February 6, 2019 • 33 mins
Emily Esfahani Smith says meaning is life’s essential pathway and expecting fulfillment by seeking happiness will only lead us astray.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
There's just one study that shows that kids who do
chores around the house have a greater sense of purpose
and it's because they have a role to play that
even if they don't like it, they're put in a
position where they're giving back and they feel needed. So
here that even um there somewhere she's on dishwashing duty
all the time. I'm doing this for you. But welcome
(00:32):
to you. Turns the podcast where we talk about all
things change, transformation. I'm Lisa Us and I am Jill
Kerzig and in our conversations in this safe space we've
created here on our podcasting studio, UM, I think we
have kind of tried to be realistic about what we're
looking for in times of transition, and the idea that
(00:58):
searching for happiness, like that's what you want. You want
to be happy, you want to come out of whatever
transition you're in, and you want to feel like you're
happy and happier than you were. And I don't. I
feel like we keep hearing from people that there's something
else and something bigger. That's why we're taking it out
of the safe space today. We're going to the dangerous place,
(01:19):
which is where all the good stuff happens anyway, And
our guest today is going to lead us there. We
are joined by Emily Sani Smith. She is a journalist
and author of the Power of Meaning, Finding fulfillment in
a world obsessed with happiness. Thank you so much for
being with us here today, Emily, thanks for having me.
So let's break it down meaning versus happiness? Why? What? How? So?
(01:47):
I was in graduate school studying positive psychology a few
years ago, which is this field of psychology, social science
research that's concerned with the study of the good life.
So how can we be happier? You know, how do
you live a life of character? How do you deepen
your relationships? And while I was learning about positive psychology research,
(02:10):
I started noticing that, you know, there's so much of
this research on happiness within positive psychology, and it gets
blasted out to the media. And there's this obsession in
our culture with happiness, that it's the be all and
all of life and in our constitution or declaration of inness, right, Yeah,
exactly the core of who Americans are. Yeah. And as
(02:33):
a magazine editor, I was guilty of making one thousand
and one tips available to people. Well, and I think
it's I think it's reasonable because people think, oh, if
things aren't going right for me, if I feel bad,
then the solution is to pursue happiness that will make
me feel better. But what I learned in this program
was that actually, this manic pursuit of happiness that our
(02:57):
culture kind of encourages us to do can backfire in
a big way. So when people obsess over happiness and
kind of direct their lives around the pursuit of it
the way that you know, the media encourages us to
do articles these studies, they actually end up feeling unhappy
and lonely as a result of that. And on the
(03:20):
other hand, there's this whole other way of kind of
organizing your life and this other pursuit, which is meaning.
And I remember there's this one study in particular that
was distinguishing between a happy life and a meaningful life,
and it showed that, you know, happiness is about feeling
good in the moment, positive emotions, It comes and goes
(03:41):
um People who are happy kind of get the things
that they want, they like, they spend their time shopping
and taking care of themselves. Whereas meaning was bigger, it
was about connecting and contributing to something beyond yourself, whether
it's a community, raising your children, important work that you
do that you can feel proud of, and that people
who are leading meaningful lives are doing things like you know,
(04:04):
raising kids, volunteering, engaged in meaningful work, starting you know,
companies or projects or pursuits in their communities to make
the world in some way a better place. And I thought, wow, Like,
if I think about the kind of life I want
to lead, it's it's meaning Like, that's what I want
to be thinking about, not happiness. You know, generationally, did
(04:25):
you find yourself completely out of step with with your peers?
It's funny. So I'm I'm a member of the millennial generation,
and there's this There are kind of two stories to
tell about. Yeah, yeah, um So. On the one hand,
there is a lot of evidence that suggests that millennials
really care about meaning. But the way that they conceive
(04:49):
of meaning, I think can be problematic because they think, oh,
I only want to work at jobs that are meaningful
for me. I only want to, you know, do things
outside of my job that's meaning full, and meaning has
to be this kind of capital m meaning or capital
P purpose that they're trying to find in their work.
And one of the things I try to do in
my book is bring the concept of meaning down to
(05:12):
earth a little bit, because I think we've put it
up on a pedestal, especially young people. And when you
put it up on a pedestal, and you think, oh,
I have to find a job that changes the world
in some grand way, or my life has to be
heroic or epic, and for the history books that you
end up missing the point about what meaning really is,
and then ultimately later in life feeling disappointment when those
(05:35):
things don't come to pass, as they inevitably won't for
so many of us who end up leading ordinary lives
that are wonderful, but not the extraordinary thing that we
may be thought when we were in our late teens
early twenties. And that's something that's so cool about your book.
There's not a lot of grandiosity to your vision of meaning.
And you know, when I tried to distill it and
(05:57):
think about, Okay, what's the message in this book for
all of us, it did not feel to me like
it was great grand ambition, more in the moment kind
of meaning than definitely and meaning that you kind of
construct for yourself in the moment. I mean when I
so when I first came across that study on happiness
versus meaning, and I ended up writing an article for
(06:18):
it for The Atlantic that ended up being titled There's
More to Life than being Happy. What really motivated that
idea that there's more to life than happiness is looking
around at the people who I really loved and cared about,
my friends, my fiance, my parents, who were kind of
stressed out all the time. They weren't leading super glamorous lives,
but they they were doing important work and in work
(06:42):
broadly to find whether it's kind of maintaining a garden,
you know, taking care of their family, being a caretaker,
or you know, career work. And there's no kind of
place in this cultural conversation on well being that I
think values that kind of life, and so I wanted
to put a language around it and kind of honor
those kinds of lives. I'm friends with the psychologist who
(07:03):
spoke to the fact that if happiness is the goal,
it's not enough um to counterbalance this level of suffering
in the world. So the moments of happiness that we
have just feeling good really doesn't justify the suffering that
so many of us and existentially how much suffering there
is in the world. But meaning really does it makes you.
(07:24):
It gives you a reason to wake up in the
morning in spite of the fact that there will be suffering,
and that will be hard and you will struggle because
saying the reward where the counter to that is, you know,
a little bit of happiness isn't enough to warrant the
amount of suffering there is. That that's such an important
point and I think that you can look at that
in a global way, like how rates of depression, suicide,
(07:48):
opioid drug alcohol abuse are all increasing and the research
is pretty clear my read of it anyways, that what's
driving this rising tide of despair is a is a
lack of meaning in people's lives, but also on a
more micro level in your own life, Like the more
you know, immediate forms of suffering they don't you don't
have to necessarily be a drug addict, but just the
(08:09):
stress in your life, the uncertainty is the self doubt, uh,
and how having some reason kind of gets you through
that and pushes you on through the you know, good
stuff at also through the bad stuff. Is that what
you mean when you talk about in your book learning
to Suffer Well. I was struck by that phrase. Yeah.
