Something You Should Know - How Things Do (and Don’t) Become Popular & How to Navigate Difficult Social Situations With Ease

Episode Date: April 12, 2018

“Eat your veggies – they’re good for you!” Every parent has said that to a child and yet, as a parent, you probably shouldn’t. I start this episode of the podcast with some fascinating research about what to tell kids about healthy foods. (http://www.chicagobooth.edu/about/newsroom/press-releases/2014/2014-05-08) What if I told you that nothing really goes viral? You’d probably say, “Of course it does – cat videos, songs, lots of things go viral.” Well, not according to Derek Thompson, senior editor at the Atlantic magazine and author of the book Hit Makers: How to Succeed in an Age of Distraction (https://amzn.to/2HtzsCC). Derek reveals exactly how things become popular – and it isn’t the way you might think.  In schools today there is a lot of emphasis on typing on a keyboard rather than writing with pen and paper. So you may be surprised to hear the benefits kids receive by simply writing on paper – and maybe schools should re-think their policies that deemphasize penmanship in early grades. (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/science/whats-lost-as-handwriting-fades.html?_r=0)  Who hasn’t been socially anxious? I am sure you’ve been in one of those situations where a lot is on the line or you don’t know anyone and it makes it uncomfortable and difficult. This is especially true for the millions of people who are naturally socially anxious anyway. With some help is clinical psychologist Ellen Hendriksen author of How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (https://amzn.to/2v7gVtb). Ellen is also the host of the wildly popular podcast, Savvy Psychologist (https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/savvy-psychologist) She joins me to offer some rock solid suggestions to help navigate those anxiety provoking situations so you act, look and feel like you belong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, wherever you get your podcasts. Anything that you make will go viral. Nothing really does. Don't expect that just because you've made something that is funny or clever or smart or catchy will simply catch on like it's the measles. Also, does your child write with a pencil and paper or mostly type on a keyboard?

I'll explain why it matters. And ever feel anxious at a party or other social situation? So social anxiety is this perception, and there's an emphasis there deliberately on perception, that there's something embarrassing or deficient about us that unless we work hard to conceal or to hide it, it will be revealed and then will be judged or rejected. All this today on Something You Should Know. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives.

So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft

AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker, John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts.

Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. This episode of the podcast is being released on Thursday, April the 12th, my birthday. And last week, we set an all-time record for the most number of listeners in any one week since the podcast started. So, if you like this episode, feel free to pass it along to a friend, share it with a friend, and maybe this week

we can beat last week. First up today, I want to talk about kids and veggies. And if you are a parent of young children or know a parent of young children, this will be very important. When you tell a kid to eat his veggies because they're good for him, you can bet those veggies will stay right there on the plate. Research from the University of Chicago shows that young kids, roughly preschool-age kids, will reject food simply because they know it's good for them. They make the connection that healthy food will automatically taste bad, no further discussion

is necessary. Other research shows that telling children that food will help them achieve a goal, such as, you know, eat your spinach and you'll grow strong, or it'll help you learn to read, this also will decrease a preschooler's interest in eating those foods. Even though parents have the best of intentions to educate kids about healthy food, it does seem to backfire. Instead, the advice is, if you want your kids to eat their carrots, you should just give the kids the carrots and either mention that they're very tasty or just say nothing.

And that is something you should know. How do things become popular? It's a fascinating question. Certain names are popular while others fall out of favor, but those names may come back later on and be popular again. Some songs get to be big hits while other seemingly good songs don't. Some gadgets catch on, but others don't. Why?

And exactly how do these things go from obscurity to popularity? What's the path? Here to discuss that is Derek Thompson. Derek is a senior editor at The Atlantic Magazine, and he is author of a book called Hitmakers, How to Succeed in an Age of Distraction, which was named one of Inc. Magazine's 10 Brilliant Business Books of 2017 and one of Amazon's Best Business and Leadership Books of 2017. Hey, Derek, welcome. Thank you very much. It's great to be here. From my early days in the radio business, you know, hit songs would become hit songs,

but I didn't know any radio stations that played new music. They only played hit songs. I always used to wonder, well, how does a song get to be a hit if nobody plays new music and they only play the songs that are already hits? So this has always fascinated me, is how things catch on, how things become popular when it doesn't seem like there's any direct route from here to there? Well, you've hit on one of the central paradoxes of popularity, which is that, by definition, every new product has to be new. But in fact, human psychology dictates that we mostly like things that are old.

