Something You Should Know - The Best Way to Learn Anything New & How to Deal With People You Can’t Stand

Episode Date: August 5, 2019

If you wear a certain fragrance, people will perceive you as 12 pounds thinner. That’s just one of many fascinating things I discuss about you amazing sense of smell in the first segment of this episode. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2011/02/scents We spend our entire lives learning. Yet we seldom think about HOW we learn. One person who has thought about it a lot is Scott Young, author of the book UltraLearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career (https://amzn.to/2yCu4cF). Scott joins me to discuss the best and worst ways to learn anything and how you can learn anything better.  Gotta cramp? Reach for the pickles. There is some fascinating research I discuss on how what appears to be an effective and fast cure for a muscle cramp and it is in a jar of pickles. https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/phys-ed-can-pickle-juice-stop-muscle-cramps/ We all come in contact with difficult and unreasonable people. What is the best way to deal with them? Well, it depends on what the goal is, according to Rick Brinkman, author of Dealing with People You Can’t Stand: How to Bring Out the Best in People at Their Worst (https://amzn.to/2YG8cMa). Rick reveals the best ways to handle jerks, idiots and other difficult people who get in your way so that you get what you want without escalating the trouble.  This Week's Sponsors -Dashlane. For a 30 day free trial of Dashlane Premium go to www.Dashlane.com/sysk 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, did you know the way you smell can make you appear thinner? I'll explain that. Then, if you want to learn anything, you have to understand the good and bad ways to learn. A lot of people, when they are learning something, will tend to cram it. They will try to learn it in a short period of time. And we just

know from countless studies that this is actually the worst thing you can do if you want to remember things long term. That if you want to actually remember things long term, you want to space it out. Also today, why the next time you get a cramp, you should reach for a jar of pickles. And how to effectively deal with people you can't stand. You know, those whiny, negative people. And the problem is that when people are being whiny or negative, they tend to go into generalizations. Everything's wrong. Nothing's right. It's always that way.

But you can't problem solve a generalization. So they're kind of stuck in their own quicksand. 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. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. and we dive right in today talking about your sense of smell. Of your five senses, the sense of smell is unique. It's not talked about a lot. For example, you may not know that everyone has their own unique odor, except for children of multiple births. Twins and triplets all smell alike. Women have a better sense of smell than men. Smell falls off dramatically for men after their mid-50s, and for women it doesn't happen until their mid-60s. In a recent study, men thought women wearing a citrus floral scent were 12 pounds lighter. Green apple and cucumber scents create the impression of a larger

space, while the scent of roasted meat creates the impression of closer quarters. Recall can be enhanced if learning is done in the presence of an odor, and then that same odor is present at the time of recollection. This is why some teachers burn chocolate-scented candles in their classroom and then again on mandatory national tests like the SATs. And your sense of taste is about 75% smell. And that is something you should know. Everything you know, you had to learn. Some things you learn quickly.

Other things take time. Some things you learn to remember. Sometimes not. We all do our best as we go through life to learn things, but how often have you ever thought about how you learn things? What does it mean to learn something? What's the best route to get there? How can you be a better learner? Scott Young is a successful writer who decided to take

a hard and careful look at how human beings learn. And he's author of a book called Ultra Learning, Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Acc and accelerate your career. Hey Scott, welcome to Something You Should Know. Oh, it's great to be here. So there is different kinds of learning, right? You can learn to ride a bike or play the trumpet, which is different than learning about history and mathematics. Well, if we're talking about scientific definitions, I think learning, if we were to look up a textbook, would probably say something about changes in the brain that adapt our behavior based on experience. So that's pretty broad and includes a lot of things that maybe we don't even think of as learning. For instance, you know, our habits are in a sense a kind of learning. It's a changed behavior in response

to things. And so learning is really quite broad. And that's what I'm talking about, that it's really goes well beyond that sort of narrow definition of studying for school. And so we think we know how to learn, right? I mean, most people don't stop and think, well, what's the best way to learn this? We just try to learn stuff. So there's actually a lot of really good research that shows, well, not that people are absolutely terrible at learning. Obviously, people are absolutely terrible at learning. Obviously, if we were terrible at learning, we wouldn't be very successful as a species, but that there are lots of little traps that we can fall into. So one of my favorite ones has to do with what is known as retrieval. And basically, there's a lot of studies on this. But one of my

