JACOB: Hello and welcome to another episode of Greater Than Code. My name is Jacob Stoebel and I'm here with my co-host, Rein Henrichs.

REIN: Thanks, Jacob. And I'm here with our guest, Dr. Mireille Reece. She is a clinical psychologist in the Pacific Northwest. She works primarily in private practice where she provides psychotherapy as well as psychological assessment for a variety of individuals with different diagnoses. And before that, she spent nearly three years working in clinical neuropsychology where she conducted psychological and neuropsychological evaluations and provided brain injury rehabilitation for individuals both in the clinic and on location. Most recently, she is the co-host of Brain Science, a podcast on the Changelog, which focuses on exploring the inner workings of the human brain to understand behavior change, habit formation, mental health, and the fundamentals of being human. So those are all things we care about. So, we're excited to talk to you.

MIREILLE: Great. I'm so excited to be here with you guys today.

REIN: What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

MIREILLE: It's been interesting as I've reflected on that question since I was aware that you guys were going to ask me that. There's a lot of things I could say would be my superpower, but what really stands out is I'm just me. And I think that's the case with all of us. And so, my super power is really the sense of respect around the individuality of every person and go that people don't have to look like me, think like me or do like me, but I need to come to each person and relationships with other people with that fundamental sense of respect. So, I really think that this was cultivated, of course in my work in the field of psychology. But really, I think I have always been a learner and not accepted things at face value. So I have this sense of curiosity, which drives learning, which has been placed within the lane of humanity. And so, I'm always curious about people and learning and understanding more of who they are so that we can all work better together.

REIN: So there's no way I'm going to get through this whole episode without mentioning Virginia Satir, so I might as well start now. She has a quote that I really like, which is people come together if there are similarities and grow through their differences.

MIREILLE: Oh, amen. Yes. Another proverb I've heard is as iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. And that we're not the same and that's really a good thing. And some of the ways in which I've been more challenged by trying to understand another person, be it in a clinical sense or really, especially now with having kids and being involved with other parents who have different priorities and values and ways in which they do things, that I really have to recognize that while it might not feel good, it doesn't mean I can't learn from them to change and then be a better me and a better human overall.

REIN: Do you think this is something that you were born with or is it something that you developed as you grew older?

MIREILLE: Yes and yes. [Laughs] I never liked simple answers.

REIN: So, let's just get right into it. Nature versus nurture, if you could just solve that for us right now.

MIREILLE: That is one of the things I'm most fascinated by. And if you haven't heard of it, there's this aspect within the field called epigenetics. And so, epigenetics looks at the interplay between genetics and environment. And so, like one way in which we can make sense of this is thinking about it with people who deal with alcoholism. We know that there isn't a one-to-one correlation that if your parents are alcoholics that you will invariably be an alcoholic as well because there are personality factors and environmental factors which influenced the way in which that gene gets expressed or not. And so in life where you can also think of it like siblings. I'm one of four. I have a twin brother who is 54 minutes older than I. And so, we all grew up in the same house and yet our recollection of events or scenarios or interactions are definitely not the same. And we are, by all means, not the same people in terms of what we value, the choices we make, and how we do our lives.

JACOB: Yeah. I think my parents could testify that birth order is a huge difference exemplified by me and my brother, my brother being almost six years older. Huge difference of six years of experience being a parent than being a novice. [Chuckles]

MIREILLE: Yeah. There's lots of practice and learning that then they get to implement that you then get the benefit of where they're just trying to figure it out with round one.

REIN: Yeah. And even though it's the same family with the same parents, the relationships between everyone are still unique.

MIREILLE: They are. And so, really understanding the way in which our environment does play a role in who we are. Because I mean, I grew up, I spent a lot of time in a gym. I started gymnastics at the age of three. I started competing when I was six. And so my life was basically divided between school and gymnastics with some other dance, ballet, diving, other sports tethered in. But so, that's been a huge component of who I am because when I wasn't in my house and I wasn't in school, that's where I was. And so, a lot of my mental framework has to do with what was built in a sort of sporting world, which was not the case for my siblings in the same sort of way. And it's definitely not the case for all people.

REIN: I was preparing for a talk I gave on blame and moral judgment. And to do that, I read a very large amount of moral psychology and moral philosophy papers. And a metaphor that I came across that sort of helped me understand this nature versus nurture thing is the idea that there is a first draft of the moral mind that this is based on our innate capability for empathy or perspective taking. And then this draft is edited over time as we grow up and have different interactions and things like that.

MIREILLE: Yeah. And so there are lots of facets even in talking about that because there's aspects of the brain that are involved with even that perspective taking and empathy. And so we talk about this over in Brain Science as it relates to empathy in terms of mirror neurons. And mirror neurons were discovered in this research around monkeys and imitating behaviors of other monkeys. And that these are really one of the key parts of our brain involved in empathy. And so I can be aware of another person's emotional state, as based on the way in which these neurons function in my brain. So when we're looking even at morality, it is a ever fluctuating construct so to speak, because experiences change it as we grow and our brain changes. Like our frontal lobe isn't fully cooked, so to speak. It's not fully developed until mid-20's in women and even sometimes a little later for men. Sorry guys. [Chuckles]

REIN: Maybe this is too nerdy and we can detour back out of this quickly. But based on what you've learned and what you've researched, what is your theory on the neurological basis of cognition? Like what's happening in the brain? Do we know enough to say yet?

MIREILLE: No, because that's the fascinating thing about our brains because even the terminology we use around it. The mind is really the way in which our brain works together. And so, I mean we can't put a thought under the microscope. We can't put a thought under a functional MRI. However, we can collect data around what parts of the brain have energy flowing through them when it's under a functional MRI. And so to say, for example, there is research that's been done around forgiveness. And the way in which people forgive, it actually runs different neural routes. So the same structures might be involved. But when I can forgive someone or when I can't, the information travels in alternative way.

REIN: I've also seen research that suggests that cognition sort of oscillates between low level sense-making activities and what we call higher level cognition. And so it's not like you spend some time thinking high level thoughts and then you do a little sense making. It's all interpenetrating.

MIREILLE: Yeah, right. Think of like multiple plates spinning simultaneously. And this is why too, I think it's really important to be considerate of these things because there's so many things going on at the same time. One psychiatrist, Dan Siegel, talks about this and he says where attention goes, energy flows. And so the more I focus my attention on one thing, the more I'm not going to attend to these other things. It doesn't mean I don't see those things or that they're not present, however my attention isn't captivated by that. An example might be like when you buy a new car, and I'm sure this has never happened, but you buy a car and you go drive your car and then you go, "Oh my goodness, there's one and there's another. Oh, and there's another." I'm pretty sure the car company did not dump a bunch of those cars on the road on that day you bought your car. However, you are much more cognizant of that car because it has emotional relevance to you. So you "see it". And so that's the other thing, like it's not the eyes that see or our ears that hear. It's the way in which our brain makes sense of that puzzle of data and that is always in influx.

REIN: So that's the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon?

