Escaping Perfectionism  ## Metadata - Author: [[Hidden Brain]] - Full Title: Escaping Perfectionism - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/9704dcb4-5e9a-4753-bf09-ad45713eb7f6 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Early Shame Fueled Relentless Striving** - Thomas Curran grew up materially deprived and felt shame comparing himself to wealthier peers. - That childhood shame became a lifelong driver to 'buy' status and prove his worth through achievement. Transcript: Thomas Curran Thank you for having me. Shankar Vendantam Thomas, you grew up in a working- family in a small town in England. And as a teenager, you were acutely aware of the social status of two friends, Kevin and Ian, and the contrast with your own family's means. Can you paint me a picture of what that was like? Thomas Curran Yeah, so my upbringing was one of love and support but also material lack we didn't have a great deal of money and one of my earliest memories of that is going to school with the wrong backpack Or the wrong pencil case the wrong brand of sneakers I didn't have gadgets like a Game Boy or a PlayStation phones were just coming in then I didn't have one of those either. And when I compared myself with these two characters, Kevin and Ian, who had all of those things and were able to express, I guess, their personalities and their identities with these Material goods, you kind of feel like even though this is all stupid stuff, right, just stuff, but it really matters to a kid. And especially if you don't have it so as i grow older and things like cars started to come into the picture this kind of shame really started to get really into my bones and that was huge Actually cars was a massive part of this because cars are kind of the ultimate status symbol right you just look at how they're advertised all my friends were bought these really super Sleek cars with modifications and all the rest of it and that was like really crushing for me that was really embarrassing not to be able to have one too I didn't have the freedom that they Had I couldn't go anywhere I just tagged along really in the back seat and I I suppose this is where I first learned about shame what it meant to feel ashamed and embarrassed about I am in Life and what I have. And I sort of learned that you kind of got to buy your way out of that shame in this world. ([Time 0:04:43](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3a355600-d2ca-49ec-8943-349ab50b0442)) - **Performing Perfection Onstage** - Curran overprepared talks to avoid showing weakness and would visibly signal long work hours. - Even after success he ruminated that his TED talk felt polite but not show-stopping, increasing self-doubt. Transcript: Thomas Curran So all that work did end up paying off and I was able to elevate myself up the academic ladder, I should say, into second tier and then elite institutions. And that's when I did a very important TED Talk at a resort in the US back in 2018 and I think going to that TED talk was when I finally realized I'd sort of made something of myself here but Nevertheless I really felt out of place at that conference there's people that were paying thousands of pounds uh they were from you know I taught you talk to them they're from this mega Firm or that mega firm or that big industry and it was kind of overwhelming a little bit and they sort of just carried themselves with confidence and and again this kind of really picked At my thoughts of inferiority and and now the weird thing was i was the one on the stage you know like i was the one who they were there to see I'm a bit of a perfectionist. Now, how many times have you heard that one? Shankar Vendantam How did the talk itself go? Give me a sense of the preparation you put in and how the talk itself was delivered and how it was received. Thomas Curran So the talk itself was extremely nerve wracking, but I'm not a natural speaker. It's not something that I ever thought I would do. And I've kind of just been thrust into in a profession that kind of requires you to be pretty good at speaking so one of the things I do to combat the anxiety that's associated with that Is to overthink things over prepare because in my mind that's the most fail safe way to make sure things don't go wrong it's so important that you don't show an ounce of weakness or vulnerability Because in that moment things can cascade, they can spiral and when it's so public that's when you feel like your deficiencies or shortcomings are being exposed and in the end I was able To recite a 15-minute talk word for word without any mistakes which was incredibly important for me but at the same time it wasn't the most charismatic of talks it wasn't the most inspirational But I did it and people were very polite and they applauded and I'm sure they appreciated it but at the same time you could tell that it wasn't quite the show-stopping talk that perhaps Other people at the conference had been able to deliver. And that, you know, you do think about that. Shankar Vendantam So in the aftermath of the talk, when you sort of look back on it, did you remember sort of the polite applause? What portion of it did you end up ruminating on? ([Time 0:10:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8cd22f08-675f-4650-9186-fb158384c3b6)) - **Perfectionism Is A Deficit Orientation** - Curran defines perfectionism as striving from a place of lack, not mere high standards. - Perfectionism is driven by needing validation to soothe feelings of inferiority rather than pursuing success itself. Transcript: Thomas Curran My students, and many, many people around me were struggling with something called perfectionism. A need and desire to do things perfectly and nothing but perfectly that comes