You may have heard of hormesis — the idea that intentionally embracing small stressors activates the body’s repair and defense systems, building resilience, improving how the body and even the microbiome function, and ultimately protecting against the harms of chronic stress.

We typically think of these hormetic stressors in terms of things like exercising, taking ice baths, sitting in a sauna, and ingesting certain plant compounds. But you ought to consider adding socializing to that list.

As my guest today explains, while we tend to avoid socializing as we do all stressors — even the good ones — it’s something that can strengthen our health, resilience, immunity, and sense of meaning. Jeffrey Hall, professor of communication studies and co-author of The Social Biome: How Everyday Communication Connects and Shapes Us, joins me to discuss why relationships are harder to build in the modern world, how our adolescent approach to making friends needs to evolve, and why we must intentionally “exercise” our social muscles in a world where they’ll otherwise atrophy.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Jeffrey’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #772 — How Long Does It Take to Make Friends (And How Does That Process Work, Anyway)?
• AoM Article: 3 Things No One Ever Told You About Making Friends in Adulthood
• AoM Article: The Importance of Developing and Maintaining Your Social Fitness
• AoM Podcast #863: Key Insights From the Longest Study on Happiness
• AoM Article: Love Is All You Need — Insights from the Longest Longitudinal Study on Men Ever Conducted

Connect With Jeffrey Hall

• KU’s Relationships and Technology Lab
• Jeffrey’s faculty page
• Jeffrey on LinkedIn
• Jeffrey on IG

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Transcript

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. You may have heard of hormesis. The idea that it intentionally embracing small stressors activates the body’s repair and defense systems building resilience, improving how the body and even the microbiome function, and ultimately protecting against the harms of chronic stress. We typically think of these hormetic stressors in terms of things like exercising, taking ice baths, sitting in a sauna and ingesting certain plant compounds. But you ought to consider adding socializing to that list, as my guest today explains. While we tend to avoid socializing as we do all stressors, even the good ones, it’s something that can strengthen our health, resilience, immunity, and sense of meaning. Jeffrey Hall, professor of Communication studies and co-author of The Social Biome: How Everyday Communication Connects and Shapes Us, joins me to discuss why relationships are harder to build in the modern world, how our adolescent approach to making friends needs to evolve and why we must intentionally exercise our social muscles in a world where the otherwise atrophy after the show’s over, check at our show notes at AoM.is/socialstress. 

All right, Jeffrey Hall, welcome back to the show. It’s so good to be here. So you research human relationships from friendships to romantic relationships. We had you on the podcast back in 2022 to talk about your research on how long it takes to make a new friend, and the short answer is longer than you think, and we’ll let people listen to that episode to get the details on it. You got a new book out called The Social Biome that you co-authored. Let’s talk about that title. Social biome. What do you mean by a social biome?

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah. Well, I’m really glad to be back again. I always like our conversations and it’s an honor to be a multiple guest appearance. Yeah, Andy and I came up with this idea of the social biome back in about 2019, so pre-pandemic, and the reason that we started thinking about it is that people are very familiar with this idea of a gut microbiome and the idea is that there’s this interdependent system within your guts that make the ability to digest food easier or harder. It gets destroyed if you take antibiotics, but it affects everything from your mood to your sickness, your wellness, even your brain health is affected by our gut microbiome. Microbiome also happens then when we touch people it kind of affects how we are. Well, Andy and I thought, well, there’s also a social biome. It’s this interdependent system of relationships, social interactions, which we have with one another that we both occupy. We live in it, but we also are dependent on other people within it. So how people treat us, whether people accept us, whether people introduce their own germs, if you will, like negativity or conflict or whether they’re actually increasing things to increase our health. And what we know from social interaction research is that these things make a big difference in mortality, morbidity, just like your gut microbiome makes a difference in your health too.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’m sure people have heard about the health benefits of a social life, but for those who aren’t familiar, can you just recap the benefits of having a robust, healthy social life?

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah. The thing that’s crazy about this is something that’s been building for about 15 years of momentum. Some of the earliest studies on these things began to say, well, let’s follow up with folks that we surveyed 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago and see whether they live longer or they live shorter lives, whether they had some disease or otherwise. And what they found was one of the most consistent predictors was whether or not people had strong social relationships, whether they had frequent social interactions, whether or not they could say, I have more quality friends or quality romantic partner relationships. So quality frequency and also social interaction all ended up being these important predictors. And what’s fascinating is you also look at the famous Harvard Men’s Study and other studies of longitudinal health. It finds that even if you change in the middle of your life, you can make it better later.

So let’s say that you are in your twenties and thirties, very career focused, and you’re really not making time for building relationships with other people and you move around a lot, but if you change in your forties and fifties, you can actually live a longer healthier life later too. So what’s fascinating about these different longitudinal studies is that it doesn’t really matter when you start investing in your relationships in other people. It’s always beneficial, at least it seems to be always beneficial to your health, your wellbeing, your sense of purpose and meaning, and of course whether or not you are likely to die earlier.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s the interesting thing is the longevity research on social relationships, how there’s really a tight correlation between the two.

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah, there are a couple processes that people think about are probably why the one that Andy and I spent some time exploring, so interesting is Hess’s idea of stress. So I was talking to a good friend of mine in California and she and I were talking about how lousy it is to approach 50 years old. We’ve been friends for a long time and we’re like, yeah, I exercise pretty regularly. I watch what I eat. I don’t eat a lot of bad food or bad diet, but the thing that my doctor’s always telling me is, you got to reduce your stress. And I’m like, dammit, this is so hard to reduce my stress. And I think that we all kind of have this intuitive sense that when we feel relaxed, when we feel truly at peace with ourselves or accepted, we can feel our stress levels go down.

I don’t know about you, but when I hang out with a friend over lunch or catch up over drinks or have them over to my home or talk to ’em on the phone, I feel like my body almost unwinding, relaxing, feeling safe. 

So researchers believe that one of the most important processes of feeling close, connected and meaningful to other people is that it actually reduces our overall stress response. It kind of turns it off. It turns off our stress. And what we also know about that is our body cannot marshal the resources that it needs to fight off infection unless that it is able to kind of put those sort of stressors away. So there’s a famous study that actually found that people who had better social connections and relationships or people who were also able to fight off a virus that the researchers injected into participants to find out how sick they got. So folks who were really social and had really good relationships were able to fight off sickness better. So one of the main reasons we think that it actually contributes to longevity is that over your whole life when you have meaningful relationships, people, you can count on close connections with others. You’re basically living in a de-stressed environment a lot more frequently than you would if you had nobody. And we know that loneliness is extremely stressful for the people who endure it.

Brett McKay:

I want to go back to this idea of stress because okay, you’re saying here that socializing can reduce stress, but then later on in the book you talk about how socializing is a stressor. We’re going to return to that. I think it’s interesting. Definitely there’s a lot of metaphors we can extract from that. But before we do, so we talked about all these great health benefits, mental wellness benefits of regularly socializing with other people and avoiding loneliness. People probably know about that. There’s so many articles about the loneliness crisis, the loneliness epidemic, and you shouldn’t be lonely nonetheless, people are still hesitant to socialize. What do you think is going on there?

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah, Andy, and one of the things we really shot for when we were writing this book is to be sympathetic rather than to be sort of like a school marm shaking your finger at telling other people how to behave. You really should be more social for your own good. What we really wanted to do is try to explain, well, why aren’t we? What are the barriers why we don’t? And people have very good reasons for not being social. So I think there are structural reasons, there are personal reasons, and then they’re just sort of routine related reasons. Let’s start structurally, one of the strongest negative associations with time spent socializing is work. We are in a curious economy right now in part, not in 2025, but I mean in modern history where people in the top income brackets in the United States who don’t have to keep working work more.

So it doesn’t matter how success you are, people who are professionals and working harder work even more hours. We also have the emergence of gig economies where people are basically on call all the time to try to make money to Uber somebody around or to DoorDash. We’re in an environment in which we are constantly working in order to make time to be able to live. All of that is creeping into our ability to be social. And there’s really good evidence that the more that we’re working, the harder that we’re trying to make ends meet, the less time we have for being social. The other structural reason I think is really important is we don’t have a lot of third spaces, which are basically these places where we feel comfortable just gathering together and being together. Robert Putnam did amazing work in all the way back to 2000 or 2000 when he released bowling alone.

And at that time it was demise of bowling leagues, of rotary clubs, of Elks clubs and all these kinds of things. Since that point, it’s been the decline of churches and synagogues and places of worship where people aren’t showing up or not attending weekly. Although in the last two or three years we’ve had an uptick, which is good news for socialization. So there are these structural changes that are happening around work, around third spaces or around organized spaces for being social that are in decline. And the other reason is people suck. People are disappointing. People let you down, people hurt your feelings. And one of the things that Andy and I really want to communicate a message on here is, but we have a system of repair. We have a need to belong that pushes us towards continuing to work at those relationships even if they are frustrating.

And I think what people find and lots of researchers to confirm this is we imagine worse outcomes from relational mistakes or things that we feel hurt about or things we think we screwed up like we’re boring or we didn’t make a good impression or we said something wrong. We exaggerate those things in a way that make us feel like we can’t do it. We don’t want to socialize anymore, just not enough. So part of it is because people are disappointing. We don’t want to continue to work at having our relationships with people because we’re like, why bother? It’s just never going to get any closer or this person really stunk and I don’t want to be part of their lives anymore. But the last reason it’s so difficult is routine. One thing that’s been very healthy in my lifetime is I’ve seen people have a lot more consciousness about the importance of a good health routine around exercise.

I think I always knew it growing up, but I feel like people are even treating some exercise opportunities almost like in a religious way. They just really truly believe that this set of exercise routines that they have are going to help them be better. And there’s a very good reason to think that it will. People are only recently waking up to the idea of having a good social routine. And one reporter asked me, do you think there’s been a change of heart about whether or not people actually need to prioritize spending time with friends or create a routine about being social? And I’m like, I hope, but I don’t think so. I think our current way of thinking about it is being social is the very last thing we’re going to do if we have time for it, because we got to make time for exercise.

We got to make time for our families, we got to make time for work, our commute. And then of course, I think a lot of it is we want to make time for the things which are hedonistic pleasurable in the moment, but do nothing for a socially, which is I need to finish that next Netflix series so I can be up on the new episodes that I love. So there’s a sense in which of accomplishment and access to easy media as making it even harder for us to realize that those routines are worth fighting for and they are a fight. We have to find ways to make social life be part of our routines and people generally don’t.

Brett McKay:

Speaking to that idea of the decline of socializing as a routine, one of the things that I’m always struck by when I read biographies of individuals who lived in the first half of the 20th century was how busy their social calendar was every night. They were either at a dinner party or hosting the dinner party or they’re playing bridge or it was like every single night. And I think about, I don’t know if I could do that, but for them it was a given. That’s just what you were expected to do that, and we no longer have that expectation.

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah, the expectation part is key. I think you’re absolutely right, Brett. I mean, when I grew up, my parents hosted bridge events in our basement and I remember them pulling out the card tables. My dad told me this great story is when he was a bachelor for the first time, and this would’ve been in the late fifties? No, this would’ve been in the late sixties. Sorry. First thing he wanted to do was set up a bar at his apartment because that’s what you did. You had friends over to entertain them so that drinking wasn’t something you did alone. You had to have it so that you could entertain. I did actually research project recently that found that how many nights a week that people are going out to visit their friends has gone down a lot. But what’s even more surprising is when people idealize what a good night would be, they idealize a less social one.

So in the past when you ask them that question, what’s an ideal night? A lot of people say, oh, time with friends out doing interesting things or spending time together with people who I’m really enjoying or a visit from someone who I care about or visiting someone I care about. Now, when I did the survey just last year, what I found people were saying is spending time alone, quietly in a room watching my favorite program and relaxing in pajamas, there was this glorification of a feeling in which detachment is actually pleasurable. It feels better to be away from others. And so what’s curious is that we’ve had an expectation shift that’s so dramatic, not just I think from the early 19 hundreds, which is absolutely true, but even from the 1950s and 1960s, 1970s and eighties, it’s even palpable if you look at just how people respond to these survey questions from that time period.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I mean you see it sort of anecdotally when people tweet things or Instagram things, they talk about, well, I’m just so happy that people canceled the plans at the last minute. Now I don’t have to do that thing. And that’s the expectation. Now people, the expectation is I just want to be by myself, not be around other people. And you call this world we’re living in now the age of interiority.

Jeffrey Hall:

Yep. Yeah. The age of Interiority idea came up a while ago. I got a report for the Wall Street Journal on this topic of declining time spending being social, and then it was this time decline was not just in the United States. It happened in UK data and data from Australia and other less precise measurement throughout the global north, but also places like Japan and so industrialized world in general. And what’s interesting about this is this decline of sociality happens it seems over longer periods of time and kind of a pendulum swing. So on one side of the pendulum is this idea that being alone is something to be glorified. So we can see this in the romantic era where people are like, I’m wondering lonely like a cloud or to move away from civilization is the only way to find oneself and the monastery or the monk or the aesthetic who is completely in denial of social contact, almost to a hermit like status.

These people were glorified as being either closer to being divine, which kind of was the contemporary understanding of what it meant to be enlightened or maybe your full self, right, unencumbered by others. And then there were other periods of time. If you look at the discourse and the time, it was like people who are on the margins of society or outcasts, people who are hermits are misanthropes. People who are seeking their own time are selfish that we are obliged to one another and that obligation to one another carries incredible benefits in terms of democracy and discourse and comradery and a sense of purpose and meaning or community or I think people of faith talk about this as a brotherhood or a sense of this is what communion looks like. What’s interesting is when that pendulum swings back and forth, people seem to turn either towards or away from the idea of being solitary is a good thing.

I think we are in a time of interiority. The pendulum has swung towards Putnam forecasted it and his bowling alone time use trends are forecasting it. Now you offer that example of people having top Google searches, how do I get out of plans or how do I stop showing up? But we also see that at my daughter’s, one of my favorite places, her favorite places to shop for socks, and she’s a fan of fun socks, is a place called Attic Salt. And I took a picture of socks that say, friends don’t make friends hang out. It’s curious. It’s everywhere is the sense that not interacting with others is something to be celebrated. And I think when we think about this in one way, this normalization of being alone and isolated is something that I see everywhere throughout our media and our representations of what’s being valued, but in another way, it’s making sense of something.

We’re collectively trying to come to terms with the fact that we don’t have a social life, we don’t have opportunities to connect. We’re too tired, we’re too stressed out, we don’t have the bandwidth. So we need a remedy. We need a solution that makes us feel soothed and comforted by the fact that this is the reality we live in. And the age of interiority is also basically making sense of a situation we don’t like, but we need to make sense of it. We say it’s okay to be alone. It’s okay to spend more time away from others because other people suck and friends don’t make friends hang out.

Brett McKay:

We’re engaging in some ex-post facto reasoning, some after the fact reasoning because we find ourselves not having much of a social life. And instead of facing that fact and maybe letting ourselves be a little sad or disturbed by that lack, we tell ourselves, well, you know what? I’m glad I don’t have to socialize. I didn’t want to socialize anyway, okay, so the reason why things are so hard or people have social inertia to socialize the structural aspect of it, we’re working more. Our work schedules are completely different. It’s not like 50 years ago where everyone nine to five, then everyone’s got different schedules. I think related to that, the structural aspect too, I’ve noticed as a parent with pre-teen and teenagers, kids are just doing all sorts of different stuff. It used to be maybe 60 years ago you either did boy scouts and you did the little league in your town and that was it. Now your kids can be involved in volleyball and dance and student council. And so you have parents who are trying to shuffle their kids to these different things. And because these things are all out of sync, parents can’t get together and hang out and the kids can’t get together and hang out. That’s another structural aspect to that. 

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah, I think you nailed it, man. I think you nailed it. And I’ll point out something I will tell you is a bright spot in the data. So the bright spot in the data is that people who are families who are married with children are spending as much if or more time at home with their kids in social time. And that’s a good thing. We know that strong bonds with children are good for children. We know that strong bonds with children are good for parents, and we see a particular uptick, and I would say this for your listeners out there, for men, it looks like married men with children are spending more time with their kids than they have in the past. And this is a good thing and it’s something to celebrate. I think it’s kind of one of those things you don’t often hear good news about men and boys, and I think this is something that’s really great.

Fathers are more invested in the context of a married relationship with their children, and I think that what’s important about that is where does that time come from though? And you’re alluding to the ideas that time has to come from maybe time parents went with each other. And that’s what cracks me up when I think about it. I’m like, well, where was I when my parents were down in the basement playing cards with their friends or when my parents did stuff, did they expect to be entertaining me? We’re in this kind of curious time where I think a lot of parents, especially ones who are upper class or upper class aspiring, are trying to cultivate this sort of perfect experience for their kids because they’re concerned in a broader sense. Their kid won’t have every opportunity that they need to be successful to get into college or six career-wise because they have felt this broader sense of social anxiety or economic anxiety, and frankly, the age of AI and the kind of conversations like pretty soon we won’t even have any jobs because AI will take all of ’em, does not help.

As a parent of a 15-year-old and a 12-year-old, I’m like, God, I have no clue what’s coming to pass. So it makes you feel more anxious that you need to be making your kid is studying and learning and engaging in extracurriculars. As a consequence, this cultivation of childhood has the positive consequences of parents spending more time with their kids, and that’s good, but has the negative consequences of us trying to micromanage a perfect experience, which means parents aren’t spending time with each other, they’re not going out with their friends. They feel like they can’t prioritize their own time one-on-one with their own friends because in some ways that’s really not a good long-term economic decision for their families. So one of the pieces of advice that I give a lot in these things is couples should support each other. Having friends that are not couple friends that are individual friends.

So if you are in any kind of marriage or long-term relationship, you should encourage your partner to have friends and go spend time with their friends. And that may seem obvious, but there’s actually a lot of counter discourse that say, don’t go out with your friends because maybe they think that their friends are going to have a bad influence on them in early parts of relationship, or you’re not spending enough time with your own kids. If you’re married with children or you shouldn’t be going out, you should be at home with us. But what’s interesting is there’s lots of good research that says A happier marriage is also one where couples, each member of that partnership has friends.

Brett McKay:

I’ve seen that in my own life. Whenever I hang out with my friends, I just show up better with my family.

Jeffrey Hall:

And it also shows that you’re being cared for and nourished by the folks. As a person who actually studies friendship a lot, I’ve thought very deeply about the idea that one person can’t provide everything for you. You need a community of people to help you feel a fully robust and rich person. And frankly, my wife is wonderful, but my friends provide different advice. They have different stories. They’re willing to talk about NBA basketball with me, they’re willing to shoot the shit about politics in a way that my wife and I just don’t. So there’s a different communication. There’s a different topic, there’s a different depth, there’s a different way of knowing me, and I think all of those things make me better in my relationship and more able to have a long-term meaningful relationship with my partner.

Brett McKay:

So barriers to socializing the structural aspect, work intensive parenting. Then the other barrier is just people suck. People let you down. They can disappoint you. And then the third one, third obstacle is just routines of socializing. We don’t have them anymore. There’s no longer the expectation that there socialize regularly. What’s interesting though, so socializing is hard, as you said, you’re trying to be very sympathetic and letting people know, yes, yes, it’s good for you. But yes, it’s very hard to come by. But what’s interesting, I still think a lot of people have the expectation that socializing should be easy even though there’s all these obstacles. How do you think that mismatch between expectation and reality also gets in the way of socializing?

