Harvard Business School Professor on Building Trust, Reducing Regret, and the Underrated Power of Oversharing | Leslie John

The brain benefits of self-disclosure, the costs of staying silent, and how to know what to reveal and when. Leslie John https://www.lesliekjohn.com/ is the James E. Burke Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Her new book is called Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing https://www.lesliekjohn.com/book. In this episode we talk about: Why self-disclosure can feel risky but is often socially rewarding The psychological and physiological costs of keeping secrets How putting feelings into words can reduce rumination and anxiety Why validation is often more helpful than advice Why undersharing leads to missed opportunities in relationships, work, and life Get the 10% with Dan Harris app here https://app.danharris.com/membership Sign up for Dan's free newsletter here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD LinkedIn |  Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to http://linkedin.com/happier Fast Growing Trees | Get 20% off your first purchase at http://fastgrowingtrees.com, using the code HAPPIER at checkout. Monarch | Start your free trial and get 50% off your first year of total money clarity using our link: http://www.monarch.com/happier or code HAPPIER. Fabric by Gerber Life | Apply today in just minutes at http://www.meetfabric.com/happier To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:18Dan Harris?

  Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How are we doing today? Many of us, quite justifiably, worry about oversharing. There's a reason why we use the expression TMI, too much information. But today, you're going to hear a Harvard Business School professor make the case, very convincingly, in my opinion, that the real danger is TLI, too little information. There are, she says, steep costs to staying bottled up. It can have all sorts of negative health implications. Conversely, there are immense benefits to self-disclosure. Even if it's scary, there are huge benefits, both physiological and psychological. Of course, then, the question is, how do you do it successfully and strategically without oversharing? And we're going to get into that in a very big way today.

• 1:03Dan Harris?

  We're going to get super practical for you. My guest is Leslie John. She's the James E. Burke Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. She's got a new book, and it's called Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing. In this conversation, we talk about why self-disclosure can feel risky, but is often extremely rewarding socially and psychologically. We also talk about psychic and somatic costs of keeping secrets, how putting feelings into words can reduce both rumination and anxiety, why validation is often more helpful than advice, why undersharing leads to missed opportunities in relationships, work, and life, and much more. Real quick, before we dive in, a reminder to check out my new app.

• 1:48Dan Harris?

  It's called 10% with Dan Harris. We've got a growing body of meditations from many of the world's greatest teachers. We also do these amazing weekly live video meditation and Q and A sessions. We meditate for a couple of minutes, and then we chop it up. And it's really a great chance for you to get your meditation questions answered, not just about technical meditation stuff, but also about how to apply it to your life. There's a lot of evidence for this approach. The science shows it's much easier to boot up and maintain a habit if you do it with other people. So join the party. DanHarris.com, that's where you can find the app, DanHarris.com, or you can get it wherever you get your apps. All right, we'll get started with Leslie John right after this.

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• 3:55Dan Harris?

  Leslie John, welcome to the show.

• 4:03Speaker 03

  Hi, thanks for having me.

• 4:04Dan Harris?

  Pleasure to have you here. I am always curious, I feel like a bit of a fraud, or I feel a bit unoriginal for always asking this question at the beginning, especially when I'm talking to people like you who are real researchers who go deep on a subject, but I'm gonna do it anyway, which is, so here I go with the unoriginal question, why this subject? I'm curious, like, how you got here?

• 4:27Speaker 03

  Ah, it was a journey. It was a combination of what I was seeing in data, but also, it was my own personal life, what was happening. And, part of, it was a disconnect, so, as a baby academic, when I first started my research journey, I was studying kind of the mistakes we make in opening up, like, how online, we overshare, for example, the Virgin flight attendants that vented about their employer and got fired based on what they posted, so all of these things we do online and we get ourselves in trouble. I literally would stand in front of thousands of people giving talks, saying, "No, no, no, we're sharing too much."

• 5:08Speaker 03

  But then, my personal life, I was keeping it suppressed and separate from the professional life, but then in my personal life, I could no longer ignore the fact that I was kind of a card-carrying oversharer, like, I love taking those BuzzFeed quizzes, they're my kryptonite. I have spoiled surprise parties before. I do all kinds of things that are foolish with respect to, like, my online privacy, but I also had a lot of fun doing it, like, I have fun filling out BuzzFeed quizzes. So, there was this disconnect, this increased dissonance of like, what I was saying in my professional life, and then personally, I was experiencing these joys of disclosure and being kind of reckless.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  And so that got me really interested in how, what the upside might be to revealing. And, when I looked at my research, you know, at that point, it was about 10 years of research, when I looked at it from that perspective, I thought... Well, yeah, we make mistakes online. That's not wrong, but it's not right because the one single thing that was coming across in my work, if I put it all together, was that when I made people feel safe and put them in a space that was maybe fun or safe, they were overwhelmingly happy to share and happy to do it. So there were several different studies, some of my own and some that others did that really, really changed my mind on that. That really popped like, wow, there's a lot of upside that we're not capturing.

• 6:37Dan Harris?

  Tell me about those studies.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  So for me, the study that changed everything was a thought experiment I ran. So listeners, if you suppose you're in this little thought experiment, let me ask you this. Imagine that you're choosing between two different people to date or two different suitors. And you talk to one of them and you ask them, have you ever had any STDs? Now, I know that that's not going to be your opener. I'm boiling this way down for you because you're busy people. But like, you get to this question, okay, whenever you do, that's a whole other story. But you ask, so have you had any STDs? And the person says, I have had so many STDs I can't even count. Ugh. So then the other suitor, you ask the same question and they

• 7:24Speaker 03

  say, I'm not answering. And so we put people in this super awkward choice. Now, admittedly, as my father would say, neither of these is exactly a fine specimen. So like, you'd rather not date either of them. But if you had to choose, who would you choose? And again and again, we found that people preferred begrudgingly, but nonetheless, they preferred the revealer, the person who admits to the worst possible thing relative to the person who simply stays mom. And we found it with thousands of different people, different contexts. Another one is if you're deciding who to hire, would you rather hire someone who on the application, they admitted to having had really bad grades or the person

• 8:05Speaker 03

  who opts out of answering? In that situation, 89% of people prefer the revealer. And so these kind of jaw dropping results to me made me think, well, why? Why are we doing this? And what I realized is that the person who doesn't reveal, like the person who holds back in a really salient way, we don't trust them. We view them with contempt, so much so that we'd rather date someone, hire someone who says the worst possible thing relative to someone who just keeps mum. And now the person who says, I'm not answering the SD question, they could just be like saying, look, that's not cool. That's not a cool question. And so then I dug even further into this. Okay, trust, why? Why is it that we distrust hiders? And why do we trust revealers?

