Speaker 1: She said, it's now never.
Speaker 2: I got fighting in my blood.
Speaker 1: I'm tiff.
Speaker 3: This is Roll with the Punches and we're turning life's
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Speaker 1: See Perry, welcome to Roll with the Punches. Thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 3: I thought i'd open the door for the listeners to
Speaker 3: come in because we've gotten online and we've been chat
Speaker 3: chat chat chat chatting, and I'm loving it already, and
Speaker 3: I was like, oh.
Speaker 1: We probably should do a podcast. Yeah, definitely, definitely. How
Speaker 1: are you over there?
Speaker 4: In?
Speaker 1: Was it Norville, South Carolina? South Carolina? See, I'm pretty
Speaker 1: proud that I could remember that already. I am. I
Speaker 1: am impressed. I don't know places in Australia at all.
Speaker 1: So you're ahead of me.
Speaker 3: Film and that's the only one you need to know,
Speaker 3: and that's the coolest place to be.
Speaker 1: There you go, Box, There you go.
Speaker 3: I've been really excited to talk to you because I've
Speaker 3: been thinking and talking and obsessing a lot and starting
Speaker 3: to get really into the psychology and concept of courage.
Speaker 3: Resilience was a bit of a rant that I was
Speaker 3: going on, but it seems to be intersecting for me
Speaker 3: with courage, and I'm developing a real interest in I
Speaker 3: like to take the simple memes and if you don't
Speaker 3: mind me swearing bullshit and las answers and magic pills
Speaker 3: out there, that is people saying I can be resilient,
Speaker 3: do hard work? Do these do that be five seconds
Speaker 3: of courage with no context. I'm like, well, five seconds
Speaker 3: of courage. It's all well and good, but what the
Speaker 3: fuck is that?
Speaker 1: Yeah? And how do you and how do you get there?
Speaker 1: You know, it's it's you know, it's one thing to
Speaker 1: say like I can recognize it when it's happening, versus
Speaker 1: it's another thing to be like, I'm going to go
Speaker 1: do this thing now. And that's a that's a very
Speaker 1: different experience and they In our research, we're finding that
Speaker 1: there there's a difference between whether you're going to take
Speaker 1: a courageous action and whether you're going to call something
Speaker 1: that you're seeing or even that you see in yourself
Speaker 1: in the past, courageous. So in my theory, all of
Speaker 1: courage comes down to taking a worthwhile risk. So it's
Speaker 1: a situation where a person is aware of some kind
Speaker 1: of a risk. There's a thing a person wants to do,
Speaker 1: and there's some kind of a risk they have to
Speaker 1: take to do the thing. The question is is it worthwhile?
Speaker 1: Is it worth doing? And you have to add the
Speaker 1: worthwhile part to it because otherwise you end up with
Speaker 1: situations where people doing some ridiculous TikTok challenge is courageous
Speaker 1: and it's like thank you, not really, not really, And
Speaker 1: the people are more likely to say something's courageous and
Speaker 1: more likely to do the courageous thing when the goal
Speaker 1: is very clearly worthwhile, is very clearly important to you,
Speaker 1: or good or valuable or societally lauded or something like that,
Speaker 1: but the risk runs the opposite direction in the two
Speaker 1: different forms, the higher the perceived risk, the more likely
Speaker 1: you are to say the action is courageous up to
Speaker 1: a point where the risk overwhelms how good the goal is.
Speaker 1: But the more risky something is, the less likely you
Speaker 1: are to actually do it. So we call the two
Speaker 1: different kinds of courage accolade courage and process courage. So
Speaker 1: accolade courage is calling the thing courageous. Process courage is
Speaker 1: do you do the thing. Accolade courage is increased when
Speaker 1: the action seems riskier or when you build up the risk,
Speaker 1: and process courage is decreased when you build up the risk.
Speaker 1: So it's already so yeah. So a really great example
Speaker 1: of that is I saw a thing online the other
Speaker 1: day that Monty Python in The Holy Grail is fifty
Speaker 1: years old, and if your listeners are familiar with that
Speaker 1: movie at all, there's a character in it named Sir Robin.
Speaker 1: And not to give away too many spoilers or anything,
Speaker 1: it's a delightful old movie if you have a chance
Speaker 1: to see it. But this Sir Robin character is one
Speaker 1: of the knights who's seeking the Holy Grail, and he
Speaker 1: has a minstrel who follows after him talking about brave, brave, brave,
Speaker 1: Sir Robin. But Sir Rabin's minstrel just follows him around
Speaker 1: talking about how he's not afraid to be killed in
Speaker 1: nasty ways, and then proceeds to delineate all the nasty
Speaker 1: ways in which Sir Robin might die. And of course
Speaker 1: Sir Robyn does not find this encouraging and chickens out.
Speaker 1: And it is a peak professional moment for me that
Speaker 1: I'm able to quote Monty Python in professional settings. So
Speaker 1: you know, life goal achieved, but there is it's funny
Speaker 1: because there's some truth to it. So if you are
Speaker 1: telling someone I see you have a you have a
Speaker 1: boxing career, yes, yes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yes, my background he's boxing, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: So if if I'm your coach and I'm going to say, Tiff,
Speaker 1: you're super super brave for going up against her. She
Speaker 1: is so tough, you know, the last person she put,
Speaker 1: the last person in a hospital, You're so freaking brave
Speaker 1: to go in there. Like, that's not really the pep
Speaker 1: talk that you need. You need the pep talk of
Speaker 1: you've got this right, You've got this, Your training's going
Speaker 1: to kick in, you know, get her do this. You know,
Speaker 1: here's some professional technical advice that I have for you,
Speaker 1: based on my knowledge of boxing, which for me is nothing.
Speaker 1: But you know, here's what you want to do that's
Speaker 1: going to be helpful. It's in the it might be
Speaker 1: helpful at the end. It might make you feel good
Speaker 1: at the end if I say, wow, you were so
Speaker 1: brave in there. But if I if I lead with
Speaker 1: that before you go into the ring, you're going to
Speaker 1: be like, well, I don't want to know how tough
Speaker 1: she is. I don't want to know that she's probably
Speaker 1: going to briecklay nose. I don't want to know that
Speaker 1: right now. Thanks.
Speaker 3: So, yeah, it's like you've listened in on some of
Speaker 3: I've got a brutal boxing coach.
Speaker 1: I'm not fighting anymore. But like one of one of
Speaker 1: the last.
Speaker 3: Times I was fighting under him, and i'd had a
Speaker 3: break and I was coming back, and the pep talk
Speaker 3: that day was so you're fighting and I'd had I'd
Speaker 3: had bugger all training. I was like, I'd gone in
Speaker 3: and I said, I want to start training, but I
Speaker 3: can't fight because I'm about to open two brand.
Speaker 1: New gyms, so I'm very busy.
