Dan Harris

A friend of mine, a really smart friend of mine, her name is Dolly Chug, and she's a professor at NYU School of Business.

And she has this expression,

And that actually has been a key unlock for me.

So many of us have a story that we're a good person or a bad person, but when we get feedback, we get defensive because it either reminds us that we think we're a bad person or it challenges our core belief that we're a good person.

And so that's the wellspring of defensiveness.

If, however, you change your self-concept to good-ish – which, by the way, it just makes complete sense.

We're all a mix of good and bad.

But if you change your self-concept to good-ish, well, then when you find out you screwed up and you're not as chill –

in the hallways of NPR as you thought you were, well, then, okay, well, that's fine.

It's not fundamentally threatening because I'm good-ish.

And so there's always room to grow.

It's what the psychologists call a growth mindset.

And so talking to Dolly about that was one of the things that really turned things around for me.

I love the idea of good-ish mindset.

It's interesting to try to teach your kids that.

That's where I'm at right now is like talking about the good-ish of human nature and that we're all good and bad.

And it's a complicated concept actually to wrap your head around because so much of parenting and so much of like children's literature and storytelling is about the good and the bad and they are separate and distinct characters.

And it's like next level to think about

Oh, it lives in all of us.

And what do we choose to lean into and what is activated and what are our triggers for each of those components?