• 8:48Speaker 03

  And what I realized is that opening up, sharing something sensitive is a really key way we build trust with others because we're relinquishing control to the universe. And we're saying, we're implicitly saying, I trust you to not make a fool out of me. And so when we show we trust others in this way, it causes them to like us and trust us. And you know, when you think about it, trust, it's really the currency of social relationships. And as herd creatures, it's an incredibly important thing. That was one. Then there was another study that is kind of real science. I shouldn't joke about my own discipline, behavioral science. I love my job. We get to put people into these strange but illuminating situations. Many thought experiments.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  So this was a neuroscience study, so a hard science. They put people into a brain scanner because they wanted to see what areas of their brain were activated when they did different things. The key thing was what happens when they give people an opportunity to reveal, to answer questions about themselves, to self disclose. And what they found was that relative to when they don't get to share personal information, the ones who get to reveal, the pleasure centers of their brain lit up, so to speak, were activated, right? So it suggests that self disclosure is intrinsically rewarding and motivating. So it seems like it's fundamentally important. It's the same areas activated when you have sex. Like, so it's really core.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  And then the third study that really blew my mind was, this was a study that I actually only encountered as I was writing the book. And it's an old study. It's an oldie but a goodie or baddie, depending on how upsetting the result is to you. But in this study, what they did was they videotaped preschoolers as they were watching a scary video. And they videotaped their faces and then they also measured how sweaty their palms were. So this is called in psychology all galvanic skin response, essentially how physiologically stressed you are, right? Because when you're stressed, your palms and your fingertips get sweaty. And what they found was that the children who revealed a lot in their faces,

• 11:01Speaker 03

  who let it out, what they were feeling, they were very expressive in their faces, they were actually less physiologically stressed. So letting it out seemed to make you less stressful. So that's pretty awesome. But the tricky thing is that by the time these children reached kindergarten age, my eldest is that age, I have two boys, there were gender differences. The boys had started to hold back. So the boys had kind of learned, right, this cultural to be stoic and that males don't show emotion. And so they end up being more physiologically stressed. So that really, really shook me as a boy mom.

• 11:39Dan Harris?

  I have struggled with that so much. It's hurt my relationships, but it's hurt my relationship to myself to be, the words that have been used to describe me are emotionally guarded. And yeah, I do think I picked that up from the culture.

• 11:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:58Dan Harris?

  I have a very clear memory of being with a bunch of buddies in seventh grade. We were horsing around with a lacrosse ball and I got hit in the head and I cried and everybody mocked me so hard that I think I just decided like, I'm never gonna let myself get into that position again.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  Yep, totally. Now, here's hoping that things are changing. I like to say, just like to say, every parent screws up their kids in a different way. The goal is to not screw your kids up in the same way that your parents did. Although I did have a very happy childhood. So my kids, I'm always saying to them, I think I may be overcorrecting, I'm saying, how do you feel? Tell me how you feel. It's okay how you feel. Let's work through it. Like I may be too aggressively, tell me how you feel. But times are changing, I do think. I hope so, that it's becoming more okay. And in fact, surveys show that if you ask men, do you think you should share more? Do you wish you shared more? A little more than half say, yes, I wish I shared more. So there seems to be a recognition or motivation, at least.

• 12:59Dan Harris?

  Let me back up a little bit because you said a lot there is great. Oh, I'll just throw in one random thing that I was just laughing about in my head that I'll just, I'll get it out, I'll let it out. When you were talking about STDs, I was remembering there was a pamphlet at the Colby College Health Center in the early 90s.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 13:17Dan Harris?

  And the title was chlamydia is not a flower.

• 13:21Speaker 03

  It sounds like a flower, doesn't it?

• 13:23Dan Harris?

  Yeah, it does. I always thought it was hilarious. Not chlamydia, the pamphlet.

• 13:28Speaker 03

  Are you gonna ask a question or are you saying more on the story?

• 13:30Dan Harris?

  I was gonna ask a question, but go ahead.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  Okay, good, because, sorry, because I wanted to get in my funny STD story, which is, it's so funny because it goes right back to college, too. So for me, I went to the college, the health center, and I wanted to get an STD test. So I go there, I walk in, and wonderfully, they have a form there where you don't have to say, you know, it's a busy waiting room. The nurse asks you, you don't have to say what your problem is, you fill out the form, which is a godsend, right? So I'm like, you have this privacy in front of everyone, I'm filling out the form, I would like an STD test. Well, I thought I was through, but then, when it was my turn to go back, the nurse,

• 14:14Speaker 03

  big clipboard, Leslie John here for STD testing.

• 14:21Speaker 03

  You were so close to getting it right of the behavioral design of this.

• 14:26Dan Harris?

  So the lesson is disclosure feels good, but not when somebody else does it for you.

• 14:32Speaker 03

  In some ways, yes. When it's something that's really embarrassing and stigmatizing, you want to have control over your story, right?

• 14:40Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was, I mean, I lived through it. We all lived through embarrassing things, but yeah.

• 14:46Dan Harris?

  So like I said, I do want to go back a little bit in what I think is the order of operations logically that you follow in your book called revealing. So in revealing, you talk about the fact that we as humans tend to prefer sins of omission to sins of commission. In other words, we think, even though your data is showing that other people will trust us more if we reveal in the right way and we'll get to the right way eventually, but we tend to think it's better to keep a lid on things. Why?

• 15:20Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  Well, when we do think about whether to open up, when we do think about whether to share, the number one thing we think of is the risk of revealing. We fixate on the risks of revealing. And then we stop there. We just stop there. We stop risk of revealing. And, you know, there's plenty of risks of revealing. The problem, though, there's a few problems. One is that we overestimate the risks of revealing. So there's a cognitive bias, which your listeners may already be familiar with. You probably talked about it before, called impact bias, which is that we overestimate how long we're going to feel badly when something bad happens. So, yeah, we've all had the embarrassing moments, and then we cringe afterwards. But you know what? The cringey feeling goes away.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  But we want to avoid that feeling so much because we forget that it goes away. And what we don't consider, meanwhile, we don't consider the costs of keeping mum. We don't consider, if we don't say what's on our mind, like if a colleague keeps showing up late for meetings and it's really bothering us and we just keep letting it go, one, they won't change probably. But two, it consumes our mind. Not saying something is a very active thing, right? We get annoyed, we ruminate, that's annoying. It's bad for our well-being. And then it often seeps out in other ways, with passive aggression, with testiness, or with avoidance, right? So I want us to realize that not saying the thing is a choice,

• 16:50Speaker 03

  and it's a choice that has consequences, just like saying the thing.

• 16:55Dan Harris?

  It's a choice that has consequences, just like saying the thing. So on a physiological level, what are those consequences?

• 17:04Speaker 03

  Of not saying the thing?

• 17:05Dan Harris?

  Yeah, yeah. And actually, on both sides. Like, what are the benefits of self-disclosure and the costs of staying mum?

• 17:12Speaker 03

  Right. Well, so many. If we were to think of something like a secret you're keeping, the costs of that are rumination, mental load. And actually, in studies where people are asked to keep a secret, so even as simple as like, "Don't say the word 'white elephant.'" And then you get an IQ test. Your IQ actually temporarily decreases. You become less intelligent when your mind is preoccupied. And then because of the mind-body connection, there have also been studies showing that people who chronically keep secrets, they have lower well-being, like they get sick more often and so on.

• 17:57Speaker 03

  On the flip side, if you have, there's amazing studies of, for example, these are old-school classic studies by James Pennebraker, where he randomizes people with HIV to write a diary about their thoughts and feelings, or to not do that. He draws blood and then he measures the health of their blood. And sure enough, when people open up even to themselves, it has this physiological benefit. There's lots of reasons why. But the other side of it is when you say the thing that's on your mind, you often fail to anticipate the benefits of saying it. And so one thing that I like to do when I'm trying to help people think through disclosure decisions better, right?