Speaker 3: And that went from I walked in at week three
Speaker 3: and he goes, you're fighting on whatever whatever I've made
Speaker 3: and I was like, okay, right, so that's how he rolls,
Speaker 3: and that was that was his tact was you're fighting it,
Speaker 3: you're fighting an ex Commonwealth Games Chicken. I'm like, and
Speaker 3: I never but I wouldn't know. I was like, you
Speaker 3: do everything to get a rise out of me. I
Speaker 3: don't know whether that's true or not.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. But it's not building
Speaker 1: up how incredibly risky this is. It's instead like I
Speaker 1: hear you say that, and I mean I wasn't there,
Speaker 1: but I hear you say that, and it sounds like
Speaker 1: it's the sort of thing that's meant to be motivating,
Speaker 1: Like I have faith that you can do this. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: My curiosity I think first started around this area when
Speaker 3: so I was twenty nine, when I had my first fight,
Speaker 3: and I was a bit of a gung ho.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, oh do this look at me?
Speaker 3: And I had this facade of look at like of
Speaker 3: who I was at the time, with a fair lack
Speaker 3: of self awareness that I now have when I reflect back,
Speaker 3: and so I look at now, I look back at
Speaker 3: that and I go, that was a girl who was
Speaker 3: doing everything that she could to do the things that
Speaker 3: other people were scared of and called and curR and
Speaker 3: believed it was courage.
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, people are.
Speaker 3: Scared of this pool And it was only the penny
Speaker 3: only dropped when people kept asking are you're scared of
Speaker 3: being punched in the face? That's crazy? And I was like,
Speaker 3: that's a bit crazy. I'm not really scared of that.
Speaker 3: What am I scared of? And then it's like, okay, well,
Speaker 3: what is courage if it's because because we paint pictures
Speaker 3: of courage and then we believe it and it's not true.
Speaker 3: And also it can be reckless.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, and I think and that's that's where the
Speaker 1: worthwhile goal comes in. And so if you imagine two
Speaker 1: people running into a burning building to save a baby,
Speaker 1: so that's a really good goal, right, and one person
Speaker 1: is really afraid to run into that burning building and
Speaker 1: the other person's a little less afraid to run into
Speaker 1: that building. They both are heroes, and they both are
Speaker 1: are are lauded as being courageous, even though it kind
Speaker 1: of took more for the one person to do it
Speaker 1: than the other. And there's some of the early research
Speaker 1: in psychology by Jack Rafman on courage looked at the
Speaker 1: fear proneness of people who were decorated bomb disposal operators
Speaker 1: and found that they were not they experienced less fear
Speaker 1: than other people, and so he's like, well, maybe they're
Speaker 1: not courageous, maybe they're fearless. And I'm like, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I feel like that's not how we talk about it,
Speaker 1: and that's not how we think about it as a society.
Speaker 1: And that got me headed down the road of thinking
Speaker 1: about like this difference between what it takes to do
Speaker 1: the action and what the action and how it looks
Speaker 1: to the outside. And there are some situations in which
Speaker 1: someone can be incredibly courageous, but it's really only career,
Speaker 1: just just for them. So any sort of like personal
Speaker 1: fear that you have that's more specific to you is
Speaker 1: going to take more accolade courage for you to do. Now,
Speaker 1: does that mean that I think you deserve a metal
Speaker 1: for it? Not necessarily, but maybe just within your own self,
Speaker 1: you can be like, oh, I was really afraid to
Speaker 1: speak in public, or I was really afraid to ask
Speaker 1: for a raise, or I was really afraid to ask
Speaker 1: out this person, or I was really afraid to I
Speaker 1: was really afraid to go up in a high place,
Speaker 1: or some sort of thing like that, and we kind
Speaker 1: of neglect those. I think the other thing with the
Speaker 1: burning building example is that it has to be for
Speaker 1: a good reason. And so if there's two people again
Speaker 1: in the burn unit, they ran into a burning building,
Speaker 1: let's pretend they're equally afraid. This time the one person
Speaker 1: ran into, say a baby, but the other person ran
Speaker 1: into make a TikTok video. Like that other person's just
Speaker 1: an idiot, right, most of us think that other person's
Speaker 1: just an idiot. But I guess I could see where
Speaker 1: you know, that person might be thinking, oh, I'm pursuing
Speaker 1: this super important thing, and but yeah, our view of
Speaker 1: what the risk of what the both the risk and
Speaker 1: the goal is matters a lot.
Speaker 3: What do you think about I feel like everyone wants
Speaker 3: to wear the courage badge but also be feearless, and
Speaker 3: they talk about it like it's the same thing. I
Speaker 3: want to be fearless, which I don't want to feel
Speaker 3: fear but I want to do I want to be courageous.
Speaker 1: I yes, Well, some people think that and other people
Speaker 1: kind of lean into the I am going to exhibit
Speaker 1: personal growth by doing one thing per year that scares me,
Speaker 1: and I have encountered people who have said that to
Speaker 1: me that I teach improv and and people take the
Speaker 1: intro improv class and they'll be like, I'm doing this
Speaker 1: because it scares me. I'm doing one challenge per month
Speaker 1: or whatever, and I'm like, great, come on in, We're
Speaker 1: happy to have you. But it's it's a There's a
Speaker 1: famous book in the US that a ton of i
Speaker 1: think middle school basically kids have to read called The
Speaker 1: Red Badge of Courage, which spoiler is about a soldier
Speaker 1: who's excited for the war because he gets to prove
Speaker 1: he's courageous and then he finds out that that sucks
Speaker 1: and that's the Uh. It's kind of like so it's
Speaker 1: I think you'd get like these weird extremes, and I
Speaker 1: think people don't know what to do with the fear
Speaker 1: sort of thing and courage, and so to me, it's
Speaker 1: easier to just talk about it as risk rather than fear.
Speaker 1: So you have to think that it's some kind of
Speaker 1: a risk, whether you focus on that risk or not.
Speaker 1: If there's absolutely no risk, I don't think people would
Speaker 1: necessarily think that it was courage, but I think that
Speaker 1: they could see how other people could see it. As courage.
Speaker 1: So I had an interesting discussion once with somebody who, Oh,
Speaker 1: my gosh, what kind of a He was some sort
Speaker 1: of a surgeon type person who did what I'd consider
Speaker 1: like scary operations. Plus I've got a little bit of
Speaker 1: that ill factor for blood, and so for me his job,
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, no, I would be horrified if I
Speaker 1: had to do your job. But I was telling him
Speaker 1: something about my class that I was teaching that morning,
Speaker 1: and somehow it came up that there were like three
Speaker 1: hundred people in the class, and he's like, how do
Speaker 1: you do that? You know? And I think we were
Speaker 1: both like, thinking, how do you do that? That's you know, wow,
Speaker 1: I couldn't do that. So it depends on courage. I often,
Speaker 1: really often get asked a question about courageous people, and
Speaker 1: I the longer I do this, the harder I push
Speaker 1: back against thinking about courageous people just as a whole,
Speaker 1: because I think we all move through the world with
Speaker 1: our own sense of what's risky for us, what seems risky,
Speaker 1: what we may have a fear response to, or we
Speaker 1: might just think to ourselves that's risky, and or even
Speaker 1: just that's very hard for me to do well, and
Speaker 1: we all have our own goals that we're pursuing, and
Speaker 1: we often end up with situation so that the things
Speaker 1: that are held up as as sort of peak courage,
Speaker 1: that there are monuments to for courage are almost always
Speaker 1: situations in which the society that puts up that monument
Speaker 1: thinks that interprets the goal of whatever the action is
Speaker 1: is really good as a worthwhile, valuable one, and interprets
Speaker 1: the situation as having a lot of risk for that person.
