A Secret to Rise Above Microstress

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Robin Dunbar popularized the idea of the Dunbar Number. You’ve probably heard of it. It’s the hypothetical number of people we can manage to maintain at any given stage of life. There are roughly 500 people we might recognize in the grocery store and smile and say hello, 100 we would invite to a wedding, 50 to a party, 12-15 over for a barbeque, 5 we call close, and 1.5 we will confide in. 1.5 because women often have two, and men frequently have one.

It turns out that if we can strengthen the relationships with the 500 more tangential people in our lives, we can build resilience to the micro-stressors in our lives.

You know what stress is. Stress is your partner loses their job, your child gets sick, you get a cancer scare. Or your house burns down. Sorry, that was a bit extreme. But extreme is often what we think when we think of stressful events. We overlook the micro-stresses in our everyday lives.

Microstress is a last minute edit from your client on the project that’s overdue. It’s realizing no one is picking up the boys after soccer practice, and you might have to rush over to transport six kids around town. It’s when your screen sharing app fails in the middle of your presentation. It’s when you can’t find your keys and you’re already late for the interview.

Microstressors are small, often overlooked stress-inducing events or interactions that occur in everyday life. They may seem insignificant on their own, but their cumulative effect can be substantial.

Because here’s what happens next: The 1st degree stressor is you pick up the assortment of kids at practice, and run around town for 40 minutes, yet then discover you don’t have the right ingredients for the meal you planned. You had an enjoyable evening of cooking planned with your family. So this makes you irritable, and you inflict a 2nd degree stressor on your partner with those vibes. The 3rd degree impact is you stay up late to work on the client’s last-minute changes, which disrupts your sleep, so you skip your morning workout. Not to mention the somewhat alarming emails you imposed on your colleagues at 10:30pm. So it goes.

“I’ve been just trying to get through this week for the past two years.”

Where Does Microstress Come From?

Miscommunication, tech glitches, interruptions, decision fatigue, social media notifications, and so on, all provide cumulative micro-stressors throughout the day, which impact you and everyone you interact with later. And these are just the stressors that affect your personal productivity. Rob Cross and Karen Dillon, authors of The Microstress Effect: How Little Things Add Up–and What to Do About It, also identify those kinds of stressors that deplete our emotional reserves such as toxic people or a constant impulse to care for the well-being of others.

And there are the microstressors that challenge your personal identity such as being asked to do tasks that don’t align with your values, or attacks on your personal identity or self-worth. Here’s a diagnostic tool to try to help recognize where it’s coming from.

How Do You Combat Microstress?

When we think about overcoming difficult moments in life, we often think of the personal attributes, or fortitude, people possess. It’s true that mindfulness, intentional breaks, exercise, healthy diet, and adequate sleep are all quite effective at alleviating stress and promoting well-being. Definitely do those things, but also recognize that they are personal, often isolated, and subject to our own willpower, discipline and habits.

But if you ask people the role of others to overcome adversity, you get different answers. It’s not just close friendships that matter, but a variety of relationships, especially those formed around shared interests such as cycling, religion, singing, tennis, or activism. These connections often involve individuals from different professional, socioeconomic, educational, or age backgrounds, enriching our lives with authentic interactions and broadening our perspectives. The activity itself feels like the primary pursuit – your exercise class, book club, or volunteer group – but the hidden benefits of these social interactions are surprisingly powerful.

In their research, Rob Cross and Karen Dillon point to these social groups to provide the strength to “rise above” microstressors in our lives. Specifically these social groups provide empathy, perspective, humor, and help us see a way forward – all in a way that closer ties, such as involved colleagues or family members, might not recognize because of their proximity to the stressful event.

Go join a singing group. Yes, a singing group. Robin Dunbar claims that the combination of endorphin release and speed-to-friendship made singing clubs the most effective means to create a sense of belonging and community. He found similar results with dancing groups and rowers.

So there you go. Put yourself out there.

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We just released a new series of courses on Embracing Curiosity for Career Growth. It includes valuable ideas how to overcome the small obstacles and micro-stresses that slow us down. You can find our catalog of high-impact courses here. And if you want something more tailored, you can learn about our custom work here.

My book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy here. And if you want to learn to apply some of these ideas and be an effective coach for your team, we wrote a course on that too. It’s called Coaching Skills for Managers.

Really It’s Okay, You Can Say No.

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Judith, community organizer extraordinaire, just asked you if you can work the Snack Shack for two hours at the Saturday afternoon soccer game. You have a walk scheduled with your sister then. But your sister will understand. Your sister is easy to reschedule and Judith is hard to say No to.

So you say Yes. You didn’t really want to. Sure, you would love to help out, honestly, almost any other day. It’s just that Saturday you had something else scheduled with your sister.

It’s fine. Whatever. Your sister will understand.

Joseph in marketing just asked if you would write a guest blog about your current project. Great, one more distraction looming over me. You’re busy enough as it is, but you say Yes. You hate writing, and you know the task is going to hang over you for two weeks. You cheerfully say Yes anyway.