• 18:42Speaker 03

  What's a disclosure decision? That's even a new thing, right? It's the decision to reveal or not. What I do is I say, okay, what are you thinking about? So you're thinking about something. I'm thinking about a really big meeting that I have coming up, and I'm stressed about it, okay? So I'm thinking about it. It's not like a secret meeting or anything. I'm not even keeping a secret. I'm just like worrying about it in my mind. So I'm worrying. And when you worry in your mind, is you kind of loop around and sometimes, like me, or you think catastrophically, or you imagine bad things. It's all in your head. It's all in your head. Now suppose you were to write down, just for yourself, write down on paper the things that are bothering you, that you're worried about this meeting. Just write down what's in your head, write it down on paper. You would think that that shouldn't really make a difference. That's just whether it's in my head or on paper, it's the same thing.

• 19:27Speaker 03

  However, it's fundamentally different. Because when you put feelings and thoughts into words on paper or spoken, that forces a kind of logic and a kind of structure. So the logical part of it is transforming thoughts into language engages the prefrontal cortex part of your brain. So it engages the more logical part of your brain, just doing that. And then secondly, when you put feelings and thoughts into words,

• 19:56Speaker 03

  Whether you're speaking to yourself, writing down, you naturally give a story structure to it because human beings are really good at making stories. So you naturally kind of narrate and impose a story structure to it in a way that you wouldn't if you were just circling in your brain, right? And stories have a beginning, a middle, and the end. The end might not be a happily ever after, but there's a sense to it. The process of making a story of your swirling thoughts and feelings imposes a kind of sense and certainty. So it gets rid of that uncertainty of things swirling and now you have more concreteness, more certainty. And we all know that uncertainty is such a huge source of anxiety. But now you've made things much more concrete and certain and you can deal with it. You can cope with it better.

• 20:41Speaker 03

  And that's just if nobody's listening. Now, if you have a friend, someone who cares about you, a spouse, a loved one, if you have someone there, a therapist, listening to you, that takes the whole thing up a notch because number one, you do it better. You are better at translating your feelings into words because there's an audience there, right? So you take it more seriously. But more importantly, that person can react. And I'm going to just give you the quick result here because you know, we academics, there's a gajillion variants on the studies here. But the finding is that when someone listens to you, the number one thing they can do to make you feel better,

• 21:26Speaker 03

  increase your wellbeing, decrease rumination, make hard things more manageable, is to validate you. They don't even need to agree with you. They could just say, "I hear you. That sounds like it's really hard."

• 21:39Speaker 03

  Things like that, that's a kind of validation. And just hearing that is so comforting. The second thing, the next level ninja thing. So validation is huge. Just if you can do one thing when you're listening to your spouse, validate. But secondly, scientists have also tested different things that your spouse, partner, friend, therapist can say. So there's different categories. For example, brightsiding would be like saying, trying to emphasize the bright side, the positive. There's another, it would be trying to say, well, maybe that person that you're arguing with, maybe they didn't feel the same way. Trying to get the person who's venting to you to take

• 22:18Speaker 03

  perspective. And then the third thing they tested is the old, with time, things will heal, this too shall pass. And out of those, the thing that was most soothing to people is, this too shall pass, which reminded me of when I, before our first baby, you know, people are very wonderfully and overwhelmingly happy to give advice. And I remember that my dear cousin Sue, she said, I'm only going to say one thing, the one thing I'm going to say, and I want you to say it out loud, is this too shall pass. And I thought it was kind of silly at the time, but I literally said that out loud when our baby

• 23:02Speaker 03

  was, you know, screaming in the middle of the night and I'm like bobbing around trying to get him to calm down. So it's really powerful stuff. And I say this also because I'm an academic, so I'm a professional skeptic. And you know, it sounds good. Open up, share your feelings. But I really wanted to do it because I wanted to see, and doing is believing. And I really can say that the science stands up. I use myself as a guinea pig.

• 23:28Dan Harris?

  I want to get into your personal experiences in a second. And of course I want to get into the how of the successful strategic disclosure. But just on the study you just referenced about the three options.

• 23:39Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 23:39Dan Harris?

  Brightsiding, this too shall pass. And then what was the second?

• 23:43Speaker 03

  Trying to get the person to take perspective.

• 23:45Dan Harris?

  Oh, cognitive empathy. Yeah.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:48Dan Harris?

  Yeah. Perspective, cognitive empathy. I feel like it was missing one thing, the best option.

• 23:53Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 23:54Dan Harris?

  Which is, that sucks.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I love that one. And I wish they had tested that one. That would also make a great title of a paper. I think that that sucks. To me, that sounds like validation, right?

• 24:07Dan Harris?

  Yes, it's validation.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  Yep, that sucks. So yes, Dan, number one thing, your intuition, that sucks. And it's so helpful. In fact, a friend of mine, I write about her in the book. She's almost completely lost her eyesight. And I asked her, you know, what should people say to you? What's the most comforting thing? And she said, "That sucks" is the best thing. She said, "When I go to my doctor's appointments, I love it because I feel so under..." She's like, "I know, this is weird. I go to the doctor and every time I go, they tell me that my eyesight is worsening, yet I love going." Because they're not trying to sugarcoat things. They're not trying to distract me. They just acknowledge, "Yeah, that sucks. We're going to help you however we can, but that sucks."

• 24:51Speaker 03

  And just feeling understood like that is incredibly powerful.

• 24:56Dan Harris?

  The greatest gift you can give people, and it doesn't cost anything.

• 24:59Speaker 03

  Completely.

• 25:01Dan Harris?

  So if I were to sum up the research that you've shared, and I'm going to sum it up with your words. The real problem, as you say, isn't TMI, too much information. It's TLI, too little information. It goes against a lot of our intuitions, but the science is clear. Does that sound like an apt summary?

• 25:23Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 25:27Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Leslie John talks about how many disclosure-related decisions we make every day without realizing it, why not saying the thing can lead to rumination and resentment, a rule of thumb for sharing, and how undersharing can quietly undermine relationships.

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• 26:47Dan Harris?

  All right, so I'm sure that the vast majority of people listening right now are thinking, okay, yes, this very smart professor seems to have the evidence on her side. And I'm sure they can interpolate back through their lives and think about the times when they've done it and they felt better. But how do you know what to reveal and when?

• 27:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. That's the big question. So, revealing is not something we're born good at or bad at. I think of revealing as a skill and something that we can all get better at. And so as a skill, it's something that we need to practice and experiment with. I think the very first thing that we can do to do this better is actually realize just how many disclosure decisions we are actually making without realizing it every day. So let me just quick, like a day in the life, okay? This is like an ordinary day, a day in the life of disclosure decisions. Okay, you wake up, you roll over to your partner in bed, you say, I love you. Okay, you say that, but then you don't say, I slept like crap.

• 27:51Speaker 03

  I'm really miserable. I might be short today. You don't say that. You stand in front of the mirror, you're both brushing your teeth. What you think to yourself is, I look okay, but just okay. I really didn't think I would feel this old at this age. You just think that, you don't say it. You go downstairs, your kids are frolicking, your spouse is, I have small children, so they're packing the lunches. They say to you, hey, what should I put in for snack? You say, I don't know, just make the decision. And then you're kind of in an argument, but what you don't say is, look, I really need a hug because I'm exhausted. And when I'm tired, I have a hard time regulating my emotions. Right. It's never about the stupid snacks. I mean, I could go on and on, but you can see that there are so many things that are unsaid.

