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Episode 187: Stuck in a stagnant rut, Mirror emotions, More detail on agreeableness
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dear dr. Lyle why am I so stagnant despite doing poorly in practically all of the dimensions of my life romantic social pursuit I don't take any effective action I've done an immense amount of therapies from various modalities worked with many therapists including numerous other things to no avail I stew and I rage but I don't do anything and I don't know why I also like to feel like a victim so as not to feel the pressure of responsibility any advice that that's amazing I it's amazingly insightful and and yet the person sits if this is actually a true question the the answer to the dilemma is that you that all all creatures always are running cost-benefit analysis and so the the reason why a person takes action or doesn't take action or specific course of action is cost-benefit analysis and so as they say apparently they're not doing well in any domain but I am immediately interested in the following observation and that is that if they're not doing well in the main domain of trade and commerce why is it that they've got the resources to go to therapy so it's like hmm how did that happen and and how is it that you are are doing okay or well enough that you're not doing anything about this and the answer is is that the person's probably inherited money trust fund child or has some set of circumstances possibly they already have a made of some kind that supports them money doesn't grow on trees and so the the resources to to do what this that the person does are coming from somewhere if they're so that that's how one of the main motivating factors for animals is hunger starvation predators and cold okay discomfort drives productive activity and so the person has no discomfort per se then then somebody somewhere was productive and they're benefiting from it now so that's the first question of mr. MS stagnant is how is it that you have any resources at all and is there any end of them in sight and why are we so comfortable that we're we're sitting around and going to psychotherapy and yet we've got the resources to do that where did we get them from now mmm now in principle you can feel pretty stagnant in areas of your life despite having gone to therapy so the person took action that was reasonable to go get information the the reason for change is new information that is that is why people change is that they have new information and that new information it may it may be that new information has said that what you were have just been doing for the last 16 months in this project is we just got one more day of data that says that it's not working that's new information you know we're gonna give this business one more try we're trying to sell purple hot dogs and we've done everything we can and we now we've just spent you know our last thousand dollars on some goofy internet ad and we expected it you know that it had a chance to work and out it didn't work okay we've got new information and so now the new information is we consult our bank account and we've now don't have any more money left so now we have to make a change so no matter what the what the circumstances are what the changes that we're observing the reason why people change behavior patterns is new information so the this person is then done a society lis acceptable reasonable strategy to get new information which is to go to therapy and apparently there there's been a lot of complaining so it turns out that there have been talking to therapists who probably have incorrect information on why it is that people struggle and have difficulties in life and most therapists believe that or I should say most I believe that it is most actually in surveys is probably close to even between believing this or not believing this but a great many therapists believe that the reason why people are having the struggles that they have today is because of traumatic events in their history and so a great deal of therapy today is about going to therapy and processing going back through and thinking through those traumatic events and and those traumatic events may have been quote a bad relationship with my father somehow this was traumatic the or it could have been some actual real traumatic event there's some event that took place that was very dangerous or very uncomfortable for the individual for a period of minutes or or or hours or even repeatedly over a course of their of years who knows the but at any event the notion is is that that the reason why the person has the ineffective behavior pattern that they have today is because they're responding to essentially damage or quasi damage that has been done to them as a result of having had traumatic events this is an incorrect analysis of the nature of trauma in human life and its outcomes the I don't just state this as a matter of opinion I have a tremendous amount of empirical evidence to support this the but most therapists don't know about this evidence and they've been incorrectly educated and as a result they are mistaken and their understanding of why people have the current struggles that they have and so the in honestly doing the best work that they know how to do they lead the person down the memory path of trying to process traumatic events and thereby try to help them and they're ineffective it's not surprised not surprising that they're ineffective this is this is looking for the your heart problem in your past because you must have had a broken heart okay I have to tell you this is very common