Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 340: The Science of Hope | Jacqueline Mattis

Episode Date: May 11, 2022

How does hope work? In this episode from the archives, Rutgers University clinical psychologist Dr. Jacqueline Mattis discusses hope from a scientific perspective and how we can cultivate it. Dr. Mattis, who is also a Dean of faculty at Rutgers, did not start her career wanting to study hope. She started out studying spirituality and religiosity, specifically concentrating her field work and interviews in African-American and Afri-Caribbean urban communities. She wanted to know why people living under high stress conditions so often choose to be good and compassionate. And that research ultimately led her to hope.In this episode we talk about: How her family history influenced her relationship to optimism and faith The difference between spirituality and religiosity The benefits of hope and skills to cultivate itThe ways hope can go wrongAnd the benefits of denialFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/jacqueline-mattis-340-repostSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, today we're talking to a renowned psychologist who has come up with five strategies for cultivating hope. Jack Lematis is a clinical psychologist

from Rutgers University, where she's also a dean of faculty, as you'll hear, she did not start her career wanting to study hope. She started out studying spirituality and religiosity, specifically doing a lot of field work and interviews in African-American and African-Caribbean urban communities. She wanted to know why people living under high stress conditions so often choose to be good and compassionate, and that research ultimately led her to hope.

This is the final interview in our two week series on the subject of hope. The three previous guests approached the issue from a Buddhist perspective. Dr. Madis will talk about hope from the scientific perspective. How does hope actually work? What are the benefits and how do we cultivate it? What she does have in common with our previous guests is that she too sees hope as a skill and not as a blind or a complacent state of unfounded optimism. If after this interview you find yourself wanting to put hope to work in your own life,

maybe in your own meditation practice, and you happen to have the 10% happier app, then make sure to go check out our new talks and meditations from some of the finest teachers around about how to cultivate hope as a skill, just tap on the singles or the talks tab in the app to check out the new stuff. If you don't have the app, maybe now is a good time to try it out. You can do so for free, just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps. Here we're going now with Dr. Jacqueline Mattis. Jacqueline Mattis, thanks for coming on the show. Thank you. This is exciting. I'm glad to have the opportunity to have this conversation with you. Me too. So how did you get interested in hope? You know, actually, at the beginning, I wasn't interested in hope.

I don't think I thought about hope as a primary way of doing the work that I do. I started my work being interested in spirituality. And I was interested in how people once they decide that they believe in something, how that decision ultimately informs their willingness to do good and be good. And it was through that work and talking with people about what believing in a God or a system of God's ultimately does for people. And the ways in which people's decisions about being good in the world is impacted by their belief, one of the things that came up in those conversations was the sense of, if you believe that something bigger than you is out there, then ultimately it's hard not to be hopeful. And so the conversations about hope sort of came out of conversations about belief,

particularly belief in the presence of hardship. So I came to hope through the sort of back door. Before we talk about hope, just curious, why did you want to look at belief? What brought you to that? I think it was a combination of personal circumstance and my own family experiences and how they were sort of mapping on to the work that I was doing when I was a graduate student. So I grew up in Jamaica, came to the United States. My mother always talked about the fact that you couldn't explain our hear from our there, meaning as she certainly participated

and certainly pushed us as her kids to become educated to do well in the world, educationally and otherwise, you couldn't predict from the great grandfather she knew who was an enslaved person, right? Or knew of she didn't know him personally, but she couldn't explain the movement from a family that was enslaved to a family where my mom graduated from Columbia University with a graduate degree. And she was able to put her four kids through college. My oldest brothers of physician, I'm a professor, my sister's a business owner and my other brothers

and IT director. So you couldn't explain our here, right? The people that we were, we had the opportunity to become. You couldn't explain that from the places where our family started in terms of the family history that we knew. And she always attributed that journey to faith and to the ways in which faith pushed her to do things and pushed members of our family to do things that were just on commonly beautiful and kind. Moments of self-sacrifice, moments of sort of working against the odds. And so thinking about that, faith was a root of her hope. And one of the things that, you know, I learned about organically from my family was the realities of the kind of optimism

where you can't really explain why you're optimistic, right? Because there's nothing in the world around you that should explain why you should believe something good is going to happen. But that kind of optimism is what pushes people to do the unexpected and to risk everything. And it's what explains in a lot of ways, the ways in which people end up being successful. However, you define success. And so for me, studying spirituality was a way of sort of trying to understand,

like when my mom talked about faith, which she also inculcated in us, what is that thing? And why do people who believe in God or in something bigger than themselves, even if they're not religious, what is that thing? And why do people who believe in God or in something bigger than themselves, even if they're not religious? What is that thing called faith? And how does it work? And how does it exactly lead to this sense of hope? Because there wasn't a literature around that. And particularly not for African Americans. And so I wanted to study it because I was

watching it happen in my own family. You say she inculcated faith in you. Do you have faith or you or are you religious? I am both. I do she inculcated faith in you. Do you have faith or you fool? And or are you religious? I am both. I do have a strong sense of faith and I am someone who's both religious and spiritual. Absolutely. What's your tradition? So I grew up in the Christian church. I was raised in a Baptist church. I don't necessarily align with any particular denomination, but I do identify as a Christian. And so for you, I mean, we talked about your mom, but does it work the same way for you? Does believing in something larger in yourself,

and in this case, the story of God and his only son give you hope? It does. It does. And that same model that I saw in my mom, and my grandmother, and in people in my family, that same model of, you've got to expect that things are going to work out for the good, right? And you've got to expect that you are responsible for participating in that work. But not just for yourself, the thing that was most

profound for me in watching my mom's sense of faith in my grandmother and my grandfather's sense of faith was what it led them to do for other people, right? And so my siblings and I can't ever remember how many people were in our home, other kids who were in our home, who my mom raised, right? But I think we all stopped somewhere around 18 or 20. But there are a lot of kids that were a part of our home who their families couldn't care for or the kids were being abused and Jamaica didn't have a foster care system. So families had to trust that if they dropped their kids off or left their kids at someone who would care for them and our home space was a space where

my mom would just care for other people. And so I grew up with the constant message of it could be a Saturday or a Tuesday and we would have to make room on our beds or make room in the drawers for the next set of kids who were gonna join us as our new cousins, in quotes. And my mom grew up that way. My grandmother raised 26 children other than the 14 kids that she had. And so we grew up in a family where, regardless of the fact that our families did not have memes,

somehow or another that sense of, we are responsible for loving people through the worst moments of their lives and you don't ask questions, you just do it and you expect that what you need is going to be provided to you somehow. And our families lived experiences, evidence that that happens, right? That if you just make the decision that the details will work themselves out, but you don't let people live in harm. You have to allow people to live through love and you're responsible for creating that world.