Why do we constantly say Yes to things we honestly don’t want to do, or even when we have a conflict? Vanessa Patrick calls this the Acquaintance Trap. If a stranger asks if you will sit in an hour meeting, that’s easy. Just say No. You’re busy. Or don’t even respond. It doesn’t matter. You don’t know them.

If your best friend asks you to walk their dog, you normally would say Yes. But on Thursday afternoon you have a workout class and can’t do it. You say No. She understands. You have your workout class, and it’s important to you. Together you both find someone else to do it.

But your acquaintances are your weak ties. It’s a Mom on the volleyball team. (What’s their kid’s name again?) Or it’s Joseph from marketing whom you sort of, kind of, know. When an acquaintance asks you, there is a momentary spotlight on the question, and the inescapable truth: we care what other people think about us. We care about our relationships, our reputation. We want to be viewed as competent and capable. So we say, “Yeah, sure I can totally do that. Easy.” We describe ourselves as someone who gets along, someone who know how to please other people, how to solve problems, be available.

The other big reason is that we don’t know how to say No. Nobody teaches us to say No. No one tells us it’s okay to say No.

When someone does ask, there’s a spotlight on you, a spotlight on the question. What do you do? How do you respond? The social expectation is that you will say Yes.

If we can muster the courage to say No, we often come up with an excuse that blames a third party or circumstance. We might say, “Oh I’m sorry I can’t. I have to take my cat to the vet then.” So here we are sustaining our identity as a do-gooder, yet blaming circumstances beyond our control.

As Vanessa Patrick describes in her book, try instead using an empowered refusal. An empowered refusal is when you tell the other person you are not available for their ask because it doesn’t align with your values, goals, and identity.

An empowered refusal is a proclamation that that’s not the kind of thing you do as a person. You can apply this idea to anything – “I’m not the kind of person who skips the gym. I’m not the kind of person who takes on work that will bury me in anxiety. I’m not the kind of person who takes the elevator when the stairs are available.”

Or in the first example, you might say, “I’m sorry I can’t work the Snack Shack on Saturday. I made a commitment to my sister and I need to keep that promise.”

So when your boss surprises you by asking you to attend a 4pm Wednesday meeting, you tell him honestly, “I’m sorry. I have an exercise class at that time and I’m committed to my personal health and well-being.”

Most importantly, an empowered refusal is a declaration of who you are, and not a rejection of the other person. Because we worry most that our saying No will be viewed as a rejection of the other person. When, in fact, saying No can be an assertion of who we are.

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Our company Mindscaling, just released a new series of courses on Thriving through Emotional Intelligence, and how to make exactly these types of decisions. You can find our catalog of high-impact courses here. And if you want something more tailored, you can learn about our custom work here.

My book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy here. And if you want to learn to apply some of these ideas and be an effective coach for your team, we wrote a course on that too. It’s called Coaching for Managers available over at UDEMY for Business.

We Can Have Unified Voices in Divided Times

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How does it happen that we can escalate from conversation marked by civil respect to one filled with mockery and derision? How do we bridge the gap between listening and disdain? And once we have demonized others, how do we get back to seeing the good in everyone?

Leading up to World War I, the media in Germany and England reflected a delicate balance of admiration and rivalry. They perceived each other as competitive yet civil rivals, eager to outdo one another in both business and sporting events like sailing races. Though diplomatic tensions simmered, they remained largely respectful.

However, with the outbreak of the war in July 1914, the tone of the media in both nations underwent a dramatic transformation. The English portrayed the Germans as barbaric “Huns,” amplifying stories of alleged atrocities such as spearing infants and hanging clergy. In contrast, German media cast the British as treacherous colonial oppressors, eager to dominate weaker nations. The hardships inflicted upon Germany by the British naval blockade, initiated in August 1914 when British ships began patrolling and mining the North Sea to block supplies from reaching German ports, became a focal point of their reports.

Even the arts became a battlefield of sentiments. The German poet, Ernst Lissauer, penned a song titled “Hymn of Hate Against England.” It rose to such popularity it was nearly as recognized as their national anthem.

Surprisingly, despite the mounting hostility in the media, the general populace in cities like Paris, London, and Berlin harbored a belief that any conflict would be fleeting. They optimistically predicted that the war would conclude before the New Year. After all, their frame of reference was rooted in recent history—conflicts like the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 that lasted just seven weeks, and the more drawn-out Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which spanned less than a year. This sentiment was reflected at kitchen tables across Europe, where parents comforted their soon-to-be-soldier children with assurances of their return by Christmas.

Yet, by Christmas Eve 1914, a swift end seemed impossible. The front line sprawled for five hundred miles from the Belgian coast to the Franco-Swiss border, with over 100,000 soldiers entrenched, sometimes mere meters apart.

On this tense night, Officer Walther Stennes recalled a surprising development:

German and British troops on the Western Front, Christmas Truce of 1914. © IWM

“On Christmas Eve at noon, fire ceased completely – on both fronts. Initially, there was apprehension. But as hours passed, it became clear this wasn’t a prelude to an attack.”

Private Albert Moren of the Second Queen’s Regiment noted,

“It was a beautiful moonlit night…and they sang ‘Silent Night’. I thought, what a beautiful tune.”