90% of the time we're listening to music, we're listening to a song that we've already heard. Every year this century, a majority of the top 10 films in America have been sequels, adaptations, or reboots. Familiar, familiar, familiar. And so I think we live in a cult of novelty, a myth of novelty, where there's this sense from marketers and from, you know, product makers that people inherently and desperately want to consume new things. But the most fundamental truth from human psychology is that we prefer those things that are sneakily familiar. And so I call these products that live at the perfect intersection

between familiarity and surprise, I call them familiar surprises. But the familiar surprise, is it the result of a collision of random events, or is there some guy sitting in a tower going, you know what, we're going to make this song a hit, and we're going to make that movie a hit, and let's crank up the machine and make it happen? The easiest way to answer that question is to say that when you're in a hit, and we're going to make that movie a hit, and let's crank up the machine and make it happen? The easiest way to answer that question is to say that when you're in a market with very few channels of exposure, then it is possible to dictate hits, to dictate top-down hits. For example, if you live in a world where there are only three television stations, let's call this

world the 1950s, then it's quite easy to create a consumer product that tens of millions of people consume because they don't really have a choice. You have 90% penetration of television in the American household. There's only a handful of television channels. So clearly, just about anything that you put on those channels is going to become a hit. This was true with the music markets of the 20th century as well, that for a long time, you had what was famously known as the payola scandals of the 50s, 60s, 70s, and so on, that essentially you had labels, you know, white guys on the coast, dictating what kind of songs would be played by the radio DJs, and through sheer familiarity effects, as

people heard that song over and over and over again, they would come to like it. They would come to preference it and want to hear it next. And so, yes, you did, in a relatively clear sense, have popularity dictated top down. But we live in a world today not of scarcity of media channels, but of abundance. You can imagine every Twitter handle essentially being a metaphorical radio station, a single person reaching thousands or millions of people at once. Every Facebook page is a kind of radio station. Every newsletter, every blog post,

that all technology that has a one-to-one million potential is essentially a proverbial radio station. And so now it's much more difficult for hitmakers, for cultural gatekeepers to dictate popularity top-down. And in the music industry, that's had a really, really interesting effect. You said that as you were growing up, you felt like radio stations were extremely repetitive. Well, they've just gotten more repetitive in the last few decades. The 25 songs that have been on the Billboard Hot 100 for the longest period of time have all come out since the 1990s.

Now, that's not because music got so much better and so much catchier since the 1990s. Rather, it's that as the music industry itself has gotten smarter about what people want to listen to, they've come to realize that people don't want to hear new songs at all. They just want to hear the same thing over and over and over again, and so top 40 radio stations have become more repetitive. What about things like fashion, clothes? It would seem that the people who design the clothes and make the clothes, to some extent, have always and will continue to dictate what clothes we wear?

People will certainly try, of course, yeah. But I think fashion cycles have gotten faster. That the hype cycle, you could say, the amount of time it takes something to go from popular to unpopular and then back to popular again, that sine curve is sort of compressing and that swing is becoming more violent. You can see this in fashion industries like clothing fashions, but maybe the easiest place to study fashion trends actually isn't clothing fashions, but first names. That might sound a little weird at first, but first names clearly follow a fashion cycle, right? If you hear that your mother or your sister is going to brunch with her three friends, Edna, Ethel, and Bertha, you have a pretty good sense of the median age of that brunch. It's probably going to be pretty old. A lot of really popular baby girl names today,