there's a great deal of commonality between psychodynamic thinking and New Age wackadoodle philosophy in in natural medicine so people are told that they're that they have problems with their lungs because they can't get enough breath in because they've they're grieving okay people are told that they're they have cancer because they felt bottled up anger and then the cancer is essentially poisoning themselves or some such thing there was you can kind of hear the irritation in my voice it's its irritation because I've actually known and met practitioners that have doctorates quote and that they give this kind of feedback to patients and to me it's horrendously irresponsible and it's it does far more harm than any kind of possible wacky good that could come out of such a bizarre explanations and so the ideas are incorrect and your lung problems you know whatever they are are not as a result of repressed grieving and your cancer is not the result of bottled-up anger and what else have I heard oh yeah somebody was having trouble with their vision and it was because in theory that there was things that they didn't want to see alright so a good friend of mine who's an ophthalmologist if he ever heard this he he he would want to hang whatever whatever practitioner was saying this to a client because like maybe they've got cataracts that I can remove and then we can take take care of the problem for God's sakes maybe they have diabetes as a result of their diet that's actually causing pressure on the system and they're getting you know a pathological process that can be reversed no it's not psychogenic so the so this individual is it sounds like they may have if they've been complaining in therapy and talking about their victimhood then we know what the flavor of that therapeutic process is looked like very likely well meaning totally misguided therapists well you know essentially participating in a dance that is a speculation about what the ultimate causes of the problem are in a way that this is not going to work this is working on a heart problem by talking about your your broken heart and it's not going to fly we need to talk about your diet and we need to do analysis of your cardio pulmonary function and we need to figure out what's going wrong we might need surgery for godsakes we might need a pacemaker we might just need a better diet I'm not sure what we need but what we sure as hell don't need is a psychological analysis of this and so it sounds like it's quite possible they've gotten ineffective psychotherapy whether or not better or more accurate therapy would work in other words when a person comes in and we've got a cardiovascular problem that Caldwell Esselstyn knows absolutely exactly what to do to reverse it and he can tell them what to do but that doesn't mean they'll do it okay remember we're gonna run into motivational problems with the pleasure trap personality intelligence etc and so it isn't necessarily the case that even though we know how to fix it that the individual will take that opportunity in the same way if there's such an stagnant person that is stagnant came in to see dr. Jen hawk or myself they would get an analysis of their competitive dilemma and in that competitive dilemma we would talk about the fund about what it is that they could likely do that would improve their competitive position and we would also talk about the feeling that comes from working diligently at the fundamentals of the competitive problem and we would explain how the mind map draws out how to how to generate self-esteem and how that this is the only way the self-esteem is generated that it's through diligent excellent effort repeatedly administered to two problems that are that are important to us that our inner audience our internal audience observes our efforts repeatedly and then gives us a signal that we call self-esteem now once a person has a correct understanding of how it is that their mind works and control that they can exert with their own efforts towards changing their feeling experience they they may or may not do anything about it remember what sits behind all of these cost-benefit analysis is personality so a person that is inherently highly conscientious and and emotionally stable and intelligent and etc that that individual is much more likely to take action that is logically related to positive outcomes than an individual that's lower in conscientiousness far more impulsive and not as smart okay so that it isn't necessarily true and none of those characteristics will either damn you or save you in isolation there's all clients of very smart people that are stagnant and there's all kinds of not very smart people that are incredibly diligent and productive and would take a new idea once they were stagnant and see that it would be helpful for them and start working so in no way is there anything in the in the personality cards that dictates success or failure however this is a this is an interesting question because it's one that it's the kind of question and from the from the an individual that I would be all interested in exploring exploring with them this this client is worth half an hour of my time okay or an hour in other words this is like okay let's make sure that you have and overlooked your understanding of how your own mind works and that you haven't overlooked the importance of earning your own self-esteem and that you haven't also overlooked the importance of the fundamentals that would be associated with the statistical likelihood of increased success in the competitive arenas if we are sitting around in dynamically oriented psychotherapy blaming our