This episode was prerecorded as part of a live continuing education webinar. On-demand CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs. Register at allceus.com slash counselor toolbox. I'd like to welcome everybody to today's podcast on dialectical behavior therapy skills. Interpersonal effectiveness is what we're going to be talking about. We're going to start out by defining interpersonal effectiveness because a lot of us have used the term, or maybe we haven't, but you may not know exactly what it means. And it's more than just communication skills. We'll identify barriers to interpersonal effectiveness, examine the goals. You know, why do we want clients to be interpersonally effective? And how do we know that they are fully interpersonally effective as opposed to interpersonally effective in some areas? And we'll review techniques for improving interpersonal effectiveness. Like I said before the class started, the happiness isn't brain surgery podcast goes into much greater detail on different activities you can do with clients in order to help them learn and apply this information. The clinical side, we're really going to stick more towards theory and I'm going to let you use your own creativity to create some of those exercises. So what is interpersonal effectiveness? It's the ability to ask for what you want and say no or yes to requests from other people. So basically it's knowing what you want, asking for it, getting it most of the time and being able to set boundaries. How cool is that? So like I said, it's more than just communication skills because to be interpersonally effective, you need to be able to not only communicate but also get your needs met and know what those needs are. So the goals are to get others to do things you want them to do, realizing that this isn't going to happen 100% of the time, you know, but we want to be more effective at getting our needs met more of the time. And when there are situations that are really important, getting those needs met and getting a yes. So, you know, for example, if your friend asks you if you want to go out hiking this weekend, if you say no or if you say yes, you know, that's probably not a huge big deal to that person. Now if your friend says, I need you to pick my kid up from school because I'm going to be held over at the office. Now that's something that's more of a big deal. So if it's something that's really important, you want to make sure that you are more effective in communicating how important it is and getting those needs met. So we also want to help our clients make sure that others take them seriously. And if you think there are a couple things that may get in the way of being taken seriously. One is the way you ask, when you ask for something from someone and you give the tone like it's not all that important or you hedge, you know, if you wouldn't mind or if it's not too big of a deal. People are not going to tend to take it as a serious request or something that's very important.  The other or one of the other reasons that people are often not taken seriously is because they may ask for something and make it seem like it's this huge big deal. When it's really not all that consequential. So they're always making mountains out of molehills and people may tend to see that as somebody who gets, you know, all fired up about something that in three days they won't even care about. So we're going to talk about clarifying goals and objectives and wants and needs, but also assertive communication. We want people to effectively be able to set boundaries and say no to unwanted requests and we're going to talk about five levels of saying no, or yes. We want them to strengthen their relationships and interpersonal effectiveness means being able not only to make good, healthy relationships, but be, but being able to nurture those relationships and deal with them when things go a little bit wonky, because not, well, no relationship that I know of is ever perfect 100% of the time. So strengthening those relationships so they can withstand the occasional storm. It's also important to be able to find and build new relationships. Now if you're an introvert you may not need 50 friends, you may not even want 50 friends. If you're an extrovert, on the other hand, you may really enjoy being around a lot of other people. So depending on your temperament, depending on your personality, however you want to say it. You may or may not need a greater number of relationships, but it's important to know, you know, if you develop a new hobby, how do you develop friendships with people who share that same hobby or interest. And then we'll end on talking about how to identify hopeless relationships and end them. And we're going to talk about using how to use a decisional balance exercise to figure out whether this is an important relationship that is worth going through the energy and effort for, or if this is a relationship that is doing more harm than it could ever do good. The barriers to effective interpersonal skills start with lack of effective communication skills. If you can't effectively articulate what it is you want and need, then it's going to be almost impossible to be interpersonally effective. And when we get down to Dear Man, we'll talk about how to help people become more effective at their communication. The lack of clarity about what you want from other people is also a barrier. If you want somebody to be supportive or to spend quality time with you or, you know, find some other kind of subjective term. If you tell them that they may hear you and they may want to do that, but their idea of supportiveness or quality time may be very different than yours. So that goes back to communication skills. But you also have to know in your mind, what does supportiveness look like? How am I going to know if this person is being supportive or spending quality time? Balancing your needs with the other person's needs can also get in the way of being effective. And it can go both ways. You can be more concerned about getting your own needs met, which tends to alienate people. Or you can be so concerned about getting approval from others that you sacrifice your own needs and you end up getting run down and beat down and feeling exhausted and resentful. Emotions can also get in the way. When people interact in a situation and there is some sort of conflict or issue, it doesn't even have to be conflict. Sometimes they get into their emotional mind and you've got that adrenaline hay is going. So you're not thinking clearly about what is the next right step.  So we'll talk about emotion regulation and how to get into the wise mind in order to choose the best course of action. Sacrificing long term goals for short term relief or urges is another barrier. If somebody wants you to do something and you know this comes up a lot in sobriety where if your long term goal is long term sobriety and happiness and all that stuff out here, but somebody wants you to go out gambling with them or go to a situation which might be dangerous for your sobriety. Then it can be a little bit more difficult if you're more concerned about maintaining that relationship than maintaining health happiness and sobriety. Other people can get in the way by trying to convince you to be or do something that you don't want to do. And sometimes you're just in a situation where no matter how effective you are, no matter how assertive and how clear you are about what you need, other people or that situation is just more powerful than you. It happens at work a lot. It happens in politics. It happens in life. So understanding which situations are basically unwinnable and figuring out what to do about those to be effective. And that effectiveness means doing what you need to do to ultimately keep moving towards meeting your goals. It doesn't necessarily mean winning every battle. You want to win the war. A need for external validation keeps a lot of people from stating their own needs because they want so much to be liked. They can't tell themselves that they're okay. So they need other people to tell them they're okay. And beliefs that they don't deserve what they want. And I've worked with a lot of clients over the years who honestly deep down in their heart don't believe they deserve to be happy because of the things they've done or the things they haven't done. So we'll talk about how that can get in the way of reaching their goals if they don't believe they deserve to reach their goals and different ways we can help them start embracing this concept of the beginner's mind and every day is a new opportunity to try to make the best life possible. So dear man, D means to describe in specific objective terms. So I tell people, if you're going to be specific and objective, then you're going to write something down, and I can call somebody in from off the street. They can read that description and they can look at the situation and go, yes, that's done, or no, that's not. An example I usually use is house cleaning because, you know, that's pretty objective there. For me, a clean kitchen means the dishes are done and put away. All of the stainless steel has been wiped down because I cannot stand fingerprints. All the flat surfaces are clean of everything that's not supposed to be there and wiped down and the floor has been swept. Those are, you know, very objective things. Somebody can look at a sheet and go, yep, the stainless steel has been wiped down. Yep, the dishes have been done. That's objective.  Do you think this is clean? It's kind of time to look at me and go, yeah, looks fine to me. And I'm just like, can't you see the fingerprints? I'm a little OCD, but they love me anyway. If I want something to get done to my specs, I need to be able to set out the specs. If you want quality time with the family one weekend, one day each weekend, you need to spell out what that looks like for them so everybody knows what the game plan is. So describing in specific objective terms that anybody can understand, even people who aren't involved in the situation is the first step. Express feelings and opinions using I statements and one of my favorite activities to do with people. If we're doing it in individual, I have them write it down as homework. If we're doing it in group, I have somebody start telling a story about a time when they got got upset. And they're supposed to use I statements whenever they're expressing feelings or opinions. And as they go, when they start turning to the and he made me time out. No, what happened. I felt XYZ because of what happened and encouraging people to take ownership of their feelings of their actions of their responses.  