Thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this conversation.

Yeah, I think we're certainly compatible in this interest. What we're talking about here is self-leadership. It's the ability to steer ourselves. I think regardless of whether you're talking about someone working in an organizational context or a relational one, it is this ability to manage our emotions, to manage our mind, which is so pivotal to being successful and happy and productive. It turns out there's a lot of science that weighs into how we can do this well. I'm eager to chat with you about it.

I think these are age old questions that we've been struggling with since really the dawn of civilization as we know it. A couple of months ago, I came across this wonderful article that was describing this new discovery in ancient Persia, of these ancient clay tablets, which, if I'm remembering correctly, are the first written documents that we now have on record. What was interesting is when the scientists translated these tablets, one of the things that people were talking about were problems of managing emotions. So, in the first written records that we have of people, we see these struggles of emotional regulation. We see this appearing through eastern texts like Bhagavad Gita. We see it in the Bible, and we continue to struggle with it today. I think this is one of the big challenges that we face.

If you go back in time and you look at how far we've come in terms of the solutions that we have come up with for helping people manage our emotions more effectively or this inner life, we've really come a far way.

Here's a little bit of trivia that I find just so interesting. The first surgical procedure that we know of was a technique called trepanation, which involved using a stone drill to bore holes in the skull. One of the uses of this first surgical technique on record was to help people manage their emotions. If someone was really dysregulated, you just dig some drills or holes to let out the evil spirits. Fast forward to the more recent times, it wasn't long ago that we were sticking ice picks behind people's eyes to poke holes in their brain in the form of a lobotomy to help people manage their emotions. I don't endorse any of those things as tools in 'Chatter' that we would give to help people right now. We've come a lot further from that and I think that's exciting. These are ancient questions that modern science now has a lot to say about and I think listening to science can be helpful not only for improving the quality of our own lives, but also making us better leaders, better partners, better parents.

Happy to. Just to be clear, when I use the term chatter, what I'm talking about is getting stuck in a negative thought loop. You're experiencing some problem. You divert your attention in order to try to work through it, but you get stuck. I think it's one of the big problems we face because it sinks us into three domains of life that we care a great deal about. Thinking and performing, which is what you're asking me about right now, but also our relationships and our health.

Now, if we start with that first category thinking and performing, there are two ways that chatter can sink us there. The first thing that happens is, our chatter consumes our attention. That's problematic because we only have so much attention that we can devote to anything in our lives at any given moment in time. A great example of this that rings true to many people is, to just think about a time in your life when you were worried or ruminating about something and you try to do something else at the same time, like reading a few pages in a book. Many people have had the experience of reading several pages, getting to the end, they are positive that they read the material, but when they're done, they don't remember anything because their mind was somewhere else. Just as a sanity check, has this ever happened to you?

Right. I plug in instead of reading a book, working on a project or listening to someone else speak. If your mind's somewhere else, you're not in the moment, this can be problematic. That's one way that chatter can undermine us in these performance contexts.

Another thing that it can do is, it can take our habits, complex behaviors that we've learned to execute without thinking that are essential to our success and it can function to dismantle those habits, precisely, when we need to rely on them. This is what we see happening often with people working in performance contexts like Osaka or probably most famously in recent times, Simone Biles dropping out of the Olympics because of what she called the twisties, which is another term for chatter. If you think about what allows Simone Biles to achieve the greatness that she has achieved in her career, it is the following. Through lots and lots of practice, she's learned how to execute these incredibly complicated behaviors without thinking. She could typically run down the exercise mat, jump up in the air, spin three times, do a few somersaults, keep a smile on her face and perfectly stick her landing. Now, she does that without thinking. As she's executing that behavior, she's not thinking very hard, "Well, first I need to do this, then I need to do that." It's all automatized as a function of all the practice she has put into that task.

What chatter does is, it undoes that automatic behavior because we start hyper focusing on the individual elements of what we're trying to do. So, as she's running, she's now beginning to think, "Am I running fast enough?" When she jumps in the air, she's thinking, "Did I get enough height?" And once you start scrutinizing the individual elements of the behavior, research shows that the whole performance unravels. This is not something that is exclusive to athletics, though. We see it happening across different fields of athletics, from golfers to baseball players to basketball players and so forth. But I think it is also quite relevant to many of the complex behaviors that all of us engage in our respective fields.