I love the you know, Buddhist concept that life is suffering,
and it sounds like such a downer, but I think
(08:31):
when you drill down and you think about all the
ways that we on a day to day basis are suffering,
whether it's anxiety about our status that we're never going
to accomplish the goals we want to that, oh we're
never going to be good enough that you know, I
I'm so stressed out that something, you know, someone I
love is dying or sick, or all my kids getting bullied.
(08:54):
There's so many ways that we can just be full
of anxiety and dread and hopelessness and the ability to
kind of manage that and to push through that and
be resilient and the face of it is it's a
fundamental capacity that you have to master if you want
to lead a good life. And the research is clear
that the way to be resilient and to suffer well,
(09:17):
as you know, to quote this one research or who
I quote um, is to be able to find a
meaning in that suffering. I think the happiness becomes elusive
the more you pursue it anyway, and especially in this
day and age, where you you happiness you may achieve
isn't even enough because you have the expectation that you
(09:41):
should have the same level of happiness as everyone that
you see on your Instagram feed, and so it becomes
like a very fruitless chase, which creates suffering in spite
of the fact that you're trying to search for happiness. Yeah, no, exactly.
It's the you know, the targets always shifting. It's the
old old, you know thing about the hedonic treadmill that
(10:02):
as soon as you're a little bit happier, you want
to be even more happier because you adapt to that
happiness level. And then you look around at other people
and you know these are kind of false personas that
they're you know, projecting to the world. But still, you know,
it's it's hard to you compare what's you know, what
you're feeling on the inside to what they're showing on
the outside. But it's still hard and um and definitely
(10:23):
the fact that like happiness is so elusive and that
we strive for it is kind of causing some of
this suffering. And I think you can say the same
thing about happiness is people have wisely said about success,
which is you shouldn't strive to be successful to get
into that great college or getting that ideal job, because
just strive to do good work, strive to leave a
(10:43):
good life, and that happiness um will often be the
byproduct of that um. But even if it's not always that,
you can have the satisfaction of knowing that you've done
something that's kind of move the needle forward in some
way for others. Sound like a stoic, and really, yeah,
I do lot stoicism. I have to say when we
(11:05):
come back, we're going to dip into how we actually
create meaning in our lives. Before the break, we were
speaking with Emily A. Shani Smith, the author of the
(11:25):
Power of Meaning, and we're trying to figure out how
to create meaning in our lives. And you have technique
for pillars of meaning, So can you walk us through
those police After I came across this research and this
insight that a life of meaning is what we should
be pursuing instead of focusing so much on happiness, which
(11:47):
by the way, is an idea that's grounded in ancient philosophy,
and so it's it's not just kind of modern research. Anyways,
after I came upon that insight and it was really
moved by it, I started wondering, well, how exactly can
we find meaning in our own lives? Is there some
universal formula that can apply to everybody? Or are there?
(12:08):
Is it? Yeah? Right, exactly? It's like meaning in three steps, um,
or do we each have to kind of work through
it on our own and find the answers in our
own And the answer kind of ends up being both
all of the above. So um. I went on this
kind of journalistic exploration where I interviewed many people, read through,
(12:28):
as you know, really thousands of pages of psychology, research, neuroscience,
you know that that ancient philosophy that I mentioned, literature,
anything that I could find that really bore on this
question of how people find meaning. And as I started
looking through all these bits of data, I started noticing
certain patterns come up again and again. And so when
(12:52):
you look at what people are saying when they tell
you my life is really meaningful, they're usually talking about, um,
one of four things, or all four of them, or
a combination. So the first is belonging, having a sense
of belonging, and that really means being in relationships or
in communities where you are valued for who you are
(13:17):
intrinsically and where you value others in turn for who
they are. So it's not like you're only valued because
you subscribe to the beliefs of the community or because
you accomplished certain things, but just by virtue of being
a person in the world, you're valued. And so like
this kind of pure, unconditional like love that you know,
we aspire for. So that's kind of what belonging is.
(13:39):
The second is purpose and meaning and purpose are terms
that get conflated and used interchangeably, but purpose is actually
more specific than meaning. It's about having a goal or
some kind of principle that organizes your life and that
involves making a contribution to others. So know, for example,
(14:01):
you know, your purpose might be I want to be
a doctor and work on a cure for cancer. I
spoke to a hospital cleaner who said, my purpose is
helping sick people heal. So she kind of took the
day to day activities that she was doing and connected
it to, you know, the bigger mission of the hospital
and the healthcare industry. So that's purpose, And the point
(14:22):
I like to make about it is that it comes
in all shapes and sizes. So to kind of go
back to one of the things we're talking about earlier,
this idea that meaning has to be grand, it's not.
That's not always the case, you know, it can be
a more local, in the moment thing. For a lot
of parents tell me my purpose is raising my kids.
Even as an act that makes some kind of contribution
(14:45):
can be kind of purpose building that. There's just one
study that shows that kids who do chores around the
house have a greater sense of purpose, and it's because
they have like a role to play, even if they
don't like it, they're kind of put in a position
where they're giving back and they feel need it. So
you're that eavy up there somewhere. Yeah, she's on dishwashing duty.
Oh yeah, all the time, I'm doing this for you.
(15:08):
But yeah, exactly. But your purpose can shift. It sounds
like it doesn't have to be a lifelong purpose. It
sounds like you can have a different purpose for different
phases of your life. Definitely, And I think that, you know,
when we think about transitions and how like life can
shift and move over time, one of the things that
makes those transitions so hard is that there's usually a
(15:28):
shift in purpose happening, and so you lose an old
purpose and you have to find a new one, and
that can be painful. You know, there's research showing that
when people are searching for meaning, they they're not as
happy and they're kind of suffering more. But when once
they find it, they feel better. But in those transitions,
you're like doing that hard work of like growth and
searching and finding. So definitely, you know, you may your
(15:49):
primary purpose might be your job for many decades of
your life. Then you retire and you have to find one,
or might be raising your kids they go off to school.
You have to find a new one, and that's searching. Period.
Don't expect to feel happy, you know, delicious in any
particular ways. This is exactly search exactly exactly. Yeah, it's
like the pain is kind of how you know that
(16:10):
you're growing. So if that's any hope, right, that is
thank you, all right, So we have purpose, we have belonging, right,
and then going here the third one is transcendence, and
these are those moments of awe and wonder where you
are kind of lifted above the your ordinary consciousness, ordinary
(16:36):
kind of experience of the world and feel connected to
something much bigger than yourself. And this can kind of
exist on a spectrum. So some people have major transcendent
experiences where they experience a full sense of self law.
