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Episode 49: Overthinking, Reading ppl, family embarrasment, and what to do if you're ugly
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all right dr. Lyle how are you doing today good about yourself not too bad it's been a good new year little rainy down here in Southern California yeah what do you know well you know that's like a miracle drought so we need the rain to okay yeah well today today we're doing a listener emails questions and comments and how we've really structured these is we get some emails from people everybody's emailing me I get a couple of couple of emails a day about different questions about the show from out all kinds of people and then we try to pick the you know the most recent ones and try to get as many as we can and so but if there's anybody who has a question that they would like answered if they call then we can put them on right away otherwise we're going to just see what we can get from the emails so the number is six five seven three eight three zero seven five one and yeah we've had a lot of good different emails and we are so you are approaching the 50th episode so yeah how about that amazing we didn't we didn't think we were gonna be on this lawn no I thought maybe three or four and then then we just kind of there let forget it all right so all right all right so let's uh let's just get right to we've got a few good questions here okay dear dr. Lyle thank you so much for all the informative uplifting and funny discussions you guys have had so far I'm sure you I will gladly keep recommending you to all my friends and family okay I have a question concerning dr. Lyles tip on how to deal with the anxiety attack is there some sort of strategy that you have to deal with general anxiety this listener sometimes I sometimes get a bit obsessive when it comes to responsibilities I fall on some sort of a hole of what-if thinking which is sometimes okay if I do that work because that makes me a better employee when I do it at everyday stuff it can get really intense and it drains my energy my father is a lot like that which really annoyed me as a child so it might be the genes and I'd like to know how to fight it I think it's the desire to do my best but it makes me become a bit obsessive like if I need to take a friend's dog out for an hour I will do major preparations talk to my friend about her dog's fears his likes dislikes bring an extra rope bags treats avoid all the people other dogs on familiar places otherwise one of the preventable bad things might happen and of course because of all this worrying it makes me a bit unstable and tense and unpleasant things always do happen which makes me over prepare in the next walk as well and all in all it makes me do less and less of anything or might just be the fear of looking stupid in front of other people and/or my internal audience which is why when I hear other people make some sort of mistake in their life I try to remember it and plan on preventing it but of course I can control everything and at times I realize that I have clearly crossed the line from being reasonably prepared to quote the dark side how do I find the middle ground and then from time to time I can catch myself running all these calculations overthinking everything but I still can't stop well we need to get this person's name and phone number because we need to hire them for our next project yeah very so this is a great employee yes so what we're seeing here is hyper conscientiousness and this is genetic so the person's father was very much like this so it's no surprise that the that the this individual has those same circuits they inherited this the now how to combat this the in truth when we're dealing with personality characteristics like this you can't move the needle very much you can move it maybe just a little you can work your way around personality characteristics a little bit so this person sitting firmly at the 99 percentile for conscientiousness that's very clear I would say they're probably in the 99 s there are 99 and a half 99.7 that this is somebody that would plot out and ask questions about how what the dog likes this is a 1 in 300 to 1 in 500 kind of a human so this is a this is an absolutely stellar employee and this is a person that that is the dis conscientiousness is just deeply ingrained in this nervous system and it's not going to be easy to move the needle but we might be able to move it down if we can move them down on occasion to the 98th percentile that can be a lot of relief so that's that's where this anxiety is coming from is is simply the it is a we would call this disorder level anxiety in the sense that that the cost/benefit on on the amount of energy that's being expended towards reducing very low-level risks is quite a bit and to the extent that we we figure and they figure that they're not living their life as enjoyably as it could be now the so there's a couple different ways to try to approach this now a classic way is going to be out of cognitive therapy is going to be a technique that we're going to call down arrow and so let me let me describe this for four people so if you take a sheet of paper and turn it just portrait and then you that then about the top fourth of that page you draw a little box that you can write in and you would say something like this this is going to be what we call the worst case scenario down arrow technique so we think about the worst thing that could happen so the worst thing could happen is you know I'm going to lose my job so okay so if we're going to lose our job then we're going to take an arrow from that box and we're going to go down the page an inch