We've seen it happen over and over again, and we see the consequences and the benefits of it. So, high faith. Two part question to that. One is, could you have that same motivation to help people without faith? And the second is, can this kind of faith ever lead to decisions that might actually be unwise?

Yes. Yes to both. There are lots of people who don't believe in a God. People who are atheists, but who are spiritual. And I think this is a place where I've learned the distinction between religiosity and spirituality. So religiosity requires you to believe in a God and participate in structures and rituals that are attached to the worship of a God.

And that certainly describes people like me. Spirituality is about an appreciation of the sacredness of life and the recognition that if life is sacred, then there are certain things that you never let happen to another living thing. And there are people who are you never let happen to another living thing. And there are people who are atheists who are quite spiritual. And that spirituality, the faith in the sacredness of people, as opposed to the faith in a God, is what leads people,

both religious and atheist, to make the decision that they are going to care for others, and that leads them to make that decision on the basis of the, essentially the hope that doing so is going to lead to good things for the other. So I think the one absolutely can have a sense of faith that is not rooted in religion and be enormously hopeful and also just enormously good. So absolutely. For me, it just happens that the way that I was raised, my meaning-making systems are attached to my sense of faith in God. What about the second part of that question of can having faith that everything's going to work out? Could it lead you down on wise roads? Absolutely. There is such a thing as unrealistic optimism. And people can have a misguided sense of optimism, a misguided sense of hope, and that can lead people to take risks that are dangerous. It can make people assume that things

are going to work out, that are absolutely not going to work out. They can make attributions to things that actually pretty dangerous for them to make attributions around. And so their ways in which hope can actually lead you down the wrong road, if it's not rooted in a thoughtful appreciation of how the world works of the data in one's own environment. One can take really problematic risks. But there's a way in which even things like we talk about bystander effects, right, where something is going wrong for a particular person and there are people around who are watching and no one intervenes. There's a way in which that bystander effect

may be rooted in a hope, right? So for some people it may be rooted in fear that I'm not going to intervene because I'm afraid of what will happen if I do. But there's a way in which some people don't choose to intervene because they're hopeful that somebody else will. And that's one of the ways that hope can in some ways lead to an abandonment of one's

own responsibility, an abdication of one sense of connection to in responsibility for the other. And that in a number of ways is dangerous, as we can see. So hope can go wrong in a couple of ways. One would be even if you have faith in the unwirldly or otherworldly, you do have to put your finger in the wind to get a sense of like what's going on in terrestrial terms. And then the other way is that you can just blindly hope that other people will deal with

the problem and you don't have to. Yep, absolutely. We talk about the fact that hope is optimism with a plan, right? And to the extent that one stays in the world of it's all just going to work out, then one is optimistic. And in some cases that optimism is rooted in a kind of fantasy because you don't have any data to suggest that things will work out. But for someone who's truly hopeful, you do have to do the work, you do have to take a step back and look at the world around you, read the room, right, and read the past and put the pieces together in a way that narrates you to the, because I know this thing has happened in the past, because I know that my circumstances

are similar or different in these ways, I can make a reasonable expectation that these things will work out. So hope is rooted in data. It's not fantasy. And yet when you were describing your mom's worldview, which is you can't explain our here from our there, I think you described a kind of hope that you couldn't make sense of given the world around them. So does that fit with what you just said? It does in the sense that one of the things

that people point out when they're looking at a pass that seems unfathomable, and a present that you couldn't explain from that pass if you don't connect the dots, right? So if you don't look at the intervening pieces, the start point and the end point make no sense. But when you look at the intervening pieces, which is where the hope comes from

and where the data comes from, you know, one of the things, if I make this a personal story, one of the things that my family talks about is the fact that the very first person in our family, whose name we know is Sam Easton, and he was named for the man who owned him. And Sam Easton made the decision to work

to buy himself out of slavery. And then he bought his twin sons out of slavery. And his wife unfortunately died in slavery because the person who owned her kept raising the price on her. So he was never able to purchase her freedom. He made choices along the way. And there are choices that were facilitated by a number of people in his life at the time as far as we know. But he had a plan full set of actions that ultimately led to certain outcomes for him. He taught himself to read and write after he bought himself out of slavery. And he bought land that became land that his son's owned.

So there are decisions all along the way that had a different decision been made. A different set of outcomes would have happened both for them and for us generations later. So to say that you can't predict our here from our there is not to say that it's truly inexplicable, but to say that one has to take this whole story with a sense of awe of how amazing life can arc itself towards something really good, and that arc is an arc that is partially made by us, but it's partially made for the people who are spiritual by a God who has no boundaries, right, and has no bounds, and who can improvise a life in ways that we couldn't on our own.

When I put myself in Sam Eason's shoes, I think like one of the miracles there is that he didn't take matters into his own hands, Veeza Vee, the slave owner who kept raising the price on his wife. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the decision to keep focused on goodness, Absolutely. The decision to keep focused on goodness, to make one's life different from the, and to carry on one's life in a way that is different from the life of those who are around you. So the immorality of slavery and the brutality of it to live through that and become loving and to be dedicated to love, that's extraordinary, but that's a daily decision, right? And that's a daily decision that's rooted in the idea that one doesn't have to become the person who is in that sort of immoral position, you can become different. And you have to imagine

that day to day, like what that different could be, especially if you don't see other examples of it. But again, it's one of the reasons why that connection between faith and hope is so powerful for me is that hope requires a sort of prophetic imagination. It requires you to be able to see something that you don't see in front of you right now and to imagine it in enough details that you can work towards it and recognize the pieces of it as you're moving towards it. But the fine line there is you still have to read the room. You have to have prophetic imagination but it needs to be grounded in some data. Absolutely, absolutely.

So you've got to have models. You have to see something in your world that suggests that some piece of this is possible and you just keep working towards it. And in some ways you make the possibilities, right? So if you're loving and you have a wife who's loving or you have these twin sons who become loving, you see the data manifesting in your own world

and you keep working at it. But we all have models. We all have models of goodness. We all have models of the impossible. And Sam Easton may have had really good parents. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, and I'm sure Sam Easton looked around him and saw of the thousand people in his world.