So I spoke to a Buddhist meditator who told me
that on one of his retreats, he was sitting out
by the pond meditating and all of a sudden, This
(16:57):
was after you know, weeks of meditation, by the way,
so don't expect this to kind of happen if you
start meditating, But all of a sudden, his sense of
self completely dissolved and he felt at one with everything
around him. And these experiences, in part what makes it
meaningful is they affect a transformation in us where we
after we have the experience, we come back and we
(17:18):
feel more connected to others and because of that connection,
more wanting to do good in the world. So I
talked about how these experiences can exist on a spectrum.
Let me tell you about him more minor experience, which
is that um there's a study where the researchers had
students go out and look up at this um towering
(17:38):
grove of eucalyptus trees out on Berkeley's campus in California,
just for a minute. But even after that experience of
all in transcendence, they had this feeling of connectedness and
it transformed them, just like it transformed my friend who
had this more powerful experience of self loss. And the
way the researchers measured it is by after they exposed
(17:59):
them to that trans sendant view, they put them in
a situation where one of the confederates in the study,
so someone who's in on the study had a thing
of pens and dropped them all over the place, and
the people who had the transcendent experience were more likely
to be helpful to this person and pick up more
pens than those in a control group. So yeah, so
(18:19):
those are transcendent experiences. They are intrinsically meaningful because they
do lead to the sense of connectedness. But then they
also kind of re orient our lives in a way
that makes us behave in more meaningful manners. So it
connects us to something bigger than ourselves exactly exactly, and
that that can be you know, with purpose, like you
can feel connected something beyond yourself, like your organization's mission
(18:41):
or your family, but with transcendence, it's something more cosmic,
like it's the universe, it's humanity as a whole little yeah,
little awe or like you know, god like religion is
a really powerful portal to transcendence to and increasingly we
are not a religious people. Yeah, so maybe this is
this is a growing challenge and we're not people who
(19:03):
are in nature. I think we're missing those experiences for
awe and transcendence in our culture now, and that has
to be hurting us in our search for meaning. I
would think, yeah, absolutely, I think so, And I think
that there's this kind of this um. Sociologist named Emil
Dirkheim talked about how people have kind of two fundamental natures.
(19:24):
One is just the nature that goes out each sleeps, works,
is engaged in day to day life. The other is
this nature that wants to experience the sacred. And so
we're kind of emphasizing one at the expense of the other.
And it's we're starved for these experiences. That was Young
and Freud's big argument, wasn't it Young thought the primary
motivator was for union with the divine and Freud said,
(19:48):
oh no, no, no, it's about the penis, right exactly. Yeah,
I guess, yeah, I guess I'm were with young on
that one. Um, okay, So introduce us to the fourth
concept behind meeting. So this one is storytelling. And you
know what I think of storytelling Before I wrote this book,
The first thing I would think of is novels and
(20:08):
movies and television shows, these kind of fictional stories that
we engage with in our day to day lives. Um,
and those are important for meaning. But what I'm really
talking about when I talk about storytelling is the story
that you tell yourself about yourself, the narrative that you
craft about your life, where you came from, who you are,
and where you're going. And this pillar turned out to be,
(20:32):
I think, in a lot of ways the most interesting
one because it's I think a lot of people don't
realize that they are the authors of their stories, that
they have the capacity to therefore change and edit the
story if they're telling a story that's kind of holding
them back. So there's this really rich um research, tradition,
(20:53):
and psychology around what's called narrative therapy. And it shows
that the stories that we tell, and we're all telling stories,
whether we realize it or not, about who we are
and why things happen the way they do. The stories
we tell determine how we think about ourselves and how
we experience the world. And if you're telling a bad story,
the story of oh, I'm not good enough, I'm always failing,
(21:15):
I'm a victim, it actually affects your sense of day
to day meaning. People who tell these more negative stories,
I feel like their lives are less meaningful as opposed
to people who tell stories that are defined by themes
of growth and love and redemption and kind of forward movement.
When we get back, we are going to explore this
idea of storytelling a little bit wi deeply. We've been
(21:48):
speaking with Emily as the Honey Smith. She is the
author of the Power of Meaning and editor at the
Manhattan Institute, and we're talking about storytelling and primarily the
stories we tell ourselves as one of the pillars for
a life of meaning. Can we talk about your story
a little bit and how you came to the point
(22:12):
of understanding meanings as sort of your why so? I
I think that my interest in meaning must have been
seated in my childhood, because I had a childhood where
I was really surrounded by people who were seekers and
organize their lives around this pursuit of meaning. So I
(22:32):
grew up in Montreal living in a Sufi meeting house.
And for those who might not know, Sufism is a
school of mysticism that's associated with Islam and UM. Some
popular common cultural touch points are the whirling Dervishes, the
people you know might know who those are, the poet
(22:54):
ROOMI was also a Sufi. Uh So, so what is Sufism.
It's this kind of spiritual path where you are, like
a lot of the other mystical paths as well, whether
it's you know, Jewish mysticism or Christian mysticism or even
Buddhism Hinduism, You're trying to move forward and and find
yourself um, growing closer to God. This kind of union
(23:17):
to the divine is what drives these spiritual seekers. And
so what that meant growing up in the meeting house
was that, you know, people would come, these Sufis would
come to our home twice a week in the evening
and they would meditate for several hours in this large
room that we had, sitting on the floor listening to
classical Persian Sufi music. I'm a little bit imagining little
(23:40):
Emily running around and in between them with your toys.
But no, no, definitely, I mean I definitely I was
you know, I was always kind of I was running
around and there was sometimes this the bathroom that they
would all use on the main floor had a light
switch on the outside, and so I was feeling very mischievous.
I would turn the light switched off when I would
see someone going there, which wasn't in the spirit of
(24:04):
ex but I had, you know, I had some ways
to go um. But so meditation was part of their practice,
and an emphasis on loving kindness as well and on service,
and they so they had this kind of spiritual discipline.
And I grew up with these people who cared about
leaving meaningful lives and who weren't caught up in this
(24:25):
happiness site. Guys, you know, a lot of them had
led really difficult lives. They were refugees from the Middle East,
or they were Westerners who had been beaten up by
life in other ways, and yet they found comfort in
this spiritual practice that was difficult and demanding, but that
brought them a sense of meaningfulness. So, you know, eventually
(24:46):
we we moved out of the meeting house. We came
to the US, where I spent the second half of
my childhood, and I think without that daily grounding of
Stuvism in my life, I really began to wonder, how
do you live a meaningful if outside of a religious
and spiritual context, what makes life worth living? And that
(25:06):
question led me to study philosophy and college and uh,
positive psychology and graduate school. And it was really in
that positive psychology program to go back to what we
were talking about in the beginning where I came across
this research about happiness and meaning that I thought back
to the Sufies and thought, oh, of course, like that's
what they were doing, and that's what my own kind
(25:27):
of yearning for something more has been driven by. And
that's why I feel so ill at ease by these
cultural messages that say happiness, happiness, happiness, because I was
coming from kind of a different heritage. Um And I
wrote my book to kind of appeal to people who
may be religious, may not be religious, because I think
that you know, to your point that we're less religious today.