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah, it plays a big role, and I am very sympathetic to this because I have a group of high school friends that we try to get together and it is really hard to schedule something. There’s five of us. We have very different schedules. Some of us work jobs that have to commute a lot. Some people have busy travel schedules or family schedules. It’s hard. So it’s legitimately difficult to get people together. Part of the reason that we have this weird expectation that should be easy though, I think comes from the fact that during developmental times in our life where we found the most friends, which tend to happen during elementary school to high school period, and then for some people go to college, that’s also an important time as well. During all of those times, the structure created time. So I’ll just give you enough, for instance, I went to a high school that I knew a lot of the folks that went to high school with me from middle school and some of them from elementary school.

I lived within driving distance of most of them as most people who go to high school in the United States do. I did activities with them during the day, such as we took similar classes, but I also did activities with them After the day was over, we did cross country or swimming. The creation of a school system necessitated lots and lots of my time being spent with the same people over and over again. That is the recipe for friendship. So when I say that those times your life were easier to make friends, that’s just fact, but it’s fact because it was necessary to spend time together in order to do any of those things. What’s interesting is if you think about or you disaggregate what school does and put that into your regular life, what would that mean? That would mean you would see people during the day, you would pick activities you enjoy together and do them together.

You would also date from that same group of people and be single, which is usually characteristic. Not only high school students have a partner. What that means though is you’re open to the possibility of new relationships. As we mature and move into emerging adulthood, which is roughly between 22 and 30 and then later middle age adulthood, what we start doing is closing off all of those avenues. We say, I’m now living with a partner, so I’m not going to go out without her or him. We say, now I have children, so I can’t go out because I need to be a good parent. We say, well, I have to work extra hours because I’m committed to this. All of those foreclosures of our time and openness to making friends makes it harder and harder to make friends. But we don’t remember that school was a time in which you had tons of time, tons of people available to be made friends with lots of activities to do together, and this is critical.

You were in a time of your life where it was developmentally important to be connected with other people that were not people from your family of origin. What happens in later life is your developmental period focuses on new family, new connections that you now solidify and bring into fruition. So what’s interesting is that people don’t see the developmental changes, and frankly, academics like myself do a very bad job of talking about adult development. We just don’t talk about it very much. We don’t think about it, but essentially that means is people don’t even understand. The reason it was so easy in the past was the circumstances created that ease and we just can’t see it, So when we’re young, we’re brought together with peers by default, it’s automatic. It’s built into the structure of our lives. We don’t have to try. It’s just really easy to make friends, but then we carry that expectation over into adulthood even though we’re in a very different stage of life, and that old pattern from our youth where we don’t have to be intentional doesn’t work anymore. We’re going to take a quick break for you word from our sponsors, and now back to the show. I’ve seen this mismatch of expectation and reality when it comes to socializing, making friends and different groups that I belong to, and it’s frustrating for me people’s inflated, inflated expectations.

Brett McKay:

I was in charge of the men’s group in our church, I think it was 10 years ago, and a common complaint was there’s not enough fellowship. So okay, well let’s do something about it. Let’s plan some events. We plan some events, and we would do a lot to communicate that this isn’t the time we’re doing it. Here’s what’s going to happen, who’s going to come? And we get show of hands and we get this buy-in, and then the day of the event would show up and it would just be the leaders there. You’re like, okay, then. So you’d go like, oh, hey, we had this event. People couldn’t make it. And the common excuses were like, I was just busy, or I was just tired. I had something else going on, and well, okay, we’ll plan another event, and no one would show up. And then people would just continue to grouse. Well, there’s no fellowship. And you’re like, okay, guys, we’re trying to create this for you, but it’s going to take some effort to make this happen. And they just get upset. It’s like, why don’t we have fellowship? And it’s like, well, it’s hard. You got to show up. You got to make the effort. You got to make it a priority. And if you don’t, then you’re not going to have that thing you want.

Jeffrey Hall:

You have to make it a priority. And what does that mean to make it a priority? It’s very something we should really dwell on in the sense that people think about, oh, I prioritize friendship, but what does that actually mean in practice? One thing is showing up. Because I wrote this book, I’m very aware of showing up, so I really work hard to show up. If people invite me to a wedding, I’m like, I’m going, it’s going to be uncomfortable or difficult, or maybe I want to do something that day, but I’m going to go anyway. And I tend to have a better time than I thought. People invite me to a going away party or retirement party or a baby shower. I show up, I show up because it sucks to have a party and no one comes. I mean, is there something more insulting to someone to have a party that no one shows up to?

I’m going to be the person that shows up. I show up to funerals because I figure that I would want someone to come to my funeral if I was to pass away. I show up to everything that I possibly can, and I almost in some ways work with my wife because we almost joke with each other and my wife will be like, I don’t really want to go. And I’m like, come on, show up. Because showing up means that you show your care and concern for other people. But fellowship is showing up, right? Friendship is showing up. You cannot have the benefits of conversation, friendship, or fellowship without showing up. And so the key part of what it means to make it a priority is to show up for others when invited and say yes, not to make excuses and go anyway. And one of the things that I think is critical here is that the research evidence bears out that this is good for you.

There’s plenty of excellent research that says that people way overestimate how bad of a time they’re going to have at these things and underestimate what good things are going to come from it. So they are negatively forecasting something and it’s not true. It’s a false belief that’s not helping. But the other thing they forget about is showing up once makes it easier to show up the next time. So one thing we talk about in this book is this idea of a social battery or basically your social energy. And what we know is the more familiar you are with people, circumstances and conversations, the less work it takes from you. So every showing up is easier. So in the case of your men’s group, let’s say that you’re a person who shows up the first time and you’re a little uncomfortable. You’re worried that people don’t think you have to say is good.

Maybe you haven’t done the reading. If you’re having a Bible study group or something like that. I didn’t do the reading, maybe I couldn’t come. And then you go, and then you’re feeling those anxieties. They work themselves out. The next time you go, the research would suggest that you fill all of them less. It’s less work. So what’s happening is simultaneously, as your brain and your social behavior adapts to a new circumstance, it becomes less work. What’s also happening, which is great, is you’re actually contributing an investment of time into a relationship with other people. So each time you show up is more time kind of put in the piggy bank of investment towards friendship. So what’s fascinating about this is when you start thinking about it as I’m showing up over and over again, makes it easier to keep showing up and there are additional benefits of comradery, friendship and all those things, you begin to realize that this routine has this wonderful self-sustaining ability. In the same way that we talked about the negative feedback loops. There’s also a positive feedback loop, but you have to start with showing up.

Brett McKay:

Well, this idea of showing up, this goes back to that idea that I wanted to explore further. We mentioned earlier where, okay, socializing actually reduces stress in your life, but this idea of showing up in overcoming these barriers to socializing, it makes socializing sound like a stressor. It is stress. That’s why a lot of people avoid it. It’s like, well, there’s all these obstacles. People are terrible. It takes a lot of effort to socialize. So in that sense, it is socializing is a type of stressor.

Jeffrey Hall:

It absolutely is, and people are a major source of stress. But there’s also some fascinating research that suggests it’s maybe good stress, it’s good stress for you. I’ll give you an example which I find really fascinating. There are several studies that have found that they count up questions of who are your close friends or who are the family members you can count on? And then survey researchers will ask another question, which is, so who’s a stressor in your life? Who are family members that are really stressing you out and frustrating you? And what’s weird is that even the people who are frustrating or difficult are also people who help abate loneliness or keep it at bay. And what that means is, is that even when we’re contributing to people who are difficult, we are still feeling important to a community. I’ve actually also started to rethink when people stir up stuff.

I don’t know if you have a family where there are members of family who are stir something up, create conflict when it’s not there or get mad about something. In some ways, what’s curious is now that I’ve kind of taken some time to step back from it, I’m like, well, part of this is that they understand by engaging in this, they’re actually getting people to talk to them to have something to talk about. They have emotional drama to be able to resolve, and it makes them feel connected to part of a broader system. Now, it’s not a particularly functional way of doing it, but that stress interestingly also probably makes them feel valued and connected by the group because they’re trying to work on something in that family or in that dynamic that’s struggling. And we need people in those communities. In my mind, people like my mom who worked really hard to keep everybody engaged with one another and it’s a thankless task, but if she wasn’t doing it, my brothers and I probably wouldn’t talk to each other as often as we would otherwise.

So what’s interesting is social stressors are not necessarily bad things in the long run. They bring us into a community of connection. But the other thing I think is important for us to keep in mind is that’s also the good stuff. Being important to other people means you also have to see them through difficult times. One thing that Andy and I talk about in the book is if I’m a good listener to a close friend and they’re struggling and I have had friends go through divorce, I’ve had friends go through major losses in their life, I’ve had friends struggle with their parents, ill health and all of these things I imagine will continue to come as my life continues on. It is work for me to listen on the phone. It is work for me to show up for them and know that they’re going to do 80% of the talking, and it’s mainly going to be about them.

It’s work for me to check in on them and send a message and sometimes send a message that they won’t even respond to because they’re overwhelmed with the circumstances they’re in. But guess what? Every action of putting that work in is good for you as the giver, but it’s even better for them. It’s even better for them to feel cared for better for them to feel like they have someone they can talk to. And you might be the only person in their life that’s reaching out like that. When we begin to realize that our actions to put work into and the stress into these relationships are actually things we do for other people, it reorients our thinking rather than going, well, I got to do this for myself. I need to go to the gym so I’m not unhealthy. We begin to go, I am engaging in social activity, good for other people, and it’s giving to other people to check in on them and make plans with them and care for them and listen to them. It warrants our thinking, I think, in a way that really helps us get out of our own sense of interiority and towards another people which is healthy.

Brett McKay:

No, I love this idea of socializing as a good stressor. It made me think about how exercise is a stressor in our physical life. Exactly. And so when we exercise, we stress our bodies, but by stressing our bodies acutely regularly, we actually diminish chronic stress in our lives. And I think the same thing goes with socializing. So if we think of socializing as a good stressor, if you get doses of it every single day, it reduces our overall chronic stress and increases our overall wellbeing. And like you said, it’s something we can do for the good of others, but at the same time, it does do a lot of good for us. 

Jeffrey Hall:

Absolutely, there’s a quote that I have in the book that I really like Nick Cave, for those of you who may or may not known, Nick Cave was actually a member of a pretty hardcore kind of post punk band. And at the time, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, and then there was one before that as well. And he lost his teenage son to a tragic accident. And he talks about the importance of communication. When you’re at your worst, you feel, I mean, I cannot imagine the grief of losing my own son. And Cave says, it seems to be essential even if just a corrective for the bad unexpressed ideas, we hold in our heads to communicate with others. And what I really love about that quote is that he’s conveying this idea that it is healthy for us to get out of our own heads and relieve our stressors that are internal by being stressed socially.

So I’m stressed out about all kinds of stuff, my kids, my work, my situation, and whatever it is, there are stressors in my life. There’s plenty of really good data and excellent research that says when we express those stressors to other and share them and laugh about them and see them outside ourselves, they actually have this wonderful restorative power to not only bring people together and sharing that burden, but also you actually feel less stress in the long run. So it’s like the stress in the moment of caring for others is not only great for building a relationship and a sense of belonging, which prevents long-term chronic stress and loneliness, but the stress of thoughts unexpressed in our head that we’re not sharing with others because we’re afraid of being vulnerable or afraid of admitting weakness also can be benefited by communication, by talking about it and by talking about it, we can laugh about it and see perspective. And another person says, oh yeah, I’ve gone through the same thing and it stinks and it’s not fair. And then you go, oh, I’m not alone. My ideas are not just corrosively sitting inside of me, but they’re actually being expressed in a way that another person can see me more clearly and I can see them.

Brett McKay:

And also the reason why I like this idea of socializing as a stressor and kind of relating it to exercise as a physical stressor, it made me think of that theory of an evolutionary biology of evolutionary mismatch. 

So people talk about, it’s so weird that people go to gyms and walk on these treadmills and lift these weights. Why do we do this? Well, we live in a world where you don’t have to do a lot of physical work to live. You just sit at a desk all day. So we need physical activity. So we have to intentionally put our bodies under physical stress by going to these weird buildings with these contraptions that look like torture devices to get that stress. And it’s the same thing with socializing. We are evolved to socialize, to connect with the group. We now live in an environment where there’s a mismatch. Opportunities to socialize aren’t as automatic and built into modern life as they used to be. They’re not going to happen by default. So we have to intentionally inject social stress in our life the same way we intentionally inject physical stress into our life.

Jeffrey Hall:

I think that’s really brilliantly said. We’re living in a time where it seems conceivable that you can be in a room, never interact with another human being, have all of your food delivered to you as long as you’re making enough money to pay for it, never socialize even with another person. And in the age of ai, have your therapist, your girlfriend, and your best friend all be an AI program. We have created an environment where we can take all of the friction of human society and take it away and replace it with technological affordances of being delivered our food, our comforts, even our social life. So we are at a very huge evolutionary mismatch right now. And it wasn’t even all that long ago in the past where the concept of friendship was deeply born by the fact that we are in the world making exchanges and building trust with one another.

Brett McKay:

So how can we socially exercise?

Jeffrey Hall:

There are simple steps. So if you think about the idea of first thing is enough reflection of where you’re at, where are you at in the continuum? Are you a person who have plenty of social life? You’re given out to everybody around you. You’re the person that people can call on. You’re very busy. And in that case, the book probably is just in some ways just kind of patting in the back and saying, good job. We also do say in the book, you can be overtaxed, you can go too far. You can get to the point where you’re spread too thin and you need some time alone. You need solitude also to balance that out.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s a good point. So socializing is a good stressor, but any stressor, it’s on that U-shaped curve exactly as you go up, it’s good. And then at a certain point you have diminishing returns and actually is bad. Same thing with physical exercise, moderate exercise is good, but if you go past a certain point, it’s going to be detrimental.

Jeffrey Hall:

And I give a talk recently in Kansas City about social, and I was surrounded by young women professionals who were social networking professional reasons, but also to give back to the community. And I said to them, I’m like, I’m guessing I’m in a room of people who are such deeply committed to their social life that they actually need to hear the solitude part of my talk. So I’m going to start with the solitude part of my talk, and I really want to reinforce for folks out there. I’m not saying if you are on the far end and the reaches of being socially stressed to keep doing what you’re doing, nourished solitude is critical for restoring our sense of connection to one another, that shutting off and letting go of our social responsibilities, particularly the social responsibilities that come through our phone is really important. We need to find time to restore restorative, solitude, critical.

And that use shape curve, you describe exactly in the middle part of the curve. Small acts of sociality are probably all you need for a person kind of in that middle part. You’re not too social and you’re not totally alone. Things like talking to your neighbor, talking to a stranger, making small talk at work, making time to make sure that you meet up with friends once a month. Recognizing that small talk gets such a bad rap that we have to reorganize our thinking about it and realize just checking in with another person and showing them dignity and respect, whether that’s your barista or the person that works at your office or a neighbor, is critical in building community. So small steps, nothing big. Some things once a day, like checking in with a stranger or person in your world, something once a week, checking in with a close friend or with someone that you want to really talk to. And once a month, maybe that’s a longer sort of, if you have time for it and you should make time for it, like a dinner together or out together to do something fun, whatever it is that you like. So you can make that work. But it’s really important to realize you have to know where you are to start. So the big thing about breaking social inertia is knowing where you begin.

Brett McKay:

One thing you’d also do in the book, you talk about different ways we can communicate with others and socialize with others, and we have the internet. It’s just so many different ways you actually create a hierarchy on which ones are better than the others. If you’re going to reach out and connect with someone, walk us through that hierarchy. What are some of the ways we can and which ways are better?

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah, I do a lot of research on social media, on texting, on phone calls. It’s one of my major areas of research. And there’s a hierarchy essentially. And when we think about what that hierarchy is, is I’m encouraging people to move up the ladder of connection, is what I call it. And at the very, very bottom of this ladder of connection is actually scrolling mindlessly on social media. There are mixed studies. I don’t think the evidence is unequivocally that this is harmful for you, but there’s plenty of research that say, depending on the type of content that you’re consuming, it is, it can be very harmful in the sense like doom scrolling. I also think that for certain demographics, like younger adults seeing things that are constantly making them feel that they’re being left out fomo or they’re not as good or they’re not as accomplished, they’re not as successful as other people, those are all pretty bad for you.

And if you can think about ways to minimize the amount of time you’re doing those things, it’s good. So that one is not more or less. The next level up from that is texting. Texting is actually I think kind of an unsung hero of connection. There’s a lot of fun studies that have been done recently that finds that even people you haven’t talked to for a while appreciate a text that just says, Hey, I’m thinking of you people don’t use email anymore. But if you are of the demographic and also of the age group or email’s comfortable, send one of those. One step up from texting would probably be a phone call or a video chat, scheduling a time to check in, have a longer conversation back and forth, whatever. Also, a lot of young adults, interestingly, are more adept at using video chat just to hang out together.

So they just leave it on and then they go about what they’re doing. People long distance relationships do that as well. And then the top of that hierarchy is face-to-face communication. So if you are a person who finds themselves just lacking for time to do any of these things, all I’m asking is one step higher. Maybe if you’re pretty good at keeping in touch on text and you have group chats going on with lots of folks, you can have one you want to check in with and call in the next week, make an appointment to call them. And that’s the only way I keep in touch with my friends, by the way, is by an appointment. So it’s not like I’m just seeing if my friend Craig’s going to pick up the phone. I know he’s a busy guy with kids. We make it time to do that. So I’m just asking one step up, one step up at a time and to recognize that any step up is actually shows empirical evidence to be beneficial.

Brett McKay:

I thought it was interesting the research about the difference between video calls and just regular phone calls.

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah, that one’s interesting too because I think that’s an evolving norm. Some stuff suggests that video chat actually makes you feel a little more lonely because it actually makes you feel perhaps that you’re missing that person more when you see them. And some people really love talking on the phone. I would include myself as one of them. The sound of another person in my head makes me feel so close and connected to them. But when I’m on video chat, I get distracted and confused and I feel like I need to be more aware of my facial behaviors, which makes me feel weird. So I think kind of think a jury is still out. A lot of people are stuck on video chat all day long at work, which I think also degrades its sense of efficacy. But young adults have taught me that they seem to really get it. That video chat’s a good opportunity to just kind of have someone in your room while you’re doing other things.

Brett McKay:

It might be a generational thing. I don’t like video chat. 

Jeffrey Hall:

Me neither.

Brett McKay:

And it’s a reason why on the podcast, I don’t do video. I just like to do audio only.

Jeffrey Hall:

Hey, can I give you a shout out for out? Thank you. It’s a lot less work on my part. I think I can watch my words a lot more closely and really think about what you’re saying, but if I’m watching the interaction, I’m way too attentive to what I’m doing.

Brett McKay:

And you don’t have to worry about the lighting or what your hair looks like. 

Jeffrey Hall:

I’m having a good hair day though, Brett.

Brett McKay:

The tricky thing about socializing is it requires other people. And so it’s a collective action problem. So if you want to socialize, that’s great, but if the other person doesn’t or there’s no one else to socialize with, well then you’re kind of out of luck. It’s like wanting to play catch. There’s no one to play catch with. That’s what a conversation is.

Jeffrey Hall:

Totally.

Brett McKay:

So what do we do about that? Because that collective action problem, it’s structural, the way our time is scheduled up, how our space is arranged, what can we do to improve the structure of our lives so that socializing is maybe a bit easier, can’t be completely easy or completely frictionless. I think the effort is part of what makes it good for us, but how can we approach it to facilitate it being a bigger part of our lives?