Speaker 1: So we have monuments to fallen heroes, especially who died
Speaker 1: in service of their country, and we have monuments to
Speaker 1: great leaders who risk things that are considered societally appropriate.
Speaker 1: In the US, we had a lot of things happen
Speaker 1: and where monuments were taken down to causes that people
Speaker 1: no longer believe in, and monuments put up to other
Speaker 1: and it's a huge especially with civil rights stuff. It's
Speaker 1: been a civil rights versus civil war, which interestingly I'm
Speaker 1: only connecting now have exactly the same start to them
Speaker 1: of civil But the rhetoric around that has been absolutely
Speaker 1: fascinating and I think really gets at what a society,
Speaker 1: or at least the loudest people in a society are
Speaker 1: valuing at any given time, or the richest people or
Speaker 1: the people who own the land who put up the monument,
Speaker 1: and this whole area of accolade courage can end up
Speaker 1: being really controversial and people have really strong opinions about it.
Speaker 1: When I first started doing research and courage, I would
Speaker 1: go to a conferences, and the way academic conferences work
Speaker 1: if you're on some sort of a panel discussion or
Speaker 1: some sort of a symposium, is that usually the speakers
Speaker 1: meet beforehand briefly to talk about logistics. Who is going
Speaker 1: to run the PowerPoint? Do we want all our powerpoints
Speaker 1: on one computer or do we want them on to
Speaker 1: plug in our computers separately? Do we want questions after
Speaker 1: everybody's talk or after each individual talk. And I would
Speaker 1: be in a group of people who'd done research on courage,
Speaker 1: and we would we would have these conversations, but then
Speaker 1: it would always turn into what I got to calling
Speaker 1: the Courage Researcher support group, where we sat around and
Speaker 1: we talked about how people would get offended by our
Speaker 1: research because they would be offended by our research. This
Speaker 1: one woman, I'll never forget, she would on a job
Speaker 1: interview talking about her dissertation research, and someone like banged
Speaker 1: on the table ball at dinner and stood up and said,
Speaker 1: you're cheapening the idea of courage. And he huffed out,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, wow, that's kind of a lot. That's
Speaker 1: a lot, And I think that a lot of it
Speaker 1: is this accolade courage sort of idea that if I
Speaker 1: call something courageous that you don't agree with the goal
Speaker 1: or you don't see as risky, you're gonna be kind
Speaker 1: of offended by it, Like how do how do you
Speaker 1: don't see that as risky? So at that same conference,
Speaker 1: we had a discussant, the person at the end who
Speaker 1: kind of summarizes what all three people talked about, who
Speaker 1: was just simply offended by me. Because I had a
Speaker 1: scale where we asked people. It had a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of questions about I would willingly give my life for
Speaker 1: my country if needed, down to I I would have
Speaker 1: dental surgery to save a tooth, or I would ask
Speaker 1: for a raise if I really needed one. It had
Speaker 1: sort of these lower level ones also, and he was
Speaker 1: just super offended by this, and he asked everybody, He's like, cool,
Speaker 1: here thinks it's courageous to ask for a raise if
Speaker 1: you need one, that's just being good at work. And
Speaker 1: I was like, wow, okay, Bud. And outside of the
Speaker 1: clinical psychology community, I've gotten a lot of pushback from
Speaker 1: people about these risky kind of actions that people take
Speaker 1: that feel risky to them but not to most other people. Weirdly,
Speaker 1: within like this therapy kind of community, people get that
Speaker 1: because that's what therapists see. They see people who come
Speaker 1: in and they say, here's this thing that everyone else
Speaker 1: can do and I can't do, and I want your
Speaker 1: help doing it. But yeah, it's it's just wild. And
Speaker 1: people also have really strong opinions about the the worth
Speaker 1: of the action and what that risk benefit thing turns
Speaker 1: out to be. So I do a lot of research
Speaker 1: where I ask people to describe a time they've acted courageously,
Speaker 1: and then I will have undergraduate students help me code
Speaker 1: them into different categories. Every single person who's done some
Speaker 1: coding for me has encountered something where they read it
Speaker 1: and they think to themselves, that's not courageous. And what's
Speaker 1: happening is they're identifying that they don't really see that
Speaker 1: as risky and or they don't see it as valuable.
Speaker 1: So a couple of my favorite examples. I had a
Speaker 1: student who was from South Africa and she had a
Speaker 1: hard time reading any of our statements that people in
Speaker 1: the US had made about being courageous when dealing with
Speaker 1: a vicious dog because she grew up with lions near
Speaker 1: The kids were worn about lions. You know, if you're
Speaker 1: outside you see a lion, they're going to eat you,
Speaker 1: so watch out. And that's different and perhaps so Australia.
Speaker 1: You have a different thing. I don't know. The perception
Speaker 1: in the US is that Australia is filled with dangerous
Speaker 1: animals who will kill you. But that may be a
Speaker 1: little bit of an overstatement, but the I thought that
Speaker 1: was super interesting. I was later on talking with a physician,
Speaker 1: one of my a personal physician of mine, and he
Speaker 1: did the little you know, like let me chat with
Speaker 1: you a little bit before you're sitting there in your
Speaker 1: paper gown and it's awkward, And he was asking me
Speaker 1: about my research, and I told her about an older
Speaker 1: person we had interviewed who talked about how her doctor
Speaker 1: told her that she couldn't have any more, that she
Speaker 1: should not get pregnant again because it could kill her,
Speaker 1: but she really wanted another child. So she went ahead
Speaker 1: and had another baby, and he just like, he just
Speaker 1: was like, that's a terrible idea. That's not courageous, that's
Speaker 1: just dumb, and you know, but he's seen very different things, right,
Speaker 1: so he's seeing that from a totally different perspective. For me,
Speaker 1: the one that stood out for me was reading a
Speaker 1: was reading a narrative of someone who said that she
Speaker 1: was dating this guy and they were really in love
Speaker 1: and they'd talked about marriage, but the problem was that
Speaker 1: her that his parents, his mom didn't like her, and
Speaker 1: one day the mom asked her to break up with him,
Speaker 1: and so she did, and she never told him why,
Speaker 1: and she described this as courageous. I know, it goes
Speaker 1: against it goes against the narrative that we all have
Speaker 1: of how true love should go. But her description of
Speaker 1: why this was courageous was that she knew that he
Speaker 1: always came with his mom and this was setting him
Speaker 1: up for lifelong tension with her, and if she didn't
Speaker 1: tell him that it was his mom, then he would
Speaker 1: continue to have a good relationship with her. And now
Speaker 1: I still have a hard time wrapping my head around
Speaker 1: that one, but it is what it is, and there's
Speaker 1: in the extreme sort of a version of it. People
Speaker 1: who've done heinous things will call themselves courageous, and you
Speaker 1: think to yourself, no, that was a really bad thing
Speaker 1: you did. You shouldn't do that. But if you read
Speaker 1: writings that they have put out in their crazy manifesto,
Speaker 1: for example, they'll use the language of courage like, nope,
Speaker 1: this is this is a good thing, and I'm risking
Speaker 1: it all for this good thing that everybody's going to hate.