(25:51):
I think that makes the question of meaning all that
much more urgent. Just let me to it for a second.
Are you religious in an active way or you do
consider yourself religious? Person. I would say that I have
a very strong religious sensibility. So I really love religion.
I'm fascinated by all religions. UM. You know, when I'm
home with my parents, you know, they come to the
meeting house in New York, I'll go with them the
(26:13):
Sufi meeting house. With my husband, you know, we go
to UM church services together. So I kind of, you know,
I'm kind of a junkie for all variants of it.
It's interesting, I mean, it sounds as though you have
found your purpose in trying to explain what you've learned,
share what you've learned about meaning over time. But is
(26:34):
that is that what you feel like your purposes now? Mh.
So I'm working on a new book proposal about ambition
and success, and I've been thinking a lot about my
own you know kind of path and read and thoughts
about success and read it redefinition of it. And one
of the things that is clear to me is that
(26:57):
in some of my earlier years, like as I was
late late stages of high school, trying to apply to colleges,
looking in college about what my future would be, that
I was very much caught up in kind of a
success mindset like you have to get into a really
good school, you have to like get a job that
you can support yourself and that's prestigious, and all these things.
And doing this book and also kind of doing the
(27:20):
research for this book that I hope to write about
Ambition has really made me realize that the best way
for you, kind of from the perspective of your kind
of mental health and your sanity, to think about success
is by yoking it to whatever you think your purpose is.
So it's not about how many you know, books you sell,
(27:43):
or how much money you're making, or what house you
live in, but it's about the extent to which you're
living out this purpose that's really important to you. And
I would kind of think of my purpose as you know,
finding these ideas and sharing them with people and kind
of moving them, uh, the way that I was moved
as a kid reading you know, these great books that
(28:05):
profoundly affected me. So for listeners out there who are
maybe maybe struggling, maybe feeling unhappy and making the shift
from unhappiness or even from being happy to finding more meaning,
what techniques would you offer to help them shift their
stories find a purpose. How do they go down this
path of creating more meaning in their lives specifically, definitely.
(28:29):
I mean there are two things that come to mind,
and one is, um, taking yourself outside of the really
toxic process of social comparison, because I think that if
you're talking about, you know, yoking your sense of success
and identity to what your purpose is, as soon as
you start comparing yourself to others, whether it's on Instagram
or oh my my friend who's you know, this successful
in their career or whatever, then you lose sight of
(28:51):
what you're here to do. And so just you know,
removing yourself from that process of social comparison, just staying
in your on swim lane, realizing that we each have
unique important work to do on this earth and that
what they do it does not make me any lesser. Um.
And the second, I would say, focus on how you
can shift your story if you're telling a story that's
(29:13):
holding you back. So I think of this guy who
I wrote about in my book named Emma Kanaka, who
had been you know, it's an extreme example, but I
think it's one that we can apply to our own
lives too. He had been paralyzed playing football, and so
after he had this injury, he started telling himself a
really negative story like I'm never going to be successful,
(29:34):
I'm never gonna get married, like my parents are gonna
I'm gonna be dependent on them for the rest of
my life, Like look at me, I'm I'm a loser basically. Um.
But with time, he started to reflect and think about
who he was, and he realized that the person that
he was before his injury was actually a pretty selfish person.
(29:56):
That he partied a lot, that he cared more about
being the life of the party than helping other people,
that he cared more about his own performance on the
football team and how his team was doing. And this
kind of edit to a story that oh, no, like
I can be a better person than the one that
I was before ended up changing his life and leading
him to getting a degree in counseling and working on
(30:19):
as a mentor to kids in his career now. And
it changed his life. And the shift that happened is
what psychologists would call shift from a contamination story, a
story that moves from from really good things happening to
bad things happening, to a redemption story story that moves
from bad to good. And so if you're telling a
bad story, searching for the good and looking for the
(30:42):
good outcomes, I think is a really helpful way to
get yourself back on that kind of hopeful, meaningful trajectory.
As an editor, I'm just so intrigued and delighted by
the idea that you can edit your own story in
your mind like that. But sometimes you need an assist, right,
I mean, I feel like we've all known people who
were very stuck in a victim narrative, and they might
(31:04):
have a really good reason to see it that way. Definitely, Yeah,
But you know, sometimes you need you need help, and
especially when I mean it's one thing to look back.
You can be much more reflective and edit your story
when it's something that is in the past, when you're
in the middle of it. In the midst of it, yeah,
it's it's harder to reframe that narrative. Do you have
(31:26):
any tips for that? Definitely, I mean, I think I
think you're absolutely right. But one of the things about
storytelling is that it's it's not going to necessarily happen overnight.
It could you know, it could be a long process.
And I would say when it comes to both the
point of getting an assist and also trying to rethink
your story as you're living, and especially if it's something difficult.
(31:50):
I would turn to others as kind of editors in
your story, or if you see somebody going through a
hard time, kind of helping them edit their story. So
I know so many times, like somebody I love will
be like, oh, I'm just I'm you know, my boss
doesn't think I'm doing well at work, and I'm you know,
I feel like a failure and I'm not kind of
accomplishing as much as I want to. And then I'll
(32:13):
think about just last week, how they told me that
they had gotten a really nice evaluation that they had,
you know, some something that they had written was published
and they got really good feedback. And so being like, hey,
like what about all these other pieces of evidence that
contradict what you're saying? So doing it for others or
doing it for yourself, like trying to find the evidence
that might help you rewrite that story. Uh. You know.
(32:36):
One of the things is humans that we have as
a feature of our brain is a very strong negativity bias.
So bad things happen were much more affected by them,
much more likely to remember them. We have to have,
like in a marriage five good things happen to like
undo the effect of one bad one happened, like comments
on social media, yeah exactly, ten great ones, and one
(32:57):
person says you look fat in that dress, Yeah exact
us for those of the day, exactly exactly. And I
think knowing that and knowing that we have this kind
of blinkered therefore a perception of reality is good because
it makes us, hopefully we're trying to edit your story,
you will see that all that negativeness is not an
accurate picture of reality. So it really search for the good,
(33:19):
search for the evidence that contradicts the bad. Such great advice, Emily,
Thank you so much for being with us today. Thanks
for having me. It's fantastic. Thank you. If you want
to connect with Emily, go to Emily Esfahan smith dot
com and connect with us at You Turns Podcasts.