into the next box so now we've lost our job now what now what's the worst thing that could happen well I'm going to get I'm gonna have to leave my apartment okay so we put leave my apartment then we draw a little arrow down below there and we find out where we're going to go next so now we have to think about where we're going to go next well if I don't have a job don't have an apartment I could go stay with my mother okay so we put go stay with my mother then what's the worst thing that can happen I have to put up with my mother harping about how I should have stayed save money so we put that in there and so what we're eventually heading towards is we're finding out just what is the worst thing that could possibly happen to the individual and in this case this individual might have to live with their mother for a few months till they find another job save up a little bit of money and then they move out again so that that's actually the the worst thing that they're that they are facing here they hyper conscientious person maybe on eggshells all day long around their boss because they are worried that they're going to get fired and what they haven't done is they haven't really consciously done the down-arrow so it's an interesting characteristic of people that they will start to touch the worst-case scenario but they'll back off of it pretty quickly in the sense that they they pretty quickly recognize it's probably not going to happen and so their mind sort of leaps off of it and doesn't actually go down into the grit and get it under your fingernails so the down-arrow is a is a technique to actually get down into the grit make yourself imagine what you will really have to do and will do if you do face the worst-case scenario and once you get it is what I call it get it under your fingernails and then you can see what it's like really try to feel it in your imagination and really look at how bad it is and also how long it's likely to last so you know most most inconveniences are of a few weeks or a few months duration and they're not permanent they may be humiliating and we may be anticipating that that humiliation will follow us around for the rest of our mating lives as that might in the Stone Age but it's not going to in the modern environment so in this case so that that's one technique that I would have this listener think about is to use the down arrow and what we're trying to arrive at is a psychological location that I call a position of power so a position of power is where you you get to psychologically one you have really thought through the worst case scenario and you have figured out how you are going to handle that worst case scenario you actually know what you're going to do if that happens and you've made some peace with it in other words you're it's like okay that if this is the price and this is the consequence and that's what happens that's what happens and it is from the position of power that your anxiety will drop and you will actually be able to behave in a much more relaxed confidence fashion with respect to anything and so this is a it's a psychological location that takes a bit of getting used to to do this a lot of times people do not want to or they're avoiding actually thinking through the worst case scenario sometimes they think that if they think the worst case scenario that they're going to attract the worst case scenario which is of course nonsense so we want to think through the worst case scenario think it down into its grisly little details get comfortable with it get to a position of power and then from there we can relax so that's one way to do things now another way to do things is quite different also has its roots in behavioral style therapy for obsessive-compulsive disorder so if it turns out if you're for example a let's suppose you're a hand washer let's suppose you're you've got OCD over germs or a germ phobic and you're all weirded out about hands and shaking hands and touching things and everything else under the Sun and you're washing your hands 40 or 50 or 60 times a day which is not uncommon the once again what's happening is this person is over estimating the worst-case scenario so what what they need to do is they need to actually experience the worst case scenario so they opt to not wash their hands and and grit it out and just like live through the anxiety of not washing their hands and find out that they were wrong and this this is no cure for OCD but it is in fact the treatment of OCD in its various guises and this will dial down the anxiety for OCD a little bit okay maybe 20 30 40 % and that can be a huge difference for people so you have to pay the price of actually going into the anxiety in order to find out that you were that your wild worst case scenario over estimation the worst case scenario is mistaken so in this person's case what I would do is I would engineer for them that we would we would take on some of these tasks they would take on and we would intentionally flake out okay so we would intentionally do things very average and mediocre so in that case what we would want to do is we would want to make sure that the other people that would be involved would see that what we did was you know average work walking the dog changing the dogs soup whatever it is that the person is doing that they're doing so brilliantly I would have them do an average job and lose a little bit of status over this and then just survive it and this would in doing so they the intention would be actually I have I have a target for this and that is for most things you want to target if you're highly conscientious individual you want to target the 80th percentile so you want to do an 80th