favorites is they took students and put them into different groups and asked them to use different methods to study. One of them they asked to do repeated review, meaning that you just look over the text over and over again. And the others they asked to do free recall, which means that you close the book and you try to write down on a piece of paper everything that you can remember. And immediately after they did this, they asked them how well did they think they'd learned the information. And the reviewers were the people who thought they had learned it best. They said, yep, I've got this. Whereas the free recall people, they thought, oh man, this is really hard. I'm not actually getting this. But when they tested them, it was actually the opposite, that those who did free recall

perform better. So the idea of learning is full of these little traps where you can think you're learning something really well. You're thinking you're doing what works best for your memory, and it's actually something different. Is to learn to remember, is that what learning is? When people say you need to learn this, what does that mean? You must memorize it, you must understand it. What does it mean to learn it? Well, memory is certainly a component of learning. Obviously, if you don't remember literally anything, then it's hard to say that much learning took place. But I think it's also important to separate what we talk about with memory because, again, going with the studying analogy, a lot of people think memory is just,

okay, if I say, you know, what is the capital of France, and you think Paris, and you're able to just sort of spit out that answer, that that is essentially what memory is. But memory is also a lot of other things. It's things like when you're riding a bicycle, for instance, you're doing that because you have memory stored in your head about how to move your muscles in order to control the bicycle. And so there's lots of different types of memory, and there's lots of different ways

that we remember things. And so this is, again, that the essence of learning is not just being able to spit out facts, but being able to perform in situations based on having experiences with them. Well, the concept of learning to ride a bike is interesting because everyone knows the saying, oh, it's just like riding a bike, meaning once you know it, you always know it. But when I learn stuff to study for a history test, just because I know it now doesn't mean I'll know it a year from now. Why is that? So there seems to be a couple reasons behind this, but one of them that has been hypothesized is that there is actually a difference between what psychologists

call declarative memory, which is the kind that you can actually put into words, and procedural memory, which is the kind of informally known as muscle memory, or the sort of motor skills that you learn throughout your lifetime. And it seems to be that procedural memory is more durable than declarative memory. And this can actually have interesting interactions. So in one example, often we will remember our pin code by how our hand moves, even if you had to write down, let's say, well, maybe not the numbers, but if it was a longer password, I certainly remember it by how it feels on the keyboard and less by what the exact letters are. And that can be because you've got this muscle memory or this procedural memory of moving your fingers to type in your password

that is more durable than the ability to recall it explicitly. And it may be that they are based on slightly different memory systems and one of them just lasts longer than the other. What about people's ability to learn? Is it different or is it more in the skill and the approach that everybody can learn more or less the same if they do it correctly? Well, so it's both. There's definitely a lot of evidence that some people can learn better than others, and some people can learn certain skills better than others. And I don't think that there's much use denying that. But at the same time, there's also effective ways to learn things and ineffective ways to learn things. And so a lot of what I try to talk about is what are the effective

ways to learn things. So I mentioned one of those principles already, which is retrieval, that if you get students and you just ask them what would they like to do when they study, so this is another experiment that was done, they will often, if they don't feel very confident, use that strategy of repeated review. So they'll continually review the same information. And if you force them, on the other hand, to say, okay, you're not allowed to do that, you have to do free recall, then they actually will score better on the test. So free recall is better for all people than repeated review. Some people will do better with both than with the others. So there are people who will learn faster than other people.

But definitely this difference in how they learn is also based on what kind of methods they're using. And what are those two methods you just mentioned? Well, so this is just one idea, but this is the contrast between what is called review and recall. So review is when, you know what you're talking about, when you have your notebook and you flip through it and you just sort of read it again and again and again, and this makes you more and more familiar with the information, but it doesn't necessarily help you remember it for a test, whereas recall is when you close the book and you try to actually recall from memory what was in the notebook without looking at it.