For example, I do a lot of public speaking and through doing hundreds of presentations, I've learned how to do certain things like use my hands in particular ways or smile or pace the room. If I stop in the middle of a presentation, I start thinking about, "Am I walking enough? Am I smiling enough?" That takes my attention off executing the tasks as I normally would, and my performance suffers as a result.

That's the way that chatter can dismantle performance and thinking in performance contexts in ways that can be destructive.

Well, I think flow has a very technical definition where time is standing still, and you are completely immersed and engaged in the act at hand. Whether every athletic performance qualifies as a state of flow, I think is not clear. But I think you can make the argument that chatter detracts from flow and would bring us out of that state because with flow, the demands of the situation are perfectly matched by the skills that you bring to bear in that instance. If your mind is somewhere else, thinking about other things that are consuming your attention, that's going to prevent that from happening.

Absolutely. I couldn't agree more.

We completely agree about the messenger, the message and the audience or culture. I think that is the holy trinity of effective communication. What can detract from that certainly worry and other forms of chatter. I think worrying is chatter about the future and present and rumination tends to be about the past, but that can certainly interfere with that process. Being overly analytical in the form of overthinking things, I think can also detract from that because in part, what engaging in any one of those mental processes does to us is, it tilts the balance away from being from balancing our own interests and those of the audience that we're communicating with to being more focused on the self, more immersed in our own experience. I don't think that is a great thing for communication.

Well, I think this is why, we've got the front part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, and it's what makes us so incredibly unique as a species. It is that ability to pivot when needed. Now, ideally, you're not pivoting midway through running down the exercise mat at the Olympics. That's not where this challenge is being faced. Ideally, you can choose to pivot when you're not in the middle of the competition, but if you must call a timeout, we do have the cognitive capacity to call those timeouts and augment how we respond. This touches on a broader issue that is of central relevance to the book, to my research and how I think about our mental lives, which is, our inner voice and our ability to use language to weigh in on our problems. It can often get us in deep trouble when it conspires into rumination and worry and all the ways we've been talking about thus far. But I think it's easy to forget because we tend to over focus on the negative stuff as opposed to the positive. So bad is stronger than good in general.

What we often forget about is that this inner voice that we possess and more broadly, our capacity for introspection is a remarkable tool. That allows us to do many different things from planning and simulating to correcting, to creating narratives, to coaching ourselves through problems. The challenge that we face is not to always be on autopilot executing habits. The challenge is to know when we need to slip into that automatic mode and then to be able to do it without any obstacles. But in other moments, when we can be more deliberate and reflective, I think the challenge there is, how can we recruit our minds to help us problem-solve without falling down the rabbit hole that is rumination. That is the puzzle that I think the Gita gets at and that I try to address in my research and in the book.

It's a very tricky finding. It's a tricky phenomenon in the sense that what we've seen is that we know from lots of research and when people experience chatter and this is true across culturally and across gender, contrary to stereotypes, people often want to share it with other people. They want to talk about it. There are a couple of exceptions to this rule. People tend not to want to talk about experiences involving shame and certain forms of trauma, but for all the other muck that we experience, we typically want to get it out. Talking about what's bugging us can be a very effective tool if you do it the right way with the right people. Maybe we'll get into that a little bit. But it can also be problematic because one thing that happens is, oftentimes, we find people to talk to about our chatter and then we start talking and then we keep on talking about it over and over and over again. This can have the counterproductive consequence of pushing away people who genuinely care about us, because there's only so much they can listen to before we ourselves start to bring them down, particularly if we just keep on harping over the same things over and over. We begin to sound like a broken record, and that can be frustrating for others. That's one way that this experience of chatter can create friction in our relationships with others.

The other way it can do so is, by leading to something that we call displaced emotion, which we see playing out nowadays at the societal level due to the collective chatter we're experiencing due to the pandemic and the political and social turmoil that is permeating this world. The term displaced emotion or displaced chatter refers to the following very common experience of, "You're frustrated, and you then take your frustration out on an innocent party." The real-world example for me here is, I've had a chatter filled day at work. I come home; I'm doing some emails on the computer in my office at home. My daughter comes in; she wants to talk to me about her day. "Daddy, Daddy, can I tell you about what happened?" "Hold on. I need to finish the email." "Daddy, Daddy." "I just told you I need to finish the email." Now I've lost it. She really hasn't done anything to provoke me terribly. But what I'm doing is I'm taking out my frustrations on this other party. I think this phenomenon plays out in the context of road rage, increased violence that we now see.