MIREILLE: I'm not familiar with the terminology for that one. That was from my brain.

REIN: It's also called Frequency Illusion. Like once you're prime to see something, you start seeing it everywhere.

MIREILLE: Oh, okay.

REIN: So it's like, "Oh, why do I keep seeing that actor," and everything.

MIREILLE: Right. But it's because you've sort of tuned your mind to that channel in some way.

REIN: Yeah.

MIREILLE: But emotions play a role in attention too. All of the things, like if you're exhausted, so the physiological state. All of these aspects of who we are play a role in whether or not I'm attentive to X, Y, or Z at any given time.
 
REIN: Okay. Here's a thing I want to ask you about. What is your position on extended cognition? Because I keep using the word brain, but is that accurate?

MIREILLE: Well, say more about what you mean by extended cognition.

REIN: By extended cognition, I mean the idea that the mind is both embodied and embedded. So it's embodied in our bodies. So our bodies play a part in cognition, but it's also embedded in the environment. So our cognition changes in reaction to different environments that we're in.

MIREILLE: Yes. And so I would not reference that as the brain. The brain is the actual neural structures. So the components, the things that are I'm capable of touching.

JACOB: I heard a podcast a while back that the traditional way we think about perception and cognition is not like we perceive something from our outside environment like on the outside of my body. Maybe I perceive something that smells really bad, like smelly garbage. And then I have an internal reaction to that, like a repulsion. Maybe I want to like vomit or something. And let me see if I can articulate this right. The idea is like maybe in some cases it's the reverse of that is that we think that we're looking on the outside of the world and then deciding how to interpret that. But maybe it's like we're going to look at, it's going to be flipped. Is there any truth to that?

MIREILLE: You mean in terms of sort of -- because you're getting at sensation and perception. So like my sense is taking data and going, my brain then is going to make sense of that data via perception. So this way in which I perceive or I sort of consolidate that information I'm taking in from the census, and so then that's the world in which I live in is according to how I've made sense of the interplay between my environment and my senses.

JACOB: Yes. This is like kind of blowing my mind. But yeah.

REIN: Maybe another part of that is that the 'Oh, that smells gross' reaction is effective. And so it just sort of shows up in our brains [inaudible]. We didn't cause it and then we respond to it.

MIREILLE: Sure. Well that's why --

REIN: In our minds, excuse me.

MIREILLE: [Laughs] Not necessarily outwardly. This is why I'm so captivated by our minds and our brains and how we sort of put this puzzle together of going through our world. So a lot of what I work with with people is recognizing sort of narratives they've created, maladaptive thoughts, way in which they've put pieces together that don't necessarily go together. I think about it recently, my kids had this puzzle that they got and it was of a picture and there's a lot of like black throughout it. And so my kids are elementary age and they're putting this together, but there's a lot of like minor nuances with how they put the pieces together that didn't go there. And so obviously, it wouldn't create the correct picture because the pieces were in the wrong place. And so our brains can do that as based on the feedback we've gotten from other people in terms of how we've labeled things. For example, I think about it like athletes in terms of prepping for a race. People might say, "Oh, you're anxious," and label the emotional experience, anxiety. However, a probably better way to articulate that internal feeling is anticipation because it's got this sense of excitement with it and it's not solely based on fear. So I'm like charged and ready to go. And so those words and nuances in words make a difference in how I then feel. Because imagine I am actually participating in the picture of how I see my world and then responding to that.

JACOB: I think that's getting at what I was thinking about. I think the example I heard was we think of it of like, okay, I'm a caveman, an early human and I see a lion and then I get scared. And because I get scared, my pulse starts to increase. But the suggestion is like, maybe what it is is I see a lion, my pulse starts to increase, my mind notices that my pulse is starting to increase and then I get scared. But there could be other reasons why my pulse should be getting like, just like you said, because of excitement or because of anticipation. But we've sort of wired to understand that like, "Oh, higher pulse, I'm scared."

MIREILLE: Yeah. And then you don't sort of reflect on that, like, "Wait, hold on a second." For example, in the case of panic attacks, a lot of people don't realize that one of the first things they do, because anxiety is a precursor to the panic, that they start holding their breath. And if I can't breathe, guess what I'm going to do? I'm going to panic. And so then it sets off this whole sequence of events, which may or may not be real, but I've just conditioned. And so we know that the way in which we see our world is based on the sort of neural networks. And so, I start a play like neurons operate by the all-or-none law, which means they either fire or they don't. So I get to this threshold and it's like we just run that play like to grandmother's house we go. So our brain goes, "Oh, I've practiced this route, this is the same route I run." And then I don't learn how to differentiate it. So in that example of going, here's a threat, like here's a lion, tiger or bear, and that much of what we're afraid of or that creates the sense of anxiety isn't something future. But actually something we've experienced in the past that our brain goes, "That's dangerous," because it's trying to keep us alive and say, "Hey, be wary. You need to run a different play because the last time you were here, that was a lion," i.e. that was painful. So you want to avoid that in the future. The challenge is to be able to differentiate that and go, "Oh brain, I understand how you're trying to help me in this situation. However, I'm not six years old and that clown really isn't that scary."

REIN: I think this is a lot like what Virginia Satir calls Survival Rules, which is as we grew up, we developed these sort of internal and often covert rules that determine choices we make for us. And they develop because we had an experience where a bad thing happened and we want very much for that bad thing to not keep happening. Even at an unconscious level, we develop this aversion. And so this rule, because the survival rule often these happened in the family because she was a family therapist. But these are things like don't talk back to dad when he's been drinking.

MIREILLE:
Yes.

REIN: And so, you will learn this sort of survival rule for how to deal with powerful men in your life, let's say. And then you leave the family and you go out into some other environment, like a workplace, and you've brought this rule with you.

MIREILLE: Yes. And so the kicker is being able to one, identify that and go, "Oh, this was sort of how I operated in this system," because we're all in systems. There's a family system, there's systems in workplaces. All relationships sort of have these systems. And go, "Oh, however, this isn't the same person." And so, I need to then recognize that I'm responding or reacting. My brain is telling me that this person is as my dad was. And so, I need to walk cautiously when that isn't necessarily true. But see, there's some research who will talk about the brain sort of as the primary motivating factors are to avoid pain, have pleasure, and minimize how much energy we expend. And so those survival rules are sort of really embedded in that of like, "Oh wait, I'm not going to engage this person in this way because that didn't pay when I was a child." And wow, that takes so much work.

REIN: They also have to operate quickly and without conscious deliberative thought because of their survival rules.

