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Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new kind of daily podcast from Hello Sunshine, hosted by me, Danielle Robay.
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And me, Simone Boyce.
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Every weekday, we re bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more.
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I am so excited about this podcast, The Bright Side.
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You guys are giving people a chance to shine a light on their lives, shine a light on a little advice that they want to share.
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Listen to The Bright Side on America s number one podcast network, iHeart.
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Open your free iHeart app and search The Bright Side.
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A new season of Bridgerton is here.
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And with it, a new season of Bridgerton, the official podcast.
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I m your host, Gabby Collins.
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And this season, we are bringing fans even deeper into the ton.
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Watch season three of the Shondaland series on Netflix.
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Then fall in love all over again by listening to Bridgerton, the official podcast.
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on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Subscribe to catch a new episode every Thursday.
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Guess what, Will?
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What s that, Mango?
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I ve been trying to write a promo for our podcast, Part-Time Genius, but even though we ve done over 250 episodes, we don t really talk about murders or cults.
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I mean, we did just cover the Illuminati of cheese, so I feel like that makes us pretty edgy.
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We also solve mysteries like how Chinese is your Chinese food and how do dollar stores make money?
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And then, of course, can you game a dog show?
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So what you re saying is everyone should be listening.
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Listen to Part-Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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There s many, many ways in which these emotions show up.
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And one of the things that psychologists talk about is this phenomenon that they call disenfranchised grief, which basically means that there s 1,001 versions of these griefs and these separations that are not socially acceptable to mourn.
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And so we don t mourn them.
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We don t even name them to ourselves as something that requires mourning, because we don t think of them that way.
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Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world.
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Thanks to each and every single one of you that come back every week to listen, learn and grow.
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Now you know how much I like research, how much I like psychology, how much I like the mind and how much I love learning from people who deeply take the time to understand complexities, challenges, life situations that we all go through
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And sometimes we don t really have deep insight on some of the biggest emotional challenges of the journey of our lives.
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And today s guest is someone who does just that.
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And I ve been wanting to have her on the podcast for a long, long time, probably a couple of years in the making.
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And we re finally doing that.
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So I m very, very grateful.
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Today,
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Our guest is none other than Susan Cain, the author of Quiet the Power of Introverts in a World That Can t Stop Talking, which spent 7 years on the New York Times bestseller list and has been translated into over 40 languages.
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It was named the number one best book of the year by Fast Company, which also named her as one of its most creative people in business.
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Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications, and her record-smashing TED Talk, which was where I first discovered her, has been viewed over 30 million times on TED.com and YouTube combined, and was named by Bill Gates as one of his all-time favorite talks.
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Now her most recent book that I highly recommend you go and order right away and you re going to want to especially during and after this conversation is called Bittersweet, How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.
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Please welcome to the show Susan Cain.
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Susan thank you so much for being here, really grateful, really excited to learn from you today and these are actually my favorite conversations on the podcast, sitting with someone
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who has studied and deeply absorbed a theme, a transition of life that is often not spoken about enough.
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So thank you so much.
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Well, thank you so much, Jay, for being here.
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It s just such a joy.
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I ve been a fan for a long time.
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Well, the feeling is very mutual.
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Let s dive right in because I think, you know, the work that you ve done up until now on being an introvert and being quiet and stillness is really powerful.
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But this new book, Bittersweet, what I find really interesting about this is
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I find that as humans, and I m speaking on my behalf, and I think a lot of my community feels this way as well, is that we ve never been taught about what to do with pain.
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We ve never really been taught about what to do with the feeling of loss or sorrow.
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We don t really know what to do with it.
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And the generic advice we get is, well, it will heal with time, or it will go away naturally.
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And I wanted to ask you, where did you start on this journey of figuring out what to do with pain?
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And when you started that journey, what surprised you the most?
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I had had experiences in my own life and the generations of my family before I even entered into this world had had experiences in their lives that I think kind of set me up to be thinking about these kinds of questions.
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This particular journey really started for me when
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I noticed that I was... I mean, I love music of all kinds.
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I love happy, upbeat dance music, but I found myself drawn especially to minor key, kind of longing, yearning music.
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And I started to notice that that music had this effect on me that wasn t about sadness.
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The only word I could use is love, actually.
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I mean, the music would give me a sense of uplift, and I realized that the uplift came from love, and it was because the...
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musician composing music like that they are expressing the pain that all humans experience at one time or another and they re basically saying we all feel this some of the time and I m letting you know that I
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I, the musician, have felt that way.
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Everybody else listening to this has felt this way.
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And the music is then going to take this extra step of turning the pain into something beautiful, which I think is kind of the call that we all have in this world.
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And so anyway, it was really trying to understand what that music was all about.
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that got me started on this inquiry of what bittersweetness is.
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And I started looking at all these different traditions from all over the world and across time.
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And they re all telling us that the willingness to accept the fact that life is a mix of joy and sorrow,
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is one of the great bonding agents we have because we all are humans who are in that same state of being.
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So it s a great bonding agent and it s the source of our creativity and it s the source of transcendence.
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But it all started, it all started with music and it probably started before that, you know, with various family experiences that had primed me to be thinking in these ways.
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And do you believe that it s our avoidance of that idea that life is both bittersweet and that life is both joy and sorrow?
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Is it the avoidance that causes us more pain or causes us more stress and pressure?
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And is that why we need acceptance?
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Is acceptance the right word?
