Unraveling the Past with Dr. Susan Campbell
Have you ever wondered how your childhood experiences shape your reactions as an adult, especially in relationships and leadership roles? Dr. Susan Campbell is a renowned relationship expert, author of nine books, and a sought-after voice in understanding human work and love relations, and in this episode we’re diving into the intricacies of emotional regulation, the impact of childhood experiences, and the importance of authenticity in our personal and professional lives.
Listen in as Susan shares insights on the profound effects of seemingly minor childhood traumas, explaining how unmet needs during our formative years can influence our reactions and emotional regulation in adulthood. We also discuss what it means to “get real” with yourself (and why you should), the tangible benefits of self-awareness and authenticity, and insights into managing emotions, understanding triggers, and embracing genuine connections.
And as with everything I share on the podcast, this is what I believe based on what I’ve read and researched. But please don’t take my word for it. Keep what sticks, discard the rest and for goodness sakes, go out and test drive it!
What You’ll Learn In Today’s Episode:
What triggers our reactions.
How our childhood affects our reactions as adults.
The beauty of recognizing our trigger reactions.
How to manage dysregulated emotions as a leader.
How to navigate differences with others.
Whether a touch of mystery truly matters.
Authenticity in the dating scene.
Ideas Worth Sharing:
“Most of us have unfinished childhood business, unfinished wounds from the past.” – Dr. Susan Campbell
“It’s your responsibility to learn how to regulate your emotions so they don’t become the kind of emotions that create chaos in your environment.” – Dr. Susan Campbell
“Emotions are normal, even if they’re dysregulated.” – Dr. Susan Campbell
Resources:
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Speaker 1 0:01
Hey, it's Christina. Thanks for joining us. And welcome to the Squeeze.
Speaker 2 0:12
Emotions are normal, even if they're dysregulated, I
Speaker 1 0:28
My guest on the show today is Dr. Susan Campbell. Susan has authored nine books on relationships and conflict resolution, including her latest, From Triggered to Tranquil: How Self-Compassion and mindful presence can transform relationship conflicts and heal childhood wounds. That was published 2021 Susan has delivered hundreds of seminars and workshops internationally. She's counseled 1000s of individuals and couples, and she's appeared on CNN's News Night, Good Morning America, and Dr. Dean Adel helping to interpret what she refers to as the status of contemporary human work and love relations. Susan has also directed a think tank. She's run nonprofit organizations, consulted to plenty of Fortune 500 companies, and she's also guest lectured at the Harvard, Stanford, and UCLA business schools. I first came across Susan's work 17 years ago when I was living in the Bay Area of San Francisco, and someone shared her book, Getting Real with Me. They also suggested she might make a good coach for me. Once I had a sense of the scope of her work, I found myself a bit hesitant to reach out, wondering why the heck this well-known author and academic would want to work with me. Well, thankfully, I got past my hesitancy, and I've worked closely with Susan on and off during the past 17 years in a variety of relationships. She's been my coach, my trainer, I'm certified in her coaching methodology, and she's also been something of a business colleague. I've attended many of her weekend retreats, and participated in numerous honesty salons with other Getting Real practitioners. What I've appreciated most about working with Susan is just how much she actually lives the Getting Real work that she's espoused throughout her huge body of work, and this makes her a trusted and valuable partner. And I'm grateful to be able to share Susan's work with you here today, and I really hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. All right, so we have Susan Campbell on the podcast today. Welcome, Susan. I have included lots of information already that listeners will have heard on the intro about you and your work, but maybe you could just say a little bit about what you're up to lately, and kind of where your interests and passions lie. What are you doing lately?
Speaker 2 2:49
Lately, I'm doing the same thing I've done for at least the last 20 years. This hasn't really changed,
Speaker 1 2:57
so what's
Speaker 2 2:59
that? My big frame is culture change, trying to give humans the tools we need to live in a world with increasingly rapid change, exponential change, and increasing diversity and conflict. So, change and conflict, those are my two big areas, and I've boiled it down to my area of contribution has to do with human communication, helping communicate about differences, helping you see what's going on that might be uncomfortable to see, communicate about things that are uncomfortable, basically how to deal with bad news, inconvenient truths, and polarized opinions, learning how to hold the tension when you have to listen to somebody who disagrees with you. So, I deal with that in marriage, I'm a relationship coach, dating families, the corporate arena, team building, mostly, and communities, intentional communities who are trying to live together sustainably. So, those are those are my clients.
Speaker 1 4:11
Yeah, so right up my alley. I'm working on a lot of similar things to what you're talking about there. So, I'm going to just start with a little scenario, so I've been working in leadership development for, you know, a couple of decades now. Excuse me, and I, over those years, have encountered a lot of different tools to help leaders face into those sticky, difficult conflict kind of situations, and I should add that a lot of these tools are pretty reasonable, but what I'm finding, it doesn't seem to matter how good the tool is. I often hear from leaders, you know, when I check back with them, like, how did that go? I hear it didn't work, and what's interesting when I probe is that I oftentimes uncover that it seems like. They got triggered, or the other person got triggered, and then both parties kind of doubled down on their defense mechanism, whatever, and nothing really shifted, and so it's enormously frustrating, you know, not just for the person, but also for the people trying to, you know, promote leadership development in organizations, and obviously difficult conversations is a big part of leadership, so I guess my question that I want to put to you first is, first of all, do you recognize what I'm pointing to, and if so, like, what's really going on for people? Why is this work sometimes just too hot to handle, and if not, what am I not seeing?