Those are two ways that chatter can have striking negative interpersonal or relational outcomes, which further highlights precisely why figuring out how to manage that mental state is so incredibly important.

I'm happy to. I think this is one really important issue because, there is this very common assumption that our culture really promotes, which is that when we're experiencing chatter, what we should do is we should find someone to talk about it, just express our feelings and vent. There's been a lot of research on the consequences of venting. What we've learned is sharing what you're feeling about some problem you're grappling with; this can be good for strengthening the relational bonds between two individuals. It feels good to know that there's someone there to validate what I'm going through, empathize with me.

But, if all you do is rehash what happened to you and what you felt, it doesn't do anything to help people work through the problem. In fact, after venting, people end up often being just as upset, if not more upset about the problem as when they've started, because the conversation just keeps all the negative feelings alive.

The best kind of conversation when it comes to chatter is to do two things. First, the people you're talking with, they do take the time to listen and hear what you're going through to a certain extent. It is important to establish those empathic connections. But at a certain point in the conversation, it shifts from rehashing to trying to work through together to reframe this problem. If you came to me with a problem or some chatter, I would take some time to hear you out, to listen to what you're going through. But at some point, in the conversation, I'd say, Hey, I got it. Can I offer you some feedback or some advice or let me ask you a question? How might you have dealt with this differently? So forth and so on? The idea here is or the blueprint here is, you want to start by learning about the experience and letting the person share what they're going through and then gently transition to start shifting into this reframing or perspective broadening mode to actually help them work through the experience.

I think knowing about those two principles to getting good chatter support can be really empowering. There are two very clear take homes. The first is, if you are the one dealing with the chatter and wanting to get support from other people, think carefully about who in your network is skilled at not just listening, but also helping you reframe and work through the problem. Those are your advisors. Those are the people you want to connect with. Then on the flip side, if you're the one who's being approached to provide some support, be mindful of these two principles. Take the time to listen, but then shift to reframing.

For me, these principles are really personally very valuable because I can tell you that I've got a relatively big support network, but most of the people in that network, I don't consider them my chatter advisors, they care about me, I care about them, but they're not particularly helpful in letting me both talk and then advising me through the problems. There are only a handful of people that are skilled at this and those are the people I go to.

Well, everything we've just talked about with respect to how to be a good chatter advisor, someone else deals with instances in which another person comes to you for help with their chatter. There are plenty of instances that as a parent or a leader or colleague you will have when someone will confront you and ask you for your support. But there will also be many situations in which you see someone struggling with their chatter, but they haven't asked you for help. Then the question is, what do you do? You care about this person, this colleague, this loved one and you want to help them, but they haven't asked you for it. The research that is out there pertaining to this phenomenon suggests that you should be careful about volunteering for support when it's not asked for because it can blow up in your face. I think this is a very common experience that many parents have had, certainly true of me earlier in my life, where I would have seen one of my daughters struggling with something. I don't like to see that. I approach, "Hey, sweetie, can I help you with this? What's the problem?" And that, that innocent attempt to help is met with resistance and defensiveness. "Did I ask you for help? Why are you bothering me?" And then she calls Mother, and then I get in trouble.

What's happened there is I have threatened my daughter's drive to feel like she has agency, that she's self-efficacious, that she's capable of handling her own circumstances. This is an incredibly powerful drive that characterizes most of us. And threatening that can elicit negative outcomes. Then the question is, "Okay, well, what do you do?" If volunteering the support is going to get you in trouble, should you not help at all? No. This is where the idea of invisible support comes into play. This is some work that Niall Bolger at Columbia has really pioneered. The idea is you start finding ways to help people outside of their awareness. You're not shining a spotlight on the fact that you're helping them. You're getting them resources, but you're doing it unbeknownst to them.

Let me give you a couple of examples, because there are many ways that this could play out. Some are incredibly simple. Let's say my wife is overwhelmed by chatter for various reasons. I can do things to ease her burden. Let's say it's her day to take care of the groceries rather than her doing it, I just volunteer. I go to the grocery store. I pick the kids up. Now I'm doing those things and I'm not, at the end of the day, giving my wife a little documented receipt that says, "See, all the things I did today. I'd like a little pat on the back." I'm just doing them and making her situation a little bit easier as a result. That's one very instrumental way of providing invisible support.