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How are you constructing that thought process for us?
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I would say acceptance is the first step.
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We do have to accept.
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And acceptance, by the way, looks like many different things.
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You know, it doesn t only look like kind of sitting calmly and letting things wash over us.
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It s also understanding that some of the time we re going to feel overwhelmed or angry or whatever it is in response to.
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an aversive event and being okay with all of those kind of chaotic emotions that come up.
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But all of that, that s only step one.
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There s a guy named Stephen Hayes who s developed this thing called acceptance and commitment therapy and it breaks down this process.
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Acceptance is stage one, commitment is stage two.
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What commitment looks like is
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It s identifying the source of your pain and realizing that the only reason you feel pain in the first place is because something has happened in an area that matters to you.
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So to use it as a kind of signpost of this is what matters to me.
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You know, maybe you ve just had a breakup or a bereavement or whatever it is, and you realize, wow, like this, this thing that I ve lost, this matters.
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So now you want to like,
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commit yourself to that area of life because now you know how much it matters.
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And we see people doing this in different ways all the time.
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They re just not always aware of it.
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Just as examples, after 9-11, suddenly in the United States there was a huge rush of people signing up to become firefighters.
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And in the wake of the pandemic, there s a rush of people signing up for medical school and for nursing school.
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And you could say both of these decisions, they re kind of counterintuitive.
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It s kind of like people are signing up to be, you know, closer
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of like that we belong with the divine or we belong in the Garden of Eden or in Zion or Mecca or whatever it is, there s this feeling of we belong somewhere else.
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And you know, the Wizard of Oz, we belong somewhere over the rainbow.
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That s just, that s a state that human beings feel on a fundamental level.
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Sad music, minor key music, puts us in touch with this state.
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So instead of making us feel sad, it s making us feel
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connected with the more perfect and beautiful world to which we feel we belong.
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And, you know, you re talking about different cultures.
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You can see this in music all across the world.
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You know, there s like, like in Portugal and Brazil, well, Portugal is the music of Fado and Portugal and Brazil, they both have the idea of Sodage, you know, the idea of like the longing for like a lost love that you may never have experienced in the first place.
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And this is embodied in the music.
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Um, and as I understand it, um, in Hinduism, there s an idea of viraha, which is the same idea of kind of like longing for a lost love.
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And the idea there is that music, the legend has it that music and poetry like began with that sense of loss.
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And there s like a,
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a tale of a bird that is weeping because its lover was killed by a hunter s bow.
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And that moment of the bird s weeping is said to be the start of all art and poetry.
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So there s something very deep in us that feels these things, but is uplifted by them because we re together in that state of exile and we re together in that state of longing for a better world that we re always reaching for.
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When you find that bright spot to help you get through your day, it s powerful.
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That s where The Bright Side comes in.
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A new daily podcast from Hello Sunshine that s bringing you a daily dose of joy.
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I m Danielle Robay.
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And I m Simone Boyce.
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Listen, both Danielle and I are reporters.
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We ve covered the news and we know the world can feel heavy, but The Bright Side podcast is a space to have a little fun, to learn something new and get into some friendly debates.
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That s right.
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Join us five days a week to see how life can look from the bright side.
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We ll hear from celebrities, authors, experts and listeners like you, whether it s relationships, friend advice or figuring out how to navigate life s transitions.
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We ll talk through it all together.
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Listen to the bright side from Hello Sunshine every weekday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Guess what, Bango?
2
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What s up, Will?
2
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So iHeart is giving us a whole minute to promote our podcast, Part-Time Genius.
2
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I know, that s why I spent my whole week composing a haiku for the occasion.
2
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It s about my emotional journey in podcasting over the last seven years, and it s called Earthquake House.
2
SPEAKER_03
Mango, I m going to cut you off right there.
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SPEAKER_03
Why don t we just tell people about our show instead?
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, that s a better idea.
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So every week on Part-Time Genius, we feed our curiosity by answering the world s most important questions.
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Things like, when did America start dialing 911?
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Is William Shatner s best acting work in Esperanto?
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Also, what happened to Esperanto?
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Plus, we cover questions like how Chinese is your Chinese food?
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How do dollar stores stay in business?
2
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And of course, is there an Illuminati of cheese?
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There absolutely is.
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And we are risking our lives by talking about it.
2
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But if you love mind-blowing facts, incredible history and really bad jokes, make your brains happy and tune in to Part-Time Genius.
2
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Listen to Part-Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
2
SPEAKER_04
When the Taliban banned music in Afghanistan, millions were plunged into silence.
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Radios were smashed.
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Cassettes burned.
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You could be beaten or jailed or killed for breaking the rules.
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And yet, Afghans did it anyway.
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This is the story of how a group of people brought music back to Afghanistan by creating their own version of American Idol.
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The danger they endured.
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They said my head should be cut off.
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The joy they brought to the nation.
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You re free completely.
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No one is there to destroy you.
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I m John Legend.
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Listen to Afghan Star on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
2
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That s so interesting and I agree with you and you re spot on that especially in the bhakti tradition there s a statement similar to viraha it s called vipralambha bhav which means service in separation or love in separation
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and love in separation or longing is seen as higher than love in connection because there s a deeper longing there s a deeper sense of connection and intimacy that is experienced in wanting to be reunited with a loved one whether that be the divine in certain traditions or whether that be a person but what I find really interesting is how some of these concepts can be so easily misconstrued or swayed like the idea that
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I think a lot of people would feel that longing for a better life actually causes a lot of pain as opposed to the idea that you re really putting forward is longing of knowing
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that there is more and i m just trying to really get into that subtlety of like longing for a better life actually causes us more pain and stress sometimes whereas what i think you re saying and i d love to clarify that more deeply is longing knowing that there is more there is meaning there is purpose to this experience could you does that help is that
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And I m really allowing my mind to connect random dots right now.