And it also puts people on the defensive it pushes them away. We want to encourage people to bring other people in interpersonal effectiveness means bringing that relationship closer and making it more workable. The a stands for assert, asserting what you want and don't expect mind reading, even if you can read minds, you know, maybe you can, I don't know. Even if you can, you probably know that most other people can't. So don't expect mind reading because they can't do it. And if you expect people to read your mind and do what you want them to do. And then they don't, you're going to feel disappointed and resentful, most likely. So we want to look back and when clients start talking about how people aren't meeting their needs are living up to their expectations. We want to have them examine did you tell them what those needs and expectations were, or did you just expect them to know. Sometimes it's the latter so then we talk about well how can you communicate what your needs are in order to help this person. Get with the program, because a lot of times in relationships people really want to make it work, but they don't have the information so we need to get the get the knowledge out there. The last part are our endear is reinforced by explaining the benefits to the other person ahead of time. If you do X, then this is the benefit to you. If you call when you're going to be late that I won't be nearly as upset and stressed out and our evening will go a lot more smoothly. But if you're really ahead of time that we've got a big project coming up, then I can clear my plate so I can devote myself to this project. Making sure it's a win-win part of this means knowing what the other person or having an idea what the other person wants. I mean if you're dealing with your boss it's usually pretty clear. If you're dealing with another person what is it that's meaningful to them and how can you convince them that meeting your needs in this situation will help them get their needs met as well. M stands for mindfulness too often when we're in discussions, especially conflictual discussions where we're trying to assert we can get sidetracked really easy. It's important to stay focused on your goal. If you're talking about something that happened five minutes ago, stick with that, resolve that issue before you move on to something else. If the other person or when the other person starts feeling like they're losing control, they're not in power in this particular conversation, they may use diversion techniques like blaming, magnification, justifying or switching topics. So being aware of that, encouraging clients to think back over situations where they've had a discussion with someone and it hasn't gone well and it ended up with that person using some of these techniques if you will. And rehearsing how can you counter that if they want to blame you for what's going on. How can you hear that and respond in a way that's effective and stays on point. How can you diffuse that if they're magnifying, you know, you always or you never focus on the exceptions, you know, I hear you saying it feels like a lot of the time I don't do this. However, you know, there, there, there have been times and, you know, credit where credit is due justification happens a lot. Well, I did that because you obviously weren't going to do it. And then figuring out how to respond to that.  Yes, you did that but what are the consequences overall and are the consequences worth what you did. Switching topics is the easy one. If you're mindful, being aware of when somebody's trying to take you off the path, acknowledging it and tabling it for a later discussion I hear that you want to talk about what happened last week. When we're finished discussing this issue and we can come back to talking about that. You're never going to get anything accomplished. If you are constantly struggling against someone and going on six different paths. That was one of the first mistakes I made when I was in my first practicum. We were trained in humanistic rogerian client centered. And I went and I did my sessions and bring my tape to my supervisor. And he'd listen to him and we talk about him and after about the third one. He turned off my tape. And he looked at me he's like, Where are you going with this. And I was like, not really sure where the client wanted to. And his response was like, No, there was no like about it. His response was, No, you need to have a direction. And if they want to talk about something noted, but they need to finish the original path first. And you need to help keep them focused because switching topics and engaging in behaviors like that is a way of avoiding the uncomfortable stuff. And I was like, Oh, learn something today. So being mindful and being mindful of why people do this a lot of times, blaming magnification justification is a protective mechanism in response to feeling out of control. A stands for appearing confident in verbal and nonverbal behavior. Many of our clients. Well, they can take either extreme. And I've had clients with both. Sometimes people ask for things and they will hedge, you know, if you don't mind if it's not too much of a problem. That's not confidence that is being very passive and gentle. Aggressive on the other hand would be kind of getting up in somebody's emotional or physical space and going you will do this. What you need to do is help clients figure out what confidence looks like and how they can appear confident. And I encourage them to watch a variety of television shows and examine what confident behavior looks like and differentiate it from aggressive behavior. So when they see somebody or see something that seems aggressive. Tell me why that seemed aggressive as opposed to confident and get them to start articulating what they're seeing or hearing and a lot of times it's going to be in the nonverbals, whether it's confident or confrontational. An end stands for negotiate. Sometimes a lot of times you're not going to get all of your needs met or get 100% agreement. So be willing to offer and ask for other solutions. Not everybody is an active learner where they think on the fly and they hear things and they process. Some of us are reflective learners. We hear we process we mull it over we find the connections and then we have a light bulb moment. So speaking with somebody who's a reflective learner, or you're talking to somebody who's a reflective learner, help them embrace that and understand and communicate to other people help other people understand that it's not that I'm not listening I need a moment to think about it. It doesn't have to be days, but sometimes one person can state their case if you will, and then you need to take a little bit of a break of a break. So the other person can really think it over and contemplate their response, and then come back with a mindful response. If you're prepared to compromise. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. So what parts of this are you willing to let go, and what parts are you not. And if you have to say no, encourage people to be willing to say no but offer alternatives. Right now we're in kitten season. I'm going to switch from one of the rescues I work with about a bottle baby who looked to be not even a week old, which means that kitten is going to need to be fed every three hours around the clock for at least the next two months. Give or take. I don't have that kind of energy in me right now. So I cannot take on a bottle baby, but I can take on mama cats with kittens and older cats to free up slots in other fosters care. So they can devote energy to feeding a bottle baby. So that is my compromise that is my alternative. I know that I can't handle the first part, but there are things that I could do to pitch in to kind of be a team player. Have clients think about times when they've asked for something. Haven't gotten it. Think about what kind of alternatives, could they have offered that might have gotten them a yes, when they actually ended up getting a no. Another thing that's important is to clarify priorities. There are many things to consider here. There's getting what you want. First, you need to know exactly what it is you want and how the other person can provide this. So you have to have a clear goal and destination in mind. If you just want to feel better. How many of us have had a client come in and say, I just, I want to feel better. I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. I feel for them. I know what feeling better looks like to them. So I need to understand you want more energy, your concentration. What makes you happy? I mean, happiness is defined differently by different people. So we need to get a more objective definition of what are you hoping to get out of counseling. You can be crying episodes or fighting or number of days. They just want to crawl back under the covers and not get out of bed, you know, define it in something that's observable to fix it. If you're talking about a toaster. That's pretty obvious if it makes toast is fixed. But if you're talking about an interpersonal situation, or even a situation at work. What you envision as the resolution may not be the same as the other person. I know there were times I went to my old boss and I'm like, this isn't working, we need to fix it. And I had a very different idea about how to go about it than he did. And a very different ideas of endpoints. So it's important to communicate what is it you're hoping to achieve. The next one is, I want to know you'll never leave. And, you know, rationally, most of us realize that that's not something that anybody can guarantee. However, what is this saying, this is saying that the person has fears of abandonment, and they want some sort of reassurance that the relationship is going well, and not dissolving in front of their eyes. So what would that look like, what would it look like if you felt secure in a relationship. So those are ways that I kind of encourage clients to be more descriptive in nailing down exactly what they want. Keeping the relationship is another priority though, you may not be able to get what you want and keep a relationship. So you've got to weigh those two things. If I get what I want and I lose this relationship, what's the impact versus if I keep this relationship and don't get what I want. What's the impact, and where does self respect fit in all of that. At the end of the day, how will I feel about looking in the mirror. So three priorities you need to balance or encourage clients to balance when you're helping them become more interpersonally effective. So balancing needs starts out with asking for something or saying no. Asking for something level one, you ask tentatively you take no it's kind of like do you want to go out to dinner tonight. You're not really committed either way but you figure hey what the heck I can put it out there. Maybe it's been a long day, and you don't want to cook. So you may ask confidently. Would you mind going out to dinner tonight or I would really like to go out to dinner tonight.  Level three is asking confidently and resisting no this is when you're going to start getting into needing to create that win win situation. I would really like to go out to dinner tonight. So I won't have to do dishes afterwards, and it's been a long day. It will help me feel more relaxed. So, so the evening can go better, whatever you want to say. Anyway, so you're starting to negotiate and create that win win and make sure the other person sees how it benefits them because it's more important. So you're going to put more effort into it. Level four you want to ask firmly insist and negotiate on options. I need to go out to dinner tonight. I don't have it in me to cook. I don't know if going out to dinner would ever get to level four but we're going to stick with it. I don't have the energy to cook. Where would you like to go, you know, if you can go anywhere you want, as long as we go out to dinner where would you like to go. So that's negotiating level five is the not no negotiation and with dinner probably never going to get there. But sometimes there are things that are that important that they're non negotiable. If you're in recovery, having people not use around you, not bring alcohol around you, maybe something that is really important. If you are somebody who's very sensitive, I have one friend who doesn't get bothered by a lot of things. I couldn't even read the preface to Marley and me before I was boo who crying like a little kid. But things don't seem to bother him near as much. And there have been occasional times he shared memes or things with me on Facebook. And I've just kind of been like, okay, I could have gone my entire life without seeing that. So it was important for me to ask firmly and be like, don't ever send me that again. But expressing to him why it was important, not just saying don't ever do it, because, you know, then they don't understand, but making sure that people understand what your boundaries are, why they're there, why it's important. So, because they respect you, or if they respect you, then they'll respect that boundary. And