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah. One of my good friends from high school, she had this phrase, she went to social work and she talked about the idea that you need to basically follow the weaker impulse. And I love that phrase because it gives you kind of a sense in which that how you need to be alert to the tendencies to not do this stuff. And what I mean by following the weaker impulse when it comes to being social is you had a hard day, there’s a social event that you haven’t been planning for a while, and you’re like, oh, I don’t want go. You need to follow the weaker impulse, which says it’s a good thing to go another way. Encourage the people in your life to be social. Maybe that’s your partner, maybe that’s your kids. Encourage the people around you to set a norm and an expectation that being social is something that’s worth fighting for and worth doing.

I think structurally and socially, this is a very, very hard problem. Robert Putnam, who I’ve mentioned before, has been counseling every president since Bill Clinton about how to build social interactions and build social community. And they have not been able to reverse the trend. I don’t know how our trends around work can be fixed, but some of this is about acknowledging that we are also engaging in trends that we have probably more control over than we perceive. And I think the big one is how we choose to use our leisure time around media entertainment. I think we have to reorganize the way that we think about what’s valuable about consuming media and say that maybe this is really not the thing that needs to be occupying my time the whole time. And if I make an exception by saying, this night of the week, I’m going to reserve for catching up with a friend or otherwise, it’s a worthwhile endeavor to do so.

What’s hard is I wish for a world in which we could return to a sense of social obligation to one another. I wish for a world in which that it became more normative, that people would reach out and care for the people, especially those who are needed and isolated. But the biggest thing that I got to recommend is the only change that I think you really have control over is to recognize that making it a priority in your life means showing up, doing so consistently and taking your knocks when people can’t be there for you. People can cancel on you, you forgive them, and you try again. If people don’t text you back It’s okay. It doesn’t mean the text didn’t matter. You chit chat with the bagger at the grocery store and that 16-year-old rolls their eyes at you because some middle-aged white dude telling them this or that. That’s okay. I take my knocks. I recognize that every social interaction is not going to be a great one. But the fact that I’m trying in my world and my community, I think makes me a person who’s trying to build a healthier biome for living for everyone.

Brett McKay:

So exercise your agency to change the environment around you.

Jeffrey Hall:

You got it.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And I think the idea is if you start making it a priority in your life, hosting parties, hosting, even just small get togethers with your friends reaching out, the idea is that it can act as a social contagion. People are like, oh wow, this guy’s having a get together where he just has beers and sodas and it’s nothing really big, but I had a really good time. Maybe I could do that.

Jeffrey Hall:

And I think what’s curious about this is that we also know from other research on social norms and contagion is this is how it happens. People begin to understand that this is something that can be done and they see pathways to doing it. Any major social change happens because enough people have modeled it and demonstrated how it works to make it work again. And I’m hopeful. I mean, I think there’s a lot of reason to be hopeful.

Brett McKay:

So if listeners were to take one small action this week to build up their own social biome and the social biome around them, what would you recommend?

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah. I would say make a plan with somebody that you love. If that’s your romantic partner, if that’s your best friend, if that’s your family member or brother or sister, make a plan to talk to ’em. Make a plan to have lunch. Make a plan to check in, make a plan to make a phone call. Put it on your calendar and do it. And even if you’re just listening right now, send that text. Say, Hey, we haven’t caught up for a while. Would you like to get together? Or, we have this thing coming up. Or When are you available to have lunch? Again, do it while you’re listening to this conversation that Brett and I are having. And then keep being persistent. If that person says, oh yeah, definitely, but I need to get back to you. Get back to them. Follow up, keep working at it. And once you have that opportunity to connect with them, the best piece of advice is to say, let’s do it again. And not just do it out of politeness, but actually put it on the calendar to do it again. And once you start doing it, it becomes easier and easier.

Brett McKay:

It’s true. After I read this book, I told you this in the email that I sent you before this interview, it inspired me. I set up a ruck with some guys here in town. Very cool. Saturday morning, eight o’clock, eat some donuts along the way.

Jeffrey Hall:

That’s awesome.

Brett McKay:

And it was easy. I could have done this so many times, but that social inertia. But looks like a lot of guys are going to show up and it should be fun.

Jeffrey Hall:

And I would also say, if not all of them show up. Do it anyway. Yeah,

Brett McKay:

Do it anyway.

Jeffrey Hall:

Do it again. And maybe new people will show up next time because they weren’t available this time. I think we’re too quick to assume that social failure means it’s not worth doing, and that’s just not the case.

Brett McKay:

Well, Jeffrey, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Jeffrey Hall:

Absolutely. So my run of relationships in technology lab here at the University of Kansas, and my research is posted there, but also on LinkedIn. I’m really active on posting about research related findings on LinkedIn. The social biome specifically is something I promote on Instagram and I’m Jeffrey Hall, PhD at Instagram. So those two kind of places are in which people can kind of see updates on what my work is being doing. So I’d love to have you there too. Fantastic.

Brett McKay:

Well, Jeffrey Hall, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure. Hey, thank you. My guest today is Jeffrey Hall. He’s the coauthor of the book, The Social Biome. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Make sure to check out our show notes at aom.is/socialstress. You can find links to resources and we can delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the A one podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. You find our podcast archives and check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action. 

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The British just seem like a classier bunch. Part of it is that winning accent. But it’s also because English culture has long been steeped in the tradition of learning and practicing etiquette.

Here to share some of the essentials of modern etiquette that are important no matter which side of the pond you live on is William Hanson, a British etiquette expert and the author of Just Good Manners. William shares the difference between manners and etiquette, and why young people are especially interested in both. He then takes us through how to introduce yourself and others, the history behind the “no elbows on the table” mantra, the rules of small talk, some overlooked guidelines for table manners, how to enter a conversational circle at a party, considerations for elevator etiquette, and much more. Whether you’re dining at a fancy restaurant or just want to navigate social situations with more confidence, William’s insights will help you present yourself with the panache of a proper English gentleman.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #897: Answers to the FAQ of Modern Etiquette
• AoM Podcast #422: Men & Manners — Tipping, Emojis, and Much More
• AoM Article: The Importance of Good Manners
• AoM Article: How to Acquire Good Manners
• AoM Article: A Man’s Guide to Dining Etiquette and Proper Table Manners
• AoM Article: How to Make Introductions Like a Gentleman
• AoM Article: How to Make Small Talk
• AoM’s Complete Guide to Giving a Great Handshake

Connect With William Hanson

• William’s website
• William on TikTok
• William on IG

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. The British just seem like a classier bunch. Part of it is that winning accent, but it’s also because English culture has long been steeped in the tradition of learning and practicing etiquette. Here to share some of the essentials of modern etiquette that are important no matter which side of the pond you live on is William Hanson, a British etiquette expert and the author of Just Good Manners. William shares the difference between manners and etiquette and why young people are especially interested in both. He then takes us through how to introduce yourself and others, the history behind the no elbows on the table mantra, the rules of small talk, some overlooked guidelines for table manners, how to enter a conversational circle at a party, considerations for elevator etiquette, and much more. Whether you’re dining at a fancy restaurant or just want to navigate social situations with more confidence, William’s insights will help you present yourself with the panache of a proper English gentleman. After the show’s over, check out our show notes @AoM.is/etiquette. All right, William Hanson, welcome to the show.

William Hanson: Thank you very much for having me.

Brett McKay: So you are a professional etiquette teacher. How did you become an etiquette teacher?

William Hanson: Well, it wasn’t something I necessarily sort of woke up one day and thought, right, that’s it, I’m going to become an etiquette teacher. It wasn’t a profession I was even aware really existed. As a child growing up, I wanted to either be the Archbishop of Canterbury, for whatever reason, or a spy or a newsreader. That’s the trajectory I was heading in, I had decided. But then my grandmother gave me this book of etiquette for Christmas when I was 12. And sort of after a few sort of, have I read any of it type questions, I thought, well, I bet I just better read a bit and then I can tell her I’ve read it. And it was actually very interesting and very funny and I bought more books on the subject. And then when I was 16, 17 at my school, they came up to me and said, oh, we’re looking for someone to teach the younger years how to set a table. Do you think you could do that? And I said, well, when do you want me to do it? And they said, oh, Tuesday afternoons. And I said, oh, instead of playing sport? They said, yes. So I didn’t need to be asked twice, really. And that’s how the teaching side of things started.

Brett McKay: And so you got a new book out called Just Good Manners, where you take Americans and just anybody through the ins and outs of British etiquette. And we’re gonna dig into that because I think it’s applicable to whatever country you live in. But I thought it was really interesting, you talk about the history of etiquette education in the United Kingdom. Can you tell us a bit about that? Because I didn’t know about this.

William Hanson: Yes, I think Britain has always, or England even, we should say before it sort of became Britain, has always sort of led the way in education, in manners and etiquette and civility. Swiss finishing schools as well were very popular and they basically did the same thing, but they just had the mountains skiing. That’s what they could offer that we in Britain couldn’t. But even going back to the Dickensian England, not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, but men would sort of go on what was called the grand tour around Europe just before they settled down. And whilst that was happening, the ladies were being finished and you would have sort of characters like Dickens portrays one in Little Dorrit called Mrs. General, who is there sort of taking these group of sisters under her wing, finishing them and telling them sort of how to behave and what was expected of them. So this sort of education has always existed, certainly in the last sort of 300 years or so.

Brett McKay: And you’re the director of one of like the last English etiquette schools, correct?

William Hanson: Yes, so sort of at the height of the 20th century, which is when these finishing schools, we still had presentation at court, which is when young girls would curtsy in front of the king and queen, as it were, before they were sort of eligible to be married, completely outdated practice and one that Queen Elizabeth sort of quite quickly when she ascended the throne knocked on the head because she thought it was ridiculous. But you had finishing the schools such as Winkfield Place or Lucy Clayton. And Lucy Clayton actually in 2001 sort of regenerated into the English Manor, which is the company I’m now very pleased to run and own.

Brett McKay: So at the beginning of the book, you make a distinction between manners and etiquette. And I’ve seen this distinction before, but what do you think is the difference between etiquette and manners?

William Hanson: I would say manners are sort of the top line fundamental requirement for being a human being wherever you are in the world to treat people with civility, charm, grace, decorum, respect. How we do that is by using a set of rules. Most of the time, the etiquette is correct. Sometimes it isn’t. We actually have to break the rule of etiquette. But etiquette is, it can change from country to country and what is considered polite in one country can be very different and actually impolite in another. So you use the set of rules according to your environment.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and a lot of people, when I see them make this distinction between manners and etiquette, manners is just sort of how you comport yourself with other people to make sure things go smoothly, etiquette of the specific rules. They often say, well, manners are more important than etiquette. And you make the case, well, maybe not.

William Hanson: Yeah, I would say I think it is impossible to be a well-mannered person without knowing something about etiquette. You don’t necessarily need to know that a dinner napkin at its largest is 26 inches. For example, I think you will be able to get through life without knowing that pearl of wisdom. But I would say following the rules of etiquette makes you a more well-mannered person. You can be a well-mannered person without knowing etiquette, but I think you can be an even more well-mannered person if you use the two. I think they work together.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I agree with that. Because I think what etiquette does, it gives you something concrete to do. Because oftentimes people just don’t know what to do in certain situations. Like, I don’t know, what am I supposed to do? Well, here, follow these rules. You can be well-mannered by following these simple rules.

William Hanson: Exactly. As a child, I don’t know about you, Brett, but as a child, I liked to know what was expected of me. Because as a child, of course, we’re all petrified, or most children are petrified of being told off or grounded or whatever the form of punishment is. And so we sort of want to know when we go to this person’s house, what are we doing? What are we expected? How am I meant to behave at schools? For example, we were given parameters and boundaries. And that’s sort of all it is, really, in adult life. I think adults thrive with parameters and boundaries and knowing what is expected of them. Because we all want to get it right. And we’ve bizarrely got to a point in life where so many people will say, oh, I don’t need etiquette. Who knows etiquette anymore? And actually what they’re doing, rather badly, is masking the fact that they don’t know the rules themselves. And so they are sort of saying it doesn’t matter because actually they don’t know and they don’t want to admit their sort of blissful ignorance.

Brett McKay: And something I’ve noticed, and I think you’ve noticed this as well with your career, because I think you’re really popular on TikTok, I feel like a lot of young people crave that knowledge of etiquette because they want to know how to act in the world with other people in a way that’s well-mannered and smooth.

William Hanson: Yes, absolutely. I think there are so many sort of ways now for people to be sort of, rightly so in some instances, called out or flagged down for bad behavior. And so younger generations who have grown up knowing that actually they can’t really be an awful human being and get away with it, are more conscious of it. One of my biggest demographics on my social media videos is Gen Z. And actually when the Gen Z people come and sort of say hi to me in the street, if they pass me, whether it’s in London or New York or wherever, they’re so nice and so polite and cautious about coming up to me. Whereas some millennial followers that I have, and I am a millennial myself, will sort of charge up to me and almost demand immediately without sort of being conscious that I may not be working, I might be out in a social capacity and demand that I do a photograph with them. I don’t mind doing a photograph, but sort of ask me nicely. So Gen Z get a bit of a bad rap, but actually from what I’ve seen, I think it’s quite good that they’re interested in how to behave and just sort of being aware of how their actions affect other people, which is really all it is.

Brett McKay: So let’s dig in to some of the rules of etiquette that you highlight in your book that can help us guide our social interactions. I think a lot of etiquette is primarily about interacting with other people

William Hanson: Yes.

Brett McKay: And making those interactions as smooth and as comfortable and as pleasant as possible. Let’s start off with introductions. What’s the best way to introduce yourself?

William Hanson: Well, I think when I was writing Just Good Manners, this was one of the things that I found sort of faintly interesting was that in the etiquette books, the Emily Post original edition from the 1920s, for example, there is nothing about introducing yourself because it used to be the etiquette that it was incredibly taboo to introduce yourself, but there was lots of advice about introducing other people. Whereas now etiquette books, Just Good Manners aside, will have information about how to introduce yourself, but nothing about introducing other people. And certainly a lot of Brits or people that spent too much time in Britain and sort of picked up some bad British habits, when they go to introduce themselves to someone, whether it’s on the street or at a cocktail party or whatever, apologize for introducing themselves. Maybe that’s because we in Britain are programmed to know that it’s not really good form historically to introduce yourself, although absolutely fine now, but they’ll say, oh, sorry to interrupt, or, oh, sorry to come up to you today. And actually, well, I don’t know anything about you, but I have just, I do now know that you’ve just interrupted me and that you’re apologizing. So already I’ve noticed that you’re apologizing and you’re interrupting me, whereas I may not have noticed actually. So just, I think something positive and upbeat. Hello, my name’s William. Very lovely to meet you, for example, is all you need to do. And say your name clearly as well. It is so important to say your name that so few people actually bother to say their names when they’re introducing themselves, which is extraordinary behavior because otherwise I don’t know what to call you.

Brett McKay: Okay, so be positive, be upbeat, don’t apologize, say your name clearly. You mentioned people don’t know how to introduce other people. And I’ve noticed that as well. Whenever I’m interacting with individuals and let’s say they’re with their spouse or you’re going over to a friend’s house and their grandmother’s there, no one knows how to introduce people to other people. So I end up usually just having to introduce myself. So what is the proper protocol on making introductions?

William Hanson: So it can get quite complicated. And actually, when I started teaching etiquette 18 years ago, this was the bit that I would in class dread coming to teach because it can be quite wordy. But what you don’t need to do is you don’t need to say both parties’ names twice. So if you’ve got Bill and Ben, for example, you don’t need to say, Bill, this is Ben. Ben, this is Bill. You don’t need to reverse it. And the example I would give you is to sort of show you why that is wrong, is if you take the head of state in any country. In Britain, it would be the king, the president in America. Let’s take the president, for example, whoever that president is. If I said, Mr. President, may I introduce Bill, that is fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. I put the president first. I’m giving him the respect as head of state. But if I then switch it, Bill, this is the president, that second time I have elevated Bill and relegated the president, which in a diplomatic context is completely the wrong thing to do. So you only need to say the most important person’s name first. How you define who that most important person is, is up to you. And it depends on context. In a professional setting, the CEO of the company is probably going to be more important than the intern. A client to a company is going to be more important than the CEO. Socially, you probably now would go on age rather than looking at gender. So Granny being 85 is going to be sort of elevated above Annie, who’s 18.

Brett McKay: Okay, that makes sense. And then you also talk about whenever you make an introduction to add some context to the introduction.

William Hanson: Yes. None of us really like making small talk if we’re completely honest. I mean, small talk with complete strangers for some is absolute purgatory. So you can make life easy for the two people that you are introducing by saying, Bill, this is Ben. Ben’s just flown in from Sydney. And Bill, I believe, didn’t your mother used to live in Australia? If you can find a link, that’s perfect because then they do have common ground. But if not, you just say, Ben just flew in from Sydney, leave it at that. And then hopefully one of them goes, oh gosh, I’ve always wanted to go. And just says something. But if you just say the names and do the introduction, people just stare at each other like, great, you’ve introduced me, but who are you?

Brett McKay: We typically shake hands when meeting someone new. This is the art of manliness. We got to talk about the etiquette on handshaking.

William Hanson: Yes. I mean, handshaking, which of course it slightly went out of fashion during the pandemic, but is thankfully now back. It’s probably the only physical contact you will have with most people. And I think, and I don’t know about you, Brett, you can tell so much about someone by the quality of the handshake. Do you judge someone?

Brett McKay: Of course. If I get the limp fish, it’s an immediate like, yeah, yeah I don’t know, yeah, yeah.

William Hanson: Yeah. It’s an ick to use a modern parlance. Already in the first couple of seconds whilst we’re judging a new person, I’ve met them and it’s a limp fish handshake, as you say. And it’s unpleasant. Similarly, if it’s a bone crusher, you think, wow, why are they having to overcompensate and come across as overly assertive? So the handshake is so important. And I, again, in the book, when I was writing, I thought, well, actually maybe, maybe I’m being a bit harsh on people that have bad handshakes because I can remember, I think my parents telling me how to shake a hand age five, maybe, roughly around age five. But then no parent, I mean, maybe there are parents out there that sort of are the exceptions that prove the rule. No parent then revisits that handshaking lesson when their child is now 15. And actually the strength of their handshake is going to be very different for what they were doing when they were five. You’re sort of told what to do and then nobody revises it. And actually having a good handshake is often half the battle, particularly in business.

Brett McKay: No, I agree. Handshake is important. Something I’ve taught my kids. And I like a good firm handshake for men and women alike. I’m an equal opportunist when it comes to that sort of thing.

William Hanson: Oh, absolutely. And I would, again, one of the things I’ve enjoyed doing writing the book is sort of tracking where the changes have come in and what these changes are. And again, if you read the original Emily Post or books published in the 1920s, ladies didn’t massively shake hands. The hostess might’ve shook hands with guests, but other than that, ladies didn’t do it. Now, anyone of any gender, business or professional, everybody shakes hands. Everyone should take off their right glove if they’re wearing gloves. It’s flesh to flesh. Obviously, if you’re in absolute minus 40 degrees Celsius temperatures, fine, you can keep your glove on. There are always sort of caveats to it. But yes, a handshake is pretty equal.

Brett McKay: So this is related introductions, but this has happened to me a few times. It’s whenever you encounter someone you’ve met before, but you can’t remember their name. You’re not really acquaintances, but you know of each other. How do you make those, what we call reintroductions to each other?