Let's say someone in my lab group is struggling with a skill. Let's say it's their presentation skills rather than pulling them aside, if they haven't asked me for help and saying, "Hey, I've noticed you really not been up to par. Here are some things I think you could do to improve your circumstances." Instead of doing that which might threaten them, I can just organize a lab meeting and say, "Hey, I want to focus today on resources for improving the way we all present. Here are some things I find helpful. Let's go around. What are things that you find helpful?" What I'm doing there is, I'm getting this person, the information, the resources they need. But I'm not shining a spotlight on their own inadequacies in this regard. That's another way you could help.

The final invisible support tool that I'd like to mention is a tricky one to talk about, which will become clear in a moment why I say this. It's tricky because you must do it in the right context. What I'm talking about is affectionate touch. So, to be clear, I'm not endorsing affectionate touch when it is unwanted or in the organizational context. But, an affectionate embrace, a hug, a pat on the shoulder, a caress, this is a very powerful tool of providing invisible support. If you think about what is the first tool that we use that we get from others for helping soothe us in our emotional lives, it is touch. When babies are born into the world, we put those babies on their mother's chest, skin to skin contact. We know from lots of research that an affectionate embrace releases a cocktail of stress fighting chemicals. It also reminds us at the conscious level that there are people that appreciate us and value us. And that's another way of supporting someone invisibly. It's putting a hand on someone's shoulder. As cheesy as that may sound, there is a lot of rigorous research that shows that it can be a helpful and invisible tool as well.

That's a wonderful example of invisible support. Thank you. I'm going to use that one.

I'll talk about two that I use together. They're blended together. They're both distancing tools. When I say distancing, one of the things that happens when we experience chatter is, we tend to zoom in very tunneled vision, like on the problem at hand, we can't think of anything else. What we've learned is that the ability to take a step back and view our circumstances from a more detached perspective can often be very helpful. This is an ancient idea. Of course, it's an idea that is embodied in many forms of Eastern philosophy. But what we've learned more recently is that there are many different ways to get distance from your experience, and some of them are really simple and somewhat even counter-intuitive to some. So, let me tell you about two distancing tools that we have studied and that I personally use a lot.

One is called distance self-talk. What this involves is, trying to coach yourself or think through a problem using your own name and the second person pronoun you. Doing this silently, of course, not out loud. The form this might take is, if I'm really stressed about something, "Alright Ethan, how are you going to manage a situation?" What we know is that, it's much easier for us to give advice to other people than it is to often give advice to ourselves. Many people report finding it much easier to weigh in on someone else's problems objectively than their own. What I absolutely love about this distance self-talk technique is, it uses language to shift the way we think about ourselves. We typically use names and pronouns like you when we think about other people. The link between using a name and a pronoun and thinking about someone else in our mind is so incredibly tight that when we use those parts of speech to think about ourselves, it gets us to relate to ourselves like we were relating to someone else. That makes it much easier for us to work through our problems in a wiser and deliberate manner. So, the moment I detect some chatter beginning to brew, I instantly use this technique. It works fast. "Alright Ethan, how are you going to manage a situation?" It alters my perspective, helps me regulate my emotions. That's one tool.

The second tool that I often use with this self-talk is something that we call mental time travel. This involves thinking about how I'm going to feel about something that I'm struggling with. Sometime down the road, a day from now, a week from now, a month from now. All our emotions come and go. They peak and eventually end. If you take a step back to think about our lives, we can easily become aware of this. The problem is that when we are mired in chatter, we lose sight of that bigger picture concerning our emotional experiences, and we can feel like the stress is overwhelming and is never going to end. So simply reminding oneself that, "Hey, a week from now you're probably not going to be as worried about this as you are right now. Or maybe it's a year from now." That does something powerful for a mind that is consumed with chatter. It gives it hope, and hope can be a useful antidote for this chatter experience.

Those are usually my first line of defense when it comes to chatter. I use my name to coach myself through the problem and I think about how I'm going to feel about this a week, a month or a year from now. Often, that takes the edge off. It doesn't make the problem disappear, which we wouldn't want to do. Negativity in small doses is very, very useful. It's a functional state that we've evolved to experience. What makes negativity dysfunctional is when it consumes us in the form of chatter. These tools take the edge off that negativity, allow us to or me personally, to get back to my life. Those are my favorite tools.