one thing is true with saying no. Sometimes people will ask you to do things and, you know, you're kind of ambivalent, but you agree. You can always put out your option later, like if somebody wants to go out to dinner at Oh, Charlie's, and you wanted to go to Olive Garden, you can say, all right, we'll go to Charlie's tonight. Next weekend, let's go to Olive Garden. So putting it out there so it's still fair level to encourage people to say no confidently, but be willing to reconsider with the kitten example I gave you. You know, if they would have said, we really need somebody to handle this kitten over the weekend until we can find a proper placement for it, can you just take it for four days. Well, I might be willing to reconsider at that point, I probably would have. So if they can change the situation in some way to make it more doable for you be willing to reconsider. Level three say no, no firmly resist saying yes. Level four, which is like I said where I usually end up say no firmly, but negotiate I cannot do that or I will not do that. However, I will do these other things, you know I want to be a team player I want to cooperate, but that is not something I can do that is conducive to health happiness insanity right now. And again level five shouldn't come up very often. But it comes down to those non negotiable things I will not do this. And if I'm forced to do this, then I may have to change the situation. So the points to consider when asking for something, can the other person deliver. If you are saying yes to something, can you deliver, you know let's consider that first is this even doable. Does it relate to a high or low priority goal, those low priority goals are probably going to be level one or level two, you know you'll take it or leave it. The high priority goals you're probably going to put some more into. How will it impact your self respect to say no, or to take no. So if you tell somebody know, how is it going to impact your self respect in that particular situation. And, you know, with me with animals kittens puppies dogs whatever, it is really hard for me to say no, and my self respect kind of, I have to look at it very seriously because I believe that it's partly our ability to take care of them. So the bleeding heart part of me kind of takes a little hit when I say no, but the rest of me that's a mother and a business woman and you know trying to be a saying human being maintains my respect by saying, I can't be good to anybody. If I'm completely worn down. I'm examining each person's rights and values in the situation. What's important to me may not be important to somebody else and I can respect that that's not one of their values, and I can respect their right to say no, and vice versa. And that's something we need to encourage our clients to look at is, you know, maybe this isn't something that was really important to that person, examining what type of relationship you have with somebody. If you're just friends, you're going to ask different things than of somebody that's a co worker, or someone who lives four doors down from you in the neighborhood. So encouraging people if they get a note to think, was this an appropriate request to make a person that I have this kind of relationship with. What is the effect of your action on your long term goals. So if you say no, does it help you achieve your long term goals. For something is it helping you achieve your long term goals. If not, you probably want to consider whether it's worth cashing in that kind of friendship karma, because relationships have to be a balance. So if you're asking for something you're basically cashing in some karma from the bank and going okay, you give me this then there will be a give and take later. There has to be give and take in the relationship. Now there are going to be times when people are in crisis, and you know one person in the relationship will need a whole lot more energy and effort for a sustained period of time even than the other person. But in healthy relationships. When this other person needs something, even if it's for a sustained period, then it's, you know, give and take there is a balance it's not just one person always taking Think about if you've done your homework. If you're not effective at getting your needs met or getting yeses. Are you creating an effective win win situation. Do you know what that other person's needs and wants are, and can you phrase your needs and wants in a way that will help them have a positive outcome as well. Even if all these other things are in alignment, the moon is full the stars are aligned, your timing just may be off. There are times when any other time, and I think we've all heard this and said it, any other time I would do it in a heartbeat. But right now, I can't being aware and respectful of that, encouraging clients to step out of themselves. And instead of being stuck at the no step back in here the any other time I would do it for you. And reflecting on whether their timing was just really bad, looking at what their part was in it. If clients are in their emotional mind when they are trying to have these discussions, they are trying to make the unpleasantness stop there and fight or flight. So encouraging them before going into any sort of interactions or whatever, which pretty much means every day at the beginning of the day. To mitigate any vulnerabilities if they're tired, if they're dehydrated if they haven't eaten well if they're in pain, or if they're sick. Making sure that they do their best to mitigate any vulnerabilities so they have as much energy as possible to deal with the curveballs that life might throw at them. Encourage them to review their distress tolerance skills, especially accepts and improve the moment. So go back to emotion regulation and regulating vulnerabilities, or you can just Google dbt and accepts and improve in order to identify what each one of each letter and these acronyms stands for, but basically these are methods of stepping back on hooking from your emotions until that adrenaline rush can bleed off until you can get into your wise mind. A lot of times it involves acting the opposite, taking a mental vacation, or trying to do something that will get you in a better place. All of these will help people take a break, take a break until they can get into their wise mind. Remembering that in the emotional mind, we are typically reacting on instinct, like if a B lands on your arm. Our instinct, you know, B lands on your arm, you may have the initial instinct to try to swat it off, because you don't want it to sting you.  So the wise mind would say, just be patient and it'll fly away in a second. Thinking about that every time, or encouraging clients to think about the B analogy, before they act each time. Are they swatting at the B, or are they making the best choice based on all of the information. This is one of those acceptance and commitment therapy kind of shortcut questions, but clients need to know before they take a decision, before they make a choice. Is it going to help them get closer to their long term goals? Or is it just them wasting energy? Because it's one or the other. If they're doing something, then in some way helps them move towards their positive goals. Wonderful. If they are doing something that's just kind of like spinning their wheels in mud, it's a choice they are, it's a valid choice to make, but is it helpful? We want to ask them, what are your long term goals in terms of happiness? What does it look like to be happy in your world? What are your health goals?  What are your goals in terms of your health? Is it just kind of staying alive, avoiding terminal illnesses and stuff? Cool. You know, just knowing what they are will help you figure out how much energy to devote to that. What are your long term goals in terms of relationships? Not only with whom, but what are those relationships going to look like? What does a healthy relationship look like to you? What are your long term goals in terms of work and personal growth? So having people really think about these and create that picture, create that collage of what they are working towards. We'll help them figure out or answer the question, is this helping me get closer to my ultimate goals? But we know that to get to our goals, we have to do things. And if we're going to do things, we want to do things that are consistent with our values, which is the second part. And I asked them to identify three or five adjectives that they want somebody to use to describe them.  It depends on the different person, successful, creative, wily.  Another activity you can do in group is have each person write down on an index card or a little piece of paper, five adjectives that describe somebody in the room. Put them all into a hat. And then the group leader pulls it out reads those five adjectives and you've got to figure out who was being described. Captain caveman. We don't want people to cave on their boundaries and priorities, unless they choose to. And most of the time we want them to be able to maintain solid healthy boundaries. Sometimes other people can get in the way of this by trying to convince you to do the right thing. And if you really want their approval, they may have more power at convincing you to do what they want instead of doing what is important for your clients long term health and happiness. So I encourage them to look at why, if they've caved on their values and their boundaries before. What is motivated that what made them decide that you know what okay I give in how what is motivated them to become Captain caveman. And what can they do what changes do they need to make so they can be stronger and maintain their boundaries. There are other situations that people are just not going to win. And I said earlier sometimes you have to sacrifice the battle in order to win the war. A cop on a traffic stop is more powerful than most people that person at that particular point in time has the power. Our clients can choose or we can choose to buy our time and then go fight the ticket if you will in a in a court where things are allegedly more level. If you're in a meeting at work and your boss is saying something that you vehemently disagree with. The chances are your boss is probably going to win and thinking about with this power dynamic a is this an appropriate place and time to argue the point. And am I going to win, or is this is this person is my boss going to win so I need to figure out how to make the situation work for me. If you've ever been in middle management, you've been here. If a child, a young person wants the car keys and they're trying to get them from their parent, you know, parent has more power. So sometimes the youth is not going to win in a lot of these situations negotiation and patients play an important role in being interpersonally effective. And sometimes, you know, a child might say, I will pick my sister up from camp every day this summer if I can just have the keys right now and go into the negotiating. And that's possible. But being aware that there are some situations, some battles you're going to lose. So how do you turn it into a win. That's going to be different for each client. Each client is going to have to figure out how do they deal with defeat if they don't get their own way. What does that mean about them. What does that mean about the situation, and then going back to those priorities we clarified. What does that mean in terms of how they meet their wants and needs, their relationships and their self respect. And what is the next step that's necessary to help them continue on a positive direction. The need for external validation can cause people to give in, not be assertive, and to fear abandonment. So this adds all kinds of stress. I encourage clients to really explore what they consider the difference between being self confident and having self esteem and arrogance. A lot of my clients are are hesitant to develop self esteem because they equate self esteem with arrogance so we talk about the difference.  