There's just one study that shows that kids who do
chores around the house have a greater sense of purpose
and it's because they have a role to play that
even if they don't like it, they're put in a
position where they're giving back and they feel needed. So
here that even um there somewhere she's on dishwashing duty
all the time. I'm doing this for you. But welcome
(00:32):
to you. Turns the podcast where we talk about all
things change, transformation. I'm Lisa Us and I am Jill
Kerzig and in our conversations in this safe space we've
created here on our podcasting studio, UM, I think we
have kind of tried to be realistic about what we're
looking for in times of transition, and the idea that
(00:58):
searching for happiness, like that's what you want. You want
to be happy, you want to come out of whatever
transition you're in, and you want to feel like you're
happy and happier than you were. And I don't. I
feel like we keep hearing from people that there's something
else and something bigger. That's why we're taking it out
of the safe space today. We're going to the dangerous place,
(01:19):
which is where all the good stuff happens anyway, And
our guest today is going to lead us there. We
are joined by Emily Sani Smith. She is a journalist
and author of the Power of Meaning, Finding fulfillment in
a world obsessed with happiness. Thank you so much for
being with us here today, Emily, thanks for having me.
So let's break it down meaning versus happiness? Why? What? How? So?
(01:47):
I was in graduate school studying positive psychology a few
years ago, which is this field of psychology, social science
research that's concerned with the study of the good life.
So how can we be happier? You know, how do
you live a life of character? How do you deepen
your relationships? And while I was learning about positive psychology research,
(02:10):
I started noticing that, you know, there's so much of
this research on happiness within positive psychology, and it gets
blasted out to the media. And there's this obsession in
our culture with happiness, that it's the be all and
all of life and in our constitution or declaration of inness, right, Yeah,
exactly the core of who Americans are. Yeah. And as
(02:33):
a magazine editor, I was guilty of making one thousand
and one tips available to people. Well, and I think
it's I think it's reasonable because people think, oh, if
things aren't going right for me, if I feel bad,
then the solution is to pursue happiness that will make
me feel better. But what I learned in this program
was that actually, this manic pursuit of happiness that our
(02:57):
culture kind of encourages us to do can backfire in
a big way. So when people obsess over happiness and
kind of direct their lives around the pursuit of it
the way that you know, the media encourages us to
do articles these studies, they actually end up feeling unhappy
and lonely as a result of that. And on the
(03:20):
other hand, there's this whole other way of kind of
organizing your life and this other pursuit, which is meaning.
And I remember there's this one study in particular that
was distinguishing between a happy life and a meaningful life,
and it showed that, you know, happiness is about feeling
good in the moment, positive emotions, It comes and goes
(03:41):
um People who are happy kind of get the things
that they want, they like, they spend their time shopping
and taking care of themselves. Whereas meaning was bigger, it
was about connecting and contributing to something beyond yourself, whether
it's a community, raising your children, important work that you
do that you can feel proud of, and that people
who are leading meaningful lives are doing things like you know,
(04:04):
raising kids, volunteering, engaged in meaningful work, starting you know,
companies or projects or pursuits in their communities to make
the world in some way a better place. And I thought, wow, Like,
if I think about the kind of life I want
to lead, it's it's meaning Like, that's what I want
to be thinking about, not happiness. You know, generationally, did
(04:25):
you find yourself completely out of step with with your peers?
It's funny. So I'm I'm a member of the millennial generation,
and there's this There are kind of two stories to
tell about. Yeah, yeah, um So. On the one hand,
there is a lot of evidence that suggests that millennials
really care about meaning. But the way that they conceive
(04:49):
of meaning, I think can be problematic because they think, oh,
I only want to work at jobs that are meaningful
for me. I only want to, you know, do things
outside of my job that's meaning full, and meaning has
to be this kind of capital m meaning or capital
P purpose that they're trying to find in their work.
And one of the things I try to do in
my book is bring the concept of meaning down to
(05:12):
earth a little bit, because I think we've put it
up on a pedestal, especially young people. And when you
put it up on a pedestal, and you think, oh,
I have to find a job that changes the world
in some grand way, or my life has to be
heroic or epic, and for the history books that you
end up missing the point about what meaning really is,
and then ultimately later in life feeling disappointment when those
(05:35):
things don't come to pass, as they inevitably won't for
so many of us who end up leading ordinary lives
that are wonderful, but not the extraordinary thing that we
may be thought when we were in our late teens
early twenties. And that's something that's so cool about your book.
There's not a lot of grandiosity to your vision of meaning.
And you know, when I tried to distill it and
(05:57):
think about, Okay, what's the message in this book for
all of us, it did not feel to me like
it was great grand ambition, more in the moment kind
of meaning than definitely and meaning that you kind of
construct for yourself in the moment. I mean when I
so when I first came across that study on happiness
versus meaning, and I ended up writing an article for
(06:18):
it for The Atlantic that ended up being titled There's
More to Life than being Happy. What really motivated that
idea that there's more to life than happiness is looking
around at the people who I really loved and cared about,
my friends, my fiance, my parents, who were kind of
stressed out all the time. They weren't leading super glamorous lives,
but they they were doing important work and in work
(06:42):
broadly to find whether it's kind of maintaining a garden,
you know, taking care of their family, being a caretaker,
or you know, career work. And there's no kind of
place in this cultural conversation on well being that I
think values that kind of life, and so I wanted
to put a language around it and kind of honor
those kinds of lives. I'm friends with the psychologist who
(07:03):
spoke to the fact that if happiness is the goal,
it's not enough um to counterbalance this level of suffering
in the world. So the moments of happiness that we
have just feeling good really doesn't justify the suffering that
so many of us and existentially how much suffering there
is in the world. But meaning really does it makes you.
(07:24):
It gives you a reason to wake up in the
morning in spite of the fact that there will be suffering,
and that will be hard and you will struggle because
saying the reward where the counter to that is, you know,
a little bit of happiness isn't enough to warrant the
amount of suffering there is. That that's such an important
point and I think that you can look at that
in a global way, like how rates of depression, suicide,
(07:48):
opioid drug alcohol abuse are all increasing and the research
is pretty clear my read of it anyways, that what's
driving this rising tide of despair is a is a
lack of meaning in people's lives, but also on a
more micro level in your own life, Like the more
you know, immediate forms of suffering they don't you don't
have to necessarily be a drug addict, but just the
(08:09):
stress in your life, the uncertainty is the self doubt, uh,
and how having some reason kind of gets you through
that and pushes you on through the you know, good
stuff at also through the bad stuff. Is that what
you mean when you talk about in your book learning
to Suffer Well. I was struck by that phrase. Yeah.