MIREILLE: Yeah. So, we process bottom up. Imagine if you think of our brain like the three brains in one. And so, if I use the model of my hand, so you have put your hand up like you're swearing in and then fold your thumb across the front of your four fingers and then fold your forefingers over the front. So imagine then in this analogy that your wrist is like your brainstem and that's most closely associated with reptile brain. And then that thumb on the inside is more of your mammalian brain. And then the four fingers over top is our neocortex, or like our frontal lobe. And so, we process information that comes in through the senses - see, smell, touch, taste, or hear - up through the brainstem into that mammalian system and then our neocortex. Now of course, it's not that simple. There's always top down and other processing, however it gets at that reactivity because the brainstem being responsible for primary or essential functions like breathing, heart rate, and fight or flight. So if it's like, "Oh, that's dangerous," my brain perceives that as a threat, I'm now going to react as though it is a lion, tiger or bear, because it didn't get up to the next step or stages in my mind or my brain to be able to go, "Hold on. Pause, one second." That is not actually as you see it to be.

REIN: And also by the time these things arise, consciously, all sorts of stuff gets attached to them as they work their way up through this process. So for example, with moral judgments, your perceptions don't present facts to you that you then judge, they present experiences which are already laden with values and so on. And so, by the time you're making a moral judgment, you're not just a judge who's weighing things in a very deliberative way. You're responding to, "Oh, that was wrong and I feel like shitty that that happened and now I have to do something about it."

MIREILLE: Yeah, exactly. So it just makes it all the challenging to be able to live life while all of those things are transpiring. Oh yeah, and while you're trying to engage with somebody else or respond to a situation.

REIN: Yeah. I also saw a study that suggested, and this is sort of obvious, but it's nice to have like papers I can cite, that we engage these more deliberative top-down processes when we have more access to cognitive resources. So this means more time, less stress.

MIREILLE: Yup. You got it. So in one of my training experiences, I had the opportunity to work with Dr. John Briere and at that time, he was a psychologist at USC and worked primarily with women in the Somalian sex trafficking. And he looked at what they call the HPA axis, otherwise known as hypo pituitary adrenal axis. And what he found was that people with PTSD have a more sensitive HPA axis. And so they don't know if the trauma causes that increased sensitivity or if they're born with more of the sensitivity, which then creates more reactivity to whatever trauma they encounter. But so when people are, for lack of a better word, assaulted emotionally or overwhelmed, be it a traumatic situation, so be it little 't' trauma versus big 'T', PTSD, it changes the way in which you can process that data because if that emotion reactivity is there, which is very much embedded in the fight or flight, I have far less access to those higher order thinking in order to help calm and remind me that the world is not how my brain, my body is telling me it is.

REIN: A lot of the time I get the sense that I have to consciously struggle with these unconscious or pre-conscious impulses to control my life. What are some tools do we have to try to make this space we need to get more control over these things?

MIREILLE: Well, one of the things is really orienting to the senses ironically, because senses are all real time. They're live. And so I wouldn't do this -- well, we can say what can I see, smell, touch, taste, or hear? In a moment, if I'm feeling overwhelmed, I could be like, I'm in my office, I'm sitting at my desk, I'm wearing this article of clothing. I have this necklace on. Like everything that I can see, smell, touch, taste, or hear because that's literally what's happening, not what my brain is telling me is occurring. I'll give you an example. When recently I had the opportunity, one of my children had a birthday party and so it was my first exposure to VR. And so, I did this VR experience where I go up an elevator and I was to walk off a plank out of the high, high elevator. So I'm going up and this was especially fascinating for me knowing what I know about the brain and that this isn't real. However, I can look around the elevator and see the buttons and hear the elevator music. So I have multiple sensory systems engaged in what I'm doing and the doors open. And here's this itty bitty plank that I can step out of while I see the tippy tops of skyscrapers, mountains, birds flying across the air and my anxiety spikes like, "Oh, my goodness." I can't believe that this is what the signals my brain is sending me. And so, I literally got down and touched the ground with my hands so that I had alternative data that combated or ran interference to the other information. And so then I stood up and I could step off because I knew that the signals my mind was sending to me weren't actually rooted in reality.

JACOB: It's like watching a scary movie with the lights on?

MIREILLE: [Laughs] Yeah. So that you have collateral data which tells your brain otherwise. One of the things is when we are activated or in that place of fight or flight, we tend to see far and narrow because it's adaptive. Like if there's a tiger or a bear coming, I need to know a long time before they're close to me. So I'm going to get rid of extraneous or seemingly irrelevant data because I just need to fixate on that target. But when I can calm down, I shift sort of like my mind to the camera lens to panoramic instead of focused. And so, looking for ways in which I can collect other alternative collaborative data that helps remind me that it isn't as scary. That being said, one of the other critical things is because we are by nature a herd species, i.e. we function better with other groups and people. So incorporating other people, when I struggle, like shame as being a big emotion, like Brene Brown talks a lot about this and that the biggest resource we can utilize when we're in a shame storm is connecting with another person.

REIN: Virginia also talks a lot about how important being grounded is for her, especially for the therapist. And so for me, I do a lot of facilitation, so I'm not a therapist, but I have to get people to relate to each other. And so, I think about that a lot in terms of what I need to do so that I can be in the right head space to facilitate. And she gives the example of you're talking -- on her case, it's a family. But in my case it might be I'm talking to a group of people in a meeting. I noticed that I'm getting these weird reactions from them even though I'm just trying to tell them some stuff I think they need to hear. I'm getting these weird reactions from them. Like they're kind of shying away from me and they look really uncomfortable. And then if I take a moment to become grounded and not only just taking the senses, but also an awareness of my own body and what I'm doing, I realized that I'm leaning forward and my hands are making fists on the table and I'm shouting.

MIREILLE: [Laughs] Yes. Oh, that's beautiful. And so, being aware of our body language is really important, especially as it relates to empathy. There's part that can help us do that better. And one of the things is what you're getting at in terms of what we call an affective prosody. So the rate tone, how I speak. I could say to someone, "I like you", or to be like, "I like you," or, "I'm fine." I'm sure you've never heard that. When that is not at all what they mean. And so when I'm trying to relate with other people, being able to empathize means moving or maneuvering it from a different position. And so sort of that frontal lobe function perspective planning, holding this working model of if I moved myself to the position of the other, how might I perceive what I am doing to them? Hence like, Oh, I'm leaning in, I'm yelling at them or talking very loudly and my hands are a fist. Even thinking about that in terms of how we appear physically, like different even in terms of gender. I think Gavin de Becker, his book, The Gift of Fear, talks about, he says that women are afraid that men will kill them and men are afraid that women will laugh at them, kind of different. And I think there's a difference in sort of how we're trained as based on gender. Not necessarily intentionally, but rather these ways in which men are reinforced to trust their intuition, to trust themselves. Like, you know you can do it, you go with your gut and you don't feel like you have to justify it or sort of contort it in any way to be like, "That was my perspective." Whereas women in some ways are conditioned like don't make anybody else feel bad. You don't really know because you have to be considerate of respectful around everybody else. So you should always contort yourself in order to accommodate another. That's not going to work well if I feel like even there's a power dynamic in terms of gender and to go, "You know what? I need to be considerate of how other people could perceive me coming across." Like if I'm talking to a group of men or I'm talking to a group of women that there's a different way in which that interaction is going to feel. And I need to consider that, otherwise I'm just going to fumble all over the place. Think about it, it'd be very weird to pick up a soccer ball and throw that on the field, presuming that it's football versus using the soccer ball on a football field.