And everybody I've worked with so far thank you has said yes.  You want to build a good group discussion. And if clients believe they don't deserve to be happy. I encourage them to tell me all the reasons they don't deserve to get what they want or think they should have. Why don't you deserve it. And then I make them argue the other side.  And then we'll take all of those reasons on both sides and synthesize them. None of this is perfect. All of us have made mistakes so yeah, sometimes we haven't been 100% deserving but really most of the time. And the difference is that on us deserving to be treated well to be happy to achieve yada yada. So we want to help them understand that even if you've done something that you feel guilty for or ashamed of. It doesn't mean you don't deserve to have a new start things that inhibit interpersonal effectiveness. People play devil's advocate with the following myths, and you can do this in group, go around the room and have somebody make a devil's advocate statement. If I make a request it shows I'm weak. So I would also encourage them to explain that to me why does that mean you're weak. I have to know if a person's going to say yes before I make a request. Why. If I ask for something or say no I can't stand it if somebody gets mad. So going back to those irrational thoughts and cognitive distortions that we are so familiar with. We want to encourage them to address this playing devil's advocate make request making requests is really pushy bad selfish thing to do. My guess is that's what they heard growing up. So, encouraging them to explain their reasoning for this and then argue the opposite. Saying no to a request is always selfish. I asked them to look at what they consider selfish. The way recovery is selfish and in a way it's true. We have to be 100% we have to be there and happy and functional to be of service to anyone else. So we do need to take care of ourselves. And if that's what they mean by selfish. You know, I would encourage them to look at whether that's a good or a bad thing, taking care of oneself versus doing everything for oneself at the expense of everyone else. I should be willing to sacrifice my own needs for others parentheses all the time. We might talk about when this might be true. I must really be inadequate if I can't fix this myself. A lot of times we talk about things like asking for help when you need it versus just asking for help because you don't want to do something. If I would just think differently, I wouldn't have to bother everybody else. How often is that worked. So pointing out to them that a sometimes no matter how how you think you may not have the tools, but be sometimes and a lot of times other people don't see it as a bother when you're asking for help. They're willing to provide help. So encouraging them to explore whether they're assuming they're bothering people. I shouldn't have to ask you should know what I want and do it. Again, if you're able to read minds don't expect everybody else can but generally nobody can read minds. So it's important to put that back out there you can use some motivational interviewing and say something like.  They'll probably say no. So then you can turn it back around and say, All right. So why is it that other people should be able to read your mind. Or you could just ask what a more effective way would be to get their needs met. I shouldn't have to negotiate or work at getting what I want. Play devil's advocate here. What happens if nobody had to negotiate or work at getting anything. Other people should like approve and support me. Again, one of those usual irrational thoughts. Everybody's not going to like approve and support you. If they don't what does that mean. Other people don't deserve to be treated well if they aren't nice to me. So you know how do you feel about yourself if you're mean and spiteful to someone just because they were mean and spiteful to you. I must have what I want when I want it. And my first response is why what happens if you don't get it. And generally it's it feels awful or I can't stand it. Then I follow up with okay, how can you deal with that reaction not being able to control a situation and getting angry about it. Revenge feels so good that it's worth the negative consequences. Asking them what's the benefit to revenge in this particular situation. How does it help you use your energy to get closer to your goals. Most of the time it doesn't it may feel better, but it doesn't really help you use your energy to get closer to your goals. And one they really hate is in what way does revenge actually give that person your control and energy, because they're convincing you to use your energy for something that's not going to further you towards your goals. You're giving them your power. Getting what I want is more important than how I get it the end always justifies the means. So there are a lot of different questions you can ask. I encourage them to differentiate between a want and a need, and sometimes we'll go through the Hans scenario. Hans's wife was sick, and he couldn't afford the medication. If she didn't get it she would die. He knew where he could get it, but he would have to steal it. So does Hans let her die, or does he steal the medication? Either way is it's sort of a lose lose question or quandary. But we talk about you know what would you do in those situations and why would one win out over the other. So keeping relationships. Give no attacks, threats, manipulation, judging, sneering, smirking, eye rolling or name calling. Be nice. Be interested. Listen. Pay attention to nonverbals, not only theirs, but also yours. Notice if you start tapping your foot or looking disinterested. Try to maintain healthy eye contact. Obviously don't bear into their soul because that's kind of freaky. But don't be looking around at everybody else in the squirrels outside the window. Try to unhook from your emotions. If you start to get upset, remind yourself by saying I'm having the feeling that this is unpleasant right now. And deal with that. But try to unhook so you don't have to get stuck struggling with the unpleasantness. Validate the other person by paying attention, reflecting back what they say and pay paying attention to what's not being said. Understand how the other person's reactions and thoughts make sense based on their past and present. It may not from be what you would have done, but based on their experience, how does it make sense. Acknowledge the valid and show equality, treating the other person as an equal, not as fragile and incompetent, or on the other hand, as domineering. And have an easy manner. Smile, laugh, try not to get too intense. Keeping self respect also means being fair to yourself and the other person. Not apologizing for your feelings or opinions and not invalidating the valid. What your feelings are are your feelings. They are very valid. Stick to your values and be truthful. That helps you maintain self respect in interactions with others. So if you're having difficulty getting needs met, ask yourself, or have the client ask themselves, do I have the knowledge and skills I need to be effective in this situation? Maybe they have issues with authority figures, so they might need additional skills in dealing with that. I know what I really want in this situation. Am I having trouble balancing priorities, compromising, or is fear, shame, or guilt getting in the way? Figuring out exactly where the barriers are. Our short term goals, getting in the way of long term goals. Maybe I really want to get a promotion, but I also at this point in time really, really want this person to like me. Is my emotional mind in control and are my emotions getting in the way of using my skills? Are worries, assumptions, or myths getting in the way of me being effective? And is the environment just more powerful than my skills are? Sometimes it is, and sometimes you have to accept a loss. Generally developing relationships. Relationships require attention and a clear awareness of what you want, need, and expect from other people. It's important to make full use of opportunity to interact with others and to interact with people who share similar interests and generally respond positively to you. Start by looking for people with similar interests. Introverts may only want to be around a couple of people while extroverts may enjoy broader gatherings. Figure out what your interests are and then start exploring meetups and Facebook groups and church groups and anything you can think of where you might be able to meet people with similar interests. Work on conversational skills. Practice, rehearse, asking open-ended questions. Identify two things each day when you read the news or look on the internet that you could make small talk about. Practice finding common ground with people and practice skillfully self-disclosing, not giving people way more information than they wanted. It's a give and take and we can explain how we learned about reciprocal self-disclosure when we were going through counseling training.  To maintain relationships, you need to be mindful, which means being self-aware not only of yourself, but also your impact on others and their impact on you, any transference issues you may have going on. Pay attention to conversations with interest and curiosity, which includes not multitasking, staying in the present instead of planning your response while they're still talking. Focus on those around you if you're in a group situation and be open to new information. I encourage clients to try to learn at least one new thing each day and try to let go of judgment, judgmental thoughts about others. Using your wise mind skills, you can observe and pay attention with curiosity, staying in the present instead of focusing on your response, focusing on those around you, and letting go of those judgmental thoughts. So that's kind of a rehash of what we just talked about. But then you take it to describe. Once you've observed it, then you describe it by replacing judgmental words with descriptive ones. Avoid assuming or interpreting what other people think without checking the facts. Don't question others' motives and try to give others the benefit of the doubt. Take all that and then try to participate in the situation by engaging in interactions, going with the flow, and becoming one with group activities and conversations instead of trying to hold on and control where everything goes. Sometimes relationships are just unhealthy, so it's important to make the decision in the wise mind if a relationship needs to be ended. Consider problem solving if the relationship is important and not destructive. Troubleshoot problems and rehearse coping strategies ahead of time, problems in this discussion about ending the relationship. Be direct, be safe, and practice the opposite action for love, which is disinterest. People with emotional dysregulation often struggle in relationships due to lack of effective interpersonal skills, need for external validation, and a lack of clarity about exactly what they want and need out of situations and relationships. Interpersonal effectiveness helps people clarify their wants and needs, enhance their assertiveness and interpersonal skills, enhance their self-esteem, and develop and maintain supportive relationships that can help them achieve their ultimate goals. If you enjoy this podcast, please like and subscribe either in your podcast player or on YouTube. You can attend and participate in our live webinars with Dr. Snipes by subscribing at allceuse.com slash counselor toolbox. This episode has been brought to you in part by allceuse.com, providing 24-7 multimedia continuing education and pre-certification training to counselors, therapists, and nurses since 2006.