percentile job you don't want actually do an average job you want to do an 80th percentile job if you do that you're exceedingly unlikely to get fired okay so this this is about as fancy as anybody needs to get for their behavior so we target what is you know moderately to solidly above-average and that's what we aim for and that's what we intentionally get and that's uh going through that sort of exercise plan is another way to try to shake the the stranglehold but a hyper conscientious personality can have over person's life all right so that's that's what I would do and good luck to them but get their resume all right very good okay so our next question this is from our listener she's a 49 year old divorced female living in the western United States okay dear dr. Lyle have a question for you I don't think that I'm very good at reading people I would like to become better at reading other people's emotions and their thoughts through their words actions and especially through their nonverbal cues do you have any suggestions or information about this subject well yes boy there's there's quite a quite a bit is known about this there there's a woman and I can't remember her name but if you look for online somebody will will find this you could find in five minutes there's a woman that's a social psychologist that wrote a book I don't know how to read a person like a book or something that's not the name of it that is something about like that and it's uh she was if we look it up she was the she was a consultant for I think she was a consultant for the OJ case so the and so what she did is she's big injury preparation social psychology and I I picked up her book off the shelf one day probably ten years ago and it was some cheesy title about you know how you can read a person etc and I didn't think I was going to find anything intelligent in it and it turned out it was full of intelligence she is she was a legitimate scientists a legitimate PhD in social psychology and she had gone on to make a fortune in the legal arena by by essentially knowing how to read people and so in in jury selection specifically and so it's all about reading those kids apparently the prosecution turned down her services I think she was she offered them to the prosecution for free they turned him down then the defense said well what the heck we'll take it because she wanted to be a part of a high-profile case and so she winds up you know helping sleazy OJ Simpson defend himself and they went the so ridiculously but did so but the is is that she talks about all kinds she was very sophisticated about reading all kinds of cues from from dress from hair grooming language you know body posture all kinds of stuff is very good in addition you can it's also useful just to understand what we call the big five and so if you go on Wikipedia and read about the big five which I've talked about at length I think it's on my website I think I have a discussion called the perfect personality which talks about the big five and by knowing what the big five are which is openness to experience conscientiousness introversion extroversion agreeableness and emotional stability and if you add IQ to that you I it once you get comfortable and understand that those are the six main variables in the human personality then you start seeing that people are leaking those things all over the place so they leak them in their dress how they walk their posture their facial expressions are immediately indicative of a great deal about their personality the how they answer the simple questions just the manner of their conversation with other people that you see that people are leaking their rebuild is agreeable introverted extroverted they're leaking their intelligence they're leaking their openness to experience in the ways that they dress certainly that's before we even get to the content of their conversation so there's quite a bit you can get pretty good just by knowing that those are the six variances and you're not looking for you're not getting distracted by other things trying to fit them in somewhere you simply recognize that every individual genetically is sitting at a location on those six bell curves you can pretty quickly slot people along those curves and that that's useful if you wanted to get really fancy I don't know how available this is but Paul Ekman who is say a pioneer in in the study of cross-cultural expression of emotion Berkeley professor Kaman with what's known as the facial action coding system where you can you can learn to read the micro muscle movements in the face which are indicative emotions that people are trying to mask and so I'm sure the big poker players in anybody that's got any big money on the line is has studied you know studied with Ekman's stuff but did that's getting I'm sure way too far for our listener but it's but it's out there in the world if it was really what word do Pollak man yes they made a TV show about his work called lie to me yeah okay they made a really really great show where they actually taught taught via the viewers all the little micro expressions and how to read and all that so good so there's probably there's probably exercises that you can purchase and you know somewhere and you can probably get very good at that with more practice the website holder there's a cursive program on his website you can like practice your game and learn how to read things oh they're done there you go and finally I would say that to to to get a bit more knowledgeable about human motivation in general the best book that I know this sort of explains human nature is called the moral animal by Robert Wright it's w RI ght and this is a tremendous introduction