parents or our traumatic history for our current inability to compete then we're not going to be successful and we're not going to change direction not very likely but if you get sort of crisper more accurate understanding of what the underlying causes are of the feeling and actions associated with the stagnation then it's very possible that we can get this this organism back on a more productive and happiness generating direction as a result of improving its competitive standing with respect to the the problems of life well yeah I'd be interesting to be a fly on the wall on that scenario because hmm I know a lot I know some people that they feel like they're stagnant I mean you look at them objectively in there they're doing quite well I mean sometimes feel like they're stagnant and they're not they're not they don't feel like they can take effective action sometimes it's the ego trap and sometimes it's an EPS of traps and you know who knows but yes it's always fascinating to hear you walk walk through their people's minds with regards to these issues all right what else we got all right mmm dear dr. Lyle ever since I've been listening to the podcast I'm now seeing the world in bell curves and spectrums thanks for that your explanation of anger and guilt being mirror emotions really struck with me struck me do you think there's always a mirror emotion like anger and guilt or is it rather mostly a spectrum like your explanation of depression and then boredom when related to stress I'd be curious to hear more about categorizing these emotions that's a that's a good question I haven't really quite thought about it I didn't quite grasp that and and map that in that way until they asked the question I think I sort of intuitively have been aware of this but yes the fact that anger and guilt are so clearly the mirror image of each other I think that it's likely that we're gonna find that elsewhere so for example I think we had a question with with Jen the other night about lust and disgust or something like that with some and so that that would be an example of there being mirror images between finding someone extremely attractive and being lustfully drawn to them versus finding them repulsive and trying to push her sosa way and so we can see that this is a sort of a bell curve with either end of it being you know the opposite reaction in terms of you know essentially in terms of behavioral prescription and etc and also approach avoidance strategy so yeah let's let's think about that you could think about being really excited and very happy versus being depressed so that would be that would be another example and with boredom being boredom is a little difference that would be the difference between being bored and very interested so those two would be on the opposite into that spectrum about how inherently interesting something is versus a judgment that it is completely uninteresting and what's sitting underneath all of these feelings is obviously the cost-benefit analysis for genes survival so intensive lust is saying that individual is extremely valuable for January production my my systems find that person extremely attractive and I want to mate with them the in order to reproduce the DNA that built them that's precisely what the chain of events is that's going on inside those those cost-benefit algorithms the boredom versus excitement or interest is going to be it's going to be the ie extremely interested is this looks like it's really valuable information that could increase my likelihood of gene survival through whatever increased likelihood of survival or reproductive success pathways ie oh you just showed me how somebody says that I can do something to really help my kid in this or that domain that's a reproductive pathway and so a parent might be extremely interested in that like oh my kids got some you know struggling with some physical process and it turns out that if they don't eat this or that food that that would could be very important wait a minute I'm really interested okay versus boredom is the the system saying I don't see that there's any interesting information or any interesting possibilities here these people this place this lecture this this book and I see nothing in it that it's going to aid and abet my life experience so I don't want any more of it so you can see I think that the notion here is correct that whenever you have a motion of any kind there should be a corresponding in other words that that emotion is going to be either positive or negative because the very reason why you have an emotion is it's a signal of genes survival importance so the it should be the case that that emotion being either positive or negative there is a mirror image emotion on the other side of it that is the that is the opposite of what it is that that that is what the other the other side of it is on the same with respect the same evolutionary values so and it's going to have its corresponding specific signal to tell you about that so yeah I hadn't I sort of I think we're all vaguely I mean certainly I've talked about this which happiness and depression but this it is a nice question and a nice thing to help me clarify my own thinking and understanding of what and how a motion would be structured yeah it would I believe that they would have logically interrelated polar opposites on on any emotional dimension I think that's correct and dr. Luke can you go over again a while back maybe maybe a couple dozen shows ago you talked about the stress related to motivation you said that and I can't remember all of it you were saying that if you don't have any evidence that you might complete