from a sense of lack, a sense of inferiority, a sense of deficiency, a sense that I'm not perfect and in order To gain approval and validation in this world that I'm worth something, that I matter, that I need to be perfect. Shankar Vendantam So you've conducted a study that has tracked levels of perfectionism over time. What do you find? Thomas Curran So we found recently that perfectionism is increasing among more recent generations of young people. This is a study we did back now in 2016-2017, essentially looking at college student data of perfectionism. So we have about 30 years worth of perfectionism data looking at various indicators of perfectionism and we found when we ran the numbers that perfectionism was increasing and increasing Really rapidly it's up about 40 percent since 1989 and that's concerning because it's associated most strongly with negative mental health outcomes like depression, anxiety, self-harm And this hard data is telling us something significant and something that we need to be paying attention to. Shankar Vendantam So perfectionism is really fascinating because unlike many other flaws, many people celebrate this trait. You call perfectionism our favorite flaw. What do you mean by that? Perfectionism is something that I think in modern society is lionized, celebrated. Thomas Curran We know it carries self-sacrificial patterns of behavior, makes us feel a little bit miserable. But nevertheless, we also think that perfectionism is what carries us forward and makes us successful. A necessary evil, so to speak. Something that if we want to get ahead, we might need a bit of perfectionism. Shankar Vendantam And of course, this has become something of a joke as well, Thomas. In many job interviews, when candidates are asked to name a flaw, many of them will say, I'm a perfectionist. Thomas Curran Yeah, that's exactly right. And recruiters, time after time, tell us that that's the most overused cliche in job interviews. And I think it says something about what we consider to be socially desirable weaknesses, that if somehow we can communicate that we're willing to, you know, sacrifice ourselves in Some way and push ourselves beyond comfort, that that is something they'll see as positive, something that they really want on their team or in their organization. So that speaks really to the ubiquity of perfectionism at the moment. Shankar Vendantam I want to spend a moment talking about what perfectionism is and what it's not, because I think many of us might use the same word but mean different things by it. Many people might say perfectionism is about setting high standards and working hard to meet them. But that's very different, I think, from your definition. You say perfectionism is less about pursuing success and more about avoiding failure. One of its hallmarks is something you call a deficit orientation. What do you mean by this term? So a lot of people associate perfectionism with really high standards, that's true. Thomas Curran But actually, perfectionism is far, far deeper than what we see on the surface. Because what really matters is where it's coming from and where those excessive amounts of striving and high standards and go-getting attitudes that you see on the surface are coming From in the perfectionistic people is is a place of lack a sense that i'm not good enough that i'm not perfect enough and i need to prove to other people all the time that I'm worth something, That I matter in this world. And the way that I do that is through being perfect. Because of course, if I'm perfect, I'll get their validation and that will make me feel better. That will soothe those shame-based fears of not being good enough. ([Time 0:22:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f1a00844-450f-44b9-9821-1217211b5288)) - **Perfectionism Has Risen Dramatically** - Longitudinal data show perfectionism rising steeply among young people since 1989. - The increase (~40%) correlates strongly with anxiety, depression and self-harm risks. Transcript: Thomas Curran We found recently that perfectionism is increasing among more recent generations of young people. This is a study we did back now in 2016-2017, essentially looking at college student data of perfectionism. So we have about 30 years worth of perfectionism data looking at various indicators of perfectionism and we found when we ran the numbers that perfectionism was increasing and increasing Really rapidly it's up about 40 percent since 1989 and that's concerning because it's associated ([Time 0:23:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4eb48f97-1fba-4d76-95fc-c1ba30adf259)) - **Failure Triggers Shame, Not Growth** - Perfectionists respond to setbacks with intense shame and guilt, not constructive learning. - They ruminate and self-sabotage, making it hard to appreciate success or recover from failure. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam But there are also some external markers of perfectionism. And when perfectionists encounter adversity, you found they often respond with shame and with guilt. Can you explain what that means, Thomas? So what we see in the lab is exactly what I experienced when I encountered that breakup in my own life. Thomas Curran When you put perfectionistic people in stressful situations, perfectionism will aggravate the stress. So every time you go into the lab, you tell perfectionistic people to do stressful things, maybe give a public talk or complete a competitive task against other people. And in the end, you say you didn't do very well or you failed. You'll see is perfectionistic people respond with intense amounts of self-conscious emotion lots of shame lots of guilt about having slipped up in some way particularly if that slip Up is public