to evolutionary theory and evolutionary psychology and very readable it takes people through the story of Charles Darwin himself and his trials and tribulations in life and and it's it's told in that way you know sort of as a biography but it's beautifully done to to educate people in in in psychology and therefore understanding other people's motivation so with all those tools there's no way you can miss in no time you'll be way better than average now you said it take anybody about five minutes to find us over the internet it took me nine yeah unfortunately it took me nah minutes Oh the name of the book is reading people by JoEllen Demetrius and whenever you're dealt serella okay all right fair enough now everybody knows that that's a that's a heck of a book I didn't read it I just I probably read 25 pages of it standing in the bookstore I was too cheap to buy it but I could tell it's the real deal and and so there you go that's a very helpful book all right fantastic so yeah read the book if you read a few pages and yeah okay so next question yes okay this is from another one of our listeners she's 30 year old single female dear doctor live yeah I struggle with feeling shame and embarrassment over the family or parents that I come from there's a lot of dysfunction in my parents relationship yes they are married but they probably should split up and overall they have not prospered in life I'm the only one in my family with my shit together and I wonder how I can get over feeling such shame over my parents poor choices in life which have led to a terrible financial situation I'm embarrassed to talk about them when friends and co-workers make conversation about parents and family members what should I do interesting there's there's probably several different ways that I would go about trying to manage this if I was seeing this person clinically I would clearly want to know I would want to know what what she's thinking and what she's so embarrassed about so what we've heard is that the parents have are not good shape financially and and she feels like that that that didn't happen by accident but essentially there's been some chaotic decision-making and quote dysfunction that has led to this and so the so I would I would be wanting her to sort of tell me more this story about what is it when she pictures things in her mind's eye what's the what is she thinking other people are going to be thinking or were they to find this out and so she's carrying around probably quite a bit of anxiety and she's once again very likely overestimating the worst case scenario that and this is what happens with you know high conscientiousness people is they overestimate the worst case scenario so just as with our previous case of the hyper conscientious individual that what we in effect what this is like is that this is like its own little enclave of OCD so it's a it's an overestimation of how horrible it is that I'm going to die because my hands aren't clean so I got a washerman wash them this person is sort of washing and washing her reputation or her family's reputation by keeping it as clean as possible worrying very much about these cross examinations and you know dodging and avoiding and spending a lot of anxiety about this and she's the reason she has a great deal of embarrassment which is the anticipation of the status loss that she believes will come should this become sort of more common knowledge now a what I would probably do is I would probably gently have her face her worst case scenario which is first first of all I have to say that I can't recall any time in the last 30 years that anybody asked me what my parents did or what their financial circumstances were so this is this may be more common for her in her life at this point were in her made her community whatever that community is that may be more common but I have to tell you since my 30th birthday I can't recall a time when I was ever asked anything about my parents financial circumstances or their careers so the good news is is that people been cross-examining you up to now it's probably about ready to stop because it's essentially nobody's business and it's pretty much irrelevant to you so I don't think people care that much one way or the other now one of the ways that you could find out is that in selected circumstances where it might manage to come up in a place where there's not too much status on the line you could actually risk coming somewhat clean so people say well what are your parents do you say you know what whatever they do they don't do it very well okay is there they're you know they're surviving but it's they're getting by but it's so-so okay mostly moat the good news is that I learned how to not do things from watching my parents hmm so we could what we are doing is that this is a preemptive strike where we are this is this is what we can call in in the legal arena we call this confess and avoid so we come very open so instead of sitting there like a target waiting for the prosecutor to say where were you on the night of the six do was anybody with you you know what were you doing how do we know that you were where you said you were that that person's in trouble but they're not in trouble if they say I was by myself and there wasn't anybody with me well is there anybody that could verify nope there's nobody that can verify it I was by myself now this is this kind of this is confessing of would like we just put it out there and the jury looks at this and has a little shift in their in their perception but instead of you defending against this furtively and try and duck it we actually need it head-on in a relaxed fashion in a somewhat self-deprecating fashion