Madison, Emma, Ophelia, were basically unheard of a few decades ago for young girls. And I think that it's really important to, you know, think about, all right, with these fashion cycles, how exactly are these sign curves moving up and down? Why is this happening in the first place? And the answer, it turns out, is that most parents have a taste for first names that are familiar but not too familiar. Essentially, they have a taste for first names that are familiar but not too familiar. Essentially, they have a taste for first names that are familiar surprises. And what will happen is that, take a name like Samantha. In the 1980s, it wasn't that popular, but it was just popular enough

that 220,000 parents decided to name their baby girl Samantha in the year 1992. But then five years later, what happens? All those little Samanthas go off to kindergarten, and parents who think they gave their baby girl a totally original and unique name realize that little Samantha is in a kindergarten class with four other Samanthas. So the younger friends think, oh my God, that's horrifying. I can't possibly name my baby girl Samantha because she's a special snowflake who deserves her own special first name. Won't name their baby girl Samantha because she's a special snowflake who deserves her own special first name, won't name their baby girl Samantha.

We'll name it something else like Emily. And thus, without any sort of top-down dictation, the name Samantha rises from obscurity to popularity and then falls back to obscurity. So I think it's important to remember that we can have fashion cycles even in markets where nobody is trying to market us anything, right? Like in first names, Nike or Adidas aren't telling us to buy shoes and then also name our baby boys Nike and Adidas. Like that's never been asked before in any commercial ever. Instead, it's a taste preference that is originating from the public itself, and it is moving up and down because of this preference for familiarity

and this taste for familiar surprises. So let's talk about this whole notion now of, you know, with social media that things go viral and that this idea that now the game is all changed and anybody can have a hit and all that. So what's your take on that? I think that a lot of times when something becomes popular out of nowhere, we just default to saying, oh, it went viral, without any real understanding of what that implies. In epidemiology, virality implies something really specific. It means that I get sick, I actually am a little bit sick right now.

I get sick, and then I get you sick, and then you get two people sick, and they get four other people sick. And so the illness sort of passes person to person over many, many, many different generations of sharing or infection. Okay, that is one way that information can spread. A rumor, for example, might mostly spread person to person. But there's another way that information spreads, and that's through broadcast. So let's take the biggest broadcast, the Super Bowl. When someone watches the Super Bowl, they are watching simultaneously with 140 million other people in America. That is not a viral moment. It doesn't make any sense, therefore, to say that a Toyota advertisement in the Super Bowl went viral. No, it didn't.

It infected 140 million people all at once. No disease has ever done that. And so you look at these two ends of the spectrum, virality versus broadcast, and for a long time it was difficult for people studying trends to know, all right, how is this particular trend spreading? Is it, you know, bell-bottom, let's say, democracy, you know, an interest in a certain blue color? Was this spreading person to person, or was it spreading via broadcast? For a long time, it was impossible to know.

But sometime in the last, you know, 20 years, the Internet caught on, and data leaves a pixel trail. We can see exactly how a Facebook post spread or how a YouTube video spread maybe throughout Twitter. And the data scientists that have looked at these stories, at these so-called information cascades, have said this looks much more like a series of diffuse broadcasts than it does like a bunch of viral moments. And so that's important because it suggests that information that goes big is still typically spreading through broadcast. It's simply the case that sometimes these broadcasts we can't actually see, and so I call them dark broadcasts. So let me give

you a quick example. Let's say that I write an article for The Atlantic, and so I call them dark broadcasts. So let me give you a quick example. Let's say that I write an article for The Atlantic, and it's posted on the Atlantic.com homepage, and then Drudge picks it up, and you are reading Drudge, and you see my piece on Drudge, and so you share it on Facebook. Now, your friends who follow you on Facebook, they will only see the fact that it was shared on Facebook. So they might say, wow, this piece by Derek Thompson is going viral. It's all over Facebook. But how did you see the piece? You saw it on Drudge, a page that millions, if not tens of millions of people visit every single week. That page is a broadcast. And my thesis here is that an enormous amount of information that we say is going viral has a secret broadcaster, a dark broadcaster. I think this is true for so-called viral fake news on Facebook. I think it's true for so-called viral articles on BuzzFeed and things like that. And so the outcome, the so what of this theory is, A, when you see something that is so-called