Marmaduke Walkinton of the London Regiment shared,

“We began to pop our heads over the side…and then we saw a German standing up, waving his arms, and we didn’t shoot. The understanding gradually grew.”

Those small gestures of trust quickly grew, German Josef Wentzl recollects,

“What I had still believed to be madness several hours ago I could see now with my own eyes. Bavarians and English, until then the greatest of enemies, shook hands, talked and exchanged items.”

They traded gifts, chocolates, cigarettes, and stories with one another, and enjoyed impromptu kickabouts of soccer. In northern France, near the village of Fleurbaix, soldiers from opposing sides gathered in no-man’s land to hold a joint burial service. They stood side by side to bury their fallen comrades. With Germans on one side and the English on the other, officers at the forefront and every head bared in respect, they jointly laid the deceased to rest. Together, they sang, ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’ in English and ‘Der Herr ist mein Hirt’ in German, their voices harmonizing in shared grief.

However, this fleeting moment of shared humanity was not to last. Commanders, uncomfortable with the truce, acted swiftly. George Ashurst, a British soldier, reflected the sentiments of many in the trenches: “The generals behind must’ve seen it…‘Course that started the war again. We hated the sight of the bloody generals.”

The Christmas Truce remains a poignant example of humanity’s potential to transcend even the harshest of divides. In the throes of war, soldiers, mere meters apart, found a shared sense of humanity, if only for a brief moment.

We possess the capacity to truly listen, to assume the best in others, and to recognize our shared humanity. Let’s commit to reaching out, understanding that we are all here together, striving for the best and uplifting one another.

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Our company Mindscaling, is busy building powerful online micro-learning experiences to drive the human change that propels your team. You can find our catalog of high-impact courses here. And if you want something more tailored, you can learn about our custom work here.

My book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy here. And if you want to learn to apply some of these ideas and be an effective coach for your team, we wrote a course on that too. It’s called Coaching for Managers available over at UDEMY for Business.

We Actually Can’t Stand Cruelty

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Here’s a common scene: The grown-ups are upstairs chatting, maybe having drinks, relaxing, while the kids are playing in the basement, in the yard, elsewhere. The parents are having a moment.

Someone remarks, “Oh, it’s like lord of the flies out there, but they’ll figure it out,” and the adults nod appreciatively. Because yes, kids behave just like the characters in Lord of the Flies, and lacking structure, rules, or social expectations, kids are savages, and life is inherently nasty, brutish, and short.

That trope, borrowed from William Golding’s 1954 book gets repeated everywhere. It makes me crazy to hear it. Golding was a disaffected addict writing horrifying fiction. Don’t believe it. As Peter Conrad writes in his review of Golding’s biography, “Golding called himself a monster. His imagination lodged a horde of demons, buzzing like flies inside his haunted head, and his dreams rehearsed his guilt…” He spent his latter years deeply regretting the novel.

I believe our natural state is to assume best intentions of others, and support and comfort our fellow humans. And even when we are taught to be cruel, are we reluctant. Yes, we can be deeply tribal and protective of our own. But even then, we hesitate to hurt.

Consider that throughout historic battles and wars, military leaders often lament that their soldiers aren’t cold-blooded killers. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, one of the most prominent and successful British commanders of the Second World War, wrote home “The trouble with our British boys is that they are not killers by nature.” In the U.S Air Force during WWII, less than 1% of fighter pilots were responsible for 40% of the planes shot down.

One of the most compelling pieces of evidence that we really don’t like hurting one another comes from research about the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg during the Civil War. Of the 27,574 muskets recovered on the battlefield, 90% were still loaded. Since most of the time spent managing a rifle involves priming with gunpowder, loading with a shot, packing with a ramrod, and setting the trigger with a percussion cap, it seems crazy that so many rifles were not discharged. If it takes a second to fire, and minutes to load, most rifles at any given moment on the battlefield would not be ready to shoot, right? What’s going on?

But wait. About 12,000 of those muskets – nearly half of the rifles recovered – were double-loaded. Thousands of rifles were even triple-loaded. But these soldiers were trained and drilled. They knew muskets fired one ball at a time. What’s going on? Well, loading a gun is a perfect excuse not to fire it. And if it was already loaded, well just load it again. Look busy. Do anything except attempt to kill someone.

According to Army psychologist, and Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman, “The obvious conclusion is that most soldiers were not even trying to kill the enemy.”

It’s not danger, per se, that we are avoiding. It is specifically harming others that we simply cannot abide.

We love dangers and thrills. Our society actively seeks out physical danger through activities like rollercoasters, recreational drugs, rock climbing, white water rafting, scuba diving, skydiving, hunting, and countless other exhilarating, and sometimes stupid, behaviors. However, facing aggression and hatred from fellow citizens is an experience of a profoundly different magnitude.

We’ve all encountered hostile aggression, whether on the playground as kids, in strangers’ rudeness, in malicious gossip, or in hostility at work from bosses and peers. In all those cases, we’ve known the stress it causes.

At our core, human beings yearn for connection, understanding, and community with one another. Though cruelty and violence sometimes arise, they are but brief shadows cast against humanity’s inherent pursuit of compassion.