• 28:34Speaker 03

  And in each of those examples, I bet you, I mean, the old me, I wouldn't have even considered the possibility of opening up more. But you can see already in this tiny example that the problems that arise when we don't open up, like when I don't tell my spouse that I had a really crappy sleep and then I'm gonna be short and then I'm gonna need a little more space. We get into these tiffs because he can't read my mind, right? And so I think the number one thing, as we're getting into the how to is like, realize, make visible what's typically invisible. Realize all of the times you're not saying the thing. Now, this is not to say we should always say the thing, right? For good reason. We do not want everyone to say everything that's always on their mind. Like,

• 29:17Speaker 03

  you get to work that day, your assistant says, how are you doing? You say, great. You don't say, I'm overwhelmed. I gotta get a big meeting. You don't say that appropriately, right? But then if your bestie comes into your office and says, what's on tap? And you just say, I'm really excited for this meeting and you don't say, I'm also nervous and hey, maybe you can help me practice the beginning of it. Right. You can see that like your opportunities to develop personally, to experience joy, to have stronger relationships, those are being held back because you're not saying the thing. So number one is realizing the opportunities.

• 29:51Dan Harris?

  Just to reflect back to your point, Stoicism, not in the sense of the Greco-Roman philosophy, but as we, moderns understand it, like this kind of closed off, walled off, self-sufficient, individualistic factory setting that many of us have is actually a losing strategy because you're denying yourself the resources that are all around you if people actually have access to your inner life.

• 30:16Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. And you're denying yourself many other things, right? When a life of undersharing is a life of missed opportunities. It's a life of friendships that never blossom. It's a life of colleagues who, I'm being dramatic here, but these are all symptoms of undersharing, colleagues that never quite trust you. Romances that never spark, relationships that fade apart instead of deepening. One of the things that When you ask, how do I decide what to share and what not to share? One super basic rule of thumb is to go one layer deeper than you ordinarily would. So what does that look like? Well, imagine you're watching your kids play soccer and there's another parent beside you.

• 30:59Speaker 03

  And you're making small talk, which, ugh, we all hate small talk. It's, small talk kind of gives us the illusion of connection, right? It has the trappings of real connection. There's like smiling and eye contact and shared reality, but without the risk, without the depth, without the sharing and vulnerabilities. These kind of small talk situations leave us feeling really socially tired, but emotionally not nourished. So how do you, how would you know what to share? What does it mean to share one level more in that setting? Okay, this simple setting. What you could do is instead of commenting on what is happening or what happened, like, hey, the kids are smiling, the kids are having fun. Take it one level deeper and comment on the meaning of it, what it means to you.

• 31:44Speaker 03

  So say, for example, the kids are smiling. You know, I don't even remember the last time I laughed. I don't even remember the last time I had like a really, really great gut laugh. And then you can take it even further. If you really want connection, you could say to the person beside you, what about you? And ask them a question and there you're, you're off to the races. But to answer your question of how do you know what to share? One, you got to experiment. There's no right or wrong. And when you experiment, you get a better feel for it. But as a rule of thumb, one thing you can do is to kind of go one level deeper than you might think you should.

• 32:21Dan Harris?

  And then the bonus move is, once you've pushed your comfort zone a little bit and gone a click deeper than you normally would, in, in whatever the context is, you can, and I'm not sure what the right term for this, you may have a term in your book that I'm forgetting. You can then, you know, ask an appropriately probing question of

• 32:40Speaker 03

  Right.

• 32:41Dan Harris?

  of your conversation partner.

• 32:42Speaker 03

  Exactly. And that's really how friendships, relationships, colleague ships begin, true ones, right? It's by this back and forth. It's not necessarily in one session, but over time, the back and forth. Of gradually deepening self-disclosure. Now, people do this fairly naturally. Like, one thing I often say, I teach a lot of executives, I teach negotiation a lot, and they're like, "Well, yeah, Professor John, you tell me I need to get information from them. I need to know their stance, but what if they don't say anything? What if they're not revealing?" And I say, "Well, revealing, it gets revealing. If you share something, share your values, share your interests, it's almost instinctual for them to share back. But if they don't, you can always ask them a question."

• 33:27Dan Harris?

  That kind of gets to a key thing here, which is context. We just jumped from standing on the sidelines of a school.

• 33:35Speaker 03

  I know, to negotiation.

• 33:37Dan Harris?

  Yeah, and so, that's not a critique. It's just, this feels highly context-dependent.

• 33:43Speaker 03

  Yes, it is highly, highly context-dependent. I think that the people that are best at doing this, that are the most skilled at revealing, they're not the ones that always share, and they're not the ones that are always reserved. They have the greatest disclosure flexibility. It's the people that can go from extremely open, like with your life partner, like, super open, to being extremely reserved and guarded, like, in a very competitive context, for example. So it's knowing how to maneuver in between. And it starts with self-awareness. It starts with understanding your own internal state and understanding your own goals.

• 34:27Speaker 03

  So sometimes when people are chronically reserved, when they undershare, there's two reasons. One reason is that they don't know how they feel. They're not in tune with their inner self enough. The other is, like my husband, he's super in tune with his inner self, but he's just a very reserved person. He has kind of a different threshold for revealing than I do. He's the yin to my yang. But it starts with self-awareness. And then, part of that is understanding, what's the goal? What am I trying to achieve? Why might I reveal? Right? And there's lots of different reasons why you might reveal. But thinking through, what's your purpose here? What's your, are you trying to vent? Are you trying to get social support? If that's the answer, then you're going to choose one context and one person. You're going to make it a really intimate place with an intimate person.

• 35:12Speaker 03

  Or is it because you want to share your story to influence change? That would be something I call a catalyst confession where, you know, a leader reveals something really sensitive because they want to maybe de-stigmatize something, like the classic example there being Magic Johnson. The day he retired from the Lakers, he said, I mean, you can watch it on YouTube. It like gives me goosebumps every time. He says, I'm retiring effective today because I've contracted HIV. And you can tell he's really nervous. And that is a catalyst confession in the sense that it spurred positive change. There have been studies that have looked at, in the years after that, so pre-Magic confession, post, it spurred at least 900 more people to get tested, right?

• 35:57Speaker 03

  So the point is there's so many different goals of revealing, and you got to think through what's your goal? Because that answers then the question of when, how, to whom, and so on.

• 36:09Dan Harris?

  That makes a ton of sense. And I believe in the book, you refer to it as interrogating your why. And so if your question is, how do I know what to reveal and when? A great compass would be, what's your goal?

• 36:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:22Dan Harris?

  You know, and so if your goal in your marriage, or your whatever romantic configuration you've got is a healthier relationship, well, then the sky's the limit in that context. If you're in a harsh negotiation with shitbags on the other side of the table, then you're gonna, you know, your goal is gonna be to, you know, I think if you've got your head about you, your goal is going to be to arrive at the best deal possible for all sides. So then your decisions about what to disclose and when will all be downstream from that.