Speaker 3: But it's it's.
Speaker 1: People have very strong opinions about what counts as courage
Speaker 1: and what doesn't. And it almost always says a lot
Speaker 1: a lot more about the person saying that it's courageous,
Speaker 1: I think, then it says about the actual person doing
Speaker 1: the thing. It says I I see what you did.
Speaker 1: I see it as valuable, and I see that you
Speaker 1: took a risk to do it. Not necessarily that it'd
Speaker 1: be risky for me, but I see that you took
Speaker 1: a risk to do it. So if I can understand
Speaker 1: where you're coming from. And we did this with little kids, right,
Speaker 1: so we'll tell little kids that they're brave or courageous
Speaker 1: for having done some kind of a thing. It's super
Speaker 1: common here in the US, if you get little kids
Speaker 1: after they get their vaccines, they'll get a little sticker
Speaker 1: from the doctor's office. Very commonly they'll say, oh, it
Speaker 1: was brave, right, And you know, is it courageous to
Speaker 1: get poked with a needle? You know, if you're an adult,
Speaker 1: probably not, unless you're fearful of needles, in which case
Speaker 1: it probably is. But you're not going to go around
Speaker 1: being like, I was so brave I got a vaccine
Speaker 1: today and I'm forty five. You know, you're not going
Speaker 1: to say that that.
Speaker 3: Stupid courage in the in academia. Does courage full under psychology?
Speaker 3: Does your research full under psychology?
Speaker 1: There are I think my research has ended up being
Speaker 1: more being kind of at the intersection of psychology and philosophy,
Speaker 1: and I've collaborated with philosophers a lot. They're actually more
Speaker 1: philosophers interested in courage than psychologists.
Speaker 3: Interesting is there was there before your work? And I
Speaker 3: guess is there broadly a consensus on what courage is?
Speaker 1: Is there? Is it easily?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, not at all, not at all. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's that's also probably part of the traction issue.
Speaker 1: That's why I'm so so keen to say, my definition
Speaker 1: is my this is how I see it. So the
Speaker 1: strongest definition of courage in psychology, the one that gets
Speaker 1: the most study, is probably that courage is acting despite fear.
Speaker 1: And I think that this definition comes at this, well,
Speaker 1: I know this definition comes out of clinical work, where
Speaker 1: my theory says that, well, sure, within a clinical context,
Speaker 1: courage is acting despite fear, because that's the problem people
Speaker 1: are coming to you to solve, Right, They're afraid of
Speaker 1: doing something. They want help doing the thing, and so
Speaker 1: they've come to you for assistance doing the thing that
Speaker 1: they're afraid of. And because because you know you're good therapist,
Speaker 1: you're not going to treat somebody who comes in and says,
Speaker 1: I'm afraid of standing in the middle of traffic on
Speaker 1: an interstate, but i'd like some help in being able
Speaker 1: to do that. That person is going to get a
Speaker 1: different kind of evaluation and they're going to get a
Speaker 1: different kind of treatment, and you would never help to
Speaker 1: systematically desensitize them to standing in traffic. Right, that would
Speaker 1: never even occur to you that that's a thing you
Speaker 1: should consider. But if you describe courage, if you define
Speaker 1: courage as acting despite fear, you end up saying that
Speaker 1: those folks are courageous, that that would be a courteous action,
Speaker 1: because that's a terrifying thing to stand on the interstate
Speaker 1: and like face down a semi truck, Like why would
Speaker 1: you do that? You shouldn't do that, don't do that.
Speaker 1: It's a bad idea. But the if you just leave
Speaker 1: courage that way, that's how it ends up, and if
Speaker 1: you define that. The philosophy definition of courage, on the
Speaker 1: other hand, is super heavy on the objective good of
Speaker 1: all of it and the objective fear that people feel
Speaker 1: or feeling the proper amount of fear. And as a psychologist,
Speaker 1: that doesn't resonate with me very much, because we all
Speaker 1: have very different opinions about what the good is and
Speaker 1: about what risks are for us, and about what feels
Speaker 1: appropriately risky for us and what we are the risk
Speaker 1: is overblown. But I think that those are really personal
Speaker 1: excuse me kind of things, and I always have to Oh,
Speaker 1: and also, philosophers are excited about moral exemplars and exemplars
Speaker 1: of things, and I am not a giant fan of
Speaker 1: exemplars because I think that people who can be very
Speaker 1: courageous in one situation might not be courageous at all
Speaker 1: in a different situation. So someone who's afraid of public speaking,
Speaker 1: I think, would see my life and think, oh, you
Speaker 1: do all these courageous things. You must be a very
Speaker 1: courageous person.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I talk in front of hundreds of people all the time,
Speaker 1: like it's literally my job. I seek out those very
Speaker 1: large classes and I'm excited by them. I do improv
Speaker 1: comedy where I make up things in front of people
Speaker 1: and hope they laugh. But I'm really afraid of heights,
Speaker 1: and I'm really afraid of inclosed spaces. So if you
Speaker 1: asked me to change a light bulb on top of
Speaker 1: the auditorium, I'd be like, no, that's not me. And
Speaker 1: I found out I was afraid of inclosed spaces when
Speaker 1: I had an MRI, or tried to have an MRI once,
Speaker 1: And so I'm in the MRI machine and I'm going, oh,
Speaker 1: this is very tight and very loud, and then at
Speaker 1: one point I wiggled a little bit and they were like,
Speaker 1: we have to start over again. Lay still, and I
Speaker 1: was like, oh, I can't, you know. And I did
Speaker 1: everything I could think of to do this. I trained
Speaker 1: as a clinical psychologist specializing in anxiety disorders and desensitization.
Speaker 1: So I tried all of those things. I teach an
Speaker 1: online class that involves a ton of breathing exercises and relaxation,
Speaker 1: mindfulness kinds of things. I tried all of those things.
Speaker 1: I actually it was a General Electric MRI machine. My
Speaker 1: father designed X ray equipment for General Electric. Although he
Speaker 1: never designed MRIs, he was friends with the MRI group,
Speaker 1: and one of his friends probably got a patent on
Speaker 1: some of the stuff that was in that very machine.
Speaker 1: So I thought about my dad's friend, who I was
Speaker 1: sure had designed this. None of that helped. I pressed
Speaker 1: the little panic button and I noped out of it,
Speaker 1: and yeah it, Yeah, I'm going to need sedation if
Speaker 1: I need another one of those. But anyways, the the
Speaker 1: you know, the if you look at me in a
Speaker 1: medical context, or you look at me in the context
Speaker 1: of free climbers, for example, I and the biggest chicken
Speaker 1: in the world, and I think that's true. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm kind of extreme on both of those. I think.