Lead with kindness and compassion. All we have is each other.

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Our company Mindscaling, is busy building powerful online micro-learning experiences to drive the human change that propels your team. You can find our catalog of high-impact courses here. And if you want something more tailored, you can learn about our custom work here.

My book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy here. And if you want to learn to apply some of these ideas and be an effective coach for your team, we wrote a course on that too. It’s called Coaching for Managers available over at UDEMY for Business.

Bring Back the Hang: Creating Meaningful Connections in an Unplanned World

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One of my most enduring college memories is the hang time—hours and hours of unstructured, unobligated hanging out. Our dorms were designed as suites with six (was it seven?) rooms of doubles and singles around a shared lounge and bathroom space. In that lounge, we would play hours of spades, debate history or politics, party, argue over music taste, and even wrestle sometimes.

There was no agenda or invitation list. People came and went, and we invented activities on the spot. One fall day, we decided to throw a “roll in the leaves” party, moving bags and bags of colorful leaves into the lounge area and hallways in the dorm. Afterwards, we had crickets hiding in the dorm for weeks as we tried to clean up.

The essence of the hang is to keep the stakes low. Let everything unfold, speak your mind, share the space. Just be.

Sheila Liming, who teaches writing at Champlain College and recently published a book called Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, observes that when she enters a classroom minutes before class, it is almost always silent, with most students looking at their phones. They are talking and interacting, just to other people—sharing moments, jokes, and small confessions with those they know and trust who aren’t in the room.

Whereas initiating a conversation with the person next to you is a bold act of vulnerability. Who knows how they will react? How will you start or end the conversation? It’s much safer to text a confidant privately.

This behavior results in the “displacement effect,” where time spent online displaces in-person interaction and exacerbates loneliness. Loneliness isn’t the only consequence, however. Emotionally, we are quicker to resent, cancel, and block someone online, but not in person. In person, when someone annoys or angers us, we want resolution. We want to convey our feelings and hopefully reach an understanding. But virtually, we can simply turn them off, more easily moving to feelings of contempt.

Sheila Liming defines hanging out as “daring to do not much and daring to do it in the company of other people.” Another way to think of this is spending time with others without imposing too many expectations on what that time should achieve or produce.

A corporate holiday party is not a good hang. Quasi-mandatory company events designed to bring people together and socialize might achieve that goal, but they lack the casualness of a genuine hang. The problem lies in the aesthetics. When we throw a “party” with a specific time, guest list, menu, and theme, we create expectations of vibe, decor, and dress, prompting questions like, “Am I wearing the right thing, saying the right thing? Am I doing this right?”

A good hang does not have a prescribed agenda or set list of obligations. In these environments, social improvisation is the key. It can be challenging and scary, and we might feel out of control.

Dr. Liming often sees first-year students in her office during the initial weeks of school, distraught and upset because they feel unanchored and lost in this new world of college. Their high school friends are elsewhere, and their habits and rituals are disrupted. Suddenly, they are surrounded by unfamiliar people with lots of free time on their hands.

Whenever a new, bewildered first-year student enters her office with anxiety and impostor syndrome, contemplating going home, Dr. Liming has a similar experience coaching them through the change. She reassures them that it will get better, they will adjust, and they will find fun people and things to do. Nine times out of ten, that’s exactly what happens. A month later, they have new friends, are happy, excited.

But the key to working through that transition is sitting with that discomfort. The key is putting down the phone, and allowing the unscripted hangout to happen. In the vulnerable improvisation of the hang, we can find ourselves and each other.

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Our company Mindscaling, is busy building powerful online micro-learning experiences to drive the human change that propels your team. You can find our catalog of high-impact courses here. And if you want something more tailored, you can learn about our custom work here.

My book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy here. And if you want to learn to apply some of these ideas and be an effective coach for your team, we wrote a course on that too. It’s called Coaching for Managers available over at UDEMY for Business.

What if We Are Actually Hard-Wired for Kindness and Compassion?

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Remember the book, “Lord of the Flies”? You probably read it – or at least heard about it – in high school. The story plays to our darkest fears of human nature. “Lord of the Flies” a fictional story based on the idea of “veneer theory.”

The idea behind veneer theory is that human civilization is like a thin veneer or layer on top of a more primal and savage nature. According to this theory, human beings have an inherent capacity for violence and aggression, and it is only through the rules and norms of civilization that we are able to suppress these tendencies and create a peaceful society.

Published in 1954, “Lord of the Flies” sold slowly at first, until taking off and eventually selling tens of millions of copies. It won a Nobel Prize in 1983. Translated into over 30 languages, the book tells the story of a group of boys who are stranded on a deserted island and the ways in which their society devolves into chaos and violence. “Lord of the Flies” is known for its exploration of human nature and the darker side of humanity.

It was written by William Golding, an Englishman who grew up in a middle-class home and then served in the Royal Navy in World War II, where he witnessed the horrors of war. These experiences had a profound impact on his writing. His works often explored the darker aspects of human nature. Or as Golding put it, ‘Man produces evil as a bee produces honey.’