• 36:54Speaker 03

  Right, right. All of that is true. I would also say that my colleagues and I have tested, kind of what's the line? If you want to know what's the line between TMI and TLI? And I can't give you a clear answer because the line is of course always moving because it depends on context. But what I can tell you is we've tested all kinds of circumstances, like a super contentious negotiation, a leader introducing themselves to new colleagues, someone on a date. And in all of those situations, going a little bit further than you think you should is advantageous to the negotiation, to getting close. Like, we even go to the level of, in one study, we have

• 37:38Speaker 03

  Managers and companies come up with like a little self-introduction, say, okay, you're going to introduce yourself to new employees, write down what you'd say about yourself. And when people do that, they only say their strengths. But then what we do is we did a series of studies where we had employees watch a video of a manager, one of a few different videos. In one, the manager said, expressed a weakness, said, "I'm a little bit nervous at public speaking." Then in the next version, we took it a little further. "I'm a little bit nervous about public speaking. Sometimes my mouth gets dry." And the third version, "I'm a little nervous about public speaking. Sometimes my mouth gets dry and I get full-on panic attacks."

• 38:20Speaker 03

  Okay, so these three versions. And we're like, what's the tipping point? At what point do you think this person is incompetent? And the line is further than you think. The first, when they say, "I'm a little nervous about public speaking," people still, they're really motivated to work for the person because they're being forthcoming. But the question is, does it decrease their competence? Nope, it doesn't. They still think they're competent. Even the second level there, "I'm nervous about public speaking. Sometimes my mouth gets dry," people still are like, "Yeah, this is still a competent leader," right? So you would think that you shouldn't say any of this, but the first two levels, actually, they build trust. All of these build trust because they're revealing sensitive information. The question is, as a leader, when is it undermining of your competence?

• 39:01Speaker 03

  Only the third one, when you say, "Okay, that's TMI. I get full-on panic attacks," that's diminishing of your competence. But the reason I give this example is that we've done studies, like in all parts of context, you can see the line is a little further than you think.

• 39:15Dan Harris?

  Hmm. It's funny, I've built my whole career on having panic attacks.

• 39:19Speaker 03

  I know. I don't want to, I don't want to like, trigger anything. Sorry to make light of it, but I've been wanting to talk to you for so long because I feel like for every, I peed myself on stage story, I had lots of embarrassing stories in my book. I'm like, I don't know that I can top that. It's so real and I just love the way you grew from it and made a career out of it in a way. Yeah, it's really admirable.

• 39:42Dan Harris?

  I appreciate that. I have to say, I stumbled on it. I remember the moment when I decided to include the panic attack story. I can remember what I was looking at. I had decided years before that I was going to write a book about meditation because I'd gotten interested in it and I had read a bunch of books and they were all extremely annoying. And I just had this entrepreneurial feeling that I could write something that might appeal to skeptics. And there were many more skeptics at this point than there are now. Cause this was back in like oh eight or oh nine when I was coming to the decision to write this book. And I wrote a bunch of bad versions of the book and they were mostly sort of like how to books.

• 40:27Dan Harris?

  And I have this memory of just sitting at the desk in our then apartment. The feedback I was getting was that you should make this more of a story. And I thought, oh, maybe I'll tell the story of how I had a panic attack. Cause that is what got me to meditation. And my instinct wasn't, I'm going to make a catalyst confession. My instinct was, how do I make this interesting? I wasn't really trying to be brave. I was just trying to find a way to get people interested. And then when I put it out, or shortly before I put it out, when I started to panic about the fact that I was putting it out, I realized, well, this is actually either very brave or very stupid. But what I've found is that people love you if you make a confession the right way.

• 41:10Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. Yeah, the right way, totally. Preach. I mean, it's interesting because as I wrote the book, I kind of fancy myself an oversharer because, you know, in the book I have a lot of self-deprecating funny stories about myself. But as I wrote the book, so I was, chapter three, I'm like, I need a story of someone that was undersharing. They didn't realize it and then they did, and then their life changed. So I'm looking for a story because I realized like this book is going to be boring if I just study one. The stories really bring it to life. And it was later in the middle of the night that I realized, oh my God, this is me.

• 41:52Speaker 03

  There is something that I, a secret, something I knew about my mom that deeply affected me, my life course, that I had felt a lot of rage about. And I'd been keeping this secret for 10 years. And it was literally not until I was writing the book. That I realized the impact this had had on me and my life and my relationship. And then I'm like, I can't not talk to my mom about this because I will be a complete hypocrite. I wasn't thinking about writing about it. I just was like, I need to do this. So then I told her and it was one of the most meaningful conversations, certainly with my mom, possibly of my life.

• 42:34Speaker 03

  And then I did end up writing, you know, I talked to her and then it was a whole level of like, wow, to make this point, the person who studies sharing, who studies undersharing herself, didn't realize she was trapped in it until she was literally writing a book about it.

• 42:48Dan Harris?

  Did you reveal in the book what the thing was about your mother that you hadn't shared?

• 42:52Speaker 03

  I did, I did. Do you want me to reveal it?

• 42:55Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 42:56Speaker 03

  It's so meta. Yeah, no, I mean, it's like anything in the book, you know, you put a book out into the world and I've had many conversations with my mom and my family. Like, the most important thing is that we've talked about it and that we've grown from it. And like, I am closer than ever with my mom, but then she said, you know, I'm 75 years old. Who the hell cares? It's nothing to be ashamed of. I want people to know and I know you care a lot about this and I think it's going to be great. So I did it. Okay. So what's the story? So the month before my first marriage, I had second thoughts. I called my mom the month before and I said, Mom, what should I do?

• 43:38Speaker 03

  I really love him, but I just don't feel like I want to rip his clothes off, attracted to him. I don't think I said it like that to my mom, but you know, and my mom said, you know, you know, she was kind, she was, she said, it's funny because the month before I married your father, I also had second thoughts. I enjoyed my flirtations with other men, as she would say. And I felt like such a wave of relief because I'm like, not a weirdo. And then she said, obviously she went ahead with it. She said, I am so glad that I went ahead with it. I mean, my parents have a wonderful life together, wonderful marriage. She said, look at what we have. And she said, I know you, you're indecisive. You have the mature kind, the like, super

• 44:23Speaker 03

  physical love, that kind of goes away fast, but you have the most important thing. So I felt really assured. She's like, do what you feel is right, but this is my perspective. And so I was liberated and I got married and I was, had a wonderful day and it was all great and then, but it was not all great. So five years later, I was divorced. And once I was divorced, it was all over. I came across an email from my brother. He forwarded it to me. He said, hey Les, check this out. Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, indeed. It was an email between my mom and father privately. At the very bottom of the email, they had added my brother because he does their finances. At the very bottom of the email, the very first, when it was just between my mom and my dad, they were talking about my mom going to a lover's house. And my dad obviously knew about it and

• 45:08Speaker 03

  it's like one of these things you can't unsee, right? It was so shocking to me. And my body filled with rage when I found that out because I immediately went back to this fateful phone call and I thought, I only knew half the truth. My mom undershared with me. If she had told me the whole thing, the whole way that their marriage works, I would never have married this guy. So it felt like undersharing, telling half the story was worse than saying nothing at all. Well, then the years I tempered down, I did marry the love of my life, as she says to say. And you know, I realized like, it was more me. What's my mom supposed to say? It's the month before the wedding. Like what's she supposed to do? I'm the one that married him. It's all on me. But I did

• 45:51Speaker 03

  have this secret. She didn't know that I knew this about her and I'd always felt really, really, it was a big wedge between us. So I brought it up to her, literally as I was writing the book. I had a conversation with her and she said, you know, I've always wondered if I said the right thing. And it was just like the most loving, wonderful. We talked about so many things and we achieved this new level of understanding and yeah.