Speaker 2 5:40
Well, it's true that people have a hard time just staying present with what I want, what I feel. Here's my feedback to you. Oh, I can hear your bad news without getting reactive. It's really hard for people, because most of us have unfinished childhood business, unfinished wounds from the past, things that had you feeling not good enough, like your voice maybe didn't matter, like you had to scream and shout to get your needs met, so so many of these communication issues between adults and we're supposed to act like adults, there's an inner child in there who is still got a lens that it's looking through that's a fear lens, so we're very primed because of this unfinished childhood business, and that's the root of these trigger reactions that you're talking about, trigger reactions like shutting down or blowing up, and then you know, regretting it later, or just not being able to hear, like freezing and going, "Geez, what just happened? I was so on automatic, you know, I gave a good competent response, but I really wasn't present, so all of these are what I mean by trigger reactions. They're basically fight, flight, freeze. It's a normal survival mechanism in the brain when the human feels like they're threatened, but we're usually not threatened in these adult leadership situations, but there's enough similarity between those situations, like somebody criticizes you, or you think they're criticizing you, and that reminds you of your dad criticizing you when you were 10 years old, and just trying to learn how to throw a baseball, or that kind of thing, so, so, a lot of things work that are the roots of these trauma reactions are not even real traumas when you're a child, but they're not having the needs met that kids have. Kids are more sensitive than I think a lot of parents realize, and parents are busy, and it's not like you're a bad parent if your kid grows up insecure and fearful. We've all got this sort of layer of fear that's repressed, and so part of my work has been to help people understand that that's a normal human communication too, and we've got to learn to deal with it and accept it, which the normal part is we sometimes get reactive, we get triggered, we get over amped, our nervous system gets over activated about something that you might say is out of proportion to the present situation, but it's because there's some old feelings that never got felt, like let's say you were criticized a lot when you were a kid, and you had pain around that, and you wanted to cry, and you wanted to go and say, you know, I think you don't love me, Mommy, when you talk to me like that. Now, some kids can do that, but a lot of kids put give way too much power to the adult, and maybe there are other things as well in the household that makes them feel unsafe, so they can't just go and ask for reassurance, because that's the normal response. The normal response is not to, not to hurt, or not to sometimes go, "Oh, I'm criticized, you know. Does she love me? That's, you know, that's normal. But on top of that, the ideal, the securely attached.. I'll explain that in a minute, but the securely attached child will just say, "Mommy, you yelled at me, and that scared me, and "Do you still love me? Same thing as a securely attached husband and wife situation, your partner says something insulting, and you'll, you'll ask for reassurance, or you'll ask for comfort, or you'll ask, did you really mean that, but so many of us shut down as soon as we felt that painful thing. Happen in our bodies at the hands of our parents often, as I said, well-meaning parents, and so the fact that we shut down means there's stuck energy there that still hasn't completed, it still hasn't gotten the reassurance and the help that it needs, and so these childish reactions we could say with hopefully compassion in our hearts when we say that childish reactions are still right there ready to be triggered in a way, in the good sense of the word, in a way so that you can notice them and do something to heal them.
Speaker 2 10:39
Course, most people don't want to, don't think they can heal them, and don't want to show them, but honestly, if we can become more accepting about these trigger reactions, there are tools, and I'm sure we'll get into that a little bit here. There are ways to help yourself heal and get help from others, even, even all these years later. Well, that's a big interest of mine, is working with emotional triggers.
Speaker 1 11:06
Yeah, and there's something you know, so I'm I'm completely aligning with what you're talking about. It's making a lot of sense, and you and I have known and worked together for a long time. Where I'm getting stuck is, so let me just give you an example. So, I've done a lot of around emotional intelligence in organizations for years, and I still find resistance to emotions. So, you know, the party line may be, yeah, no, emotions are part of organizational life, but the implicit or the unspoken norm is no, actually, emotions don't belong in the boardroom, or they don't belong here, or whatever, which you know I've always found partly humorous and partly ridiculous, because to me it's almost like saying, well, okay, everybody, there's going to be no breathing in the boardroom, like it's sort of bizarre that we would think we're at choice about whether we have emotions or not, so when I think about the resistance that I face just with something like emotional intelligence, when I hear what you're describing, the roots of those triggers, I'm thinking to myself, How in the world do you package what you're saying, which I completely align with, in an organizational environment in a way that doesn't make people run for the hills and say this is therapeutic, where's my couch to lie on? Like, how do you deal with that?