Yeah, well, Golding was also a reclusive, brooding alcoholic, who once divided his students into opposing gangs and encouraged them to fight each other.

While his fictional narrative certainly grabs your attention, just like a good Halloween movie, the premise doesn’t hold up. It’s just an alarming and exciting story that makes you stop and pay attention. In the British news, that’s called a “marmalade dropper.” As in, “That crazy ass story about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars made me drop my marmalade!”

We’re attracted to conflict, but it’s more unusual than we realize because the media knows we’re triggered by negativity, and feeds the beast within. And now that AI and user algorithms have taken over your feed, they know EXACTLY how to pull your chain, because every click and scroll surrenders that much more control.

What’s that old parable about the internal battle between the good wolf and the bad wolf? The good wolf represents bravery, generosity, and love. The bad wolf represents anger, hatred, and greed. The child asks his wise grandfather, “Which one wins?” and the grandfather replies, “The one you feed.”

Remember, there’s no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end. – Scott Adams

Every day we are actively creating the world together with the stories we tell ourselves and each other. We believe what we choose to see in the world. I choose to see that people are innately good, prone to assuming best intentions, and quick to lend aid and help in times of calamity and adversity. History is full of stories of disaster altruism:

  • On September 11, 2001 immediately after the plane attacks into the burning Twin Towers, thousands of people were descending the emergency exit stairs, knowing that the building was on fire. They cleared the way for firefighters to ascend, and helped each other in an orderly and polite way. One survivor reported, “People would actually say, ‘No, no, you first. I couldn’t believe it, that at this point people would actually say, ‘No, no take my place.’
  • During World War II, people throughout Europe risked their lives to protect and hide Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution. These individuals demonstrated incredible courage and selflessness, often at great personal risk.
  • In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, many people from across the United States traveled to New Orleans to provide aid and assistance to those affected by the storm. This included volunteers from all walks of life, who donated their time, money, and resources to help others in need.
  • In 2011, following the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan, many Japanese citizens organized to provide aid and assistance to those affected by the disaster. This included volunteers who traveled to affected areas to provide medical care and supplies, as well as citizens who opened up their homes to those who had been displaced.

Ok, yes if you look for it you can find hoarding, pillaging and “shortage psychology” too. During the Great Depression in the 1930s, competition for jobs and resources was fierce, with many people struggling to make ends meet. This led to a rise in crime and antisocial behavior, as people competed for limited resources and opportunities.

More recently, during the COVID-19 pandemic, competition for resources such as medical supplies and personal protective equipment (PPE) has been a significant issue. Remember the run on toilet paper? The world shut down on about March 13, 2020 and by March 23, 70% of grocery retailers were out of toilet paper.

Crises can bring out both the best and the worst in people, depending on a wide range of factors, including cultural norms, resource availability, and the nature of the crisis itself. Yet, what if we are actually hard-wired for kindness and compassion?

What if a belief in our innate generosity is exactly the kind of idea that has the power to change our communities, our society, and our nations, for the better?

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Recently I wrote about Mindscaling’s big project to convert Faisal Hoque’s book, LIFT into an interactive learning documentary. You can see previews of that elearning project, and his important new book here. Our company Mindscaling, is busy building powerful online micro-learning experiences to drive the human change that propels your team. You can find our catalog of high-impact courses here. And if you want something more tailored, you can learn about our custom work here.

My book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy here. And if you want to learn to apply some of these ideas and be an effective coach for your team, we wrote a course on that too. It’s called Coaching for Managers available over at UDEMY for Business.

Be Who You Needed When You Were Younger

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Hello and welcome back to my newsletter! Last time I was writing about how a practice of gratitude helps us make better decisions for our future self. Basically, you should try to make daily choices in the interest of Future You. It’s sounds obvious, but you can read more here about why it’s hard to do. 

This week I’m featuring a conversation with the fabulous Brook Raney, founder of One Trusted Adult. We were in the studio yesterday recording content for a brand new online course Mindscaling is building for them. We got into a discussion about how to become the kind of person we needed when we were younger. Once the course is done, we’ll send along some snippets of the beautiful course. In the meantime enjoy a brief interview with Brook!

Shawn: Brook, so grateful to work with you. You wrote a book called One Trusted Adult, and then you started a company called One Trusted Adult. What brought you to this work?

Brooke: Well, my mission began one afternoon as I sat in an auditorium filled with students and educators and listened to the third prevention program in a month—suicide prevention, substance abuse prevention, and bullying  prevention. All of them ended with the same sound advice: If students had a worry, concern, or question, they should seek out a trusted adult. 

After hearing this message for the third time, I had to stop and wonder: Did the students in that auditorium see me and my fellow educators as the trusted adults these programs advertised? And did the adults in the room, me included, embrace this role and do all we could to build relationships of trust with our students?

Even if we do view ourselves in this role, are we adults trained and prepared to be the trusted adult our young people need? Do WE have the skills and the capacity to support what these prevention programs are prescribing?