• 46:17Dan Harris?

  I hear that story makes me like your mom a lot, honestly. On a lot of levels.

• 46:22Speaker 03

  She's the best.

• 46:23Dan Harris?

  Did you mention before that you peed yourself on stage? I, you made a quick reference to that.

• 46:29Speaker 03

  I did.

• 46:30Dan Harris?

  10 minutes ago, and I've had a little mental note in my mind of like, come back to that.

• 46:36Speaker 03

  Oh, it's so funny. In college, I acted in a play, The Visit of the Old Lady, Friedrich Dürnart, der Besuch der alten Dame. It was in German, and I played, there's this schoolteacher, who is very, very, very uptight and schoolteacher-y, like stereotypical. And there's a scene where she lets loose and she gets super drunk in a bar. And in that scene, I got really into it, and I had this bottle of vodka, water, and I was wearing a dress with thin pantyhose, and all of a sudden, like, everyone's laughing so hard that I just peed myself, like, a waterfall. And I was so nervous that people would see the, like, shouldn't gesture,

• 47:18Speaker 03

  the waterfall coming between my legs. You know, in my mind, I'm like, it's like gushing, gushing. But then, for whatever reason, in that moment, I thought it would be a good idea to try to cover it up by diluting it, by throwing the vodka, so throwing the vodka, the water everywhere on stage. So that's my peeing on stage story. But I told it. So when I was a grad student, this was maybe, I don't know, eight years after that event. It was late at night, I was at a conference party, we were sitting around with mostly junior people, but a few super fancy grand poobah academics. So people that you really want them to know who you are and you want to impress them. And someone had the idea of, hey, let's go around the circle and share our most embarrassing story ever.

• 48:03Speaker 03

  And so most people resorted to these, like, humble brags, such as, oh, my God, there was a typo in my abstract, oh. But I, I may have been drinking because it was not a strategic choice, although, knowing what I know now, I would have done it again in a heartbeat. But I decided to go for it and share my actually most embarrassing story, which I've now also shared with you in the book. And so the next day, I just had the worst, it was a disclosure hangover, right? It was that gut-wrenching, post-reveal rumination of, what did I do? But then, the thing is, the two super fancy schmance professors, they became some of my closest friends. I got the job at Harvard in part because

• 48:44Speaker 03

  one of the guys there, we became very, very good friends. I call him, he's my academic big brother. And it wasn't in spite of that, it was, I think, partly because of it. And that's some of the things, like, yeah, it sucked in the short term, but in the long run, like, getting a bit edgy sometimes, it makes people trust you and like you, and it's fun.

• 49:04Dan Harris?

  Yes, and it is a risk. And I think if you're going to take the risk, you have to be okay with the fact that it might not work.

• 49:10Speaker 03

  Completely. And I've certainly made, you know, Colin, my hubby is the yin to my yang, because I remember when I was first pregnant, in a spirit of joy and transparency, whatever that means, I decided to tell our landlord. And then it led to a series of things that basically required us to move out. Because I think it was something to do with, there's lead paint and we could force them to de-lead and the landlord knew this and I didn't, because I'm clueless. And so they just like, kind of kicked us out. These things can bite you for sure. It's not like we should always share everything, but I encourage people to try a little bit. Just go a little bit further than you think you should and see what happens.

• 49:52Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Leslie talks about some practical principles of disclosure, some down-to-earth guidance for difficult conversations, and why sharing your feelings is linked to having fewer regrets later in life.

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• 51:14Dan Harris?

  Let me ask you about some terms I believe are in your book. The Goldilocks principle?

• 51:18Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. Yeah, so that refers to not too much, not too little, just too right. And the amount of disclosure that you want that is appropriate in any given situation. You can go over, which is TMI. You could go under, which is TLI. And the point is, the line is always changing. So one of my favorite stories with that is, so it was Miss Universe 1997. I love beauty pageants. I know they're super misogynistic and terrible in many ways, but they're also super fascinating. And so in Miss Universe 1997, the three people at the end, there's three contestants. And what it boils down to is the final question, right?

• 52:01Speaker 03

  Which is super dreaded by the contestants because it's very anxiety inducing, right? Random question in front of all these people that's really important, scary, but very entertaining. The question was, if you could do anything for one day, what would it be? The first contestant, she says, I would magically fly from place to place and travel. That was TLI, right? There was no real vulnerability, not the most original. That's TLI. One of the other three candidates said, I would not wear clothes. And that was TMI because a conservative beauty pageant crowd is like, whoa, whoa, whoa. But then Goldilocks, Miss USA, of course, Miss USA.

• 52:40Speaker 03

  I just became an American citizen, so I'm very, so Miss USA says, Miss Brooke Mahalani Lee. She comes out and she says, I would eat everything in the world. Horragesous laughter. She says, you do not understand. I would eat everything twice. And she wins. And so that is the sweet spot, right? And you can think like in other contexts, if people are like really struggling with their weight, that would be like kind of a dick move, right? But in that place, it was just right. And the super cool thing was that I managed to track Goldilocks, AKA Brooke Mahalani Lee. I managed to track her down as I was writing the book. She walked me through that moment, which is like 30 years ago now.

• 53:23Speaker 03

  And she said, yeah, it was an unfiltered, kind of unfiltered look, but it also. She didn't use these words in my words. It was a catalyst confession because the backstory was that Donald Trump had just bought it. And he was thinking about imposing a weight clause on the winner so that if Miss Universe gained weight, they would not be Miss Universe anymore. And so that was like so abhorrent to her that she said that partly to make a statement, right? To make change and yeah, pretty awesome.

• 53:53Dan Harris?

  I want to keep going down my list of terms from the book that I'd love to hear you explicate, but I like that one and I like that story. The next one is the Ben Franklin upgrade.

• 54:02Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. This is when we think about disclosure decisions, when we're deciding whether to reveal or to not reveal, to the extent we are, but now that we're aware that we, the opportunities, we are going to, we realize these, the number one thing we think about are the risks of revealing. But what the Ben Franklin upgrade does is it forces us to consider all four quadrants. What I mean by that is to make a good decision, we need to consider the pros and cons of doing the thing, revealing, and the pros and cons of not doing the thing, of not revealing. So it's actually a two by two matrix, right? And Ben Franklin, it's called the Ben Franklin upgrade because it's based on, there's an

• 54:44Speaker 03

  old story of Ben Franklin who was helping his friend make a decision of, maybe it was whether to move to America or something, I don't know. And he helped his friend walk through like, okay, well, you want to think about it in this way with the pros and cons. And so we want to upgrade our disclosure decision making so that we consider not just the risks of revealing, but fundamentally also the benefits of revealing, the downsides of not revealing and so on.

• 55:11Dan Harris?

  So just staying on the subject of the disclosure decision, and we've talked about this, but I'm just going to come back to it. Like one of the key things I think is to read the room. Is there more to be said about how to read the room? Are there any, what's that fancy academic term? You guys like heuristics?

• 55:30Speaker 03

  So fancy things to read the room.

• 55:34Speaker 03

  Well, I do think that knowing who is in the room is really important, and that's a mistake we often make on social media. I mean, not as much anymore, we're more aware, but knowing who is in the room, literally. But I really think that going back to your core of like, what's your why? What's your purpose? Is a really key way to start. And then thinking through these, we can walk through one if you want, but like an actual disclosure decision where you think about not just the risks of revealing, but all of the other factors, the other three quadrants.