Right, and there's a big difference between the two, and yet you would think, well, maybe that one, that one works just as well as the other, but not so. Definitely. And again, it's one of these deceptive things because after you do the review, students will say, oh, I've learned the material quite well. And this is because we actually don't really know how much we've remembered. And so we use these proxy signals or these sort of little approximations to what we expect to have remembered. And so we use these proxy signals or these sort of little approximations to what we expect to have remembered. And in this case, it's how familiar does it feel? How, when I read it again and again and again, it's feeling more and more familiar to me. But this is actually slightly

different than the ability to recall it without looking at it on the page. So in other words, you're practicing being able to recognize the right answer, but not necessarily to produce the right answer. And I mean, this is just one of many, many different examples of little ways we get misled in our studying and learning habits. What about when you're trying to learn something like playing an instrument or riding a bike, or it isn't what you're trying to think about and learn and remember. It's more about doing. Again, there's a lot of interesting little tidbits on that. So one of them that I find really interesting is that it has been known for a long time by psychologists that people have a difficulty transferring. So if you learn something in one context, say in the classroom, and then you try to apply it in another context, say real life, we often fail at that. We often are not able to transfer those contexts.

So one of the best things that you can do when you're learning is to try to practice the thing that you actually want to get good at. And a lot of people, when they are learning a new skill, like let's say speaking a language, for instance, they will just be working on a little app and they will be playing around with the app and they never actually practice having conversations or they decide they're going to wait until they get to the point where they're ready and just like the people who are doing the review versus the recall they will often take a lot longer to actually learn the information in a way that they can use it because they have difficulty transferring those skills so but so take me through i want to learn to play the violin. I don't really, but let's say I want to learn to play the violin. So what's the best way to do that?

Well, so the starting point, I would say, is to practice playing the violin. So this is, I know, sounds kind of obvious, but for a lot of people, they would maybe start with a book, or they would start with, you know, well, I'm going to have to go through all of these theoretical exercises. So the first place would be to practice the violin. The next step is what I call drilling. And this is something that we're all familiar with, but it's often something that we don't understand why we're doing it. And so in this case, you want to break down what is the activity of playing the violin into components that you can practice and get good at

separately. So expert violin players do something which is called deliberate practice, and this is something where you are trying to work on the points that you find hardest, not just playing the same tunes that you feel most comfortable with over and over again. And so this often means that if you're working on an entire piece, you don't play the entire piece from start to finish, but you focus on the few little tricky elements that you were starting to mess up when you were actually playing it through. There's a concept I've heard over and over again, and this particularly applies to sports, that if you want to be a better tennis player, play with people better than you. Well, absolutely, because if we don't get that feedback that, you

know, our skills are not as good as they could be, then they tend to just stay where they are. So indeed, a lot of the research done by Anders Ericsson on deliberate practice shows these plateaus so that we get to a level where we feel comfortable playing games of tennis, and then we don't improve because our habits, our little kind of micro decisions that we make while we're playing the game are good enough, but they're maybe not the best thing for us to do. And this can lead to this situation where we don't get better because in order to get better, we actually have to get a little worse first. We have to practice on working on something. And so if you play with someone who's better than you, then your old habits are not going to be good enough and you're going to get pushed to go further.

Whereas if you just play with people where you're winning all the time, you're not going to have that same pressure to improve. So when you play someone who is better and you don't necessarily know how to play someone better because they're doing things you're not used to, they're running circles around you. How is it that people somehow raise their game without necessarily knowing how to raise their game just by playing someone better? Well, there's two things. Obviously, having a coach helps because they can tell you what you're doing wrong and what you're making mistakes with. But even just the idea of you learning on your own and getting feedback can be enormously valuable because very often what we're doing is we're making subtle little adjustments. And so if we get some kind of negative feedback, oh, I missed that shot, then you start trying different things. You start, okay, well, maybe I will try to do this next time, or I'll try to do that next time. And I will try to adjust to it. And you can learn through this sort of approach, get better and find ways

to compensate for those weaknesses. But again, like we were saying, if you're playing someone where you always get their shots and you're always able to return it, you're not going to get better at the same pace. We're talking about and learning about learning. And we're learning about learning with Scott Young. He's author of the book, Learning. Master hard skills, outsmart the competition, and accelerate your career. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lightning, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla

who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. During her journey, Isla meets new friends, including King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and learns valuable life lessons with every quest, sword fight, and dragon ride. Positive and uplifting stories remind us all about the importance of kindness, friendship, honesty, and positivity. Join me and an all-star cast of actors, including Liam Neeson, Emily Blunt, Kristen Bell, Chris Hemsworth, among many others, in welcoming the Search for the Silver Lining podcast to the Go Kid Go Network by listening today.