Okay, hi welcome back again to 19th and 20th century philosophy today. We're talking about Edmund Husserl Husserl was a German philosopher Born in 1859. So 11 years after Frege Born the same year as John Dewey and 30 years before Martin Heidegger 1859 is also the same year that both on Liberty by Mill and Mill And Darwin's origin of the species were published. So 1859 was a pretty big year Husserl died in in 1938 10 years after retiring Now Husserl is often regarded as the grandfather or founder of continental philosophy Certainly, he was the founder of the tradition of phenomenology Which became an important part of the continental tradition Um But like Frege before him probably better to think him of him as a progenitor rather than a practitioner of that tradition now, um Husserl was trained in mathematics and psychology His early work again much like Frege's was on logic the foundations of mathematics and the theory of meaning um Husserl's very earliest work focused on The foundations of mathematics particularly on the concept of number And on the nature of arithmetic and arithmetic knowledge Husserl tried to ground this in psychology, right? So at the beginning of his career, he was a follower of of his mentor Brentano's psychologism But by 1900 Husserl had given this up and had become one of the strongest proponents of anti-psychologism Now some interpreters have thought that this was due in large part to frege's critique Of husserl's views in their correspondence. They had they wrote letters to each other in the early 1890s um as well as uh frege published a review in 1894 of husserl's first book The Philosophy of Arithmetic But other interpreters have more recently argued that husserl started to independently recognize The problems with psychologism and little known writings from 1891 and to come to Some of the key ideas that he shares with frege Earlier than we had previously thought So after this point husserl's first major work was the logical investigations The first part of which is a major attack on psychologism The later parts of which he lays out his views And his method of phenomenology In the context of trying to understand the nature of logic Like frege, husserl's investigations of logic and mathematics lead him into considerations of the nature of meaning And many have said that husserl took over frege's distinction between sense and reference sin and bedoy tongue directly But again more recent commentators and interpreters have pointed towards this 1891 essay by by husserl Which is earlier than frege's discussion of sense and reference by about a year And the fact that husserl sent that essay to frege as part of their correspondence Is evidence that maybe husserl arrived at the distinction earlier Or even that husserl may have influenced frege's thinking And whichever way the influence goes it's certain that these were That there were these significant similarities and interactions between these two thinkers I think that's key And just as a as another side note if frege is a Progenitor of analytic philosophy and husserl of continental philosophy What does it say about the supposed analytic continental divide? That their interests were so close to one another and that they actively engaged ideas That's what we're thinking about now husserl never gave up on brentano's dream of making philosophy into A rigorous science. This is something that husserl took away from brentano Though husserl gave up on psychology as a method for doing this so instead Husserl came up with a new approach phenomenology to do the job And he thought this was going to be the key to turning philosophy into a strict science Now giving a full account of what phenomenology is and how it works and its history would be a whole course, right? But I think it's helpful to think about the differences between psychology As a as an approach to philosophical questions and husserl's phenomenology. So Both are concerned in some way with with consciousness with the mind or with experience especially the the sort of psychology of of husserl's time But phenomenology is purely a first person method Psychology is at least partly third person. It looks at it looks at The mind from the point of view of behavior and from an objective standpoint Psychology is empirical, right experimental But phenomenology is a priori, right? It's not only first person, but it doesn't depend on the content of any particular experience um And while psychology is concerned with the study of concrete mental activities unfolding in time Um phenomenology is concerned with with universal essences essences of consciousness Now One thing that's worth mentioning Given given that we're talking so much about the relationship between husserl and frega Husserl's phenomenology involves an expansion of the theory of meaning that husserl shares with frega from just language, right? So Whether whether he's talking about natural languages like german or english or constructed languages like logic and mathematics frega is focused on the meaning of language the meaning of expressions in a language um Husserl is interested in that but also expands his focus to include The the meaning of any kind of conscious Experience or or act, right? So he's also interested in The meaning of perceptual experiences for example So the structure of consciousness for husserl is is what he calls intentional it has intentionality means it represents something As being a certain way it stands for something, right? um Not only does it refer to something outside of itself, right? It also has a sense or content so he Uses that two-dimensional picture of meaning to talk about Experience like now It's also worth saying like frega this further content is not a mental picture It's it's another kind of objective thing that husserl sometimes calls the noema, right? The noema is is a lot like the freguin sin or sins And uh, it You know and then in different parts of of husserl's career. He thinks of this more platonistically, right? Or a more um, you know in a Kantian transcendental way Um, although that's that's a very complicated story Now for frega and husserl both I think there are puzzles about the relation between The expression or the intentional act its sense or sin or noema And its referent or the object it indicates Does the word or the experience Determine both its content and its denotation Or is the content of the Of the word or phrase um Or the experience Somehow involved in determining what the denotation of that thing is what the reference of that thing is So there's a set of of puzzles there for um Frega and husserl to solve and also for their interpreters to try to understand Now you've read husserl's expression and meaning When part of it which hope gives you a good sense both of the continuity with frega as well as what is distinctive about husserl's early phenomenological method There's a lot more to say about this and so I look forward to discussing it with you But that gives a sort of introduction to Some of the key ideas And some of the background here of husserl and his relationship to frega So thanks for thanks for joining me. Uh, I look forward to discussing with you And uh, I'll see you next time


The people who come here and they come into these labs, they're sometimes not even knowing where they want to go, but what we do here gives them the opportunity to work that out and see where they can take their skills to help others and see what they can change. Hi I'm Vance Lawrence, I'm the Senior Technical Officer in Undergraduate Chemistry here at the Research School of Chemistry at the ANU. A lot of what we're doing here is trying to get the basic theory into people's understandings, a small amount of basic techniques as people progress through their technique base improves and the theory and the understanding is more what happens in the lectures. During laboratory classes we are in the labs. That's not always common with people in our position in other universities. We provide advice and some instruction on technique, particularly as we get to higher year levels and we're always keeping an eye out on safety. You have your head on a swivel as they say. The lab behind me, this is Fergie and theoretically this is the only lab that is always timetabled for chemistry. This is largely where the students will do their planning work. All of their actual work happens at the few hoods. One of the things I'm often doing is synthesizing materials that may be known to science but aren't known to commercial science. Quite simply because there's not the call for it. It's one of these rare research materials. It proves the point. It helps show the theory that they're trying to demonstrate but it's not a commercially viable thing. So what we've got here is trimethyl for nitrofenyl and final silane. So 50 milligrams of this retails for about $178. So when you add up how much of synthesize just to make sure that our third year class can actually do what it needs to do, technically that's about $146,000 worth. You can't spend that kind of money on undergraduates unfortunately. So what do we do? We synthesize it ourselves. Well today the students here, they're doing the final year catalytic chemistry course and they're actually making use of the silane that we made up previously. Well these labs are brilliant. The student interaction is the best part of our jobs. All the reward every day of seeing the students passing through and moving on. And that is seriously its own reward. I know it sounds a bit corny but for me it is.


I am sure you have heard of Amazon Alexa. One can create a wide variety of voice-based apps using Alexa. You will notice that many Alexa apps are developed using Lambda or Python or Java. If your organization has invested in Drupal extensively, it makes more sense to make Alexa skills using Drupal PHP rather than use Lambda or Node.js or Python. In this presentation, we will show you how to easily create Alexa voice skills using Drupal libraries for Alexa. We have some live demonstrations for you on an Alexa Echo device. So let's start. Hi, welcome to FACTSkill. Do you want to hear a Drupal fact? Here is a Drupal fact. Drupal was originally written by Drives by Tart as a message board. Do you want to hear more Drupal facts? Yes. Here is a Drupal fact. As of March 2021, the Drupal community comprised of more than 1.39 million members. Do you want to hear more Drupal facts? Yes. Here is a Drupal fact. Drupal has over 2,903 themes that change the look and feel of websites. Do you want to hear more Drupal facts? Goodbye. The architecture of the FACTSkill is lightweight and can be used for multilingual, real-time voice notifications example, policy updates, flash briefing, etc. One could add search features and make a useful skill such as finding a parking space skill. Welcome to Geography Drupal. You can touch a category or you can speak the category, example, capitals, mountains, etc. Now, which one would you want to do today? Capital of Uganda is Kampala. Uganda, officially the Republic of Uganda, is a landlocked country in East Central Africa. It is bordered to the east by Kenya, to the north by South Sudan, to the west by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to the southwest by Rwanda, and to the south by Tanzania. The southern part of the country includes a substantial portion of Lake Victoria, shared with Kenya and Tanzania. Uganda is in the African Great Lakes region. Uganda also lies within the Nile Basin and has a varied but generally a modified equatorial climate. Alexa, give me the geography of Turkey. Capital of Turkey is Ankara. Turkey, officially the Republic of Turkey, is a country straddling southeastern Europe and western Asia. It shares borders with Greece and Bulgaria to the northwest, the Black Sea to the north, Georgia to the northeast, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Iran to the east, Iraq to the southeast, Syria and the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and the Aegean Sea to the west. Istanbul, the largest city, is the financial center, and Ankara is the capital. Turks form the vast majority of the nation's population, and Kurds are the largest minority. Alexa, goodbye. Goodbye. This one is a sophisticated skill. The demo shows actual integration with Wikipedia API and also Google Maps. This skill can be used for quizzes and dialogues and API integration. We used a lot of APL code, Alexa presentation language, and tons of JavaScript to make the skill. It is still a lightweight architecture. Run recipe. Six slices, day old bread. Two tablespoons, butter, melted. Half cup, raisins. Four eggs, beaten. Two cups, milk. One teaspoon, brown cinnamon. One teaspoon, vanilla extract. Total calories, 600. Step one, preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, 175 degrees Celsius. Step two, break bread into small pieces into a baking pan. Step three, pour melted butter over bread. Step four, sprinkle with raisins. Step five, in a medium mixing bowl, combine eggs, milk, sugar, cinnamon and vanilla. Beat until well mixed. Step six, pour the mix over the bread and lightly push down with a fork until the bread is covered and soaking up the egg mix. Step seven, bake for 45 minutes. Your bread pudding is ready. Serve hot or serve cold as preferred. You can add syrup or ice cream to make it yummier. Enjoy your bread pudding. This kind of skill can be used to bring voice to a numbered list of items or a bill of materials. Has usefulness in inventory and pharmacy and healthcare and construction. Wherever there is a long list of items, this skill can be used. Alexa, run Drupal storefront. Welcome to storefront. Please select a product. Alexa, search for sugar. Searching for sugar. Alexa, search for mango. Searching for mango. Alexa, select mango. The product is mango. Quantity updated successfully. Going back to the main menu. Alexa, search for banana. Searching for banana. Alexa, select banana. The product is banana. Alexa, input four. Quantity updated successfully. Going back to the main menu. Alexa, search for honey. Searching for honey. Alexa, select honey. The product is honey. Alexa, input one. Quantity updated successfully. Going back to the main menu. Alexa, check out. Check out. Thank you for shopping with storefront. Alexa, search for milk. I can't find the product you're searching for. Adding for to your shopping list. Alexa, goodbye. Goodbye. The storefront has a sophisticated architecture. It pulls the item list along with stock levels and pricing from the inventory management. It gives a good B2C interface for voice-based e-commerce. In the demo, we have provided full integration, including search. The demo shows all the way from selecting a product to actual checkout. A feature that could be useful is that a reorder level can trigger. Alexa reminder and Alexa shopping list. Thereby making this a unique skill for your customers. Look at the blogs hosted on a Drupal site. There are five blog items as highlighted by the cursor. The Alexa voice blog skill will be voice enabling these blogs in real time. This is a live integration with a Drupal blog. We will be using an Alexa simulator screen. Instead of the Alexa device. Alexa get my blogs. Hello, Fiverr friend. Here are your latest blog items. This is a Drupal con demo. How to integrate sales force with Drupal. Leadership in remote workforce. How to leaders successfully manage productivity in these challenging times. Alexa integration. How to do Alexa integration. Drupal 11. Is there really something like that? What kind of enhancements in 2021 and 2022 will lead to a Drupal 11? Alexa Drupal PHP. Lightweight framework for heavy lifting opportunities. Start your voice enablement today with the Alexa Drupal PHP. Voice blogs can be a good ROI for your Drupal investment. A voice blog can bring productivity and excitement to your Alexa Drupal initiatives. If you have invested big time in Drupal CMS. Doing voice blog skills can connect your employees and business very effectively. Today. We saw six demos. Here is the code structure. For developing Alexa Drupal PHP skills. You need a Drupal server on cloud or on-premise. You will need to host the Alexa Drupal libraries on the Drupal server. You will also need an AWS account to set up the callback from Alexa to your Drupal code. As far as people expertise is concerned. You need PHP expertise for building the skills. You also need people who can do front-end design using Alexa proprietary APL. And people who understand common technologies like JavaScript, web services, JSON formats. Here are some resources. To help with your Alexa Drupal PHP journey.