gone viral, look for the dark broadcaster. Look for the moment where it spread to many people at once. Look for the person who has an interest in spreading it to many people at once. And then B, if you're a creator, not a consumer, but a maker of things, don't expect that anything that you make will go viral. Nothing really does. Don't expect that just because you've made something that is funny or clever or smart or catchy will simply catch on like it's the measles, because no piece of content is the measles. You have to develop a smart distribution plan for your content if you want it to become popular. My guest is Derek Thompson. He's a senior editor at The Atlantic Magazine and author of the book Hitmakers, How to Succeed in an Age of Distraction. Contained herein are the heresies of Rudolf Buntwine, erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator. Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the

blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God, and we are not its favored children. The Heresies of Redolf Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years.

She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named the Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back,

and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Derek, you're saying that things don't go viral in the sense that we think of things going viral. But don't things like cat videos truly go viral? Because there is no big dark broadcaster. It's just cute and people share it.

And there's no motive. There's no product. There's no profit motive. It's just a cute little cat video that I watched, and I sent it to my friends, and they sent it to their friends, and it really does go viral. No, it doesn't go viral. There's lots of articles that are, let's say, videos on YouTube that travel quite far and are seen sometimes by millions or billions of people.

And you think, well, surely this must just be tens of millions of people just organically passing this along with no help from a broadcaster. But when you investigate the story of these pieces of content, the information cascade, you almost always find a broadcaster. One likely broadcaster is the fact that YouTube itself has a page where you can find the most popular videos. And lots of people simply go to that page to find videos that are becoming popular. If that page is being seen by tens of millions of people all over the world, then that page is itself a broadcaster. And so finding ways maybe to manipulate early popularity might get your cat video to that page that tens of millions of people are attending to every day, and therefore you're essentially using the YouTube architecture to broadcast your video. used to essentially manipulate early popularity to get a piece of video on a most popular page

and therefore get it in front of tens of millions of people, only a small percentage of whom are going to pass it along. That is not a viral strategy. That is a strategy to use the architecture of a social media site in order to promote a message to many, many people all at once in the hope that some of them will pass it along. So first, it's about finding a way to have a one-to-one million strategy, assuming that then a few of those million people who see it will pass it along one-to-one in their social networks. Okay, but so what?

I mean, if a cat video gets millions of views and people say it went viral, and you say, well, that's not really the definition of viral. Viral is something going onesies and twosies, and you say these things actually have dark broadcasters that are broadcasting to thousands. So isn't this just an argument over the definition of what viral means? I mean, the fact is the cat video has now been seen by millions of people. So aren't we just splitting

hairs over the definition of a word? I mean, you say they're dark broadcasters, and technically a broadcaster has to, by definition of the word broadcast, has to send their message via radio or television on a frequency through the air. That's the definition of broadcast. So technically, you're misusing the word broadcast just as people misuse the word viral. But so what? It's just a cat video. Well, I mean, so the answer to so what if it's a cat video

is nothing if you're an ordinary consumer. There's two important reasons, though, why I think the viral myth is really, really important. I've said them before, but I'll say them again. The first reason is that it's important because if you are the maker of something, let's say it's a song, let's say it's a, let's start with a song. You know, if you believe in the viral myth, if you say, okay, well, things that are good enough, that are catchy enough, they spread on their own, they are viruses, then that excuses you from having any marketing or distribution plan. Because you can essentially say, I've made something that is the measles, I've made something that you can teach it and therefore one-time done with the making

that i don't have to focus on a distribution strategy but some of the most famous on in music history utterly failed until they had a great distribution scheme but take a second most popular song of all time rock around the clock nineteen fifty four is bill haley in a comic uh... when that song came out nineteen 1954, it was a total dud. It was a B-side to an album called 18 Women and One Man.

It was completely forgotten. It sort of played on the radio for a few weeks, and then it was utterly lost to oblivion. And it was only when it appeared the next year in a movie called Blackboard Jungle that the song rocketed to number one, became the first song to ever hit No. 1 as a rock and roll song in the Billboard Top 100, and eventually became the second best-selling song of all time. The song came out in two different years in two different distribution strategies. In 1954, it failed on the radio, and in 1955, it became the biggest hit of the century when it appeared in a movie.