I love the you know, Buddhist concept that life is suffering,
and it sounds like such a downer, but I think
(08:31):
when you drill down and you think about all the
ways that we on a day to day basis are suffering,
whether it's anxiety about our status that we're never going
to accomplish the goals we want to that, oh we're
never going to be good enough that you know, I
I'm so stressed out that something, you know, someone I
love is dying or sick, or all my kids getting bullied.
(08:54):
There's so many ways that we can just be full
of anxiety and dread and hopelessness and the ability to
kind of manage that and to push through that and
be resilient and the face of it is it's a
fundamental capacity that you have to master if you want
to lead a good life. And the research is clear
that the way to be resilient and to suffer well,
(09:17):
as you know, to quote this one research or who
I quote um, is to be able to find a
meaning in that suffering. I think the happiness becomes elusive
the more you pursue it anyway, and especially in this
day and age, where you you happiness you may achieve
isn't even enough because you have the expectation that you
(09:41):
should have the same level of happiness as everyone that
you see on your Instagram feed, and so it becomes
like a very fruitless chase, which creates suffering in spite
of the fact that you're trying to search for happiness. Yeah, no, exactly.
It's the you know, the targets always shifting. It's the
old old, you know thing about the hedonic treadmill that
(10:02):
as soon as you're a little bit happier, you want
to be even more happier because you adapt to that
happiness level. And then you look around at other people
and you know these are kind of false personas that
they're you know, projecting to the world. But still, you know,
it's it's hard to you compare what's you know, what
you're feeling on the inside to what they're showing on
the outside. But it's still hard and um and definitely
(10:23):
the fact that like happiness is so elusive and that
we strive for it is kind of causing some of
this suffering. And I think you can say the same
thing about happiness is people have wisely said about success,
which is you shouldn't strive to be successful to get
into that great college or getting that ideal job, because
just strive to do good work, strive to leave a
(10:43):
good life, and that happiness um will often be the
byproduct of that um. But even if it's not always that,
you can have the satisfaction of knowing that you've done
something that's kind of move the needle forward in some
way for others. Sound like a stoic, and really, yeah,
I do lot stoicism. I have to say when we
(11:05):
come back, we're going to dip into how we actually
create meaning in our lives. Before the break, we were
speaking with Emily A. Shani Smith, the author of the
(11:25):
Power of Meaning, and we're trying to figure out how
to create meaning in our lives. And you have technique
for pillars of meaning, So can you walk us through
those police After I came across this research and this
insight that a life of meaning is what we should
be pursuing instead of focusing so much on happiness, which
(11:47):
by the way, is an idea that's grounded in ancient philosophy,
and so it's it's not just kind of modern research. Anyways,
after I came upon that insight and it was really
moved by it, I started wondering, well, how exactly can
we find meaning in our own lives? Is there some
universal formula that can apply to everybody? Or are there?
(12:08):
Is it? Yeah? Right, exactly? It's like meaning in three steps, um,
or do we each have to kind of work through
it on our own and find the answers in our
own And the answer kind of ends up being both
all of the above. So um. I went on this
kind of journalistic exploration where I interviewed many people, read through,
(12:28):
as you know, really thousands of pages of psychology, research, neuroscience,
you know that that ancient philosophy that I mentioned, literature,
anything that I could find that really bore on this
question of how people find meaning. And as I started
looking through all these bits of data, I started noticing
certain patterns come up again and again. And so when
(12:52):
you look at what people are saying when they tell
you my life is really meaningful, they're usually talking about, um,
one of four things, or all four of them, or
a combination. So the first is belonging, having a sense
of belonging, and that really means being in relationships or
in communities where you are valued for who you are
(13:17):
intrinsically and where you value others in turn for who
they are. So it's not like you're only valued because
you subscribe to the beliefs of the community or because
you accomplished certain things, but just by virtue of being
a person in the world, you're valued. And so like
this kind of pure, unconditional like love that you know,
we aspire for. So that's kind of what belonging is.
(13:39):
The second is purpose and meaning and purpose are terms
that get conflated and used interchangeably, but purpose is actually
more specific than meaning. It's about having a goal or
some kind of principle that organizes your life and that
involves making a contribution to others. So know, for example,
(14:01):
you know, your purpose might be I want to be
a doctor and work on a cure for cancer. I
spoke to a hospital cleaner who said, my purpose is
helping sick people heal. So she kind of took the
day to day activities that she was doing and connected
it to, you know, the bigger mission of the hospital
and the healthcare industry. So that's purpose, And the point
(14:22):
I like to make about it is that it comes
in all shapes and sizes. So to kind of go
back to one of the things we're talking about earlier,
this idea that meaning has to be grand, it's not.
That's not always the case, you know, it can be
a more local, in the moment thing. For a lot
of parents tell me my purpose is raising my kids.
Even as an act that makes some kind of contribution
(14:45):
can be kind of purpose building that. There's just one
study that shows that kids who do chores around the
house have a greater sense of purpose, and it's because
they have like a role to play, even if they
don't like it, they're kind of put in a position
where they're giving back and they feel need it. So
you're that eavy up there somewhere. Yeah, she's on dishwashing duty.
Oh yeah, all the time, I'm doing this for you.
(15:08):
But yeah, exactly. But your purpose can shift. It sounds
like it doesn't have to be a lifelong purpose. It
sounds like you can have a different purpose for different
phases of your life. Definitely, And I think that, you know,
when we think about transitions and how like life can
shift and move over time, one of the things that
makes those transitions so hard is that there's usually a
(15:28):
shift in purpose happening, and so you lose an old
purpose and you have to find a new one, and
that can be painful. You know, there's research showing that
when people are searching for meaning, they they're not as
happy and they're kind of suffering more. But when once
they find it, they feel better. But in those transitions,
you're like doing that hard work of like growth and
searching and finding. So definitely, you know, you may your
(15:49):
primary purpose might be your job for many decades of
your life. Then you retire and you have to find one,
or might be raising your kids they go off to school.
You have to find a new one, and that's searching. Period.
Don't expect to feel happy, you know, delicious in any
particular ways. This is exactly search exactly exactly. Yeah, it's
like the pain is kind of how you know that
(16:10):
you're growing. So if that's any hope, right, that is
thank you, all right, So we have purpose, we have belonging, right,
and then going here the third one is transcendence, and
these are those moments of awe and wonder where you
are kind of lifted above the your ordinary consciousness, ordinary
(16:36):
kind of experience of the world and feel connected to
something much bigger than yourself. And this can kind of
exist on a spectrum. So some people have major transcendent
experiences where they experience a full sense of self law.
