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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Appearances
And you know, I've actually heard you use this on prior podcasts and you weren't even aware of it.
So can you think about times when you might have coached yourself through a problem using your own name and you?
Yeah, there you go.
You just did distance self-talk. So distance self-talk involves using your name and you to typically silently coach yourself through a problem. You could do it out loud, but if you do it out loud, you want to be aware of who's listening because it violates social norms, not only to talk to ourselves out loud, but use our own name to do it. We talked before and you've talked before about
how much better we are at giving advice to other people than we are taking that advice ourselves. A little factoid there, there's actually a name for that phenomenon that we've studied this in my lab. It's called Solomon's Paradox.
Named after the Bible's King Solomon. Here, I'm going to give you another pop quiz. Don't get nervous.
No, I think you will. I think you will. So what was King Solomon famous for? Being? A king? Being wise.
He was a wise guy. So King Solomon, like super wise individual. People would travel from all over the world to receive his counsel. But when you look at his own life, he made a slew of terrible decisions. This is true of humanity. Like when I ask audiences, hey, you're much better at giving advice to others and taking that advice yourself, every hand in the room goes up.
When you use distance self-talk, what it's doing is you're using language to automatically shift your perspective, to put you into this, I'm talking to someone else advice giving mode. Think about the word you. The word you is the verbal equivalent of pointing a finger at someone else. Most of the time we use the word you when we're thinking about or referring to another person.
That's exactly right. You're putting yourself into this coach advice giving mode. And what did we say earlier? We don't say to our friends the things that we say to ourselves when we get stuck in that chatter. So when you use your own name and you to coach yourself through a problem, it's like it's putting guardrails up on your self-talk that prevents you from going down that more negative route.
Ethan, all people make mistakes. You've made mistakes before. You've learned from them and you'll be fine.
Rather than I'm such an idiot. I mentioned before we started filming that I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. And although you may not hear the accent right now, in my mind, when I go into the chatter zone, it's a filthy sometimes interberatement. And so I'm not doing that when I'm in distant self-talk mode.
So really what we see happening is you get into this more challenge mode. I can manage this. I can do it. As opposed to being in what we call threat mode. I can't manage this. I'm going to screw up. So another example would be one of my favorites from a study was someone was thinking about having to plan a huge event for someone and it was really, really stressful. You can do this.
You can manage this retirement party for this person and get a great turnout. People are going to come and they're going to love it. You've got this. You know, in my book, I actually, I share an artifact from Mr. Rogers. Remember Mr. Rogers? He was the- Really? Wow. There is some cosmic connection that led me to bring this up.
So Mr. Rogers in my mind is the human equivalent of a warm cup of tea on a rainy afternoon, right? Just kind of soothing. And there was this moment where he had taken some time off from filming his show and then he was about to come back and he was racked with chatter, racked with self-doubt. And he journaled a little bit about it.
And he's, you know, it's how can I possibly live up to expectations? I've been gone and I'll never be good enough. And then at a particular moment in that essay, he switches. He starts using distant self-talk, essentially. You've got this, the hour have come. You're going to do a great job and so forth and so on. It's in the book.
And it's just remarkable because you see the entire tenor of the conversation shift. when he goes into this distant self-talk mode.
Yeah, so rituals in popular culture get a bad rap because we often equate them with certain forms of anxiety. And there are those links that do exist where you have people who are suffering from anxiety conditions become really over-reliant on a ritual to a point where it can be harmful. But a ritual in the right proportions can be quite helpful. I often call them ancient chatter fighting tools.
So if you think about it, are you religious in any way or? Very spiritual person. Okay, very spiritual person. So I'm sure that there are certain spiritual rituals that you've been exposed to. Grieving rituals, right? Religions around the world have been like, well, let's just stop for a second. Let's pause for a second. Take the loss of someone.
This is like a real chatter challenge for a lot of people. Like their worldview is shattered now. How are they going to go on without this person that they love, that they care about? Religions have identified, hey, that might be a really hard time that people are dealing with. Let's give them a tool to manage that situation. It's a grieving ritual. So here's what we know about rituals.
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