Emily Falk

So we can disagree with someone else without being defensive, right?

We can be curious about their position.

We can learn about what their motivations are.

We can even potentially get on the same page about a number of different things

without automatically conceding our position or automatically changing what we're doing in our day-to-day life.

I think that Isabel's question and comment highlight something that's really important about the ways that we take feedback on board for things that might be very important to us versus things that might be less important to us.

So research from Brent Hughes's lab has looked at the way that we construct our sense of self, and there's kind of a hierarchy

where some of them are much more core to our sense of who we are, maybe thinking about the ways that we're kind or honest or loyal to our friends and family.

Those things might be more core, and other kinds of things might be more peripheral, the things that are more specific or less of the most important values to us.

And in his team's research, what they found is that when people were given feedback about their performance on a particular task from supposedly a group of experts, first, people were much quicker to take on board the positive feedback than the negative feedback.

So when they said, wow, this person looks like they're really smart or this person looks like they're really funny or really engaging.

then that's easier to say, wow, I didn't think of myself as somebody who is a particularly engaging speaker, but I guess if this audience thinks I am, if this set of evaluators thinks I am, then that must be true.

And on average, for the typical person in the study,

they were a little bit more hesitant to take on board that negative input.

So that was particularly true for people who came into the study with higher self-esteem and lower levels of depression.

And so, you know, Isabel's story makes me think a little bit about some of those people

base differences in how we're navigating our day-to-day lives, where if we're finding that it's very easy for us to absorb other people's negative evaluations, that might be a situation where we want to take a step back and figure out if we could get some support to bolster our own sense of self, our own sense of self-esteem and well-being, because that could be a flag.

What Soma's describing sounds a lot to me like mindfulness.

So the idea that we can notice what's happening, kind of like we notice the weather, and that we can accept it in a non-reactive way or even with a somewhat distanced perspective like we've been talking about.

And Soma's friend's experience of navigating terminal diagnosis and illness is a really beautiful story.