To give a sense, I mean that's 1.3 million children refugees in just over two weeks. It is the, in speed and scale, the biggest refugee crisis we've seen since World War II. We spend every day at the train station watching husbands and wives farewell each other, fathers sort of get down on their haunches and explain to their sons and little daughters, you know, why they're going to a country they've not heard of and why dad is staying behind. And that's those families at that point, it's taken them usually three or five days to get to that point through freezing conditions, nights in bunkers or worse makeshift bunkers and basements. I saw children in hospitals in ICU and incubators, they cannot leave or at least it's much more complicated and dangerous for them to leave. So these emergency medical supplies that UNICEF gets in, surgical equipment, you know, midwifery equipment because mum's having babies in bunkers and makeshift maternity wards, that kind of supplies that UNICEF is getting in are life-saving. Child protection, tracking and tracing, which UNICEF does well but is an enormous ask. We're very worried about trafficking right now given the scale. You know, you're looking at a million refugees in Poland, these kids need some normalcy, that goes hand in hand with trauma support. And then the basics, water, sanitation. We were recently doing water trucking in Mariupol but it's not to the scale we need because every time there's talk of a humanitarian corridor it's broken. I go from what Ukrainians say to me and of the hundreds of families, usually mums and children who are good enough in their moments of deep stress and sorrow to talk to me but as they were leaving I did not speak to a person who did not want to be back.  Everyone wants to be back.


Hi, I'm Chris Bloom, and I'm an architect in a storage BU. Today, I'm going to talk about traditional stateful applications on OpenShift 4 using OpenShift Container Storage 4. And we will show this on a little demo that leverages typical Rails and Postgres application. Today, we're going to talk about what we consider traditional stateful applications, why you should use OCS for these applications, and then I'm going to show you this quick demo with the Rails and Postgres application. So what do we consider traditional stateful applications? These are applications that typically store state and rely on that state to be present. So these applications generally, when you install them, have an init phase where they initialize their backend storage. And typically, if it's a database, they put in tables and indexes and all that. And then once users use these applications, the data that they rely on, it grows and you have to keep it. Since they're traditional applications, they're not necessarily aware that they're running inside of OpenShift. And they also don't typically leverage OpenShift for Kubernetes APIs, such as secrets or config maps, but they might be using them indirectly without knowing that they're actually using them. So why should I use OCS for my stateful applications? OCS has a very easy way to install itself. It's built upon battle-tested software like Rogue and Seth that have already been used for many, many years by customers in productive environments. And it has been shown that using this software, it's very easy to scale out and not only increase the capacity, which is easy, but it can also increase the performance almost linearly. Then obviously, using OCS, you get Red Hat support. And since that software, Seth and Rogue, the storage software is so popular, we can also look on a very large community that helps us in certain areas. So going forward with the demo, what we're going to see is a deployment of a typical Rails application that relies on a Postgres database backend. So Postgres manages the state of the application. Application itself is not stateful. And Postgres is backed by OCS to retain it. And to show you that this is actually true, we're going to scale down the application in the end to simulate a fault. And then we scale it back up so that it comes back up and we show that our data is actually safe. So let's head over there. For this, we're going to use this example here that I've prepared. And we're just going to deploy this application now, just like we have in the example here. This will take a bit, but I'm going to fast forward the video so you don't have to wait. With the OC status, we can theoretically check on our application and we do see that it's currently still new. But we can also see that we already have a PVC for our Postgres database. And that is already bound. So the backend storage system, which is backed by CefRBD, has already created this volume and it's ready for the pod to use it. So let's check how far the deployment is already. Okay, so our Postgres deployment has finished. The database is ready to be used. The Rails application is currently in the build phase. And as you can see in the guide here, after the build we deploy, have a hook, and then we actually deploy our application. We'll come back in a second. Okay. As we can see now, the Postgres part is running and the Rails application has gone through its build deployment hook setup and it's now also running. So we are good to continue. And to continue, we will figure out how we can reach our application by checking on the routes. And our routes looks like this. So in this example, we see that we have to append slash articles to log in. We are using these credentials here. So username, open shift, password, secret. Let's do that. We click on new article and we use a title like I'm running on your CS. And this is great. So this is our first article. I'm not going to comment on it right now, so we go back to the other video and we see that this is a great article. So this is our first state. As you've seen, we have gone through an init phase, the Rails application that prepared the Postgres database. And now, as a user, we created our very first data and that will also be retained in our Postgres database. So now, let's look a little bit more on our storage backend. And for this, let's first get an overview of our PVC system volume claim that we already saw before. Now its name is Postgres, it's bound. It's using SethRBD. To look at SethRBD a little bit closer, we will go into the SethRook toolbox. And this is how we get in there. Then we can execute commands like SethDF or RadosDF, which will both give us a good overview of how our storage is used. We do see that our storage glass is based on SSD disks. We do have a lot of pools, but we're currently only interested in this pool because it matches what the storage glass is using. So SethRBD is backed by the SethBlock pool. And so let's look at the images that are inside of this pool. We do this by executing RBD with minus P, which is for pool. And we do see that we have two images. And based on the PVC name, I would assume that it's this volume that is basing our Postgres database. So we can look at this a little bit closer using info. And we do see that size is five gigabytes. So this is very, very likely our image. List all the PVCs in all namespaces like this. Then we can see that there are actually two PVCs that are using the OCS storage glass. And that's our Postgres application and also the Nuva database. Nuva database is using 50 gigabytes. So since this is five gigabytes, this is indeed our Seth volume that we're exporting to our application. So now we have our application up here and we do see that the articles are there and everything is good. So let's simulate a little bit of full. We go over here and this is the web UI of OpenShift 4. And we are looking now at the replication controllers inside of our project that we created called myDatabase app. And we do have here the replication controllers for Postgres and Rails. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to watch the pots here and here I'm going to change the count. So I'm going to decrease the amount of Postgres databases that I say we need. This will terminate our Postgres cluster. So what the replication controller did is it started a new Postgres. And as you can see, even though it's a completely new database, we now have our articles up there and we're perfectly fine with this. So this concludes our little demo of Rails application using Postgres that is backed by OCS as you can see. It's fairly simple to do that and even to demo this in a matter of 10 minutes. And if you have questions, please use the Q&A part and I'm happy to answer there.


