How to Be a Better Human - How to redefine your self-worth (with Meag-gan O'Reilly)

Episode Date: March 8, 2021

“What am I doing with my life? Where am I going?” During this isolated time, many of us are having to readjust our identities because our visions for what life was supposed to look like completely shifted -- and so perhaps has the locus of our self-worth. Dr. Meag-gan O'Reilly is a licensed Staff Psychologist at Stanford University's Counseling and Psychological Services. In this episode, she offers helpful frameworks for cultivating a life --and society-- that can better recognize the basic intrinsic value of each person. Dr. O’Reilly’s research interests focus on social class, college student mental health, resilience, and multicultural identities, particularly gender and ethnicity. She also operates a private practice in downtown Palo Alto, Inherent Value Psychology, in which she provides clinical services to Silicon Valley professionals. To learn more about "How to Be a Better Human," host Chris Duffy, or find footnotes and additional resources, please visit: go.ted.com/betterhuman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Who am I? What am I going to do? What will my life look like? These are questions that students are naturally asking themselves as they graduate high school or college. But they're also questions that all of the rest of us are asking ourselves, too. I know that I am certainly asking myself these questions all of the time right now. Who am I?

What am I doing? What am I doing right now? Well, I mean, right now, right now I'm hosting a podcast. I'm a podcast host, but I'm also a comedian, whatever that means. And I used to teach fifth grade. Maybe that's who I am. I don't know. During this time in the world where so many of us are having to readjust our identities because our visions for what our life was supposed to look like have been blown off the rails. A lot of us are having to recalibrate where our self-worth comes from. So whether you are a student who is about to graduate and figuring out who you're going

to be, or you're a teacher or a parent, or maybe you're just a person like me who is having these questions brought to the forefront of your brain, I think that there is a lot to be gained from talking to someone who knows how best to approach these questions. So today on the podcast, we're going to be talking with a staff psychologist devoted to youth. Here is a clip of what Dr. Megan O'Reilly had to say about self-worth at TEDxSJSU back in 2018. Obviously, 2018 was quite a while ago. And yet,

I think that what Dr. O'Reilly had to say is still incredibly relevant today. How many of you have been asked, what do you do or what do you study? And feel like that question is going to determine how much respect or attention you receive. That looks like the whole room. Now, this is just the surface of the types of daily experiences that slowly erode away our sense of inherent value and replace it with a sense of conditional mattering. A conditional sense of self-worth means you think your worth as a person depends upon something else. Now as a psychologist who's heard and held hundreds of human stories,

I have witnessed firsthand how this mentality of feeling like you are not enough has stolen dreams, ambitions, relationships, health and happiness away from people. So I'm here to declare enough is enough with these worth wars raging with one another. Think about how radically different our world and relationships would be if each of us actually acted like we all had inherent value. Again, our society is riddled with many conditions and consequences for not meeting them. And even those of us who seem to be winning at these conditions stand to lose

because conditions change with time, age, or unexpected hardships. Furthermore, those of us with more minority identities have even more treacherous path because there are extra messages of unworthiness lofted upon you based on stereotype, microaggression, discrimination, prejudice, and outright hate.

We're gonna hear so much more from Dr. O'Reilly and get to ask her about her work. This is How to Be a Better Human. I'm Chris Duffy, and we'll be right back. And we are back. Dr. Megan O'Reilly, thank you so much for being here. So hello, happy to be here. I'm Dr. Megan, Megan O'Reilly. I am the staff psychologist at Stanford University and the CEO and co-founder of Inherent Value Psychology, Inc., which is my private practice in Palo Alto. Amazing. Well, you know, I love how this is one of the things you talked about in your in your TED talk, but I also love how you do it in practice

too, is not defining yourself solely by your professional life. I feel like over the past year, as there's been so much turmoil in people's professional lives and as the economy has been really challenging for people and a lot of people have lost work, it seems like many people are dealing with that like sense of identity where, you know, if I am my job and I don't have my job, then what am I anymore? Yeah, it's actually a really unfortunate opportunity to actually pause and begin to redefine ourselves. Without this academic downturn and loss of work, we may never had a chance to pause and start to unzip our identity from what we do. And so I want to acknowledge the grief and the loss that a lot of people are experiencing.