The difference was the distribution strategy. The difference was the context. The song, obviously, didn't change at all. And so I think stories like this make us, the only lesson you can draw from a story like this is that if you're trying to explain the success of cultural products, you can't just focus on the content itself. You have to focus on the distribution strategy as well. And I think too often the myth that we tell ourselves,

it excuses us from having to do distribution and marketing. It lets us think that something can be brilliant enough to be automatically popular when we know that some of the most popular songs in history weren't automatic at all. They require distribution marketing behind it. So that's number one. But number two, I think that, you know, you raise an interesting point, which is, you know, why should we care about, you know, how a cat video spreads? That doesn't matter at all. And you're right. It doesn't matter how a cat video spreads. But look at the last 14, 15 months of conversation around Facebook and and twitter it's been about russian propaganda it's been about the propagation of fake news and

c and uh... and and and outrage in house social media can be weaponized in order to move democratic votes so the architecture of the systems has become incredibly incredibly interesting and other incredible great concern uh... to people who want to make sure that ordinary citizens are getting good information. And as we've investigated fake news, it turns out that a lot of this fake news was not, in fact, going viral in the way that most people think of that concept. It was being pushed by Russian propagandists, by Macedonians,

and by other people who had an interest in many, many people seeing it. Well, it's pretty interesting in the sense that we're all part of this. We're all part of what gets to be popular and what doesn't get to be popular, and we're all living it, but we seldom take the time to examine it like you've done. So it's interesting to get an analysis of really what's going on. Yeah, I think it is. And I think that, you know, the viral myth was not a subject that I sort of was looking for when I started writing the book. It came from interviews with data scientists. And I simply asked them, you know, how does a piece of content go so-called viral on social media? And a lot of some of the smartest data scientists I could talk to said,

well, you know, if you actually study this stuff, if you look at the map of how popular videos go from view number one to view number one billion, those maps, those information cascades, they don't really look like viruses. They look like a series of diffuse broadcasts, which means that there's always a handful of one to one million or one to ten million moments that are mostly responsible for their popularity. And I thought that that was just so interesting and so fascinating because, you know, who in their right mind looks at the information cascade of a cat video.

Like why would you ever do this? It doesn't make any sense. It is, as you say, totally beside the point when it comes to simply enjoying, you know, a funny video. But not all videos are funny and a lot of us are in the business of trying to make our own stuff become popular. And so I think it's really important to understand the mechanism by which ideas go from one to one million.

Well, I appreciate the explanation and the analysis. Derek Thompson has been my guest. He is a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine, and his book is called Hitmakers, How to Succeed in an Age of Distraction. There's a link to the book in the show notes, and I appreciate it. Thanks very much for being here, Derek. Great, thank you. Do you love Disney?

Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes,

Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, join me, Megan Rinks.

And me, Melissa Demonts for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our Lister poll results from But Am I Wrong? And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday,

where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. You probably remember as a child having to go to some function or activity, and you were nervous about it, and the advice from your parents was probably something like,

just be yourself. And while that advice was well-intended, it probably didn't do much to improve your nervousness or anxiety. It is, it seems, a pretty universal experience to have social anxiety at some point in your life. It's a lot worse for some than others, but everyone has those certain social situations that can be difficult to navigate and get through. Clinical psychologist Dr. Ellen Hendrickson has been helping people deal with social anxiety for a while now,

and she's written a new book called How to Be Yourself, Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety. Ellen is also the host of the very popular podcast called Savvy Psychologist. Hi, Ellen. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate you having me on. So this whole idea of social anxiety, how big a problem is it, do you think? I would argue that social anxiety is normal. 40% of us identify as shy, which is just the everyday way of saying socially anxious. And if you change the question and ask, have you ever been shy? Like were you shy as a child? Were you awkward

