Building up your self-belief

Timestamps 

00:00:00: Introduction 00:01:29: Inner voice 00:03:41: The chatter 00:05:35: Distancing techniques… 00:06:37: … temporal distancing 00:08:22: … distanced self-talk 00:10:10: Environmental tools 00:11:45: Recognising when chatter starts 00:12:39: Using the right chatter advisers 00:14:47: Finding the best techniques for you 00:15:36: Ethan's career advice 00:16:38: Final thoughts  

Interview Transcription 

Sarah Ellis: Hello and welcome to the Squiggly Careers podcast.  I'm Sarah, one of your hosts, and this episode is part of a special series that we've created to bring to life some of the ideas and insights in our new book, You Coach You.  In this series of six episodes, we'll be talking to experts to get their thoughts on how we can help ourselves through some of the knottier moments in our Squiggly Career.  It might be coping with a challenging relationship at work, maybe you feel like your progress has stalled, or perhaps you're just figuring out how to find more meaning from your job.    Every episode relates to a chapter in You Coach You, and today we're focusing on self-belief, and specifically the chatter that happens in our heads.  You'll hear me talking to Ethan Kross, who is the author of one of my favourite non-fiction books of the last couple of years, which is called Chatter, and he's really going to talk to us about how we can dial down the volume of our chatter, and instead put our inner coach in charge.  He's full of practical ideas and insights and he's such a brilliant expert on this topic, so I'm really looking forward to sharing this conversation with you.  I hope you find it useful, and I'll be back at the end to let you know who's coming up next.  So, let's start with the basics, because I think it's really important to make sure we all understand this idea of chatter, so what do you define as the difference between your inner voice and that unhelpful chatter that can get in our way?  Ethan Kross: When I'm using the term "inner voice", what I'm talking about is our ability to silently use language to reflect on our lives.  So, if you can repeat a number silently in your head, 2-0-9, repeat that right now; you've just met your inner voice.  So, our ability to silently use language to reflect on our lives is an amazing tool.  I like to think of it as a kind of Swiss Army knife of the human mind that lets us do lots of different things.  Your inner voice is part of something called our working memory system.  It's a basic system in the mind that lets you keep information active for short periods of time.  So, your inner voice lets you do that, but a lot of other things too, like simulate and plan.  So, before I go on an interview, or before I have to give a big talk, in my head, I'll simulate my answers, I'll go over what I'm going to say before the presentation or the interview.  Word-for-word often, I'll rehearse the response.  That's my inner voice allowing me to simulate what I'm going to say, absolutely essential to performing well in those contexts.  We also use our inner voice to coach ourselves through difficult times.  A lot of people experience this, myself included, when I'm exercising.  And sometimes, if I'm doing it virtually with an instructor on a screen and they're telling me to do things, "Three more sets, one, two, three", that's the inner voice coaching ourselves along.  Then finally, what your inner voice lets you do is lets you create stories that help you explain your experiences in this world.  So, when we experience adversity, we don't get a job, a deal doesn't go through, we are rejected by someone else, what many of us reflexively do is we turn our attention inwards and, "Why did that happen?  What does that mean about me?  What does that mean about that other person?" and we use that inner voice that we possess to create a narrative that explains what we've just gone through, that ultimately lets us move on with our lives.  So, keeping information active in your head, coaching yourself along, simulating, creating stories, this inner voice lets us do lots of amazing things.  The catch is that when we experience problems in our life, difficult experiences, when we're rejected, when we're anxious, when we're depressed or angry, we often reflexively try to tap into this inner voice to help get through those tough times.  But we don't come up with clear solutions to our problems, and we instead start getting stuck in a negative thought loop.  We worry endlessly about the future, we catastrophise, we ruminate, "Oh my God, what if this…", etc.  That's what I call chatter, and chatter is truly a destructive internal state.  I think of it as one of the big problems we face as a culture.  What we know about chatter is this: it makes it really hard for people to think and perform well at work.  It consumes our attention, leaving very little left over to do our jobs.  It can create friction in our social relationships with other people, our loved ones, our colleagues, our friends, and it can even damage our physical health, leading to things like cardiovascular disease, and even certain forms of cancer.  So, it's a real issue, and it's for that reason why I've spent so many years studying it in the lab, and the good news is that we know there are lots of very simple practical tools that people can use to manage it, science-based tools, I might add, tools that have been validated by science to help people.  Sarah Ellis: One of the tools, or one of the techniques that really struck me in the book is this idea of distance.  And though distance doesn't necessarily solve our problems, it does seem to give us data, and it does seem to increase the likelihood that we can find our way through obstacles or challenges.  So, perhaps you can just describe to our listeners how that works and why I've now had to start drawing flies in workshops, and people have responded really well to the fly?  Ethan Kross: So, here's what we know about chatter.  When you're experiencing chatter, it zooms us in on our problems.  