I love that. I think that tab, that tool, which in many ways I would describe as an amalgamation of several distancing tools I talk about in the book. It's not one, it's a bunch together. Fly on the wall perspective, transcendence. It taps into what I think is one core principle that explains how many tools for managing chatter work. Which is, it broadens our perspective. It breaks us out of this narrow, zoomed in approach to managing our problems to allow us to look at the bigger picture. When we look at that bigger picture and we realize that we're one piece of this broader puzzle, there's some solace that comes with that mental shift. I think this is why experiencing the emotion of awe can be so powerful and helpful when people are struggling with chatter. Because you realize when you think about life more broadly, this is just one element, it's one morning that's not going well amidst a much broader life. And that flexibility can be powerful.

Oh boy! It's a big question to end on. Well, I think what led me to this career and this question really goes back to my experiences growing up with my dad, who from a young age, impressed upon me a few ideas that ended up being quite pivotal to how I think about myself, the world and my role in it. One thing that my dad did was he talked to me a lot about Eastern philosophical ideas. He was not Eastern philosophy, Ph.D. by any means, but he was really interested in that space and he read in that space for fun. From a young age, he would talk to me about the power of the mind to help us navigate this world if you know how to steer it well. That was a teaching that I always valued and benefited from growing up. Then I got to college, took my first psychology class and learned that the ability to skillfully use introspection to manage oneself was indeed a real asset for many people. But it can also be a tremendous liability. That just perplexed me. We've got this tool that is introspection. Sometimes it helps us, other times, it harms us in the most devastating ways. Why does that happen? How can we use science to figure out how to prevent it from happening? That emerged into a curiosity and a journey of exploration that continues to bring me much joy. I continue to think that trying to explore and understand how the mind works is one of the greatest jobs you could have, because it is fascinating to ask questions about it.

The other thing that led me to this path and is also one of the reasons I worked hard to translate what we know about this topic for a broader audience and chatter and some other things I'm doing along those lines is, my dad always taught me about the importance of helping in some way. I do think that if there are valuable scientific nuggets that we're learning about, if I can play some role in disseminating that information to other people in a way that appreciably improves their quality of life, that gives me real personal meaning and is why I enjoy having conversations like this so much.

I couldn't agree more. In fact, one of my favorite chapters in the book dealt with rituals and the role that rituals play as a tool to manage chatter that spiritual and religious traditions have given us and relied on throughout centuries. For much longer than science has been working to help us solve our problems, it has been religion and spirituality that has been doing so. We now find ourselves at this moment where the ancient and the modern are coming together, not antagonistically, but in a way that is potentially symbiotic, where we're using science to make sense of how certain facets of religion and spirituality impact our lives. That to me is just a fascinating space. I think the more we embrace it, the better. If you think about how it compares to the amount of people in the world who fervently believe in religion and spirituality as compared to science, we have a tremendous opportunity to understand human nature by looking at those individuals. I think we're beginning to do it. I think there's more work that can be done. It's a fun journey to be on.

Here's what I think would be phenomenal from both a scientific and a helping society point of view. I would love for us to one day be in a position where we can prescribe individualized plans for helping people manage chatter. The note I end the book on, and this is where I think the research stands is, we've done a great job at identifying individual tools that work for people. We've profiled very carefully how those tools work in terms of their underlying mechanisms and so forth. But what we haven't really done as a field is, we haven't looked at how people use different combinations of tools in different situations, and how that differs depending on who the person is and what culture they come from. I think we have the resources to start addressing those tools. Despite very much wanting to, I can't prescribe seven tools to you, but three to my wife, depending on the problem you're dealing with. I would love to see us develop that kind of rich contextual understanding of how people experience problems in their lives and how we can help them.

We're doing research on that topic right now and hopefully we'll have something to say in a few years.

That's exactly right. The metaphor I use is a fingerprint. We all have a unique physical fingerprint. We also have a unique psychological one. I think we're often searching for simple individual solutions, one size fits all approaches, and they don't exist. I think in some ways it does humanity a disservice to think you could reduce everyone's problems to one tool. That, to me, is not disparaging. It's exciting. It means there's a whole lot more for us to explore, to figure out these complex connections between people's problems and tools. My hope is that we keep working at it.

Likewise, I'd love to come back. Thanks for having me.