Speaker 2 12:29
Well, if people can accept that they do get triggered, so that's the, that's the first step. The next step is also accepting that it's your responsibility to learn how to regulate your emotions, so that they don't become the kind of emotions that create chaos on your team or your environment. So, I would say dysregulated emotions don't belong in the boardroom, other than just as you know, normal blips, okay? You can't always regulate your emotions as soon as they get dysregulated, and when I say regulate, I mean things like calm yourself, reassure yourself that you're really safe, and there, you know, that takes a little bit of practice, but a breathing practice where you go, oh wait, I'm getting activated, I need a break, or just saying to the person you're talking to, I need a moment, or if you're in a meeting and you're really agitated, you might have to take a bathroom break, so emotions are normal, even if they're dysregulated, but it's everybody's responsibility to learn how to handle your own emotions, and that starts by admitting that some of them are difficult to handle and admitting that publicly
Speaker 1 13:55
well, and so that's like you're almost taking what you're talking about encompassing it under the umbrella of I don't want to put the label emotional intelligence, but I do know that organizations, mostly the ones I'm working in, are actually willing to use that label, whether they're practicing it or not, is another thing. So, there is a normalization of emotional intelligence. So, what you're describing with the dysregulated emotions being everybody's individual experience, I love that. That's simple. It makes sense, and I think that's something that leaders would, you know, sort of immediately understand and embrace. So, you were talking about attachment, and well, actually, let's back it up. That's.. I want to get there, but not quite yet. So, if we were imagining a scenario, let's just say it's a leader who has to have a difficult conversation with someone on their team, and let's say this leader maybe struggles a little bit to be a bit more of a quote unquote hardline leader, so they, they want to be liked, they maybe thrive on the approval and the acceptance, and they pride themselves on being someone that's like open door, you know. Lot of trust, so they've got to go have this difficult conversation, and part of it is perhaps about holding the employee accountable, because the encounter, the employee is not following through, maybe they've had conversations, this might even be a repeating process, so this leader is getting, you know, just even triggered at the thought of having this conversation, so could you kind of kick in here with like what would be some processes for managing those dysregulated emotions to go forward and actually create a more productive outcome for that leader.
Speaker 2 15:34
So you said that the leader already knows that they have some fears about delivering bad news. They know this is a tender place for them, so they would need to start there, being aware of what's that for, what's that? What am I afraid of? I'm maybe a lot of us afraid that somebody won't like me, or that there'll be some kind of backlash, that there'll be something bad will happen if I do something that makes somebody else uncomfortable, like the child who thinks I gotta always keep Mommy happy, you know, I have to bend myself into a pretzel to keep my parent happy, that is extremely common, whether it's Mommy or Daddy, you know, whoever's the most volatile parent, we learn. Okay, I'm going to be the adapter, so I grow up, and I'm become this particular kind of leader that you're talking about. So, first, it's important, ideally, at least, if this leader had done some pre-work getting ready for the meeting to give difficult feedback to this employee, and I'd say really, really sit with what creepy feelings are coming up in your gut, and what thoughts are coming up, like fear thoughts, like if I, if I deliver this, they're going to become even more whatever you know, even more withholding, or even more defiant, whatever the fear thought is. Sit with that, and what are the feelings that come up sometimes? What you're going to get when you do this self-inquiry practice is memories from your own past that you never have remembered before. When we sit and listen to ourselves long enough, and people who've done long meditation retreats can attest to this. You just sit there for a while, and stuff bubbles up from yourself that doesn't seem like anything that meditation is supposed to be, you know. It's old sitting and breathing and listening to yourself, so it's a natural healing process, but people in the business world were so busy and we're so focused on outcomes that this is a this this does go counter to the implicit corporate culture. Okay, the explicit is, oh, we're very friendly to emotions, but the implicit is fast, fast, fast. Fast is better than slow. Get the job done, too much to do and too little time. That corporate implicit culture is not friendly to learning about these deeper layers of yourself, so you're going to have to go counter to the culture, you're going to have to figure out a way to make time for yourself, your deeper self. Well, I think
Speaker 2 18:30
sadly, once once people learn how to do it, they go, "Wow, I am, I'm so much more of a master of myself now, I'm not on automatic so much, but it takes a little work and a little stepping out of the busy busyness to do this, yeah.
Speaker 1 18:44
Well, and you, I like the frame you've provided, you know that idea of that self-inquiry again, because I think to get through that bubble of like the implicit corporate speak of like being outcome driven fast, fast, fast, right? We, I mean, you just, you really don't have to be a rocket scientist to walk into an organization and see that that's the overwhelming culture, and so what I found in my work is that I have to be a bit sneaky to kind of do an end run around that, and one of the ways that I do that is in just really simple sort of frames that people can understand, and so you just gave me one there that there, you do a simple self-inquiry practice prior to that conversation, where you're, you're really just like you just say it so simply and beautifully, like just sit and listen to yourself, and that what you're actually fostering is like a healing process, which is such a different, different reality than you know the outcome driven world of the culture. I also appreciate the point you made about you just kind of have to like, you know, be brave and courageous and pull up your boots and like push back on that that culture that is so dominant to say, you know, actually by doing this I. Am getting those outcomes because you're probably going to have a more productive conversation with that employee that is going to, you know, be based on you being a little bit more, I don't know, you, for lack of a better word,
Speaker 2 20:13
you're more all there and therefore more trustworthy.
