Dr. Ethan Kross
speaker
968 appearances
6 recordings
6 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Dr. Ethan Kross’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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One of the things he reported doing as he was trying to navigate this terrifying moment where this fire is raging and might spell the end of him and his fellow cosmonauts is he starts coaching himself through the problem using his name and you. So he starts using distant self-talk. in, in a moment of heightened stress.
And there are lots of illustrations of this, um, few Wimbledon's ago, uh, Jovovic when he was, um, early on during the tournament was getting, uh, getting beat pretty badly by, um, by an opponent, he takes a break, goes to the bathroom and comes out of the bathroom and he's just like a bat out of hell. And he like demolishes his opponent wins.
I think he went on to win the entire tournament after that. And after the, after the match, someone asked him, Hey, you know, like what happened in the bathroom? Um, when he took a break and he's like, I coached myself through the problem. I gave myself advice. I said, you can do it. The match isn't over. You got this.
It was like textbook case of using this tool to coach himself through the problem. Tons of examples of this. Malala Yousafzai talking about dealing with the threat of the Taliban reported doing this too.
Well, I love that. It's a perfect illustration. And it does seem on the one hand, yeah, but we're talking to ourself. But let's think about for a moment the things we sometimes say to ourself when we're struggling. We say things to ourself. We think things about ourself that we would never dare offer to another human being, let alone someone we want to succeed. My buddy comes to me.
My daughters come to me. My wife comes to me with a problem. Like, I'm giving them the most constructive advice I possibly can. It doesn't mean I'm always being unrealistic with them and telling them, but I'm trying to always support them to the best extent possible.
You suck. Why even? I would never do that. Yet. Oftentimes, lots of people default to doing that with themselves. And so by switching the pronouns that we're using to refer to ourselves and using our name even, it's automatically putting us into this more constructive advice giving mode. And it's a simple thing to do. It's what I love about so many of these tools. If you know what they are, boom.
I mean, how long does it take me to think, all right, Ethan, how are you going to feel about this next week?
And it's a blend. We don't know enough about blends either, but I blend the two together quite frequently. So we just covered like the three, what I call internal shifters, sensation, attention, and perspective. And there are lots of tactics within those. These are things that you could do wherever you are. You have those tools within you. But then here's the beauty of the human condition.
We also have these shifters around us in our relationships with other people, in our physical environments and in our cultures. And those are even more places that you could find resources to help yourself.
You know, I think you do get deep change, um, with some of these tools. Um, you know, and I think, um, it obviously varies person to person by circumstances, but the sensory experiences, I think you get really deep, deep shifts. They may not be long lasting, those sensory shifts, but sometimes a temporary reprieve is what we need to then either use another tool or get back on track. Um,
Just think about the sweaty Muay Thai fighter. I mean, that's a deep experience, emotional experience, I'm guessing you had or you've had when that occurs. Likewise, with attention, being able to divert your attention away from something that's bothering you onto a really immersive alternative experience is you can think of attention as your mental spotlight. Like, what are you looking at, right?
If you change what you're looking at from something that is causing distress to something that is causing maybe the opposite, This is going to change that emotional experience. Perspective, in some ways, I think that's the shifter that lends itself most vulnerable to the critique that you just offered. But let's not misinterpret that vulnerability as an indictment as to the power of that tool.
In many ways, it might be one of our most precious tools. So- When we've got to look at something really hard and now reframe it, right? It's very hard to take something that is a giant negative and make it a giant positive. We don't see that happening very often. What we do see happening is taking something that is negative and reframing it to make it more manageable.
Being able to do that, that is not like the fact that we don't take it to be a super positive, like the loss of a loved one or an immense rejection. I think that's impractical. And I think there are probably good reasons why you wouldn't want to be able to do that. I have come across certain people in my life, and I'm speaking from anecdote here, who were exceptionally adept at
almost pathologically so, at reframing a really, really bad thing, just totally positive. And as a result, they didn't actually learn from that experience. I've been around those people too. Right. And so I think you do want to have some safeguards on our ability to reinterpret things.
You would never experience them because we do have this motivation to avoid pain. So then you would live a life free of it and you would be robbed in your term. So like the example I like to give people that really I think resonates is physical pain. Most of us try to minimize the experience of physical pain. We're motivated to avoid pain. I'm a great example of it. I do not like physical pain.
Giant baby at the doctor, all these things. All right, well, what if we're successful? We never experience physical pain. We can actually look at people who never experience physical pain because there are people born into this world who are incapable of having that experience due to a genetic anomaly. What happens to those people is they die young.
because their hand gets caught in the stove and they don't experience a cue to tell them to pull it out, right? So we want to be able to have these negative experiences because they have a functionality to them. What we don't want to have happen is keeping our hand in the stove or like a hypersensitivity to pain. That's the emotions getting triggered too greatly.
So have I quieted the critique yet?
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