the task and you kind of feel not depressed but you don't you don't feel really motivated to complete it but then you go through a little bit of stress of a little bit of anxiety and then then you get this surge of motivation and then and then once you very very competent at it it's no longer difficult than you feel bored right can you go over that kind of that that spectrum again yes this is what I call the general mood model so if you think about a think about a if you have an x axis and you x and y axis and along the one the bottom end of the x axis we're going to put on the very close to the origin we're going to put we're going to have a line that goes that starts near the bottom left corner of near the origin and it starts there and it's going to go up at a 45 degree angle cut to the right and so if you think conceptually of this of this little 45 degree line segment and on the lower left you put depression and then up a little ways from there you put anxiety and then in the middle of that line segment you know halfway up the line segment we put stress and then we put the the next thing that we would put was that we would put excitement and then finally we're going to put boredom at the top now this has been my sort of observation about how how the perceived probability success is going to influence how it is that you feel the the at the very low so proceed probability of success is going to be on the y-axis so very low perceived probability of success is going to be it's going to be depressing we're going to infer that the value that's involved here is pretty important to the individual so if the value is not very important than then all of the feelings so the intensity of feelings are attenuated appropriately so you're just not as a upset or stressed about about a broken shoelace as you are about you know whether or not you've got a problem closing the escrow of your dream home so the the depression is going to be low perceived probability of success we're gonna find that as you're perceived probably business success rises a little bit the characteristic feeling that we see in in people is going to be less depression and it's going to be more anxiety so if we gave it numbers it might make some sense to people suppose the perceived probability of success was 2% if it's 2% let's suppose you you had the doc say well there's a 2% chance that that we can remove this thing and cure your cancer it's like wow that's pretty depressing it means it's very likely that they can't do it okay if they come to you and they say well there's a 15% chance now you're not as depressed it's more anxiety it's like oh my god there's a really good chance I'm going to die but I might not I got I got a chance so you can feel anxiety coming up with a low perceived probability of success but there is still a significant perceived probability you can imagine that if you're feeling tense like that let's say it's 25 I mean pick a number but if you're like oh my god you know I hope that this works I hope it works and then they come with a new lab report and they say actually it's 2% devastating okay depressing it's like I'm defeated so now they come with a lab report and they say actually it looks like it's more like 50/50 okay you can actually feel a little difference there from the 25 to the 50 it's like okay I'm really stressed yeah I'm stressed about this then you could call some of it anxiety but anxiety often has a feeling of dread that it looks like it's not you know it's not gonna work okay so so now we we've improved it a little bit to where to where it's like you know what I think God I could I could really win this thing I could also lose it but I could win it and so that's a high state of high tension but it's character elite character logically somewhat different than the dread feeling that often comes with anxiety the now we're gonna move it up to the new lab report comes and says you know what we sent it to a new lab it can can actually see clearly more through the molecular structure of the tumor we didn't have this technology even six months ago now it looks like there's a 95% chance that you're gonna be fine tremendous excitement okay it's like oh my god what a tremendous relief how exciting oh my god let me see those results again are you sure etc okay so now that this is you know happiness so you can track all this with a guy you know flirting with some girl in the you know for the ninth grade prom he's thinking about asking her out it looks like she kind of insulted him today a little bit in class just as he was thinking about asking her out and now what does he feel depression what was he feeling when he was thinking about it but he hadn't been insulted by her yet anxiety he was thinking he probably wasn't gonna be successful but he was maybe gonna ask anyway okay what if she gave him some pretty decent feedback but it wasn't super warm but it was at least something and it seemed like she was treating him just as well as any of the other kids maybe a little bit better stressed as he's walking up to her okay what if she smiles and and is slightly flirtatious with him and and gets playful with him now what does he feel excitement okay the what if it's his girlfriend and they're already well established and she fully expects him to ask her out for the thing and it's actually already you know done but now we actually asked to say hey you know we're going to the we're going to the junior prom right you know how much excitement is that huh it's just his mom told him don't forget to tell Sally you're taking her to the junior prom so go yeah mom that's right okay that's right I forgot I need