And I want to see if we can make an opportunity out of this crisis and actually have people prompt themselves to ask, you know, who am I outside of my work? What else defines me? What else do I enjoy? And actually use this forced pause as an opportunity to kind of make their self-definition more robust. As someone who works a lot with students and, you know, you see a lot of students in the day-to-day, what would you say are some of the major disruptions that they've been dealing with? The very first one is, you know, because I work with undergrad and graduate students at Stanford University, they are very high achieving and they've planned their future, you know, two, three, four, five plus years in advance. And what this has, what coronavirus has done is really made a

lot of those dreams deferred. A lot of them are being robbed of milestones. I still am grieving for the senior class that didn't get to walk. It's such a huge milestone. But I'm also grieving for the graduate students who are having their research pause or their dissertations pause and really feeling quite dashed. So one of the struggles I'm seeing is just the academic pace. They're having to stop, pause, revisit, and maybe even lose funding. And that's just on the academic side. More than that, I'm seeing, you know, the isolation kick in. Some students are home. Some students are on campus. They're not able to converse and really get through the hardship of academia with each other. So that's gone. And really everything that they had going

on for them before this hit is being exacerbated. But the biggest one is also grief, the profound grief that people are also struggling with, not just the grief of identity, but the actual grief of people. We need to recognize that a lot of students have elderly parents or grandparents that that have actually been lost to coronavirus. So they're trying to do their academic hustle while they're still in the midst of the opening stages of grief. It feels like that sense of disruption and the loss of milestones, I feel like that applies to so many people,

whether you're a student or not. And so what is it that you are telling people to help them deal with that? How do you help students process that? Are there specific strategies we should be using? That's a great question because a lot of us in the mental health field are creating strategies specifically for this, because even as counselors, we're in this with y'all. And so we're actually pulling on what literature is related from other prior pandemics, but really coming up and being innovative with what the best

science tells us. And what I've been pulling from is the literature on self-compassion. My first strategy for students is telling, well, parents, students, everyone is telling them, this is not your fault, right? This is on the level of act of God type of interruption, disruption. So there's no need to additionally fault the self or feel behind or feel thwarted in your efforts. This is really something that's taking everyone by left field. And so that's actually a place where we get to feel our shared humanity, grace, and compassion. So that's usually my first door in. You know, it's so funny when you say that because because the fact that like you're in it with us, too. Right. I feel like I remember right when this was all starting around March,

I had a conversation. I had a session with my own therapist and he was like, well, you have a tendency to kind of do catastrophic thinking and think that things are a catastrophe. And it's important to remember they're not always catastrophes. And then he was like, but, you know, this kind of is a catastrophe. So sometimes it's actually accurate. That's okay. 100%. Yeah. So, you know, I think this kind of goes back to your, what you've talked about around self-worth, right? Because when we miss these milestones and when we miss the social support, that's often what we build our identity and what we build our self off of. Are there things that we should be doing to shift in that direction,

to kind of use this as a productive time rather than a destructive time? Ah, well, let me make two quick tweaks to even the asking of that question. Please, oh my gosh, I love that. Yes, let's fix this question. Because listen, surely I know that I am not doing it right. That is, the whole point of this show

is how to be a better human. And it is not coming from the perfect human here, Chris. That is not how it's supposed to be framed. Oh, we're all in it together. But I do think the framing matters. So first off, you said, is there anything we should do? And I like telling my clients, because I'm a cognitive behavioral therapist, the language we use actually primes us in certain directions. So when you say should, you're already behind. Okay. And I tell people not to should on themselves. And that's exactly how it should sound. So I would like to change that in,

is there anything we could do? Is there anything, any way we can actualize our choice in this matter? All those are more empowering, active terms. Okay, great. Let's take it again. Take two. You're probably going to hear take one, but now take two. Is there anything we could do in this time? Yes. I think this time could be a nice opportunity to actually return to something that as a culture and as a society, we've kind of moved away from that has had detrimental impact. So that and what I'm hinting at is being more contemplative. So we're forced to be indoors.

We're forced not to connect as much. And we're really forced to be in our own minds and in our own homes. So now that the go, go, go is kind of slowing down, and I'll talk about parents here for a second, but now that the go, go, go has slowed down, we can make our minds a better place to inhabit. We can look at how we're thinking, how we're feeling, what connections we want to invest in, how to be inventive and innovative around those things. And so I think now is a nice time to rekindle those parts of self that we really felt like we couldn't devote time to. People have been returning to nature in droves. It's the one thing that hasn't been closed. And I really feel like this has been a sparking point for people to return to nature in any meaningful way.