He saw some who were engaging in behaviors and living in ways that he made a decision. I will never be that. And others who he said, I wanna be like this particular person in these ways. And he crafted himself into versions of that. So I think we all make choices in our lives about who we're going to become as we are becoming. And those choices every day pay off one way or another for good or bad.

Now you're getting close to the Buddhist notion of karma. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We've got to be really careful about the choices notion of karma. Yes, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. We've got to be really careful about the choices that we make. So let's go back to the choices you made early in your academic career. So you really got interested in your mom's narrative and started to explore whether you could build up

the scientific literature there, but then you got on to hope. So walk us through what your early findings were in the zone of hope. Yeah. So the first set of studies that I did that looked at spirituality were about the definition of spirituality, right? And so I wanted people to define for me, when you say you're religious, what do you mean? And when you say you're spiritual, what do you mean? So I was asking African-American women in particular this question. And one of the things that came up in those conversations was, I'm spiritual, I'm religious because I have to believe that there is something bigger than this. I have to believe there's something better than this I had. And so every day the decisions that I make are about trying to live into that version of the life has to be better than this. It has to be more meaningful. And so the beginnings of the conversation about hope came with a definition

of spirituality and religiosity. But the work that I was doing that really sort of anchored for me a real interest in hope came when I was doing a study on altruism in low income urban communities. And particularly among African Americans living in low-income urban communities, and particularly among African-Americans living in low-income urban communities. And the decisions that people made when they have extremely few resources. So women who had only literally $20 to their name and a month ago before they would be able to get a paycheck from whatever jobs they were working, the decision that they made to use that $20 to buy food for somebody else because their decision was that person's

hungrier than I am. And I can make a choice between whether I spend the money on me or I do what I think God expects me to do, which is to care for somebody else who can't care for themselves right now. Those decisions were always rooted in a sense of, I don't have to worry about what's going to happen because somehow or another is going to work out okay. And it was those kinds of decisions that ultimately led me to pay attention to hope.

It's the self-sacrificing decisions that people with very few resources made or people who had everything on the line. So, you know, some of the articles that I've written, I talk about women who they were receiving social service aid. And there are all sorts of Googles and guidelines around who can be in the house and whether or not you can take in someone else.

And mother after mother I talked to, there was some other mother who was struggling in some way with addiction or depression or anxiety and could not care for their children. And these moms would take in children and they knew if a social worker showed up on a spot visit and saw these other kids and knew that they were living there, you would lose your kids and you would lose everything. And they had to make the decision, do I let another family suffer? Or do I make a decision that, if I am careful and I make sure that nobody outside reports

that I'm taking care of these kids, that I have to take care of these kids, I don't want them going into foster care. And so they, parents made enormous sacrifices and took enormous risks. But they did it because they ultimately realized the difference between this child being okay and not being okay is someone stepping in and doing the right thing. And they sort of made the decision, I'm going to leave this to God or I'm going to leave this to the universe to have it work out, but I can't make the decision to leave a child in harm or in harm's way. And so altruism is rooted in a profound sense of hope.

And that for me sort of brought that conversation to the fore. It's a fascinating path that you took here following your interest. Can you define hope? Yes. So hope, in order to define hope, we need to define optimism. So optimism is an orientation towards the future, where one expects that things will work out well in the future. Hope is that same sense of expectation that future events, future experiences will work out. But the second piece of hope is what people talk

about is an agency mindset where you don't just expect that things will work out in the future, but you also anticipate that there is a plan that will get you there and you engage the plan in some ways. So hope is optimism, future orientation with a plan. So I'd love to hear more about what you learned when you really turned your attention fully to hope. Yeah. So one of the things that I learned is that people will indeed take enormous risks

in the service of hope. Right. So there are lots of decisions that people would, you know, you'd look at someone who is making a decision to help a child who, you know, if someone found out you would lose your children and those kids would be sent to foster care anyway. And there's something about the human spirit that says, I have to decide what the values are that I need to live into and lean into. And that those values are going to be the thing that hope drives, right? And that ultimately drive my sense of hope. So a radical commitment to caring and loving is rooted in and also cultivated

by a sense of hope and hopefulness, right? So when you think about the decisions that all of us make about whether we're going to spend the extra time that we need with the person that we need to spend time with, when we know that we have other things that we need to do, but the decision that somebody else's life and pain means more to us than any other outcome that we can worry about.

And so we're going to hope that things are going to be okay because this experience, this person, this situation deserves attention. And I'm just going to have to figure the rest of it out. And I trust that it will all work out okay. So digging deep into this work around hope led me to realize that hope forces you to clarify your values and once you clarify your values, it helps you to double down on hope. And so that's one thing that became clear. One of the other things that became clear is a lot of the literature that I was reading on optimism and hope talked about this notion that there's a theory that psychologists have held

on to for quite some time called the conservation of resources theory. And the argument there is that people with resources have good reason to be optimistic. They have good reason to be hopeful because the things that they need are already there. They already have the resources they need to survive. But that optimism and hope also become resources that help you to do the things that you need to do. And that ultimately, whatever decisions people make are intended to prevent the loss of resources, so you try to prevent yourself from losing money, from losing time, et cetera. But you also work to try to prevent yourself from losing optimism because you realize if optimism is fueled you through to the next good thing

in your life, you don't want to lose access to your own optimism. So you can serve that as a resource as well. The material end of conservation of resources theory never made sense to me because I grew up among working class people and people who were poor. And I saw in the communities that I grew up in, lots of people who were deeply hopeful. They were not irrationally hopeful. They were working hard to make things work out for themselves. And if you look at the folks that I grew up with and folks I grew up around, even if people didn't become materially secure, they were able to produce children

who were wonderful human beings. In conditions that would suggest that wonderful human beings couldn't grow up there. And so a lot of that is about being able to imagine your children into a future that every single day you have to make the decision about how do I love this child into good decision-making? How do I love this child into being a loving person, an honest person, a caring person? And parents did that every day. And so, you know, even kids who were involved in activities that no kid should be involved in.