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I m not following my notes or my questions at all because I just feel like there s so much depth here to uncover.
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I hope you don t mind me doing that by the way, Susan, I apologize.
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Are you kidding?
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Oh my gosh, I love that.
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No, no, no.
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I think it s a spot on question.
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And I think that what you might be getting at is the difference between longing for material things or that kind of thing versus
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kind of more existential longing for, you know, that which is beautiful, good, true, longing for like perfect love, longing for the divine.
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Those are very different kinds of longings for, you know, like I m longing for a nicer car.
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Maybe we re using the same word to describe two very different states of being.
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Yeah, no, no, that clarifies it.
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I think that s a great thought that affects that.
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And for me, I think what I love about what you re saying in this book is that artists and musicians most of the time get their inspiration from sadness, darker emotions and experiences.
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And it s often a really painful, traumatic,
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transition in their life that creates their greatest art form.
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You gave the example of the bird just a few moments ago and do you think that the opportunity to transform pain into something creative like music or art or poetry is possible for everyone or is the right way for everyone when a lot of people would say well I m not poetic or I m not artistic or I m not creative
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Is that still what you ve found and discovered to be a really healthy form of healing?
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Oh yeah, absolutely.
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I m so glad that you asked that question because when I talk about this and I do say, you know, whatever pain you can t get rid of, make that your creative offering.
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But I m using that word creative in a very loose sense.
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Like it doesn t have to be, you know, the painting hanging on the wall.
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It could be like the cake you bake or the organization you found or, you know, the time you reach out to the friend who really needed to hear the thing that you just said at that exact moment.
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There s a lot of different kinds of creative acts.
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The real creativity is the transformation of pain into beauty, and beauty can take endless different forms.
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In the book, I talk about a lot of different people who do things like this, like the mother whose child is killed by a drunk person on a highway and starts Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
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There s 1,000 examples like this.
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Though I was hesitating, as you could see, even to give that example because I also wouldn t want people to feel like, well, it necessitates starting some gigantic, famous organization.
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It doesn t take anything like that.
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It just takes some kind of act.
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It could be an act of extremely modest and private transformation.
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But I think the transformation is the key.
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Yeah, I love that as a solution.
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I think what I notice in my work is that often for people to get started, even when things are somewhat more stable, starting is so difficult.
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And the idea of starting anything when you re in trauma or pain, and you are right that when you look at some of even the greatest careers of musicians or actors, often
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What they create is to heal their trauma, but they don t necessarily heal their trauma in that journey.
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What do you think is the difference?
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There s two questions here.
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I m really getting excited about this topic.
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Let s start first with how does someone start?
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simply when they re in so much pain they ve gone through a really tough difficult situation they re not buddhist monk trained they re not exposed to feeling that they re naturally creative in what the world considers to be creative i agree with you this could be a business it could be a
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It could be a painting, it could be a room in your home that you redesigned.
3
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It doesn t need to be an entity or a huge charity.
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But how does someone just start when they re actually like, how can I start?
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I m just so stuck in my pain.
3
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Well, I mean the first place to start, remember at the beginning we were talking about before there s commitment to the thing that you value, first there s acceptance.
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And acceptance includes kind of like sitting with a wash of pain.
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So it may be that you re not really ready to do any kind of like grand act or modest act of transformation for quite a long time.
3
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And that s okay, you know, and to accept that also.
3
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To the extent you start to feel open and ready to it, connection really is the key.
3
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And maybe it s one other person who you re connecting with, and maybe it s a person you don t ever meet in real life, and it s just somebody you re connecting with over the internet.
3
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Here I m coming from my introvert s background of knowing that people have very different wishes in how they want to connect, and you should be honoring your own wishes.
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Some people will want to be in a room full of
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of friends or strangers and some people really don t want that and all that s fine.
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But I do think that connection of one kind or another is always going to be the key.
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It s what it s what humans want most of all.
3
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I m just thinking of somebody who I talked to a lot for the book, and I wrote about her.
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This is a good friend of mine.
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Her name is Lois.
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She s my sister s mother-in-law.
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And she lost her daughter, Wendy, to ovarian cancer.
3
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And they were, like, incredibly close.
3
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And Lois is an incredibly upbeat, cheerful person by nature.
3
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She s not a bittersweet type at all.
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But, you know, she kind of went into a time of really dark despair.
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And it was something like two years, you know, that she was like in her house and hardly coming out.
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And she said just kind of like creating a shrine to her lost daughter all over the house.
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She said like she was hanging pictures of her like up at all these crazy angles all over the house.
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Like she didn t even have the wherewithal to hang them straight or in any way that made sense.
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She was really in an altered reality.
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And what started to bring her out was realizing that
3
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She still loved her husband deeply, loves her other children deeply, her grandchildren deeply, and feeling that the message that she was sending to them was that maybe they shouldn t be moving forward with their lives or maybe they didn t matter so much because she was so lost in the love for her one daughter.
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And it was that that was one of the things that most pulled her out.