William Hanson: Yes, I think a lot of people sort of can get quite offended that the other person hasn’t remembered you. But actually, you know, sometimes we’re the most memorable and interesting person in our own lives because we’re there, we’re the only person that is sort of the world expert on ourselves. But other people may not necessarily remember you like you remember them. So just say your name quickly. Hello, so lovely to see you again. It’s William, of course. What have you been up to since I saw you at Brett’s, for example? Just help them out rather than sort of expect them to remember every detail about you. Obviously, if they can remember everything about you, that’s fantastic. Actually, a really simple trick I often do in restaurants or hotels I go to a lot, I just write down the staff’s name in a note in my phone. And so when I’m going back in, I can remember that, you know, Grant is the tall waiter with the ear piercing. And so when I go in again, I can say, oh, hello, Grant, how are you? And generally, you find you get a thousand times better service when you actually bother to learn their names. It also helps, I think, trains your brain to remember people’s names better as well.

Brett McKay: I like that. That’s a classy move. I’m going to start doing that. What happens if you forget someone’s name? Any tips on navigating that?

William Hanson: Yeah, I mean, apologize and move on quite quickly. So, Brett, if I called you Ben, for example, and you say, oh, no, it’s Brett, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Brett, I’d probably say, using your correct name and then move on. But again, it’s quite a British thing to make that into a drama and to over-apologize. Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry. Oh, that happens all the time. And the more of an issue I make it, the more of an issue it becomes. So just say sorry, say the correct name, make a mental note not to get it wrong again, and move on.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s something I’ve learned after reading your book. British people like to apologize, very apologetic.

William Hanson: We do. I mean, look, hey, it’s better to over-apologize than not apologize at all.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

William Hanson: But it can go the other way as well.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about small talk. Any etiquette to small talk? Are there topics that are taboo that you definitely don’t want to go there?

William Hanson: Yeah, I would say this is something that has not changed very recently. Sex, money, politics, health, and religion still remain for small talk. And this is conversation with people you do not know well. I’m not saying when you’re talking to very good friends. But with strangers, avoid sex, money, politics, health, or religion to begin with because you just don’t know what people’s opinions are, what makes them engage, what disengages them, what offends them. And it’s so much better to sort of play it safe. And some cultures just don’t get small talk. The Germans absolutely don’t get it. The Dutch sort of get it but aren’t particularly good at it. But think about small talk as the slip road onto a major highway. If you didn’t have that slip road and you were joining the conversational highway going at 70 miles an hour, you would crash. And so you need that slip road to just sort of build your speed up into a slightly more interesting conversation. That is the point of small talk. I’m not pretending it is fascinating, but it is needed in order to have a proper conversation with someone.

Brett McKay: Okay, for our American listeners, a slip road in England is what we call an on-ramp over here. And that’s the metaphor I always use for small talk. Some people say they hate small talk and they just want to jump to the big talk. But you’ve got to take the on-ramp of small talk to get up to speed into that deeper conversation. So what are your go-to topics for small talk?

William Hanson: I mean, look, in Britain, we’re obsessed with talking about the weather. I was being interviewed yesterday. It was a British journalist. We spent five minutes talking about the weather at the start of the interview. But in Britain, our weather, we often can have three or four seasons in a day. If you’re in gorgeous California or you’re in the Middle East where the weather is sort of fairly consistent, the weather’s not going to be spoken about. But beyond the weather, I just talk about the environment that you are in there and then. You’re trying to find a shared experience or something in common with that person. And if you have nothing else in common, you don’t sort of have lots of hobbies in common, what you do have is the room you’re in. Gosh, what a beautiful ceiling. Aren’t the band fantastic? Something upbeat and positive is what we want. Talk about the canapes. How do you know the host? That’s safe and better small talk than, gosh, well, it’s a lovely sunny day, isn’t it?

Brett McKay: In America, we’re obsessed with work.

William Hanson: Yes.

Brett McKay: So often work is a topic of small talk. What do you do? In Britain, apparently, that’s frowned upon to talk about work in small talk.

William Hanson: Yeah, well, I’ll be honest, your American tendencies are sort of creeping in. And I think particularly younger generations are slightly more work-focused and find it less taboo. But people really shouldn’t be defined by their jobs. I mean, I do speak as someone who’s an etiquette coach. I’ve got a slight vested interest in this and pushing my own personal agenda. But if I go to a party this evening, I’m going in my social capacity. Whether I’m a dentist, a tax lawyer, or an etiquette coach, it’s got no bearing on whether my friend has invited me to that party. And as much as I love my job, I mean, I have no other talent, so I don’t know what else I’d do, I don’t want to talk about it all the time, actually. There’s more to me than my job. And so certainly to begin with, and again, when you say to people you’re an etiquette coach, people sort of either freeze or start panicking. I’d quite like to talk about something else, thank you very much.

Brett McKay: Yeah, or if you ask someone about their job, they hate their job.

William Hanson: Oh, and then you’ll say, oh, God, I don’t really care, really. Especially if you meet someone, yeah, and they start moaning about their job, and you think, well, I was just asking it to be polite. I don’t really need a whole rundown.

Brett McKay: What do you do when you’re engaging in small talk and let’s say the conversation starts going into some of those taboo topics you mentioned earlier? Any way to navigate that deftly?

William Hanson: Well, I mean, hopefully, most of your conversation is listening and being able to pick up on what you’re being given back. And if you’re asking a question, especially if you think it’s controversial and you’re not getting much back from the other person, it is probably time to move on. But often it’s other people witnessing or listening into the conversation that will have to step in and could see the car crash, to use another driving analogy, about to happen. And so, I mean, it’s such a cliche, but it works, is just stepping in and going, well, what lovely weather we’re having today and saying it very pointedly. I’ve only ever had to do it once at a dinner I was hosting. And that should be a clue to the people that had started to get a bit heated, but also to the other guests. We need to move this on. Everyone needs to step in and help me here.

Brett McKay: Let’s say you’re at a cocktail party, a mingling event, and you’re going there by yourself. You don’t know anyone and there’s already established little circles of conversation going on. How do you enter a conversational group with class and smoothly?

William Hanson: This is hard to explain on an audio podcast, but generally you want to, first of all, before you actually move in, make sure there are what we call an open body language group. And usually that means there’s a great big gap for you that you can go and stand in. If there’s no gap, don’t try and approach them because they’ve sort of subconsciously or consciously closed that gap off. And so you’re not going to get much success. But really, basically, if you know somebody in that group, much easier, you just make eye contact with them and hope they bring you in. But if you don’t know anyone in that group, it’s as shallow, basically, I hate to say it, it’s as shallow as picking the one that looks like you. So that could be you’re tall and blonde, they’re tall and blonde. It’s a group of women and one man, you look at the male, for example, or man in a tie, man in a tie, just anything that you will have most success joining a group if you basically pick the person who looks most like you, smile at them, make a really nice positive signal. If you get a smile back, you step forward and do your approach and would say, oh, hello, may I join? My name is William. Again, don’t say sorry to interrupt. If you don’t get a smile back and they sort of look away or close the gap, you just move on and try and find someone else.

Brett McKay: That tip of looking for people that look like you, you talk about in the book, you go into a party where the invitation had ambiguous instructions on dress code and it was either black tie or 1970s apparel.

William Hanson: Yes.

Brett McKay: So you’re the etiquette guy. You went black tie. Of course you’re gonna go black tie. But there was only three other guys that went black tie. You guys just ended up talking to each other the entire night.

William Hanson: We did, because again, it’s shallow. When people don’t know many other people, they don’t take risks. If you’ve got a group of mice, you’ve got a group of cats. Okay, the cats might want to play with the mice, but the mice don’t want to play with the cats. And it’s the same. So I didn’t know there were two dress codes. I was someone’s guest. I was going on secondhand information without having seen the invitation. I always ask to see the invitation now after that drama. But yes, there were, you know, in a room full of 100 people, there were three of us in black tie, tuxedo. And it was quite boring after a while because no one else wanted to talk to us. And it’s sort of playground stuff, but it does happen.

Brett McKay: I’m sure a lot of people have had this happen to them when they’re at a party and they start talking to someone and this someone does not want to let go of you. But you want to go talk to other people. How do you politely break away from someone who’s talking your ear off?

William Hanson: Well, ideally you want to introduce them to someone else and pair them off. It’s not great to leave someone standing on their own. If they’ve said something objectionable or you absolutely have to go because you’re going to miss your flight or something, then fair enough. But try to pair them off with someone else. Brett, it’s been so lovely talking to you. I’ve just seen someone over there I’ve got to go and get and speak to before they leave. Have you met Susan, however? And I’ve sort of seen Susan floating around and I grab her as she comes past and go, Susan, may I introduce Brett? Brett has just flown in from Sydney. And Susan, I believe your mother is from Australia. I’ll leave you two talking and off you go. So that’s what you ideally want to do. But if there is no one, you’re going to have to leave them standing on their own, but you can make it sound like you are the bore. So I would say something like, well, Brett, look, I know I’ve monopolized so much of your time this evening and I know there are lots of other people you want to go and talk to, but maybe we’ll see each other in a few weeks’ time at that fundraiser. Shake hands and off we go.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So I think we’ve handled introductions, we’ve handled small talk. Let’s talk about table manners. Let’s start with this question. Why do the British have what seems like such complicated and fastidious rules of table etiquette?

William Hanson: Well, I would say, I mean, thankfully, it’s not the case anymore in Britain. We have such a wide and varied cuisine. But historically, our food was always a bit rubbish. And I think a lot of these rules might have been developed just to sort of slow down eating it. You didn’t want to rush it because it wasn’t very tasty. And so we came up with these sort of rules to have very small mouthfuls and small portions. And we had a lot of alcohol with our food, different alcohol for each course. And also, you know, in Britain, we like a rule, we like structure. And I think British dining is the most complicated compared to European, which is a different thing from British dining, we should say. And that’s not a Brexit thing. It’s always been that way in sort of etiquette land. We’ve always had British and then European dining and then American dining. But we do like to overcomplicate things sometimes.

Brett McKay: And you recommend that people learn British etiquette because that’ll basically cover your bases.

William Hanson: Yeah, and that’s something I picked up from my great friend and colleague, Myka Meier, who’s the leading expert in America in etiquette. And she teaches British dining as the sort of the gold standard, because if you can do the top standard, you can easily do the bottom standard, whatever that one is. I guess it’s like driving. I mean, I know it varies now, but if you learn to drive on a stick, you can drive an automatic. But if you learn just on an automatic, you can’t drive on a stick. And so it’s probably best to learn the hardest one. And then you’re covered for all bases.

Brett McKay: So I think most of us growing up heard the rule, no elbows on the table. And you talk about the history of why we have that rule. So what is the history of the rule, no elbows on the table?

William Hanson: Yes, and this is what people seem to forget, particularly with etiquette and dining etiquette, is that we have not just come up with these rules to annoy people. There is a rich history behind all of our cultures. And the no elbows on the table one goes back to sort of medieval Britain and Europe, where the tables were not secure tables like we’re fortunate to eat from today. They were created from benches and sheets of wood twice a day when people were eating two meals a day back then, not three. And if you put your elbows on the table, because of the way the food would be laid out down the center of the table well balanced, if you put your elbows on the table, the table would tip and it would not be secure. And so thus it became the etiquette to not put your elbows on the table because you didn’t want the food dropping onto the floor. I would say now we as humans, we’re sort of so ingrained knowing all our ancestors have learned not to do that. We sort of subconsciously or consciously know it as well. And so something we still follow, even though our tables are by and large secure.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and it also doesn’t look good when you’re at a nice dinner to have your elbows on the table.

William Hanson: No. It’s horrid. I mean, it’s actually very difficult to eat with your elbows on the table. I challenge anyone to do it nicely. Maybe at the end of a dinner when you’re sort of chatting over a cup of tea or coffee with your host, maybe having a little bit of a chocolate or something, I can sort of see that it’s okay in that instance, especially if your host is doing it. But formally, whilst there’s proper food on the table in the middle, then no elbows off.

Brett McKay: When you’re a guest at a dinner, when should you start eating?

William Hanson: So once the host has started, basically, is the rule. If there’s a guest of honor, you would wait until the guest of honor has started. But generally on most meals that we have, there isn’t a guest of honor. And so once the host starts, and they should be served last, then you may pick up your cutlery and begin.

Brett McKay: I think everyone knows that when you’re out to eat, you don’t start eating your dish until everyone has been served. But if it’s like an informal dinner at your home with friends and family, do you need to wait until everyone’s gotten their food to start eating? I mean, is that the rule?

William Hanson: Oh, yes, yes. Everyone’s got to have food in front of them and be ready to go. And they’re not still waiting for potatoes or sprouts or anything like that. You wait until everyone’s got it. And that’s when the host then picks up their cutlery as a signal, we may now begin.

Brett McKay: If you’re a host of a dinner, how should you pace your own eating?

William Hanson: Yes, you want to sort of identify the slowest eater around the table. And obviously for family dinners, you can probably work out who that is quite quickly because you dine with them quite a lot. Growing up in my household, if my parents were hosting, it was always granny. Granny would do a lot of talking, but not a lot of eating. And so my father was always sort of there dissecting a singular garden pea or something because that’s all he had got on his plate whilst granny started, whilst still taught and did less eating. But host starts first, but host finishes last. And that’s a huge discipline. And the idea is that you don’t leave one person still eating with the rest of the table staring at them. So the host sort of picks who’s the slowest, follows them so that they can match pace. And so they are included and are not feeling like they’re holding things up, even though let’s be honest, they might be.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Let’s talk dinner place settings. This is how you got your start as an etiquette teacher. First thing you did was teach how to do dinner place settings. I’m sure if you’ve been to a fancy dinner, you see just this layout and you’re like, oh my gosh, which fork am I supposed to use? Which one’s the bread plate? There’s that whole advice that was in the Titanic, start from the outside and work your way in with the silverware. Does that really do the trick or are there nuances to that?

William Hanson: That does generally do the trick. I mean, all of these dining etiquette rules only work if a table has been set nicely. But working on the proviso the table is set nicely and correctly, that one generally works. However, in American dining etiquette there is what’s called the American informal play setting where a teaspoon, used for dessert, will actually precede the dinner knife. American etiquette books often will show both the standard play setting with outside in and then this American informal and the outside in rule does not work at all because it’s sort of zigzagging all over the shop. So I’m very against the American informal one because I don’t think it helps people and the whole point of etiquette is it’s meant to sort of help people whereas this is one exception too many and also nobody that I have spoken to and please if you’re listening to this and you know where that rule came from please tell me because my colleagues and I, even the American ones, just can’t work it out. Who came up with that? What was the logic behind that? I think with any rule if you can’t find the logic behind it it’s probably time to ditch it.

Brett McKay: What’s the etiquette of napkins? Apparently you’re a big napkin aficionado.

William Hanson: Yes, I’ve got an unhealthy amount of napkins for a grown man of my age but I love a good quality napkin. I’ve yet to get to the stage in life where I take my own napkin to a restaurant but I’m sure it’ll happen at some point because in Britain, I don’t know what it’s like in America as much but in Britain some places are obsessed with paper napkins and I’m just not convinced. I don’t think it doesn’t need to be paper because it’s bad for the environment so a perfectly serviceable linen napkin that can be reused is I think a bit better but yes, napkins on the lap, not round the neck. Historically you had different types of napkin for different types of meals. The larger the meal, the larger the napkin. Today it’s very unlikely unless you’re me that you have different sizes of napkin which is fine just as long as it’s sort of clean and ironed that’s all I ask.

Brett McKay: Should you put your napkin in your lap as soon as you sit down?

William Hanson: Not the second you sit down unless food is sort of hovering behind you ready to be placed down.

Brett McKay: Okay.

William Hanson: I would sort of within the first minute.

Brett McKay: Okay.

William Hanson: Is when you can do it. You don’t want to look too keen.

Brett McKay: What do you do with your napkin if you need to leave the table for the restroom for example?

William Hanson: Then it would go on the chair and again some people get sort of when I say this sometimes in class people will recoil because they’re like oh well the chair is so dirty. Well if the chair’s got arms put it on the arm of the chair never put it on the back of the chair because then we can see it but actually if you’re worried that the chair is that dirty what sort of establishments are you dining in? So just rethink where you’re going. So yes seat of chair or arm of chair and then on the table when you’re leaving but you’re not coming back.

Brett McKay: Okay that’s what you do with it when you’re done you put it on the table?

William Hanson: Yes

Brett McKay: Okay.

William Hanson: Absolutely I’m not coming back goodbye thanks so much and really everyone should do that at the same time as well.

Brett McKay: What do you do with your silverware when you’re done?

William Hanson: So it depends if you’re eating what is in America called continental style which is not a term we have over here but if you’re eating continental style or you’re eating zigzag style continental style again many American etiquette coaches advocate for that knife in right hand fork in left hand you would sort of place them in a triangle on the plate when you’re resting with the bridge of the fork going over the knife almost creating like a pizza wedge shape in front of you and that is just to show I’m paused I’m just going to take a sip of my drink I’m chatting to my neighbour I’m pacing myself whereas when you’re finished they would go together and you know different countries have slightly different angles in Britain we do 6:30 if you imagine the cutlery is the hands of a clock with Americans it’s generally 5:25 some Europeans it’s 4:20 some it’s 3:15 I don’t really care as long as they’ve gone together that’s all the wait staff are looking for they’re not going to look at your cutlery and go well they’ve done it in the Dutch way and we’re here in California so we’re not going to clear that plate they’re not looking for that as long as it is together that’s what they want to know.

Brett McKay: Let’s go back to handling utensils how to hold them so you mentioned the two styles the continental style and the zigzag style so the continental style is when you got your knife in your right hand your fork in your left hand and you got the tongs or the face of the fork pointed down right?

William Hanson: Yeah and they work together and in Britain or continental style we let go of both of them when we’re resting but other than that we have got one in each hand they’re almost extensions of our hands whereas in zigzag style you might cut one or two pieces up with the knife place the knife down on the upper edge of the plate turn the fork over into the dominant hand stab and eat and then transfer it back pick up the knife cut another bit set the knife down transfer the fork I mean that’s an aerobic exercise Brett.

Brett McKay: Yeah no I don’t like the zigzag style I like where you just use the utensils as extensions of your hands for the duration of the dinner.

William Hanson: I think it’s a lot easier but some people insist it isn’t but you know to each their own as long as the food’s going in their mouth and not all over the shop.

Brett McKay: The other benefit of it too is it allows you to take up less space because your elbows are tucked in you can keep your elbows tucked in you don’t have your elbows all jutting out and bugging the other person.

William Hanson: Exactly.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

William Hanson: Yeah. And that’s key as well, because some dining tables you’re really tightly packed. Now in American dining, you prefer round tables, and actually at state banquets at the White House used to be straight edge tables like we have in Britain a lot more, but Jacqueline Kennedy switched them over to round tables, and that seems to be how it’s stayed at a state level at the White House. And the beauty of a round table, other than being more sociable, is that you are less restricted and you aren’t immediately sitting next to somebody where you could elbow them. But on a big, grand, straight edge table, you do have to be very conscious of where your elbows are going.

Brett McKay: Let’s say you’re at a dinner where you’re being served family style, so all the dishes are on the table and you’ve got to pass them around to make sure everyone gets serving. What are the rules of passing dishes?