Look for the Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Scott, let's talk about the idea of a coach or a tutor. I mean, in school anyway, usually you get a tutor when you're like falling behind. If you're the top of the class, you often don't have a tutor. But when you're the top athlete, you often do have a coach.

So what's the role there? Well, I think coaches can often see your performance separately from you. So you have your own sense of how you're performing, but you're always inside your own head. And in particular, they can offer another perspective on what you're doing. So I think a lot of that's sort of what you talked about. We tend to think of tutors and people who are helping you as something that's more remedial because you're not able to learn it on your own. But I think really people of all stripes would benefit from tutors and benefit from coaches because they can see what you're doing and say, hey, what if you tried it this

way? Or hey, what if you did it that way? And that's true even if you are better than the coach that you're working with because even if you are better overall, there may still be little things that you're doing which are tripping up your performance that you can work on and they might be able to spot those. So you don't have to be the best to be the coach. You just have to be able...

Coaching is itself a whole other skill, actually, isn't it? It isn't just playing the game well, it's learning how to coach well. Definitely. Just like being a teacher is not the same as being a performer as well. Like, you have to learn how to see someone else's performance and figure out, okay, what are some ways that it can be improved? And that's, again, slightly different from actually doing those things yourself. What do we know from the research about things that maybe people believe help them learn that don't or aren't very effective? Well, so we just talked about one right now, which is the idea of this review versus retrieval. So that's a really common one that people will

tend to focus on review instead of doing retrieval. Another one has to do with spacing. So this is another really useful result from the psychological literature that a lot of people, when they are learning something, will tend to cram it. They will try to learn it in a short period of time. And we just know from countless studies that this is actually the worst thing you can do if you want to remember things long term, that if you want to actually remember things long term, you want to space it out. So you want to expose yourself to the information, either by doing some kind of recall or by doing some kind of practice on multiple different occasions, and that this is going to make it a lot more durable. So continuing our discussion of memory, if you are able to practice

something just once, it's very easy to forget it. But if you practice it multiple times, spread out over a few days or weeks, it will store in your brain much, much longer. So, cramming at the last minute doesn't work in the long term, but does it work for the test tomorrow? It can work for the very short term. So if you do do this kind of what's called mass practice, you can get over a very short term learning goal. But again, this is sort of a constant problem for students because they cram for this exam and then they forget everything. And then when they start the next class that builds on it, they're already behind. So really what I recommend is that if you can develop some kind of spacing schedule,

so if, okay, you're studying unit one and you're going to practice it again another three times in the semester and you have that in your calendar, you'll do a lot better than if you just try to review just the week before the exam because you will have built it into your long-term memory and that's just a much more stable thing for going forward. What else? What else do you find that either people don't know about how to learn better, or people think helps that doesn't? One of the ones that I thought was really interesting has to do with feedback, because feedback is obviously very important for learning. And in some skills, it would be nearly impossible to learn without any kind of feedback. If we're talking about, you know, learning a bicycle, if you had no sense of

whether you were setting up right on the bicycle, it would be almost impossible to learn. But interestingly, a lot of the studies that were done on feedback show that feedback often has a negative effect. So in a meta-analysis, I believe that was done by Abraham Klusier and Angelo Denise, they found that something like 37% of the studies they looked at, feedback was actually negative. And this can sometimes be because feedback is a distraction, it's not actually helping, but it can also be because the information in the feedback doesn't help you improve. So we can all think about that time that a teacher told us that we were no good at something. And I mean, that was feedback too,

but it didn't exactly motivate us. And so one thing that students often will focus on and teachers will focus on and coaches will focus on is praise. And so if you praise someone and say, oh, you did a really good job, that's great. That often actually can have a negative impact as well, that if the information being given isn't relevant to the task, if it's just saying, you know, you're so smart, you're so great, then that can also have a demotivating effect and it can allow the person to not work as hard at improving. So what does work? What kind of feedback, if any, is better? So the best kind of feedback that you can get is what I call corrective feedback, which is where you not only are told what you're doing wrong, but how you can fix it.