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And it doesn t mean that her grief has gone away at all.
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But there s this incredible way of putting it that comes from the writer Nora McInerney, the difference between moving on versus moving forward.
3
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You know, the message we get in this culture is, you know, eventually you should move on, like get over it.
3
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That s that s the message we re getting one way or another.
3
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And instead, we can move forward, which means
3
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You do go on with your life, but you re carrying the lost person with you always.
3
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You don t ever have to leave them behind.
3
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They have shaped you.
3
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They will shape you forever.
3
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They will always be a part of you.
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You re carrying them with you, even as you move forward.
3
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And I think that s a much healthier and more manageable way for people to deal with their lost beloveds.
3
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And with all of that, I think connection is at the heart of all of these ideas.
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Were there any specific examples you saw of how people carry someone with them long term in a way that becomes healthier and healthier for them as opposed to more and more debilitating for them?
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What were some of those examples?
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I m intrigued as to...
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How someone who s had a really, like you said, like you were talking about people who ve lost, you know, children or people who ve lost partners or of course parents, like what was the healthiest way or methods that you saw people keep people in their lives without it impacting their current relationships and their current outlook as well?
3
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Well, with Lois, who I just told you about, who lost her daughter, she often talks about how she really wants to still be talking about her daughter all the time.
3
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And she said people around her would very understandably often not talk about her daughter because they were afraid to remind her and upset her.
3
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But of course, someone in that situation doesn t need any reminding.
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They haven t forgotten anyway.
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But much more to the point than that, they want the person still to be
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part of their lives, so they want to be able to talk about them in everyday life and just bring up their name naturally.
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Now, I m not saying every single person feels that way, and if you know someone like this in your life, it s probably a good idea to ask them what their preference is, but I do think many people feel that way.
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And then another example,
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is from Nora McInerney who has this idea of moving on versus moving forward and her situation was that she had lost her husband when she was still quite young and she did end up remarrying but she says that the marriage she has now and the relationship she has now with her new husband
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is the way it is because of her lost husband.
3
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You know she is the person who she is and she is the wife and partner that she is because of the experiences that she had with her lost husband and so he s still present with them and a part of her and
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And it s all integrated.
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It s not like there doesn t have to be this stark delineation, you know, between that which was and that which is.
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It s more like it s all one continuous flow.
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How do we need to adapt as a society, do you think, to allow for this kind of healing, this kind of life?
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Because as you said,
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Most often we don t want to talk about it.
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If someone does talk about someone they ve lost in their life it can be quite unsettling and uncomfortable.
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A because I think people are not used to talking about these themes as we discussed previously but also because people are scared of saying the right thing or the wrong thing and they d rather not and then ultimately it s about well
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When is it right to talk about it?
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I think there s a lot of aspects of this that make it complicated.
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What are you seeing a good progress?
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Did you even come across any communities or any tribes or societies or places in the world or people that you found were having healthier conversations around loss?
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Do those even exist?
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Yeah, there s actually, and I don t know if I ll be able to give you, you know, names at my fingertips, but it s actually fascinating.
3
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I would say there s a movement now that has sprung up to talk more about death and grief and loss and all of it.
3
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It s a broader movement with many different subgroups to it.
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I think we kind of reached a tipping point, you know, it s like in the early
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It was around the early 20th century that we started moving loss and death and all of it completely off stage.
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It was seen as being completely non-appropriate.
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Don t talk about it ever.
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This was a period where it also became out of fashion even to talk about bad weather.
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You weren t supposed to notice anything negative at all.
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And I think there s a reclamation process that s going on right now with people realizing we will actually
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be more whole if we can integrate all of this into our daily lives.
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It s not about a love of the macabre or the morbid, it s nothing like that.
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It s just like, tell the truth about being alive, like integrate it all.
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And so yeah, these movements are springing up.
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And then I think you see it in other ways too, you know, like, I don t know, the last 10 or 20 years, it s become increasingly common to talk about things like compassionate leadership.
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And what does compassion mean?
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We think it means, yeah, be nice.
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The word compassion, it literally means,
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to suffer with someone.
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That s what it means.
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And so this movement for compassion is really talking about making a place for people to be able to bring their joys and their pains and for other people and colleagues to be there with them.
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And of course it s uncomfortable and messy and no one has the answer yet of exactly like how to do business with all our lives and all our emotions out there too.
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It s complicated.
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But I do think we re starting to wrestle with it.
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Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
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And I think that at least being able to have honest, transparent, non-judgmental spaces seems to be a good beginning point.
4
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And I think that that requires a lot of openness because
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often there s a judgment on how we want to be treated about our loss and then there s a judgment from the people on the outside of how you should be reacting to your loss and so there s this mishmash of expectation based on judgment which seems really uncomfortable like if you ve just gone through a loss but then you re expecting that people should deal with you a certain way that s really
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tough because chances are most people are not equipped with the tools to know how to interact with you but then those people are also expecting you to get over it as you said or move on instead of move forward and so I find that there s often this tension between these two sets of expectations that ends up causing a bit more stress so it really requires a lot of openness and non-judgment from everyone
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One of the most moving moments I ve ever seen at a conference came when the organizer of the conference asked everybody to write down on a piece of paper just something that they had been through recently or were going through, you know, some like life trial.
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And people wrote these things on their pieces of paper and put them in a hat and they all went up to the front of the room and then the organizer sat and
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on the stage and he s just started pulling these pieces of paper out of the hat and reading them aloud.