it validates in them a sense that that fear that they're not good enough whereas people who score lower on the perfectionism scales, well yes of course these things do have An impact on their emotional state but it's a far less profound impact and they're able to bounce back quite quickly. Shankar Vendantam You told me that after that talk that you gave, you engaged in a lot of brooding and rumination about how the talk went, and you're worried that it had not landed properly or what could Have gone better. But you're also seeing this in the data, that perfectionists engage in a lot of brooding and rumination and revisiting things over and over again. Thomas Curran Yeah, perfectionistic people, people who are higher in the perfectionism spectrum, what you tend to see is they also score higher on what we would call self-sabotaging thought patterns. So things like you mentioned there, worry, rumination, they're really hyper-vigilant about where they sit relative to others, how they're performing relative to others. ([Time 0:26:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cf215746-29f0-4549-aa7c-1424965ef513)) - **Success Becomes A Moving Target** - Perfectionists push past diminishing returns and never feel satisfied by success. - Success raises expectations, creating a treadmill where achievements become temporary relief. Transcript: Thomas Curran So that's a really curious finding, actually, in the perfectionism literature. Know perfectionists work really hard and they push themselves well beyond comfort into a zone of declining and diminishing returns for every little bit of effort that they put in. Failure is very common among perfectionist people because the goals that they set themselves are way too high and even if they do succeed, perfectionism really just turns those successes Into dead ends because the better we do, the better we feel like we're expected to do. And so we just continually keep ourselves on tiptoes, clinging for more and more. I suppose it's like running on a treadmill that never slows down. ([Time 0:29:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1d95392e-7e74-44b5-9a3b-ec030bf86c96)) - **Withholding Effort To Protect Image** - Perfectionistic self-preservation causes people to withdraw effort after failures to avoid shame. - This paradoxically reduces performance and can appear as procrastination or deliberate under-effort. Transcript: Thomas Curran Think, why we don't see very strong correlations between perfectionism and performance. When things start to go wrong, perfectionists do something really, really interesting. They withhold their effort in order to save face, to kind of preserve their image and their sense of self. And we've done a lot of experiments looking at this phenomenon. And one of the most illuminating experiments is when a colleague of mine, Andrew Hill, took people into the lab, gave them a cycling task and said, you've got to complete a certain distance In a certain amount of time. And based on your fitness, should be able to do x amount of distance so he got them going with the task and everybody worked really hard to meet the goal and at the end he told them no matter How they did that you failed now what's really interesting here is that after telling people they failed he asked them to do it again and that's where something remarkable happened Because people who didn't have a great deal of perfectionism on that second attempt after the first failure didn't really change the amount of effort they put in if anything it went Up slightly but the people who scored high in perfectionism did the exact opposite they withheld their effort on the second attempt because the thinking in their mind is you can't fail At something you didn't try and if i put all of myself into this first effort and still didn't make it well i'm not gonna do that again because the feelings of shame and embarrassment was So intense that i just don't want to feel those things again and so this is this is the perfectionism paradox i suppose this is that they really are so intensely fearful of that failure That when it looks like it's going to be a very likely outcome of anything that we're doing, then they take themselves away from those situations. That's incredibly self-sabotaging. It doesn't just look like complete withdrawal, by the way. ([Time 0:30:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7359d5b2-32e3-46ac-94fb-f8eb056dc66d)) - **Athlete's Self-Punishment Example** - Mikhail Youzhny's on-court self-harm illustrates extreme self-oriented perfectionism and self-loathing. - Self-oriented perfectionists lack self-compassion and punish themselves for minor errors. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam At one point, he was the number one player in Russia and a top 10 player in the world. During a match at the Miami Open in 2008, he missed a point and slammed his own face with his racket. After the third blow, with blood streaming down his face, he required medical attention. Would he be an example of what you would call a self-oriented perfectionist, people who subject themselves to incredibly harsh criticism? Thomas Curran Yeah, absolutely. I saw that point, actually, I remember it well. And it was at the end of a very long rally in which really, the shot that was missed was one of the easiest shots. And that intense emotion and outburst that came from a place of just complete self-loathing for the fact that having made all of these really tough shots, you couldn't make the easy One. And these are the intense expectations that self-oriented perfectionistic people hold themselves to. The moment they fall short of it particularly in very important situations the self-loathing the sense of how on earth could you have been