You get stuck in this tunnel vision-like way of thinking about the issue ahead.  And when you're zoomed in really narrowly on the issue that's bugging you, it becomes more difficult to see alternative solutions to the problem, which often lie in your surroundings when you can zoom out and see the bigger picture.  What the fly speaks to is adopting a fly-on-the-wall perspective, taking a step back to get some distance on our problems, to like that fly on the wall peering down on the scene that is your life, seeing the big picture; and then trying to figure out a solution, taking that additional data into account.  One of the things we've learned about distancing over the years is that there's not just one way to do it, there are many different tools for adopting this zoomed-out fly-on-the-wall perspective.  So, let me just describe a few very briefly for listeners.  One thing you can do is you can zoom out using something that we call "temporal distancing", or mental time travel, and this is a tool that I've relied on a lot myself personally during the pandemic.  When we're stuck dealing with the adversity of COVID, and we're thinking how awful our situation is right now, one thing we can do is think, "How am I going to feel about this problem, not right now, but how am I going to feel about this, six months from now or a year from now, when more therapeutics will be available, when our vaccines will be even more widespread?" and so on.    When you look forward into the future, what that often does for people is it gives us a sense of hope, because we realise that as awful as what I'm going through is right now, it's temporary, it will eventually get better, as all pandemics have in the history of our species.  We have persevered through them.  It's taken different periods of time, but we've gotten through them.  When you're able to recognise that what you're going through right now is temporary, that gives us hope, which can be a powerful tonic for an inner voice run awry in the form of chatter.  So, that's one way you can distance.    You can also distance by going back in time, and I do this a lot too, when I'm thinking about how awful the last year and a half or two years have been.  I think about the last pandemic, the Spanish Flu, and how in many ways, that was much worse than what we're dealing with now.  No MRNA vaccines, no Zoom to keep connected with people in the community, no takeout delivered to my doorstep.  That gives me broader perspective.  One other tool I'll just throw out there that I also rely on a lot is something called "distanced self-talk".  What this involves is using a linguistic tool to help give me advice, like I would give advice to someone else who I care about.  What's been remarkable in a lot of our studies is, when we look at what people are thinking to themselves, what they're saying to themselves, when they're experiencing chatter, they're saying things to themselves that they would never dream of saying to their best friends or loved ones.  In many cases, they're saying things to themselves that they wouldn't even say to their worst enemies.  Yet they have no problem thinking these things about their own life.  So, it's one thing to tell a person, "Try to give yourself advice like you'd give advice to your best friend", but sometimes when you're stuck in chatter, it can be hard to do that.  So, what we find is that there's a linguistic tool that can make it easier for us to give ourselves that advice, and what it involves doing is using your own name and the second-person pronoun, "you" to try to coach yourself through a problem; using those parts of speech silently, I might add.  In our head, when we use our name to try and work through a problem, what it essentially does is it turns on the machinery that we possess for thinking about other people.  If you think about when we use names, or words like "you", we use those parts of speech when we think about and refer to other people.  So, the links in our mind between names and thinking about others are really, really strong.  And so, when you use those parts of speech to coach yourself through a problem, it's making it easier for you to shift perspective, for getting you to think about yourself like you were someone else, and that makes it a lot easier for us to advise ourselves effectively.  One other tool that I use a lot is, I organise when I'm experiencing chatter.  So, there's a whole category of tools called "environmental tools".  These are ways of interacting with our environments and our physical spaces that can help us manage our chatter from the outside in.  And for me, cleaning and organising is really interesting, because I'm actually not organised in the sense that normally, if you were to come into our home, you would usually see a trail of clothing from the shower to my closet or office.  So, here's the interesting thing.  When I'm experiencing chatter, I will reflexively start putting things away, tidying up, making piles, cleaning.    Here's what's really cool about that; I just find this fascinating.  When we experience chatter, we often feel like we're not in control of what's happening, our thoughts are taking over.  What we've learned is that we can regain our sense of control by creating order around us, because our environments are under our control.  And that can compensate for not feeling in control when we experience chatter, and lead us to feel better.  That's why a lot of people actually spontaneously clean and organise when they're under stress.  As long as you don't take that to an extreme, it can be a very useful tool for managing chatter.  So, that's something else I'll do.  Sarah Ellis: So, when people are in those spirals and you perhaps think, "I'm feeling stuck in that spiral, I can't escape the spiral", what can help you to stop and start to make a bit of positive progress, have you found?  Ethan Kross: People often ask me -- so, I study, I've spent the past 20 years doing research on chatter, I've written a book; do I ever experience it?  Yes, I do.  