William Hanson: So I have to be honest, Britain is the only country that makes things difficult and passes things in the opposite direction to every other country. In Britain, we pass things around to the left, so clockwise around the table, whereas in America, in India, in the Middle East, in Africa, every other country, Europe, the plates or the dishes go counterclockwise to the right. That said, I would say most Brits don’t know that rule. I’m just telling you from an etiquette profession rule, that’s the rule. I think as long as you are offering the people each side of you, no one really cares whether it goes to the left or to the right.

Brett McKay: That is interesting. You talk about in Britain, it’s kind of faux pas, maybe it used to be, not so much anymore, but to ask someone to pass you a dish, like directly, hey, can you pass me the potatoes?

William Hanson: Oh, no, that’s a slap in the face in Britain, traditionally, because you’re sort of saying, look, William, if you had said that to me, the subtext to that is, William, you have not seen that I’m sitting here surrounded by no potatoes. You have failed, because again, good manners are about other people. And so we’ve developed this very passive-aggressive way in Britain, and we sort of say it now as a bit of a joke, but I can assure you it does work in practice. If you had, and I know you wouldn’t, Brett, but let’s, for sake of argument, say that you didn’t pass me the potatoes, I would say, Brett, would you like any potatoes? And you might say, no, thank you, William, but would you like some potatoes? Oh, yes, I think that I would, actually. And then they get passed.

Brett McKay: When I read that, it reminded me, I think the Dowager did that a few times in Downton Abbey.

William Hanson: Yeah, exactly.

Brett McKay: Or I just imagine the Dowager’s just saying some sort of passive-aggressive thing like that.

William Hanson: Well, exactly. And I think someone asked me a few weeks ago, do you think passive aggression is a good thing? And I think, you know, it’s better than active aggression.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s right. There’s also etiquette on passing the salt and pepper. What’s the rules of passing salt and pepper?

 William Hanson: Yes, so salt and pepper travel together is the mnemonic that we teach children, but it works beautifully for adults as well. They are a marriage couple, in effect, and you don’t want to split them up. So if someone says, please, could you pass the salt? You would pass both the salt and the pepper together in one hand if they’ll fit in one hand, but two hands is fine. And I think that goes back to necessity. When salt and pepper pots used to be teeny tiny, they weren’t great big mills or grinders like we have now. They were much smaller, and so you didn’t sort of want to split them up because then you might not find them.

Brett McKay: Tell us about salt cellars. I never heard of these things until I read about them in your book.

William Hanson: Yeah, salt cellars are sort of small little dishes. So I guess a lot of salt. What does your salt and pepper look like in your house?

Brett McKay: They’re just shakers that we just… Yeah.

William Hanson: Yeah, which is sort of the more contemporary style. But going back to the Downton or even pre-Downton era, salt was served in a little, it would often be a silver little pot, but with an inlay of blue glass, because if you put salt directly on silver, it will erode the silver and it doesn’t taste then very good and it doesn’t do the silver much good either. So you’d have this sort of blue little glass inlay that sat in there, and that’s where the salt was. And a tiny little silver spoon that you would spoon out granules of salt and put it in a neat little pile on the edge of your plate. And you would sort of add a couple of granules then using the tip of your knife. Sounds terribly complicated onto whatever was loaded up on the fork.

Brett McKay: Are they still used today?

William Hanson: I would say this one is being slightly relaxed. Most restaurants you go to now, you don’t get salt cellars. I would say salt cellars now, you would see it in a very grand private house, if at all.

Brett McKay: Okay.

William Hanson: But most restaurants, it’s the salt shaker with one hole in it. Pepper has several holes and you can apply it more or less wherever, but try and taste the food first.

Brett McKay: All right, but for listeners, they ever have a dinner at a manor, they know what to do when they see a salt cellar.

William Hanson: They do know what to do, exactly.

Brett McKay: Any other rules that a guest at a dinner party or maybe even an extended stay in someone’s home should follow to show proper hospitality, proper manners?

William Hanson: Yes, I mean, I think it obviously depends on context and whether you know them well or not. But, you know, particularly I get so many, I do a podcast as well, and so many letters we get in about, oh, I had my family to stay. They stayed with us for an entire week and they didn’t once offer to cook or they didn’t take us out for a dinner to say thank you. Yes, it’s an awful lot of work having someone stay in your house for anything over one night. And even that can be quite tricky. So if you are going to stay, don’t assume that your hosts will be entertaining you all three meals of every day either and the stuff in between. But do offer to take them out, to say thank you, to give them a night off cooking. I mean, that’s, I don’t know about you, most hosts don’t want other people cooking in their own kitchen.

Brett McKay: No, I wouldn’t like that.

William Hanson: You can get quite territorial.

Brett McKay: Yeah

William Hanson: But please, let’s order takeout or let’s go out for a nice meal in a restaurant. It’s on us. Just something to acknowledge the effort that they’re going to. Take a nice gift, write them a decent length thank you letter afterwards.

Brett McKay: What’s a good gift to bring as a guest? What’s your go-to? Because I think a lot of people say like wine or maybe that’s not a good one.

William Hanson: Yeah, I mean, it’s a good one if you know that they like Italian Merlot, for example. If you know that that’s their favorite wine, take them a couple of bottles and it should be a couple of bottles if you’re staying for several nights. It might even be a case of wine if you’re staying for a week plus. But if you don’t quite know what they drink, or indeed if they drink, and more and more people aren’t drinking now, particularly with the younger generations, alcohol is probably not the best thing. So chocolates, I mean, the practice of post-desk gifts goes back to Chicago in the ’30s and chocolates were the absolute sort of that was all that was acceptable. Most people like chocolates or can quite easily re-gift them if they don’t. But ideally you want to take something personal and personalized to them.

Brett McKay: You know, when I heard, and I would like if I got this, which is like a nice bottle of olive oil, because I use olive oil a lot.

William Hanson: Do you know, olive oil is becoming such a popular gift over here as well in London. And it’s great. I mean, a good quality.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

William Hanson: Particularly if it’s Italian olive oil. I mean, over here it might be easier to get that than with you. Yeah, it’s a nice novel thing. Doesn’t matter if you drink. I don’t think many people are allergic to oil. So it ticks a lot of boxes.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and it often comes in a nice bottle that presents well too. So I like that. Let’s talk about elevators. Is there an etiquette for elevators?

William Hanson: Oh, yes. If you’re in a really old building in Chicago or New York or London, the elevator is probably going to be a little bit tighter than in a great big new build somewhere in Los Angeles. And so the senior person, whether that’s the senior in the business or a lady or granny, whoever would go into the elevator first. The person who gets out of the elevator first when it arrives at the floor is the person closest to the elevator doors. And that’s the person who got in last. It winds me up in hotels where they’re taking you to your room and you turn up at floor seven and they put their hand in front of the lift doors and you sort of have to edge past them because they want you to go first. But that’s all very well, but I don’t know where I’m going. I’ve not been to this hotel before. So actually I want the hotelier to get out of the lift, put their hand across the lift doors from the other side of the lift and point me in the right direction, much more courteous than sort of awkwardly edging past them.

Brett McKay: Is small talk appropriate in an elevator or should you just keep to yourself?

William Hanson: I was having a heated debate about this only a few hours ago. No, in Britain, it’s so taboo to speak in an elevator. I’m going to film a social media video, I think, that just sort of has a group of us saying nothing in an elevator. And then I’ll just say at the end, we’re British, we don’t talk in elevators or lifts as we call them over here. But look, if you and I got in an elevator and we knew each other and there was no one else, you can absolutely speak. But with everyone else, Brits are so private with their conversation and thoughts, we couldn’t possibly have someone else over here what we’re thinking or saying. So there is normally this very awkward silence in an elevator.

Brett McKay: Well, I prefer the silence too. I’m a big fan of that.

William Hanson: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Brett McKay: So the British are famous for queuing, standing in line. Any etiquette for line standing?

William Hanson: Yes I mean just sort of, it’s so democratic it’s first come first served. It’s so straightfoward we get very irritated when someone tries to jump the queue. And so etiquette rule number one is, if you don’t mind the rules, don’t play the game, basically. So if you don’t want to queue don’t queue and I think you are all going to be shocked down in flames in Britain, if you sort of try to jump the queue. And I would say that is actually the commonalities between Britain and America, I mean, I think we are all sort of the Olympic gold medalist of queuing in Britain, but I would say you’re probably the silver medalist in America. Whereat it doesn’t even get bronze is the Europeans. And actually when you go to Disney in Paris oversee the American concept as British I’ve been to a lot of the Disneys the American ones are great, because everyone follows the queuing standing in line pressure call, but in Euro Disney or Disney Paris as it’s now called yeah it’s a little bit of a freeforall and it’s quite stressful.

Brett McKay: How do you handle line jumpers? Lets say someone tries to break that sacred social order, should you call them out?

William Hanson: Oh, yes. No we would and I think we would sort of call them out probably giving then the benefit of the doubt to begin with. We might say something like, oh actually the back of the queue is just here. For example because it might be an innocent mistake, if they then go “No, no I’m gonna join it from here” then well that’s a war crime.

Brett McKay: Is it proper to save places in line? Can you do that?

William Hanson: If its not a busy queue you could perhaps do it for maybe like a minute.

Brett McKay: Okay.

William Hanson: But I would be very careful even don’t so I would probably not advice that.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I agree. It has to be done in moderation [0:48:16.9] ____. Well, William, this has been a great conversation and we only scratched the surface of what’s in this book. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

William Hanson: Yes, the book is out now, Just Good Manners, published by Gallery at Simon & Schuster. It’s available in all formats. There’s an audio book. So if you’re not sick of my voice after this interview, there’s more of it on audio book, e-book and hardback in all good bookshops.

Brett McKay: And any other place on the internet where they can learn about you?

William Hanson: Oh yes, there’s my Instagram @williamhanson, TikTok @williamhansonetiquette or my website, williamhanson.com.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, William Hanson, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

William Hanson: Thank you so much, Brett.

Brett McKay: My guest today was William Hanson. He’s the author of the book Just Good Manners. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website williamhanson.co.uk. Also check out our show notes @AoM.is/etiquette where you find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives and make sure to sign up for a new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to my podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

A few weeks ago, I came across an article about how young people these days are tired of dating apps and want to meet romantic partners in real life. You know — the way people developed relationships in the good old days of the former millennium.  

The only problem? The kids today don’t know how to take part in the dynamic that kickstarts the in-person development of romantic relationships: flirting.

The Death of Real-World Flirting

Several factors have contributed to the lack of flirting ability among young adults.

The biggest one is smartphones. Because Gen Z and Gen Alpha have lived in a world where they could mediate all their communication through a device, many haven’t developed the social skills necessary for adept, in-person flirting. This has resulted in increased social anxiety when striking up conversations with potential romantic interests.

Dating apps have also exacerbated the decline in flirting ability. The nice thing about dating apps is that they guarantee initial, mutual romantic interest. You can only chat with someone on an app if they’ve also expressed interest. It takes the uncertainty and risk out of shooting your shot. When you flirt in real life, you don’t have the same guarantee. The person you approach may or may not be interested, and the only way to find out is by chatting them up and engaging in flirty banter.

COVID lockdowns didn’t help flirting skill development either. When I spoke with Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communication studies and the author of The Five Flirting Styles, he observed: “Post pandemic, there’s a lot of young folks who kind of missed out on some key developmental stages where you fall in love for the first time and interact with the opposite sex. A lot of young adults in their twenties right now, because of the pandemic, missed out on what it felt like to have those experiences.”

A final factor in the demise of flirting is the increased skittishness modern men feel as to what’s appropriate in terms of making romantic overtures towards women and what might come off as creepy or as sexual harassment.

To help young dudes who want to revive flirting and strike up relationships with women in real life, I took a deep dive into the research around this timeless skill. Here’s what I learned.

What Is Flirting?

Researchers define flirting as a mix of verbal and nonverbal behaviors that express attraction and gauge the other person’s receptivity to a romantic relationship. A coy smile, a playful tease, a casual lean forward, a compliment — all are flirtatious signals across cultures.

Here’s an important thing about flirting: it’s usually ambiguous. When you’re interested in a woman, you typically don’t just blurt out: “I think you’re hot and want you to be my girlfriend!” You’d risk immediate rejection from unrequited attraction. It would really weird the gal out. And it would be super ineffective: ambiguity is what makes flirting work and builds attraction; certainty is boring, while uncertainty turns our brains on and makes a situation or a person compelling.

The ambiguity of flirting allows you to show your interest without outright declaring it. It’s a way to test the waters in a low-pressure way. If the other person responds positively (smiles back, laughs, touches your arm), the flirtation can escalate; if not, both can save face by pretending it was just friendly banter.

There’s a thrill in trying to figure out if someone is picking up what you’re laying down. But because the uncertainty inherent to flirting is not just exciting but confusing, young people often want to avoid it. For those used to the security of dating apps, engaging in this dicey dynamic can feel too socially risky.

The 5 Flirting Styles

When we typically think of flirting, we think of it as something extroverted that you do in bars and clubs where you throw out pick-up lines with sexual innuendos.

Jeffrey Hall has found that’s actually just one type of flirting style among many.

Hall has identified five distinct flirting styles that people naturally tend toward. Understanding these styles can help you recognize your own approach and read others’ signals better:

1. Traditional: Follows conventional gender roles where men initiate and women respond. Values courtesy but can lead to missed opportunities.
2. Physical: Openly expresses sexual attraction through body language and touch. Great for quickly establishing chemistry but can come on too strong.
3. Sincere: Creates emotional connections through meaningful conversation. Most effective for starting long-term relationships but can be mistaken for mere friendliness.
4. Playful: Treats flirting as a fun game or confidence boost. Creates excitement but can send mixed signals about serious intent.
5. Polite: Emphasizes courtesy, respect, and subtlety. Comfortable for everyone involved but often so subtle that interest goes unnoticed.

Based on Hall’s research, there’s no best way to flirt. All the different styles can lead to romantic relationships. The best thing to do is to lean into the flirting style that’s most natural for you. Doing so will not only allow you to be more authentic, which is attractive, but help ensure you find someone who’s compatible with you. If you have a sincere flirting style, you’re probably not going to get along with someone who’s a more extroverted, physical flirt. And that’s okay! “I wrote this book [The Five Flirting Styles] to my younger self because I wanted to know that the way that I communicated attraction was okay,” Hall told me. “You don’t have to be some suave, dashing guy to flirt effectively.”

These styles aren’t mutually exclusive. You might be mostly sincere with a dash of playfulness, or mostly polite but become physical once you feel more secure with someone.

If you want to know what your flirting style is, you can take Hall’s flirting inventory here.

Science-Backed Tips to Improve Your Real-World Flirting

Research shows that flirting is a learnable skill. Here are evidence-based tips to help improve your game:

Have fun and keep it light! This is the most important tip. Studies suggest a lighthearted attitude makes flirting more effective because it puts both people at ease. “When you have a mentality of being interested and excited about another person and just having fun with them, it shifts your perception and your behavior,” Hall explains. “Being present for the moment and enjoying the excitement of meeting someone who has romantic potential actually changes your nonverbal behavior. You can become more attractive in the eyes of the other person.”

Make her feel good about herself. Flirting is about expressing attraction, and it feels good to feel attractive! If you approach a flirtatious encounter with the mindset of helping someone feel good about herself, you’ll do well.

Start with basics. Smile and make (non-creepy) eye contact. Studies consistently show these simple signals indicate approachability and interest.

Use humor. Both men and women rate humor as highly effective in sparking attraction. Telling a funny story or offering a little gentle teasing creates rapport. Equally important: laughing at her jokes shows you appreciate her sense of humor.

Be a good social dance partner. Flirting is a social dance. Ask questions and show genuine curiosity. When she asks you a question, answer her and then throw the social ball back to her.

Mind your body language and create light touch when appropriate. Uncross your arms, face the person, and lean in slightly. If the situation allows, brief touches — like a tap on the arm when making a point — can enhance connection.

Show clear intent and follow up. If things are going well, you should segue into making your romantic interest more explicit. Hall’s research has found that “when you make very direct requests like, ‘I enjoyed our time together, I want to see you again, can I get a way to contact you?’ and the other person says yes,” it clearly shows that the flirting between you and the other person was indeed flirting, and not just friendly banter. “It says, ‘I’m interested in you as a person for romantic reasons, not just having a nice conversation.’ Showing clear intent can help you avoid the friend-zone.”

Also, make sure to follow up if there’s mutual attraction. “Lots of young women’s complaints about men’s behavior on flirting is men don’t follow up,” Hall says. While men often think they need to increase their allure by playing it cool and making a woman wait to hear from them, this isn’t the case: “There’s very clear research that being consistently available, showing clear interest repeatedly in a woman when there’s mutual attraction is key to creating a romantic relationship.”

Will a Man Come Off as Creepy If He Tries to Flirt With a Woman in Real Life?

A lot of young men hesitate to flirt in real life because they’re afraid they’ll come off as creepy. Hall says this worry is unfounded:

“If you’re worried about coming off as creepy, then you’re probably not the creep. Creeps don’t think that they’re being creepy. If you’re concerned about whether you’re coming on too strong, that’s okay. It means that you’re actually aware that how you treat another person matters. You’ll be fine.”

Just observe how your overtures are received, reading a woman’s signals as to whether your advances are welcome or not, and proceed accordingly.

How to Tell if a Woman Is Flirting With You

Flirting is a social dance, but how do you know if someone wants to flirt with you? It’s hard! Research found that men correctly spotted flirting only 36% of the time.

Signs a woman might be flirting with you include: frequent smiling and laughing (especially at your jokes), maintaining eye contact or making coy glances, finding reasons to be physically close or lightly touching you, playful teasing, asking personal questions, and offering compliments.

The key is looking for multiple signals appearing together over and over again. One smile doesn’t mean much, but if someone is laughing, leaning in, making eye contact, AND asking about your weekend plans — that’s strong evidence of flirting.

Make sure to check out our detailed article on how to tell if a woman is interested in you.

Conclusion

If you’re a young dude wanting to meet women out in the real world, you’ll need to up your flirting game.

As Hall advises, “This is truly some of the best stuff you’re ever gonna do in life. So prioritize it — even when you’re like, ‘I could go out to this party and there’s new people and it could be uncomfortable.’ Go to the party anyway. Everyone feels uncomfortable when they’re talking to new people. Do it anyway. The stakes aren’t nearly as high as you’ve imagined them to be. And it’s fun!”

So get out there and practice. Strike up conversations at coffee shops, bookstores, or social events. Start small with a simple smile and hello and see where it goes from there. Keep your flirting light and fun and don’t worry about the outcome. By doing so, you’ll paradoxically find that romantic success naturally follows.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Think about a time you’ve had to speak in front of others — maybe during a work presentation, a wedding toast, or even on a first date. Did you struggle with using too many filler words, such as “um” and “like,” talk too fast, or awkwardly ramble?

Most of us try to fix these saboteurs of speech by giving ourselves mental mantras: “Slow down”; “Think about what you want to say.”

But my guest would say that becoming a more engaging and effective speaker comes down to realizing that it’s a very physical act that requires getting out of your head and into your body.