I did clinical work with kids who were involved in gangs. And most of the kids that I worked with were involved in gangs because they were trying to protect people. They did it out of love, and they did it out of the sense of hope that if they gave up their own freedom their own Ability to control their own lives in in certain kinds of ways that they could protect people who are a part of their families Friendship court etc. And again, there's a sense of I believe a good thing can happen And I have to plan my way through it and the way that I am going to plan my way through it is by making decisions that may cost me. But for the benefit of other people so the enormous sacrifices that can come from hope also came through. I'd love to talk about hope right now you're the culminating final guest in this series we're doing on hope on this podcast and.

hope on this podcast. And we've been talking about the fact that we're in a can you us moment for hope in this country and for the species, you know, globally, because it looks like the pandemic is kind of winding down, but, you know, we don't know about these variants and we don't know about whether enough people will take the vaccine and, et cetera, et cetera. So, but I think many of us, if not every single one of us, is hoping to return to some sort of normalcy. So, how do you think about hope right now from your professional and personal perspective? You know, I know that there are lots of folks who are thinking about this as a time of particular pessimism. And perhaps it's because

I'm someone who is hopeful that I have this particular perspective. I also see this as a time of enormous hope, right? And so one of the things about hope that I think is powerful, if you know that we still have choice, you still have reason to hope. Number one, we saw that when there is a crisis, you have scientists who do the work that they need to do, and that ultimately leads to the outcome that we all are anticipating is the best outcome, which is the getting of a vaccine, right? And that just happened.

And that's because of choices that people have made, right? Choices that they made before they even became scientists to become scientists, but also choices about how they were going to pivot in this moment to do a particular kind of work. And even in this moment, as we see these interesting dialogues, where there are some people who choose to do things like wear masks to protect not only themselves, but others, and others who choose not to, the fact

that everyone still has a choice gives us reason to hope. There's a reason to think for those who are making decisions that are actually quite dangerous for the health of themselves and others, they still can be hopefully moved, if not converted, to recognize that they have the option of doing something beneficial for people outside of their own immediate circles, things that could

actually be beneficial to us all. And until the story is over, every day they still have the opportunity for choice. And so there's good reason to be hopeful in that regard. But, you know, when we look in a larger landscape, we see that we have options about whether we're going to pivot to do different things when it comes to taking care of our environment. Right, we know that we have choices. There are people who are exercising those choices. And if we look at the data, the people and the nations, the communities that are making different kinds of choices that are healthful choices are seeing some of the benefits of that. So the root of our hope in this moment is in recognizing that we are never in a choice-free environment. And the choices that we have still on our plate, our choices that could actually lead us to optimal outcomes. So these are moments to still maintain a sense of hope.

But if the outcome rests on people that we cannot control, where do you muster the hope? See, I think this is a beautiful thing about hope. Human beings have always been social animals. We have never been in an environment where the decisions that we make only rest with us, that would require us to live in a fantasy world. So we've all always lived in environments where the decisions that we make have implications for others and the decisions other people make have implications for us. But when we think about the reality that we are deeply interconnected and there are some situations where the stakes don't feel that high.

And there are others where the stakes are clearly higher, but our choices always impact each other. And so recognizing that we recognize there have always been enough people who make the decision to do the right thing and to lean in in ways that their decisions actually are beneficial to other people in really meaningful ways that we can use them as the model. And we do have some measures of control over the behavior of other people if we choose to exercise those. So there are some nations that have made the decision. You don't get a choice about whether or not you wear a mask. If you don't wear a mask, you're going to be fine or you will be jailed one way or another. I'm not suggesting that we do that in this country. But when we pretend that we don't have options, then that locks us into only certain possible outcomes.

If we recognize that we have options and we have the opportunity to change outcomes in particular ways, but it rests with our leaders, right? And it rests with us. It's a simultaneous kind of decision. I give and take. How are you managing your own hope or lack thereof at this kind of interesting inflection point in human history? I think about a couple of things, one of which is my own privilege. I think about the fact that I'm enormously privileged. I'm living in a country that has multiple vaccines that are really super effective. I have family members who can't say that. A lot of my families in the Caribbean, I have family Europe and in other places in the world.

And so I think about the fact that I live in a space where I have access to resources and the way that I was raised by my mom and the way that my siblings and I were raised, is to think about the fact that we're responsible to take the privileges that we have and double down and help other people. So I have the option to do really good work right now. I have the privilege of having a job that is dignified work that allows me to be able to care for other people. And so in this moment, what I've been leaning into is just an enormous sense of gratitude and a real decision to use that sense of gratitude

to force myself to make the decisions about what am I going to do today that is meaningful, that will be helpful to someone other than myself. And if I can do that, I feel like I'm living a life of purpose. And so I'm sort of in that particular place right now, but it's a place I try to be in no matter what. It seems like maybe your hope is focused on your personal agency in a micro sense rather than the macro sense of will we be able to go back to the movie soon because enough people get vaccinated before the variants take hold. It's micro and macro and intuences. It's micro in the sense of I have some choices about what I can do and the ways in which

I can operate. And there's an appreciation that if enough people make those decisions in a way that are outward facing, that we can ultimately do some good things together. It's macro in the sense that I believe that if all of us sort of think about what are the most important things for us to be aiming towards, right? So as a community, what is our goal here, right? And a sort of narrow sense the aim might be to wear a mask or to just get to a point where we can all start going outside again. In a larger sense, there's a real commitment to this is a really great time for us to really think about who we are to each other, right? Because the pandemic is happening at the time

that other really major social movements are happening and movements around social justice are happening. And so I'm not worried about being able to get back to going to a movie theater, but I am worried about and really intentional about thinking when we start operating in large numbers again, how can I be sure my nephews are going to be okay, right?

How can I be sure that the institutions that we're all participating in really use this moment as a moment to think about, what did we learn in this moment that we can actually capitalize on that could allow us to do some really good things for each other and with each other, right? As a part of a university,

we're seeing that people can work from home and take care of their children in ways that actually allow families to thrive. Are we going to use these as moments to say, why did we do work life the way that we did before? Other than the fact that it's always how we have done it, how can we be more humane, more humanistic in the way that we organize the fact that it's always how we have done it. How can we be more humane, more humanistic, in the way that we organize the lives that we lead so that we can meet the needs of families and

communities. So there's real opportunity in these moments to think about, is it about a haircut, is it about access to the movies, or is it about opportunities to leverage what we have learned in ways that can allow us to do good things. And then can we plan towards it? So look to the future and see what we could do differently. And then think about in the moment, what do we do to get there? I'm hearing in there two things. One is a focus on what really matters.