I'm a human being, I think most of us do.  So, yeah, I experience it at times.  But what I've become really good at is, number one, noticing it.  The moment it starts to brew, because I know what chatter is, because I have a vocabulary for describing this internal experience, I know when it's beginning to happen.  Then, once I being to sense it happening, I immediately start using different tools to nip it in the bud.  So, I'm actually really good at muffling the chatter, and I think that's the potential that knowing about these science-based tools has for folks, right.  Once you know about these tools, it becomes easier to implement them really quick.  I want to segue to other people.  And in fact, what we know from lots of research is that many of us, when we experience chatter, that chatter motivates us to share it with other people.  Chatter acts like jet fuel, we usually find people to talk to.  Now, it turns out other people can be a huge resource for us, or a tremendous vulnerability, and this is one domain that I think people want to think really carefully about.  Who do you actually go to to get help with your chatter, from your social network, because there are lots of folks in our social network who care deeply about us?  They are kind, loving people, we may even be related to them.  They are not good at helping us with our chatter, and they can actually make it worse.  What we've learned is that there are two qualities that really capture a good chatter adviser.  What a good chatter adviser does for us is they take a little bit of time to listen and hear what we're experiencing, what we're going through, but that's not all they do in the conversation.  They don't just get us to vent our emotions.  Just venting our emotions doesn't help us work through our chatter.  It can make us feel close and connected to the person we're talking to, because it's nice to know that there's someone there that's willing to listen to us; but if all we do is vent about our feelings, we often leave those conversations just as worked up as when they began.  The really skilled chatter advisers do two things: they take a little bit of time to hear us out, to learn about our experience; but then, at the appropriate in the conversation, they start cuing us to go broad.  They start asking us questions, or giving us feedback from their own lives about how they've dealt with situations.  So, "You know, Sarah, that sounds awful, but that's just one isolated example.  Think of all the other wonderful interviews you've done" or, "Here's what's happened to me when I've dealt with that situation; here's how I managed it".  So, they're trying to shift us out of this venting mode, and into this broader-perspective mode, to help us ultimately find solutions to work through the problems.  That's the signature of a good chatter adviser.  When I was trying to figure out what do I put into the book, Chatter, what tools do I talk about, and how do I best help people who are trying to work through their chatter in their lives, the best I can do, based on what we know from the science point of view, is give people access to these tools.  There are about 27 or so that I talk about in the book.  Then it's up to, I think, readers to figure out, "Well, what are the combinations that work best for me, given the unique situations that I'm experiencing?" and sometimes it's a bit of trial and error.  You try this out, it works, you keep doing it; you try this out, it doesn't work, you go to something else.  Sarah Ellis: And just to finish, we end all of our interviews on the Squiggly Careers podcast by asking you just to share one piece of career advice, which has either really helped you, so advice you've had that has really stayed with you, or it can just be your own words of wisdom.  Ethan Kross: I'll throw in two things really quick, and the first is somewhat of a cliché, but it's really been true for me which is, if you can, try to find something that you enjoy doing, because if you enjoy what you spend your work-life doing, it ends up not feeling like work, which has this bad label, but instead feels like a joy.  I'm privileged to have that experience doing research on the topics and writing about what we talked about today.  So, do try to find something that you love doing.  The second one is a bit more practical and concrete, which is oftentimes, we don't know what to focus on each day, if you have lots of potential things to work on.  Someone once told me, he wakes up every morning and thinks, "What project has the best potential to have the most impact and to get done in a reasonable amount of time?" and that's how he focuses on what to do, and that's something I often use as well as a tool.  Sarah Ellis: Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to today's episode.  I hope you found that a really helpful listen.  I really enjoyed talking to Ethan.  I loved his work and his writing already, and I'm always relieved when people are as good in real life as they are through the words that they write.  Next in our series, you'll hear Helen talking about relationships with Thomas Erikson, who's the author of lots of books; but the one that most people have probably heard about is called Surrounded by Idiots.  So, I'll be really fascinated to hear that discussion.  Of course, You Coach You is out now.  It has more than 50 ideas for action, 100 coach-yourself questions and lots of tools to try out.  So, whether you're trying to build your belief, develop in a new direction, or invest in your resilience reserves, if that sounds like it would be useful, please do grab a copy.  And, we'd love you to support and share our work however you can.  So, if you're already reading it, please let us know what you think, we'd love your feedback.  And, tag us in your posts and pictures where we're just @amazingif.  We don't often get to see that many people actually reading the words that we write, so we really do like those pictures, so please do send those.  Thanks so much for listening, and we'll speak to you again soon.