Since that moment, I’ve learned through my research that young people who can name a trusted adult INSIDE their home as well as a trusted adult OUTSIDE of their home are LESS LIKELY TO bully or be bullied, suffer from depression, or abuse substances, and MORE LIKELY TO be able to turn toxic stress into tolerable stress, and remain calm in the face of challenges. They also build key capacities, such as the ability to plan, monitor, and regulate behavior, complete tasks they start, show interest in new things, volunteer in their community, participate in physical activities, and engage in school and be available for learning. 

Shawn: In your work, you emphasize the importance of creating healthy boundaries with youth, and that sometimes these boundaries can get blurry. What do you mean by that?

Brook: Yes, building healthy boundaries creates opportunities for everyone to grow. But sometimes adults can blur those lines even with the best intentions. Here’s an example – at a summer camp I run we have a rule where at meals campers sit at designated tables and camp counselors at other tables. This is so that each can have time to process, chat, catch up, and so counselors can get some important details on the schedule. This was a shared and declared boundary and all of the staff worked together to uphold it. 

One summer, a new counselor didn’t see the importance of the rule, and chose not to uphold it. She allowed her campers to come over to the counselor table and braid her hair, put stickers on her hands, and give her pictures they drew. As they did this she looked at me and mouthed the words, “look…they love me!”  I then asked to speak to her privately. I shared my observation that she had centered herself in the experience of the campers. Instead of being on the outside, facilitating their experience, she had made herself so integral that they couldn’t operate without her for even 20 minutes. She immediately recognized that her desire for their admiration had clouded the important work of educating, empowering, and supporting them that she was there to do. 

It’s a small simple example of how sometimes leaders can have the best intentions, but instead hinder the growth of the youth they are working with. We have found that those who are fueled by the admiration of young people (being liked and loved rather than trusted and respected) are far more susceptible to boundary blur than those who name sources of strength and affirmation from their personal lives. In other words, when we seek to gain, heal, or be affirmed by and through our interactions with young people, we have lost our way. From here it is easy to slip into unhealthy power dynamics, inappropriate relationships, oversharing, or savior syndrome. 

Shawn: Other than go out and buy your book, what’s one thing people can do now to start on the path of becoming a trusted adult?

Brook: Well, one of the first things we can do is change our assumptions. Don’t assume young people have Trusted Adults in their lives. Instead, ask them to name them. I met a teacher once who was really struggling with a student who sat in class every day with his hood pulled up and his head facing down. When I asked her if she thought he could name a trusted adult at school she said, “Of course he can! He has me, his advisor, his coach, the school psychologist… he is surrounded by trusted adults!” I said, “Great! But why don’t you ask him?” The next day she did… and he answered, flatly, “No.” He told her he couldn’t name anyone who he’d describe as a trusted adult.

Join me on this mission, and let’s ensure that every young person on this planet can name an accessible, boundaried, and caring trusted adult. And when in doubt, just try to…. Be who you need and Be who you needed

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Our company Mindscaling, is busy building powerful online micro-learning experiences to drive the human change that propels your team. You can find our catalog of high-impact courses here. And if you want something more tailored, you can learn about our custom work here.

My book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy now.

And if you want to learn to apply some of these ideas and be an effective coach for your team, we wrote a course on that too. It’s called Coaching for Managers available over at UDEMY for Business.

Better Questions Build Friendships

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Hello and welcome back to my newsletter! Last week I was writing about how most of the successful people I know don’t focus on being successful. Instead they focus on taking on projects that help them become a better version of themselves, which then leads to (sometimes surprising) successes.

Here’s my question this week: In this holiday season, how do we deepen and grow our relationships with friends and family? Because our relationships are among the most important parts of our lives. 

We tried a social experiment recently. My wife and I hosted a few friends for dinner. After people arrived and got situated and caught up with greetings and small talk, we introduced a conversation game.

In the days leading up to our gathering, my wife and I composed a stack of questions designed to help us learn more about one another. Keep in mind all of us have known each other for years — at least fifteen years or more. I had a bowl of cards with light and fun questions such as “Do you have an amusing or embarrassing Thanksgiving story?” and “If you could go back in time, what year would you like to visit?”

We also had a deeper set of questions which asked things such as, “What is one of the biggest risks you have taken in life? How did it turn out?” And “What’s a memorable experience from childhood that you think shaped who you are today?”

Everyone agreed the game was a success. We took turns asking each other questions we had never asked before, and as a result we had meaningful conversations, everyone had a balanced opportunity to contribute and listen, and we all learned something new about our friends.

I’ve been enjoying Kat Vellos’ book We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships. She points out that there’s nothing wrong with small talk. Small talk is fine as an on-ramp to more meaningful conversations, but small talk alone doesn’t allow relationships to deepen and grow.

We often fall into conversational habits in which we ask the same questions, and provide the same answers. To build meaningful relationships and friendships, we can accelerate that by asking more powerful questions. Powerful questions are open ended and allow the person responding to choose the direction of the conversation. Powerful questions create possibilities and encourage discovery, understanding, and insight.

“The importance of friendship has been hiding in plain sight.”

– Lydia Denworth, author of Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond

Friendship is as important as diet and exercise for our mental and physical health. We often think of friendship as enjoyable, nice, and comforting, but we don’t often think of friendship and social connection as being essential to our ability to thrive. We don’t think of our friendships as critical to boosting our immune system or staving off long-term mental ailments.