Obviously, you know, a lot of us care about the movies, but what is more important is thriving families. And the other is a real deliberate attempt to look for potential positive outcomes while grounded in present moment reality. Absolutely. Absolutely. The way hope has been handed down to us from our forebears. I mean, I think about the Greek myth of Pandora's box. I would spend a long time, so I took classics in college, but my recollection is Pandora opens this box, which she's been told not to open

and out of which comes a parade of horribles, death, grief, sickness, whatever. And then the last thing is hope. I always read that as like a twisting of the knife. It's like, oh yeah, we're gonna give you all this horrible stuff And we're gonna keep you sort of on this false fuel of blind hope that some point it will stop sucking But what's your take on that and how should we how should we look at hope? Dan you don't get to write the handbook on hope

Dan, you don't get to write the handbook on hope. I think in some ways, it's a beautiful and powerful story. So we know that people in particular who have lived with lots of barriers, lots of challenges in life, but who have been able to maintain a sense of hope, like in some ways, they become the models of hope for us, right? So I think I've, you know, I talked about my great, great grandfather. I can't think of a life in terms of the condition that is more horrible than being enslaved, right? I can, there are people who lose family members to war, to all sorts of things, and they still have this sense of, it will ultimately be okay. And you know why I know it's going to be okay because it was okay yesterday.

And I did these particular things to make it okay. And these people did these things to help me make it okay. And I did it for them as well. So I think in some ways that even the story of Pandora is the story of what it means to be human, right? And to be human in the most vulnerable sense, which is the vulnerability is what we all fear, but that message of despite the challenges, despite the horrors. At the end of the day, I'm not leaving you with a horrors, that's not the last thing you're going to end up with. You're going to end up with the capacity to project yourself into a future where things actually will be okay. And I'm going to leave you with a sense of agency to be able to get there. So use

the horrors as a way of sort of reading what have I gotten from this experience so far, what have I learned, and then hope your way, imagine your way into a different set of alternatives. You can do this. I think it's a great way to end a myth. So the hope wasn't the twisting of the knife, the hope was, yes, life is going to be difficult, but here's this fuel that will allow you to surf and transcend. Absolutely. So yeah, hope is not the end, it's not the knife, it's the bridge, it's the fuel, it's the food that gets you to the next good place. Did you see the, I don't know if you just came out, there's a documentary about Tina Turner. Oh, no, I don't know if you just came out there's a documentary about Tina Turner?

Oh, no, I haven't seen it. Tina Turner, it turns out, I mean, I was vaguely aware of Tina Turner because I'm nearly 50 and I was alive and sentience in the 80s and so private dancer was on my radar and what's love got to do with it, et cetera, et cetera. Turns out, by the way, she hated that song, I didn't want to record it. But anyway, Tina Turner was raised by sharecroppers who abandoned her, both mom and dad left and she ended up being raised by a cousin. Learn how to sing in church, kind of randomly met this guy named Ike Turner, who changed her name to Tina, married her and beat her ruthlessly for years. And through all of these hardships, Tina Turner was really hopeful and ended up emerging

from a horrible childhood into a terrible marriage, emerging from that marriage leaving like behind and then becoming after leaving like behind on her own a global megastar. All of the success we know about Tina happened after all of those hardships. So anyway, this is coming to mind as an avatar of hopefulness. Yeah, absolutely. And all of us have those moments where, again, against all odds, there's something in you that tells you, this is not it for me.

Right? We've all had those moments where it's the teacher who tells you you can't do the thing and you say, essentially, I'm just going to have to deauthorize that because this is not it for me. I know what I'm going to be able to do. I know I'm going to be a doctor. I know I'm going to be a lawyer. I know who I'm going to do this thing. All of us have those moments and it's one of the biggest gifts in life.

There's those sort of intuitive moments that tell you, no, this is not the end game, right? There's something out there that's better and some people can imagine it in detail. Other people just have this sort of resonant feeling of it. But I can imagine that for Tina Turner, that sense of when you're left by your parents, someone came to get you, right? So here's a reason to be hopeful, right?

Is that someone and to be optimistic? Someone came to you, you didn't have to live out your life alone, right? Along the way, the story of who ends up being the global megastar is the story of people who make friendships with you and the teachers who pay attention to you and the woman who decides to help you figure out how to sing that note. So everyone's life is a pastiche of all of these moments of people making decisions to love you into a reality that sometimes they can imagine for you and sometimes they can't imagine that far but they can imagine this moment. And so her life as a global megastar wasn't just about

like it's about whoever else came along the way to make the decision to do the thing. I mean, when I talk to people in studies that I do about how they got to be where they are, invariably there's a, let me tell you about the police officer who took me in when my family couldn't take care of me. That I did one of the studies on altruism's police officer and his wife raised 20 kids over the course of their lives. 20 kids who are not their own, they had four boys. But they just kept taking in kids who were getting in trouble,

were having struggles in a variety of ways. And all of those kids talked about, you know, Mr. Rivers, Sergeant Rivers was the person who saw me, was like, you're getting in trouble, you come home with me and then he just kept taking me home, right? And so when they tell the story of who they became as lawyers as teachers, et cetera, they could tell the story about the parents who weren't able to take care of them, or they could tell the story about Mr. Mrs. Rivers and all the people that came into the river's household. And in the teacher who said, do you know, you argue a lot, you should be a lawyer,

right? And who imagined you into that existence when you couldn't have imagined it. But the glory of life is that our lives are these infinities of moments of people caring and attending and being aware and loving us into, as well as the people who don't do that, who do the opposite. But it's the stitching together of all those people who make the decisions to care and attend and lead and teach that leads all of us to the good places that we get to be in. Much more of my conversation with Dr. Jacqueline Matis right after this. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. Jack will in Mattis right after this.

I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brownleur, we will be your resident not-so-expert-expert. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking, oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong, what would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts.

You can listen ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Let's talk about how we can generate hope as a skill. I know you've got these five strategies that you discuss based on your work. So the first one, I believe, is start with goals. Tell us about that. So in order to be able to truly be hopeful, you have to have an endgame. So there's something you have to be moving towards, some outcome that you have to hold as meaningful and as a final outcome that you're trying to move to. So the hopeful person has to set some goal. If you decide that the thing that I want to be is successful and being successful for me means I'm going to be a lawyer or I'm going to be the kind of person who people can rely on regardless of what profession I take up. You've got to have some goal that you set that is going to allow you to be able to tell

when you've reached there, when you've achieved the final outcome of one's sense of hope. So it's got to start with goals. This seems in line with what we're discussing before about the difference between practical actual hope and fantasy. Absolutely, absolutely. And it's also what distinguishes to some degree optimism from hope. So optimism can be a sort of generalized sense that things are just going to work out okay.

