Loading...
Loading...

coming up next on passion struck we want to feel known for who we are and we want to not be so alone
and what's interesting the corporate world or academia buttoned up academia i started noticing like in
these meetings nobody is sharing their actual feelings about this like we're sharing our thoughts
we're kind of dancing around and i just realized how pervasive this is the holding back i'm not saying
we should reveal everything all the time but i think that most of us stand to benefit tremendously
from revealing a little bit more a lot of the time welcome to passion struck i'm your host john
miles this is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to
live like it matters each week i sit down with change makers, creators, scientists and everyday
heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning
heal what hurts and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming whether you're
designing your future developing as a leader or seeking deeper alignment in your life this show
is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention because the secret to a life of
deep purpose connection and impact is choosing to live like you matter
hey friends welcome back to episode 737 of passion struck before we dive in i want to take a
moment to thank you this past week i released my new children's book you matter lima and the
response has been overwhelming i am so grateful for your support your messages and the way that
you've helped bring this book into the world it means more than i can fully express and that
moment connects directly to what we've been exploring here over the past month because at its core
you matter lima is about helping children feel that they matter something many adults spend years
trying to rediscover and that idea carries forward into this series in our last episode on
Tuesday i head on legendary good morning america host jone london and we began life beyond the script
a series about what happens when the version of life you've been living no longer fits and you're
asked to write something new because a meaningful life isn't felt once it's rewritten over time
through experience and through the choices we make about how we show up but once you begin that
process once you start to evolve to rethink the question another challenge emerges how much of
yourself are you actually willing to reveal my guest today is Leslie john the james ebork professor
of business administration at Harvard business school Leslie's award-winning research has appeared
in top academic journals and media outlets including new york times the wall street journal
and the economist and her new book revealing the underrated power of oversharing explores
attention most people feel but rarely examine we're often taught to be careful to hold back the
filter who avoid saying too much but what if the greatest cost isn't oversharing it's undersharing
in today's conversation what stood out most is this silence shapes our lives more than we realize
the moments we hold back what we don't say what we don't express what we keep to ourselves
quietly shape our relationships our opportunities and our sense of connection
today we're going to explore why people fear saying too much but overlook the cost of saying too
little how self-disclosure builds trust connection and psychological safety the role vulnerability
plays in relationships leadership in everyday life while small moments of openness have outsized
impact and how revealing who you are at the right time reshapes how you experience the world before
we get into this conversation a quick ask if this episode resonates with you please share it with
a friend a coworker or someone you know who may need it you can also watch the full conversation
on our YouTube channels and if you haven't yet leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts
or Spotify would mean a great deal it helps more people find these conversations now let's begin
my conversation with Leslie John thank you for choosing passion struck and choosing me to be
your host and guide on your journey to creating a life that matters now let that journey begin
I am so excited today to welcome Leslie John to passion struck Leslie how are you today I'm
well thanks thanks for having me I'm going to open today up in kind of an unusual way I understand
that you were good friends with Alice and Brooks and oh yes she she was just texting me actually
she's getting her hair done she's reading my book in there so art we have to share the same
stylus and she they just texted me a photo of the stylus shanine and else and she's sitting
in the chair reading my book it was so cool that is awesome I had Allison and for the listeners the
episode is Allison Woodbrooks you'd have to search for like that but it was such a fan favorite
because she teaches the course around talking it's like some crazy name like that the fun of
talking good or in life or yeah exactly how to talk good or in life or something like that exactly
I love it so cheeky today we're going to be talking about the science and power of opening up but
I brought Allison up on purpose because when we were doing that interview we were talking about
like this lost art of connection that so many of us have and she and I were talking through that
when you're really paying attention to someone it's almost like holding a mirror up to yourself
because in the other person through their stories you also see your own journeys and it helps
you relate to them in more ways does that resonate to you that's so well put beautiful
so I thought given that I knew the two you worked together and I'd heard you talk about her
another podcast I thought I would start there yeah but today we are talking about your brand new
book and one of the most moving narratives follows John and Grace whose relationship
you cover in the book and I want you to talk about it but it collapsed not from conflict but
from withheld vulnerability and I was hoping you could start there sure yes so Grace and John
had this whirlwind romance when they were in college he was an exchange student from Australia
and they just really bonded and fell in love quickly but he lived in Australia and there's
this pivotal moment in their young relationship where she was going to she cast in all her savings
and she was gonna jump on a plane and go be with him for at least the summer and they'd been
planning this and just before she left for the airport she kind of had some she needed reassurance
and so she called him she said do you want me to come and he said if you want to or something
like that and then she didn't get on the plane because she didn't feel like she didn't feel it
you know that she felt as if she loved him and wanted to be with him but she wanted him to express
how he felt and so they eventually broke up and married other people had their own families
and then years later something like 20 years later they has happenstance had it they connected and
also as happenstance or fate had it he had just gotten divorced and she had just gotten divorced
and so 20 years later they got together and they said all the things that they didn't say
when they had in their youth that they had wanted to say but were too scared to say
to the demise of their relationship and then they finally 20 years later became reunited and
now they're married and John moved to the US and they're together and I interviewed them for
the book and it was so lovely because I was talking to Grace and then John was in the other room and
he was like overhearing and making like these loving and snide remarks and then I'm like bring
him over here and then we were all talking together and you can just feel their warmth and their
love for each other. Well I love it Leslie and you argue that we worry too much about oversharing
or a TMI and not enough about undersharing or a TLI to the little information. I know. What do we
even have a word for it? Now we do. What do you think we're getting wrong culturally?