Speaker 1 20:17
Ah, interesting. And would you agree, Susan, that, like, let's say back to this leader scenario, that your, your employees can, like, pick that up from you, like, whether you are all you, and when you're not, when you are trying to please them. I mean, would you agree that people can pretty easily pick that up, whether they're conscious to what they're picking up or not?
Speaker 2 20:37
Yes, yes, they can pick up when there's like unspoken things underneath you, underneath what you're really saying, even, even if they don't know exactly what it is, they just, they just feel a little bit of mistrust,
Speaker 1 20:52
yeah, yeah, so I love that, what we're kind of in the neighborhood of is something you and I have talked about, and I think you gave me these words many, many years ago, that there's this opportunity to practice being more comfortable with that discomfort, and I was thinking about, like, you know, in terms of the way I work in organizations, it's a lot of one on one coaching support, but I also come in and work with teams and do facilitated sessions, so there's a number of different ways, but that sort of generalized supporting leaders to feel their reactivity, but still like stay in that moment of self-inquiry, or even in the moment, let's say, let's say that this guy or gal, who was someone who was uncomfortable giving bad news in the scenario I created, let's say they didn't take the time to recognize, or maybe they had a fleeting thought, like, "Oh, this is really hard, or whatever anxious kind of feeling thought they had. They went in, they had the conversation. It didn't go well, and now they are in a state of maybe even more heightened awareness, because their sense of security and connection control is a threat. And so I guess what I want to probe, because I think this is what so often happens, is leaders create the mess, and now they're in that place where their temptation is really just to, I don't know, you know, they, they talk about, like, oh, I want to quit and go somewhere else, or they're just hoping something from outside will come in and shift things for them, so in that moment, what would be a great process, sort of building what you were talking about with the self inquiry, and maybe it's the same thing, but I don't know, but a process for after the fact, now that like things are all over, they're feeling a bit shredded. What's a good, like, what I would call a timeout process for someone in that situation, more reflective in nature, perhaps.
Speaker 2 22:41
You can almost use the same practice that I mentioned as your pre work, so your post work would be, oh geez, it didn't go well, and I'm feeling terrible about myself, let me sit with that, that might be another aspect of repressed childhood fears or fear stories like I'm not good enough. The other one was I'll be abandoned if I, if you know, if I make somebody uncomfortable. And now I'm dealing with the I'm not good enough fear. And whoa, now I see I got, I got two really big core fears that are just under the surface, waiting to be triggered when something unexpected or disappointing happens, so that let's say I come up to that not good enough story feeling, maybe some memories. Imagine that as a much loved child, and that that is you, that's your tender part, so that's the deeper aspect of this inquiry, and this may be really foreign to the get the job done ethic in your life, but we all, I think, need some kind of a reparenting job here, and who's going to do that, but yourself, or maybe you can get some of it from your beloved. If you're lucky enough to have a really secure love relationship, you can say, you know, tell me I'm not that bad, you know, to your spouse or something. That would be lovely if we all had that, or if we all had a support group like AA or something, where we, where we could get some external, we call it co-regulation. It's like when a mother hugs a crying child. We all need co-regulation when we're triggered, or when we're, when we're feeling those insecure feelings about ourselves. I did want to say, though, that short of doing the deep pre inquiry, and you didn't have time to do it, or you just didn't, didn't want to, you can at least pre do a use a preamble. This is kind of a quick, quick preamble when you have to. Deliver bad news that's called sharing mixed emotions, and it's in my book, Getting Real. And it's basically, I'm going to need to give you some difficult feedback today, and I want you to know that I care a lot about our working relationship, and I want to make sure that what I'm going to say doesn't damage that, so I want to say what's there for me, and then I really want to hear how this impacts you, and then how we can heal any mess that has been created by that. So you start by like preparing the person, but also letting them know that you're coming from a caring place, so version of I want to deliver difficult feedback to you, and I'm afraid, I mean, you can even use that word and still be an adult, respectable person, and I'm afraid of doing so, because you know, I don't, I'm not very good at this, I hate making people uncomfortable. You could even say that, even without doing deep pre-work. If you've got a general idea that you have fears inside of you about making other people uncomfortable, go ahead and admit it. It makes you come across more human, and it softens and relaxes you, because you bring in again more of yourself online for the interaction, and it's going to go better.