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And it was so profound because it was like, you know, one person was going through like a terrible divorce and another was dealing with an illness.
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And, you know, it was just like one thing after another.
4
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And you realize if you had looked around at these people,
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all of them cheerfully milling around the conference and, you know, like happily shaking each other s hands.
4
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You d have no idea of what their true stories are because we don t present that particular face to the world.
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That s not what we do.
4
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And so just the moment of being reminded of all our complexities that
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are existing behind our smiling faces.
4
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That was very profound.
4
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And I think there s probably a lot of different ways that we could do that.
4
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You know, like in schools, they sometimes have what s called a parking lot of like a whiteboard where the kids could write down what they re experiencing or feeling or thinking or whatever.
4
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And they don t have to put their names.
4
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You look at the whiteboard and you suddenly see like a picture of the emotional and experiential state of the class.
4
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And I think we could be looking for more and more ways to do that with each other, so that even if we re not so skilled yet at dealing one-on-one with how do I talk to you about what you personally are experiencing, collectively we can see each other a little more clearly.
4
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Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
Did you find a difference in approach, Susan, to
4
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people who lost someone to death i.e passing away etc or losing someone who is still alive who may even still be in your life to some degree who who may be maybe they re geographically distant but they re still present they still have their own life you may be aware through friends or through social media of what was the
4
SPEAKER_00
Was there a difference in approach to dealing with those two types of loss?
4
SPEAKER_00
Did you see different ways of emotionally regulating or reacting to the different types of loss?
4
SPEAKER_00
I think what we ve been talking about now, especially the examples you ve shared, have been very much losing a child or losing in that sense.
4
SPEAKER_00
But what about losing a partner or losing a long-term friend or someone in that capacity?
4
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Yeah, and it s funny that actually, or not funny, but that we went in the direction of bereavement because, I mean, I talk about bereavement in the book, but that s not really the focus.
4
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The focus is much more on just like, in general, the fact of, you know, this human condition of there being a pain of separation and a desire for reunion that animates us in so many ways.
4
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So yeah, to your question,
4
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Of course, it depends on each individual circumstance, but people do go through quite profound losses and separations.
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There s many, many, many, many ways in which these emotions show up.
4
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And one of the things that psychologists talk about is this phenomenon that they call disenfranchised grief, which basically means that there s like a thousand and one versions of these griefs and these separations.
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that are not socially acceptable to mourn.
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And so we don t mourn them.
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We don t even name them to ourselves as something that requires mourning, because we don t think of them that way.
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If you broke up with somebody, yeah, everybody knows that you might have a few tissue boxes out for a few days or something, but nobody thinks of it as a subject of mourning.
4
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And other people aren t primed to react that way.
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You know, your colleagues aren t primed to support you in the way that they would if you were having a classic bereavement.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I think the real difference has to do much more with our expectations for ourselves and what we expect of each other in terms of how we process.
4
SPEAKER_03
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4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I think as I m talking to you and I m listening and thinking about some of the areas I saw in the book, what I m always fascinated by is the balance of how do we encourage people and ourselves to talk about our pain, to discuss it as we re encouraging here and to be more transparent about it.
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What is the balance that allows you to use that to then turn it into something creative or action-based or meaning or moving on?
4
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and becomes like a form of self-expression and when does it actually limit you?
4
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Because I think we experience both, right?
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So you see people build empires out of their pain and no one knows they re going through anything.
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so they can build something really phenomenal coming from a place of lack during their childhood or their pain or whatever it may be and no one even knows and no one s unaware and we ve seen that play out in unhealthy ways but you also see the opposite where or you see two other ways where someone is expressing their pain but they re constantly in their pain they can t find a way out of the cycle
5
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What is the balance between expressing, accepting, finding meaning and discussing your pain on a daily basis versus being able to transform it as you re encouraging?
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What have you seen as that difference maker?
5
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Because I think we are encouraging people to share more and that s massively needed but I guess what is that
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What creates momentum towards a shift?
5
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And like you re saying, there s this tyranny of positivity, right?
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It s not about just, well, we should just be positive or you should look at the bright side.
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We know that that s out of date and that should not be amplified across the world.
5
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But what is the balance?
5
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I think it s a common concern.
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It s like, well, if we let this in, maybe it ll take up all the oxygen, you know, maybe there won t be space for anything else.
5
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Maybe I ll kind of like never come out of it again.
5
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And I guess that s where I think that the bittersweet view of life is so helpful because
5
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The bittersweet view of life is saying life will include pain, life will include sorrow, but it also will always include joy and beauty.
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And so the job is to never forsake one for the other.
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So if things happen to be going amazingly for you,
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Don t forsake the fact of the tragedies in the world that exist now and may one day exist for you.
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But by the same token, if things aren t going well, don t forsake the miracle of this world.
5
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Don t forsake that either.
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And I think that s really useful.
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And I ll tell you this one parable that I came across that I found so helpful for framing all this.
5
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This one comes from the Kabbalah, which is the mystical side of Judaism.
5
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And the parable is that all of creation was originally an intact and divine vessel that then shattered and that the world that we re living in now is the world after the breakage.
5
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So it s a broken world.
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But it s also a world in which scattered all around us are the shards of light from this vessel.
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And the job for all of us is to bend down and pick them up.
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And you re going to notice different shards of light from the ones that I notice.
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But we each have the capacity to be aware of the breakage and to turn in the direction of beauty.