in this case so what about your parents oh and what about them and well you know are they are they doing fine it's like they're getting by that's about all they ever do okay so boom we get ready they confess and avoid tactic and we watch what happens and probably the people on the other side are slightly puzzled and a little bit taken aback but or I don't don't really have a lot of latitude to push nor do they have any real motivation to push and and so this is this is one way this young lady could experiment with this tactic and just an isolated circumstances and find out just how well it works and I think that she would find that it would work surprisingly well and that I don't think it's going to come up very often anyway but if and when it does coming up with a confession avoid strategy here I think is a will put her psychologically in a position of power after she experiments with it because she'll find out that oh well the the biggest baddest worst thing that's going to happen is that people are going to be a little surprised at your strength and your and your candor and but yet you're not calling for help or whining about it and it's kind of like oh those are my parents are over there and I'm kind of embarrassed of them a little disgusted and I am over here and I'm a quite different entity and that that kind of commentary will create that kind of delineation that I think will protect the person's status very well we offer yeah is it possible for her friends to see her as like a disrespectful child to be talking about them like that well first of all the only reason it's coming up is because somebody cross-examined her okay so we're not out there volunteering if anything to anybody it's nobody's business but if it comes up in a cross-examination then if we if we use this kind of strategy it's going to put people back on their heels and and so that's that's why it's not disrespectful to do this you asked me you got you gots a rather little bit of an uncomfortable response and a little bit of an open response but essentially I'm not hiding anything yeah there how are they doing this person is I think so they haven't prospered but it she's a little from the sound of it she's a little overly sensitive about this there's a lot of people that haven't prospered there's a lot of parents that haven't saved for retirement or in trouble look as long as these people are above ground they're managing to eat they're not they're not living in a rat hole somewhere hey it's okay now it may be real pretty lousy relative to her friends and relative to her social circles and relative to herself in her future that may all be true but we can still use the phrases hey they're getting by you know they get by which they do and and well you know how are they enjoying life God knows I mean these are weird questions where do they live oh you know they live in an apartment like that just says right away hey my parents aren't wealthy they're not homeowners I mean who on earth would they don't own their own home I mean these are these are bizarre cross-examinations now the it seems possible that the the most anxiety provoking cross-examination we come out early in a dating relationship where some male is trying to assess or socioeconomic status effectively her dowry you know I mean sort of what are what are the financial circumstances that are sitting behind her okay and my point is that's sort of nobody's business you just quietly defend that and they shouldn't be cross-examining anyway and if they are we can parry those pretty easily and we can say that they're fine they get by that and that's that and and and I have to tell you that males don't really care so if anybody if any woman out there thirty year old woman is worried that the male's care a whole heck of a lot about your parents pedigree and their financial circumstances believe me he's an awful lot more concerned about your waist hips ratio and he's as long as he's excited about that and he can see who it is that you are he doesn't really give a damn here you are worrying about 1% of the variance in that situation so Benny right that's how I would sum that up once again same type of strategy where we go a little bit into the anxiety to test the worst case scenario and that's how we get relief from an overactive Oprah hyper conscious brain that is overly worried about it mm-hmm okay all right well speaking of relationships now and what the male is concerned about we have a very interesting question here from a listener yeah dear dr. Lyle I'm an ugly woman what advice do you have for women as far as dating in relationships it seems that all men really want beautiful women or at least average women and never ugly I feel like giving up altogether because I know no meaningful good man would want me long-term instead just casually casual mating very interesting we'll use slightly different words so we'll use a little bit of political correctness here that the listener didn't give for herself we're going to say less attractive so the I would say the following is true the I've actually made a bit of a study of this and I've being the the social outcast oddball psychologist that I am I have had a lot of free time on my hands where nobody wants to talk to me and that's led to things like standing in the middle of a mall and just watching humans for a while just to watch them in in particular habitat and I have watched people and analyzed their attractiveness by the scads and what I have found is that most people are genetically pretty close to not very many people fall to the far left of the mean so this is what I'm trying what I'm trying to explain is that most of quote less attractiveness has to do with