So for people whose children, whether they're young and in daycare, whether they're older and in college or in high school or wherever they are, for those people who have their kids actually in a physical space, who are physically attending school, how can they mentally support their kids? There's so many challenges here for both the youngsters and parents. Things as simple as, you know, having my little one's two years old, so keeping her mask on outside. So things as simple as that. The first thing I would say is to kind of get clear on developmentally where your child or kid is at and start looking at some of the best practices that the CDC and

others have. Even Sesame Street has some things online about how do you talk to a kid about viruses and things like that. But for parents, I would say it starts with you, as in most things. Yeah. And obviously this doesn't apply quite as much to higher education, like your Stanford students. But I used to teach fifth grade. And one of the things that I was really struck by working in elementary school is how, you know, there's the academics are very important, but so much of what you're trying to teach is how to be a compassionate, caring human being. And it feels like there's actually a real opportunity in all of the suffering and the sacrifice that we're all making around COVID is so much of it is about compassion and caring for our community and trying to protect the vulnerable. And I do feel like there are real lessons for kids and for adults in that. Yeah. I think emotional check-ins can

become a new family norm. I, again, my daughters too, but me and my husband are already talking about how to check in on core emotions. So tell me something that you're proud of today. Tell me a time you felt lonely or tell me about a time where you actually helped somebody else. You know, just regular prompts where you get some narrative from their day, even if it was inside all day, but you're actually hearing how they're processing things and you can get in in a different way. And you're also sharing those things too. So you're kind of building a family culture of emotional communication. Okay. I am going to give you a second for that to sink in and for you to soak up all of that great advice while we go to a quick ad break. And we are back with Dr. Megan O'Reilly.

We're talking about self-worth and self-esteem. And here is what Dr. O'Reilly said in her talk about changing the messages and the stories that we tell ourselves. How do we unlearn an unhelpful message that is so entrenched? Disclaimer, the methods I'm briefly about to describe are not easy. the methods I'm briefly about to describe are not easy. They won't happen overnight, and they might not even happen over the course of years. It's a process, and I call it life span work.

But on an individual level, let's start with the hardest task, which is to stop comparing yourself to others. I know what you're thinking. How can I do this when the world around me does this constantly? Well, a full answer would pull on the literatures from self-compassion, gratitude, would likely advocate for a separation of comparing to acquire new skills and increase performance and comparing that is harmful for your sense of self. Another part of my answer is to do something that resonates with you for its own sake. When was the last time you did something, not because it's going to show up on your resume,

not because it meets that condition of worth that you're wrestling with, but just because you enjoyed it? It's probably been a while. What this does is it softens our stance toward ourselves. It allows us a zoomed out perspective and gives us a chance to experience ourselves and others in a non-conditional way. In our families, we need to nurture the unconditional self and respond with love and acceptance to successes and failures. In our schools and

institutions, this is difficult because we are seeking outcomes, but a person is not a product and we need a culture that delineates the two and helps us see that one does not define the other. So I leave you with the challenge to get started on some of this. The next time someone asks you, what do you do or what are you studying in an attempt to qualify your worth? I want you to try to answer them from this new understanding of inherent value. Don't provide an occupation or a field of study. Instead, share with them something that you cherish about yourself. Try to break interpersonal ground with them and not start with labels. For example, if I could go back to that pool party and have a second chance of introducing myself,

I would once again not say I'm a Stanford psychologist, but I would say that I'm a story keeper, that I show love through listening, and then I share what I learn to educate and liberate people. That says so much more about me, and it's something I do cherish about myself. And I'm really honored to have shared it with you tonight. Okay, so Dr. O'Reilly, let's talk more about what you were saying there in the talk. So much of school, especially middle and high school and college, so much of it is actually what happens outside of class, right? Defining your identity, making friends, relationships, figuring out who you are. How can people still do that in this time where it feels like the virtual world is kind of set up solely for the instructional piece. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yeah. Chris, what if I told you that now might be a purer way to figure out who you are?