Speaker 1: I think I'm more fearful than most people of the
Speaker 1: one thing, and I'm less fearful than most people of
Speaker 1: the other thing. But I all of us have some
Speaker 1: of those different characteristics, right, So you'll often see first responders,
Speaker 1: for example, who are super courageous in doing and taking
Speaker 1: physical risks of some sort for their own for the
Speaker 1: sake of other people. I mean, admirably so. But you'll
Speaker 1: see that if some sort of traumatic kind of thing
Speaker 1: happens on the job, they're now very often sent to
Speaker 1: talk to someone, and a lot of them just don't
Speaker 1: want to do it and find that threatening to their
Speaker 1: idea of who they are that they would even need this,
Speaker 1: or threatening to you know, it's threatening to open up
Speaker 1: like that. So that would be a case where the
Speaker 1: person who's not taken physical risks but who jumps wholeheartedly
Speaker 1: into therapy when needed would be more courageous in that context.
Speaker 1: And so that's mostly about like the differences in the risk,
Speaker 1: but I think the difference in the goals are striking too.
Speaker 1: So we had a study published a couple of years
Speaker 1: ago now looking at how courageous Americans rated two different
Speaker 1: women who both were in the news at the time
Speaker 1: that the data was collected, Kitlyn Jenner and Kim Davis.
Speaker 1: And so Kitlyn Jenner is a famous transgender woman who
Speaker 1: had rose to fame as a male athlete and publicly
Speaker 1: came out and since has had a whole lot of
Speaker 1: political weirdness that wasn't a part of it at the
Speaker 1: time of the study. At the time we collected the data,
Speaker 1: it was really just her being on the cover of
Speaker 1: various magazines saying I'm Caitlin and I'm transitioning. And Kim
Speaker 1: Davis was a county clerk who issued marriage licenses, and
Speaker 1: when same sex marriage became legal in the US, she
Speaker 1: refused to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples because
Speaker 1: of her religious beliefs, she said. And so those two
Speaker 1: women were both in the news for sort of politically
Speaker 1: opposite reasons, and we asked people how We gave people
Speaker 1: little description of what one of the two women did,
Speaker 1: and we said, how courageous is this person? How much
Speaker 1: risk did she take? How much did she do a
Speaker 1: valuable thing? And how much she did a valuable thing
Speaker 1: predicted their ratings of courage better than anything else. How
Speaker 1: much she did a valuable thing was also very much
Speaker 1: predicted by their traditionalism, their their belief in traditional gender
Speaker 1: roles and traditional family structure. And it was exactly the
Speaker 1: results that you would predict. And since then, I've had
Speaker 1: this weird little hobby of looking at whenever anybody calls
Speaker 1: someone else courageous in the news, and it's virtually always
Speaker 1: someone calling somebody courageous for doing a thing that they
Speaker 1: that the person saying it's courageous believes in. It's never Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm pro right to choose, but I can see how
Speaker 1: these pro lifers are are courageous, Like, no, that never happens.
Speaker 1: That doesn't happen. That's a thing where we kind of
Speaker 1: fight against. And that's that's part of your horrified expression
Speaker 1: when I was for those listening, she had had a
Speaker 1: horrified expression when I was describing the woman who dropped
Speaker 1: her boyfriend and didn't tell him why.
Speaker 4: The uh, the extent to which you disagree with what
Speaker 4: that goal is prevents you from seeing someone else's courageous.
Speaker 1: And I think sometimes we see what is an apparent
Speaker 1: counter example to that in soldiers or in other sorts
Speaker 1: of situations, like I can definitely, I'm just presuming that
Speaker 1: you have thought of courageous opponents that you've had in
Speaker 1: the ring. But you both are boxers, they both are soldiers.
Speaker 1: They kind of have the same sort of ethos and
Speaker 1: it's the same activity it just so happens that you're
Speaker 1: paired up against each other for some kind of a reason.
Speaker 1: But it's it's usually my spineless, my spineless colleagues from
Speaker 1: the other party are trying to do this cowardly something
Speaker 1: some some some compared to my brave colleagues from my
Speaker 1: own party, who are doing this heroic and noble thing
Speaker 1: and standing up to evil blah blah blah. And it's
Speaker 1: it's a it's it is so wrapped up in how
Speaker 1: much you believe in what that goal is.
Speaker 3: It's fascinating and it makes me think of what a
Speaker 3: profound impact Atlas of the Heart, which was one of
Speaker 3: Brede Brown's more recent books, was written. When I read
Speaker 3: that and leaned into language and definitions and how we
Speaker 3: understand and when you were talking before about how we
Speaker 3: tell kids they're courageous, and as you were talking before,
Speaker 3: at some point I had an epiphany and I had
Speaker 3: to google it was like, is encourage and courage are
Speaker 3: those two words related? I had to google it because
Speaker 3: they do. Yeah, because encourage has it feels like it
Speaker 3: has a very different context.
Speaker 1: But they are.
Speaker 3: But I don't feel like when we encourage someone, we
Speaker 3: feel like we I don't know, like convinced them too,
Speaker 3: but without some sort of veil of bravery or fear.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but often, I mean often I think that like
Speaker 1: a reallycoag like an encouraging kind of statement, things like
Speaker 1: you're gonna be okay, you got this, you can do this,
Speaker 1: and that building up the likelihood that you're going to
Speaker 1: succeed is a thing that people do to try to
Speaker 1: encourage themselves as well, to try to make themselves feel
Speaker 1: more courageous. I mean, I tried it in the MRI.
Speaker 1: It didn't work for me there, but It's worked for
Speaker 1: me in other situations where I'm like, yeah, yeah, you
Speaker 1: can you totally you can do this. And that's a
Speaker 1: common kind of a thing. But a thing that most
Speaker 1: the thing that people do most often to try to
Speaker 1: make themselves feel more courageous is they think about how
Speaker 1: valuable the goal is. They think about how good that
Speaker 1: outcome is going to be if they get it, and
Speaker 1: that you know, at least if they try excuse me,
Speaker 1: And that's also sort of a kind of encouragement, right,
Speaker 1: so you know, like if you if you just say
Speaker 1: he was encouraged to do he was encouraged to make
Speaker 1: this investment, well, probably he was told that the investment
Speaker 1: would pay off in the long run. Right now, is
Speaker 1: that a good thing or is that a bad thing?
Speaker 1: I guess it depends on if it pays off or not,
Speaker 1: and if you believe in whatever the investment is. But
Speaker 1: the the but yeah, the whole idea of encouragement. We
Speaker 1: do encourage others. We usually encourage them to do things
Speaker 1: that we want them to do, though we don't encourage
Speaker 1: them to do something that we think is bad. Like
Speaker 1: you would be a terrible friend if you encouraged your
Speaker 1: friend to date someone who you thought was really inappropriate
Speaker 1: for them, Like, that's that's wrong. You shouldn't do that.