physical condition so the first thing that you can do and the dis entire Lander your control is to get into very very good physical condition and this can be done by eating a healthy diet you don't have to go all the way to mcdougal Esselstyn or Goldhammer but you could so you could go on john MacDougall's website and read what he has to say about what people ought to be eating and if you eat a diet pretty well consistent with that and you exercise moderately you will eventually become in very very good condition and so that that will level the playing field first of all you have to understand that a great many of your competitive females that may be more genetically endowed in terms of how pretty they are are not going to go to that trouble and are not going to get in themselves in very good physical condition so even if you were unfortunate in terms of certain issues skin tone facial configuration whatever the heck it is body shape morphology in general you may not have been fortunate there in terms of that luck of the draw but your competitors are squandering their genetic advantages because they don't know what to do in terms of getting in condition so when I have looked at people you will see variances but with respect to official Beauty certainly but when you look at people a great deal of the variance has to do with literally what kind of condition are they in physically so you can be coming in great physical condition nothing can stop you this is all diet exercise etc your your hair hopefully some people have big problems with their hair yeah on a few occasions I've seen you know people I've seen women in their 30s that have lost you know 90% of their hair and that's you know at that point you may want to do cosmetic things about that but we're going to assume this assume this person has hair and that it's worth having that hair be very attractively done it may not feel like it's worth it if we're not in great physical condition but if you're in great physical condition it makes sense to have your hair done and it makes sense since probably to have your hair fairly long it's quite likely that long hair serves as an indication to males of the females dietary history and whether or not she's had sufficient food over a relatively long period of time that would indicate fertility so we think the long hair is associated as a fertility cue in male so your hair ought to be kind of as long as you can reasonably get it and take care of it and we're going to add that to a body that's in very good shape and we're going to be eating very healthy food and exercising so we're going to have as good as skin is that we can have we are going to once we're in very good shape good skin good hair we're going to go to the dentist and make sure that our teeth are white and and decent I had one young lady come into me that her whole dating career was being destroyed by the fact that she had one front tooth that had been damaged in her youth and was very very dark and I said you know we can talk all day about what we're going to do about everything else but the bottom line is is that - Scott - go you got to have it fixed and it was a financial burden - it was going to be a $1,500 problem or whatever it was I said that's what's standing in our way we're going to have to solve that problem whatever it's going to take well the problem got solved and so did her dating problems essentially instantly that had been a major deficit that had not been being addressed the sometimes what will happen is once we start to clear these hurdles were bit by bit we start getting more and more motivated to do everything else that that because a lot of times people are in the ego trap with respect to their attractiveness like why why try when we are going to fail so therefore don't try at all and just forget the whole thing and so what we want to do is we want to crawl out of the ego trap and we want to get in great shape we want to eat healthy food we want to get our hair long we want to get our tea white and then we're going to be increasingly interested in having nice clothes and then we're going to you can work on your posture and fitness and movement go to yoga and then as a last resort which would be the last thing that we would ever do not the first the laziest thing to do is to have cosmetic surgery okay that's almost always a mistake not always but almost always do everything else first okay and if it turns out that by the time we've done everything else and we're still not getting any good feedback then then we can look at that as an option but that I have to tell you I have seen very few people in my life very few that I would call ugly I have seen all kinds of people the majority of them are not very attractive because they're not in very good condition and so keep in mind but you've got tremendous control over that and make sure we exercise that control fully before we consider this game over because it is probably not game over it's also the case that of course all men would want beautiful women if they're heterosexual males that's true but they're not designed by nature to only be happy with such creatures so you're going to it's going to turn out that males self calibrating equipment is going to mercifully make it so that they're usually reasonably happy with somebody that is similar to in attractiveness to them so if it turns out that you are a genetic - you can probably be darn near a 5 in - competitively in this society because you can take care of your yourself in these very important ways and and I see all kinds of people who are not that attractive who are with partners who are also not particularly attractive but they can they can absolutely