• 56:03Dan Harris?

  Yeah, let's walk through one. You want me to invent a scenario? Or do you have one in your mind that you can use?

• 56:08Speaker 03

  I can do one. So imagine that you did something super successful at work, and it was a team effort. Maybe you made a cool new ad campaign that was widely successful, or a new product. Or in my business, you wrote a new academic paper. And so it was a teamwork, it was collaboration. But fundamentally, you knew that the core idea was yours, that you came up with the core idea. And you remember pitching it to the team and everything. So that's clear. So the big boss asks your colleague, hey, whose idea was this? Who came up with this? And they say, it was a group effort. And part of you dies inside because you're like, but it was me, it was my idea. I loved working with you guys, but it was my idea. And so in the old me, the old you

• 56:50Speaker 03

  probably wouldn't have even considered speaking up, right? But the new you is gonna walk through this, okay? So the first thing that's gonna come to mind are, of course, the risks of revealing. Like, okay, if I say something to my teammate, I love my teammates, they're gonna think I'm petty. It's gonna be an altercation, they're gonna feel badly, I'm gonna feel badly. Maybe it wasn't even my idea to begin with, self-gaslighting. So that's super easy that comes to mind. And then the next thing that comes to mind from that is the benefits of not revealing, right? Okay, I'm gonna avoid this altercation, I'll keep the peace. Okay, so that's, those are the easy ones. Now, the key is to keep going. What might be the downsides of holding back? Okay? So really, really force yourself.

• 57:34Speaker 03

  What are the downsides of not speaking up here? Well, I'm gonna ruminate, I'm gonna be pissed. And we all know that when we don't say the thing, it can seep out passive aggression, distance avoidance. So that's not good. I will feel badly. I won't be able to let go of this. I'll feel resentment. I won't be respecting myself because I'm not speaking up for myself. So then there'll be some self-loathing. Like, I'm being very dramatic, but you can see that there really, really are downsides to not speaking up here. And then you think about, okay, what are the benefits of saying something? Now, at first, they might just be the kind of, I won't ruminate anymore. But then real bona fide benefits are gonna come to mind.

• 58:18Speaker 03

  For example, my colleagues will understand me better because they'll know what I value, because they'll know that I value ideas, and that's important. And maybe they'll respect me even more because having good ideas are rare, and the fact that I care about them and that they know I care about that is like super baller, right? So then, suddenly, it's like, how can I not reveal? And then it becomes a question of how. What's the best way to communicate this, right? And that's another really important thing. Finding the right space, finding the right time. You're gonna wanna do this in person. You're gonna wanna start with something really positive. And then you're gonna wanna say, I feel, right? It's like, how do you do this? It's fill in the blanks. I feel, and then, I need.

• 59:03Speaker 03

  So that's kind of a easy, easy way to think about how to start doing this. But the point is that you can see, for any given decision, the thing that comes really naturally is the risk of revealing. But keep going. And you're not gonna do this, a full four quadrant reckoning for every decision. But I have found that even doing them for like, not so consequential ones like this, it's not so consequential in the grand scheme of things, it actually is a really good practice to train your mind to do it.

• 59:29Dan Harris?

  I really like the decision matrix, but let's keep going with the how to have the conversation because I agree with you. That seems really crucial. And so maybe take us another click deeper on this. I feel I need, this is an area where a lot of people get, and I see it in my own life, not only my own making of mistakes, but also watching my team make the right decision to self disclose. And then sometimes people I work with or people I'm friends with, they kind of flub the execution a little bit.

• 59:59Speaker 03

  Completely. Okay, so I have many thoughts. The first thing that comes to mind is, on your point, it's really hard giving people negative feedback, constructive feedback, as we euphemistically call it. So how do you do this? That's a thing that's important to reveal, right? You got to give people feedback. You got to say how you think they're underperforming or whatever it is. So I actually at HBS, I am the official bad guy because I am the head of the Academic Performance Committee at Harvard Business School. I'm the head of the Academic Performance Committee. And what that means is that when MBA students don't do well in their courses, when they get enough bad grades, they come to my committee and we decide whether they have to take time off, whether they can graduate and so on. It truly is supposed to be developmental. I believe

• 1:00:44Speaker 03

  that. At first I was like, but it really is developmental. We're trying to help them because as I've done this role more, I see all the reasons why there's so many reasons why people underperform. At any rate, part of my job is having conversations with these students, breaking this bad news, giving this really tough feedback. And what I have learned is the first thing, well, the old me would, they come to these meetings and they say, what did I do wrong? I was prepped and I'm like, yeah, this is what you did wrong. But no matter how nicely I tried to frame it, it's still a focus is on like eh, that they underperformed and it's on this negative, it's not a growth conversation. And then they get defensive and the medicine

• 1:01:26Speaker 03

  doesn't go down. So now what I do, I spend the majority of the meeting just listening. Just hearing them out, getting them to reveal to me. And then I understand them better. And then I actually can even be more helpful because then I really know what's going on. And then the fact that even if I know, because they've written me letters describing their situation, even if I know what they're going to say, them telling me, the act of them revealing to me is really important because they need to feel heard, right? And that's the validation. And then it's like completely disarming. They're open and then I can be like, okay, let's work on this. So when you're talking to your teams, you can get them to talk first and ask them how they're doing. Because chances are like they're experiencing some negative things too.

• 1:02:12Speaker 03

  One other thing about feedback. So I have long been skeptical of the feedback sandwich, which is, you know, start with the positive, say the thing and with something positive. I've been skeptical about it because I thought like, that's like burying the lead. They're going to forget the feedback. So I did a bunch of studies that tested this, that tested, is it better to start with like compliment or expression of how you appreciate the employee and then say the negative? Or is it better to just say the thing? The feedback sandwich, actually the first slice of it, starting with the positive is vitally important. So I disproved my own snark. I thought, ah, it's really, really important. So that's important. But then the other thing I wanted to say is to touch on the point about how,

• 1:02:54Speaker 03

  if we take out feedback, like if you need to say, if you come home from work and you feel really crappy, something bad happened and your spouse says, what's wrong? How do you do I feel, right? How do you enact that? And so what you want to do is you want to say a feeling word. And I'm saying this laughingly because it can be surprisingly harder than you think because I am a recovering emotional illiterate. What I mean by that is that when I was talking to my therapist a few years ago about something, I don't even remember what it was. And he said, okay, how do you feel? How did that make you feel? And I was listing cognitions, like.

• 1:03:37Speaker 03

  This is sucky, or like, maybe I shouldn't be worrying about this. Like, I wasn't listing actual feelings. And he's like, no, that's not a feeling. That's a thought, that's a thought. And then I finally said, what is a feeling? And then he handed me this tool, which I have in the book called the emotions wheel. And what it is, is it helps you to refine your feelings. It helps you articulate. Remember earlier I was saying, being a good revealer means first, understanding your inner state. If you don't understand your inner state, you can't answer how you feel. And so what this tool does, like, he handed me this tool and I have it in my book. I actually have an even simpler version in the book because I had to simplify it for myself. But what it starts, it's a wheel.