as a teenager? 80% of us say yes. So pretty much everybody can relate. Everybody has their insecurities. Yeah, well, it does seem to be situational. I mean, I get socially anxious depending on the situation. I don't know that I would say it gets in the way of my life. I suck it up and move forward and usually, you know, it's fine. But it does seem that, you know, especially if there's a lot on the line, or if you don't know a single soul in the room, that I would think almost anybody would feel a little anxious. Oh, absolutely. And I think it's important to say that as people work on their social anxiety, it's not that they'll never get anxious,

but the anxiety won't control them. And just like you said, that you can choose what you do. You can choose to move forward into the situation rather than letting your fear choose for you. Because what really drives social anxiety is avoidance. So social anxiety is this perception, and there's an emphasis there deliberately on perception, that there's something embarrassing or deficient about us that unless we work hard to conceal or to hide it, it will be revealed and then will be judged or rejected. So, you know, we might think we're boring or have nothing to say or that we're turning red or are awkward or, you know, a million other perceived flaws. And so no matter what we perceive that fatal flaw is, the result is that we avoid.

And that might be overt. So we might not ask a question in class because we're worried we'll look stupid. We might eat lunch at our desk rather than in the break room with our colleagues because we feel awkward. We might avoid parties because we're worried we're weird, but we might also avoid covertly. We might go to the party, but only talk to the friend we came with. We might scroll through our phone or, you know, stand on the edge of groups or spend most of our time petting the host dog. And so in sum, the root of the social anxiety is that fear of the reveal, but it is fed and watered by avoidance. I can relate to that. I mean, you worry that people will judge you, but yet, you know, how judgmental are you of other people in those situations?

And yet we think everybody else is looking at us and making judgments about us, but we're not doing it about them. Exactly, exactly. And so I think that sense of turning the tables can be very helpful. We all walk around with the sense that we are in the spotlight, and it's actually called the spotlight effect, but we forget that every other human being on the planet is walking around in their own perceived spotlight, and that, like you said, we would often not judge others

for the things that we worry they would judge us for. Maybe this is just me, but sometimes I hang back in a social situation because it can be a big effort. And, you know, I think I'm never going to see these people again. Nothing's going to come of this. Why put in the effort? And it's not that I'm afraid to put in the effort, and it's not that I fear being judged. It's like, I'm too tired. I just don't want to do this. I can definitely relate to that, and I think a lot of people can relate to that. And I often get that question from introverts, from people who say, how can I tell if my decision to hang back is based on anxiety or if I'm just being an introvert? And so what I would say to that is that introversion

is your way, whereas social anxiety gets in your way. So introversion is about where you get your energy. So introverts recharge by being alone, one-on-one, in small groups of people they know well, whereas extroverts have never met a stranger. They get their energy from people. So while introversion and extroversion are about energy, social anxiety is about fear. So it's worry over that reveal. And so if we are genuinely choosing not to engage because we don't want to, that's fine. But if fear is choosing for us, then that's a cue to try to push forward and try to grow and stretch a

little. I want to talk about what people can do in those situations. But one of the things I do is I make it a game. You know, in my head, I think, all right, I'm going to really rise to this occasion. And yeah, it's going to take some effort, but I want to see how far I can get. If I can look like that extrovert guy who I'm not really, but I'm going to give it a go. Yeah, so you've stumbled upon a really good tool, which is to give yourself some structure. And so what I mean by that is that you give yourself a role to play or a mission to fulfill. And so this can be done formally. So like, for instance, if you're a member of an organization, a well-kept secret is to take on a leadership role. And that gives you

a reason to talk to everyone and a duty to fulfill. But like you said, it can also be done informally. So it can be done on the fly. You know, when you go to a holiday party, you could assign yourself the task of talking to three new people or trying to get to know someone as well as you can in a few minutes. At a networking event, you could give yourself the goal of exchanging three sets of business cards. And with a group of friends, an unofficial role could be, you know, you could be the this is us viewing party host for your group. Whatever gives you a purpose and takes away the biggest driver of anxiety, which is uncertainty, is going to be helpful. So you've definitely stumbled upon something that science says works. Another thing that can be really helpful is to turn your attention inside out. So when we're