So this is the kind that often comes from coaching where they'll say, oh, you're doing your tennis backhand like this, you should do it like that. And thus you can correct it. Now, the challenge is that for a lot of domains, we don't actually have corrective feedback. We just have feedback that says, you know, you're doing better or you're doing worse, but you don't actually know what you need to do to fix it. So the important thing to realize with feedback, I think is not so much, okay, well, we need to do to fix it. So the important thing to realize with feedback, I think, is not so much, okay, well, we need to have corrective feedback because that's helpful, but to recognize also when you can't have corrective feedback. So if you are running a business, for instance, and you release a product and your product absolutely flops, it's easy to say, okay,

I'm going to talk to my customers and ask them what I should have done instead. And I mean, your customers can tell you whether or not they wanted to buy your product. So that is a kind of feedback, but they probably can't tell you what you need to do to fix your product to make it better unless it's something really obvious because they are not the product developers, they are just the customers.

And so it's important to also distinguish what kind of feedback you can get so you don't overreact to the feedback and start just implementing suggestions from people who don't actually knowact to the feedback and start just implementing suggestions from, you know, people who don't actually know enough to give you the proper advice. What about learning with people, not from people, but, you know, I think of like the Beatles, you know, and I don't think they had a whole lot, if any, formal musical education. But boy,

when they came together and worked together something very magical happened that probably might not have happened if the situation was different yeah so working in groups and i think especially picking environments where you can be exposed to people who can give you that kind of feedback is really important so we all know that learning a language through immersion is much easier than learning it through a classroom, for instance. If you're going to learn French and you live in France and you speak French every day, that learning with other people is going to be a lot easier and more effective than if you're just studying it from a textbook. But this is also true of a lot of skills that we don't normally think of as learning through immersion. So if you wanted to learn an academic skill, for instance, grad school very often functions as this kind of environment where you're surrounded by people who are also smart and also researching this topic, and you're having conversations about it constantly. And you

quickly pick up this sort of indirectly, what do people think is important? What do they think matters? What are the different effects? What are the different sciences going on? That would be actually quite difficult to just piece together if you were only reading journal articles. Similarly, if you want to be at the cutting edge in some kind of professional skill, picking the right company or the right office to work for can also matter. Because if you're, again, surrounded by those people who are doing cutting edge work, like the Beatles, you're also going to naturally learn through watching other people and learn by kind of tacitly picking up the skills that they think matter. Great. Well, I think I've just learned more about how I learn than I've ever

learned before. My guest has been Scott Young and his book is called Ultra Learning, Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition and Acc and accelerate your career. You will find a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, Scott. Really interesting. Well, thank you so much, Mike. 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, 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 listener 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. 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. Here is a universal experience that most of us have on a fairly frequent basis. And that is having to deal with people who, by all outward appearances, are idiots, morons, difficult. They're people you cannot stand. Wouldn't it be great to arm yourself with a little intel that would make it a lot easier to interact with these people, since they do show up sooner or later in your life? Well, good news. Here to help is Rick Brinkman. Rick is a speaker and writer who has developed

some really keen insights into human behavior, and he is the author of a best-selling book called Dealing With People You Can't Stand, How to Bring Out the Best in People at Their Worst. Hey, Rick. Well, it's a pleasure to be here, Mike. Thanks for having me. So generally, why do you think people are difficult? And I suspect that we can all be difficult at times. Some people seem to make a career of it, but why do people become difficult? Well, people get stressed out. We all do. And different things may stress it out differently.

And we found that there's 10 behaviors that are stress responses. You know, in the simplest thing, some are more out there attacking, like when people attack you or run over you or be a know-it-all. Others are more passive, like somebody who's whining is kind of flopping around helpless. But even more passive than that is people who say, fine, no, nothing's wrong. But you don't really know where they stand. And you know, it's not fine. So everybody is potentially one of these people. And we all have probably been that way. Absolutely. And it depends on two factors, relationship and context. Who are you with and what's going on? You know, I was interviewing a CEO to do a program for her people. And she admitted to me that when she's at work, she's more likely in the control area of the lens, get it done, make things happen. Things have to be

under control. If she gets a little too stressed out, control can easily manifest as what we call a tank where people, all right, people, here's what we need to do. But then she says, when she goes home, she becomes a whiner to her husband about the problems at work. Her husband can't understand, how does she possibly run a company? She's such a whiner, but he doesn't get to see her in her other context and all our other relationships in her blazing tank glory. So you've mentioned a couple of them, the whiner and the tank. Let's talk about these specific types. Can you walk us through them and perhaps the best way to deal with them?