• 1:04:20Speaker 03

  The core of the wheel in my book is good, bad. Is the feeling positive or negative? Okay, I can do that. And then the next band out is, is it an arousing feeling? Or is it a calm feeling, right? So if you think of good, bad, you can have active good, like joy, elation, excitement. You can have low arousal good, which would be like calm. Similarly, with bad stuff, you can have high arousal, anger. You can also have like sadness, which is low arousal. So those are the first two bands. And then from there on out, it goes into like, okay, are you disappointed, frustrated? It has all these different adjectives that are feelings.

• 1:05:02Speaker 03

  You start at the core and then you zero in to what you're feeling. And I found that so helpful. It expands your emotional vocabulary, which helps you understand yourself. So that's a long-winded, but I think important answer to the I feel. Because I feel, like, say your feelings, it sounds so cheesy, but it really, it really is substantive when you think about it, right? And the other thing, the I need is really important. The reason why the I need is really important is because we often

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  Assume that our partners, that our friends can read our minds. And I know that sounds crazy because like it's completely illogical. But it's an implicit sneaky belief. It's called mind reading expectations. So it's the belief that others should just know how you feel. And a lot of us are really high in that. There's a scale to measure it called the mind reading expectation scale, which I did. Again, I was a guinea pig for all the things in my book and I found my mind reading expectations are off the chart. One of the items is something like that you believe in the fantastical notion that your partner should just know how you feel. And so, once I realized that, that my score was super high, I realized, oh my gosh, he can't read my mind. Of course he can't, I need to say what I need.

• 1:06:15Speaker 03

  So I need can be, I need a hug, I need you to listen, I need you to problem solve, I need perspective, I need you to be on my side. Like you can think there's all sorts of different needs you might have and you need to say it. Because otherwise they can't read your mind. And one of the really, really tricky things in relationships. One of the reasons why relationships, you know, you wake up married to someone and after 10 years, you feel like you don't know them. One of the culprits of that is that you stop sharing.

• 1:06:46Speaker 03

  Which sounds so basic, but what happens is that when you are in a long-term relationship, friendship with someone, the longer you're with that person, the more you understand them, that is true, the more knowledge you have about them. The problem though, is that your confidence that you know them massively outsizes your actual knowledge. And you can see that that's where the problem begins. Cause if we're more confident that we know our partners than we actually are, than we actually do know them, we stop asking, we stop being curious, we stop revealing. But now that we know it, now that I know I'm a mind reader and there's this gap, what feels like over communicating, it turns out is mostly just communicating.

• 1:07:28Dan Harris?

  Take me back to the moment, though, where you're pissed off because your team members are taking credit for your idea and you're gonna bring it up with them and you're gonna do the I feel I need. How would you broach that successfully?

• 1:07:41Speaker 03

  Right. So I actually have had this situation. There was a research paper and I talked to the one person that said the thing and I started by saying, you know, it was in person, "I love working with you." Truly, like you can't, it's gotta be real. Like it is genuine. "I love working with you. I'm so grateful for this project. This project would not be the same without you." I have to say, because I respect you and I've been thinking about this and I owe it to you to tell you how this made me feel. And I know you didn't mean anything malevolent. In fact, I love how collaborative we are, but at the end of the day, when you wrote down on

• 1:08:25Speaker 03

  that authorship form that it was a group effort, the idea, ah, that didn't really sit well with me. And then she was like, "Oh, my gosh. Yes. I was just filling that out really quickly." Because I know we hate these stupid petty, like, some journals require you to attribute, "Who did that?" That, we don't like that. I don't like it because we are lovely collaborators who, we love collaborating and so we're not like, credit hungry, most of the time. But you know, when it comes to like, writing in stone, whose idea was it? And it's inaccurate. I was really worried about it. And in fact, we became closer as a result because she understood me more.

• 1:09:04Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 1:09:04Speaker 03

  And that's another really important thing that I think people underestimate the value of is feeling understood for who you really are. In relationships, there are studies showing that, so suppose I have low self-esteem and on the one hand, if suppose in one situation, my spouse says, "Les, oh, my gosh, you're so confident all the time. You're so sure of yourself. I love that about you." So, not real. The other version, my spouse says, "Oh, I know you sometimes struggle with self-esteem. I know that about you." I'm not even like validating or saying it's okay. I'm just saying, "I know that about you." Those relationships are associated with much more longevity, much more intimacy, much more love. And when you think about it, it makes sense, right?

• 1:09:47Speaker 03

  Because if he loves me even though I have smelly feet and even though I have low self-esteem, like, that's love. So it's the same thing in like friendships when saying these difficult things, they do say something about you and then they help your friend know you better. I'm not saying that this wasn't hard. It is very hard. I'm also not saying it's always gonna go well, but if it doesn't go well, you know, you've thought it through, so you're gonna do it in a good way. And if it doesn't go well, that's information, right? You learn something.

• 1:10:21Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 1:10:21Speaker 03

  We've done studies where we've asked people who've said, I love you in a relationship before, who've been the first to say, I love you. That's like one of the most vulnerable things we can say, to say, I love you to someone. We said, did the person reciprocate or did they jilt you? We didn't frame it like that, but when you feel it's time, like of these people, which are just ordinary Americans, 80% of the time was reciprocated, which I think we can take a lot of comfort in, right? Like I would have guessed, like my catastrophic thinker, I would have guessed it's way lower if I say, I love you, right? That it would be reciprocated. Now, when you feel the time is right, then you, I think you have pretty good odds. And if they jilt you, then, because I've been there, then you have information. It sucks in the moment, but it's freeing because you can move on.

• 1:11:06Dan Harris?

  I keep coming back to what you said earlier. A life of undersharing is a life of missed opportunities. And I think that sums it up very nicely.

• 1:11:13Speaker 03

  You know, if there's one thing that I think people should do more of, it's share your feelings. And now that we've gone through what that actually means, it's not just some la, la, la, la, la. So I don't need to explain how, but rather what I want to say to make the point is use data. The first data point is that Tom Gilovich, amazing psychologist at Cornell, he's studied regrets and he has found that on average, about 76% of the regrets that people have in life are regrets of things they did not do. Okay, not sharing is a not do thing. Number two thing I wanted to tell you is that in a parallel universe, there's a palliative care nurse by the name of Bronnie Ware,

• 1:11:54Speaker 03

  and she wrote a book on what are the top five regrets of people who are dying? Because she spent a lot of time talking with people as they were dying. The number three most common regret, I wish I had shared my feelings more. I mean, wow, right?

• 1:12:13Dan Harris?

  As we close it out here, can you just remind everybody of the name of your book? And then also, anything else you want us to know about?

• 1:12:20Speaker 03

  My book is called Revealing the Underrated Power of Oversharing. And if you want to do any of those quizzes we talked about, I have them on my website, which is proflesliejohn.com. I'm also on socials, LinkedIn, Insta, same thing, proflesliejohn.

• 1:12:39Dan Harris?

  We will put links to all of that in the show notes. So listener, if you want to go deeper with Leslie, have at it. And Leslie, great job. Thank you so much for making time for this.

• 1:12:50Speaker 03

  Thank you. Thank you so much.

• 1:12:57Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Leslie John. Great to talk to her. Don't forget to check out the new app, danharris.com is the place to get the app. There's a free 14 day trial if you want to check it out before you spend any money, danharris.com. Last thing to say here, thank you so much to everybody who works so hard on the show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

• 1:13:46Speaker 05

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