Michael Chad Hoeppner, a communication coach who has worked with everyone from presidential candidates to business executives, is the author of Don’t Say Um: How to Communicate Effectively to Live a Better Life. Today on the show, Michael explains why you need to treat speaking as a sport and shares embodied drills and exercises — from playing with Legos to talking with a wine cork in your mouth to throwing a ball against a wall — that will fix common delivery problems, including eliminating ums, enhancing vocal variety, and managing your gestures.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: Becoming Well-Spoken — How to Minimize Your Uhs and Ums
• AoM Podcast #698: The Secrets of Public Speaking From History’s Greatest Orators
• AoM Podcast #732: Tips From a Top TED Talker on How to Be Heard

Connect With Michael Chad Hoeppner

• GK Training
• Don’t Say Um website 
• Michael on LinkedIn
• Michael on X

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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. Think about a time you’ve had to speak in front of others, maybe during a work presentation, a wedding toast, or even on a first date. Did you struggle with using too many filler words such as um and like, talk too fast or awkwardly ramble? Most of us try to fix these saboteurs of speech by giving ourselves mental mantras. Slow down, think about what you wanna say. But my guest would say, that becoming a more engaging and effective speaker, comes down to realizing that it’s a very physical act that requires getting out of your head and into your body. Michael Chad Hoeppner, a communication coach who has worked with everyone from presidential candidates to business executives, is the author of, Don’t Say Um: How to Communicate Effectively to Live a Better Life. Today on the show, Michael explains why you need to treat speaking as a sport and shares embodied drills and exercises, from playing with Legos to talking with a wine cork in your mouth, throwing a ball against a wall. That’ll fix common delivery problems, including eliminating ums, enhancing vocal variety, and managing your gestures. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/um.

All right. Michael Chad Hoeppner, welcome to the show.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Thank you so much.

Brett McKay: So you are a communication coach. You help people improve their communication delivery. So you help people speak more clearly, more confidently, and with presence. You coached Andrew Yang, when he ran for president to improve his delivery. You also coach executives. You teach on the subject. I think when a lot of people think about public speaking or even just speaking on a first date, they’re getting ready for a first date. They’re often thinking about what they’re gonna say, they’re thinking about the content. But why do you think people should focus on the delivery as well?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: There’s a few reasons. The first is every study ever done that looks at what matters more in terms of the impression you make on other people, validates delivery as the thing. But that’s just the first answer. The second answer, which I think is a much better one, is that I’m not even interested in debating or trying to weigh one versus the other, content versus delivery. What I’m always trying to do with my clients is to help them unlock a virtuous cycle in which both things make each other better. And you can remember this for the rest of your life, which is the following drill. Hold up your hands as though you’re looking through some imaginary binoculars. If you hold your hands up like you’re looking through binoculars, you will see that your left hand looks like the letter C and your right hand like the outer half of a capital D. So your left hand stands for content. That’s the words you say, the vocabulary. The right hand looks like the outer half of a capital D, and that stands for delivery. And that’s everything besides the words. Now, if you put your hands together, you’ll see that they create this reinforcing loop.

And what many people don’t know and they discover coaching with me, is that if you just focus on the delivery and make the delivery better, not only do you sound better in all the context you just mentioned, including first dates. Not only do you sound better, but you can actually unlock a virtuous cycle in which you think of smarter stuff to say. So the instructive example of course, is if you build the ability to tolerate silence and allow your body to take air in, and therefore have the fuel to have vocal variety in your voice. And also avoid saying um, because in that silence you can’t say um, not only does your voice sound better and you come across with more authority. But in that gap, you’re giving your brain the only two things it needs to think of smart stuff, time and oxygen. So this is something that people do not understand about delivery, and they ignore it at their peril. And it can be like an absolute light bulb moment when they discover it.

Brett McKay: I’ve experienced that in my own life. I know whenever I feel I’m the most fluid and the most articulate with my speaking, it feels like I’m saying better stuff compared to when I’m not.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Exactly. And that’s not an accident, by the way. We also get trapped where we think delivery is a bunch of stuff we should paste on the outside. And part of the reason that is, is because it gets taught, typically in a really reductive way. I’ll give you an example. We get told to make eye contact for 8-12 seconds. Why? What if your thought is longer than 8 seconds or longer than 12 seconds even. Or shorter than 8 seconds I should say. Any of those things. And we get this coaching that these tools are about things we should almost shellac onto the outside of us. But that’s an absolute mistake because the outputs of communication or eye contact and gestural ease and freedom and posture and enunciation, they are outputs. They come from focusing on the other person. And when you do that, both the delivery and the content gets better. So what you’ve discovered when you’re kind of in that flow state is exactly right.

Brett McKay: Speaking of common advice that people get when they think about delivery, a lot of it’s particularly bad. It’s not very helpful, like you said, you gave the example of the one just then. But also there’s other advice about, well just don’t say um, or be more confident or don’t do this. And a lot of it’s just about thought suppression. It’s about suppressing things. Why is that not a useful approach to improving your speaking delivery?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah. Well, let’s break this down in three ways. The typical guidance that people get about delivery is not just not helpful, it’s usually counterproductive. And the way it typically works is first, they get some thought suppression. Then they get such general feedback that it’s utterly unactionable. And then they get a suggestion which is a mental instruction for what is a physical activity. And I’ll walk you through this step by step. Let’s do one that’s very common, which is when people speak at a very fast rate. Now, the typical advice they get, first of all is thought suppression, which is don’t rush.

Okay, well, as soon as you hear a don’t, the first thing your brain is obligated to do, is to fixate on whatever comes after the don’t. I titled this book, Don’t Say Um, in large part as a trick to get people to pick it up, ’cause everyone wants to avoid saying um. But the challenge is that’s the very worst instruction you can give yourself. And I say as much in the preface to the book. So it’s a bit of a trick to get the reader picking it up and using it and hopefully improving because of it.

Thought suppression is the pink elephant trick essentially, it’s built off distinction. When you give yourself a don’t, you’re obligating your brain to fixate on the don’t versus everything else in the known universe. So if someone says to you, don’t rush, you are obligated to think about rushing. And also, even more damning, who are you thinking about? You and how bad you are, as opposed to where you should be thinking about, which is your audience. So thought suppression comes first, then what comes second? General feedback, and the general feedback usually is like, just slow down. Okay, when? All the time? Every word, in between words, in the length of words? When am I supposed to slow down? Utterly vague. And then the third thing, is a mental instruction for what is a physical activity. So that sounds like remember to breathe, but then you’re giving the person you’re coaching or suggesting this to, something else they have to remember in their jam packed brains, when in fact breathing is a totally physical thing. So these are some of the ways in which the feedback goes dramatically wrong. And really the problem is this. Is it people who are already struggling then tend to blame themselves and they think, “Oh God, I’m such a failure because I couldn’t implement all this really smart coaching or advice I got.”

And it wasn’t smart coaching, it wasn’t smart advice. And it’s not even their fault that they were not able to do it.

Brett McKay: Going to this idea that speaking is a physical act, that’s one of the main points that you drive home throughout this book, is that we have to remember that speaking is a full bodied physical act. I think oftentimes we think of it as just a mental act. Why is remembering that speaking is a physical act the foundation of improving your delivery?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Everything I just explained about how feedback gets messed up can be remedied by what you’re asking. By a physical approach. And particularly for the listeners of your podcast, this metaphor, either as a metaphor or even just as a thing that people actually do, will really hit home, which is speaking is a sport. So guys out there who are listening, but anybody out there who is listening, if you like sports, speaking is that same thing. It is moving. It takes over a hundred muscles to do what you and I are doing right now, Brett, which is taking air into our bodies. Our diaphragm drops down, our lungs expand as they fill with air. Our ribs move to accommodate those inflating lungs. And then we exhale that air over our vocal cords and it picks up some sound there. And then that sound gets amplified and altered and altered with a miraculous act of coordination, which is enunciation. Even saying the word enunciation, you can feel how much your lips and your tongue and even your soft palate and jaw have to move to accomplish that. It is a physical activity. Now, hopefully that’s interesting just to hear, but here is the amazing liberation and the amazing benefit of this shift.

Just like any other physical activity, like any other sport or dance or a discipline that is physical, you can build muscle memory and get a lot better at it very quickly and break habits that you think have condemned you to bad performance for the rest of your life. You can break them almost instantly.

Brett McKay: Yeah. What you do, and we’re gonna talk about some of these drills. You provide drills for people to help improve their speaking. They’re all very physical. You’re using your whole body oftentimes in these drills. And we’re gonna talk about that here in a bit. Before we got on the interview, you and I were discussing the connection between public speaking delivery and manliness. And one of those connections has to do with the improvisational nature of speaking. Tell us about that.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Men, as a behavior that we are suggested to embrace in our lives. And I don’t think it’s just men. I think it’s a good behavior in general. But we’re often suggested to really embrace decisiveness in our life, make a decision, take a risk, things like that. Well, here’s the miraculous thing about speaking. Talking is just a series of decisions. It is literally a flowchart of words in which your brain does as miracle of choosing one word after another and putting them together in a system that can be meaningful and powerful and persuasive to others in your life. So embrace that decision making that you get to do all day long, every day, and don’t shy away from it.

Brett McKay: I love it. I think improving your speaking can open up new vistas in your life, whether romantically, in your career, and just also friendships. And I think if you look at the history we’ve written a lot of about the history of masculinity and different cultures in time, public speaking in a lot of these cultures was a mark of manhood. It’s how you proved your manhood in ancient Greece, in ancient Rome and the Viking cultures, even your ability to tell a good yarn was a way you kind of showed yourself as a man. So maybe we can hearken into that today and revive that idea that speaking well is a manly thing.

So let’s get into some of these practices. I thought this was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed your book because I’m a guy who makes his living speaking as a podcast host. I thought this was very useful. And what I loved about it, all your practices are very physical. And one practice I thought was really interesting is you have people play with LEGOs. So why are you having people play with LEGOs while they’re public speaking?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Sure. The LEGOs are a practice exercise. And the reason I suggest people do it is because it helps them learn to do incredibly powerful things, like pause, like tolerate silence, like be concise, like structure their ideas, like remove filler. And the way it works is this. You consider some content you want to speak about. It could be a speech or even an elevator pitch or a presentation, whatever it might be. And you get a stack of LEGO blocks. But you don’t start just speaking right away. Instead, you pick up the first LEGO block before you begin speaking. And then you share just the first idea that you want to. You can also think of this, the first sentence of your content.

And at the end of that sentence or idea, instead of just powering through and going to the next thing, no, in silence, you place down that LEGO block and you live through that silence, pick up the next LEGO block, still in silence, and then share the second idea that you have, or the second sentence. Same thing at the end of that sentence or thought, you place down the LEGO block, but this time you click it in place with the previous, so that clicking action even takes a moment to complete, so it enforces some silence.

Then you pick up the third one, still being silent. Once you have it in the air, then you can say your idea out loud. Third thought, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. At the end of that idea, in silence, you click the LEGO block in place. And you keep doing this. And then you’ll probably run out of LEGOs. Maybe you use six or eight or 10 or whatever it might be. And if you have more that you want to say, you simply unstack them and continue. But what you’ll probably find when you try this exercise, is that you can actually complete a lot of really powerful thoughts in just six main sentences or six main ideas, or even four sometimes. What this is doing is using embodied cognition. So not just thinking about stuff, but actually thinking or learning using your body. It is using embodied cognition to teach you how to do those remarkable behaviors of pausing, owning silence, sharing your ideas in a deliberate manner. And it’s a much faster and a much better way to do that than all the thought suppression traps we talked about.

Brett McKay: So if you have a problem with rambling for example, this is a great drill to do to help you not ramble anymore? And I have this problem. Sometimes I’ll start a thought and I’ll start speaking it, and then I’m like, oh yeah, there’s another thought I wanna get to. And I just go into that and it just sounds like a mess. What’s interesting about this drill is not only is it gonna help improve your delivery, you’re not gonna sound like you’re rambling and jumping from thought to thought. This is an example of improving your delivery improves your content, because you actually have to stop and think about what you’re gonna say before you click on the next LEGO.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, it’s not an exaggeration to say, that this drill, I invented this drill in 2010, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that this drill is one of the foundational things that allowed me to have a thriving career in this field. I started teaching at Columbia Business School in 2016 and was giving feedback in presidential races soon after that. And that’s not to brag about my journey. I want the audience to hear this very clearly. That is to emphasize the power of this one single exercise. Because to your point, yes, it doesn’t just teach you better delivery skills, but it gives you an opportunity to actually think of the brilliant, smart, insightful stuff that you have to say and helps you say those things.

Brett McKay: Okay, again, this is a drill. It’s not something you’re not gonna be playing with LEGOs while you’re giving your presentation or on your first date. Maybe you can do this before so you can get some practice. So, yeah, we’re not telling people to play with LEGOs. But you do say if you’re doing a zoom call, for example, you could have the LEGOs maybe beneath you and you can do it then ’cause no one can see your hands.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, it’s a great clarification. Thank you for bringing it up. This metaphor should really hit home for people as well, which is, in sports, we understand this. There are practice exercises you do in practice to build a certain technique that you would never do in the game. Imagine a soccer player who had a TheraBand around their lower ankles to try to strengthen their legs in some way. Or supposedly Victor Wembanyama, the amazing center for the San Antonio spurs, would practice dribbling a basketball with gloves on. Or you’ve seen pictures of sprinters running with a parachute that they’re dragging behind their back. Now, none of those athletes would use those same things in the game. They’re essentially exercises to build some muscles. And that’s exactly what this LEGO exercise is. It’s a preparation, practice exercise to build these abilities. And once you practice it enough, what happens is you build muscle memory, and you can do them without the tools. But to your point, one of the gifts of remote communication is, yeah, you have this, what I call a digital cloak of invisibility. And so you can do some of the exercises in the book, even real time, when you’re on remote calls.

Be versatile. And by that I mean, okay, maybe if the LEGO blocks are a little bit too loud on a zoom call, ’cause you hear some clicking, just substitute and use your hand instead. Place your hand gently down on the table or desk in front of you. And when you do that, your job is to actually pause for a moment and consider what is my next thought or my next idea.

Brett McKay: So something that I struggle with and I’m pretty self conscious about as a podcast host, is being articulate. I sometimes have a hard time saying the right word or saying the word I want to say. So what I do is I say those filler words, um. I say like more than I’d like to. And the thing is, we edit a lot of those out. Before it goes live. There are other filler words that other people struggle with. Something I’ve noticed talking to people on the podcast, a lot of our guests will say sort of or kind of a lot, even when what they’re saying doesn’t need that sort of modifier and it actually doesn’t make sense. Someone will say, “Yeah, they’re sort of pregnant.” It’s like okay, well you can’t be sort of pregnant. You’re either pregnant or not. So this goes to the title of your book, Don’t Say Um. I know a lot of people, when they’re thinking about delivery, they want to be better about not saying um or like. So what can people start doing? What are some drills people can do to be more precise with their language and stop using filler words?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, so the title of the book is, Don’t Say Um. It’s a trick. The antidote to that is a chapter on linguistic precision. Now, by linguistic precision, what I mean is exactly what you said, choosing your words. The exercise, the kinesthetic exercise that I teach in that chapter is one called finger walking. And I’ll talk you through it right now and then also talk about what filler is and how to think about it slightly differently. The exercise is you take your second and third finger of either hand, and you as though your hand were a tiny little person or pedestrian, you walk your fingers across the table or desk in front of you. Walk your ideas one thought at a time. So when you’ve completed a thought, bring your hands back to the front of the desk and walk them forward again. And what you’re trying to do here, is you don’t have to overthink it like matching syllable by syllable or word by word, you’re using the activity of walking your fingers to also walk your ideas across the table. If you feel yourself saying um or a like or a kinda or a sorta or have another non-fluency of some kind, you pause the fingers and you wait until you’ve regained your focus and then you continue.

Now if you say an um, it’s not a problem with your brain, it’s not a problem with your mouth even. It’s a problem with your fingers. You have not been specific enough placing your fingers. This is an incredibly powerful drill for people because it’s super versatile. You can do this on remote calls, but no one knows you’re doing it. You and I could be doing it right now, every single word, if we wanted to. I’m not right now, but I certainly could, because this is audio only, and it helps people do what linguistic precision is designed to do, which is choose words. I’ll give you another example. If a kid runs in front of a bus and you have a split second to try to help that kid, no one says, “There is kind of a, it’s kinda sort of like kind of a bus coming.” Because in that moment, we’re totally focused on that kid and that message. And in that moment, we choose words. So this exercise helps people unlock that profound and primal skill of choosing words.

Brett McKay: Yeah. What I love about this drill, I’ve been practicing it, is it gets you out of your head. Because the tendency that I have when I say I need to focus on not saying um, I do what you were talking about other the pink elephant. I said, don’t say um, don’t say um. And then I just end up. I’m thinking about saying um all the time. So I say um a ton. So what this drill does, it just gets you out of your head and into your body, and that will just lead to you being more fluid in your speaking.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, exactly. And filler language is a big topic. We could keep going about it if you want to. I don’t know, you want to dive deeper on filler? We got a lot we should get to, so we can also move on if you want.

Brett McKay: Yeah. A little bit more. What is something else about filler that you think is important for people to understand?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah. Well, the first thing is folks, be nice to yourself out there. And the reason I say that is because, let’s break it down with some math for a moment. Let’s say you say um every five seconds, which probably strikes you as a lot. Um is a single syllable. It’s a single sound. Average rate of speech is something like this. I’m speaking very generally here, but it’s something like this. Let’s call it three words per second. Let’s call each word an average of two syllables. So in a single second, you’re saying about six syllables. So that means every five seconds, you’re saying about 30 syllables. I hope everyone stuck with me on that math. Now, let’s say you say one um every five seconds. That means one out of every 30 syllables is a filler sound. And I’m guessing if in other parts of your life, you had a habit that only affected 3% of a given thing, you wouldn’t be that hard on yourself about it. So they may not be as big of a deal as you think. That does not mean, it’s not worth trying to be better at becoming more linguistically precise and choosing your words.

But be nice to yourself while you go on that journey. And as you’re going on that journey, I also invite you to broaden your idea of what filler language actually is. I’ll give you a couple criteria to think about it. If the answer to both of these questions is no, then this word is a filler word for you. Here’s the first question. Is it grammatically necessary? If the answer is no, let’s move on to the second one. Are you aware that you’re doing it? And if both of those answers are no, then that word is probably filler for you as well. Here’s a ridiculous example. I one time coached a client who used the word viscerally as filler. I swear, every couple sentences viscerally would appear, didn’t make any sense at all, didn’t fit grammatically, and he wasn’t even aware he was doing it. So keep in mind, there may be a bunch of words that you’re overusing that are not necessary and that are crutches.

Brett McKay: Going to that point of being nice to yourself. Something that I, maybe I’ll let people know. I’ve interviewed a lot of people on the podcast, over a thousand. And a lot of those people are in the media, they’re on radio, they have their own podcast, they’re on television. And even those individuals, they have a hard time with um and like, and well, and the like. So if even the pros have problems with it sometimes, it’s okay if you have problems, but we can make improvements to it. So yeah, don’t beat yourself up, if you do say um a lot. I think that’s useful ’cause I think beating yourself up just will cause the problem to grow even more. It doesn’t solve the problem, just makes it worse.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, this is my exact point. Instead of feeling bad about the same behavior for now, years or decades even if there’s something that you feel bad about, stop feeling bad about it by actually doing something about it. So as opposed to obsessing about your ums, no, just practice the finger walking drill and practice it a bunch and pretty soon what will happen is you will make improvement. And that improvement all of a sudden makes you actually feel great, makes you have an appetite to improve further. And that’s the entire point about taking such a physical approach in the book.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. All right, so another delivery issue I have. I’m gonna use this as in private, this podcast as some private coaching. But another delivery issue that I’ve been battling for a while is enunciation and speaking too fast. Sometimes I’m the micro machine guy. Do you remember the micro machine guy on the advertisements?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: You’re talking my generational language right now. So yes, I do of course.