to tell her that I II bored him it's not it's not reviewing on this radar there's no there's no feeling of threat etc so this is this is the what I call the general mood model this it's not the specific feelings that we would have the specificity comes with the domain involved so we can see that we shifted domains between a person's survival and a person's reproduction you know very different points in their lives and we can see that the feelings are have a general character to them but the specificity comes with the specificity of the domain that's in question so that that's this is a helpful way to understand for example a person that we were talking about that's stagnant essentially what's happening is is that that there are effectively board the the information that they're getting is not telling them that it's any new information isn't changing their perceived probability of success there's a there's a a little bit of a defeatist way of thinking here in other words there's somewhat depressed they feel like they can't do better in that domain so what's the point of trying and so there's a an energy conservation prescription that comes with depression that you that will also come with boredom so it's like hey I already know how to do this it's not I can't put a lot of energy into it who cares I'm not I'm not too interested thinking about think about a great free throw in or basketball that is so good at this that now the coach blows his whistle and says it's time to work on your free throws and it's like really I don't need to be working on my free throws surely there's something else that I could do that would be more valuable for my time so the meanwhile there's another person that's very depressed because they've been working on their free throws and they just can't seem to improve and they they feel very uncompetitive in this arena and they will just want to avoid the whole thing so you can see that they're those two feelings are they're interrelated to or in to each other in a way but they have a different they have a different emotional tone or character that's a slightly different signal now do you think that basketball players may feel this emotion if they say win the free throw contest at their local adult basketball camp for our listeners who don't know dr. Lyle won the free throw he set a record at an adult basketball camp all right all good very exciting all right all right dear dr. Lyle I'm a bit confused about when disagreeableness is seen as a negative and positive trait mm-hmm you've said that agreeableness is a highly valued trait and while it's clear that one would want a disagreeable lawyer you also said that charisma basically comes down to disagreeableness and when most people think of charismatic people they certainly don't think of pushing us and anger I'm probably 70th percentile disagree but pretty stable and generally try to beat my jeans by hiding it but not contradicting people avoiding confrontation for example with groups of friends am i right to do so or could I win more friends and esteem by being more quote assertive hmmm oh I don't know this is one of these funny little funny little dilemmas of how to best you know how to best maneuver around your own knowledge of your own personality for your own best interests and I think these are complex matrices that are shifting with every situation so I don't think that blanket prescriptions are going to do a lot of good the certainly I think charisma has something to do with disagreeableness because we're talking about we're talking about winning some competitive process very often it might not necessarily depends on what we mean by charisma in other words we have to get out of dictionary and start giving ourselves other adjectives and find out if we're all talking about the same thing but a great deal of what has been known as charisma is essentially dominance a sense that the individual is superior in some way and in order to get to that position and obviously a great deal of charisma is just sheer sexual attractiveness so but imagine Brad Pitt playing a part where he was very agreeable and non assertive and compliant ok suddenly the quote charisma is evaporating before our very eyes a big point of it is the the sort of message of superiority and having some force behind it and some willingness to to push for dominance in some kind of a decision-making or display arena so for this person's question I think that that it sounds like they've got enough conscientiousness and enough stability that they understand that when they are contradicting people among friends that this is going to be prickly and it's going to make them less attractive a less attractive member of the group and therefore valued less and so they're they're they're realizing hey this is a potential expense and so they've got you know a complicated brain that is wrapping around this thing and realizing that they don't want to get kicked out of the coalition or they don't want to have their their evaluation of their value to the coalition be reduced by by displaying some of the disagreeableness that's in there now I think all of us certainly have this if we're highly disagreeable or even highly agreeable we have we're monitoring how often that we want to correct or point out or object etc to the agenda or the opinions of people around us and we have to adjudicate in our own mind what's in our best interest in total with respect to this and so I don't think that this is unique to a disagreeable person but I think a disagreeable person is probably a disagreeable stable intelligent and conscientious individual is probably got a lot of action