Nationalism in Pakistan, Pakistan is a monumental society and Islam is an instrumental variable and this identity across with the two nation theory, the creation of a separate Muslim state. These all facts are telling the story of Pakistan nationalism because if we may analyze that what is Pakistani nation then we have to be kept in mind that the Pakistani nation, historically these are the Muslims who have struggled a lot for the creation of Pakistan. And the Muslims were not limited to a specific area, neither to a language, nor to a culture. That means the Muslims who were spread in different parts of the world, they collectively started a revolution in their own place as a result of which the revolution of Pakistan came into existence. So Pakistan is basically represents a multi-cultural and diverse society. Because Pakistan's representation is not based on a group or a specific culture. Basically Pakistan's beauty, the state of Pakistan's basic strength is its diversity because it is a nation of different languages, different cultures and different people who have come to Pakistan leaving their own areas and settled here. So now Pakistan represents a diverse population whose characteristics are based on a state of Pakistan and its citizens. So we can say that Pakistani society has unique features and everyone has the right to pursue its entity and identity. Pakistan does not force anyone to take away their identity. But we have also seen that under some specific circumstances, when the representative system was not present in the country, there were some groups who felt more suppressed. And because of that, the state of Pakistan has raised its voices for themselves. So we can highlight some of the issues like the Pashtuns. They are basically ethnically close to Afghans because they share common culture and language. So their relationship with each other is very deep rooted and for the centuries. But the local identity or identity or the affiliations within the group of Afghans is the largest province where the area is the largest one and the smallest province with the population. So this is a specific feature of Pakistan's main area. The population number is low. So at some times due to the distribution of resources and the civic sense it is not focused on. Specifically, why is the issue of nationalism more important in Pakistan? Because the middle class is much smaller and lesser. Here, there are tribal chiefs and there are lower class workers. The linking line of the middle class is so low that we can't even see it. That's why in the context of nationalism there is a lot of debate. Sometimes the problems are much more identical. But that is the responsibility of the political system to tackle down all these such type of issues. Similarly, let's look at ethnic or linguistic based nationalism in Pakistan whether it is within Sindh or Karachi. All these issues are present in Pakistan. But in any democratic state, nationalism's feelings are not snubbed. In fact, the main stream of the political system is the part of it and these feelings have the effort to somehow calm down. And in Pakistan, this process is going on.


From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier in the CUBE studios in Palo Alto, California. We're excited to have a great tech talk here with good friend, Howie Hsu, who's currently the vice president of machine learning and AI at Zscaler, formerly an entrepreneur which he sold his company at Zscaler before that, entrepreneur and resident in Greylock before that, VMware variety of other endeavors. Howie and I, we've known each other for a while. Great to have you come in and chat about- Great to be here. The Zoom, Zscaler, these are the new breed, modern era company, SaaS, business models, really interesting and it's something that we were talking about on email and over text, it's our topic. Yeah. Thanks for coming in. Great. So you've seen the waves at VMware, you saw the rapid growth there. And now you work for Zscaler which is experiencing rapid growth. You saw Zoom go public and I just interviewed Michael Dell. We were commenting about that on texts as well. He said, these big markets that have big total addressable dollars associated with them are right for disruption. You know, they used to have high barriers to entry in the old ways to look at it. But now with cloud and with SaaS, with data, there's different and innovation speeds. This has become a big deal. Talk about your view on this. Well, to me, you know, when Zoom and then Zscaler founded many years ago, no one believed that they would have become this big, right? When Zoom founded, there were plenty of the conference free software available out there. When Jay founded Zscaler, people thought, well, there was enough security companies, security solutions. Clearly, they defied conventional wisdom and then they just fought on. And they saw something that other people didn't see, which is, you know, precisely what you were talking about. The SaaS is so different, right? The business model, the innovation speed, the data-driven kind of the thing, it's so different. So a lot of people say, hey, you know, what's the difference between SaaS versus the conventional? Isn't that just moving that thing over to the cloud? You know, I actually used to think that way too, right? Isn't that just the virtual clients moving on to Amazon Cloud? You know, after living and breathing in SaaS company and then also observing that in the VC industry as well, you know, it's just totally different. They are nine different. Well, I want to get in this with you, because I think you can bring some good perspective onto these insights into the rocket success of, say, Zoom and Zscaler. But Zoom in particular, recent successful IPO among the recent classes past quarter, you know, Zoom, Lyft, Uber, Zoom is standing out. They're getting profitable. This is video conferencing.  Cloud, data, simplicity, and the big 800-pound gorilla was the web axis of the world, who was defined, divine for sharing slides, not so much pure video. They really innovated the focus and the speed of success, unprecedented in my opinion. I think this is a huge success of what the opportunities are for entrepreneurs. Yeah, I think on the surface, right, if you ask Eric, he would tell you that, look, you know, the WebEx was designed for sharing slides, and then the Zoom was designed from ground up for video sharing or the video conferencing. So it's very different. It requires different architecture. So that's very true, but I think that there is a more fundamental to that. The more fundamental for that is, there are a few things, right? One is, you know, the product, the life cycle is very different. Like, you know, how do you approach the customer, right? You know, the release cycle, right? The sort of the feedback loop, right?   So innovation is just, you know, accelerated because it's SaaS, because it's a true SaaS. And this is a unique thing that you said before. You know, SaaS isn't just lifting a on-premises workload and moving it to the cloud. It's a completely different mindset. Talk about this dynamic, because it forwards new kinds of risk-taking. You know, I was talking about before we came on camera. Share your insight on that.  You know, and then once the product is in customer hand, if you have a bug, if you have something, it's so costly to change it, right? But as a SaaS kind of the form factor, you can take a little bit more risk, right? You can even give, you know, that feature set to 10% of your audience, not the entire set of the audience. You can do those kinds of magic so that you can accelerate the innovation. And while as a stream wrap software, the traditional way, you know, you have one shot. If that software is not good, then you are toast, right? Yeah, so you can move quicker. You can push code. You don't have to have the on-premise dynamic. Yeah, the innovation and then risk-taking are kind of correlated, right? Relatively more risk, you know, the more you are willing to take risk, you know, relatively you can take more innovation. So that's the- Well, you and I were talking, one of the key things that you've been talking about publicly and amongst friends is innovation speed. Everyone wants the innovation fever. Hey, I got to innovate, you know, digital transformation, rah, rah. And easier said than done. Innovation speed is critical with cloud and SaaS. Why? What's the formula there for innovation speed? Well, one thing we discussed, the release cycle, right? You know, for a, not necessarily for Zoom and Zscaler, but you know, for SaaS in general, it's possible for you to have daily, weekly, monthly release, right? Traditional software, there's no way you can do that. But that's just the release cycle of that. The other thing is, you know, the you can actually take a risk and you can say, hey, I want to try to raise 1% of the customer and then see whether they are, how they are going to react to this. But in the traditional way, you have product manager debating for six months, six years on whether or how to do things right here. Let's not debate. Let's just see. Let's ship it. Right. Yes, ship it. Every Hopin always says, you know, if he's not embarrassed by your first shipment, then you're not doing it properly, which begs the question.  What is the right way to do it? And what's the wrong way to do? When you look at an entrepreneur or a friend who's trying to get some business off the ground, SaaS business, when you look at what they're doing, you can look at their, the mechanisms and how they're organizing their team, their code, what's, what jumps out at you as the wrong way and what's the right way? Well, the, I think the culture is really it, right? You know, the kind of the culture of incremental success and the fast, you know, iteration is the culture for SaaS company, right? For the traditional one, you cannot afford to do that because when you, once you make a small mistake, you are toast, right? So, so I think, you know, the culture difference, you really wanted to have faster iteration. And that also comes down to the team, the people, right? Yes. The people selection. Yes. If you, if you are kind of used to this waterfall thing, it's pretty hard to adapt to this kind of the SaaS world. And what's your advice that entrepreneurs reset? Because if you say speed is of the essence, resetting is probably something that's not hard to do then. One, one, one, I would say easy, but not easy way. Hey, these were pivot, but you know, resetting means, okay, stop, rebuild. I think, I think one, you know, way to think about it is actually looking at how to build enterprise software like the consumer sort of product way, right? If you think about Facebook or Google, the traditional Google, right? Of course, Google now has a price product. But the traditional sort of the Google, Facebook, kind of the product, it's more for consumers to consume. I mean, there are faster iterations. How often, you know, what's the criteria to release a product? Enterprise product is getting towards there, right? You know, you need that kind of the thing. So if you don't know how to do it, look at Facebook, Facebook, of course. Facebook need to pull the other way around and they need to care more about the privacy, care about more stability. So I think you are seeing the sort of the two sides of the world that the enterprise side and the consumer side, that they are learning from each other. Well, I want to get to the enterprise talk track in a second because I think you're going to get a lot of incidents. I want to stay on the SaaS, you know, cloud native or cloud specifically because that's where SaaS really shines when you really talk about cloud scale. Data, you're doing AI now and you and I have both talked about data many times. Yes.  