in a socially anxious moment, our attention naturally swings inward and we start monitoring our performance. So we think like, why did I just say that? Like, I hope I don't sound like an idiot or I hope they don't see my hands shaking or should I stand this way or this way to look more casual? And therefore our bandwidth gets eaten up and we have very little left over for listening, responding, and attending to the moment. So to remedy this, we can turn our attention from us, us, us to them, them, them. Essentially, if we try to turn our attention to anything except for us, it'll help lower our anxiety. So to listen, look, focus outward, and what that does is it grounds us in the present and allows us to respond more naturally. I would assume that the more self-confidence you have or the more self-confidence you think you have, the easier these social situations can be. Something that I like to tell my clients is that our idea of how to build confidence is often backwards. I'll have people come into my office and say, you know, I wish I could hit pause on the world and just go away and work on myself and get confident and then hit play again and reemerge and be ready to live my life. And what I say is that, like, that's great. And let's do that in the opposite order. Let's have you live your life

so that you can gain confidence. So a nice analogy is that of mood and action. We often feel like we have to feel like doing something before we do it. We think we have to feel like going to the gym before we can go exercise. We think we have to feel like we to the gym before we can go exercise. We think we have to feel like we're inspired before we sit down and write. But really, if we just put the action

first, go to the gym, often our mood catches up and we're glad we went. We sit down to write and just start pounding out the words and then inspiration happens. So the same thing happens with confidence. As we start to push and grow and do the little things that make us a little bit anxious, then we get evidence that, hey, the worst case scenario that my inner critic or that my anxiety was telling me was going to happen didn't happen at all. And we gain evidence that we can handle situations, that we can handle the little bumps and awkwardness and whatnot that happens inevitably as a part of human interaction. I love that because everybody has had that experience of having to do something when they didn't feel like doing it. And then once they got into it, it worked out fine. So everyone has

that knowledge. Everybody has that experience in them. And it works with this and it works with anything. I mean, if you take action and everything else catches up. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, and a final thing, it's just that we don't have to do this perfectly. That perfectionism is a huge driver of social anxiety. We have a sense that it's all or nothing.

We often think we have to drop this perfectly timed, witty comment into conversation, so instead we stay silent. Or at a work meeting, we think that the idea we present has to be fully formed. So again, we stay silent and then someone else says our idea. So the answer there, as we're pushing ourselves to grow and stretch, is to lower the bar, to learn it's okay not to speak in perfectly smooth, articulate sentences. It's okay to have an awkward silence or two. And if you make a mistake, alarms are not going to go off all around you. Your head's not going to explode. And so as to quote David Burns, who's an eminent psychologist, dare to be average. And that can help you relax and be yourself.

Do you think it's a good idea if you walk into that room full of strangers, but there's one person you know, go talk to that person or and that'll help ease you into the rest of the crowd? Or is that a trap where now you're going to end up spending your whole night talking to that person and you're really not mingling? I think it's totally fine to start with that person. I think it's completely okay to find an anchor, to find yourself a base, but then to try to move on from there. If we stick to the one person we know, like if we show up to an event and we stay with our partner the whole time or just a friend we came with the whole time, that's called a safety behavior. And those are the things that we do to artificially try to tamp down our anxiety, but in fact, keep us anxious the next time we have to go to a party because that safety behavior,

so sticking with the person we know, gets the credit for the fact that bad things didn't happen. And so there are two researchers, Drs. Lynn Alden and Charlie Taylor from the University of British Columbia, who show that people who let go of their safety behaviors, who decide that they are going to look people in the eye or they're not going to talk to the floor or that they will decide not to scroll through their phone if they're used to doing that come across as more likable and more authentic than than people who don't and you'd think that by stopping the things that are keeping that we think are tamping down our anxiety all sorts of unconcealed anxiety would come spilling out.