Yes. In what we call the lens of understanding, there are four quadrants. And again, you're not strictly one thing, and it's not personality typing. It's behavior, because personality is every behavior you have in every relationship and context. So in the get it done area of the lens where people are being more controlling, you got your tank. You also have your sniper who has kind of a covert control. So they try to cut you down in front of peers. Very often with sniping, there's some kind of some suppressed anger or resentment. Maybe you got the promotion they think they should have gotten,

or other people in general just are angry and suppressed, and so they snipe. And then the third controlling behavior is know-it-all behavior. I know 99%. I'm happy to tell you how much I know for hours on end. And, you know, maybe they do know 97% of a subject, but let's remove only 3% of the parts on an airplane. Ready to go for a flight? And this is the problem with know-it-all behavior. Then you have an attention area of the lens where people need appreciation and attention. And that's where you're more likely to get a tantrum. You know, a tantrum is more irrational than a tank attack. A tank attack, you know what's going on. You may disagree with what they're doing, but you know what it's about. And it makes sense to a degree.

Whereas with a tantrum, you know, suddenly it's the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back. You hear all this stuff that has nothing to do with circumstances. What you also get out of that area is a friendly sniper, people who like you. So it's friendly teasing and it's friendly put down humor, gossip, not really intending to hurt people, though it can have unwanted side effects. And then the third behavior you get in that area of the lens is your think they know it all, where somebody has such a need for attention that they act like they know even when they

don't. Moving over to another area of the lens where we want to get it right and people get a little more perfectionist, that's where you get your whining and negativity. Basically, they see what could be, this high standard of perfection. They look at what is, what does not measure what could be, and then they feel helpless of doing anything about it. And the problem is that when people are being whiny or negative, they tend to go into generalizations. Everything's wrong.

Nothing's right. It's always that way. But you can't problem solve a generalization. So they're kind of stuck in their own their own quicksand uh what you'll also get out of that get it right perfection area is a nothing person fine do it your way don't come crying to me when it doesn't work out and that point on they say nothing but you also get a nothing out of a different area of the lens where people want approval and they want to get along and they're concerned about relationship. So that's kind of nothing as well. If you don't have something nice to say, don't say it at all. Or you get yes

behavior where people are really agreeable on the surface, but you really don't know where they stand. And then in relation to decisions, you get maybe behavior. I'm sure we've all told a salesperson, I'll think about it. We really weren't planning on thinking about it, but you didn't want to hurt the person's feelings. And of course, out of that area of the lens, it's very easy for people to become passive aggressive. And so how do we handle these people? Well, it depends which one you're dealing with. I mean, let's say with somebody who's whining or negative, you have to break down their generalizations. So you listen to them.

They're going to go in an endless loop tape. Once they start to repeat something they've said, you say, excuse me for interrupting. I just want to make sure I understand. And you backtrack, summarize everything they said, and then you start asking questions to dig a little deeper. Now, they won't answer your questions right away. You'll say, what's wrong? They'll say everything. You say, okay, but what specifically?

All of it. When does it occur? It happens all the time. But don't let that stop you. You want to just, if you stay with it, even if you're recycling questions, you'll get them to be specific. And once you're looking at specifics of a real problem, you say, well, what do you think we should do here?

And some people will immediately go, well, I guess we should, and they'll come up with something. Other people might say, I don't know. And what I have found works great with I don't know. And take note, this is also your nothing person's first response on a talkative day. You say, guess, make something up. If you did know, what would it be? And then you give them an expectant look and an expectant pause. And it's amazing how nine out of 10 people will go, well, I guess, and they bring

in something that makes total sense. So clearly there are different ways to deal with different types of difficult people. But generally, what's the goal here? I mean, is it just to deal with them to get it over with? Are you trying to get them to change the way they see the world? I mean, is it just to deal with them, to get it over with? Are you trying to get them to change the way they see the world? I mean, what are we trying to do here? You're trying to get them out of that, what we call it, the red zone, the danger zone, where they're in this difficult behavior. You know, somebody could be controlling, let's say, but they're still rational. The boss says, I think we need to do this right away.