Speaker 1 26:36
Hey, you're listening to The Squeeze, and if you like what you're hearing, there's a whole world of citrus couching to discover. We've got an online leadership program, it's called Citrus You, and it features those three key tools you need to be a better leader, well, to be a better human. We also have a number of mini learning bundles that you can get into, and there's plenty more. If you're interested, you can follow us on Instagram, or check out our website@www.citruscoaching.com And the show resumes now. It's what I love. I call it sort of like the power of transparency, that when we actually show up that way, which I think you know, I do a lot of work with leaders around imposter syndrome, and, like, you know, the whole fake it till you make it bs, and you know, I think that this is one of those things that is a little bit paradoxical, because I think a lot of people think the worst of the worst was going to happen if I were to admit what you just did, but I noticed as you said, that I felt a softening in my body, and we're just role playing, so there's a way that that's super powerful, and I want to just take that and run a little bit more generally, because it reminds me so much of such a powerful theme, in particularly getting real, and then, of course, saying what's real, which were like very pivotal books for me when I first encountered them, so one of the things that I really loved about both books was the premise that while being honest, being authentic might reveal our places of difference, or being transparent, like we might actually discover we're in different places, that the object of the game isn't necessarily consensus, it was about holding difference and having both, you know, both having a place in the conversation, and so I'm actually going to read something from Getting Real, because I think it's totally in alignment, and lo and behold, I just actually literally flipped open to this page before our interview started, and I thought, well, that is meant to be. So what you wrote was, in dealing with differences or disagreements, you basically have three choices. You can try to get other people to see things your way, you can give in to others to minimize conflict, or you can practice holding differences, and that's the part I really want to land on. So, I mean, I don't have to tell you that we live in an incredibly polarized culture, more so I think, than any other time that I can remember in my adult life. But can you help us unpack, like what for a lot of people might feel a bit paradoxical? So, here we go. You know, we've taken these risks, we've, we've said these things, we've stirred this stuff up, we've gotten real. I now know you don't want to spend time with my family. I now know you would rather be in Mexico for Christmas. Like, maybe I feel a bit of relief in saying this, but like, what the heck do we do now? So this whole notion of holding differences, what's next?
Speaker 2 29:35
Okay, well, the first step is though training yourself to really listen to a point of view that's different from your own, so that's the beginning of holding differences. Oh, I, I hear you want this, and I want that, and wow, that's uncomfortable, and I care about you, and I want you to have what you want, and I don't want to give up what I want. Okay, so. That's the frame. Then the next thing is, tell me more about why you want that. You know that's basic negotiation skills, so you dialog across that difference, but you have to be able to keep your mind focused on both, both end and that, you know, that's a stretch in itself. So, that takes some practice. Yeah, well, the active listening practice that so many marriage counselors teach their clients, and we also learn this in corporate communication classes, where you repeat back what you heard, even if you don't like it, and you don't editorialize, so that practice is just very necessary to learn to hold differences, and then you can, then you can communicate across differences. Many differences are not going to be resolved, like a married couple, you know, your different personality types, you're she's always going to want to make up after a fight right away, or keep the fight going, and not have him walk away, and he's always going to want to walk away, and they're always going to get into misunderstandings about this, but afterwards they can communicate about it, and they can go, oh yes, I understand, but that doesn't mean the same problem is not going to recur over and over and over. My contention is just being able to communicate about the difference, show respect to the other person, that has a lot of value in and of itself, and sometimes that's all we can hope for. However, once we only hope for that, and we keep communicating across differences very often over time, often it's not like in the first conversation, new possibilities will emerge, because when people feel more aligned and more respectful, they're feeling safer with each other, and creative problem solving can you can actually go, oh, wow, here's, here's a both, and let's try this. What about this? So I offer you that,
Speaker 1 32:11
yeah, yeah. Well, I'm going to call it. I'm going to be a little dramatic and say that I think that when two people are willing to a risk transparently sharing what's true for them, b, as you describe it, practice that, that sort of respectful listening, where you're not trying to change what they're saying, you're actually trying to understand it, that that safe zone that gets created, it seems like this third way just sort of naturally shows up, not always, but that there is like this, as you described it, as you know, when people feel safer than those creative juices, just sort of may naturally be available to flow, so it's not necessarily that there's this sort of lightning bolt of a, you know, an idea that comes out of the sky, but it's what I've tried to describe to my clients over the, you know, the years is really just that, that you're actually taking the conversation and the individuals into a new zone, where from that place you might be able to see something different that you most absolutely certainly could not see back here when you were not able to hold those differences. So I'm going to be a little melodramatic, I'm going to call that that the magic space in the middle, because I think it's really difficult for people to imagine. I mean, it's just.. it's the limits of our, our mind to some degree, right? It's black or it's white, but actually, it's.. it's not. It's that land in between. So, I really appreciate that
Speaker 2 33:33
resistance to that has to do back to not being able to handle a lot of emotional discomfort, you know? You know, the word is patience. I need more patience, don't you? I mean, everybody needs to develop, you know. I gotta sit there, listen to something that sounds like crap to me. You just can't stand it. So that's a personal development goal that I still have for myself, even though I've been for 40 years.