so stupid what on earth are you thinking how Could you have let yourself make that mistake can be really so intense that in the extreme cases like this one they can engage in some really quite aggressive self-castigation. And that's a signature of a self-oriented perfectionist. ([Time 0:34:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c21e3604-fd11-44a0-a7fd-704100a35ffc)) - **External Pressure Drives The Biggest Rise** - Socially prescribed perfectionism — believing others expect you to be perfect — rose fastest. - This form links strongly to hopelessness, helplessness, anxiety and depression among young people. Transcript: Thomas Curran Socially prescribed perfectionism is the most extreme form of perfectionism. And it's a perfectionism that comes from outside, a sense that everybody and all around me expects me to be perfect. And they're watching and waiting to pounce if I show any form of weakness. And carrying that around with you all the time is really tough. You need to be perfect at all times. You need to make sure that your life is curated to show other people, you know, there are no weaknesses. And that is really tough to live under that microscope and to think that everybody in all times is watching. Shankar Vendantam So you found that socially prescribed perfectionism might be rising fastest amongst all the kinds of perfectionism in our society. Thomas Curran Can you talk a little bit about what the data show and why this might be happening? Essentially what we're seeing today is a rise of about 40% in socially prescribed perfectionism from the late 1980s to the present day. ([Time 0:38:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b3072308-7c80-4aa7-8cb4-03233e0a3256)) - **Success Can Mask Personal Costs** - Curran acknowledges perfectionism helped career progress but exacted hidden costs to life and relationships. - External success can coexist with instability, loneliness, and questions about whether it was worth the trade-offs. Transcript: Thomas Curran Has pushed me forward in moments where I've needed it to. The reason why I'm here is because I was very very fortunate to come through at a time where people like me were supported to go to university where I just so happened to meet the right professor At the right time he took me to the right university but without those remarkable moments of luck I wouldn be here. The second thing to say is that I look, I guess, on the surface like a very successful individual. And in many ways, I suppose I am. But I can't afford to live in the city that I work in. I don't have a house. I've had to put off things like having a family and relationships. I've lived in countless different homes. I can't set root in communities or build a long and lasting friendship group because my life has just been essentially one long period of flux. So yes, it looks like success, but it doesn't feel like success. And when I look and reflect on this journey and how difficult it's been and the sacrifices I've had to make, I sometimes question whether I might have been better off back in my working-class Community with a job that gives me some sense of purpose, with a family and a house and a community. ([Time 0:44:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/41e0bc02-9acb-493e-b3ac-0460a93f55a5)) - **Counter Rigid Thoughts With Writing** - Write down intrusive perfectionist thoughts and interrogate their realism on a 1–10 scale. - Ask: 'Do I need to do this now?' and imagine the real consequences if you don't. Transcript: Thomas Curran So perfectionism indeed involves those really intrusive patterns of thinking. I must do this. I have to do that. Why can't you be this? Why can't you do that? And I think the most important thing to do when those feelings are starting to make themselves known to you is to write them down, think about them, reflect on them, and ask yourself, Maybe on a scale of one to 10, how is this? How achievable is this? And importantly, do I actually need to do this right now? What if I don't? What would happen? And again, often the consequences when we actually sit down and reflect and not as catastrophic as your perfectionism would have you think that they might be. ([Time 0:50:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/93a00acc-e574-46c1-ad26-cf9cc434cde5)) - **Let Work Be Its Own Reward** - Focus on the work as its own object instead of making achievements extensions of your self. - Let craft or vocation bring pride without requiring external validation or naming. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam Tell me about your grandfather. Thomas Curran My late grandfather was a master craftsman, and I used to watch him for hours as he would fashion everyday things like banisters, chairs, window frames in his workshop. And they were immaculate. From the vantage point of a child, they just seemed magical. How on earth were you able to create these wonderful pieces of furniture? And of course, his meticulousness, his diligence, his conscientiousness, his high standards were unquestionably the traits of somebody who worked really hard and wanted to do things Well, but they weren't the traits of a perfectionist. ([Time 0:51:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/446b44b0-4b20-43e1-8dfb-5c964d0363ac)) - **Connection Is A Skilled, Paid Labor** - Allison Pugh defines connective labor as the work of seeing someone and making them feel seen. - This interactive skill underlies many jobs beyond therapy, including sales, teaching, and service work. Transcript: Allison Pugh Is the work of seeing the other person and having the other person feel seen. And it's all the work that that requires, reflective listening to kind of adjusting what you're saying, given how they're responding. It's an interactive dance and the interactive part is very important. Shankar Vendantam Now, I can think of professions like a psychotherapist or a chaplain at a hospital where I can imagine these skills are really, really vital. But you are saying it's not just in these professions which call for hearing and listening that these skills are important. You're saying these are important skills more generally, right? Allison Pugh Yes, exactly. They underlie so many occupations from teaching, primary care, but also your hairdresser, your real estate agent, your soccer coach, the lawyer. There's the manager, for sure, high-end sales. There's many, many people who use this kind of connective labor to achieve the outcomes for which they're getting paid. ([Time 1:01:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b59ad3f8-119b-4683-85c8-fdf8b37ee291)) - **Being Seen Has Real Effects** - Being seen by another person increases persuasion, trust, and calm in customers and patients. - Small acts of genuine understanding produce outsized psychological benefits. Transcript: Allison Pugh For sales in particular, I mean, actually, this is happening in many different occupations. To be seen by another human being has some profound effects. There's a ton of research that talks about that for teaching and for therapy and for medicine. But even in sales, you know, salespeople know this. When you, when you, the salesperson, effectively identify somebody's problems or, you know, their perspective, it is much more persuasive. ([Time 1:03:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bffdf807-7909-41b9-a8ff-00f082690872)) - **Start With Humility In Cross-Cultural Talks** - Approach cross-cultural interactions with humility and aim to 'get' perspectives, not assume them. - Ask gentle, corrective questions and be open to being wrong to help people feel seen. Transcript: Allison Pugh Given that we don't know the other person, even when we think they do, it's not a terrible approach to kind of start with humility. So even it's perhaps easier when you know they're from a different culture or background or race or whatever. But we should all, I think this starts with humility. And actually, there's been great psychological research talking about how we shouldn't think of this as perspective taking, we should instead think of this as perspective getting. So it starts with asking or checking on your assumptions about them. So your posture towards reading them is not like, this is what you're feeling. It's so it sounds like something like this. You know, it's a more tentative and you're aware. Your first task is to listen and to be humble. And those sound simple, but actually when so much of our misreads happen under conditions of trying to do it quickly, so many of the practitioners in these fields, let's start with primary Care physicians, have no time. So I have a lot of sympathy for the working conditions that are making it hard for them to see other people. But I would say, try and hold that off because your efficiency pressures are going to make you do this poorly. ([Time 1:05:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d9da73df-9a7e-46f8-90d1-7eae9bcef18c)) - **Acknowledge Those You Can't Fully Help** - Acknowledge people you can't help with a brief eye contact and a humane comment. - Small recognitions reduce invisibility and matter more than ignoring them entirely. Transcript: Allison Pugh Agree it's a profound question. I also agree it is an everyday one, especially for those of us who live in urban environments. And it's not just about the unhoused. It's also about just seeing people in our midst who have deep need that you can't meet. Just speaking directly to this questioner, I would say, in my experience, they really appreciate your acknowledgement. I think the worst is when you don't acknowledge them at all. So just looking them in the eye and saying, I can't help you today, but I hope you have a good day or something that acknowledges them as a human being is one way forward. ([Time 1:10:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e7494e95-347c-4208-bc00-633078e36e09)) - **Build A Sounding Board For Emotional Work** - Create or seek a 'sounding board' of peers who also perform connective labor for support. - Ask organizations to provide supervision and peer groups instead of relying solely on individual resilience. Transcript: Allison Pugh Mean, I hear the pain in that question, and I would say it's widely shared. One of the reasons why I wrote the book I wrote was to give people a vocabulary to be able to assert their needs as connective labor practitioners. Because what I found is that too often we are relying on people as individual heroes. And instead, there's a social architecture that organizations put into place that support it or impede it. And it sounds like this writer is working in a context in which her labor is being kind of taken for granted and perhaps even impeded by her organization. And that actually is a tragedy. You know, I ended up finding a set of factors that contribute to kind of a good social architecture where what kind of organizations are doing it right. And one of the key factors is, are there other people to talk to who do this? I ended up calling that a sounding board. And are there sounding boards out there? And this is, you know, something that therapists know, teachers know, you know, like they have those, that's a kind of common practice to have a group of people who are, you know, I had One teacher who was, he was like the math family, you know, the people who teach math, that's who I'm talking to about problems or therapists have a kind of very extensive, you know, supervision Also kind of consultative practice with other therapists where they can talk about what they're experiencing or finding or processing. Those are crucial. ([Time 1:19:06](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f7880561-c817-4d25-8c26-dd4ac2aab9ad)) - **Burnout Is A System Problem** - Burnout solutions framed as individual fixes misread the problem; organizational design matters. - Treat workers like soil that needs the right rain, not buckets that simply drain. Transcript: Allison Pugh There's too many people kind of sucking you dry. And I actually think that that's a misread because so many people talk to me about how sustaining they find these relationships. So I started to think like we're running around with a metaphor of workers as like kind of these buckets of compassion that spring holes from which their compassion drains away. And actually, I don't think that's the right metaphor. I think we should think about like kind of the workers are as soil and the relationships as rain. And sometimes the rain is torrential or toxic. And sometimes the soil is too dry. But it's not that we don't need rain. It's that we need the working conditions that enable the rain to be restorative. ([Time 1:21:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ad4ee0fd-3f3c-4f54-9cdd-d9ca132caa89)) - **Bots Can Simulate Being Seen, Not Replace It** - AI chat can feel like being seen because of human-like responses, but it's not truly interactive. - Lack of real judgment makes bots appealing for shame, yet reduces attachment and sustained engagement. Transcript: Allison Pugh Newer versions of, you know, ChatGPT and its inheritors can feel like being seen on some level. I've heard people say, wow, I feel like I'm being seen right now. And I think the kind of emotional human-like syntax and the not entirely predictable responses help people feel seen. There's a couple of problems with it. The first is that it's not an interaction because it's not a human being on the other end. There's actually no risk of judgment. And on one level, that's a great thing for all the people who are afraid of the shame and judgment of others and who are walking around with dark secrets. Many people can walk around with shame and the idea of having therapy that doesn't involve a human gaze can be very appealing. But because there's no risk of human judgment, people also are less attached to it. This is also something that research has found, that people kind of are less motivated because they know it's not a human being. So it's a kind of thing that engineers actually struggle with. ([Time 1:36:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/889a1b47-221e-4593-a4ae-2050412d832a)) - **Automation Threatens Public Connection** - Technology risks creating a two-tiered future: humans provide artisanal connection for the wealthy while bots serve everyone else. - Automating simple interactions can hollow public life and worsen social fragmentation. Transcript: Allison Pugh And I worry about that. But while doing my research, I actually think there's other things to worry about that are equally problematic. One is the idea that rich people will get artisanal connective labor from a human being, and poor people will be the ones getting theirs from a bot. And I think that's certainly implicated when people say, oh, it's better than nothing. And I'm like, well, would you choose it for yourself? So if the answer is no, then it's not better than nothing. It's not something we shouldn't subscribe to as a society. So that's one future that I see that is practically a present. And then the other thing is this kind of triage model where the simple transactions, the simple interactions become automated. And we already see that with like call centers and stuff like that. When you finally get a human, it's after you've been shouting agent or whatever at your phone for some time. Like the complex goes bumped, gets bumped to a human being. And doctors talked to me about how they think that that's a potential, like they, some of them were open to that and some of them just saw that coming. ([Time 1:40:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a6200d65-6d1b-415f-89a8-6d4bd8a79ef9)) - **Listen For The Underground Emotion** - In conversation, quiet your own concerns and listen for the emotional layer under facts. - Rephrase that emotional message back to the speaker to create relief and insight. Transcript: Allison Pugh I try and shut my own, like turn down the volume on my own issues or whatever, and really just try and hear what they're saying. I'm trying to think about like, what was it that let me say that's like a loss of innocence to that woman who broke her leg in horseback riding? And for me, that was like trying to rephrase the statement that, you know, the story that she was trying to, she was telling me a story, but under the story, there was an emotional message. And I was trying to put that emotional message into words. So I am deeply listening to the kind of facts of the case, but I'm also kind of trying to hear how she feels about the facts of the case. And then I'm trying to rephrase it or maybe even find an image or a metaphor that captures it or something like that. Yeah. Shankar Vendantam I mean, and that is where the power lies, isn't it? Because sometimes, in fact, we ourselves are not aware of that subterranean emotional layer. And when someone comes along and listens to us carefully and says, look, here's this underground river that's flowing through what you're saying, we suddenly have this moment of epiphany Of saying, oh my God, of course, that is what I'm saying. Exactly. Allison Pugh And that epiphany, it's like a release valve. ([Time 1:41:59](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ee83ace2-101b-4909-8f13-67042b80a7a4))