Chasing health and longevity, we puree kale smoothies, listen to meditation apps, read Brené Brown, and wake up for morning boot camp classes. But the secret sauce to long term mental and physical health might not just be the planks you do in your workout class, but the friends you see and spend time with.

According to author Lydia Denworth, the reason friendship and social connection has largely been ignored by scientists, until recently, is because it has been hard to define what friendship is. Scientists like to measure things they can define, and pin down. In her research, Denworth interviewed biologists and anthropologists, and found that their agreed definition of friendship is a relationship which is stable, positive and reciprocal.

Friends make time for each other consistently, leave others feeling buoyed and uplifted, and have their past interactions to build upon. In this way, the layers of a friendship are built over time such that with each repeated contact we get to reinforce past interactions, and then add new stories, ideas and values to edify one another.

For the holidays, ask the kinds of questions that bring us closer together. Looking for ideas? Try Vertellis. They have awesome questions you can try out. Happy New Year!

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Our company Mindscaling, is busy building powerful online micro-learning experiences to drive the human change that propels your team. You can find our catalog of high-impact courses here. And if you want something more tailored, you can learn about our custom work here.

My book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy now.

And if you want to learn to apply some of these ideas and be an effective coach for your team, we wrote a course on that too. It’s called Coaching for Managers available over at UDEMY for Business.

Think of Conversation as Travel

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Within every individual, there is an entire world within them, a universe of experiences, knowledge, joy and adversity. Think of conversation as travel, as an exploration. And just like actual travel, a deep conversation is also an adventure, an opening to new ideas and other ways of seeing the world.

“Almost every crisis we’re facing right now is a crisis of belonging.”

—Joe Keohane

I haven’t always talked to strangers, but I try more often now. At our local grocery store, the kind person bagging groceries always asks the same series of questions. “How heavy would you like your bags?” “Would you like your milk in a bag?” “Would you like your cleaning products in the same bag with your produce?” “Would you like your ice cream in a separate bag?”

I understand they are being polite. I usually tell them, “You can decide. You’re an expert. You have much more experience. I trust you.” Then I can go back to asking the clerk about her tattoo. That’s another level of interaction. Try asking a complete stranger about their tattoo. A few years ago I never would have done this. Are you kidding? For many people a tattoo is a sacred icon, a cherished memory, a badge of identity. I wouldn’t dare.

I was wrong to assume people don’t want to talk about their tattoos. A tattoo is a powerful and permanent reminder of an event or expression of identity. In my experience, people light up with enthusiasm if I ask. It’s their daughter’s birthday, their life motto, their favorite quote, an ancient symbol. Tattoos reflect powerful emotions and life choices. I’ve never yet met anyone unwilling to tell me the story of their tattoo.

There’s an expression in social psychology called the Lesser Minds Problem, which is short-hand for the common, impatient and reflexive assumption we make about unknown people. Namely that strangers:

  1. Have less world experience than we do (“They’re so foolish!”)
  2. Make decisions that are less informed because of their lack of experience (“They don’t know what they’re doing!”)
  3. Have a less nuanced and unrefined understanding if the world because of their lack of experience (“They don’t understand how the world works! Idiots!”).

If I have a headache and it is painfully debilitating, and then you tell me you have a headache, I may likely think, “Sure but it’s nothing like this headache!” Our own subjective pain is usually more painful than someone else’s. Which is why almost everyone buys “extra strength” pain medication. We believe our experiences are deeper, more meaningful, more enlightening, than other’s experiences.

In a research paper called “More Human Than You”, Nick Haslam and his colleagues show that we ascribe more human characteristics to ourselves than strangers. When asked to evaluate how curious, sympathetic or imaginative a stranger was compared to themselves, participants consistently described themselves as possessing more of these human nature traits. People tend to see themselves as more dimensional, and more mentally complex, than the strangers we encounter in the world.

The obvious secret to finding the humanity in others is to talk to strangers so they’re not so strange any longer. When you interact with people, their humanity becomes undeniable.

With over 60% of younger people (18-25 years old) now experiencing moderate to severe loneliness, we need to recognize that connecting with other humans is an essential human need, like breathing, exercising and thinking. In Joe Keohane’s new book The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World, he offers ideas on how to break the silence, connect with others, and enrich understanding.

Start by finding safe places to start a conversation with a stranger. The “cosmopolitan canopy” is an expression coined by sociologist Elijah Anderson at Yale University to mean safe public and semi-public places where starting a conversation isn’t considered weird or too out of place. Coffee shops, libraries, grocery stores, public squares and markets are all environments where initiating a conversation isn’t too odd or off-putting.

Shared experiences are also good environments. If you’re both watching a baseball team winning, or your local high school team losing, you have a shared point of departure.

Answer greetings honestly. A few years ago my mom died of cancer. Within an hour of hearing the news I went for a walk by myself. A neighbor walked by and asked, “Hi, how are you?” I hesitated and then told her the truth. My mom had just died. My neighbor gave me a hug and we spoke about the fragility of life. It’s the most meaningful brief interaction we have ever had, and yet to this day we always share a kind moment when we see each other in the community. And I believe that kindness can be traced back to that one moment of human honesty.