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Those two things always can and must coexist.
5
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And the idea of this parable is to kind of bring more of the divinity into this kind of lower realm in which we live.
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And, you know, whether one takes that in literal or religious terms or as a metaphor, I think makes no difference in terms of how helpful it can be in how to live.
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Yeah and that that is the hardest part I find that from people I speak to when they look at what s happening in the news and happening around us and and happening all across the world I mean it just feels bitter bitter bitter bitter bitter like there s there s not really much sweetness or the sweetness feels very fleeting or the sweetness feels very short-lived and the sweetness is more ephemeral than the bitter and the bitter feels so bold and large and big that
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it just overshadows.
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I m sure you have the same conversations and I found that getting to that balance of seeing both and recognizing the light, it s tough.
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I find that it s tough for people to understand that and that s just a reflection based on what you were just saying.
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I agree that the balance is useful and powerful and recognizing
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where we can support and help.
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To me, that s always been the greatest lesson I think I learned was, you know, in times of uncertainty, don t look for certainty, look for service.
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Like, look for meaning, look for purpose, because you will always find meaning and service and purpose in life.
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You will not always find pleasure and happiness and joy, which are not, you know, possible.
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And when I looked at
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think the work of Edith Eager in her book The Gift or Viktor Frankl in Man s Search for Meaning and you know two people who lived through incredible atrocities like they turned towards finding meaning and finding purpose and so I loved what you said at the beginning and so to me that s always been what creates the balance is you can t just look for joy.
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I think looking for joy or expecting pain
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are both really tough places to live because if you look for joy you may not always find it and if you live in pain that s really difficult and so looking for meaning, service and purpose seem to be paths forward to me at least.
5
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I agree with that.
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And I would say to each individual person listening, to use the word and the ideal that speaks most to you.
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You could speak of truth.
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You could speak of beauty.
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You could speak of love.
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But basically, it s talking about look for the higher ideals, because those kind of transcend whether you happen to be in a state of joy or sorrow at any given moment.
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There s still the higher ideals on top of all of that for which we can live.
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And I ll tell you, just for me personally,
5
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exercise I found myself doing over these last few years.
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And I just kind of stumbled into it, but I start or I try to start most of my days, especially my work days with an act of beauty.
5
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So like I look at a lot of art on social media and almost every day I share art on my social media feed.
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And it s like one of the first things I do when I start working that morning.
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And it s attracted all these other people who love that too.
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And it s become a kind of community based around that shared ideal.
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And it s a small act, you know, it s like, here s a piece of beauty to start our day with.
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It s not going to save the world, but there s something about stepping in that direction that I think is, is just incredibly helpful and uplifting.
5
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Yeah, absolutely.
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What I love about this book is that you re obviously talking about the individual, but you re also talking about organizations and companies and systems.
5
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One of the things that fascinates me is this idea that you bring up about how do you think we can end the whole winners and losers idea and tell us a bit about that.
5
SPEAKER_01
I thought that was really interesting.
5
SPEAKER_00
You know, people say, well, why do we have this whole toxic positivity thing in the first place?
5
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And I kind of went back and looked at our history.
5
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And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that around the 19th century, when things became very focused on business, people started asking the question, if somebody is a success or failure at business, is it because of good luck or bad luck?
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Or is it because of something in the person?
5
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And increasingly the answer became, it s because of something inside the person.
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And so we started looking at people and characterizing people as either winners or losers.
5
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And over time, the use of the word loser has increased astronomically over time.
5
SPEAKER_00
And if you think about it, if we re all afraid to be losers and don t want to be associated with being a loser, then of course we re going to avoid any discussion of anything that has to do with loss or pain or, you know, sorrow or longing or like anything that we re talking about.
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You would want nothing to do with it.
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Basically what it s meant is we re existing in this false dichotomy.
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So we have to get to a place where collectively in our organizations, we can just kind of be more comfortable with integrating all of these things together.
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And that s so tough, Susan, because like, and I worked in the corporate world for a few years, and I felt that they were really trying to develop that culture and investing in it.
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And they did a pretty good job.
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And that was around nine years ago now where they were doing a good job, which I m sure it s improved even since then.
5
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But I think that it s tough because, like you said, when you re chasing promotions and pay rises and career growth, turning around and saying, hey, I m really struggling at home,
5
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it s very hard for an untrained manager or leader to recognize that those things can be connected but also disconnected.
5
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I have a team today and I know that I have team members that could be going through something at home, but actually being at work is what lets them get away from that and channel their pain into work.
5
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So they re doing what you re saying, which is they have a painful environment, whatever that it may be,
5
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but they re fueling their work with that passion and momentum to say I m going to be more creative
6
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I m going to love this.
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So it s not necessarily that because they have a troublesome home that they re going to perform less at work, but I think that that requires a lot of emotional maturity from leaders and managers to recognize that work performance is not directly correlated with home situation and that it s a lot more complex than that.
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So
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is there something that leaders and managers and people who lead people even if it s two people or one person like even if it s leading your family you know it s like how do you how do we help people develop that emotional maturity because most of us and I know I would say that if I told my boss that
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SPEAKER_01
I, you know, even if you told your boss like, oh, I m feeling like I ve got a headache this morning, that would feel like, oh, no, no, I can t say that to them because if they think I have a headache, then they won t challenge me or they won t think I m reliable or they won t think that I m someone they can trust because they re worried about me.