in that brain working inhibitory you know structures to try to stop some of these objections and contradictions from arising out of their vocal cords and so yeah they're probably aware of some turbulence in that way my good friend dr. Alan Goldhamer is inherently quite disagreeable and so we've had many discussions about what it's like to be inside his mind and it's interesting because his his internal experience is different than mine so there's a waitress that comes to our table and we start to explain what we're going to do Alan is very sensitive to the woman's annoyance with respect to all the careful prescriptions about how we want things differently and he feels this irritation I at a much lower level than he does and I also feel empathy for her frustration that this is going to be a lot more cognitive energy than she was expecting to have to put up with for this and therefore I actually feel some empathy for her Alan doesn't okay and so that's a disagreeable chip I assumed it was the like a high open because I feel that I feel similarly sensitive when that those situations come up mm-hmm right so in other words I'm so I I see both sides might tip more afterwards great the great thing is a little let's hit 15% and they'll say they like me here because I'm a good Jeff are I hope to bite my lip yeah he's not the only friend I have like that I have another friend that the tips a little bit that I have to circle back and put extra money on the tables that have not not my reputation damaged when he's paying the bill so so he listened to this podcast so he won't know that that happens from time to time the but yeah so you could see that that all of us are locked in to this this is why human social behavior and optimizing your behavior is complicated and what you have is you don't have essentially as seamlessly integrated personality your personality is is built of you know half a dozen vectors and so this is a vector analytic problem that the brain is solving as to solve similar types of problems with respect to cost-benefit analysis in in any in a domain that has any richness to to the CV problem which is most most problems are fairly complicated for the human mind to solve but it does it seamlessly in the same way though there's going to be situations so they're going to come up and you're disagreeable people are having you know a lot of action in they're saying this is ridiculous the wrongs ridiculous they're wrong they're lazy they're shortchanging me they should do a better job etc they're having this sort of internal negative objecting judgmental dialogue they don't know any different it's just the way they are and they're not uncomfortable the way I am if I'm in that state I'm pretty angry and I'm pretty upset it's an unusual state and I feel like the individual is significantly out of line relative to the norms and so that's why I'm upset but to a person that's more inherently disagreeable this is sort of situation normal that they're sort of a very disagreeable person is sort of chronically feeling like the world is is you know cheating or chiseling or or somewhat unfair and that they need to be vigilant and they need to be looking out to make sure to assert their fair interests because otherwise they're going to be chiseled and cheated and that's a you know that's just sort of it's not a it's not a particularly uncomfortable place for them to be that's just where they are do something to do all day long right I've often believed that that perhaps this is maybe more disagreable people maybe potentially could be more ambitious because they they don't feel like it's fair unless they've accomplished a lot more and so therefore the only way they're gonna accomplish it is through you know through through all these things so yes I think that that's true and I think that the disagreeable dimension adds a push to feeling like the existing circumstances are not as they should be and etc so I think that particularly wedded to conscientiousness I think that's a particularly effective combination for high achievement mm-hmm yeah yeah I mean I guess yeah high achievement is and so would you would you expect that someone who's dis more disagreeable and more conscientious may also be more likely to fall into the various traps that you've talked about potentially ego trap because they the there's their expectations of themselves may be quite high versus someone who's more agreeable I'm not sure I'm not so sure about that I wouldn't I wouldn't necessarily guess that in other words they're not thinking that the other people think more highly of them hmm and they're also thinking that the deck is stacked against them unfairly ah and so as a result I think it's more likely to drive the determined achievement mm-hmm so no III don't believe that they would be more likely to be in the ego trap mm-hmm yeah now something I've thought about before is is when we talk about and this has been a question in our show some of these senators send it to me and I'm just waiting for the right time this just happens to be it is uh when you've got someone who's highly disagreeable but let's say they're they're not very conscientious and can their competitive drive caused them to result in them being actually very fastidious in in achieving a particular goal even though they may not be very conscientious personality wise let's let's uh let's back up for a second and as we start to try to we can get ourselves we can dig ourselves into a position that we don't coin it quite want to be in when it comes to this kind of analysis so so I don't want to talk out of both sides of my mouth but I want to be I want to be a