So now could be, if we allow it, could be a time to say when the cameras are off, what in my own mind do I find interesting? What in my own mind do I pursue? Not just what my friends are doing. What do I find interesting? What can I dig further into? What can I geek out on without it being open to the voyeuristic judgment of my peers? Yeah, it does kind of feel like this period, right, the recent past and presumably the next few months, no matter when you're listening to this, they've kind of blown up the entire idea of that there is something called normal, right? Like when we're all alone and we don't have this thing to compare it to,

all of a sudden you realize like, what is a normal way to, it is freeing to realize like there isn't one way of doing these things. It can be quite liberating because one thing that I like to talk about that conditions of worth do to us is what I call the three C's. It makes us compare. In comparison, we know from the psychological literature is the thief of joy. It really breaks us down. We compare, we consume, be that social media or literally consuming like other getting our food and diet out of whack or consuming things, commodities. And then we compete. We jockey with each other or we compete or we go after something just because someone else had it or might have it. And that might, we feel, increase

our value to the world. You've been spending a lot of time over the past year and over the past few months, I'm sure, too, talking to students who are dealing with these multiple crises, right? Social upheaval, pandemic, economic challenges, and everything else that's happening in the world as well, just the day-to-day things that are happening. Are there coping strategies that you are seeing that are really working well and that the rest of us can maybe use as well? You know, I work with some of the most inventive and very bright students, and they have taught me a few things, and I've been able to bring some best practices to them.

Some things that I've seen start to work kind of across age group and across station in life, and I mentioned it before, but it's really, I need to underscore now the importance of it. And it is setting habits. There's a lovely book called The Power of Habits. And what a habit essentially does, it takes away your decisional fatigue. Now that we're in so much uncertainty, we've just added, I don't know how many more hundreds of thousands of decisions we need to make in a day since our normal routine has been offset. So just the simple fact of setting a new routine, you know, now that commuting is not happening, when are you getting up? When are you eating breakfast? When do you log in? What things are you need to get done a day?

How much can you get done in a day now that their Zoom fatigue is very real? So setting new expectations for yourself that are realistic, creating new habits really helps you kind of much can you get done in a day now that their Zoom fatigue is very real? So setting new expectations for yourself that are realistic, creating new habits really helps you kind of put some guard rails on that fatigue of your mind and that energy. So you can actually deal with just a few things off your to-do list. So that's one. Another one is getting active. What that does, it kickstarts our positive, natural, positive brain chemistry, a little norepinephrine. The third and last one I would say is actually get really keen on who you can connect to, even if it's just one person regularly.

This destruction with isolation right now is that we feel disconnected from everyone. But if there's just one person who you can be real with, not just kind of shooting the breeze with kind of surface level, the need for connection now is a little deeper. Do you have any tips for how to balance that, the really powerful and helpful structure of routine with the opportunity to use this time as a creative exploratory time? Yeah, I think one lowanging fruit way would be just to block off maybe an hour, maybe more of just open-ended time. A lot of us don't know how to not do anything and just be, right? A lot of us get agitated when it's too still or too quiet or we're not working on anything. So to actually build in your routine or open phase of time where you just see what comes up or you just start writing

or you just have a blank canvas or music playing and just see what naturally comes to your body would be a nice way to rediscover yourself and kind of break past that anxiety that's just there initially because you don't know what you're doing. Maybe you don't need to be doing anything and you can just be. Oh my gosh. I feel like you're talking generally, but I'm hearing it very specifically to me. I'm like, oh, that's me. And I love the idea that now after talking to you later this week, I'm going to get a little Google calendar notification that says in 30 minutes, do nothing. In 30 minutes, you have scheduled one hour of doing nothing. And I'll be like, OK, that's my time. It's on the calendar. It's a meeting. I would love for you to do that because my whole, my guest's mission in life is to redefine productivity as liberating the unconditional self. The most productive thing you can do for yourself

and for others is care for yourself well, and really liberate yourself from all these different messages on who and what you have to be to be happy. Happiness oftentimes is about subtraction, not addition. And in those stillness, we can get a hint of what that could look like. That feels like a big flaw that the pandemic has exposed, right? The idea that we're ourselves because we do these things and we have all these accomplishments. And I know you've been saying this way before that, but I wonder, are there other flaws too that you feel like this time has kind of exposed in educational systems or just our society?

I think it also goes to something that people are feeling, even as there is an end that we see, right? Even as we know that the vaccine will eventually, hopefully it will eventually get rid of this. It's not gonna be one day, right? We now know that there's not gonna be this day where, okay, we declare victory and everyone gets to go back to a crowded restaurant and we all have a big party where we go bobbing for apples in the same, I don't know why we would bob for apples at this party, but we can't do some sort of COVID dangerous activity.

Instead, it's going to be a really like a personal and a slow thing where we keep having to be careful and we can be a little less careful over the months, but it's going to and a slow thing where we keep having to be careful and we can be a little less careful over the months, but it's going to be a slow personal thing rather than a big collective bang. And I think that is really challenging. And we're not set up as a society to handle something like that, where you have to pay attention to yourself rather than, you know, just mindlessly follow. Yes, exactly. As we are transitioning into a new phase and a lot of your students, right, there's this very defined world of you're in college and then you're done. And I know certainly people take breaks and it takes different people different amounts of time, but there's still kind of this like set framework around college. What do you tell kids or students who are finishing up and they're getting ready for this next life phase. Yeah, Chris, there's actually so much intrepidation and rational anxiety around the job market, right?

