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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yeah well put um you know you just get psych phd here we come um oh there was uh there's actually uh this famous artist i think his name was hunder hunderwasser some i'm butchering the name but his artistic style was characterized by an aversion to straight lines he thought they encroached on his creativity and when i'm when i'm in it when i'm like writing and trying to be creative like
The office is a total mess. The only time my office is clean is when I'm having a little spell of rumination about something. That's when I put things away nice and orderly. That speaks to the flexibility of our minds and how closely tethered they are to our surroundings. Again, once you know about these principles, it allows you to be less reactive and more strategic. What do I mean by that?
Earlier in life, I would organize and clean up when I was stressed out. I didn't know why. Now, when I find the rumination just beginning to percolate, I immediately start cleaning and organizing. I get in there right away. So the amount of time between the trigger and my intervention has shortened quite a bit based on what I know about how these tools work.
Okay, so relationship shifters. Let me give you three take-homes here for how to harness your relationships with other people. There are lots of ways other people can affect us, obviously. We are a social species. One is when you go to them to talk about your problems... you've got to be careful about who you choose to talk to about your problems because they can either help you or harm you.
And sometimes the harm comes even when they're really well-intentioned. What do I mean by this? Lots of people think that the best way to provide support for someone else is just to let them vent about their emotions. What we have learned about venting is venting is good for strengthening the relational bonds between people. Good to know that someone else has your back.
They're willing to hear you out, empathize with you. The problem with venting is if that is all you do, you leave the conversation, you feel tight about your relationship with that other person, the problem is still there. The best kinds of conversations do two things. You talk to someone who first gives you this opportunity to express your feelings. They listen, they engage, they empathize.
But then at a certain point in the conversation, they start working with you to broaden your perspective. they're in an ideal position to help you do that. Problem isn't often happening to them. There's an art to doing this well. So if you're now the person that someone is coming to, seeking support, you start off and, you know, like, what's going on? Tell me about it. Oh, it sounds terrible.
When you see your opening, you know, sometimes, hey, I have a thought. Can I share it with you? Sometimes they might say, no, I'm not done. And then they keep going, right? And other times it's like, yeah, tell me, what do you think?
So you want to be delicate with that because depending on the person, what they're struggling with, some people need to do a little bit more of that emotional work first.
So we want to do both though, right? We want to follow that trajectory. First, the emotional stuff, then the cognitive. The amount of time you need in that emotional zone is going to vary. But now we've just given folks a blueprint for both how to find people to provide them with the best kind of support
And if someone comes to them, here's a roadmap that they can follow to give other people good support. How contagious are emotions? Unbelievably contagious. They can spread within seconds, which is why you should be incredibly alert to folks on your team who may be experiencing emotions immediately.
That if if they spread might not be conducive to the broader to the broader group you know why does this happen why are emotions contagious because in particular when we're in circumstances that we're not quite sure. What we should feel? Other people are a pretty good source of information. So we're constantly referencing other people for info about what the situation is like.
And we're using that information to inform our own reaction. So you get these contagiousness effects a lot where it's not certain how you should feel. And you're more likely to be... infected i guess is the well let's stick with the metaphor um when it's it's someone who is at your level or above your level someone that you um just in in the hierarchy you're more vulnerable to that interesting
Yeah. So you want to pay attention to contagion. And you can use this as a tool as well. You can affect, hopefully positively, other people by trying to come in there with the right kind of attitude that you think is conducive to the goals that you have, if it's a workplace environment or even in your home. Yeah.
Another important way that people can shift us that I think is important to point out has to do with social comparisons. So we often hear that we should not compare ourselves to other people. You've heard this before, yes? Comparison, thief of joy, yeah. Thief of joy, right? Like I'm on the record. It's in print. I've said this to my kids at times. Yeah.
And it's probably the worst advice I've ever given because social comparisons are how we work. They're part of how we make sense of our standing in the world. We reference other people to gain some insight into where we are on dimensions that don't have clear standards. If you want to understand how successful you are in life,
You're going to look to your surroundings and other people to draw an inference about that. And that's true of lots of different qualities that we care a great deal about. So number one, I think the challenge here is not to stop comparing yourself to other people. Because we're going to always be doing that at some level.
But it's to understand how you can benefit the most from engaging in those comparisons. And I want to share with you two shifts here that I have found to personally be game-changing. So I inevitably will come across a profile of someone in my network who is outperforming me on some dimension that I care about. And the instant trigger that is out of my control is, ugh.
oh my god i'm a failure you know like look at the size of their h index look at how many bucks they sold last month there you go you know all my triggers right and um and that could be my default which is an envy reaction it is not an emotion that feels great but i can reframe it and i can use that comparison to be a source of motivation wait a second They were able to do this. They're like me.
That means I could probably do something like that. So now I've taken a comparison that initially is a source of envy and it's associated negative feelings and I've reframed it to be a source of motivation now.
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