I love data. I think software and data. I wrote a blog post in 2007 that says data is the new developer kit. Maybe the more developer kit was used back then, but you're not now seeing where data is part of the developer's piece of their value creation. Highly addressable, available, usable, not stored in some silo on addressable low late, you know, high latency to get it. How important is the data for the SaaS piece? Because that's where to make these kind of changes you're talking about, you need the data. Data's giving you insights. This is something that's near and dear to your heart. Explain your vision of the role of data. Yeah, I think, you know, you touched upon it, right? If you want to make sense out of something, you need the data, right? And if it's not SaaS, I would go, you know, maybe a more extreme way, but it's not clear to me that data is even useful to you because, you know, the data may be, you know, for some large software company, they may have hundreds of thousands of customers out there, but the data is spread around.  So the real, the correct or the optimal way is actually the SaaS model.  So I want to say, this is actually another benefit of the SaaS, why SaaS is going to change the world or either world is it owns the data for real, right? You know, the data may be, maybe not the private data, like, you know, but it's actually could be behavior data, right? How people are reacting to your features. Like, you know, from VMware days, we wanted to know how people, is people even using this feature? How often people use this feature? You know, people are always debating, hey, what's the maximum sort of the policy we need to give this and that? But in the SaaS world, no debate, just look at it. You mean, we always say, don't listen to what customers are wanting you to do, but watch how they do things so that you can sort of understand what product you want to develop, right? Here, you actually can really watch how customers using your product, don't listen to them.  But it was important about the data discussion because, you know, a security person would say, hey, if you put it into one spot, I can hack it. But it's not just people's names, it's other data, it's gesture data, it's usage data. So you're not talking about like, just sign in data. It's data. It could be the behavior, it could be second order data, right, you know, do people use my product? That's my data, right? You know, that's something I wanted to know. I'm not talking necessarily talking about peaking into people's email, no, you know, it's actually the thing surrounding it. It's looking for the good things in the data. All right, let's talk about the customer alignment and customer expectations. You know, customer, user experience is driven by customer's expectations usually, right? As expectations change. I think the Zoom thing jumped out at me, the Zoom IPO and their great success and we're a customer as well. Is that they really nailed the expectation of the user and Cloud certainly helped them get that speed. But this is a key thing. If you could just deliver a great experience for those customers, you can actually win big part of the market. Yeah, if you Google Eric, right, you know, Eric doesn't speak to media as much, but if you Google Eric, what's sort of the jump? Hopefully I can help you to bring him here too.  If customer is happy, you know, I'm going to happy. So my happiness hinges on the customer's happiness. So that's kind of very important because only the SaaS model, you know, made that more natural, right? In the traditional model, like whether traditional on-prem or whatnot, you sort of celebrate when you have customers signing your PO and then you don't hear from, you know, the sales guy for three years, the sales guy may move on to another company because you don't know, right? But for the SaaS, you know, it doesn't stop when you sign a PO. You actually have to earn customers happiness every single day. Adoption is critical. Yeah, customer success is important. And then that's kind of the, so there's a huge alignment, interesting, very interesting alignment between customers, you know, happiness, customer success, customer adoption of your product, and your sort of the success, right? Because, you know, when I came to Zscaler, you know, one of our first meetings is about, okay, we had a lot of customer interest, they signed a PO, how to get them, you know, ramp up the actual, the first use, right? So that kind of conversation doesn't happen in the traditional software company. You sign a PO, if the customer doesn't use your product for another 18 months, which is actually quite normal, no one is going to jump up and say, this is crazy, right? You know, we're going to do that on our part two about the impact of the enterprise, but you made up a good point, everyone, I just close out our last talk point is the data driving the experience isn't like, you know, the old way, throw and get the PO and celebrate, you got to kind of keep that going. The enterprise is changing, and the enterprise has a tsunami of onboarding of new types of developers. In some cases, they grow, we just had Cisco inside here on theCUBE this morning, they're turning network guys into programmers from CL command line prompt dudes to gals to coders. You're seeing developers now enter the enterprise to build the apps. So there's now a digital transformation initiative for enterprises to be, I guess, SAS like, but it's hard. Yeah, I think that's, you know, this is part of the digital transformation. Every company, Fortune 500, Fortune 2000 company need to do it, right? So another key interesting part is, when they do this, you know, on this journey of digitalization, you cannot possibly build all the infrastructure yourself. You will have to consume public cloud, you know, sometimes private and hybrid cloud, and you're actually going to consume lots of the SAS, right? You know, whether Zoom, you know, the Zscaler or the PagerDuty, I mean, you are not going to build those things from scratch, but you want it to have a very good sort of the stack on top of it, and how you're going to take advantage of the SAS is a very interesting aspect. Well, in a part two of our chat, when we come back on our next discussion, I want to get into the enterprise, but to wrap up part one here, innovation speed, you know, leveraging data and the beautiful risk-taking and benefits of SAS, large-scale, fast, high-value target in developing an app or a venture. What is your advice to entrepreneurs out there and or someone who's doing a digital transformation where they want to leverage SAS? What's the playbook? What's the starting point? What's your advice? Well, there are a number of things, right? You know, one, you know, there are so many SAS companies out there, take advantage of them, right? You know, like in the old days, you have to hire email admins, you have to do this. Nowadays, you know, all the SAS, just, you know, that's your kind of the, you only need to worry about the business logic, right? You have some unique insight in the business and then just to have higher programmers to codify that and then the rest will magically happen because of the public cloud because of the SAS, right? So be very mindful about the new environment you are in, right? That's number one. The second thing I want to say is, you know, how do you look at AI technology, right? You know, that the old way is, you know, program something in a definitive way. I think there will be a limit for that. You know, it has taken, you know, the software industry a long way to where we are. But if you look at the next 20 years, I think a lot of the lift is going to be done by the AI side. But it's not going to be easy to be done. You have to think about your data strategy. Where are you going to have the massive sustainable, unique, ideally even label the data? If you don't have the label data, you have to have the strategy. How are you going to have some unique model on the data with the data you have? So the data strategy, right? So essentially how to take advantage of the cloud, how to take advantage of the data. And then on top of that, you are going to do something that's solving a met- Customer problem. Customer problem. A cute landing spot in the marketplace. A met need. In a big market. Well, in a big market, even if there is already a mature solution, I bet since those mature solutions were not developed from the cloud, native cloud era and the native AI era, you have plenty of opportunities. How you and I are on the same page on this, I've been saying it and I truly believe we are living in an entrepreneurial era where with your advice and when you just laid out the better mousetrap can take down a big market. And I'm hopeful that you will also disrupt the media business. Don't tell anyone we're selling them that top secret, silent running. How we, we're going to get part two. We're going to deepen the enterprise because the enterprise now has an opportunity in the first historic time in tech history to use tools and technologies to completely reset and re-architect for this kind of capability. So we'll hit that in part two. I'm super passionate about it too. How we shoot here inside the cube, friend of the cube, legend in the industry, great entrepreneur and technologist here, in cube conversation. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.


A rational function is a quotient of two polynomials. Since rational functions don't involve any operations besides those of arithmetic, they are algebraic functions, so we know that, as long as it's defined at x equals a, the limit as x approaches a is the function value itself. This will be useful, but we may need to do a little algebra to get there. So let's find this limit. Now maybe we're lucky and the function is defined at x equals 3. We find, unfortunately, it isn't defined at x equals 3 because there's a 0 in the denominator. However, it has indeterminate form 0 over 0, so an algebraic simplification may lead to an answer. Now there's a couple ways of doing this, but a useful theorem can be very helpful. If f of x is a polynomial where f of a is 0, then f of x has a factor of x minus a. Since x equals 3 made both numerator and denominator equal to 0, then both numerator and denominator have a factor of x minus 3. And the significance of this is factoring is very hard, so it helps when you know what one of the factors is.  Similarly, the denominator is x minus 3 times something, and again, the only thing that something could be is x minus 5. And so we could remove the common factors. Now the new rational function is algebraic and defined at x equals 3, so the limit is the function value at x equals 3, which will be, and we can find this limit. And again, we find that the numerator and denominator are both 0 at x equals negative 3. Then x plus 3 is a factor of both. So we find our numerator is x plus 3 times, and our denominator is x plus 3 times, and so we'll remove the common factor. And we have an algebraic function that's defined at negative 3, so the limit will be the function value, which is, and we can even do this for horrifying expressions like this. Since x equals 1 makes both numerator and denominator equal to 0, both have a factor of x minus 1, and we can find the other factor by division. So pick your favorite method, synthetic division, and we find. And so our numerator and denominator factor as, and we can remove the common factor. And because we're dealing with the rational expression, we can only have equality as long as x is not equal to 1, but because we're taking a look at the limit, we don't actually care about what happens at x equals 1. So we can replace one expression with the other. And at x equals 1, the numerator and denominator of our new expression are, again, both equal to 0. But that means that both have a factor of x minus 1, and dividing gives us the other factor. And so we find, and so our new rational expression can be simplified to for x not equal to 1, but this time we still don't care about what happens at x equals 1, so we can replace the old algebraic expression with the new one. And in this expression, at x equals 1, our numerator and denominator are not both equal to 0. Actually, that's a good thing since the algebraic function is defined, and so the limit is equal to the function value, which will be...