in this someone doing well um a group of people thinking that they've punched too far above their way
01:22:11
yep and then exactly trying to tear them back down with disinformation misinformation whatever it's so common
01:22:18
um are you optimistic that it can change honestly really yes I think it's human well I would like to see it change but I part of me goes I think this is just humans yeah but but this is you know
01:22:31
what we if so if we said that about racism and misogyny and ageism it's just human nature people would go that's not okay like a lot of people would object on that statement and say yes we can do
01:22:44
better but no I absolutely believe that if people can understand the anatomy of bullying how it works and what it looks like in the beginning what are the early signs what are the little things they
01:22:57
can do to be socially Brave and collectively turn things around I think that that that we will see change in in workplaces first the
01:23:09
psychological research shows that we can turn this around I think you're right actually thank you no I do think you're right just because because when you make the
01:23:21
similarity between things like racism and sexism it's it's really really about cultural acceptance isn't it whether we whether we someone performs that
01:23:28
behavior whether we go that's that's fine whether we clap whether we go you know we're going to reject you if you do that again exactly
01:23:34
um and we're all governed by incentives in this Society aren't we so it's just about an incentive disincentive yes
01:23:40
interesting what's the most important thing that we haven't talked about that maybe we should have
01:23:46
yeah I mean we've talked a lot about trust but I guess so so I guess I just want to summarize
01:23:52
sort of all of that talk about trust it just that you know a lot of people in the business
01:24:00
World make the mistake of thinking that they gotta go in and be the smartest person in the room
01:24:05
so they've got to show confidence and they do that at the expense of demonstrating their trustworthiness and and if you do not establish earn
01:24:16
trust build trust you you have no medium through which your ideas can travel so trust is the
01:24:23
conduit of influence it's not a soft idea it's a true idea this is just the way people are if you come in and and you start talking at them and you
01:24:35
haven't listened to them you don't know what they're about they don't feel like you care it doesn't matter if you have
01:24:41
the best idea in the world you're throwing it against a brick wall you know you have got to earn an established
01:24:47
trust in order to influence people and how do you establish trust not thinking that you have to take the floor first so a lot of people feel that especially in business settings they
01:24:59
like a negotiation they feel like they've got to drop the anchor they have to talk first
01:25:04
when in reality it's often much more effective to ask questions and learn about the other person you're showing first that I you're interested that you understand
01:25:18
them and you're actually gaining information right so so that you when you respond you're not giving up power at all you're building trust and learning and and then you when you when
01:25:32
you respond they trust that your response is based on you actually knowing them right so they feel seen they they've been seen so
01:25:43
that's I think you know there are so many things but I I that that's one that I think is is really effective
01:25:50
we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the Alaska leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to leave the question for
01:25:55
and the question left for you is if we discovered a cure for sadness such that we would never need ex need experience it again
01:26:09
would you support the development of that cure I'm on the oh geez I I feel like I'm gonna get
01:26:25
myself in trouble but you know I referred to Susan Kane earlier her book quiet her new book is
01:26:31
called Bittersweet and it is about allowing ourselves to feel sadness to grieve that it is in many ways healing I mean why do we listen to sad songs it we
01:26:44
get some pleasure from it we heal from it so I I'm gonna have to say I I'm going for the Bittersweet and not the No No sadness imagine a world without sadness I don't
01:26:55
think that would be a nice world I think sadness is like hot and cold and sad and happy I don't think you have one without
01:27:01
the other unfortunately I don't think so either and it's in a signal right it's a human signal that our bodies send us to
01:27:06
tell us it's information yeah process loss and things like that yes I completely agree with you and to feel empathy and compassion and want to help others so
01:27:17
thank you so much thank you thank you so much it was delightful really really delightful I like so much and um in the
01:27:23
process of reading your work and watching your videos I learned an incredible amount and um
01:27:29
you've really helped me I've had so many little personal epiphanies as we've been speaking so many of them and I'm actually really
01:27:35
really excited about your upcoming book about bullying and bystanders because there's not really a big conversation happening but if there was ever a time
01:27:42
for this conversation in the world we live in in these like pants or culture mobs and the Twitter
01:27:48
sphere and all of this stuff it's a big conversation in the UK at this exact moment for a variety of reasons there's
01:27:54
been a big couple of big moments in the UK um it's it's it's it's now is the time to have a really like professional
01:28:00
nuanced conversation about it yes and to see if there is a way yes to have a language so we can actually talk about
01:28:07
it yeah I would love to speak to you again when that become when that book comes out wonderful to do but thank you
01:28:14
so much for all of your time today it's been really really fascinating really opening conversation and you know what I
01:28:19
I think you're a wonderful human being I think you're a warm competent which is what I aspire to be one day thank you I think you're wonderful too thank you so
01:28:30
much Amy means a lot to me thank you thank you [Music] oh [Music] foreign [Music]
01:28:55
you got to the end of this podcast whenever someone gets to the end of this podcast I feel like I owe them a greater debt of gratitude because that means you
01:29:01
listen to the whole thing and hopefully that suggests that you enjoyed it if you are at the end and you enjoyed this
01:29:07
podcast could you do me a little bit of a favor and hit that subscribe button that's one of the clearest indicators we
01:29:13
have that this episode was a good episode and we look at that on all of the episodes to see which episodes generated the most subscribers
01:29:19
thank you so much and I'll see you again next time