You go, yes, that's true, boss. However, we first have to handle this because of da-da-da. And the boss goes, oh, okay, we'll handle it. So that's a person who's still rational about it. We're trying to pull them back in. So when somebody's whining or negative, we want them to pull them back in so they can start to think problem solved. If somebody's being a know-it-all, we're wanting to open their closed mind and consider other people's opinions and other factors. If somebody is, you know, being a tank, extreme tank, we want to get them out of tank mode enough to have a rational conversation.

I mean, I'll never forget this one time I met a lost luggage claim in an airport. And the guy in front of me is tanking the person at the counter as if she purposely mislabeled his bags and sent them to El Salvador. All of a sudden, she puts her pen down. She looks him in the eye. She says, sir, sir, sir, I get this is very inconvenient for you and you think we're idiots. That's called backtracking when you say back what somebody says to you. However, there are only two people standing at this counter who care about what happened to your luggage. And of those two people, one of them is quickly losing interest.

And he said, what do you need to know? Now, when she says two people stand at the counter, what she is clarifying is the intent. What's the intent of this interaction? His purpose is to get his bags back. Her purpose is to get the bags back. We're on the same side. Your behavior is defeating our common purpose and he got it and see there's a uh an advantage of dealing with people in tank mode

you can be really direct you can be very blunt with them and they don't really take that as rude because tank attack is not really ego motivated behavior now that doesn't mean the person doesn't have an ego everybody's got an ego like they have a liver. But in this context, in this relationship, ego is not the big issue. The guy at the baggage claim doesn't have a care in the world that I could be standing behind and like it's a workout at the gym. And it's to your benefit to try to get a result with these people and then continue to know what you want, pay attention and be flexible. But when is it better to maybe walk away and deal with these people at another time when they're not being this way? Oh, absolutely. That is definitely an option. And sometimes, let's say if we're at a meeting and somebody snipes at me i wouldn't want to ignore it because people can only pay attention

to seven give or take two things at one time so if i ignore the sniping everybody in the room is like two bits of attention on me what's he going to do next two bits of attention on the sniper what will she say next the rest of their attention is internal. What would I do? And everybody's going, hi, I'm not here right now, but I'll get back to you if you keep pretending we're meeting. So I may want to handle it, go, excuse me, I heard you say that I must be a twin. No one person can be that stupid. What's going on? You innocently ask. That'll get the sniper to back off. But then after the meeting, you may want to circle back around and dig a little deeper and go, what's going on between us? Is there some issue? If you can clear the air,

you clear the sniping. So you don't always handle it totally in the moment it's happening. Sometimes there's a secondary step at a more appropriate time and place. So you really have to choose your battles. And also you want to think more long-term. Like usually with a tank, if you have one good interaction where you stand up to them, this is the proverbial high school bully you stand up to and then becomes your best friend. You tend to get a long-term result with them. The know-it-all is the opposite though. The know-it-all takes time. They need to know, first of all, that you know how much they know. And then they need to know that you understand the relevant factors, the important criteria.

And so if in the meeting, let's say, we get the know-it-all to feel like we understand, then that would happen by backtracking what they say so they know we heard them. We would ideally write the relevant factors, the criteria on a whiteboard or flip chart so they can see the factors that we know to, which then makes it easy. In addition, maybe we should consider this. We could add another factor to that chart. And what happens if you do this over time, the know-it-all starts to know, first of all, that you respect them. And second of all, you also understand the relevant factors that need to be attended to.

And so they elevate you to equal know-it-all status. It seems, though, that these are very deliberate strategies that are probably great to use. But in the moment, when you're confronted with a jerk and really you just want to haul off and smack him, it's really hard to stop and think, OK, now what type is he? And what do I want to do? And how do I want to get there? Which brings us to a very important internal strategy is that you want to pre-play how you'd like to be with that person. So let's say, you know, I've read the book.