So in context of relationships, recognizing that there's myself and another, and I always bring myself to that. I don't necessarily know all of the other that I may be interfacing with. Even with you guys, I know you in this digital sense, but I don't know all of your history, experiences, the things that have contributed to who you are which might contribute to how you're sort of grimacing or leaning back when I engage with you, unless I ask.

REIN: I'd like to try to tie a few things together once again by referencing Virginia Satir because that's never going to stop with this episode. So when you were talking about the sort of shaking your head no when you say yes, that kind of a thing. She calls that incongruence, where congruence is an agreement between what you say and how you say it, but also what you're feeling and even at a deeper level, what your values are or what your goals are. And so when she looks at incongruence, she analyzes it through a lens of there are three components to every interaction. There is the self, the other, and the context. And a lot of incongruent coping behaviors come from, in her model, one part of that or more being missing.

MIREILLE: Sure. I mean, I teach people about this all the time in the clinical work that I do of even recognizing what people say and what they do. A lot of times I am trying to help people navigate relational challenges and they don't necessarily know what factors are contributing to the sort of unrest either within themselves or live within the interaction. And so helping them see even their part, because I know to some degree, whenever I'm working with a patient, there's bias, not on purpose, but because I'm only getting their side of the situation. And so that doesn't mean it doesn't count or that it isn't valid. However, I have to utilize that to help them see that maybe they aren't "seeing" other aspects to the dynamic such as what we talked about earlier and going this conditioning as based on survival in childhood. Look, I'm apt to see things in the same way that I experienced because that's valid. Like that's what I went through. However, if I'm using that same data and applying it to another context, be it in another relationship or another work setting, it might be incredibly ineffective or maladaptive. Say for example, I had to shout to be heard in my home as a kid. So then I go into work and when I'm not feeling understood, I shout to be heard. Probably not going to bode so well for keeping my job.

JACOB: I've often wondered if there could be a better way in the professional setting, like at work, if it were possible for co-workers to have more transparency about those mechanics, without feeling like work is therapy. We were constantly at therapy at work. I just feel like everyone could work better together, hopefully, if we could be more transparent.

MIREILLE: Yes. Because I think that that's part of what led to even starting this Brain Science podcast because we want people, especially in tech who are working primarily with things, to see their humanity as behind the charge of whatever they create or cultivate or working with. And if we don't manage ourselves well, it's apt to show up either in the relationships with co-workers or peers or colleagues as well as within the work we do. And so, you're asking going, "How could I sort of be human?" And it's interesting because Brene Brown talks about this in terms of vulnerability and that there is still a sense of not everybody wants the same things at the workplace. Some people will say like, "We're family, this is where we work." And you're like, "No, no, no. My family is in my house and that's where I'd prefer to be right now." But going, "How can I be, to some degree, vulnerable?" And with that I'm saying, not like slime people with here's all my stuff or I'm going through X, Y, and Z and yada yada. But being honest in sort of, for lack of a better word, code switching, like using the data my brain gives me, "This is the struggle I'm going through. And while I'm not going to articulate all of the specifics of that, I can say life is incredibly full right now. I have aging parents or a family member is ill and I'm trying to focus on my work and I'm just being inundated by other phone calls or intrusions," which doesn't necessarily give the full story, but it just gives them here's a nugget and then it's offering to you to say, "Oh, I've been there too. I struggled in this way or that way." And so then you can practice seeing people as people and not as objects, not as sort of obstacles to impediments to getting my work done every day.

JACOB: Yeah. I feel like it's sort of making me think of a shook up can of soda that when you first open it, the first bit is going to get all over the place and it's going to be worthless. But then once that can come out then you get the rest of it. So what it makes me think of is people in a setting like that who haven't been to therapy already, it's probably going to be not such a good, you know what I'm saying?

MIREILLE: [Laughs] I do.

JACOB: You sort of have to explore that a little bit in a different setting maybe, then feel like you're self aware enough to sort of share it in a workplace appropriate.

MIREILLE: You know, it's funny, throughout graduate school, we used to sort of joke about never making a major life decision amidst the process of therapy for just that reason. You would disproportionately evaluate something while you're still in process. But that's a necessary part of the process. And so I think even if workplaces could recognize this and go, "You know what? We have to give space around people being themselves." And that with the little bit of knowledge I have in terms of the tech world, especially when information is so fast paced, it's sort of like you could literally work nearly 24 hours a day and still not reach the curve at which information is changing and moving. And nobody can operate like that. Nobody can. And it is really antithetical to doing yourself well.

Arianna Huffington in her book, Thrive, talks about this, which I'm not sure if you're familiar with her, but she created the HuffPost newspaper, online paper and she had major health issues as she was working to roll out this paper because she just was working in an unrelenting way and that doesn't help us. If we're trying, especially in the world of tech where creativity is really key and the cognitive load is so significant, you have to be mindful of sleep and basic physiological needs that every human being has. And so therefore, if you have other extraneous things or personal things outside of work, you bring those things to work and may affect how you work. And so, it doesn't mean that then you sort of give permission and sort of blame, "Well, I can't work hard because I have X, Y, or Z ," but rather it's a component of the equation and that counts. And so, maybe the sort of amount of work might be less on that day or in that way, but it doesn't mean you quit striving or quit putting forth effort towards that goal of whatever it might be at work or with others or at home.

REIN: What I usually tell people about work relationships is that the idea that work as a family is weird and gross, but that doesn't imply that the relationships between people at work aren't real relationships. They may not be family relationships or even friend relationships, but there are two real people that connect in a real way. Whatever that relationship is is a real thing.

MIREILLE: Yes, most certainly. And it doesn't mean that you have to have this sort of intimacy, but rather these are people you're spending hours and hours beside. And so imagine you as a main circle and then you have different relationships, circles that overlap to some degree into you as that primary circle, you get to decide how far they come in. But recognizing -- there is a research study and I read so much, I can't always remember which location I got it from. But it talked about looking at work relationships and going, "Is it worth it to create experiences outside of the workplace to better foster these in-house relationships?" And what they found was that it wasn't that, but rather water cooler talk. And the more that companies allowed for these sort of nuanced exchanges in between is what made them more productive employees. And I would offer, my interpretation of that is simply being they let them be human first and that, do you want to linger longer and have a conversation? I mean, I know as based on days and events, sometimes I want to hang out and have a conversation. And other days, not so much. In my line of work, I would talk about it like I'm in an incredibly social field, but it is remarkably isolating. So here I have all of this energy that I hold all day, but I'm holding it and I'm interfacing with others. So then to go home with my family and go, "I need to engage more and help and be present," I have to consider sort of what I've bartered all during the day in order to make that change and reallocate to give where I want to give.

REIN: There's a thing that's become really popular to talk about for teams' psychological safety. And this is another thing that a lot of people think is good, but no one knows what it is.