Speaker 1 34:07
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, going in a sort of a similar but different, I mean, we're really kind of in the same neighborhood here, but personally, I think the work of getting real is, you know it's, it's, it's profound, and I think that it invites people into an experience of honesty with themselves and others that, for some, I think is kind of foreign, and maybe even a little bit scary to them. So, like me, I, you know, I've been searching for a framework like this my whole life, and it's kind of like authenticity, you know, I sort of hold that in almost biblical terms. I also recognize I am kind of not the norm, and you know the people in my life will remind me of that all too often. I know that a lot of people hit blocks or walls that prevent them from like hanging out in those so-called grittier places, where I know that what I want is different than. What you've just said you want, for instance, back to the holding difference, and then all always in those places where, particularly, to say what I want or need is potentially going to hurt someone else's feelings or disappoint them. So it's, it's sort of a little bit of a higher level, almost like from your experience, why should anybody want to get realer with themselves, like, so really simply, what's in it for them? Well, it is a choice, being more honest and taking more risks with your communication, and I mean risks like having the other person feel uncomfortable or having the other person judge you, so what can you get out of.. I'm going to say expanding your comfort zone, because that's what this is really about. What you
Speaker 2 35:52
have more freedom in life to do more things, you have more options, but actually see more options for yourself, like people who haven't gotten real with themselves, just as an example, gotten real and use some of these tools that you and I are promoting here, like getting comfortable with discomfort. Let's say I'm just on automatic, because that's that's the other option, you can be getting real or you can just be an automatic and kind of satisfied with your habit patterns that have always been comfortable for you, so you go on through life and somebody asks you a question and your assumption is somebody asked me a question, I got to answer it, you know. Well, that's so sad to me, you've given up the freedom to check in with yourself to see what you really feel and want. Gee, I feel kind of uncomfortable with that question. When she said, "Do I feel fat? Do I look fat in this dress? I don't want to answer, you know. I want to check in with myself and realize I don't trust this question, for example. Okay, I'm using a humorous instance, but it's, can you see how some people are like trapped in the world of other people's expectations or conformity pressures, and if you say, ah, what, what good is it to do this, getting real stuff? Well, check in with yourself and see, maybe you're living your life too automatic and without seeing all your full range of options, and that you know that's kind of like living in the jail of old rules that you didn't make.
Speaker 1 37:37
Yeah, yeah, I think that that speaks volumes. So that makes me think of control. So, in a lot of your writing, you talk about how the more we try to control, the less control we feel, and I think most people listening would probably agree. I talk to my clients about control all the time, or rather, lack of it, but the need for control is obviously really strong in most people that I meet, and a lot of the leaders that I work with. So, how does one then go about shifting that orientation from try to control to being more open to simply what is happening right in front of us at the moment? And I realize we're, you know, I'm sort of covering territory you were just addressing there, but I love.. I'll reference.. I can't remember if it's getting real or saying what's real, but am I communicating right now as an attempt to control, or am I communicating because I want to relate? So, tell me about control and what's going on in terms of how we can shift our orientation to life.
Speaker 2 38:40
Well, let me clarify that distinction between communicating to relate and communicating to control first. So, some communication is in the interest of transparency to let you know what I feel, what I want, what I, or what I think, what I think about this problem we're dealing with, or what I think about what we just said, so it's not all just feelings, but it's just revealing and not worrying too much about whether you like me or not, whether you agree or not. I respect you, and you know I care about that, but I'm, but I'm not like worried about it, I'm not limited by it. Oh, I can hit a little discomfort. So that's relating, and relating is two way, you know. Here's my feedback to you. How did that land for you? I really care. So relating is more like just in the interest of revealing and being known and knowing the other, controlling is a type of communication, and there's a, is a type of communication that it comes from fear, that the way I'm using the word controlling, and then we'll talk about the normal good kind of controlling too, because. I don't want to throw all controlling out, but controlling, that's kind of automatic, and part of your conditioned addiction to safety and comfort. It's either what comes out of your mouth is trying to manipulate how the other person sees you, or trying to make sure they're not angry or upset, or going to going to go away and do harm to you, so you can't communicate freely when you're worried so much about how it's going to come across doesn't mean you can't care, and even express caring, like we demonstrated before, but you're focused so much on that that you can't even get your truth out. So then you do all these different control patterns, which are things like things like pretending to agree when you really don't agree, saying yes when you would say no, because you want to be a nice person, and so forth. There's another kind of control pattern, which is more internal. You're not even letting yourself feel your displeasure with something, or like the person who just automatically answers a question that they don't want to answer, but it doesn't even occur to them, because they're, they're so conditioned to not, to not really check in with themselves. So that's another control pattern, is you don't want to feel your own internal discomfort, which is sort of like the geez, what do I do now? I mean, that's your internal truth. What do I do now? I don't know, which is honest response a lot of times, but you don't let yourself have that, so you're acting on top of the situation. Here we go with the imposter thing, you're kind of imposter syndrome when you behave that way, because you imposter, that's different than the mistaken imposter syndrome, but there's a lot of us who are imposters a lot of the time, and we need to admit that, and do the growth work necessary to stop being so hidden from your own self, so controlling either means you're manipulating to try to get a positive, comfortable outcome, or you're in some kind of denial or suppression of your own feelings through various denial type habits. Denial is the probably the most common internal control pattern, and why do we do that to protect against emotional disorder? You know,
Speaker 1 42:48
yeah, yeah. So, what about the other kind of control? You said I don't want to throw all the control out.
