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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Like that makes what you're dealing with just feel a little bit more insignificant. And when we shrink ourselves in that way, our problems shrink too. So I will often weaponize this by going for walks in the local arboretum when I'm really struggling with something. And it inevitably helps. It's like, what am I worried about this?
Like when there are so many more things happening in the universe, like, come on, let's get back into gear.
That's right.
That's right.
Okay, so let's enter into the rapid fire part of the conversation. Sensory experiences, tremendously underutilized tool. I was blind to this up until relatively recently in my life when my daughter was in a terrible mood, was bumming me out. And One of the great songs of all time came on the radio in the car or iPad, whatever you call it nowadays. Journeys don't stop believing.
And everyone got excited and happy in the car. Music effortlessly shifts our emotions. You can use this yourself. You can use it to shift other people's emotions. All of the senses shift. are useful tools to shift our emotions.
Since I'm staying at a hotel not far from here, the moment I walked into the hotel, I was awash with this pleasant scent that the hotel has been piping through the ventilation system to make the patrons feel comfortable. We spritz ourselves with chemicals to make ourselves feel good and make other people feel good. Our senses are powerful tools.
Let's talk about other people though, because other people I think are really important. And it touches back to this problem where sometimes you go to other people and we push them away. So how do you find other people in your life to actually help you when it comes to your chatter? or the big emotions you're experiencing. I call these our chatter advisors. How do you find your chatter advisors?
You want to look for people who do two things. There are two key steps to providing good chatter support. Step one, you want to listen, empathize, validate, connect with the person. Lots of big terms there, but what I mean is you want to be there emotionally for that person. I want to learn about what you're going through. I really would like to know. what set you off at 5 a.m. the other day?
Tell me about it. Terrible. I've been there too. Genuinely connecting. What that does is it helps satisfy the person who's suffering these needs they have to feel connected. Once I do that, Then I want to shift into this kind of advice or cognitive mode. So, all right, now we're connected. You can rely on me, but the problem's still there. Let's try to look at it.
And as someone who is not going through the problem myself, I'm in a great position to help put it in perspective for you. Those are the two steps to providing good chatter support. And you would be amazed at how frequently people who are exceptionally well-intentioned don't follow those two steps. There are two ways it breaks down.
Number one, some people think that their job is just give you a sounding board to let it out. Just keep going, right? There's value in that, in connecting and learning. But if that's all we do in a conversation, it can lead to what we call co-rumination. Now we're just kind of bathing ourselves in the problem together.
And as a function, we often leave the conversation feeling connected, but the problem's still there. That doesn't work. The other thing that doesn't work, you come to me with a problem and within five seconds, Mel, this is simple. I wrote a paper on this. Here's what you need to do. Just do A, B, C, D. You'll be fine. Call me in the morning. We call those people jerks, right? Or Mel Robbins.
I doubt that. And so you really want to follow both of those steps in that order. Listen and then advise. There's an art to doing that well. I'll use my wife here as an example. Is she going to kill you? She might kill me, but it's okay. We love each other. So if my wife came to me with a problem that she was experiencing some chatter about, I
I would immediately start listening, empathizing, connecting. And when I sensed that she had gotten it out and I really understood the problem, I would ask her for permission. I'd be like, hey, I totally get it. I have a thought. Do you want to keep going or can I share it with you? Sometimes the way that she'll answer that question is, no, I'm not done. Just let me keep going.
And then I let her keep going and then I come back to it. At other moments, it'll be, yes, please. What do you think? Let's help me. And so what I love about this framework that I essentially just described that we just talked about is it gives me guideposts for how to steer this conversation.
When someone comes to me, my wife, my friend, my students, whoever, there are these two steps that I follow in the same sequence each time. Step one is I'm there to empathize and connect, listen and learn. Step two, now I'm going to try to help work with the person to broaden their perspective. So this has happened to you before. How'd you deal with it last time?
Or, you know, something like this happened to me and here's what I did. Simple ways for broadening perspective. Like a couple of questions like that you ask, it often... helps the person find the answer. I will often ask people to do a chatter advisor audit. So I'll have people like divide their world into personal and professional.
And then I asked them to list all the names of the people they go to, to talk about the chatter when it erupts. Then I'll explain to them how this art of chatter advising that we've just gone over, that the key to being a good advisor is to empathize, listen, and then Shift into that advising and I'll have them circle the names of the people on their list who do both of those things.
And I have them cross out the names of the people who don't. The people whose names you circle, that's your advisory board. And it's not always the people that you're closest to.
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