So I spoke to a Buddhist meditator who told me
that on one of his retreats, he was sitting out
by the pond meditating and all of a sudden, This
(16:57):
was after you know, weeks of meditation, by the way,
so don't expect this to kind of happen if you
start meditating, But all of a sudden, his sense of
self completely dissolved and he felt at one with everything
around him. And these experiences, in part what makes it
meaningful is they affect a transformation in us where we
after we have the experience, we come back and we
(17:18):
feel more connected to others and because of that connection,
more wanting to do good in the world. So I
talked about how these experiences can exist on a spectrum.
Let me tell you about him more minor experience, which
is that um there's a study where the researchers had
students go out and look up at this um towering
(17:38):
grove of eucalyptus trees out on Berkeley's campus in California,
just for a minute. But even after that experience of
all in transcendence, they had this feeling of connectedness and
it transformed them, just like it transformed my friend who
had this more powerful experience of self loss. And the
way the researchers measured it is by after they exposed
(17:59):
them to that trans sendant view, they put them in
a situation where one of the confederates in the study,
so someone who's in on the study had a thing
of pens and dropped them all over the place, and
the people who had the transcendent experience were more likely
to be helpful to this person and pick up more
pens than those in a control group. So yeah, so
(18:19):
those are transcendent experiences. They are intrinsically meaningful because they
do lead to the sense of connectedness. But then they
also kind of re orient our lives in a way
that makes us behave in more meaningful manners. So it
connects us to something bigger than ourselves exactly exactly, and
that that can be you know, with purpose, like you
can feel connected something beyond yourself, like your organization's mission
(18:41):
or your family, but with transcendence, it's something more cosmic,
like it's the universe, it's humanity as a whole little yeah,
little awe or like you know, god like religion is
a really powerful portal to transcendence to and increasingly we
are not a religious people. Yeah, so maybe this is
this is a growing challenge and we're not people who
(19:03):
are in nature. I think we're missing those experiences for
awe and transcendence in our culture now, and that has
to be hurting us in our search for meaning. I
would think, yeah, absolutely, I think so, And I think
that there's this kind of this um. Sociologist named Emil
Dirkheim talked about how people have kind of two fundamental natures.
(19:24):
One is just the nature that goes out each sleeps, works,
is engaged in day to day life. The other is
this nature that wants to experience the sacred. And so
we're kind of emphasizing one at the expense of the other.
And it's we're starved for these experiences. That was Young
and Freud's big argument, wasn't it Young thought the primary
motivator was for union with the divine and Freud said,
(19:48):
oh no, no, no, it's about the penis, right exactly. Yeah,
I guess, yeah, I guess I'm were with young on
that one. Um, okay, So introduce us to the fourth
concept behind meeting. So this one is storytelling. And you
know what I think of storytelling Before I wrote this book,
The first thing I would think of is novels and
(20:08):
movies and television shows, these kind of fictional stories that
we engage with in our day to day lives. Um,
and those are important for meaning. But what I'm really
talking about when I talk about storytelling is the story
that you tell yourself about yourself, the narrative that you
craft about your life, where you came from, who you are,
and where you're going. And this pillar turned out to be,
(20:32):
I think, in a lot of ways the most interesting
one because it's I think a lot of people don't
realize that they are the authors of their stories, that
they have the capacity to therefore change and edit the
story if they're telling a story that's kind of holding
them back. So there's this really rich um research, tradition,
(20:53):
and psychology around what's called narrative therapy. And it shows
that the stories that we tell, and we're all telling stories,
whether we realize it or not, about who we are
and why things happen the way they do. The stories
we tell determine how we think about ourselves and how
we experience the world. And if you're telling a bad story,
the story of oh, I'm not good enough, I'm always failing,
(21:15):
I'm a victim, it actually affects your sense of day
to day meaning. People who tell these more negative stories,
I feel like their lives are less meaningful as opposed
to people who tell stories that are defined by themes
of growth and love and redemption and kind of forward movement.
When we get back, we are going to explore this
idea of storytelling a little bit wi deeply. We've been
(21:48):
speaking with Emily as the Honey Smith. She is the
author of the Power of Meaning and editor at the
Manhattan Institute, and we're talking about storytelling and primarily the
stories we tell ourselves as one of the pillars for
a life of meaning. Can we talk about your story
a little bit and how you came to the point
(22:12):
of understanding meanings as sort of your why so? I
I think that my interest in meaning must have been
seated in my childhood, because I had a childhood where
I was really surrounded by people who were seekers and
organize their lives around this pursuit of meaning. So I
(22:32):
grew up in Montreal living in a Sufi meeting house.
And for those who might not know, Sufism is a
school of mysticism that's associated with Islam and UM. Some
popular common cultural touch points are the whirling Dervishes, the
people you know might know who those are, the poet
(22:54):
ROOMI was also a Sufi. Uh So, so what is Sufism.
It's this kind of spiritual path where you are, like
a lot of the other mystical paths as well, whether
it's you know, Jewish mysticism or Christian mysticism or even
Buddhism Hinduism, You're trying to move forward and and find
yourself um, growing closer to God. This kind of union
(23:17):
to the divine is what drives these spiritual seekers. And
so what that meant growing up in the meeting house
was that, you know, people would come, these Sufis would
come to our home twice a week in the evening
and they would meditate for several hours in this large
room that we had, sitting on the floor listening to
classical Persian Sufi music. I'm a little bit imagining little
(23:40):
Emily running around and in between them with your toys.
But no, no, definitely, I mean I definitely I was
you know, I was always kind of I was running
around and there was sometimes this the bathroom that they
would all use on the main floor had a light
switch on the outside, and so I was feeling very mischievous.
I would turn the light switched off when I would
see someone going there, which wasn't in the spirit of
(24:04):
ex but I had, you know, I had some ways
to go um. But so meditation was part of their practice,
and an emphasis on loving kindness as well and on service,
and they so they had this kind of spiritual discipline.
And I grew up with these people who cared about
leaving meaningful lives and who weren't caught up in this
(24:25):
happiness site. Guys, you know, a lot of them had
led really difficult lives. They were refugees from the Middle East,
or they were Westerners who had been beaten up by
life in other ways, and yet they found comfort in
this spiritual practice that was difficult and demanding, but that
brought them a sense of meaningfulness. So, you know, eventually
(24:46):
we we moved out of the meeting house. We came
to the US, where I spent the second half of
my childhood, and I think without that daily grounding of
Stuvism in my life, I really began to wonder, how
do you live a meaningful if outside of a religious
and spiritual context, what makes life worth living? And that
(25:06):
question led me to study philosophy and college and uh,
positive psychology and graduate school. And it was really in
that positive psychology program to go back to what we
were talking about in the beginning where I came across
this research about happiness and meaning that I thought back
to the Sufies and thought, oh, of course, like that's
what they were doing, and that's what my own kind
(25:27):
of yearning for something more has been driven by. And
that's why I feel so ill at ease by these
cultural messages that say happiness, happiness, happiness, because I was
coming from kind of a different heritage. Um And I
wrote my book to kind of appeal to people who
may be religious, may not be religious, because I think
that you know, to your point that we're less religious today.