MIREILLE: As you said that, I'm like, "What do you mean psychological?"

REIN: The definition that I've seen a lot of people use comes from a paper, Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams, which defines it as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.

MIREILLE: Yup. That's fascinating. I would say there's multiple challenges in that. And that social psychologists really look at this more in-depth than any other area within our field. But one of the things is that we are incredibly tribal. We are a herd species, which means we're better in teams than we are by ourselves, hence that sort of mammalian brain. Like mammals care about attachment, that's why dogs and cats make better pets than lizards. They don't really care if you're there. But when they look at sort of tribes in remote places, they go, "How can you be so vested in this immediate tribe that you're within and yet massacre and commit atrocities against these other tribes?" And basically it has to do with whether you're in an in-group or an out-group, and we all have in-groups and out-groups. And so while you might want a team to be your in-group, it doesn't mean that all the people in that team, one, believe that everybody's part of their team and in that group; or two, that all of those individuals are safe because safety, I would offer, is individually determined. You might think that all team members are safe. However, if one team member be it triggers one of these less conscious, early childhood narratives, experiences, they're out to see one of the members as unsafe and which will then upset the homeostasis and their ability to take risk within the community of that group.

JACOB: Yeah. And being able to remedy that, I can see how that would be very sticky because it's like, let's say you trigger some kind of, I don't have any [inaudible], in the larger sense. But let's say I did and at the next meeting, I'm talking about it and I'm crying and I'm just talking about X, Y, and Z from my childhood, that's probably not what we would need at work. But at the same time it's like, "Well, what do we talk about and how do we address it?" I can just see how that sort of thinking gets sticky. And I guess just as far as I can tell, the only way through that is just for teams that can be permissive of when people have some stuff that it's at least safe to get into it.

MIREILLE: Yeah. Yes and no. And I would say, really at the heart of some of that, because I mentioned it earlier about the work that you guys do in terms of creativity being at the forefront of that. And when we're creating, it's really we're using ourselves to build something. It's making or creating a format of chaos. And so you bring yourself to go, "What form am I going to impose to make this make sense in a way that other people can use and utilize." And so with that, you are at risk for shame, which shame says, not that you did something wrong like guilt would say, but rather there's something inherently defective. Like I am inadequate, insufficient. And therefore I want to hide, which means I'm not going to want to come out and have a conversation with the team. If I feel like, "Hi, I just vomited my work to show you." And then you criticized it in a way that felt like you were saying that my work sucked, it was not good enough. It didn't meet the threshold and that threshold could very well be my own. However, I'm hearing it through that lens of the other, then I am not going to interpret that team as safe and I'm going to go hide and further amplify that lack of safety in the group.

JACOB: And my team members, how can my team members know about that? And if they missed their mark, how can I let them know? So important, and also I feel like the professional world, most professional settings have just no experience with that at all. Like there's just no even concept of that.

MIREILLE: Yeah, and this is why like even interesting with the defense mechanisms that people have. They're there for the purpose of defending, but defense is not designed to score. Defense is designed to protect. And so, going, "How can I make an offensive play while I still feel vulnerable?" And one of the ways is really creating words around it. Again, it doesn't mean I have to sort of blather all of my personal history, but when I can name this dynamic or name what transpired in my mind between me and myself and a coworker, I now provide an opportunity to then exchange or barter that emotional energy and get direct feedback. Again, collateral data to come in to contradict that play my brain is running around whatever creative thing I just did.

JACOB: That's great.

MIREILLE: And that's the hope, that people can cultivate these skills and go, "You know what? I want to practice." Here, I'm just going to put a little bit out. I'm going to dip my toe in the water and say, "Hey, I'm not sure I understood what you meant by the feedback you gave me. Can you give me more clarity around that?"

JACOB: Yeah. Excellent.

MIREILLE: I think that's the other thing that's important in these conversations is that people can have hope that things can change because if I don't feel like what I do or any of my effort results in a modification of how I feel or the interaction that transpired, there's this thing we called learned helplessness, and that basically this conditioning of I'm damned if I do, I'm damned if I don't, I just might as well lie down and not try to stand up and say anything. And that is never going to take you in the direction that you want to go. So practicing these skills and going, "Who or what can help me take that next step?" What is the next thing I could do to help move or maneuver to just buffer some of that negative experience or negative emotion so that I can learn, "Look, look, I made progress. I did that thing. It was hard. I found out. I got other data." And now too, I'm actually building the fabric of this relationship with a team member.

REIN: Yeah, that's really interesting. I do a lot of work with teams to try to do what sort of broadly called continuous improvement. And the very first thing I have to do with the team to be successful is convince them that if we try to change things that they can make things better.

MIREILLE: Yes. And how hard is that?

REIN: It's actually really hard because a lot of them have survival rules around this or they have experiences around changes making things worse.

MIREILLE: And so this is why learning works best when it's embedded in another person's world that they can relate it to. So whenever I'm pitching to patients, I have more of an individualized understanding of sort of what their interests are, who the relationships they have so that when I give an intervention or try to reframe their perspective, I'm actually stitching it in to a previous abstract awareness of what they've already went through. So remember that time when you thought you couldn't do... and then you did...

REIN: Yeah.

MIREILLE: "Oh, you mean I can." And so, I'm trying to help people go look effort -- I want to reinforce for all people all the time, effort over outcome because I'm not solely in charge of outcomes. And that really is the kicker too because I care about outcomes and I want the best possible outcome, but I'm apt to misconstrue my sort of sense of power or ability to change my world if I only focus on the outcome. I mean, I think about it like, I have the large file of parenting to relate to. And so even recently my son was working on doing some coding and it was just this little benign caricature cartoon moving, like how do you move them from one place to another in the screen? And so, putting the line by line. And he would get so frustrated because he thought that it was supposed to go, like it was faster in his brain than what the actual direct code had to do. And so I work really hard to reward and sort of give credence around his effort to develop this sense of resiliency. And that's really what is at the heart of making humans better humans is that when we get knocked down, we get back up because life is always going to throw things at us that we didn't plan on. We didn't have the skills to know how to do, but how can we practice getting back up over and over and over again. That's how we cultivate and sort of optimize for ourselves and our lives and everybody working together. Because while it might not have worked at your other workplace or in that other team or with this other person, look, it did over here with this person in this way on that project. And so, I don't want you to lose that energy surge. I want you to look at where you're directing it and keep going.

REIN: It's interesting that you mentioned resilience specifically because there is an area of practice in the tech industry, but actually more broadly called resilience engineering, which comes from safety science in terms of how do we make it safe to fly planes or how do we make the hospital safe, things like that. And David Woods, who was sort of one of the foundational thinkers defines resilience, sort of in contrast to robustness where robustness is our ability to respond to known stressors. And resilience is our ability to adapt to unknown or unforeseen stressors.

MIREILLE: Yep. And so, one of the things that's critical with that is actually considering where you put your locus of control. Do I believe that my ability to manage my world and my life is inside of me? Or do I believe that it's outside of me and subject to all the other external factors or people? Because that's going to make a difference in how I make plays.