Speaker 1: It should be you know, you'd encourage them to date
Speaker 1: the person if you thought, oh, they'd make a good couple.
Speaker 3: Where did your interest in all of this begin? And
Speaker 3: what was like? Was there somewhere where you got to
Speaker 3: a crossroad? And when discourage thing is a thing?
Speaker 1: Look way to stop? So there's kind of two answers.
Speaker 1: I think I've always been interested in it. I've always
Speaker 1: been very interested in stories of people doing hard things,
Speaker 1: and I've always found that compelling and interesting. I had
Speaker 1: been doing research in the psychology of fear and attention.
Speaker 1: And the short summary of thousands and thousands, maybe tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of psychology studies is that when people are afraid,
Speaker 1: they pay more attention to threat. And I got bored
Speaker 1: with my research. I honestly, I got very bored with it.
Speaker 1: And in the US we have I'm in a tenure track.
Speaker 1: I was in a tenure track job. I'm now tenured.
Speaker 1: What that means is you have about six years to
Speaker 1: publish a certain amount of research or you're fired. And unfortunately,
Speaker 1: I discovered I was very bored with my research probably
Speaker 1: about three years, two or three years into my tenure
Speaker 1: track job, and that was really unpleasant. Another article would
Speaker 1: come out.
Speaker 3: Bottom was it that you did? It feel like it
Speaker 3: just made too much sense. There was no way to
Speaker 3: go with it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it felt like it felt like this is an
Speaker 1: area that has been very thoroughly explored, this is an
Speaker 1: area that's well known, and we're now down to my
Speaker 1: We were looking at minutia instead of looking at bigger,
Speaker 1: broader swaths of things, and it did not seem like
Speaker 1: the sort of it seemed like that's a very valuable
Speaker 1: part of science. I do not mean to denigrate that
Speaker 1: at all. That's a super valuable part of science. It's
Speaker 1: just not a part of science that I personally have
Speaker 1: the attention span for. And I've never been good at
Speaker 1: the fuying details, finishing things. I remember in middle school.
Speaker 1: I had loved art up until this point, but in
Speaker 1: middle school, all of a sudden you had to like
Speaker 1: polish your art and finish it completely. It couldn't be
Speaker 1: just like, you know, here's the general outline, Oh I'm done. No,
Speaker 1: it was it was all about like craft and completing things.
Speaker 1: And I remember we did this statue right, and halfway
Speaker 1: through the statue it was time to sand our statues,
Speaker 1: and the teacher, mister Ackert, he was great, but he
Speaker 1: was like, you know, now it's time to stand it.
Speaker 1: You know this is going to be most of your time.
Speaker 1: And I was just like, oh no, it's not. I
Speaker 1: got so It's like I had the overall sort of
Speaker 1: thing right, but I couldn't stand it. I just I
Speaker 1: took like a wirebrush and I scraped it so that
Speaker 1: it just looked done faster. But anyway, I felt like
Speaker 1: the research on fear and attention felt like that to me.
Speaker 1: It felt like the standing part. And I thought I
Speaker 1: just I can't do this, and every time a new
Speaker 1: article would come out, I would think to myself, crap,
Speaker 1: another thing to read. And that was really long. It
Speaker 1: was really it was a long, long, long three years
Speaker 1: to finish that out and to get enough done, and
Speaker 1: I just barely made it eat. But around the time
Speaker 1: that I got tenure, I had a colleague asked me
Speaker 1: to do an honor seminar for fear and about fear
Speaker 1: and horror, and I said sure, And so I put
Speaker 1: together the readings for this seminar and they were all
Speaker 1: pretty depressing, and so at the end I thought, well,
Speaker 1: let me put together let me have them read some
Speaker 1: things about what you can do about this. Okay, what
Speaker 1: if your fear is reasonable? Is unreasonable? Well, gosh, there's
Speaker 1: so many good treatments for that. Let's do some readings
Speaker 1: on treatments for phobias and for anxiety disorders. What if
Speaker 1: your fear is reasonable? Well, oh wow, there's so much
Speaker 1: safety sort of things, so much safety research being done,
Speaker 1: much of it in my own department. We have a
Speaker 1: thriving human factors program and graduate students with degrees in
Speaker 1: how to make products safer. So let's read some stuff
Speaker 1: about that. Oh gosh, but what about threats? What about
Speaker 1: like if you're afraid of something and it's reasonable and
Speaker 1: you can't do anything about it, Well, I guess you
Speaker 1: can respond with courage. So I thought, well, I'm going
Speaker 1: to look up the research on courage. And I found
Speaker 1: out that the research on courage literally like fit in
Speaker 1: my purse.
Speaker 2: It was.
Speaker 1: I printed it all out, and I was like, I
Speaker 1: don't even need to bring out a tote bag. I
Speaker 1: can just puld this up and take it home in
Speaker 1: my regular old purse. And so I saw it was
Speaker 1: a really neat delineation of the two different jobs that
Speaker 1: many faculty professors have, which is as a teacher and
Speaker 1: as a researcher. So as a teacher, it was really
Speaker 1: sad that there was nothing to really share with students,
Speaker 1: but as a researcher, it was a really exciting opportunity.
Speaker 1: And so I've been running with that kind of ever since.
Speaker 1: I was terrifically encouraged myself by the late Shane Lopez,
Speaker 1: who I met at a conference in twenty twenty three
Speaker 1: or two thousand and three, two thousand and three. I
Speaker 1: guess that's the right way we say that now, and
Speaker 1: it was just now two thousand and four doesn't matter anyways.
Speaker 1: It was just a life changing experience because he was
Speaker 1: so warm and so encouraging, and it was one of
Speaker 1: the most It was like the best professional conversation of
Speaker 1: my life. And that was a real turning point for me.
Speaker 1: And I went, Yes, this is very exciting, and this
Speaker 1: is new. And I was right that this is new,
Speaker 1: and I was right that this is in set, that
Speaker 1: this is meaningful to people, and that it can help people.
Speaker 1: And so that was super helpful. But I also realized
Speaker 1: well before that. Before I finished my graduate degree, I
Speaker 1: was an intern at a veteran's affairs hospital and I
Speaker 1: was lucky enough to work on a unit or severe
Speaker 1: post traumatic stress disorder from the viet mostly from the
Speaker 1: Vietnam War, and we had all these patients who had
Speaker 1: this blend of like trauma and courage and it was
Speaker 1: really remarkable. And it was and the themes courage of
Speaker 1: things that they talked about and the consequences of failure
Speaker 1: to act courageously and what that did to what that
Speaker 1: the implications that had for them later in their life,
Speaker 1: and trying to get over things, and watching patient after
Speaker 1: patient after patient confront like the worst thing that ever
Speaker 1: happened to him for the goal of getting better or
Speaker 1: in some cases, for the goal of being a better
Speaker 1: family member. Was actually really inspiring. And yeah, and I
Speaker 1: kind of took that with me and I didn't realize
Speaker 1: at the time that, but I think a lot of
Speaker 1: what I liked about that rotation was seeing the courage
Speaker 1: up close like that. One of my really neat Yeah.