Speaker 2 42:54
I'm glad you're bringing it back to that. Let's say you're a parent and you're responsible for the safety of your child, and they haven't grown up enough to have you trust that they make safe choices, so you have to control that, or you're a manager and your contract with somebody is they will do this by this amount of time, this is their job description, and it's an explicit agreement, and they don't keep to that agreement, you let them know that it's your job to kind of like maintain order around here, agreement, we have to either keep our agreement or revise our agreement, otherwise there's like chaos and disorganization, so the kind of control where you hold people accountable to what they've said they will do, that's a righteous kind of control too.
Speaker 1 43:49
Yeah, that makes good sense. I think you know, as I like consider all these sort of experiences that we're talking about and drawing our attention to what's happening on the inside, which we may or may not be aware of, and then the actions that we take on the outside. So, in terms of those control patterns, it's super useful, and there's just, you know, there's just so much here that's going on at the human level in every interaction, let alone when we're by ourselves, so you know there's just so much more to unpack here, Susan, but I know we don't have like seven hours, so I kind of want to take us like in a bit of a fun direction, maybe as a tying off our loose ends, and of course I don't think we'll ever fully tie them off, but you know I'm such a super huge proponent of authenticity and living in that sort of continual examination of what's what's real, what's here now. And so I was watching the second season of White Lotus recently, actually re-watching, I have to admit, because it's quite a great show, and I've seen it before. Have you seen White Lotus?
Speaker 2 44:59
I love it.
Speaker 1 45:00
Okay, great. So then there's these two couples, and one couple that tells themselves the truth, and they maintain a high level of honesty, and the other couple has all sorts of sketchy mystery and lots of omissions between them. First couple to begin with, very little physical chemistry or intimacy for unclear reasons, we don't know that as a viewer, while the second couple is getting it on all the time, so you know, I think, based on the infidelity and betrayal in the second couple, you know, it's pretty easy to imagine lots of hidden pain and struggles that they're both holding beneath the surface, but what the show seems to almost be trying to say a little bit is that a bit of mystery isn't always a bad thing for creating better chemistry, and eventually, of course, some mystery does arise for the couple that's, you know, being pretty much honest and transparent with one another. Actually, I'm noticing, as I said, that honest and transparent, there might be a distinction there. And then, as a result of that, spoiler alert, you know, in the end, they start getting it on more, their sex life gets back on track, and they seem to be enjoying one another much more. So, because I am such a huge proponent of authenticity, and I certainly influence my core relationships by inviting that, does too much authenticity and honesty kill the sexy vibe? Does a little mystery matter,
Speaker 2 46:23
you know, that's dependent a little bit on personality type. Actually, no, I generally want to think, you know, in all the people I know, and I've, I've, I've had a lot of relationships, and I've dated a lot, I've never had a relationship where honesty and authenticity kills the passion. It's just never happened. I mean, to me it's actually enhanced the passion, but I'm with growth-oriented people. I'm always attracting people who love the stuff that you and I are talking about, so I'm not sure about other people, I've answered this question in a lot, you know, a lot of different interviews, and you know it is sort of common mythology that mystery, but what do you really mean by mystery? Oh, I mean that's a vague term anyway, and I don't, I don't know if you even know what you mean by it. When you ask me the question, you know, like, what is this? What is this vague thing called mystery? I'm not sure it exists. Trust the person, or you don't. You know, those are much more basic. If you have chemistry, that you have chemistry or no chemistry, whether there's mystery or no mystery, because that happens right away, you know. And some people have just more chemistry, and some people need, no, some personality types need more of that sort of sexual romantic chemistry, they need more somebody I can project my fantasies onto other people, are really just kind of more emotionally neutral, objective, and they don't, they don't run, they don't run romance and sexual energy the same way, so just let's be careful of not projecting our own reality onto others, so I have to be careful not to project that authenticity always enhances the passion, because that's my bias, it's always working for me.
Speaker 1 48:34
Yeah, nice. It reminds me of something someone said to me many years ago when I was sort of starting out in this field. He said to me, you know, authenticity doesn't mean showing everybody your underwear. Got it? Yeah, not for everybody.