REIN: Yeah.

MIREILLE: And so, resiliency at the heart of it is very much more of this internal locus of control that says, "You know what? That wasn't pleasant. I didn't expect that." But I have the inner resources that when unexpected things emerge that I can figure out who or what can help me move or maneuver to the next step.

REIN: One of the things that's always been really challenging for me with this is that yes, I have agency. Yes, I get to make decisions. But many things are only partially or even completely outside of my control. And I think that really helped me with this is once again, Virginia Satir when she said the problem is never the problem. The way we cope is the problem.

MIREILLE: Oh, so well said. Yes. And I would offer that even if you don't like your options, it doesn't mean they're not choices.

REIN:Yeah. What I take from this is yes, stuff happens. It's outside of my control, but then what do I do?

MIREILLE: Right. I mean, lemonade out of lemons. There's many a times that we learn ways of navigating our life in our world that wasn't through the lane in which we wanted to cultivate that skill. I mean, I think about it like negotiating certain things. When I first started working, I was more contractual. So it was just whenever people came in. I wasn't married at the time, I didn't have another income stream. And so I was like, "I need to pay my rent and I need to be able to feed myself, put gas in my car," all these things. And so having that sort of fluctuation in my income made a difference. And so I then was like, "Hey boss, what can we do here? Is there any way in which we can work this up so that I can just have a little baseline? Like do you have a need that will meet a need that I've got so that we can both work better together?" And lucky for me it worked out well in my first try. But it also then reinforced this go ask, because you don't know if you don't ask.

JACOB: What I'm liking about this is that, or I guess what I'm hearing from this is that my co-workers are not responsible for all of my stuff, but they are responsible for allowing me to have it. Is that a good way to say it?

MIREILLE: Sure. I always talk about it like they participate in it.

JACOB: Sure.

MIREILLE: Because it's more aversive to you and ironically, we're apt to have more difficulty in our responses if whatever it might be like how they're reacting to you, the words they say, the problem that you're trying to navigate feels more upsetting internally to you. So, I can think about it like, if somebody is super inconsiderate of like, "Hey, I need this work. You need to get this to me within the next three hours." And it's like, "Do you not know the other 12 things that need to happen in the next three hours? Like, really?" I have more words than I should use. And so, to practice recognizing that and go, "I want to still give them space," because do I want to go through all of the explanation to assist them in understanding where I'm at so that they can then treat me differently or do I want to just respond to them in the best way that I can in this moment because then I'm putting it back as my own choice. And so I use a lot like, because I'm a word nerd, I love words. And so using the word 'while', while I'm not in charge of others, while they won't stop, while they keep doing this, what am I going to choose to do? How do I want to navigate that if they never do any differently? Say this team member sort of always makes the same errors. They keep doing the same thing despite you're like, "Hey, can you change how you write this code or how you roll this out to the rest of us? Don't just drop it on us within the last five minutes before we have to then talk about it as a group." That doesn't work well for me, but they keep doing it. Because you're not in charge of them, what are you going to choose to do while it might continue to feel abrasive to you? But if we come full circle to where we started and going as iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another, it wasn't how you chose to be sharpened and maybe like, I don't think that felt very good. It doesn't have value.

JACOB: I think if I was a manager and one co-worker said that to another and I realized it didn't get better, I might start to wonder like, "Do I need to say something to that other co-worker?" Because they clearly communicated that and as a manager, I would probably need to intervene in some way.

MIREILLE: Yes. I would say that would be the most functional. However, then we're going to braid back in this concept of family system and that even workplaces have systems. And so not all managers are going to think that it's their problem or their thing to work it out. It's just like a parent who's like, "You could do get out. You figure it out." It doesn't mean it's going to necessarily end well. Everybody has a different way of thinking what play they need to run.

REIN: Yeah. One of the things that's really difficult about this for me is talking about this in a way that doesn't seem to justify people's shitty treatment of other people or structural inequalities. Those things exist and they're not okay or right or good. And saying that we have to decide how we cope doesn't mean that we're saying that those things are okay.

MIREILLE: I couldn't have said it better. And I'm so glad that you highlighted that caveat because I differentiate between acknowledging and giving permission. There's a big difference between acknowledging that somebody has this issue or that, or this is where they're coming from versus saying because you're tired, you get to cuss everybody out. Because you're dealing with a family member with health issues, you can come in and leave whenever you want. It is not a hall pass. Again, while, while this is going on, what can you do? Because I still need you to act like a fundamental human.

REIN: Another way that I look at this is when she says the problem was not the problem, it could be interpreted as, "Oh, that's not really a problem. But what she means more is what she says about anger, which is that anger arises in our brains and often it's for a good reason. But the question is really not, how do we prevent anger from arising in our brains? The question is, that's a thing that happens because we're human and now what do we do with it? What do we do with the mad that we feel? The Fred Rogers thing is very accurate.

MIREILLE: Yes, yes, yes. And that's just it, like differentiating between anger as a fundamental human response. It's a fundamental emotion so nobody gets to like, "Oh, I opted out. I selected no. Thank you."

REIN: No anger for me. Thanks.

MIREILLE: Yeah, but then anger is really a necessary emotion. It conveys this sense of injustice. Or anger is usually what hides fear. There's a lot more power in anger than there is fear if I shrink back and hide.

REIN: She calls it Survival Emotion.

MIREILLE: Well said. Yes, but I want people to practice decoding themselves and really sort of rewriting that code to go, "When I get this signal, what do I do with it?" Instead of just like vomit, anger, rather, "Oh, my blood is rising. I can feel my breathing gets shallower. What can I do in light of that so that I don't lose it? That's why an awareness is super helpful because if I know that there's certain people, dynamics, situations, things that tend to make me more prone, for lack of a better way to say it, to respond or get angry, then I want to go, "Okay, what else can I do before..." I think of it like energy allocation, going, "If I know like one, if I haven't slept, I just have less resources to go about my day." So, I've used the acronym HALT. If I'm hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, I will invariably be a different human. And so, I'd probably be more prone to get angry or react angrily wherever I am simply because I'm those four things. But if I can reallocate and recognize that, then I go, "You know what? I want to be more deliberate about how I spend my time today because I know I just have less emotional resources." So I'm going to even offer that with other people with whom I interface at the workplace. Like, "Hey, today just isn't my day so I'm just going to focus on this thing, this task to get done. And so it's totally not you, but like I just need to stay in my zone today, unless it's urgent or you need me to participate. I just want to advocate for myself in a way that helps me do me well." In the same way when you walk out to your car, do you ask anybody else where they're going or do you just get in your car and go where you plan to go?

REIN: To bring this full circle, that's also a really good example of embodied cognition. So angry seems like a thing that brains do and [inaudible] seems like maybe a combination of brain things and body things. But hungry definitely seems like a body thing, but hungry affects how we think.

MIREILLE: Hungry definitely affects how we think.

REIN: I'm hungry right now.