have love relationship that is highly valued so it is it is naturally the case that almost all of us are in a situation where the vast majority of people that we would be interested in are not interested in us and almost everybody that's interested in us we would not be interested in that is the math of mating that is that is not anybody's fault that's just the nature of nature it can feel worse if you're on the Bott lower end of the bell curve because there's an awful lot more people that you would maybe be attracted to and you just feel like you just cannot get a leg in this game what you wouldn't realize is that if you're a 440th or thirtieth percentile attractiveness person you don't realize that somebody who is in eighth is having very similar circumstances it seems to you like they have a a an embarrassment of riches but the truth is they've got the very same equipment that is saying no I want a little bit better deal than I seem to be able to get you start getting into the nines and that starts not happening in other words they're they're so fancy that very high percentages of people that they are interested in are very interested in them that's a constraint on perfection almost none of humanity faces the the bounty of the constraints on perfection that leads to that our girl here that is saying this clearly does not but that doesn't mean that you can't pay attention to the variables that you've got control over exercise control over these things and ie be you know be the finest human being physically and mentally and psychologically that you can be and let the chips fall where they may I would say this that John Wooden great basketball coach at UCLA had what he called the pyramid of success and you know his own hokey way of looking at things but he had he had a crucial insight that that echoes to this day into modern psychology and that is that he defined success as a peace of mind of knowing that that you you know you did an excellent job that you made the most your potential and I would say this that he is this is very accurate in the sense that your job is to make the most of your potential and then you let the chips fall where they may so maybe you win maybe you lose but at the end of the day your your internal audience can look look at your performance and they could say we didn't leave anything on the table we we played as hard as we could and we played as intelligently as we could and if it turns out that we they were not successful that's the way it was okay but you can get a tremendous support from your internal audience from your self-esteem mechanism by doing an excellent job over things that you have control the world did not hand this person a lot of chips it handed them obviously high intelligence and hand them a lot of humility and handed them the guts to ask a question like that that's an unusual person okay if we need to work hard at the at the other aspects the more quote superficial aspects in order to make her more competitive and give her a chance to find somebody terrific that's what she needs to do needs to put that effort out and not leave you know get the peace of mind of knowing that you made the most of your potential fantastic now a question for you about the the girl you have in your office with that bad tooth how did she know that that was what was you know the reason why the guys weren't weren't liking it did they tell her I mean uh she didn't know but I mean she's staring at that big dark tooth every day and so she she had a lot of other hypotheses and a lot of worries about all kinds of things about a retracted miss and this is what's interesting is that when you're getting bad feedback you're not sure what to attribute it to now I am hoping that this woman who quote thinks she's ugly is thirty pounds overweight okay maybe more but let's hope let's hope you know if it turns out that she's she's screaming shape and she's an athlete and it's etcetera then and and she has a not desirable face then that's a tougher situation but let's I'm going to assume there's a very good chance that that's not what the situation is and in this case and so as a result what can happen is when you're getting bad feedback you blame all kinds of stuff like you do scattershot you know of all the suspects so this this girl thought that she wasn't that attractive in the face thought that she wasn't that attractive you know her she was she was not she didn't have much in the way of breast tissue there's all kinds of stuff swirling through that head blaming all the the things of why it is that she wasn't being successful when I looked at the situation I'm looking at a big dark tooth okay everything else is everything else to me is a personal taste there's there's guys that like all kinds of different sizes shapes and so on and so forth and she was in quite good physical condition so I felt like hey that's not our problem our problem is this big dark tooth and it turned out I was right so we corrected an obvious flaw that was been needed to be corrected and you know that's also similarly plastic surgery in in limited places makes sense so maybe a person has a horrendously unattractive nose on a female might be worth doing absolutely there may be other things but this is the last place we look okay last place we look is cosmetic surgery on the face we do everything else first mm-hmm okay great yeah all right okay we got a couple more questions so door this is from somebody in Sweden actually okay so dear dr. Lyle my question is I get it many more things is in my genes then I and many more people have thought but can you tell me more about what's in my genes from my closest relatives parents grandmother and so on and