little clearer about this you what you have are genes that are influencing how it is that you feel and and so we've characterized these things I think in a useful way with the words that we use like conscientious intelligence stable etc but what's actually what these things are is these are gross approximation of the way we describe individual differences between people so when we say Suzy's more conscientious than Sarah that that means that over a thousand situations it's more likely that Suzi makes the conscientious investment process and it's more likely that you know if she does 774 if I'm it's likely that Sarah does less okay but in any given situation we're not going to be able to predict it and and and and these are all that that's because those thousand situations if we give them all essentially identical close enough to identical sets of situations across a lot of different CB combinations we're gonna find on average Susie's more conscientious than Sarah but the problem is is that that there isn't sort of one ingredient in there or a gene that's that we're talking about is conscientiousness it's a it's a it's a whole that's a description of an individual difference that is global and diffuse and multifaceted like crazy so it's like I just came up with an example it's like saying judy is more beautiful than than Suzy it's like yeah except that Suzy does have better legs okay and Suzy has better lips and her nose a little better but on average most people would agree okay but we could go feature by feature and we would see a lot of features where that wasn't true and so we're using some global overall thing that we call beauty and we and even some people might even disagree okay so so we use a word to describe a whole bunch of different things and those whole bunch of different things are actually independent of each other so the legs are independent of the nose okay so but so but taken together we have a global thing that we're calling beauty and we're putting the global number on it that's the same thing as true with conscientiousness or intelligence or anything else so it isn't like we have a specific thing call that person's a nine and therefore their noses a nine the breasts or nine their legs or nine their hairs and I and their eyes or not no that isn't what it is they're a montage of a bunch of different things that we're paying attention to and so as a result there's an overall impression of their attractiveness and the same thing would be true with conscientiousness or anything else so that's why you can have a person who is really smart like dr. Goldhamer but he has no sense of direction okay so there's three-year-old children you know but they can't that are you know autistic that are had better sense of direction and Alan does which is fascinating because he has a True North health center which is the compass for going in the right direction regards to help so that's so in answer to your question or amusing it's it's not so easy to say you know we could sort of talk at broad terms and probably pull out and hypothesize about dynamics and then it would be interesting in certain cases to see if we could find a set of situations where we could we could look at those predictions out of our hypothesized dynamics and see if we've got some truth in it but it's never going to be the case that we could even say that some somebody whose judges of ten has I don't know prettier feet than someone who's a two that might not be the case in it you know in other words they may in an individual situation it could absolutely be the case that someone who's very low in conscientiousness does a better job on on specific aspect of but what we might be considering conscientiousness to be a major variable but they happen to do a better job on that than our person who's extremely conscientious and so that's why it's it's not you know it's not so easy to make highly specified predictions about these dynamic it's easier to be more general about them and to talk in terms of likely probabilities and that's you know ie someone with very high credit rating is unlikely to default on your loan and someone with a much lower credit rating is much more likely but circumstances or circumstances and that may not be how it goes down fascinating yeah my example like what I was thinking in my head asking that question is you know though it may be a bullshit example but it's the Hollywood trope of you know the psychopath serial killer but has to but they you know you see them on the movie and they're displaying quite OCD type type so that's where that came from so yeah and I think that's where the there there's a that's really good and and that points out a problem with the concept of conscientiousness okay so that's a very big word that encompasses you know maybe too much and and so the fact that yet it runs correlations against sweets of genes pretty well doesn't tell us that that we can that we can simplify it down that easily ie Hitler was extremely conscientious and yet what do we mean by that right the moral compass would be different right and okay right and so that's that's where this that's where this gets you know problematic and communication and therefore prediction mmm-hmm no fascinating yeah so I guess we add a little more again mmm okay well alright doctor our last question all right so our previous question is about potentially trying to be too too disagreeable or trying to be more disagreeable mm-hmm dear dr. Lyle I'm trying to work on this but I feel like I have an issue with agreeableness I'm too agreeable to the point that I feel bad about myself for disappointing others like turning down a job offer or rejecting a potential partner when it's obvious that those situations won't work out how do I get past this trying to please all of the people all the time mentality you'll probably never get past the mentality because that's the person's personality however you may become more skilled at figuring out how you're going to give these people rejecting messages so that's a different issue so that such a question for example opposed to to my friend Alan who I'm picking on today exposing his psychology to the world like a gallon would just shake his head from side to side in wonderment about how why such a such a thing would be difficult because it wouldn't be difficult for him to give that people negative feedback you'd be like hey this is how it is you know hey you know sorry it may be inconvenient for you but I can't come to work for you done and so so the other side of the equation is the you know far more mirror neurons far more agreeable and therefore a lot of empathy you know soaking its way through the system making it very difficult to give negative feedback you're not going to change this any more than you're going to change any of us in terms of our basic personality what you can do though is you can very narrowly get better at preparing for those kinds of situations and literally essentially writing dialogue and having some rehearsals in your own mind or actually you know in you know against the wall or to a friend this is how it is that we can get through some of these stressful situations very often these stressful situations which involve us rejecting other people are very very narrow and time limited so if you look at in the romance arena for example sometimes the the communication of rejection or acceptance is a momentous little event that has to do with one sentence that the people said and they'll know they can remember that sentence sixteen years later okay it's like yeah we were talking on the phone and I said this and then she said that and then I knew that was that it's no point pursuing it and it wasn't said by accident in other words these are these are sort of momentous moments in people's lives where the other person exposes where their judgment is really at and what's going to happen the was I going to say so the point is is that very often we we don't have to we don't have to say a lot but we may be giving our rejecting message and it may be very short but it we may want to essentially find a way to say this that it is as palatable as possible and is to displaying you know essentially who it is that we are are our friendliness and agreeableness while we still make a stand and make it clear that this is how this is going to have to go so this is you know I've got on my on my website you know a whole bunch of these little audios and some of those audios have to do with those as those kinds of issues I think for example crazy girlfriend crazy boyfriend give us an example of how does that we do things flood the circuit is also another concept blaming big Louie this is another concept there's ways that we can give negative feedback to people that if we orchestrate it carefully we can do this in a way that's extremely diplomatic and that's that's a good way to go for someone who is inherently very agreeable you sometimes need to prepare for these relatively Martyn large moments in life now if we're talking about what you're going to say to your friends that very often they say hey let's all go to such as such for dinner and you get swept up in that and you don't want to do it I think that's going to be very difficult to change so you you may you may have a little bit of success here and there but probably you're going to continue to get swept up by your friends in that kind of a situation because that's a repetitive thing that's awry naturally in your social ecological circumstances and you're not going to change your personality the but with respect to relatively more important things like rejecting potential mates and rejecting you know other other things have significant social offerings those things sometimes require that we that we exercise diligence in preparing for how it is that we're going to say those things so that we can get them said I have to tell you that the modern world has actually given us a beautiful tool for the agreeable person called email okay so I have told many agreeable people that they can break up with people over email and they can they can tell their mother-in-law they're not coming for Thanksgiving over email and you can just you it's way easier to do it remotely than it is in person and there's no reason why you have to stand up there in person and tell the guy that you're not going to see him again and that these are the reasons why and you really think he's great and blah blah blah you don't have to subject yourself to the social pressure that's very likely to be on the other side of that you can use a email or remote kind of communication where we've flood the circuit nicely just according to design say pleasant things and then blame big Louie ie I've just got things going on with myself and this just won't work or you know I'd really love to work for your company but it turns out that my circumstances are or have shifted a little bit and now it is it's just not gonna work out but thank you so much okay so we don't have to actually put up with a cross-examination we're very agreeable people get themselves into trouble okay we can we can blame big Louie flood the circuit deal with the crazies and get out and that's a that's a very useful mechanism for doing so
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