Well, what would that look like? How do you know that it's okay? The answer to that, like the hopeful person has to have a very clear answer, because if you're going to have a pathway, remember that hope is optimism with a plan, the plan has to be leading you to something specific. And so one of the things that you have to do is have a very clear sense of what the goals and outcomes are. Strategy number two is harnessing the power of uncertainty.

What does that mean? It means recognizing that it is a fantasy that we can control the world that we live in. We can work towards outcomes, but we never quite know what's going to happen. One of the things that research demonstrates is that there are people who, uncertainty leads to a sense of anxiety. So, my sense that I can't control the world and I don't know how things are going to work out leads me to a sense of, well, then I can't control anything and there's nothing that I can do to make the outcomes that I'm interested in happen. But there are some people who even against all odds say, if what I want is not certain, then realistically what that means

is that in a pool of possibilities, that the thing that I want is in those possibilities, right? So if it's not certain what I'm going to become, and I really want to become a lawyer, being a lawyer is in there along the in the same way that being a doctor or being a shopkeeper or being someone who is not employed like all of these are part of the possibilities. So if the thing that I want is part of that sense of possibility, then there's still reason to be hopeful, right? If you take away all possibilities that my sense of hope will go away. And then I have to deal with the depression and the malaise that comes with that.

But leaning into a sense of uncertainty is if you can't tell me that is absolutely impossible that I am going to become this thing that I want to be, if you can't tell me that and you have no good reason to be able to tell me that was certainty, then I can be anything that I want to be. And it's how people deauthorize folks who tell them that they can't be things, right? I certainly have a counter-teachers who told me that I wasn't going to be able to go to college or I was never going to be able to be successful in certain things for a whole host of reasons. And it never dawned on me to believe them. In part because I had a mother

who told me, no, actually it's part of the possibility. You can be a doctor, you can be a teacher, you can be anything that you want. And so my mother set for me a way of sort of challenging those uncertainties. And it's what we do is we lean into the uncertainty sometimes as a way of saying everything's possible including what I want. This seems like there's a hopeful way to look at uncertainty and then a fearful way to look at uncertainty.

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I usually, but why I'm wired to take the ladder approach. I see on certain day, and I think, well, no paycheck guaranteed here. I'm not so good. Oh, I love everything about that because it's fun. I love everything about that, because it's fun. So how do you get yourself into the mindset of, yeah, I'm going to look at uncertainty as good for me rather than fraught with peril? The thing that I lean into is, how does it serve you to sort of devolve into the fear. Because if it doesn't, then you have the option of not doing that, right? So that's one thing is if this story doesn't serve you, stop

telling that story and pivot to another story that can serve you well relative to the goals that you want to achieve. So that's part of the thing that we need to do. The other thing is to think about how realistic is a story that you're telling, right? So if the story that you tell yourself is this is all going to come out to be a horrible fiery mess. Like, I'm never going to be able to be successful at this thing. If we walk back through your life and we look at the actual data of your life, is that story accurate? And in a lot of cases, the story that people

tell when they're anxious and when they're depressed is a story that actually doesn't match with the full realities of their lives. Sometimes it matches with very particular slices of stories, like the moments that they failed relative to the millions of moments when they succeeded. So, one of the things that is important to do is to go back through and to say, well, okay, so you believe that this is going to be a horrible fiery mess and you're never going to be able to do this thing. But let's walk back to the moments when you did this thing. And you've done that thing more often than you've not been able to do it. So the actual story of your life is that you are very successful at doing the thing that you are most afraid of, which doesn't invalidate the fear, but it doesn't give you permission to stay in that

place because the data doesn't support it. Yeah, I know I've been kind of not entirely dishonestly, but kind of playing the role of House pessimist here. But I actually, a personal story is coming to mind as you keep talking about this. I love your term of deauthorizing Naysayers. I was about 10 years ago. I was in the middle of writing a book called 10% Happier, which is what this podcast is named after and I was talking to a colleague reasonably well-known her name is Barbara Walters and I was telling Barbara what I was working on and she said, don't quit your day job.

And I remember thinking, okay, yeah, so probably this book, I mean, she wasn't the only person who was not bullish on a meditation book written by a, you know, sea level news anchor. And I couldn't sell the book either. Like when I went to publishers and so it was, Barbara's feedback was in line with generally what the world was telling me. I didn't necessarily believe the book was gonna be successful, but I knew I was gonna write it.

And nothing was gonna dissuade me because I was really interested in it. And I thought I kind of need to figure this out for myself. And if, you know, my wife told me this recently and that I actually said to her once, you know, if a few people are helped by it, then it's worth doing. That doesn't sound like something I would say, but I was happy that that was my attitude. So yes, I do think even somebody like me who's prone to anxiety, yeah, hope is accessible. Absolutely. And you did something beautiful. I mean, even with someone telling you, don't put your day job, you quit your day job. You did this thing. I didn't quit my day job. I did everything at once and drove myself

crazy just for the record. I didn't quit my day. I still haven't quit my day job. That's the anxious Jewish part of me trying to do everything it was. Okay, I stand corrected. But one of the nice things is that you pivot it, right? And it's one of the things that people do when they're hopeful is, you know, setting a goal doesn't mean that the goal that you said at the beginning is the goal that you land on in the end, right? So there might be a sort of general theme to the goal. So the goal might be, I'm going to write a book, and the initial hope maybe that the book is profoundly successful. But at the core of that, I'm going to write a book, and I'm going to write a book about this particular topic, maybe,

I want to do something that allows me to move out of this kind of stagnant lane and do something to actually help people. And that may be the actual goal that is unnamed and got manifested as a book. But when the book doesn't succeed in a particular way, you pivot and you create a podcast or you pivot and you do another version of the goal. And it's one of the things that is true of hopeful people is when the articulated plan doesn't work out, you pivot. And you try to make sure that you get to the heart of what it is you ultimately want. Is that one of the five strategies? I'm looking at the five strategies. This notion of sort of being flexible, tacking, pivoting. Absolutely.