MIREILLE: [Laughs] Well, they looked at this in terms of willpower. And so, they had people come, they had college students come for this research study and had them not eat some amount of hours before they came in. And then they sat them in a room with a plate of radishes and a plate of cookies. And one group, they said, "Hey, you guys just sit here, don't eat any of these. We'll be back in a little while." And then the next group they're like, "Hey, sit here. You can eat as many radishes as you want but don't eat any of the cookies." And the last group, they just said, "Hey, you guys sit here, you can have as much as you want, but we'll be back." And then they left them for awhile. And then when they came back, they gave them puzzles to solve, cognitive puzzles to work through. And just in line of the order in terms of the food that they could have was how they gave up. Because first off, the puzzles weren't actually solvable, sorry. But then when they ran it that they recognized the people who had used this energy or their will to not eat, couldn't then use that energy to do the puzzles because they'd already used that cognitive load to abstain from engaging in something they wanted. And so, it went down. Then it was like the people who could only eat radishes stayed in longer and the people who could eat whatever they wanted then kept going.

REIN: Access to cognitive resources.

MIREILLE: Well, food is fuel and this is why like even nutrition matters. I could never say everybody needs to eat the same things because that would presume that everybody's body is identical, and it is not.

REIN: And also you said one of the low level things we prioritize is energy.

MIREILLE: Yeah. Well see, emotions at the most fundamental level are energy. We are electric chemical beings, so we have these electrical impulses, chemical exchanges. It is this ongoing bartering of systems, which is why I think tech is so fascinating because that's what you're doing all the time is you're holding something in your mind's eye and manipulating the data to output a different outcome, which is exactly what our body is doing all the time. It's like we live like Garmin, recalculating, recalculating, recalculating. And this is why habits make a difference. Because when I cultivate habits and go, "These are just sort of the fundamentals that I do," I then have that energy to put elsewhere because I don't have to think about it. I'm just running the play. It's not consuming energy in the same way.

JACOB: It sounds like it's a matter of habit. Could you define what you mean by a play?

MIREILLE: Well, a play is sort of, I think of it like a neural route. So it's the route that information travels emits neural networks. And so networks, as you know, we're not just one thing. They're multiple things intersecting. And so they can go a different way. And so neurons operating, they say neurons that fire together, wire together. So the more that these neurons fire together, which much of the time, environment and social relationships play a role in the habits we cultivate or build, that is building this network that says, for example, when I'm the first one in the office, I turn on the lights, I stop the alarm, I check the fax machine, I check my box, and then I go back and I unpack all of my things I brought in to the office. That's the neural, that's a play. So I've practiced that over and over and over again that now when I'm not the first one in the office, I still run that same play because that's what I practiced in action. But the same thing can be in terms of our thoughts. If I'm in a work environment or a relational setting that goes, "Oh, this is who this is," I'm apt to run that cognitive play because it's just what I've built through my experience and other environmental data and just other data itself. It's interesting as we talk because when I talk about the brain, it would be nice if there was a way we could talk about it as though it's simple. And whenever we talk about the brain and people, we have to consider that there's always multiple factors involved at the same time. And so, maybe as we're having this conversation and looking at other people, how might you practice looking for other systems or other data that you see at play that you could actually relate with because that's how you sort of come around and can be compassionate or empathetic to others when they feel incredibly abrasive is if you could see them. Like I mentioned about the tribe and go, "How might I practice seeing them in my mind's eye as though they were a part of the collective whole of my tribe, even if they're not family?"

REIN: Stephen Jay Gould talks about the three -- I have to word this carefully -- the three most important sort of heuristics that can go wrong. Cognitive heuristics - reification, reduction, and mistaking causation with correlation. And they're all sort of at play here. So, reification is taking an abstract thing and making it a concrete thing. A good example of this would be intelligence. This idea that there's this one thing called intelligence and you can measure it and rank it and so on. Then reductionism is taking a more complex thing and coming up with a simpler model of it. And then I think a lot of people know correlation versus causation. But the thing is these are also heuristics we need to operate in the world.

MIREILLE: Right. It's interesting even bringing those up because when I interface with other people, one of the things I'm very considerate of is the language that we use. And so, you come to me with even different language that is assumed or known within your social group or even line of work, which I can move it over into the lane of teaching. And I know my teaching friends and people talk about things like sentence stems. Where in in my field, I would talk about it like I modeled alternative ways that somebody can communicate. And so, thinking of these things going, it might not be helpful in one context. People do this in terms of attribution. So, correlation versus causation. If I think that one thing causes another -- think about it in the sports world -- like I have my lucky charm. I always have my headband or I always have these one pair of shoes because they are what will make me play my game well because we won that game when I wore those shoes.

REIN: But it's also like not, not true because it affects you because cognition is extended.

MIREILLE: Exactly. One of the fascinating things about our brains is even visualization, and that whether we visualize it like we imagine it in our mind's eye or we actually do it, our brain still has to run those same neural network like our supplemental motor cortex, like all of these networks still fire. And so, you're right. They're not, not true, but they also are not always helpful. But this is why being able to differentiate, like we talked about the lions, tigers and bears and saying, "Hey, I recognize the origin of that fear because it was in this location, but now I'm going to move it over here. And in this location, it is not applicable." In the same way my monopoly money works really well when I play monopoly. But if I try to go Christmas shopping with monopoly money, I'm pretty sure nobody would give me what I want.

REIN: So the lucky charm thing is interesting. There's a problem in the epistemology called the Gettier problem, which is you look at a clock and you know what time it is, but it turns out that the clock had stopped and it happened to be stopped at the right time when you looked at it. Do you now know what the time is?

MIREILLE: I love this. These are fascinating questions.

REIN: And so here, you have this lucky charm and it makes you play better for reasons, but the reasons that you have are not the right reasons.

MIREILLE: Yes, exactly. And it's only because ironically, you correlated those things that go together to cause the end result that you desired when instead, this is why when we talk about it like efforts, "If I don't show up to play, there is no way I'm going to win the game." "If I don't show up at my job, there's no way I'm going to have a job." And so we have to practice utilizing these things and going, "What direction am I trying to go?" So how might how I think be helpful over in this lane? Some things are helpful on the home front but might not be so helpful at the work front. I don't want to sit there and blather all of what actually went through my mind to a co-worker in the same way I would to a partner or spouse. And that's a good thing. So I would say really at the heart of this is being able to utilize critical thinking skills and differentiate locations, people, environment, situations, what factors participate in me seeing my world this way, at this time, or in this way. So in what way is the clock helpful to me to see the time in that way right now versus if I looked at it another time and I would be angry that it said that time because now my project isn't going to be completed because that's the time that it needed to be done and it is not done. We can manipulate and distort data all the time.