Speaker 3: One of my favorite guests was Captain Charlie Plumb and
Speaker 3: he was a prisoner of war for six years in
Speaker 3: the Hanoi Hilton.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I loved talking to him about adversity and
Speaker 3: resilience because it felt like sitting and speaking to some
Speaker 3: joyous grandfather of mine that had you know, that had
Speaker 3: spent his life in a in an armchair, you know,
Speaker 3: not not a prison cell, you know, getting exposed to
Speaker 3: what he did, and it was it was beautiful to.
Speaker 1: To I guess.
Speaker 3: The curiosity that he gave me around how could people
Speaker 3: be treated like that and be Okay, there is there
Speaker 3: is something that we are not pulling from that experience.
Speaker 3: There's so much because you because everything that was done
Speaker 3: to them was done to break the human spirit and
Speaker 3: came out of there and they had that had kept
Speaker 3: themselves well, They had connected that created language, that created community,
Speaker 3: that created joy, And I'm like, why are the rest
Speaker 3: of us living ourself the lives out here? Why why
Speaker 3: we're not learning? Why are we not learning from this?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah. That that does
Speaker 1: remind me though of just sort of a general perspective
Speaker 1: that so it. I think it's one thing when you
Speaker 1: come to that realization about yourself, like why am I
Speaker 1: upset about my soft little life compared to this other person?
Speaker 1: But when someone says that to you, it's kind of offensive.
Speaker 1: So because who am I to say what your worst
Speaker 1: thing is and compare it to somebody else? I think
Speaker 1: that's a that's a choice you have to make, yes,
Speaker 1: And I think when people make that choice for themselves
Speaker 1: it can be amazingly powerful and amazingly wonderful. But when
Speaker 1: other people try to make it for you, you just
Speaker 1: feel like they're a calling you weak or be disrespecting
Speaker 1: the actual suffering that you have experienced. And everybody's This
Speaker 1: was a big thing that helped me during the pandemic,
Speaker 1: which was everybody's worst thing is their worst thing? Yeah, whatever,
Speaker 1: it was that you lost during the pandemic. That was
Speaker 1: the worst thing for you, was your worst thing, And
Speaker 1: if you want to mourn that and be sad about
Speaker 1: it for yourself, you should be able to do that. Now.
Speaker 1: If you're going around demanding that other people respect that suffering,
Speaker 1: you know you're probably going to get pushed back from,
Speaker 1: and rightly so, from people who lost relatives or lost
Speaker 1: their job or something like that. But if I want
Speaker 1: to be sad about not taking a couple of planned
Speaker 1: trips with my adult children, I'm going to be sad
Speaker 1: about it because I was looking forward to those. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you just they're never going to happen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you just made me think of I remember a
Speaker 3: time I'd had a really stressful, shitty period of time
Speaker 3: and a few things had gone wrong, and I'd gone
Speaker 3: to hang out with someone and they said how are you?
Speaker 3: And I was like ah, as I told them a
Speaker 3: few things and I was like, I said, it's just
Speaker 3: the worst. I looked at me and said, is it?
Speaker 3: Though it's not cancer, is it? And I remember thinking,
Speaker 3: I remember thinking it made me so mad. I was like,
Speaker 3: I literally have a podcast where I gained perspective from
Speaker 3: people that go through real shit. I understand that it's
Speaker 3: a pretty fucking cushy problem to have, But right now,
Speaker 3: what I was trying to do was get a bid.
Speaker 1: Was share.
Speaker 3: Some connection with my friend and have someone go yep
Speaker 3: that to beat sheet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I want to
Speaker 3: them in the face.
Speaker 1: Yes, And you would know how to do that too, So.
Speaker 3: Yeah, bright carriage by not doing it when I want.
Speaker 1: To absolutely absolutely no, And that's that's a yeah, that's that.
Speaker 1: And I think that the courage sort of thing ties
Speaker 1: into that also with you know, like it's a courage
Speaker 1: contest or something. And somehow if if I say that
Speaker 1: I'm brave, or if I think that a thing that
Speaker 1: I did was brave by facing a thing that I'm
Speaker 1: afraid of. In graduate school, I decided I would I
Speaker 1: would work on my fear of heights during my behavior
Speaker 1: therapy exposure each class. And so I did that. And
Speaker 1: so there was a stairwell right outside our classroom and
Speaker 1: we were on the second floor, but it went all
Speaker 1: the way down to the first floor, and they were
Speaker 1: pretty tall. It was pretty tall too, and it's very open.
Speaker 1: And so during our break every week I would or
Speaker 1: every I guess it was every week or every two days,
Speaker 1: I would get a little closer to that railing. And
Speaker 1: my goal is to be able to chat with my
Speaker 1: friends who were checking their mailbox in the basement of
Speaker 1: that stairwell. And I hate it, and I'm still proud
Speaker 1: of that, and I'm still afraid of heides, but I'm
Speaker 1: less afraid of heights than I was. And you know,
Speaker 1: for me to say that it took courage for me
Speaker 1: to move closer to that railing, I think is one
Speaker 1: hundred percent accurate. But you know, if someone goes, you're
Speaker 1: cheapening the idea of courage. What about people who have
Speaker 1: died for our country? You know, I'm going to be like,
Speaker 1: you know, like literally I was trying to say this
Speaker 1: thing about my life or like for me, I have kids,
Speaker 1: and I had an induction with my first pregnancy and
Speaker 1: I remember like standing next to the bed, going you're
Speaker 1: going to hop into that hospital bed and then it's
Speaker 1: gonna hurt a lot. Yeah, and like I had to
Speaker 1: make myself do it, right, I had to make myself
Speaker 1: do that, and it it was you know, and again,
Speaker 1: you know, am I saying that I risked my life
Speaker 1: or you know, no, I'm not saying that am I
Speaker 1: saying that I took a public stand in the face
Speaker 1: of being and being thrown in jail. No, I'm not
Speaker 1: saying that I did that. But I did do this
Speaker 1: thing that I needed to do for me, and that
Speaker 1: kind of that kind of and.
Speaker 3: Yes, we're both watching your background to do an enormous
Speaker 3: leap across the piece of furniture.
Speaker 1: And you know, and and interestingly for her, she has
Speaker 1: pretty bad arthritis. She's very old and she has pretty
Speaker 1: bad arthritis. And she's been getting some some shots from
Speaker 1: the vet that's a high tech Oh I know the
Speaker 1: name for this. My husband does pharmaceutical things. I've forgotten,
Speaker 1: some kind of high tech biologic that works really great
Speaker 1: for arthritis and cats. And she can now do that
Speaker 1: because that was one But what I say courageously, it
Speaker 1: was it was well And you know, and if you
Speaker 1: think about it, like it's courageous if she has the
Speaker 1: if she's in a lot of pain for the arthritis,
Speaker 1: but if you reduce that pain, she's more likely to
Speaker 1: be able to do the thing. I think that's a
Speaker 1: great analogy for courage right, Like if you reduce the
Speaker 1: sense of felt risk, you're going to be more likely
Speaker 1: to be able to do it. If you're with your friends,
Speaker 1: you're gonna and they're giving you social support, or you're
Speaker 1: all doing the same thing, you're going to be more
Speaker 1: likely to be able to do it. We have the
Speaker 1: greatest exercise that the owner of the theater I worked
Speaker 1: for came up with for improv, which is an exercise
Speaker 1: where you play some silly music and y'all stand in
Speaker 1: a circle and one person does a dumb dance move. Right,
Speaker 1: So they're doing this dumb, stupid looking dance move and
Speaker 1: it looks really stupid until everybody else joins in. And
Speaker 1: when everybody else is doing it, like the risk of
Speaker 1: doing it, the risk of looking stupid is totally gone,
Speaker 1: and it actually looks kind of cool and it flips
Speaker 1: from being stupid to sort of cool. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: love that, And I think that's a lot of the
Speaker 1: social support for some of the socially courageous things we
Speaker 1: see that people do.
Speaker 3: I've really loved this, and I dare say you've given me.
Speaker 3: You've put a lot of fuel into my mind that
Speaker 3: I'm going to be unpacking and thinking of that. So
Speaker 3: thank you, because you're welcome. Yeah, you took me. I
Speaker 3: think I really wanted to go with this, which was
Speaker 3: deeper into curiosity.
Speaker 1: Cool cool, Well, this was totally worth getting up early for.
Speaker 3: Hold day ahead of you. You've written a book. Is
Speaker 3: that an academic book or is that a for everyone book?
Speaker 1: It is an academic book. I have high hopes to
Speaker 1: be writing a for every one book in the relatively
Speaker 1: near future, So stay tuned. And maybe a picture book
Speaker 1: for people like me one day. That would be very fun.
Speaker 1: It would have to have my cat leaping. You can
Speaker 1: cross that gap. Yeah, is there.
Speaker 3: Anywhere you'd like to send people or anything you'd like
Speaker 3: to promote while.
Speaker 1: I have you? Gosh, you know, I mean, this is
Speaker 1: going to sound really silly, but if you're if you're
Speaker 1: trying to increase your social courage, and in proud class
Speaker 1: is actually a great place to do that because you
Speaker 1: will be you will be getting your brain will be
Speaker 1: so full of and doing fun things that you won't
Speaker 1: notice that you're also learning how to do the hard things.
Speaker 1: And yeah, so that I mean and talk about sort
Speaker 1: of like a joyous kind of way to think about courage,
Speaker 1: that would be that would be one of them. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess that would be my only My only vague
Speaker 1: recommendation and if you're ever in Greenville, South Carolina, come
Speaker 1: see the Alchemy Comedy Company. I love that.
Speaker 3: I a few years back one of my good mates
Speaker 3: from San Diego, Bobby, he's often on the show, and
Speaker 3: he heard me, Now, I this is completely ignorant of me.
Speaker 3: I guess. I think, now, how could I have not known?
Speaker 3: But I had never I didn't know what improv was.
Speaker 3: He goes, I've got oh, yeah, one of the best
Speaker 3: improv coaches you have to have on your show. And
Speaker 3: I go, okay, what's improv? I'm like, okay, And so
Speaker 3: I look it up. I'm like, so it's pretending. So
Speaker 3: it's pretending. And I'm like, that's okay, that's weird.
Speaker 1: Is it?
Speaker 3: Does he pretend? Is he a pretend coach? Is he
Speaker 3: coaching pretending?
Speaker 1: Like? What does he coach? What is he a coach? Oh?
Speaker 1: I got I love the phrase coaching pretending. I am
Speaker 1: going to I am going to use that. That's a
Speaker 1: delayedful phrase.
Speaker 3: Halfway through this conversation, I had this epiphany and I
Speaker 3: was like, I feel about what you're describing to me
Speaker 3: the way I felt about the metaphoric value to my
Speaker 3: life of the boxing ring. So I started up and
Speaker 3: did an online improv and with friends, and then when
Speaker 3: the world opened up, I went and did an eight
Speaker 3: week in the city improv Beginner's Call and I loved it.
Speaker 1: I love that. That's great. Yeah, it is. It is
Speaker 1: like the nicest it's like the nicest twee to connect
Speaker 1: with people. It really is, really and it is right.
Speaker 3: It is a great place to practice courage because in
Speaker 3: that moment you fear doesn't help. You can't overthink your
Speaker 3: way to a solution because you don't know what's coming exactly.
Speaker 1: There's no place for anxiety. There's no it doesn't do anything.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Kenny, I don't really have time to focus on
Speaker 3: feeling like this is because I've got to be ready
Speaker 3: for when the thing is throwing my way.
Speaker 1: And also I've got a friend who does both stand
Speaker 1: up and improv, and he he always says that, like,
Speaker 1: criticism of his stand up hurts so much more because
Speaker 1: improv you didn't like, you didn't like the show, I
Speaker 1: just made that up, fuck you versus stand up is
Speaker 1: like I worked really hard on that. That was like
Speaker 1: me and so yeah, so that's uh yeah anyways, but
Speaker 1: but yeah, that would be. That would be my takeaway
Speaker 1: to people is if if social courage is the thing
Speaker 1: you're looking for, that is it's kind of the social
Speaker 1: courage equivalence of boxing or ultimate fighting, or you know,
Speaker 1: any of the challenge and rock climb, free climbing, any
Speaker 1: of the sort of physical danger, confrontation sort of things
Speaker 1: you might encounter. I actually love it, and I love it.
Speaker 3: Seems like such a paradox to have an academic on
Speaker 3: that's then going, hey, I also do himprom I'm like, oh,
Speaker 3: I expect that.
Speaker 1: No people usually people usually don't, but there's actually kind
Speaker 1: of a lot of overlap. And I started doing it
Speaker 1: when I had the colleague tell me that I should.
Speaker 1: I should now since I was studying courage, you know,
Speaker 1: at some point you're going to have to jump out
Speaker 1: of an airplane. And I was like no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I'm not. And then he was like trying to trying
Speaker 1: to encourage or cajole me into doing you know, some
Speaker 1: kind of apparently dangerous thing. And I was like, well,
Speaker 1: I'll do something that I think is meaningful to me
Speaker 1: rather than meaningful to others.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I love it. You're right, Yes, I'll have
Speaker 3: links to well of links.
Speaker 1: For Alchemy Comedy. Yeah, I'm telling you Comedy comedy. Yes,
Speaker 1: Alchemy Comedy, Alchemycomedy dot com. We have shows every Thursday, Friday,
Speaker 1: and Saturday night. And we'd love to see anybody in
Speaker 1: your listeners who happens to be in Greenville. All right,
Speaker 1: get over there, guys. Yeah, thank you so much, Cynthia,
Speaker 1: Thank you very much. TIF. It was nice to talk
Speaker 1: to you.
Speaker 2: Hie, Cheers everyone, she said, it's now never I got
Speaker 2: fighting in my blood.
Speaker 1: It