Is that, I mean, that's not on the list here, but I don't know maybe if it fits under, we haven't gone through the whole list But I'm not seeing it explicitly stated. It's the recognition of barriers Right, you know that barriers are going to emerge along the way and so you do Ultimately pivot so it's one of the many strategies that people use to maintain a sense of hope So we've gone through two of the strategies. The third here is manage your attention Absolutely, so one of the things that you have to do you know you talked about having a colleague who told you don't quench your day job If you only surround yourself with people who will tell you what you cannot do

And if you only pay attention to the details of the moments of failure You have very little reason to stay hopeful. So one of the things that research has demonstrated is that people who are hopeful actually have a tendency to pay attention to positive data. So they pay attention to the people in their lives who say, you know what, I know this is hard, but if I'm going to put my money on anyone, I'm going to put it on you. Right? So they pay attention to those people and to those narratives. In the literal sense, in terms of research, there are studies, for example, where researchers

have shown people an area of skin with a lesion on it. And one of the things that they have realized is that pessimists will look a lot at the lesion of the area of cancer on the skin. They focus their attention there. Hopeful people and optimists actually look at the area around that more than they do at the cancerous cells. And it's part of this interesting pattern that we realize that hopeful people look at the surroundings, right?

So there are fewer cancer cells in areas skin. And so they focus their attention on, oh, the positive story is this cancerous area hasn't spread. The pessimist is like, oh my God, look at the cancer, right? So they focus their attention there. So where you spend your time looking, what you spend your time listening to, what you spend your time talking about is very much related to your ability to maintain the sense of hope. If you're managing your attention in such a way that you're leaning toward the positive, could that be a kind of denial?

It can be. It can be. But denial can actually have some really positive benefits, right? So one of the things that we know from research is that optimism works well when you don't have choices, right? Hope works really well when choices are present and they're salient in some way. So there is good reason if you're in a moment where the overwhelming body of evidence suggests to you that this is going to be really hard and it may start feeling impossible

to get yourself through that moment. Denial might be exactly what you need as a bridge to the point at which you can begin to look at data differently. Right? So when we're stressed out, we don't pay attention to data in the same way. And in those moments, a good dose of denial can be really, really wonderful, really helpful. I've often chosen doses of much less healthy things. Yeah. doses of much less healthy things. Yeah. Grabbed an eye on instead of other things. Yeah. So fourth strategy on this list that I see is seeking community.

We talked before about the fact that we're fundamentally social animals, right? And there are moments when it is possible for you to maintain a sense of hope in and of yourself. But it is really, really helpful to be around people where either the people around you are reflecting to you good reasons to maintain your sense of hope, your sense of this future is possible, right? Because they help you narrate,

I see this for you in the future. Or I think if we work together, these things are possible. So being in community gives you access to people who can help to fuel both a sense of what goals are possible and then help you fill in gaps when you're trying to determine what the pathway is to those goals. Having people around you who can think creatively with you, especially when you're exhausted,

especially when you're stressed, or when you just don't know what you can do to achieve those goals. Having people around you to help fill those gaps is really important. And our research on activists demonstrates this a lot. When you sacrifice to do advocacy work or social justice work or voter rights work, whatever it might be, and you see what happens when people get to vote. The fact that they're people who are enacting the thing that you are working actively to create reminds you of why it's important, right? And you wouldn't

have that if you were doing this alone, because you wouldn't have the data if you were alone. But you also have people who say to you, thank you, thank you for what you're doing, because I don't know that I would do it, or I just appreciate that you're doing it. So that fuel, that gratitude, plus seeing the benefits of what you're doing, and the outcome of your hopefulness is what fuels us all. We spent a lot of time on the show talking about community and the fact of your hopefulness is what fuels us all. We spent a lot of time on the show talking about community and the fact that we're social animals. And I sometimes worry that people who listen to happiness podcasts here,

community all the time because the read shows up and the research is probably the number one contributor to human flourishing. And I wonder if people sort of glaze over it because they think, well, I already have that or I don't know how to get that or it's just become some rote thing that I hear people say, does that land for you? Yeah, it does. It does. I think when we don't complicate the words that we use, they can become problematic. So it is important to think about, when we just talk about having community,

it seems fantastic, but the work of it and how one cultivates it, none of that is clear from the use of that word. But the work that we do every day to pick up a phone or to make the decision to text someone, the ways that we connect to other people that allows us to be able to appreciate the awesomeness of humans, right?

And the awesomeness of this life that we get to live, even with its challenges. It feels so mundane that the idea of community, the idea of family can become mundane, but I think it's these moments like a pandemic that remind us that you can't take that for granted, right? Because a year and a half ago, the idea that we have friends may not have struck us as powerfully as it does now when you can't see them, right? Or when they're gone.

Or that family member who you couldn't go to the funeral because they died and we're in the middle of a pandemic and you just, you can't get there. In these moments, we get to start thinking about these connections that feel mundane, that we often take for granted are so meaningful. So these are the moments when we can begin to think about, like when we say community, it means the touch. And it means the power of being hugged in ways that I haven't been hugged for a year, right, or to be able to sit and hear laughter without the intervening existence of a screen. Like all of those things are what it means to be human in three-dimensional senses, and

that's really important to us. Fifth and final strategy is look at the evidence. Absolutely. So some researchers have argued that hope is sort of rooted in a particular kind of fantasy and that people who are ultra hopeful are people who are sort of deluded in a sense. And there's an emerging body of research that demonstrates that that's actually not the case, that hopeful people actually do read evidence, they read data. So you don't expect that you're going to become a certain thing or that a certain outcome is possible unless you look back in your life or across the lives of other people and you say I can see evidence of the possibility of this because I can look at this person's life or I can look back at this moment.

So hopeful people actually piece together a different set of data than pessimists do. And pessimists don't deny data either. It's just that pessimists choose pieces of data that confirm their pessimism. Hopeful people choose pieces of data that suggest if I want to get here, I have to believe that it is feasible. It may not be easy, but it is feasible to get there. If I look at this person who also had a particular roadblocks at eye face, they were able to get there.

If I look at what they did, I can find some nuggets of, if I do these three things that this person did, and then these five things that these other people did, that it will get me close to the end goal of where I want to be. So it's the capacity to do the empirical work that determines whether or not you're going to be hopeful or whether or not you are hopeful. If we follow these strategies, can somebody who has the pattern toward fear and anxiety, can somebody like that, somebody like me become more hopeful by employing these strategies, have you seen evidence that change is possible?

Yeah, absolutely. It's why therapy works, right? It's one of the ways that therapy can work. It's when you're working with someone in a therapeutic context, it's the laying out of, tell me the story of where you are and tell me the story of how you believe you've come to be in this place. And as you listen to that story, and I was trained as a narrative

constructivist therapist so that I talk about the story that we tell about ourselves and about our lives all the time. But you know, when we tell the story and we look back, one of the things that the therapeutic work can involve is to take the pieces of those stories and to think about a number of things. Number one, how does the story serve you or not serve you? Right? So how does the story of it's all going to work out badly? How has that served you?