Perhaps one of the most accessible tips Keohane gives is to break the script. Our script is the pro forma things we say every day to talk, and yet not talk. We say Hello, how are you? as a throwaway comment to fill dead air. We don’t actually intend someone to answer. Try breaking the script and actually answering the question truthfully. “Oh, I’m alright. I didn’t sleep too well but I had a fun yoga class. I’d say I’m about a 6 or 7 right now.”

When you answer truthfully, it’s a cue to the other person that this could be interesting. This could go somewhere. It’s playful, audacious, and an invitation to deepen the conversation. Take a chance. Open a conversation with someone new.

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Our company Mindscaling, is busy building powerful online micro-learning experiences to drive the human change that propels your team. You can find our catalog of high-impact courses here. And if you want something more tailored, you can learn about our custom work here.

My book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy now.

And if you want to learn to apply some of these ideas and be an effective coach for your team, we wrote a course on that too. It’s called Coaching for Managers available over at UDEMY for Business.

It’s OK, You Should Ask. They Will Say Yes.

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Welcome back! If you prefer, you can receive this newsletter when first published over here on LinkedIn. This week I show that you can – and should – ask for help, along with a few tips on how to ask from the research of Vanessa Bohns.

Recently my wife and I wanted to visit our son, a first year student at a university about a 7-hour drive away. He had only been there a few weeks, and we thought it would be nice to visit him at school for parent’s weekend, meet his new friends, and take in the fall college scene in New England.

In the end, we didn’t go. We have two dogs who would not have enjoyed 14 hours in a car, and a younger daughter who would need a place to stay for the weekend. She certainly wasn’t interested in a getaway with her parents on a long car ride, just to visit her brother. Yuck.

So what happened? We didn’t ask for help. It would have been easy. When I explained this to some friends, every single person said they would have taken our dogs for the weekend, including our old sweet yellow lab who we couldn’t bear to leave at a dog boarding kennel. Our daughter could have easily spent the night with friends. It would have taken two phone calls. We just didn’t ask.

In general, people hate to ask for help, or ask favors from other people. Our aversion to even interrupting someone else can be so strong, Vanessa Bohn has demonstrated in her research that we don’t like to approach strangers just to give them compliments (“Your sweater looks great on you!”), because we are concerned we might not express ourselves well to others. We believe we might appear awkward, strike the wrong tone, or be misinterpreted. So we say nothing. We ask for nothing.

But we shouldn’t be so worried. People will agree to requests more often than we think, particularly if the request is benign, or well-intentioned.

There’s a guy named Jia Jiang who tested this theory by spending 100 days asking random people for pretty benign, but often unusual requests. He called his experiment Rejection Therapy, and during the experiment, he made many requests of strangers. He went to a high school track and asked a random person to race him (yes), asked a police officer if he could sit in the squad car (yes), asked a Wal-Mart greeter if he could hug her (yes), asked a Subway sandwich maker if he could go behind the counter and make his own sandwich (no), asked a car salesperson if he could test drive an $80k BMW (yes), and even asked if he could give the flight safety announcement on a SouthWest flight (sort of).

The point is that people are more agreeable, and more willing to say Yes to our requests than we think they are. And because of this fact, we should be careful of the requests that we do make, and ensure they are well-intentioned, and designed for positive outcomes.

So, once you’ve figured out what you want to ask for, that comes from a place of good intent, here are a few tips from Vanessa Bohn’s research on how to make a successful ask.

Be direct: A mistake we often make is that we think it will be more polite to hint at the request, or drop clues that the other person is supposed to understand and interpret, to allow them to intuit our request, and volunteer to help. So instead of asking outright, we suggest or hint at it. People don’t always pick up on our hints. Be direct, and plain, in your requests instead.

Don’t overthink the ask: We often think we need to craft the perfect email, with compelling arguments, and carefully selected words, to gain their attention and get someone else to Yes. Actually, you don’t. The most compelling asks are direct, simple, and in-person.

Ask in-person, or at least by phone: It is very difficult for people to say No to someone else in person. Our default response is to agree, mostly because we don’t want to create conflict, adversity or disappoint someone else. And emails are easily ignored.

Don’t water down your request: In a series of studies at Columbia Business School, participants engaged in negotiations who thought they were being too assertive, or too pushy in their requests ( the “line-crossing illusion”), were more often viewed by the other person as being appropriate, and fair, in their ask. So don’t ask for half of what you actually want.

It’s OK. You can, and should, ask for help. Asking strengthens relationships, expands connections, and gives someone else a chance to give. Because giving someone an opportunity to give is a good thing.

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Still trying to figure out what you want? We wrote a 5-minute microlearning course on that. Enjoy!

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Our company Mindscaling, is busy building powerful online micro-learning experiences to drive the human change that propels your team. You can find our catalog of high-impact courses here. And if you want something more tailored, you can learn about our custom work here.

My book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy now.

And if you want to learn to apply some of these ideas and be an effective coach for your team, we wrote a course on that too. It’s called Coaching for Managers available over at UDEMY for Business.