That's such a great question. It's interesting because I think when you say culturally
where my mind goes is the cultural influences on us and perhaps there are no more apparent
than with children, right? I have small children, I have two small boys and there is this cultural
imperative almost to like perform invulnerability sometimes, right? If someone shares their feelings in
like I'm thinking of my own work in a senior faculty meeting at HBS at one time I said
I'm feeling frustrated and people are like hmm but yet when you do that it unlocks so much after
I said that people are like hmm but then also finally we got to the core of what our barrier was
and so on the cultural point especially I think there's also the gender norms too. I think it's
especially problematic for males. I have two young boys and one of the studies as I was writing the
book that really struck me was this study on preschoolers so three and four year olds and what they
did was they video recorded their faces as the children were watching a scary movie. They also
recorded the sweat on their skin on their hands it's called of course the galvanic skin response
which it measures how physiologically stressed out you are the sweaty or your hands the more stressed
you are and what they found is that there was this relationship between showing on your letting
your expression show on your face and stress specifically when you let it out you had a very
expressive face you were less stressed out you were less sweaty put differently the the children
who held it in they were more stressed physiologically and this is like a really hard core measure right
it's like the body doesn't lie and the thing that really struck me here when you talk about the
cultural element is that by the time the children were in kindergarten so like one two years later
a gender difference had emerged whereby the little boys were not showing it on their face anymore
they were holding things in which also meant the logic would follow that they were more physiologically
stressed and we know that comes with all kinds of negative implications and so that really was
one of those studies that jolted me awake on this issue. I got the opportunity to interview Dan
when his book The Power of Regret came out and we spent a lot of talk about this regret survey
that he did that he thought wasn't going to amount to much and before he knew it he's getting
thousands and thousands and thousands of people writing in and what he found is some of the
biggest regrets came from the things we didn't say or do like the story that you mentioned
why do you think silence is so costly totally yes that's so spot on I mean that jives with
so much research on regret that in the long run the things we end up regretting are the things
we didn't do and so what self-disclosure that means we regret the things we did not say
what wish we had over the kind of stupid regrettable things we say in the moment and
John and Grace are a perfect example of how like you know in the book I talk about what they
actually said but then I interviewed them so 20 years later and I know what they actually were
feeling and what she meant to say is do you still love me I still love you so much and I want to
be sure right I need assurance and that's human and that's normal but yet we have to kind of pretend
as if like we don't need assurance and so I think that I'm sorry I'm I'm rambling a little bit
I want to make sure I answer your question I'm getting caught up in their love story which I love
I was wondering why why is our silence or what we didn't do like these regrets why is that so costly
yes it's costly because the things that we don't say that we should say
they the the negative symptoms of that show up in all kinds of ways largely in the form of missed
opportunities so John and Grace not saying how you actually felt means that the love that could
have blossomed then did not it's colleagues that never quite trust you if you're a leader and
you project like so many of us this uber confident facade really your employees are never going
to quite trust you because you're not real and yet the challenge here is that these missed
opportunities are very harmful you're missing out on love you're missing out on well-being you're
missing out on influence but because there missed opportunities if you flip the side of it and you
say what about oversharing okay so I say something I maybe cross the line with some humor or sass
and I immediately get negative social feedback I see people grimacing up you see people
like looking like a bit aghast and that we're so exquisitely sensitive to negative social feedback
that we we massively kind of overweight that and we live in fear of this cringey situation of
the disclosure hangover right when you say a little too much you get negative social feedback
and so the next time that you have an opportunity to reveal you remember that and you feel like
staying silent is the safe option but you're right what the message I really want to share is that
silence is not neutral silence is costly silence has risks silence has rewards just like speaking
up but when we make these decisions of what to reveal and not we have a really lopsided way of
evaluating them we fixate almost exclusively on the risks of revealing and that's of course very
problematic and one of the things that is problematic across society now is the epidemic of loneliness
and yeah I was just doing an interview with Gordon Flett and a fellow Canadian and we were talking
about how loneliness through his research she's connected it to anti-mattering but I think it
also connected to our fear of revealing ourselves and this is something that you've written about
what is that connection definitely revealing sensitive information self-disclosure
is one of the best and most important ways that we create connections with others
yet we shy away from it because it feels risky and it is risky but that's part of the point it's
precisely because of the social risk it entails that we forge bonds when we do it and so for
example when I share something sensitive with you like a weakness of mine like I'm working on being
you can see this phrase but I'm just so so messy but when I share something sensitive to you it's
a bit of a social risk and I am showing that I trust you because when I share something sensitive
it entails risk so I'm relinquishing control to the universe and I'm saying through my actions
implicitly I trust you I trust you to not make a fool out of me otherwise I wouldn't be revealing
this right and so by showing I trust you via taking the social risk it causes you to trust me
and that mutual trust is the foundation of friendships of intimacy of
colleagueships and so on and so that's really the core thing that's going on of why self-disclosure
fights loneliness and why holding back doesn't do us any good before we continue I want to pause
for a moment this series is exploring what it means to move beyond the roles and identities
we've outgrown and part of that process is becoming more honest with ourselves and with others
on my substack the ignitedlife.net I share companion reflections and articles for each episode
designed to help you think more deeply about your own life where you might be holding back
what conversations you may be avoiding and what might change if you showed up more fully because
awareness creates insight but action creates change if you want to go deeper into this work you
can visit the ignitedlife.net and I also want to say thank you to our sponsors their support makes
this show possible and if you've been getting value from passion struck supporting the brands
supports us helps keep these conversations going
you're listening to passion struck on the passion struck network now let's return to the
conversation with Leslie John Leslie I used to take trips to Australia a lot I used to work
for this company called Lundleys and they have they have very different customs there and one of
their customs is to eat raw squid and so there was this time where I had just gotten off of this
an airplane and I joined my friend Richard who has a sailboat and and over there for high-wealth
individuals sailboats at once upon a time were a way for them to write off their taxes because their
taxes there are so high but we get on this sailboat with a bunch of his friends and they break out
these raw disgusting octopi and I am you know here in the states we don't eat raw octopus I'm not
sure how this is a delicatessen anywhere but I do not want to partake in this but I'm feeling
because it's a bunch of jocks a bunch of rugby players and I'm one that I've got to go through
with it and I understand you had a similar experience with raw steak tartar I sure did
first tell me well I'll tell you myself first tell me how it went like did you like it was it's
as I imagine it to be it was horrible I mean I'm trying to eat this thing and I don't even know
how to describe it it is just like a gob of book in your mouth I mean I imagine eating like a huge
snail because this thing is probably the size of a golf ball if not a little bit bigger so it's
oh wow and you're it's like chewy and it's just and like spreading and a whole time I felt like
I'm about ready to puke but and they're all laughing because I'm probably turning green and
and I'm watching them just eat it with raw delight and I ended up getting it down but it was
like why in the world did I do that one I just say I I have no interest in eating that right the
same thing is happening in China when you eat crazy food over there my own food a version story
when I was a baby academic I went to Berkeley to give a talk and two of the most senior scholars
there they're married and they invited me for dinner at their house so I was on my best behavior
I was super excited I was also a little nervous and I'm walking through the Berkeley hills it's so
beautiful I show up at their door and they're like welcome we're so excited you're here we walk to
the market today and we got our favorite cut of meat I'm sure they didn't say meat says something
more elegant and we're making we made steak tartar for you and I just my heart sank because
I've tried it and I just don't like it I know I've always felt a little ashamed because it's like
I'm supposed to like highfalutin things right well I don't like steak tartar but I didn't tell
them because I was trying to impress them and say it was like very generous servings of steak tartar
like two giant tennis balls and so yeah I got through it I ate it but you know what I was thinking
as I was thinking of Mr. Bean who I love I love Mr. Bean so much and there's this amazing sketch
of Mr. Bean the mime who he makes these delightful social commentaries I call them social
commentaries they're hilarious these awkward situations people are in and then he makes us laugh
about them and he's so he's at a restaurant any orders steak tartar doesn't realize that it's
proflesh the the fancy waiter comes out and makes a big great display and then Mr. Bean's a guest
and then he proceeds to try to hide it so he takes like a doll up and he puts it in the woman's
purse behind him in the box like god forbid he actually say what he thinks and that he doesn't
love it and so but it's interesting because writing the book I have stories like this in the book
and they're not just gratuitous it's because I realized like it's made me reflect on like what
would have been the harm I kept my mouth shut there was certainly some harm I mean lowercase harm like
whatever right something it didn't like but there was a cost of hiding is what I'm saying and if I
think back I'm like well what if I just said it's not my favorite thing I mean they're so nice surely
they wouldn't have wanted me to be suppressing my gag reflex and they would have offered me something
different and maybe we even would have had a good laugh over it we would have they would have teased
be about it and then we would have been maybe connecting becoming more friendly with each other so
I kind of imagine this alternate world and that's the core thing that I kept coming back to
in doing this work is like what's the harm of sharing and we're not really thinking about these
things in an even-handed way often and even like some of my most embarrassing cringy stories
in the moment I you know I the next morning I had a disclosure hangover I'm like oh my god it's
like I just poured gasoline all over my body and lit a match like what have I done career suicide
whether it's crying in front of an audience or sharing my most embarrassing story with senior
colleagues I've done it all and you know I regretted it in the moment but then when I was writing
the book I was reflecting back and thinking well what about the long game you know those two fancy
props that I told my most embarrassing story to when I was a baby academic they have become my
closest mentors and I don't think it's in spite of what I shared I think it is partly because of
what I shared because again this idea that when you say something a little vulnerable little edgy
it has these benefits of making people trust you and rapport yeah it really does and I found this
through my corporate career that it seems like when you like reveal an embarrassing truth or
something unknown about you people tend to lean in more than if you're more secretive
completely what does that teach us because you're a behavior scientist about human behavior
I mean I think that part of this is that we want to feel known for who we are and we want to not be
so alone and you know it's interesting the corporate world or academia buttoned up academia I started
noticing like in these meetings nobody is sharing their actual feelings about this like we're
sharing our thoughts we're kind of dancing around and I just realized how pervasive this is
the holding back I'm not saying we should reveal everything all the time but I think we should
be reveal I think that most of us stand to benefit tremendously from revealing a little bit more
a lot of the time and one of the most powerful things to reveal is our feelings where because
one of the reasons is that they're so credible feelings I want us to stop thinking about feelings
as like woo woo things feelings are really really solid information and they're really compelling
and when you when you're in a meeting at work and the workplace even is a place for feelings believe
it or not you're in a meeting and you're not getting anywhere and you're talking in circles you can
say I'm feeling frustrated and when you do that you'll see that it changes everything because it turns
out that if you're feeling frustrated probably everyone else is and when you name it it's like
this release valve that okay now we can really get down but now we can realize okay well we're not
meeting our goals here whatever like it kind of opens this ability to communicate clearly
and yet we're very scared of it of course not saying we should say all of our most vulnerable
feelings you know the more sensitive the feeling or the thought the the risk here it is and especially
in workplace context we need to be very careful about that I have a good friend Aaron deal and she
was taught at second city how to do improv and she's now takes this concept of improv and she goes
into many corporate environments and facilitates meetings or goes in and helps struggling teams
through the use of it and I think loosening up like that or allowing yourself to do yes and
to those around you I think opens up so much more discussion and commonality amongst your peers
yeah and where I wanted to go with this is another person that you work with at Harvard whose research
I love is Amy Edmondsons if the listener is not familiar with Amy is is kind of the person who when
you think about psychological safety you think of Amy how does an environment where you're not
allowed to reveal impact someone's psychological safety oh geez yes I mean it's antithetical the
psychological safety right and it's not just the psychological safety it's antithetical to their
well-being right there's so much research on how holding things back concealing holding secrets
it's very effortful for your brain and in fact it takes a toll on your mental and physical
well-being it even takes a toll on your IQ so we all want our employees to be on their game well if
we don't let them say what's on their minds it can be preoccupying and their performance may suffer
and I guess then the question becomes to me I think leaders have a really tremendous opportunity
to help here where when the leader goes first when the leader shares something vulnerable when the
leader shares they're pathologically messy maybe don't say it that way but like I'm working on my
organizational skills we have found this in study after study that when the leader does this
in a metered way it causes and I don't say the C word lightly as a scientist it causes
their employees to trust them more it causes their employees to be more motivated to work for them
and so leaders have a real opportunity for this another thing that speaking of psychological safety
that's really cool it's new research by Nicole Abbey Esber she's a professor at London business
school she's looked at the role of i-gay so when you're in a meeting you know some people speak
some people are less comfortable speaking the people who are less comfortable speaking are no
less valuable of course they're just more reserved so how do you nudge them to speak up now you
could say you could cold call them and say lastly what do you think but also people who are
read and to speak up that's a bit of a heart not harsh but heavy-handed way of doing it there's
actually a more subtle and elegant and I think even more powerful way of doing it as a leader and
that is making eye contact with them so Nicole has found that when a leader especially someone who
is high status in a meeting looks the person in the eye like not I'm doing it exaggeratedly not a
creepy way but like turns their eye gaze to the quiet person that's this nonverbal cue that's
very powerful and very interpretable and I dare say the automatic response is for that person
to they for sure feel more included number one and safe and number two they're more likely to speak
up yeah thank you for sharing that I'm just trying to thank through my own time and eye contact or
non eye contact and how that changes when I was at Arthur Anderson years ago we had a full-time
person on staff who would come to each of the offices and she used to be in the FBI and she
used to train FBI agents how do you tell if someone is lying or not based on their body language
and so she would come in to teach us what body language we shouldn't do and one of them had to
deal with eye contact but it was crazy even things of how a person crosses their legs what direction
they cross them do they pause before they say something do they gulp does their eyes twitch she gave
us all these things to look for but what you're saying with eyes I mean it really does come into
the truss circle on a big way so I'm so glad you showed that yeah completely completely yeah
so one of the things that your work shows is that people keep around 13 secrets at any given time
what kinds of things are we hiding yeah so this is wonderful work by my colleague Michael Sleppy and
and Millie Amason at Columbia University and yeah they they develop this questionnaire to
ask people what kind of secrets they keep and one of the common categories of secrets is secrets
around like things in your romantic relationships intimacy sex people keep secrets about that
people keep secrets about their finances you know and those things that people keep secrets about
are very much jive with my own research where you know for 20 plus years I've been asking people
sensitive questions in various ways and one of the most yeah again and again the most sensitive
things are things romantic relationships details about those are very sensitive finances are sensitive
and so there are these common common patterns and it's a bit of a paradox because the more
sensitive the thing the less comfortable we are sharing but the less we talk about it the more
anomalous and sensitive it becomes right so when we break this and start sharing it really helps
to destigmatize that's a strong word or make us feel more human and not ashamed of the things
that are just really human and natural one of the terms that I like to use to refer to this
is called when someone who reveals something in a really courageous way and it helps others
to not feel stigmatized for example it's called a catalyst confession and a prime example of that
is of course magic Johnson remember in the 90s HIV was very very stigmatized in the sense it was
kind of thought to be the gay disease and there was a lot of stigma around that and tons of
misunderstanding is about how it's actually contracted and magic Johnson comes into the conference
room in the 90s and you know it's this epic moment you can still see it on YouTube where
he walks into this conference room in a hotel in LA and he announces his retirement from the
Lakers because he had contracted HIV and that was just a complete shock and you know very sad of course
but also very courageous and his doing of that his courageous reveal scientists have studied its impact
and they have been able to find to detect that his saying that in the 90s in the subsequent
months and years caused people to get tested who wouldn't have otherwise been tested so like that
is a beautiful catalyst confession it does social good right and I think it's really it's the leaders
in society the people that are held in high regard that have such a opportunity there I think we
saw the cross speaking of secrets of Charlie Sheen's way that it came out and how different
it was between the two I have a confession to make secret juicy so I interviewed Michael Slepian
and we we do this whole hour long interview and I get done and I look down and my computer says
you ran out of face that's the worst and so Michael is still on the mic you are not going to believe
it and I am so sorry but it didn't take so I understand if you don't want to rerecord this
but he was so generous about it he said I need to make a couple calls so let's come back in about
20 minutes and we rerecorded it and then when we were done we were both so happy we rerecorded it
because it was such a better second interview because he had not spoken about something that he
wish he could have ordered differently and I asked questions differently because I had more
familiarity in it and that episode turned out to be great amazing amazing I have a confession too
in that vein where I was doing a podcast a few months ago and I was not in a good headspace going
into it there was a bunch of things going on that day and also the video wasn't working like it
was just a comedy of errors but we went through with it and then a week or so later the host emailed me
and he's like because you study revealing I'm telling you this I think the pot I think the
episode could be way better he's like do you want to record it again and I'm like yes what a gift
I had been ruminating about it too but but me the person who studies this it honestly didn't even
occur to me to say hey reach out to him I couldn't reach out to him and say I think that we could
make a much better powerful we could have a better conversation it didn't even occur to me to
to share that and then we rerecorded it and it was so much better but that's a really important
point because I think oh you know you asked why do we under share and what what we think silence is
neutral which is all of those things are valid I think a fundamental even first order problem
is more basic than that which is that it doesn't even occur to us to share we don't even think
we're feeling frustration in a meeting we don't even think to share our feelings like it doesn't
even occur to us and as an example of this the way I often talk about this in class is I take people
through kind of a day in the life boring Leslie John and what I do is I keep track but that's
part of the point right even the most mundane day there's so many missed opportunities so
what I do is I keep track of the things I said and then I also keep track like a tally of the things
that I thought but I didn't say so like I'll just do the first beginning of it with you to see
you can get a feel for it but so I wake up in the morning I'm writing this down right now I'm
doing a little tab this is real data collection on the fly real science so I have a column that says
said and a column that says unsaid on the back of a health summary statement thing from Blue
Starsfield okay I told you I'm messy so I wake up in the morning I roll over in bed I say good
morning Kali my heavy what I don't say is I slept terribly when I don't sleep well I'm unhinged
I don't say that we get into the bathroom we're brushing our teeth staring in the mirror what I
think is feel older than I thought I would at this age and how come I still have acne I'm in my 40s
cheese we get down to the kitchen he starts making the kids lunches he says what do they want for
snack less I don't know stop asking me I don't want to make decisions that's what I say what I don't
say is I'm exhausted I need a hug I have a big presentation I'm feeling nervous okay so
so we're not even at breakfast and and the very serious data collection we have done here you can
see there is the unsaid is eight and the set is two my point isn't that we should say all of the
things that are on our mind all the time you don't want that I don't want that but rather we
should consider saying these things and those until I started really actually writing the book
I didn't realize myself how many times I didn't even consider right so the old me wouldn't have
even considered talking about talking to Colin about telling him what I thought about aging and and
yet you can see that if I had shared that that would be intimacy enhancing in my relationship right
in the sense that like feeling known for who you really are having a partner that understands
your thoughts and feelings is just one of the best ways to have a secure relationship it's so
deeply intrinsically fulfilling not to mention the fact that he probably would have said something
that like was interesting or made me feel better if I told him that I hadn't slept well I wouldn't
have snapped at him in the kitchen with the lunches right he would have been like oh LJ needs
kid gloves today because she's exhausted you know but he can't read my mind and so you see that
by not sharing you see one how much withholding we're doing and two that if we shared a little more
we would often be better off but it's of course not saying we should say all the things like we
would hold for good reason you get into work your assistance as how you're doing I say great
which is good like I don't want to burden her with like I have a big meeting I feel overwhelmed I
haven't slept like there's a time in a place we often withhold out of kindness because of power
asymmetry because we don't have time whatever it is even for strategic reasons but we should consider
revealing more than we do so in that scenario how much of that not revealing from any people comes
down to shame or fear of judgment I mean some of it for sure I think that you know the my body
image that this that specific example I do think that you know there is we withhold things even
from our partners like this is the person the one person in the world that I should I be able to
say what say anything to and even then and so I think that yes some of it is our own feelings but
I also think that once you share more you realize the shame goes away so now like writing this book
was like the therapy I didn't know I needed because it wasn't until I was writing it that I was
putting the stuff in practice you know you it's one thing to know the science it's another
thing to actually do it and writing the book made me do it and now that I share my feelings with
my husband when I I tell him how I feel it's our relationship is even stronger it's it's unbelievable
the benefits so as I was writing my first book passion struck I studied Irving Goughman's work
and in the book I write about how for so many of us we go through life wearing a mask and we are
really performing life instead of living life if I have his words and rise appropriately how does
that self-presentation that we think is helping us actually blocking our connection to others
that's a great question yeah I think the self-presentation it can inhibit the deepening of
relationships right so here's an example which was when I'm thinking back bring it my I'm being
transported back to this scene when I was interviewing for academic jobs and so it's like at a hotel
and you're moving around the hotel and interviewing with various universities so the candidates move
around and I'm in the elevator I get on the elevator and clearly there's another candidate there
and I just so the door closes we're literally in a steel vault and I say to him oh I'm just so
exhausted like I just had this moment of like letting my down my guard down taking the mask off
and what the fellow candidate did was well he kept his he straightened right up he secured his
mask even further and he said oh I'm having such a great time this is such an amazing opportunity to
share my research with all these professors and then then then they did the like tap dance which
you know and then and he's he's become a very established scholar and I see him at conferences
occasionally and you know I I've always remembered that interaction or non-interaction in a way
and I've never felt the desire to kind of chat him up at conferences and and I play the other
side in my mind of like imagine if he had taken that self-presentation veil off for just one moment
in a steel vault with another person that she like right so it's safe it's so safe and if he had
done that then maybe like imagine if he had said like oh I was in this interview just now you'll
never believe what happened this like crazy thing it was so funny or whatever like and then we would
have that would have like bonded like we maybe would have been friends for life so yeah the
facade is of course there's a time and a place to not really show how you're feeling but
nice again and again more often than not I'm like I don't know like kids kids is another example of where
we often we feel like we need to be perfect around them and not show them and I think that's exactly
wrong because then the child learns that like when the child feels strong feelings are
something negative or something that they're ashamed of then they feel it's even worse they feel
more anomalous because you're so perfect and so my husband and I were really trying to make a point
of like when we make a mistake or when we disappoint them like we try not to but when we do we talk
about it and I think that's really important. Leslie at last year I had a reigning Miss America
on the show and I had her on because she was an Air Force Academy graduate and one of the first
if not the first military officer to ever get the crown but in chapter five why of disclosure
decisions you have this iconic example of Miss Universe final questions and I was hoping you could
maybe for the audience analyze the three contestants answers. Yes I love beauty pageants I have a
lot of strong feelings about them in all ways they're fascinating too right as a social scientist
they're just so interesting so this was the Miss Universe I believe it was 1998 and it was down
to the final question and so this is a very high stakes thing where the contestants get one question
they have to answer on the spot often it's not in their native language and they are judged for
it and then the winner is crowned afterwards it's very consequential and nerve-racking so in 1998 it
came down to three contestants and one of them Miss Venezuela who fun fact was wearing white
which is the color that is statistically most likely to win in beauty pageants so she was wearing white
and the question is asked and it's if you could be crazy and do whatever you want for a day what
would it be and she says something like I would magically fly from place to place and you know that
was okay but I would say you know post-doc analysis number one this this is incredibly nerve-racking
for to do what they did so I have to say that before I critique them but the disclosure analysis
I would have of that is that was a little safe TLI too little information right it wasn't kind of
it wasn't sparky it was kind of boring kind of dull the next one mistriended at in Tobago she said
she would not wear clothes and then I think there might have been even been an audible gas
because that's pretty risque for a more conservative beauty pageant crowd at least at the time
and so that was TMI in that context now you know in a looser environment maybe that would have
been a fun topic but in not in this situation and then Miss USA her name is Brooke Mahalani Lee
and she comes out she's in this beautiful royal blue funky spunky gown and she says I would eat
everything you do not understand I would eat everything in the world twice and there's
just a furious laughter and that was magical that was the sweet spot it was a little gutsy a little
risky right for a beauty queen to say to admit that she loves eating and and so that is a nice
example of that Goldilocks spot between TMI too much information and TLI too little information
it's often very narrow and it's so context dependent but I love that example because Brooke
really nailed it well when I was writing the book I was able to track her down and interview her
and so she like I played the clip for her and I was like walk me through what you're thinking what's
going through your mind it was you know what 20 ish 20 plus years later and she said 30 more like
right and she said you know that wasn't just any blurt that was agentic because what was going
on at that time was that Donald Trump he owned it and he was thinking about instating a weight
clause that meant that the winner if she gained a certain number of pounds she would lose her title
and Brooke was like so she was like an activist against this she thought this is not right and so
that her message was actually not only was it perfect in sense of like navigating that line between
TMI and TLI it was a catalyst confession right like she was trot she made a statement with it and
sure enough like things did change a little bit in the in the beauty page and I think because of her
courage I love this story but I wanted to make sure we captured that one because I think it
makes things so well chapter six the healing power of revealing I I felt was really the scientific
heart of your book yeah and I'm gonna go back to Gordon Flett because when we were talking about
mattering mattering impacts the brain's threat response when you don't feel it it when you don't
feel mattering it impacts immune function depression anxiety and recovery and it impacts people's
mental and physical well-being yeah and what was interesting to me is I was reading the book and
this chapter is the power of revealing kind of impacts the same things yes completely completely
you know you're right that's the scientific core of the book there's so much amazing research on
the power of opening up even privately like the power of putting your the the the the Catastrophic
thoughts that are swirling around in my brain when I put them on paper when I translate them into
words that process is so potent in helping us to feel better about the issue and it seems so silly
right because like what's the difference between my brain and privately writing things down
well the process of putting words on your feelings activates a different part of your brain a more
logical part of your brain so when you do this I think of it as you're becoming the CEO of your
feelings you're becoming more in control you're taking that stuff that's swirling around that
feels uncertain and you're making it feel more concrete and certain and by doing that it's more
manageable it's also another really powerful process that that underscores this is the process of
sense making so tons of research has found that when we can make sense of difficult events
when we can derive meaning from them we are able to cope better and grow from them and
we're no longer traumatized by them there's amazing studies with Holocaust victims on this for
example by sense making I don't mean making it okay what happened to you but understanding it better
that experience and so when you put words onto paper or when you dictate them there's not even
anyone on the other side you naturally impose a story structure it's something that's what
we humans do naturally it's not that you're making a happy ending or something deliberate it's just
you naturally sequence it in a story like way and that helps you make sense of it and what I love
about this is that you don't even have to try like you don't have to say oh I got to tell a story I
got to make a sense of this all you have to do is write down on paper the words that's all you have
to do and it's so powerful and then there's more studies of course that if you have an empathic
listener it's a supercharged effect it's even stronger these effects I want to go Leslie in the time
we have left to the topic of love I recently put out two episodes by the time this one comes out
and one was with Paul Eastwick where we kind of went through the evolutionary elements of love
and then I Sonia Liebermerski reached out to me and said I love to talk to you and she goes do you
mind if I bring Harry Rickson I'm like right you're asking me do I want to have the preeminent expert
and happiness and relationships come along together so so it's interesting because I found in your
chapter eight finding love a lot of correlations between your work and both of theirs how do romantic
relationships and this goes back to the example you shared with your husband earlier how do they
hinge on disclosure courage yeah that's great oh and I love that word disclosure courage it really
does take courage so in long-term relationships long-term romantic relationships the longer we've
been with someone with them or we know about them right the more we know them better with time
but the problem is that our confidence in our knowledge of them massively outpaces are actually
actual knowledge so we think we know them even better than we actually do and that's where the
problem begins and here's a demonstration of what I mean by that so in one study they had
people who have loved each other for years 10-20 years married couples come into the lab and talk
about something conflictual to them and as they did it each person wrote down like what they were
in real time what they were thinking and feeling and then they had each partner try to guess what
the other person had been thinking and feeling and they were wrong about 80 percent of the time
so but yet they thought they knew the end that they knew what their partner was thinking and that's
problematic because that means we like we stop asking our partners how they what they're feeling and
thinking we assume we know and when we do that there's all kinds of misunderstandings and so
but good thing that the antidote is very clear share it's be curious it's ask questions and this
is another one of those things that like okay share that I knew in the general sense but then when
I was writing the book I realized wow I'm not like we're talking about logistics at the end of
the day we're not talking about hey I made a speech today and I was really feeling really anxious
beforehand and then to my surprise I did really well right like we don't talk about that and it's
sharing your feeling specifically that is most bonding and so we're kind of focused on logistics
so we want to get out of that and share feelings the other thing that compounds this issue
is a trait called mind reading expectations you know we psychologists love traits and scales
so there's a scale I have it on my website too if people want to check it out you can do it for
yourself because I did it for myself when I was writing the book as you can tell I used myself as
a guinea pig for all this stuff and gosh I learned so much so I took the test myself
research oh my gosh it's totally research and my reading expectation is the belief implicit belief
that your partner should just know what you feel all the time they should just know your needs you
shouldn't have to state them and when I say it so overtly like that it's clear that this is
not a reasonable expectation but it's one of those implicit beliefs that we have and we don't
even notice it so I took the scale and I found out that lo and behold I have super high mind reading
expectations but the amazing thing is that once I realized that I'm like oh my gosh
my he can't read my mind what I haven't slept well turns out though if I tell him
he's so compassionate and so I've really learned that what feels like over communicating
what feels like over sharing especially in these deep relationships is just communicating it's
just sharing right there's a lovely another construct that I like called emotional intimacy and
that refers to do you have emotional intimacy emotional intimacy is when you feel like you can
tell someone anything you can tell them anything that's on your mind and that's really what we're
going for in the closest of relationships not all first for sure not all not even most maybe one or
two of our relationships tops but the people that do that reveal best so I think of increasingly
revealing is a skill it's not something we're born good or bad at it's a skill and like all
skills it's something that we need to practice and get better at and one of the things I've
realized with revealing is that kind of the more practice the more you do it the better you get at
it that it requires kind of taking that leap Leslie if listeners embraced revealing just a little
bit more what would be the biggest that they see in their lives the biggest advantage okay the
advantages would be feeling more at home with yourself gaining self-awareness for one because in
order for you to share your feelings I encountered this also while I was writing the book that
wait I don't even know what my feelings are I've got a tool in my book to help with that which
is one that you can see everywhere in the internet the one that I customized for my book is even
more remedial because I needed the remedial help in knowing how I felt so self-awareness feeling
comfortable at home in your shoes is just so important but on that of course well-being mental
physical well-being stronger relationships stronger more intimate relationships more
influence even that was one that really surprised me right these all this research we've done
and when leaders share a bit more it causes people to trust them more and follow their leadership
even more so there's all these benefits in really all swaths of life Leslie it was such a great
discussion today thank you so much for coming to discuss your book revealing the science and power
of opening up it was such an honor to have you thank you so much for having me that brings us to the
end of today's conversation with Leslie John and this episode deepened something we began with
Joan London because once you start rewriting your life you also have to decide how honestly
are you willing to live it Leslie's work reminds us that connection is built through what we're
willing to share trust grows when we take small social risks holding back creates distance even
when we don't intend it and revealing who we are allows us to experience life more fully this is what
life beyond the script is about not just changing your life but showing up truthfully within it if
this conversation resonated with you share it with someone who may need it leave a five-star
rating review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and explore more at the unitedlife.net next week we
continue life beyond the script with Dave Asprey and that conversation we shift from how we show up
psychologically to what supports us biologically because the version of you you're trying to become
is also shaped by your energy your brain and your physical state there are 40-something core traumas
that people can tune into at some point or another and one of them is I don't matter I'm not
lovable no one loves me I'm all alone there's this long list of things that are all nuanced and
any of those beliefs is not actually true but it feels true if you're stuck in that and most of
this programming comes long before you're an adult before you even had a prefrontal cortex to
judge it so since it was already there before your prefrontal cortex formed you're gonna believe
it to be true until it's questioned and it'll create suffering in your life like this is just
part of growing up until then remember you don't have to share everything but the more of yourself
you're willing to bring forward the more of life you get to experience I'm John Miles and you've
been passion struck
Passion Struck with John R. Miles