And sometimes it, those stories of pessimism and of gloom actually serve people because they draw people to them, right? So it has benefits, it doesn't feel good, but it may have the benefit of people coming in to rescue you. And if that's the case, then one has to ask, is that a story you want to continue to tell because those benefits feel good? Or can you achieve those same benefits or equally meaningful benefits by telling a different story that actually matches the pattern of your life a little bit more effectively? So you know, it's that work of understanding the story and how the story that you have told about your life is working for you or not working for you.

It's going back through the specific details and sort of looking at what pieces of the story aren't you telling, not because you're deliberately obfuscating those pieces, but because we recognize our stories in ways that allow us to ignore all sorts of data that are actually part of our lives. So what pieces of the story do we need to bring in that you haven't been paying attention to so far, that actually create a counter story. Right? And so you look at that counter story and you look at the evidence, you think of yourself as a failure, but let's also think about all the places where you succeeded.

And let's look at the number of successes relative to the number of failures. And let's look at why the story of I am a failure resonates so well for you and how it served you. And let's look at why it's not serving you now because we're sitting together, right? So you wouldn't have come to seek a different way of being if this was truly comfortable. So it's that work that suggests to us that there can be change

and that there is change. And we do have the capacity to shift the way that we think. We have the capacity to shift the way that we function. We have the capacity to shift the way that we function. And ultimately, that's the most hopeful thing about what it means to live a life, right? Every day we get to make a decision. A colleague of mine used to talk about the fact that we're all in the process of being made.

And we get to be part of the making of ourselves. And that happens every decision, every second, every minute, every day. We have lots of choices and lots of power. And that's where hope lies. I think this idea of changing the story you're telling to yourself about yourself is really compelling.

And it sounds like something you could do in therapy, but you could all, you know, if you've married well, if you have good friends, if you have a community, a church, or a Buddhist sangha, or whatever it is, there are good colleagues you can start to, or you could even do it for yourself if you have the wherewithal to start examining your assumptions and challenging them. Yeah, absolutely.

And as you do that, telling a different story about yourself also means telling a different story about the people in your life and telling a different story about the people around us because the hope in our ability, even if we take this outside of the self, I'm increasingly interested in intergroup relationships, right? Relationships across lines of race and sexuality, et cetera. And it's the stories we tell about who the other is and our ability to connect up with them. That story is equally meaningful in terms of the hope of us being able to live together well, right? And we have the capacity to look differently at the data we've collected about other people, other groups of people, other individuals. And to think about what pieces of the story are we not telling there that would provide us with a counter story that would actually allow us to live more beautifully, more hopefully with each other.

And who is telling the story that is so familiar and so rooted in the idea that we cannot get along, that we cannot do this thing? And what's the investment in that relative to the lots of pieces of data where people actually can figure out how to live lovingly across lines of human difference. I mean, we can do all of this hopeful work for ourselves individually, but we absolutely also have to do it into personally and into group context. I was actually just today looking at a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. about he was basically saying that if you look in your own mind, you're going to see that you've

got as much capacity for greatness as you do for Rogishness. And then if you look out at the world, you'll see that even the people or the nations that hate you the most, despite their vile behavior, there is goodness in there somewhere. We're all complicated. And seeing that complexity can actually be a source for hope. Absolutely. It's the ability to see the humanity and others and recognize that, as you said, there is goodness everywhere, everywhere. But what's interesting to me about that is that it starts by having an honest look at yourself by seeing, I think he quotes Gerta or somebody is

saying, you know, I have as much capacity to be great as I do to be a rogue or some or scoundrel or whatever. It's actually having this humble look at your own, not making yourself some perfected being. You're seeing your, oh, there's another line from poetry that my meditation teacher likes to talk about it. It's love your crooked neighbor with all your crooked heart. So if you see your own fallibility, you can see the fallibility in others. Actually, in some way, focus not just on their fallibility,

but on the remainder, which may be really positive. Absolutely. To go back to religions, although this is certainly not located exclusively in the world of religions, I think a lot about stories about taking the piece of wood out of your eye before you try to do the same for another or in order to be able to see the other. If we are able to see our own vulnerability and embrace it, if we're able to live with our own fear and the ways in which our fear of being vulnerable or our fear of some sort of boogie man out there, keeps us from being able to

appreciate the fact that the other person is scared to, or the other person is loving to and the other person laughs to and makes friends to, if we aren't able to do that work then we can't build bridges. The thing that I love about being at Rutgers Newark as an administrator is I get to see these 18 to 22 to 40-year-olds who have figured out how to have conversations with each other in ways that 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago, I can't imagine happening. Just can't imagine it. And that's beautiful. But it's partly because somehow they've figured out how to have these sort of reflective moments of,

I've been through some things and I'm going to ask you what you've been through as well. And if we look at the fact that we've had challenges and challenges in ways that we wouldn't have been able to anticipate. You know, when I look at you and I see you as somehow privileged and I leave the story there, I can't get to know you. But if I ask you about what was it like being the brother, what was it like being these two people's son or this one person's son, and how do our stories link up? If we can find those places where we can walk across bridges into each other, then it creates wonderful opportunities for us to set a goal of being able to live with each other's humanity and celebrate that humanity. That's a nice hopeful place to

leave it. I will take the wood out of my eye and try to see the skin around the cancer. take the wood out of my eye and try to see the skin around the cancer. And walk across the bridge. And walk across the bridge. All of it. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you. This was one if I really appreciated the have any opportunity to talk with you. I really did. If people want to learn more about your work, where can we go? I wish that I had a coherent website that had my work.

I think just searching for my name is probably the easiest thing to do or just reaching out to me at Rutgers University in Newark. This has been such a pleasure, Jacqueline. Thank you so much. Thank you, Dan. It's been a wonderful experience. Thank you.

Thank you to Dr. Manis. That was great. Really enjoyed talking to her. This show is made by Samuel Johns, DJ Cashmere Kim Baikama, Maria Wartel, and Jen Point with audio engineering by Ultraviolet Audio. And as always, a big shout out to Ryan Kessner and Josh Cohan from ABC News.

We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus guided meditation on the subject of hope from Orrin J. Sofer, who was our guest on Monday. meditation on the subject of hope from Orin J. Sofer, who was our guest on Monday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad-free with 1-3-plus in Apple podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey.