Shade Zahrai

When a lot of people experience trauma, they also experience PTSD, post-traumatic stress, right?

And so there's this very clear correlation, extreme trauma, PTSD.

But there is also a very large body of people who don't experience PTSD.

They experience post-traumatic growth.

They grow from the experience.

And the defining factor for them is one quality, and that is curiosity.

They choose to be curious about the experience, about how they're feeling about the experience, about what it could be teaching them or how it could be strengthening them.

And I think that is so beautiful because curiosity is something we can bring

to every situation every interaction in fact one of the things i love about curiosity so max let's say you're having an interaction okay let's say i walked in here today and i was a little bit rude when you met me you might conclude gosh she's arrogant gosh she's rude gosh she's up herself and you've made an assessment about me and my personality based on a very small interaction

What you may not have known is that right before I came into that interaction, I just found out that my son was in hospital.

I don't have kids, but I'm just, for illustrative purposes, my son is in hospital because he broke his arm or I just got evicted or my house burned down or my husband's been cheating on me, right?

We don't know what happened immediately before the interaction that we have, but we assume that that is all there is.

It's called WASIATI.

It's called, Dan Kahneman has come up with this term WASIATI, which sounds like a different language, but it's an acronym for what you see is all there is.

And it's this bias that the brain has.

We want to draw conclusions based on a very short interaction.

And I see this most common with people.

Your barista is rude.

You make all these assessments about his personality, but that barista is having a really hard day.

The previous customer just abused him on the spot or was racist or whatever, right?