Brett McKay: You talk bout how improving your enunciation can actually help people slow down their speaking. How does that work? And what are some drills for that?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, well, you don’t have to believe me. You can just test it. Say some huge bit of technical jargon or some multisyllabic phrase. Now notice that in order to enunciate that multisyllabic phrase, it takes some time. Enunciation takes time. I’ll give you a silly example actually, only silly ’cause it’s a single word. If I don’t give a little bit of time on the M in the word time, it could sound like I’m saying tide or tight, or type, as in typing on a typewriter or a computer. Enunciation takes time to actually make these sounds different from each other. And that’s just a single syllable word, time. So you could even think that saying time takes that thing time. But what about a multisyllabic word like hypochondria or exceptionalism, things like this? To get through those words with multi syllables, you actually have to take the time to make all of those precise movements. If you were thinking of a sport, again in order to do a complex move in basketball or dribbling or something, it does take time. So the very act of learning to enunciate more dynamically and committing to your enunciation actually can slow you down.

This is profoundly important to people, because part of why language is so incredible is it is onomatopoetic. And by that I mean, words often sound like the thing that they are. Slap, bell, snake. These are words that sound like the thing that they are. But if you don’t enunciate them, your audience will not feel the emotional impact of these.

So the question becomes then, if enunciation is important, which it is, and if focusing on it can actually have the side benefit of slowing you down. If you are a very, very rapid speaker, how do you use or how do you practice drills, I should say, to help enunciation? Now, in this book, everything that you’re gonna read is things that I’ve invented. So lots and lots of drills that I’ve developed working with professionals. But the next one that I’m gonna tell you for enunciation has nothing to do with me. I can take no credit for it. I will give a shout out to Andrew Wade. He was a voice and speech teacher I worked with at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. But he’s former head of the voice and speech at the Royal Shakespeare Company in London.

But even he doesn’t get the credit, because he learned it from someone who learned it from someone. And the principle goes all the way back to ancient Greece and an orator named Demosthenes. But we only know about this ancient orator named Demosthenes because Herodotus wrote down about what he was doing. So it probably goes back even further than that. So if that does not give it some historical cred and you don’t want to try it, I don’t know what will. Anyway, you put an impediment in between your teeth. And if a toothbrush works, and if a pen, your pinky finger, a slice of wine cork is a great one to use because it has a little give, so you have a little cushion there. But people, very important, safety first. If you use the wine cork, do not inhale the cork. That would not be a good outcome for speaking, okay? But you put the impediment in between your teeth just over to the side, so not right in front where it might block your tip of tongue sounds. Like T and D and N and L, T, D, N, L. Put it just to the side. And then you practice navigating around that impediment and making sure that every single syllable is totally clear, even with that impediment.

And of course, what happens is your enunciation gets supercharged, and of course, your rate of speech slows too, because you have to navigate around that impediment, whatever it is, in order to speak.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve done that before. I think it’s a very powerful tool. Another tool that actors have used for a long time are tongue twisters. Unique New York, unique New York. Is that something else you have clients do?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yes, absolutely. And by the way, back to the sports metaphor, folks this is not a wacky thing of like, “Oh, yeah, I saw Ron Burgundy and Anchorman do it. How silly that is.” No, people, if you accept this brave idea I’m putting forth that speaking is physical. It is a sport. Then you would never do a sport without warming up. You might pull a muscle, you might hurt yourself, or you just might not perform at your peak. Speaking is the same thing. So it stands to reason, if you are relying on the muscles of speech to perform well and accomplish whatever goal you have as a communicator, it stands to reason you should warm up. So those tongue twisters, those are a type of warmup, and there’s a whole bunch of them. I’ll give you the funniest one, which this is not for the faint of heart, folks. Do not try this at home. You might get injured. Here we go. I am a pleasant mother pheasant plucker, I pluck pleasant mother pheasants. I’m the best pleasant mother pheasant plucker. Whoever plucked a pleasant mother pheasant. You can see why that has some pitfalls.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Would you do that with the cork in your mouth too? Is that something you can do to increase the strenuosity of the drill?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah. You all have seen Steph Curry of the Golden State warriors doing his pregame prep when he dribbles multiple balls and makes the job harder and harder and harder for himself. Yeah. Increase the level of difficulty because you are a communication athlete. And here’s another fun thing. If you have a smartphone or even a cell phone, I’m guessing many people listening to this do, that gives you camouflage to do tongue twisters and warm up anywhere in the world, anytime, and no one knows that you’re doing it. So memorize some of the tongue twisters you can find in the book or on our website and talk into your phone and just do these tongue twisters like you’re having a conversation with someone else. And the reason I say this, is because I wanna remove any excuse you have that would prevent you from embracing this life practice, because it’s a great one.

Brett McKay: That’s a great one. That’s what I love about your book and your ideas, is that it gives you something to do. Oftentimes when you read public speaking books or how to improve your delivery, they don’t give you anything to do. So it’s just you read it and you’re like okay, well I’ll try to remember that next time. And we’ve got stuff to do. I love this. Let’s talk about vocal variety. That’s another thing people often think about when they’re presenting, like, “Am I being too monotone or am I doing too much vocal variety.” How should people think about vocal variety in their public speaking? Or should they not think too much about it?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: They should think about it for the next two or three minutes when I teach them about it. And then they should forget it for the rest of their lives. And here’s a cool reason why. You know it, you know how to do it, and you know it in your bones. Because humans use vocal variety for some really important things, like communicating the meaning of what they’re saying, like communicating the emotion of what they’re saying, like framing things with some context or orientation, and also crucially, to surprise each other. We use vocal variety to keep people engaged. Monotone voices actually don’t use any novelty. When there’s novelty, our brains tend to disengage. Think of this like the white noise of a fan in the background. Soon you hear that pattern will never change. And so now that you know it won’t change, you can ignore it forever because it’s no longer danger or delight. You hear that? So this is not something you should have to be dramatic. This is a core part of how humans reach each other. How do you improve it then? So here’s a quick system, and then you can forget it.

Vocal variety is something humans have been doing a long time. I just established that. So I didn’t invent that at all. But I did invent this naming system you’re about to learn to make it alliterative and therefore, hopefully easy. Pace, pitch, pause, power, and placement. Pace is speed. Pitch is high and low. Pause is silence, and varied lengths of silence.

Power is volume. So that’s loud and soft. Loud and soft. And then placement means where the sound is placed in your body. We are musical instruments. We have a reed in our throat. That’s our vocal cords. They vibrate and they get amplified throughout our whole entire body. So we can have our voice placed differently. If you have a friend with a really nasal voice, what’s happening technically is the sound is only amplifying in the mask of the face and the nasal passages. So we all can relate to that, of course. What we’re aiming for here is more vocal variety. For the most part. Most people contract their vocal variety when they’re nervous or giving a big presentation or public speaking of any kind. Or to your point, the example of being on a date even, when we’re under pressure, we tend to contract our vocal variety, and we should instead be trying to expand it. For the most part.

You can go too far, and we could talk about that if you want to, but that’s very, very rare indeed. For most people, the trick is to expand it. And the cool thing is they’re very interlocked, so you honestly can expand any one of them. And what they tend to do is bring all the others along for the ride. And I can tell you a couple exercises to do that, if you want to know.

Brett McKay: Yeah. What are some exercises that people can start doing today to improve their vocal variety?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, here’s a fun one. It’s called silent storytelling. I want you to talk, but you don’t get to use any sound. So you have to basically mouth the words or lip sync the words. You have to move your face a lot. Lots of facial expressions to help an audience know what you were saying. And you have to allow your hand to gesture with freedom and ease because you don’t have the advantage of sound. So think of this like lip syncing a little bit. You’re not playing charades. Let me be clear about that. You’re not acting things out, per se. You’re just heightening all of the physical aspects of your communication, because you don’t get to use sound. So you’re lip syncing words, but as expressively as you can. Do that for a few minutes. And then put sound back into the equation. But you’re not allowed to contract everything. Okay? Your enunciation and dynamic lip movement has to be just as big, your facial expressions just as big, your gestural ease and freedom just as expanded. And what happens, like magic, is all of a sudden your voice has much more vocal variety. I’ll teach you a phrase I learned from Ralph Zito, who taught at the Juilliard School when I trained with him.

And the phrase is your voice is your body. And I’ll say it differently. I’m gonna pound my chest for a second. You can hear this. Your voice is your body. And I’ll plug my nose now. Your voice is your body. So if you change how your body is operating, your voice changes dramatically too. And the silent storytelling exercise does that.

Brett McKay: I love that. That’s a great one. Okay, so we’ve talked about things we can do to improve our delivery with our voice. Enunciating, slowing down, being more precise with our words. Let’s talk about eye contact. I know a lot of people when they’re speaking in front of a group or a large audience, they might be thinking, okay, “Where am I supposed to look?” Do I just look at the back? Do I look at a random spotlight? Do I look at a group of people? So how do we do eye contact when we’re speaking to a group. And why is it important to even think about eye contact when you’re speaking to a whole bunch of people?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: It’s essential to think about it, because the way we talk about eye contact, it’s a misnomer. In fact, I don’t even like the phrase eye contact because it sounds like it’s something you have. Brett has good eye contact, like it’s a possession or a trait even, but it’s not. Eye contact is an activity. It is an activity of evaluating if your message is reaching your audience or not. That’s why we do it. And you can think of a whole bunch of thought experiments, talking to a lost tourist or helping a person who doesn’t speak English understand something. You would be looking at them and looking at them directly to learn as much information as you can. So eye contact is crucial. And it’s crucial when you’re talking to large groups as well. And this is one of the places we hear the worst kind of feedback, which is again, the reductive. Make eye contact for 8-12 seconds. Okay, why? Why that length of time? People have watched people, they say, well, that’s about how long they do it. So I guess we should make that the average. No.

Look at individual people and try to elicit some kind of nonverbal response or cue from them to see if your message is resonating. And look at different people around the room. Now, if it’s a huge audience, you don’t have to look at every single person. If it’s an audience of thousands, you will never be able to look at everybody. But if you do reach individuals in various places of the audience, what happens, because of how we’re put together as communication instruments, your communication will improve because of that eye contact. It will unlock a virtuous cycle because as you work harder to reach that person, you’re gonna gesture, you’re gonna enunciate more, you’re gonna use vocal variety and breathe. All of these things will unlock. So look at individual people. Try to elicit some kind of a nonverbal cue from them. You may not win, by the way. You may not get that. That’s okay. Even in the act of trying, you’ll still get some success. And then throw out all the garbage. 8-12 seconds, four different quadrants of the room. Look at people’s foreheads so you don’t get distracted. Scan above their heads. All this conventional wisdom that I would posit is not wise at all.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about one thing that a lot of people maybe think too much about, when they’re public speaking. They often get like, was it Ricky Bobby and Talladega Nights? Where they’re like, “I don’t know what to do with my hands.” So what are you supposed to do with your hands and gestures when you’re speaking?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, here’s the hilarious thing, folks. There’s a good reason that you’re confused about that, because you can probably think on your own of two, three, five, 10 don’ts about gestures. It’s like, don’t point at your audience, don’t make distracting hand gestures, don’t cross your arms, don’t fidget your fingers, don’t keep your hands in your pockets, don’t jangle the coins in your pockets, don’t put your hands behind your back. That looks like you’re hiding something. It just goes on and on and on. And so soon you have the question like well, okay, what the heck should I do with them? And all those don’ts, back to the idea of thought suppression and the title of the book of course, just makes people chronically self focused. Which is why you end up with these limbs hanging off your shoulders and you have no idea what to do with. So this goes back to the same idea of other focus. You have to figure out how you use your hands in real life when you’re focused on reaching the other person, not thinking about what you’re doing with your hands. For most people, that means moving your hands more than you might think.

I am not a fan of the don’t make distracting hand gestures advice for all of the reasons I just said. But one of the most brutal is this, is that when people tend to constrain their gestures, they tend to constrain everything else too. So their vocal variety vanishes, their face becomes totally stoic, and still oftentimes their enunciation even becomes less dynamic, and they just look like a more boring version of themselves. Who wants that? So what should you do? Well, you should try to liberate your hands to do what they wanna do. To speak with gestural freedom and ease. Now, I’m not saying make just like general hand waving repetitive motions. I’ll give you a funny example. I one time was involved somewhere where they had some curriculum that suggested that people think about gestures, like keeping a beach ball aloft. Okay? So everyone dutifully stood up and waved their hands like they were keeping a beach ball aloft, but they just kept doing the same gesture over and over again. Now, the idea of course, was to try to get them moving their hands a little bit, which is good. But the image and the activity was so arbitrary that it didn’t actually unlock how people speak in real life.

So instead, what I would suggest is there’s two exercises in the book that I list. One is the silent storytelling drill that I already described for vocal variety. And again, how this drill can work is you speak, but without sound. So you exaggerate your facial expressiveness. And yes, use your hands as much as possible to try to illustrate what you’re talking about so that an audience watching with no sound could understand your message. And what happens, of course, is your hands get liberated to move quite a lot. And then once you’ve done that a bit, let it go, put sound back into your speech, and then enjoy the freedom that your hands have just realized.

So that’s one. This next one is for you athletes out there. Get a ball, a bouncy ball you can throw against a wall, like a racquetball, tennis ball, something like this. And then practice speaking whatever content you want to, but throw the ball at the wall and catch it on the rebound. But now, this time, try to throw the ball in as big and as wide a range as possible. So you have to really reach to catch the ball on the rebound.

And then, talk while you do this. Now, it’s gonna be difficult ’cause your brain’s doing two things, catching the ball and talking. So it’ll take some coordination to get it down. But then what you’re gonna realize is, oh my gosh, my hands have this huge range they can actually occupy. And then, hold the ball in your hand, don’t throw it anymore and continue to speak. But allow your hands to tell a story too. All of those tools are to liberate people who tend to constrain their gestures way too much. The rare over talkers with their hands. It’s not that you’re over talking, it’s that you’re telling the same darn story over and over again. They’re just doing the same thing. So instead of giving yourself thought suppression of, don’t make distracting hand gestures or don’t talk with your hands. Instead, challenge yourself to be better. Make your hands tell a better story. And those would be some tools for gestures.

Brett McKay: I love that. So we’ve talked about some really concrete drills that people can start doing today in their daily life to improve their delivery. No matter how much you prepare, there’s a chance you’ll still get nervous when you’re speaking. Any advice for people to help manage their nerves when they do arise, when they’re in a public speaking situation? Or even it could be a first date situation.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah. I want to answer this with as much generosity as I can. And to prove that point, if you go to the book’s website, dontsayum.com, you get the Navigating Nerves chapter for free. And when I call it Navigating Nerves, because that should be the goal. Not stopping, not preventing, not battling, navigating. And we’re gonna keep that chapter free, because whether or not people buy this book. I desperately want to help folks who have been stuck in some sort of self defeating cycle for a long, long time to get some liberation about nerves in their life. So I called it Navigating Nerves, because most people make the first mistake by being in opposition to their nerves. So all those combative verbs, battle, suppress, fight, all they do is make the nerves worse. Again, it’s back to this idea of thought suppression. So if you’re telling yourself, don’t be nervous, don’t be nervous, stop being nervous. Or even putting some self judgment on there, like why are you always nervous? Why do you get so nervous? Why are you so bad at this? Don’t be nervous, stop being nervous. You can hear the voice. All you’re doing is actually amping up your nerves and also amping up your feelings of failure about that.

So step number one, you’re going to be nervous. And you might in fact be nervous for the rest of your life and they might even get worse. Why? Because you are going to attain bigger and bigger victories in your life, your career and your life and your goals and everything about your life will get better and better, folks. Especially if you do all the lessons they’re learning on the Art of Manliness podcast. You’re gonna get better and better, which means you’ll attain bigger and bigger heights. And when you do that, guess what? It might feel even more nerve wracking to be at that new height. That’s good. It means that you care. It means that you’re invested. It means that your central nervous system, by the way, is very reactive. These are good things, so stop trying to fight them. You will be nervous. Now that you’ve reset them, your goal is not to distract yourself with something utterly arbitrary. Just imagine your audience in their underwear, because now your brain has to multitask. Naked people.

And what am I trying to say? Naked people, my message. Naked people, my message. Naked people, my message. Naked people, ah. Instead, find something physical and unmistakable and measurable that you can focus on, that gives you a positive point of focus. That could be grounding your feet. That could be really being mindful of your tip of tongue, sounds in your enunciation. That could be your eye contact and trying to elicit a reaction from various faces in the room. That could be breathing, feeling your backside ribs expand as you allow air to come into your body. It could be any of those things. But put your focus on something physical and then allow that to help you navigate through the nerves. And the better and better you get at putting your attention 100% on that thing. What happens, is the nerves begin to fade away, but not because you fought them, but because you’ve put your focus elsewhere and some are more productive.

Brett McKay: Well Michael, it has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, for sure. Well, you can follow us on social if you’re a social fan, you can just search for GK Training and all the various socials you might want to. But more specifically for the book, the book’s website is, Don’t Say Um. Just the same title, dontsayum.com. And my company is GK Training. And the URL there is just gktraining.com and that’s where you can find all the warmups and tongue twisters and exercises I talked about earlier.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Michael Chad Hoeppner, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: My pleasure too. Thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Michael Chad Hoeppner. He’s the author of the book, Don’t Say Um. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about the book at the website dontsayum.com, also check out our show notes at aom.is/um, where you find links to our resources, we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website @artofmanliness.com. You find our podcast archives and check out our new newsletter. It’s called DYING BREED. You can sign up @dyingbreed.net, it’s a great way to support the show. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time is Brett McKay. Remind each other to listen to the AOM podcast. But put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Note: Sinclair Lewis once said that one of the “two insults no human will endure” is “the assertion that he has no sense of humor” (the other is the “assertion that he has never known trouble”). Why is saying someone lacks a sense of humor such a damning indictment? Why do we like to think we possess this quality, and why do we value it in others? And why do we instinctively distrust people who take themselves too seriously?

In this excerpt from Influencing Human Behavior (published in 1925), H.A. Overstreet offers some insightful theories on these questions, as well as tips on how to improve your own sense of humor.

What a Sense of Humor Implies

Apparently, the possession of humor implies possession of a number of typical habit systems. The first is an emotional one: the habit of playfulness. Why should one be proud of being playful? For a double reason. First, playfulness connotes childhood and youth. If one can be playful, one still possesses something of the vigor and the joy of young life. If one has ceased to be playful, one writes oneself down as rigidly old. And who wishes to confess to himself that, rheumatic as are his joints, his mind and spirit are really aged? So the old man is proud of the playful joke which assures him that he is still friskily young.

But there’s a deeper implication. To be playful is, in a sense, to be free. When a person is playful, he momentarily disregards the binding necessities which compel him, in business, morals, domestic and community life. These binding necessities, for the most part, encompass our lives. We have to submit to them whether we wish to or not. We have to go to work — no play about that! We have to pay our rent, to watch our moral step, to obey the policemen, to be circumspect in our diet. Life is largely compulsion. But in play we are free! We do what we please. We make the rules. And if we lose, there’s no harm done; while if we win, there’s no sadness at having brought distress to another.

Apparently there is no dearer human wish than to be free.

But this is not simply a wish to be free from; it is also, and more deeply, a wish to be free to. What galls us is that the binding necessities do not permit us to shape our world as we please. They hand out the conditions to us. We must take them or leave them. What we most deeply desire, however, is to create our world for ourselves. Whenever we can do that, even in the slightest degree, we are happy.