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Does that make sense?
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, it makes perfect sense.
6
SPEAKER_00
I used to be a corporate lawyer before I became a writer.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I remember so much this feeling of like, I mean, I did this in the 1990s.
6
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I stopped in 2001.
6
SPEAKER_00
It was actually really before anyone was talking about this stuff.
6
SPEAKER_00
But I so remember the feeling of walking into work and feeling like I had to put on a kind of emotional superhero costume.
6
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Like, you know, everything had to seem like completely together all the time.
6
SPEAKER_00
And there was a way in which
6
SPEAKER_00
That would make you feel really good in the short term, because you were wearing the superhero costume, and that feels good.
6
SPEAKER_00
But in the long term, you get kind of burned out from it.
6
SPEAKER_00
So what can leaders do?
6
SPEAKER_00
As with everything, it s so helpful when leaders go first.
6
SPEAKER_00
For leaders to model being able to talk about something that s going on with them at the same time that they re equally committed to their work, that s opening the door.
6
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It s showing other people how to do it and that it can be done.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I do wanna say, and again, this is me wearing my introvert hat here.
6
SPEAKER_00
I wanna say like a lot of people don t wanna show up to work and divulge everything that s going on in their private lives.
6
SPEAKER_00
So I m not talking about some kind of expectation or obligation to be able to do that, but rather for all of this to just become a more matter of fact, no big deal way in which we relate to each other on a daily basis.
6
SPEAKER_00
You wouldn t hesitate, because why would you, any more than you would hesitate to say that you re moving from one house to another?
6
SPEAKER_00
There s no real reason that these topics have to be so loaded.
6
SPEAKER_01
I really feel what you re encouraging is really healthy and powerful.
6
SPEAKER_01
In my own subjective experience, when I trained to be a coach many years ago, and today I do a lot of coaching, whether it s private clients or exec coaching or corporate coaching.
6
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I find that the greatest skill that I gained through my monk time and in my coaching work
6
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is the ability to hear someone s experience without projecting my own value onto it.
6
SPEAKER_01
So the challenge with the human mind is when you hear someone has a headache, you think, well, when do I have headaches?
6
SPEAKER_01
How does that affect my performance?
6
SPEAKER_01
Oh, not good.
6
SPEAKER_01
That means their performance won t be good.
6
SPEAKER_01
Or even in a positive sense, if we feel we are trustworthy people,
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when someone says something that sounds trustworthy in our vocabulary we project that they are trustworthy and so it works both ways like we give people benefit of the doubt because of our projected self-valuation and then we also project our
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negativity or flaws onto other people as well that if we would lie in a situation we re more likely to think someone else is lying in that situation as well and so there s this projection mechanism that s going back and forth and so it really requires so much emotional stillness to hear someone s experience and to truly believe that that is just what they re going through and that we need to almost be
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investigators, not interrogators, curiously of what that means for them.
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And I think that s that balance that I m trying to do as a coach, but even through the monk tradition was like, I think often in the corporate space, especially there s an interrogation versus a intrigue around someone s current experience.
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So, you know, it s a, if someone s not performing well, we interrogate them.
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Why are you not performing well?
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What s going wrong?
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Why haven t you shown up?
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Why are your numbers down?
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There s that interrogation because we are thinking, well, oh, if I was performing badly, then there must be something wrong.
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Rather than the intrigue of, well, is there something happening?
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Is there some way we can help you?
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Or do you want to talk about anything?
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Which is far more of that
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intrigue versus interrogation.
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But that requires a lot.
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It s so easy to slip into interrogator mode, isn t it?
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Yeah, I think this is one place where culture can really help.
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And here, I m thinking of one organization that I looked at in the book.
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It was a University of Michigan case study by Jane Dutton and others.
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And it looked at
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this organization called Midwest Billings.
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And Midwest Billings was basically, they were bill collectors for a hospital.
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So their job was to collect the unpaid bills of people who had been in the hospital.
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So this is not a fun job.
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No one likes this job.
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The turnover in the industry is really high because no one wants to do it.
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But at Midwest Billings, they somehow developed this culture of compassion where everybody just got really into helping each other in this joyful way.
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And so if somebody showed up with a cold, they were running to CVS to get the box of tissues.
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And if somebody was going through domestic violence, they were gathering around to support them.
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There s this one amazing quote from a woman who
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had lived all her life with her mother.
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Her mother was her best friend, her everything.
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And then her mother died unexpectedly.
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And it was like the worst, you know, the worst time of her life.
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And she says, she remembers how she felt like when this happened, she was like, I have to get back to the office.
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I have to get back to the office.
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And she said it was partly because she knew it would take her mind off things.
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But she said, she s like, to this day, I ll never forget the look of love on Letitia s face.
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Letitia was her colleague.
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And she s like, you don t expect that from your coworkers.
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I will never forget that love.
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And this unit,
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their turnover was something like 2%.
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It was like nothing compared to the rest of the industry.
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They got their bills collected in record time.
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And it was because they had this culture where it was like pro, it was proactive compassion.
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It was like they were all looking for the chance to do it.
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So as opposed to the, the attitude you were talking about of an attitude of interrogation and inquiry, it was more like,
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yay when do we get the chance to be helpful to each other and that s just it s a very different emotional starting place.
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Yeah I mean that s that s beautiful that s that s beautiful and I can only hope and wish that more and more we can move towards that and I think the best thing you ve just said now as well is that it s something we have to create in our families in our communities in our towns it s
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It s not something we can expect from leaders or decision makers.