So many people are wondering if they should just postpone their academic job hunt or otherwise, if they should just try again at a different time, do a gap year, do a code term, kind of buy themselves time, do a gap year, do a code term, kind of buy themselves time, do a postdoc. But it's really hard to shepherd them through this time because it is unprecedented. Their fears aren't irrational about, are there going to be postings open in the market that I like? Are people hiring? The freeze is just starting to thaw on certain markets. So these students and young professionals who have spent so much of their time and life force building this career, coming to this halt is actually quite distressing

and angering. And so I usually just let them pour out that anger, especially graduating from a place like Stanford. They thought they were going to have this golden key that would open any door because that's what they've been promised. But now the doors are closed due to other reasons. So I just let them pour out their anger. I help them keep their dreams alive and get savvy around how do we find out who's hiring, bust up your network, talk to people, find out people on the inside that might give you more of a true schematic of what the company's doing. But we really do have to just hold and pause that this is going to be an unforeseen kind of hustle in a different way for we don't know how long. So I hold the grief, I hold the anger, and I encourage them that all is not lost. Even if it

takes them longer than their timeline to land a job, again, they can use this time to either go home, reconnect if they have that luxury, and or reimagine their time for themselves. A lot of students are actually burnt out by their senior year or undergraduate school. So again, I always try to look for the gifts in a complication that's handed to us. So perhaps this could be a year of replenishment or a year to just study something else or look into another field. So for each person, it looks a little different. Let's inoculate ourselves to the first half of the year being very similar to this, right? I like to say new year, same you. If you got through 2020, there's

things that you did to hold on to. Keep that grit up. Keep that social consciousness with your mask wearing and taking care of others. Keep up those healthy practices, right? Keep up grit up. Keep that social consciousness with your mask wearing and taking care of others. Keep up those healthy practices. Right. Keep up that connection. We're really going to need to maintain and sustain before we get some of that relief that the vaccine and other things prepare. So kind of be thinking about your stamina a little bit longer than just the new year. Yeah, it's really new year. Whatever you did worked. Let's not mess with it right away. Exactly. Small changes. We need to stick with what's working. OK, well, so the name of this show is How to Be a Better Human. What is one idea or book or movie or piece of culture or anything that has made you a better human? Oh, wow. What a lovely question. You said piece of culture, huh? And this might be a little left field, but it made me a better

human. So, and you'll probably be familiar with this as a comedian, but in improv, the answer is always yes and. You know, you never say no when you're doing improv. I really like that stance. I think it's a little bit of metaphor for life. Because what this year is teaching us is that we never had control. We never were in the driver's seat of this orchestration of things. And now we're just seeing it play out much broader. And so we have to say yes to life.

And we have to kind of engage no matter what it gives us and where our power is and how we respond to it. And so in terms of something that's been getting me through the pandemic, it has been comedy, it has been humor, it has been leading into watching improvisational things online, and writing and playing improvisational. I play saxophone. So kind of just going with the unbeaten path and seeing where it takes you has made me a better human. It makes me listen better and makes me speak less and actually feel that shared humanity because we're all in this mix and not knowing where it's going. Imagine if you'd said, you're probably familiar with this concept.

Yes. And, and I just said, no, but yes, I am. I am very familiar. And I completely agree. I feel like it's, it's definitely made me a better person too. I've often told people that I think studying and practicing improv is really just practicing good people skills. Like how do you listen closely to someone else?

How do you make them look good? How do you set them up for success? How do you avoid the awkward situation where they're left hanging and instead support them and give them the spot on what they need? Thank you so much, Dr. Megan. It was just a pleasure to talk to you. Anytime I get to share a little bit about my walk and the walk of others, it's a joy. So thank you, Chris. Thank you so much for listening. That is our show for today. Thank you to our guest, Dr. Megan O'Reilly.

I am your host, Chris Duffy. This show is produced by Abimanyu Das, Daniela Balarezo, Frederica Elizabeth Yosefov and Cara Newman of TED, and Jocelyn Gonzalez and Sandra Lopez-Monsalve from PRX Productions. Stay tuned. We'll have a new episode for you next week.