But in fact, that's the exact opposite of what happens. When we stop trying to engage in these little behaviors, like wearing sunglasses indoors or walking the long way around, and we are fully present, we come across as much more authentic and are better liked by the people we're talking to. So it's interesting, if I'm hearing you correctly, most of what you're saying is more internal. It's what you tell yourself rather than, you know, tricks to work the room, because so much of this problem is internal. It's that inner critic telling you how horrible you are. And if you can quiet that critic and you can only think one thing at a time, now you're telling yourself more positive things, and it makes these experiences easier. Right. And again, it's not that with all these tools, it's not that you'll never get anxious,

but that anxiety won't control you. And so I think it's unrealistic to expect, oh, well, I'm going to be completely confident, you know, now and forever and, you know, never have a waiver of insecurity. That's not true. But I think with these tools that when those inevitable moments hit, we feel like we can do something and we can move forward and do it and then gather that evidence that, hey, I could handle this. And that wasn't that bad. And again, that is exactly how confidence is built.

One of the things I think that makes people feel uncomfortable with this is that there are those people that just seem to just thrive in that situation, that they're just the superstars of social mingling and meeting everybody and making everybody feel good. And, you know, people think I am so far from that, I'll never get there, that what's the point? Yeah, there's this perception that to be liked, we have to be seen as competent or confident. And that's actually not true. When we really ask people, who are the people that you like? Who are the people that you like? Who are the people that you would like to be around? Their answers don't have anything to do with competence or confidence. They have to do with warmth and kindness. And so if we can keep that in mind,

and when we're around people, do our best to connect and to be kind and trustworthy and do the things we say we're going to do, to be loyal. That, in fact, is what draws people to us. So it doesn't have to be a performance. Instead, it has to be a connection and this warmth and friendliness that all of us have inside us and can bring out. Do you think it's a good idea or is it asking too much of yourself to seek out the other guy in the room that you see who's just as socially awkward as you are? Or is that going to be a conversation of, hi, how are you? Oh, I don't know. How are you? And, you know, nothing goes anywhere. Or is that a good person to go talk to because they're less intimidating? I think that's a fantastic person to go talk to because they will be so relieved and so thankful that you initiated the conversation. And then you can talk about

whatever comes to mind. The bar is lower. And I think something to remember for folks who are socially anxious, we have a tendency not to disclose very much about ourselves. We tend not to share very much. And so in that situation, or actually in any social situation, to remember to share what we're thinking and doing and feeling and to reveal a little bit about ourselves. It doesn't have to be a confession. It doesn't have to be deep, dark secrets, but to share a little bit of ourselves. And that comes across as likable and prompts the other person to share as well. And so then if you get into this kind of gradual and reciprocal sharing, that's how trust and intimacy and friendship are formed. here because I think everybody has some social or professional situations where they are uncomfortable, they feel anxious, and this is great advice to help get them through it. My guest has been Ellen Hendrickson. Her book is How to Be Yourself, Quiet Your Inner Critic,

and Rise Above Social Anxiety. Her website is ellenhendrickson.com, and she is the host of the podcast Savvy Psychologist, and links to her book, her website, and her podcast are all in the show notes. Thanks, Ellen. It wasn't all that long ago, if you went to school, you had to practice your writing, and you were told that penmanship counts. But all that is fading away. The common core standards, which have been adopted in most states, call for teaching legible writing, but only in kindergarten and first grade. After that, the emphasis quickly shifts to proficiency

on the keyboard. And that could be a problem. According to the New York Times, children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they're also better able to generate ideas and retain information. In other words, it's not just what we write that matters, but how. A psychologist at the University of Washington demonstrated that printing, cursive writing, and typing on a keyboard are all associated with distinct and separate brain patterns, and each one results in a distinct end product. When the children composed text by hand, they not only consistently produced more words more quickly than they did on a keyboard,

but they expressed more ideas. So while competence on the keyboard is important, old-fashioned handwriting is also important. And that is something you should know. You know, part of the fuel that keeps this podcast going is ratings and reviews on iTunes or wherever you listen to the podcast. So if you haven't yet, please leave us a rating and review. It only takes a moment, and it really helps.

I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced.

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