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It s something we re going to have to bring to the spaces where we have influence.
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Susan, I could speak to you for hours and hours because I feel like the work that you do and the way you write and even this conversation, I feel like you ve really given me permission to kind of
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really reflectively have a conversation with you rather than systematically interview you and I appreciate you for that and being able to go there as well but we end every podcast and on purpose episode with a final five so I m going to ask you a final five and this is called the fast five where we answer every question in one word to one sentence maximum.
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Okay, which I m terrible at, but okay.
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No, no problems.
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I m terrible at sticking to it myself, but let s try.
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So the first question is, what is the best thing you can say to someone who s going through something painful?
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I love you.
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That s beautiful.
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What is the worst thing you can say to someone that s going through something difficult?
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Get over it or, you know, or some variation or anything that you do that signals that.
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Third thing, what s the first thing you do every morning and the last thing you do every night?
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I m laughing at myself because I want to say the first thing that I do every morning is listen to music, but honestly the first thing I do every morning is look at my phone and I m really trying to get out of that.
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What music would you like to wake up to?
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I like that answer.
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So that s beautiful.
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Oh, you know, I just kind of like go to my playlist.
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I should say, by the way, I have this Bittersweet playlist that I created.
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It s on Spotify and it s on Apple Music if people want to go there.
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So lately I ve been going to that.
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Is it called just Bittersweet?
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Like if you Google my or look in Spotify under Susan Cain and Bittersweet, you ll find it.
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I love that.
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That s so cool.
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I hope everyone goes and downloads the playlist.
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That s great.
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I love that.
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All right.
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Well, question number four.
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How would you define your current purpose?
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Yeah, telling the truth of what it s like to be alive, you know, like hopefully like, and talking about the things that people don t feel like you can chit chat about at the grocery store, but the things that matter the most.
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That s beautiful, I love that.
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And fifth and final question, if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?
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I don t know what to say because I ll tell you the very first thing that I thought of
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is be kind, but I m really, I m resisting that only because I think that when you start mandating or regulating kindness, that s often like the road to hell.
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So it is my highest value, but I don t like to associate it with law or, you know, or a compulsion.
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It has to come from a different source than that.
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Absolutely.
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Absolutely.
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Well, Susan, thank you so much for your time, your energy, your presence in this conversation, your vulnerability.
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And for everyone who s been listening and watching, I hope you go and grab a copy of Bittersweet, How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.
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We will put the link to this in the caption, in the comments.
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please please please go and grab a copy of the book if you enjoyed today s conversation if you want to learn more about how to deal with loss how to deal with sorry how to deal with pain in the workplace in your life when you re seeing it all around you and the book evolves into the conversation we actually started with which is also dealing with death and loss in that way so
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I really hope that you enjoyed this conversation.
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Susan and I would love to see what resonated with you, what connected with you.
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So please do tag us on Instagram, on Twitter, on Facebook, on whatever platform you use.
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Please do let us know what were the insights that you re going to practice or remember?
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What s going to change the way you think about something?
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And I m hoping that this episode makes you reach out to someone.
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And say, how are you doing?
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How are you doing, really?
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What is it that I don t know about you?
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What is this something that we haven t spoken about in a while?
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So please do share this conversation with a loved one as well.
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Susan, any last words or anything you d like to share with our community?
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No, I mean, thank you so much for having me.
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So wonderful and unique to talk to you.
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And I don t know, to the community, I guess I would I ll repeat something I said from the very beginning, but it really is to me one of the biggest takeaways of this whole
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The quest that I ve been on for these past seven years of writing this book is the idea of that whatever pain you can t get rid of, make that your creative offering.
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I love that.
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Yeah.
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And I hope that we can stay in touch through social media and I have a newsletter, which is SusanCain.net.
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You can find it.
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But yeah, this is, it s just been wonderful to spend this time.
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So thank you.
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Yeah, and I love that.
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I m so glad you ended on that, Susan.
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I think that s such a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, practical, actionable takeaway for all of us is any pain we re going through, turn it into something creative, turn it into something beautiful, turn it into something transformative for yourself and others.
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So Susan, thank you so much for your time.
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Thank you so much for being here.
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And for everyone who s been listening and watching, I appreciate you.
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I m grateful to you.
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And I hope you ll pass this on to someone else as well.
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Thank you so much.
7
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This is the story of how a group of people brought music back to Afghanistan by creating their own version of American Idol.
7
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The joy they brought to the nation.
7
SPEAKER_01
You re free completely.
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No one is there to destroy you.
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The danger they endured.
7
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They said my head should be cut off.
7
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I m John Legend.
7
SPEAKER_04
Listen to Afghan Star on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
7
SPEAKER_00
Hey everyone, this is Molly and Matt and we re the hosts of Grown Up Stuff How to Adult, a podcast from Ruby Studio and iHeart Podcasts.
7
SPEAKER_03
It s a show dedicated to helping you figure out the trickiest parts of adulting.
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SPEAKER_00
Like how to start planning for retirement, creating a healthy skincare routine, understanding when and how much to tip someone, and so much more.
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SPEAKER_03
Let s learn about all of it and then some.
7
SPEAKER_03
Listen to Grown Up Stuff How to Adult on America s number one podcast network, iHeart.
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SPEAKER_03
Open your free iHeart app and search Grown Up Stuff.