(25:51):
I think that makes the question of meaning all that
much more urgent. Just let me to it for a second.
Are you religious in an active way or you do
consider yourself religious? Person. I would say that I have
a very strong religious sensibility. So I really love religion.
I'm fascinated by all religions. UM. You know, when I'm
home with my parents, you know, they come to the
meeting house in New York, I'll go with them the
(26:13):
Sufi meeting house. With my husband, you know, we go
to UM church services together. So I kind of, you know,
I'm kind of a junkie for all variants of it.
It's interesting, I mean, it sounds as though you have
found your purpose in trying to explain what you've learned,
share what you've learned about meaning over time. But is
(26:34):
that is that what you feel like your purposes now? Mh.
So I'm working on a new book proposal about ambition
and success, and I've been thinking a lot about my
own you know kind of path and read and thoughts
about success and read it redefinition of it. And one
of the things that is clear to me is that
(26:57):
in some of my earlier years, like as I was
late late stages of high school, trying to apply to colleges,
looking in college about what my future would be, that
I was very much caught up in kind of a
success mindset like you have to get into a really
good school, you have to like get a job that
you can support yourself and that's prestigious, and all these things.
And doing this book and also kind of doing the
(27:20):
research for this book that I hope to write about
Ambition has really made me realize that the best way
for you, kind of from the perspective of your kind
of mental health and your sanity, to think about success
is by yoking it to whatever you think your purpose is.
So it's not about how many you know, books you sell,
(27:43):
or how much money you're making, or what house you
live in, but it's about the extent to which you're
living out this purpose that's really important to you. And
I would kind of think of my purpose as you know,
finding these ideas and sharing them with people and kind
of moving them, uh, the way that I was moved
as a kid reading you know, these great books that
(28:05):
profoundly affected me. So for listeners out there who are
maybe maybe struggling, maybe feeling unhappy and making the shift
from unhappiness or even from being happy to finding more meaning,
what techniques would you offer to help them shift their
stories find a purpose. How do they go down this
path of creating more meaning in their lives specifically, definitely.
(28:29):
I mean there are two things that come to mind,
and one is, um, taking yourself outside of the really
toxic process of social comparison, because I think that if
you're talking about, you know, yoking your sense of success
and identity to what your purpose is, as soon as
you start comparing yourself to others, whether it's on Instagram
or oh my my friend who's you know, this successful
in their career or whatever, then you lose sight of
(28:51):
what you're here to do. And so just you know,
removing yourself from that process of social comparison, just staying
in your on swim lane, realizing that we each have
unique important work to do on this earth and that
what they do it does not make me any lesser. Um.
And the second, I would say, focus on how you
can shift your story if you're telling a story that's
(29:13):
holding you back. So I think of this guy who
I wrote about in my book named Emma Kanaka, who
had been you know, it's an extreme example, but I
think it's one that we can apply to our own
lives too. He had been paralyzed playing football, and so
after he had this injury, he started telling himself a
really negative story like I'm never going to be successful,
(29:34):
I'm never gonna get married, like my parents are gonna
I'm gonna be dependent on them for the rest of
my life, Like look at me, I'm I'm a loser basically. Um.
But with time, he started to reflect and think about
who he was, and he realized that the person that
he was before his injury was actually a pretty selfish person.
(29:56):
That he partied a lot, that he cared more about
being the life of the party than helping other people,
that he cared more about his own performance on the
football team and how his team was doing. And this
kind of edit to a story that oh, no, like
I can be a better person than the one that
I was before ended up changing his life and leading
him to getting a degree in counseling and working on
(30:19):
as a mentor to kids in his career now. And
it changed his life. And the shift that happened is
what psychologists would call shift from a contamination story, a
story that moves from from really good things happening to
bad things happening, to a redemption story story that moves
from bad to good. And so if you're telling a
bad story, searching for the good and looking for the
(30:42):
good outcomes, I think is a really helpful way to
get yourself back on that kind of hopeful, meaningful trajectory.
As an editor, I'm just so intrigued and delighted by
the idea that you can edit your own story in
your mind like that. But sometimes you need an assist, right,
I mean, I feel like we've all known people who
were very stuck in a victim narrative, and they might
(31:04):
have a really good reason to see it that way. Definitely, Yeah,
But you know, sometimes you need you need help, and
especially when I mean it's one thing to look back.
You can be much more reflective and edit your story
when it's something that is in the past, when you're
in the middle of it. In the midst of it, yeah,
it's it's harder to reframe that narrative. Do you have
(31:26):
any tips for that? Definitely, I mean, I think I
think you're absolutely right. But one of the things about
storytelling is that it's it's not going to necessarily happen overnight.
It could you know, it could be a long process.
And I would say when it comes to both the
point of getting an assist and also trying to rethink
your story as you're living, and especially if it's something difficult.
(31:50):
I would turn to others as kind of editors in
your story, or if you see somebody going through a
hard time, kind of helping them edit their story. So
I know so many times, like somebody I love will
be like, oh, I'm just I'm you know, my boss
doesn't think I'm doing well at work, and I'm you know,
I feel like a failure and I'm not kind of
accomplishing as much as I want to. And then I'll
(32:13):
think about just last week, how they told me that
they had gotten a really nice evaluation that they had,
you know, some something that they had written was published
and they got really good feedback. And so being like, hey,
like what about all these other pieces of evidence that
contradict what you're saying? So doing it for others or
doing it for yourself, like trying to find the evidence
that might help you rewrite that story. Uh. You know.
(32:36):
One of the things is humans that we have as
a feature of our brain is a very strong negativity bias.
So bad things happen were much more affected by them,
much more likely to remember them. We have to have,
like in a marriage five good things happen to like
undo the effect of one bad one happened, like comments
on social media, yeah exactly, ten great ones, and one
(32:57):
person says you look fat in that dress, Yeah exact
us for those of the day, exactly exactly. And I
think knowing that and knowing that we have this kind
of blinkered therefore a perception of reality is good because
it makes us, hopefully we're trying to edit your story,
you will see that all that negativeness is not an
accurate picture of reality. So it really search for the good,
(33:19):
search for the evidence that contradicts the bad. Such great advice, Emily,
Thank you so much for being with us today. Thanks
for having me. It's fantastic. Thank you. If you want
to connect with Emily, go to Emily Esfahan smith dot
com and connect with us at You Turns Podcasts.
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