REIN: I would love to keep talking about this for another hour, but perhaps we should do some reflections. Thinking back to our conversation about what I called congruence, and there's another definition of psychological safety, which is our ability to basically bring our whole selves to work without fear of punishment or reprisal or things like that. And I think about that one a lot more than I think about the interpersonal risk taking one. And by the way, the paper for that one is Psychological Conditions of First Personal Engagement and Disengagement. And I like that one because it actually gives an analytical framework for understanding psychological safety that has components of [inaudible] than sort of psychological safety as it's more generally construed in terms of like interpersonal relationships, in-groups and out-groups, how your managers treat you, things like that. But then also availability of the emotional and psychological resources we need in the moment. And it gives a better framework for actually understanding. So, psychological safety, the problem I have with the psychological safety discourse is that it's a dependent variable or it's a trailing indicator. You can't think of the team as a machine, and then go find the knob on the box that says 'psychological safety' and turn it up. Psychological safety is what happens as a result of all of these other things going well.

And one more. Virginia Satir, there's a mantra that I use as a facilitator that might be helpful for some other people in figuring out how to interact with other people, especially in difficult interpersonal situations, which she says that the important components of practicing congruence are understanding clearly the articulated words, understanding intended meaning, making the abstract concrete and the covert overt, making the hidden obvious, and making the general specific and clarifying its relationship to you, me, here, now, and the specific situation.

MIREILLE: Yes. So good. So good.

JACOB: I'm thinking a lot about how -- I think I've talked about this on this show before, so sorry if this is repetitive. But I've been thinking about how I think one of the biggest problems maybe particularly in the tech industry is that there's sort of like just this brick wall around the concept that we have of feelings. And it's basically just like feelings, work, don't mix, keep them separate. And what I'm thinking about more now from this discussion is about how we also can't just tear down that wall and let the feelings sort of just spray everywhere and just get all over everything and how that can create a huge mess that no one wants to deal with. And then there was a few episodes ago where James Edward Gray talks about how like the advice of 'just be yourself' in the context of interviewing, which he was talking about, is really bad advice because it doesn't really mean anything because the person that we are is completely dependent on, just like you said, like who we are in relation to. So I guess the sort of the image I have in my mind now is like rather than a brick wall, what kind of filter can we put in front of our emotional lives that's appropriate for the professional world, such that the things our co-workers need to know about us and our past can come through so they can work with us as best they can, but also filtering out any of that other stuff that really is better discussed with our loved ones and with our therapists.

MIREILLE: Yes. So well said. I love having conversations around these issues because it really is around being able to see other people as people. And that when we do that, when we sort of lead with this sense of respect around 'this person is not an object' and that most of the time, most of the time people are not trying to do things to actually contribute to making our lives more difficult, but they're doing it because of who they are, what they've been through, and the way in which it makes sense to them to act in that way or do that behavior. And so, I can practice seeing other people through this lens of going, "How can I look at some good intent that they have?" People generally aren't just doing themselves and that when they do that for whatever reason, they might not be considerate of you. Be it they don't have the skills, it might be that they're full, their cognitive load, their emotional load is just too heavy at that point in time. And so, I'm going to extend grace, I'm going to extend to another, that which I would hope that others would give space for me to be as well. And that our struggles don't have to look the same. We don't have to do the same. And I definitely don't want people to be the same as me in the same way, I don't want to go listen to a symphony with only woodwind. I need all aspects, all instruments, and I need the person to come before the product or the output if I really want that to be the best that it can be because all of us are different. And so in the same way a school class would all be given a template to say, "Hey, draw a bear." People are not going to draw the same bear in the same way, and that's what makes our world beautiful. But it's really hard to see other people when I put my expectations upon them and force them to fit in a box that I created.

REIN: Well, I think that's a good way to close the show. Well, thank you so much for joining us.

MIREILLE: Yes, thank you both. I always appreciate hearing more and having dialogue because Jacob, especially what you said about being this wall in the tech world in terms of emotions. I don't want it to be a binary thing then like walk around, spread it all.

JACOB: Yeah. No, no, no, no. And I'll tell you, I used to work in a different industry and I had a workplace where it was like that. I mean in tech, there's this concept of like we're all family and what that often means is like, "You're going to work for us all the time, whenever we say, at this place." This was in the education world. So, it was very different. They had this concept of we're all family. And what that meant is that we're all going to have family therapy when we're having a department meeting.

MIREILLE: Oh, gosh.

JACOB: Yeah. And the department chair is going to be mom. [Laughs] It's sort of like has the most power, right? So, I have had experience like that and it definitely can be used to manipulate people. It can definitely be a source of burnout.

REIN: I've never seen a corporate value that can't be twisted or co-opted to hurt the workers.

MIREILLE: Yeah, and that's what kills me is really that we could all do it better. But if I don't have an awareness or really even see that other people hold value inherently, I mean, this is why we don't do testing on people. We start with rats. There's a human subjects review board that says, "Okay, that's not actually going to hurt another human," because we see them as valuable.

REIN: Yeah. [Crosstalk] It's also one of the reasons that interviewing is so hard because there's no substitute for seeing how actual people actually treat each other in real situations.

MIREILLE:Yeah. But I think a lot of people are simply unskilled. I mean, not everybody has language around certain things. And even with my kids, I ask them why they do certain things. They're not reflecting yet because their frontal lobe doesn't facilitate that function in the same sort of way. And so when I asked them, it was awesome. I asked my son who's eight, I said, "Why'd you do that?" And he's like, "My brain told me to."

[Laughs]

JACOB: My two-year old doesn't understand the word why. I just instinctually will say something like, "All right, why did you do that?" And he'll say, "I did it."

MIREILLE: [Laughs] I love it. But so, other people really just do it and they don't necessarily think, and everybody is just doing their lane in their way. And unless there's really space to talk about it and not like a sort of 'kumbaya, let's have family therapy at work' thing, but just literally a mental working model that another person has a whole background. And that the more experiences I have with that person, the more I build a 3D model of that individual so I can recognize how to pitch when I'm interfacing with them. And so in team building things are going, "Hey, you pulled back every time this person talks," they might say, "It's the tone of their voice or they just come across really loud." Or the words that they use just are really confusing to me. So I back up like, "What?" But unless that person articulates it, I wouldn't know.

REIN: And they may not know that they're doing it.

MIREILLE: Yeah. And so I'm not giving feedback to vilify another person. I'm so about growth and just getting better. And if we could make our workplace better, who doesn't want to put out a good product, who doesn't want to have good feelings when they go to work because it's workable?

REIN:Okay. We're just going to keep doing this forever.

MIREILLE: [Laughs] I know.

JACOB: It could go on for awhile. [Chuckles]

MIREILLE: Well, I really appreciate you guys giving me the opportunity to come on and share. And so, thank you for what you do and inviting me in.

JACOB: Yeah, thank you.

REIN: Yeah, it was great. And I'm going to go check out your podcast now.

JACOB: Yeah, same.

REIN: You want to remind everyone what your podcast is?

MIREILLE: Sure. Well, you guys can find me over with Adam Stacoviak on the Changelog. We're at Brain Science. And so, we're not just about what the brain does, but rather how what we know about the brain impacts what we do and how we live our lives so that everybody can be their best self.