what's in my genes from the total human gene pool that has been made since the Stone Age especially interested in how the ingredients in the five factor model is set to be an individual from a person's parents or further back in history of mankind maybe there's a percentage of how much comes from the relatives versus how much comes from the total gene pool oh okay I'm not sure he's sort of scrambling around here trying ask a bunch of things I'm going to try to answer what I think he's asking and it's going to turn out that you're each of your parents when you look at them what they are is they are me let me give you an example let's suppose that you went to there was a meeting of representatives from 10 high schools and so you you saw there was this young lady that came from high school called we're going to call Lakewood High and you meet her and you're there from Wilson High happens to be schools and I know because I grew up there and so you meet this girl from will from Lakewood High and turns out she's very attractive so what am I thinking I'm thinking wow the girls from Lakewood are really attractive ok why because she's a representative of it's the only information I've got ok so I don't know what to think about the girls from Lakewood but I'm thinking that maybe maybe they're all like that so this is what your parents are your parents are a representative of their gene pool they are not even close to the whole gene pool they're just a representative of their gene pool now it's going to turn out that they are let's suppose that another representative from from another school they come and they're Chinese so what are we thinking thinking oh maybe there's a lot of Chinese people at that high school you say so maybe there are maybe they're not but the point is is that your your parents are just a will they are a little sample the genes that built them or a sample of their entire gene pool that they carry with them in their sex cells and so you you correlate you know modestly with your parents so you have some similarity with them we're going to call that all I don't know well I do know it's it's somewhere in the general range of you know five maybe 10% of the variance of your personality is going to be associated with your parents with each parent and so what you put your two parents together you could be you are somewhat more like your parents than you are like average people on the street but you're not overwhelmingly like your parents okay now there's certain characteristics that that are more that tend to be the breed a little bit more true so IQ is going to have a tendency to be like that yeah that's how ever personality characteristics are a little flakier and so what you might think of this that you're kind of like a sample of four grandparents where each of those people as a few percent of the say in sort of food is that you are the but there's a lot of slop just like it you know you meet one individual from a group and they aren't necessarily indicative of the whole group now if you meet somebody from a small town in Iowa and farming and you meet them on on some Street and you talk to you and he's kind of open and basic and straight etc you're thinking huh maybe that's what a lot of those people in that town are like and you know what you might be kind of right because the whole set of situations people that would live there sort of select for that kind of people and personality as well as the genes that have been hanging around there for the last four by breeding generations so if they were Wilder they wound up in New York City attending acting school you say they didn't stay back on the farm so it's gonna so that's how we look at this so this is why for example this is very very much like tracking down the breeding and horses so horse breeders are very very interested in the pedigree of horses and I don't know how far back they go but they go back 20 25 30 generations and they're looking for the next Manowar they're looking for the next Secretariat and they know that those unique configurations of unusual genes will only come along once in a blue moon but they're very likely to come along eventually if there's greatness somewhere in the gene pool and and so that's that's how it works so you have you know a bunch of slop and then you know which there's a bunch of noise in the and then then you'll see it so the way to think about it is you know you're a spoonful of this a spoonful of that and certainly it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to be thinking about the genetics of your ancestry back more than a few generations because after that point it's so it's so diluted that if you're the seventh cousin of Andrew Jackson which apparently I am you know I'm sure I have essentially nothing in common with Andrew Jackson so intestine anyway yeah I hope that might not be helpful remind me who and reduction was again yeah seventh President United States just kiss you mister history lesson all right what else do we already have time for anymore you know what I think we're going to call it a day and and the rest to next time listeners if you have any if you have any questions just email me and we'll put them on the list and then we'll get them as soon as we can if you call then we'll take priority any show any time so dr. Lyle thank you and also your website that you mentioned you can watch you can watch that perfect personality is esteem dynamics org and and and you've got with a couple of podcasts early on we talked about the big five and and the perfect personality thing I've watched it on a seventeen eighteen times or so only a couple minutes at a time so
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