Speaker 2 48:48
That's a good lead into something that people say to me, because I teach honesty, and you may hear this too. People say I'm too honest, and it gets me into trouble. So I say, tell me about a time when you were too honest. Oh, well, I was dating, starting to date somebody, and I was disclosing about my wounds as a child, and how hard it was growing up with an alcoholic father, and you know, he didn't say anything, he never told me about his wounds or anything. I go, wait a minute, you were in a control pattern just then. If I, you know, if I could be blunt here, you were manipulating by telling your wound story to see if you could get him to share at an equal level without being honest about that, without where about that. So, is honesty wins, honesty, honesty,
Speaker 1 49:43
yeah, that's such an important question. Certainly, for someone like myself that takes great pleasure in bungee jumping into all kinds of stretching and examining, and you know, just being curious about what that looks like for me every day. So I want to make just one point, because. There's a body of your work that I think people could miss, and I've been using it so much with my stepdaughters and my nieces, and that's the truth in dating, because there's a way in which I'm not exactly sure if I'm, I'm kind of paraphrasing what I think you said in the book, and that was that, you know, when you go on a first date with someone, people oftentimes act like they're going to the red carpet, so they, you know, just absolutely go to the nines in how they look. They're just super careful with what they say. When the reality is that first encounter, there's absolutely nothing at stake here. You have not invested a thing yet. This is the time when you've got like there's really actually very little that you can lose, and then you know, in the similar vein, six months down the line, folks are like, okay, now the bloom is starting to come off the rose of this relationship, and now I'm starting to see that other person don't really like these things, I wish they'd change, etc. So, what I've been doing with my nieces and my stepdaughters is we've been playing the, you know, the getting real game and the truth in dating game for like eons, and I will even say transparently that one of the things that hastened my marriage to become the relationship it is today is because on our second date I brought those cards and I asked some of those questions when I recognized that there really wasn't much on the line, and in fact the time for transparency and really wanting to understand someone was now at the beginning. So I'm just curious, like, do you still do a lot of work in that in that arena? Is that still something that you're excited about and interested in?
Speaker 2 51:39
Yes, I coach people who are learning to date more authentically. Yes, in my one on one, don't do any more large singles events. I have done a lot of those, though. And what I'm trying to say in the book, Truth and Dating, is all of us need more practice being honest in relationships of any kind. Now you've got an opportunity where there's a little, little bit of excitement, you know, a first date or a second date, a little bit, a little bit of risk, but the stakes are kind of low, so why not just practice being yourself, and I, for a change, instead of, oh, I couldn't say that, because it's our second date, or our first date. So I'm just kind of encouraging people to take more risks right off the bat. The getting real and truth and dating cards that have self-disclosure questions on them, those can help. I use those when I was on the dating apps, because you know, I've done a lot of internet dating. I use them to great effect, also. Or just your own questions, like what? What now that we've had our first date, what are your impressions? Okay,
Speaker 1 53:10
yeah. Well, and I think to you know, just to reflect that the times around the dinner table, like when the girls were younger and they were home, and you know they loved that, they loved when we pulled the cards out, and just to loop back to something you were saying, when I asked the question of, like, what's in it for people, this practice of getting real. All I have to do is reflect on those conversations. The level of aliveness was very, very high. The way that we connected, I mean, honestly, to this day, my youngest stepdaughter, she will ask for them at any family dinner, and she's brought my brother's family into it, and even when we've had the whole entire extended family at Christmas, let's do the cards, so yeah, just a plug for the way in which that has absolutely normalized that self-disclosure practice in a way that I think people just naturally feel more connected, so I kind of want to just end on that piece of, like, I started with all those questions about, you know, how do you, how the heck do you normalize this kind of work inside these organizations that are absolutely hell-bent on outcomes, and I think what I'm left feeling is just a real clear commitment that it is about normalizing, and it is about calling those leaders into, you know, a way of being where they can actually feel more alive themselves, because, as I often quote, like 70% of our waking life for most folks is spent at work, so if you're like, you know, on autopilot throughout the day, it's like, how's that working for you? So, I guess I just want to offer you any last words, so knowing that probably my listeners are predominantly going to be in the organizational realm, not entirely, but like, any last words from you, Susan, about like just that practice of. Of of getting real and normalizing what we're talking about for the outcomes that I think are just, you know, such such a benefit to us in terms of aliveness. Any last comments from you about that?
Speaker 2 55:12
Yes, let's say you do work in a business or some some kind of corporate arena where you're not 100% fluent with all this honesty stuff, yet even if you're the leader or the manager, maybe you can find one other person to be your practice partner. I always recommend this to anybody who reads my books: is that it's not that easy to just read a book or go to a seminar, and then you're transformed, but if you have even one person where you could say, you know, I've been reading a lot about honesty, and I'm trying to still get to be a better leader, and I know being honest, even about uncomfortable things, and being relaxed and graceful about it, that would be my real goal. And I think you and I have a rapport. Would you like to be in on this with me? Where we once a week get together and just give each other feedback about whatever positive things, difficult, critical things, and then we debrief it, and see how that felt, you know? Would you be my, would you be my practice partner? I think that's probably the quickest way to change your own self, so that you're a model for the rest of the people in your organization.
Speaker 1 56:40
Yeah, that's great, that's super practical. Susan, it's been an absolute pleasure. I think that you know how much this means to me. Susan and I go way back, and your work that you're doing in the world has made a tremendous difference in my life. And so it's just a thrill I get to actually extend this into my group of listeners. So, thank you. Thanks for being with me today, Susan.
Speaker 2 57:03
Thanks for these wonderful questions.
Speaker 1 57:06
Awesome. Okay, so until next time, Susan.
Speaker 2 57:11
Okay, bye.
Speaker 1 57:16
So you've been listening to The Squeeze. Thanks for joining us today. If you want to continue tuning in, don't forget to click subscribe, and as always, we want to hear your thoughts, your comments, your feedback, and challenges. If there's anything you don't agree with, thanks for joining us, and see you next time,
Unknown Speaker 57:34
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