I understand what strategy has to happen with the know-it-all. Then I want in my mind to imagine, go back to that last meeting where they shut me down. And instead I said this. And I walked over to the whiteboard and I wrote those things. And then now I imagine the meeting's going to happen this Friday. And I imagine when they do that, this is what I'm going to do again. This is called positive replay, positive pre-play. Now take note that whenever we have an uncomfortable interaction with somebody, this is what we do, but we do the negative. Oh, they said that. And I felt bad. They said that I felt bad, said I felt bad. Well, you're creating an association, a trigger, you know, how you hear

a song and it takes you back or you smell something and you transport it through time. So an association is made by repetition and or intensity. Like if you get sick on a certain food, it's a while before you want to eat that food. So really, unless you take conscious control of this process, you are going to keep yourself stuck in the past. Every time you imagine it the way it was, it's more likely you will repeat it. Every time you prepare yourself in the future by thinking, oh no, what if it happens again? You're going to repeat it. But if you break that cycle, which is first of all, know what the strategy is, and then imagine doing it. Every time you think of them, this is what I would have said. This is how I would have said it.

This is what I would have done next. This is what I'm going to do on Friday. Before you know it, like magic, you're keeping these people out of the danger zone, not only getting them out, but even preventing it in the first place. Yeah, and I would imagine that once you deal with people in a certain way, it's kind of a line in the sand in the sense that they probably are less likely to jerk you around the next time? Oh, yeah. Because you're never really truly embarrassing in front of their peers. You are really helping them.

The whiner feels helpless. But if you can empower them to problem solve, they're no longer miserable and helpless. Negativity is the same thing. It's just a little further gone. can empower them to problem solve, they're no longer miserable and helpless. Negativity is the same thing. It's just a little further gone. It's kind of got all the arrogance of a know-it-all seduced by the dark side of the force. Or going to that nice area of the lens. You know, if you're approaching somebody to get a long area, you'd be like, hey, how's it going?

How's your weekend? How's the family? You know, you chat in a friendly manner and then you go, listen, I want you to know that, you know, at that meeting, if there was something going on, it's totally okay to tell me. I mean, nothing you say is going to change how I feel about you. I feel like we have a good relationship and we're going to feel closer and it's okay to talk about it. So with somebody there, you have to make it okay with them to share themselves. And you may have to do it a few times. But once they do, the first thing you say when they stop talking is, thank you. Thank you so much. I appreciate you telling me that. Thank you. Because what they're afraid of is losing approval. And so you have an opportunity to prove to them that they could tell you anything and it's not going to have a consequence. And that's what creates a long-term effect because they feel safe in your presence. And perhaps if you do this fairly consistently, you probably get the reputation of somebody not to mess around with

because it doesn't work. That's true. I mean, you're really going to get along with most people. The person who is most flexible will really survive and thrive in the world because people can't get to them. They, and like anything you learn, you know, I remember when I first learned to drive, my mother sent me to the store. Oh, I'll go to the store.

But it was nighttime and it was raining and the World Series was on. And I sat in the driveway before I went, the windshield wipers going and the game playing. And I realized, nope, got to turn off the radio. That was too much input. Now, drive a hundred miles. I don't even remember how I got there. You know, there are no dents on the radio. That was too much input. Now, drive 100 miles. I don't even remember how I got there. There are no dents on the car. It must have been okay.

Like anything you learn, at first you put a bunch of attention on it. It seems a little overwhelming, but then it becomes this automatic thing. And the same thing is true with all these behaviors. Once you've got that strategy wired, then you're going to be able to handle all kinds of people. Well, as I said earlier, these people show up in your life sooner or later, often sooner than later, and it's good to have strategies to deal with them. Rick Brinkman's been my guest. His book is called Dealing With People You Can't Stand, How to Bring Out the Best in People at Their Worst.

There's a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, Rick. All right. Thanks, Mike. Ever get a cramp? Really bad cramp? I've heard people say, well, you should eat a banana or drink some Gatorade. And maybe that works. But here's another idea. Reach for the pickle juice. It's been used in sports for decades, and a study at Brigham Young University put pickle juice to the test. Subjects exercised to the point of mild dehydration and then had cramps induced in them. Those who drank pickle juice felt relief within 85 seconds,

almost twice as fast as water or other sports drinks. Researchers have yet to figure out exactly why pickle juice is so effective. One theory is that pickle juice is a natural source of sodium and other electrolytes. Sodium is a component of sweat, and the pickle juice helps replace what was lost and helps retain water in the body. Whatever the reason, it seems to work. That's the podcast today. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening 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

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