To imply, therefore, that a person has a fine sense of humor is to imply that he still has in him the spirit of play, which implies even more deeply, the spirit of freedom and of creative spontaneity.

Poking Fun at the Respectabilities

In humor, the spirit of playful freedom gets frequent expression in delighted digs at “necessary things.” Why be so oppressively respectable? To be sure, we have to be respectable. We cannot do certain things. But at least we can take it out on the solemn respectabilities by saying certain things. This is what Freud calls “escaping the censor.” We all like to be a little wicked just because virtue is so uppish about it — and so confoundedly necessary!

It would almost seem as if the willingness and the wish to be somewhat flippant toward the solemn respectabilities — of state and church and sex and family — were a prerequisite for a sense of humor. For apparently the person who submits himself utterly to the social and moralistic compulsions can hardly possess that gay freedom which delights in building the world for itself; which delights, therefore, every now and then, in knocking the long-faced respectabilities endwise.

We Blunder

Not all humor, however, seeks to poke fun at the respectabilities. Much of it is concerned with our blunders. Now we can have the habit of taking all blunders seriously; then we condemn them. Or we can have the habit of playing with them. One of our newly-rich mothers made herself famous some years ago by declaring with great earnestness that she was looking up the best schools in Washington for her daughters, because, she said, she wanted her daughters to be macadamized. Stupid woman, says the serious person; she ought to have learned better English!

To see the humor of a situation, therefore, apparently requires not only the ability to blunder and to see blunders — we all possess that — but the ability to blunder and to see blunders with a certain detachment. The deadly serious person is all wrapped up in what he’s doing. The crusader, for example, is never humorous about his crusading. If he were, he would doubtless not crusade. In order to get himself properly worked up, he has to put his soul right up against one deadly, detestable fact and hold it there. He must see nothing else, particularly nothing that will mitigate the one fact. In the same manner, a person may put his soul so immediately up against himself, or his troubles, or his ambitions as to see nothing else in the universe. He then is said to take himself too seriously; and any joke made at his expense is not a joke but an insult.

Humor Is Not Censorious

But the humorous person is blessed among us because he has the habit of taking other people’s blunders rather lightly. He is not a perfectionist. There are few more deadly persons than perfectionists. They take the joy out of life because what they require of us is so dolefully beyond our powers. The finely humorous person, on the contrary, is felt to be one of us. He is not offensively our moral superior. He knows our weaknesses; but he rather suspects that he has similar weaknesses himself. Hence, when we are with him, we are comfortable. We know that he will not pry too severely into our shortcomings. He will not draw a long face and threaten us with eventual damnation.

Why We Like Humorous Persons

From the foregoing brief analysis, then, it should be clear why — other things being equal — we like persons who have a sense of humor. The humorous person has a number of delightful qualities: he is playful; free; creative; not priggish, nor fanatic, nor bigoted; he is not afraid of laughing at the too solemn respectabilities; he is not censorious; above all, he’s everlastingly and refreshingly unexpected. Therefore we like to live with him. And so because, by implication, we deny these delightful qualities, we offer the direst insult when we jokingly say to a person: “You’re all right, my friend; but you haven’t a grain of humor in you.” We mean that he had best not be around too much!

Can We Cultivate Humor?

And now we come to a difficult question: how can this fine quality of humor be cultivated? The foregoing analysis should cast some light upon the problem. Humor, we said, exhibits itself in a number of typical habits. Can we cultivate these? In the first place there is the habit of being playful. If we vaguely suspect that we have not a noticeable degree of humor, we might ask ourselves: Are we ever playful with serious things; or is it our habit always to take serious things — our work, our soul’s salvation, the salvation of our neighbors or the world — with prodigious solemnity?

The Puritan may cry out against this, but serious things apparently have to be taken with a touch of playfulness if we are not to surrender the freedom of our spirits. Why, for example, if we are scientists, be so deadly in earnest about our researches in chromosomes. Chromosomes are valuable, no doubt;  but there are other things in life. Besides, there is even a possibility that one may be mistaken about one’s blessed chromosomes and that a later scientist may have a good round laugh at one’s expense. Or if it is not chromosomes, then vegetarianism, or antivivisection, or fundamentalism or birth control. We can get the habit of being playful with our serious concerns. We can knock them about a bit; be irreverent towards them; consider them temporary nuisances. We can refrain from scowling when people disagree with what we hold certain or sacred; and we can heroically restrain ourselves from passing laws to compel them to bow the knee to our beliefs.

Are we timid towards the respectabilities? Then we can learn to poke fun at them. We can realize that the world is still in the making and that the last respectability has not been cast into the mold of eternity. We can at least be proud of our ability to be free spirits and can genuinely make faces at the oftentimes royal pretender, Convention.

The first thing, of course, that we have to learn is that humor is something far more than making jokes. It is an attitude. If we are of that unfortunate number who can never remember the right joke at the right moment, we may rest easy. There are more things in the heaven and earth of humor than made-to-order jokes. The important thing is that we begin to be free with our utilitarian and conventional concerns — playfully free; that we renounce the slavery of too strict allegiance and take mental and spiritual holidays. The effect is much like an actual vacation; we come back a little boisterous and contagiously happy.

It is good to be earnest about our convictions. But not too earnest. Humanity has had a long, hard march. It is often tired and blunderheaded. Apparently there is no use getting too wrought up about the mistakes it makes. Things straighten out far more quickly in the presence of the genial and understanding mind than in the presence of the mind all ugly to condemn and to crucify.

The Crucial Test

But now we come to our real test. It is fairly easy to laugh at the incongruities in the behavior of other folk; it is not so easy to laugh at the incongruities of our own behavior. Have we been disproportionately wrathful at something that really, in the long run, amounted to little? And has our life-companion rather caustically remarked that we seem to have lost our sense of humor? To be sure, life-companions should not be caustic in such crises. Far better if husband and wife agreed beforehand on a non-irritating signal to be given on all such trying occasions. But even the mildest and most kindly-intentioned signal might only infuriate us the more.

We had best, therefore, in time of fair weather prepare for storms. We might do well then to remind ourselves fairly frequently that the most liberating ability possessed by man is the ability to laugh at himself. With sufficient self-reminding, it is not impossible to build up a laughing-at oneself habit. Our irritations, frustrations, disgust and angers would take on a most delightful sporting quality if we began to watch ourselves under stress and to note the precise moment at which, our sense of proportion completely vanishing, our humor went into the discard.

A sense of humor, then, is not to be regarded as a mysterious gift which some fortunate individuals are endowed. It is a system of prevailing habits, habits which it is apparently within the power of all of us to develop. Primary among them is the habit of playfulness. Expressed briefly, this is the habit of taking things out of their conventionally accepted relationships, as, for example, when we use a good utilitarian pillow for a pillow fight instead of for a nocturnal head-rest. So the punster plays with words when he departs from the accepted utilitarian way of holding each word strictly to a single meaning. So, again, a contest becomes play when it is agreed that losing is bereft of its conventional meaning of disaster.

To be playful, in short, is to re-create our world of binding necessities, to do with it what is not conventionally expected or required.

It seems reasonable to assert that there is no fixed or inherited degree of playfulness in each of us, but that once we are aware of the basic relation of playfulness to humor, the degree to which the former operates can be noticeably increased.

So we can learn, with moderation, to play with the serious things of life. We can play with people’s blunders. We can overcome our habits of undue censoriousness. Above all, we can grow the habit of noticing incongruities, noting them, however, without bitterness and raising them by exaggeration to laughable conspicuousness. Finally, precisely as we can direct this fine playfulness towards others, we can direct it towards ourselves, learning this solid salutatory habit of not taking ourselves too seriously.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Ever feel like you can’t say no? Like you’re constantly doing things you don’t want to to avoid letting others down or having them think less of you? You’re not alone. Saying no to people’s requests is something I’ve had to work on throughout my adult life. I know a lot of other people who have trouble saying no, too.

And it isn’t just a modern problem.

My recent interview with Alex Petkas about Plutarch’s Lives led me to revisit the ancient writer’s Moralia — a collection of essays about topics ranging from how to manage your anger to knowing if you’re growing in virtue. Plutarch’s got an essay in there on the issue of people-pleasing. The Greek word Plutarch used for people-pleasing was dysōpia, which is roughly translated to “the embarrassment that makes us grant unjustified requests.”

In today’s article, we’re going to take a look at what Plutarch said about dysōpia and his ancient-yet-still-relevant advice on how to overcome it.

The People-Pleaser’s Paradox

Plutarch notes that excessive people-pleasing often comes from a good place. Courteous and conscientious people are the ones who typically struggle with dysōpia. Those who care about doing the right thing and about how they look in the eyes of others are capable of shame, and like other ancients, Plutarch thought shame could be a very healthy thing; shame was a virtue because it checked reckless and selfish behavior.

But, Plutarch observes, someone can be too sensitive to shame, and it is from this overweening sense of shame that people-pleasing arises. A person who struggles with dysōpia feels excessive shame for something they shouldn’t: saying no to annoying or unnecessary requests. Plutarch takes an Aristotelian approach to the virtue of shame: you should feel it at the right time, for the right reasons, and at the right intensity. Because dysōpia is an inappropriate experience of shame, Plutarch considered it a vice.

The Real Cost of Never Saying No

Plutarch catalogs the price we pay when we succumb to dysōpia:

• We make promises we can’t keep.
• We lend money to people who won’t repay us.
• We compromise our integrity.
• We sacrifice our needs and values to avoid momentary discomfort.
• We allow ourselves less time to focus on the people and causes that are really important to us.

Plutarch’s most keen insight about the cost of not saying no to people is that we often end up creating the very thing we were trying to avoid: embarrassment and a bad reputation.

Here’s Plutarch’s thinking:

• A people-pleaser says yes to requests to avoid feeling bad about saying no and to build a reputation as a helpful person.
• But because the people-pleaser never says no, they overcommit and fail to follow through on the commitments they’ve made.
• Consequently, they gain a reputation for being a flake and are looked down upon by others and feel bad about themselves.

Plutarch’s Guide to Breaking Free From People-Pleasing

Plutarch offers practical advice on overcoming the vice of people-pleasing:

1. Start Small

Don’t try to transform overnight. Start with low-stakes situations:

• Decline the extra drink offered at dinner when you’ve had enough.
• Send your meal back at a restaurant when it wasn’t made right.
• Exit conversations you aren’t enjoying.

2. Practice Strategic Silence

If someone makes an unreasonable request, Plutarch doesn’t think you always have to respond. Sometimes, you don’t need to say anything at all. As Plutarch puts it, “Silence is an answer to the wise.”

If a random person on LinkedIn messages you to “pick your brain” for an hour, ignore it. If a family member texts you asking for a big loan, delete it.

3. Remember Your Past Regrets

Plutarch recommends reminding yourself of moments when you said yes to something you didn’t want to do and how crappy you felt afterwards. Hopefully, the painful memory will keep you from making a similar mistake.

4. Adjust Your No Depending on the Person

Plutarch was a keen observer of human nature, particularly social status. He understood that how you refuse someone varies based on their status. Here’s Plutarch’s playbook to saying no based on social status:

Dealing With Power Players

You know the type — high-status individuals used to getting their way. Maybe it’s your boss or an influential client.

With these types of people, whose good graces you generally want to stay in, Plutarch recommends taking a subtle approach to saying no.

Instead offering a direct, terse no that may ruffle their feathers, try:

• Appealing to their sense of excellence and artistry.
• Making it about living up to their high standards.
• Turning their pride into your ally.

If a prestigious client is pushing you to cut corners on a project, frame your no in terms of maintaining the exceptional quality they’re known for. “I know you’ve built your reputation on outstanding work. That’s why I can’t in good conscience rush this crucial phase.”

Regular Folks

With people who don’t hold power over you but make requests to which you don’t want to acquiesce, Plutarch suggests using humor to tactfully decline.

So if a well-meaning, clueless person asks you to join their MLM, say something like, “Thanks for the invite, but I still have protein powder in my garage from the last multi-level marketing business I joined. Have to park the car in the driveway! Ha!”

If you can’t inject humor, Plutarch thinks giving a straightforward no is completely fine:

• I don’t lend out my tools anymore.
• I’m unavailable that evening to help.
• My policy is to only offer those opportunities to grad students.
• I don’t do morning meetings; that’s my focused work period.
• That’s not possible.
• No, but thanks for thinking of me.

The Shameless Ones

These guys are the professional boundary-pushers who treat “no” as the opening bid in a negotiation. You know who I’m talking about — the people who just. won’t. quit.

For these people, Plutarch recommends fighting fire with fire.. When someone’s being shameless in their demands, you have permission to be equally shameless in your refusal. Tell them to pound sand. Kick rocks. Jump in a lake. Sit on it.

As Plutarch says: “A handy arm with knaves is knavery.”

I found this bit of advice particularly helpful for some reason. If people can be bold with their asks, then I can be just as bold with my nos.

The Buck Stops Here

For Plutarch, learning to say no isn’t just about being assertive — it’s about being true to your telos in life. 

The goal isn’t to become cold or unhelpful, but to find a balance between kindness and self-respect. As Plutarch puts it, we need “a harmonious blend” of courtesy and firmness. The above advice can help nudge you more toward the self-respect side of the spectrum if you’ve had a problem with people-pleasing your entire life.

Go Deeper

We’ve put out lots of podcasts and articles over the years on how to overcome people-pleasing and say no. Check out these AoM classics to go deeper into this subject:

• How to Firmly Say No Without Coming Off Like a Jerk
• Podcast #915: Finally Learn to Say No
• A Better Way to Say No
• Quit Being a Pushover: How to Be Assertive
• Podcast #407: How to Stop Being a Nice Guy

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

How to Win Friends and Influence People may have sold tens of millions of copies, but its author, Dale Carnegie, wasn’t born a complete natural at embodying the principles the book espouses. Instead, the warm, low-key charm Carnegie was known for during his life was developed through intentional and consistent effort and practice.

One of the tools Carnegie used to hone his social prowess was a folder he kept called “Damned Fool Things I Have Done.” As detailed in his biography, when he made some kind of social misstep that reflected a behavior or quality he wanted to improve, he wrote down the incident and filed it away. “I put in that folder, month after month, written records of the damned fool things I have been guilty of,” Carnegie said. “I sometimes dictate these memos to my secretary, but sometimes they are so personal, so stupid, that I am ashamed to dictate them, so I write them in longhand.”

Carnegie’s “D.F.T” folder contained records of the times he stuck his foot in his mouth, committed a faux pas, made someone feel awkward, gave into laziness, arrived somewhere late, bungled a conversation, procrastinated, lost his temper or patience, and so on.

One of its entries said: “Wasted ten minutes in an unnecessary harangue with the phone company about their shortcomings.”

Another read: “H.P. Gant made an extraordinary success as toastmaster tonight. I should have complimented him highly, but I was so absorbed in myself that I neglected to say any words of appreciation.”

When an office clerk was slow to help him, Carnegie made this record of the interaction: “I was peeved. My voice showed it. I irritated the clerk and got very poor service in return…It affected nothing desirable whatever. I, who take money from people for telling them how to handle human nature, was as crude and ineffective as a caveman. I was ashamed of the incident.”

Under an entry he labeled “Don’t make sweeping statements that may offend someone,” Carnegie wrote: “I said, while teaching the 5-7 PM class, that ‘all Tammany politicians are crooks,’ or something nearly that. Joseph Davern, an ardent Catholic, took a feeling of exception to it. It was just at the time that religious controversy regarding Al Smith’s religion was developing. Davern made a most excellent speech on tolerance, decrying the fact that I should make such an unguarded and unfounded accusation. I apologized.”

While the advice often given today is not to dwell on one’s mistakes, Carnegie thought it was best to get your shortcomings out in the open and confront their cringe-inducing reality head-on. If embarrassing social failings only pop into your head while you’re lying in bed at night, and then get quickly pushed out of the mind, it’s not possible to learn from past foibles and figure out how to get better in the future. For Carnegie, writing down his deficiencies and then regularly reviewing the contents of his Damned Fool Things I’ve Done folder was a helpful habit — akin to the spiritual practice of self-examination. As he observed:

When I get out my D.F.T. folders and re-read the criticisms I have written of myself, they do more to help and direct me than anything Solomon could have written. They help me to deal with the biggest problem I shall ever face: the management of Dale Carnegie.

For more insights from Carnegie on how to develop your social prowess, listen to this episode of the AoM podcast:

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Do you have trouble feeling comfortable when socializing? Maybe sometimes you do fine, but other times you feel nervous, shy, and awkward. Or maybe socializing always feels like a struggle. Either way, you know how frustrating and even debilitating social anxiety can be. It cannot only lead to avoiding potentially enriching experiences and a failure to make desired connections, it can sometimes be hard to understand.

So what’s going on when you socially misfire?

Here to unpack that question is Thomas Smithyman, who is a clinical psychologist and the author of Dating Without Fear: Overcome Social Anxiety and Connect. Today on the show, we get into the dynamics of social anxiety in both romantic and platonic contexts. Thomas explains what defines social anxiety, how it exists on a spectrum from mild shyness to an outright disorder, and what causes it, from genetics to faulty thinking. We talk about the protection strategies people often use to avoid the pain of social judgement, and why they actually backfire. We then get into what you can do to be more socially comfortable and confident, including a key to effective flirting, why you should try to make a “mediocre first impression,” and how to find your way into what Thomas calls the “warm social world.”

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM series on overcoming shyness 
• AoM Article: Introversion as an Excuse
• AoM Article: How to Overcome Phone Shyness
• Sunday Firesides: Want to Solve Your Social Problems? Get Over Your Self

Connect With Thomas Smithyman

• Thomas’ website
• Thomas’ YouTube channel

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Do you have trouble feeling comfortable when socializing? Maybe sometimes you do fine, but other times you feel nervous, shy and awkward. Or maybe socializing always feels like a struggle. Either way, you know how frustrating and even debilitating social anxiety can be. It can not only lead to avoiding potentially enriching experiences and a failure to make desired connections. It can sometimes be hard to understand. So what’s going on when you socially misfire? Here to unpack that question is Thomas Smithyman, who is a clinical psychologist and the author of Dating Without Fear: Overcome Social Anxiety and Connect. Today on the show, we get into the dynamics of social anxiety in both romantic and platonic context. Thomas explains what defines social anxiety, how it exists on a spectrum from mild shyness to an outright disorder, and what causes it from genetics to faulty thinking. We talk about the protection strategies people often use to avoid the pain of social judgment and why they actually backfire. We then get into what you can do to be more socially comfortable and confident, including a key to effective flirting, why you should try to make a mediocre first impression, and how to find your way into what Thomas calls the warm social world. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at AOM.IS/social anxiety.

All right, Thomas Smithyman. Welcome to the show.

Thomas Smithyman: Thank you. Thanks for having me on.

Brett McKay: So you are a psychologist who specializes in helping individuals with social and dating anxiety. How do you end up in this niche?

Thomas Smithyman: It’s, I think like a lot of psychologists, I ended up here because I was trying to figure myself out. Right. Not uncommon at all in my field.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So it was a… Me search, like research is me search.

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. So I had a, when I was a kid, I was… I was at, like a nerd school basically. I took all the nerds in Sydney, Australia, and I put us all in one place. And I personally didn’t really interact with women. It was so far from my home. I didn’t interact with girls my age or anything. Basically the whole way through Australian High School, which is age, I guess 7th grade through 12th grade. And so then I showed up in the US and I was basically a 12-year-old socially like a, I knew how to interact with guys. But I discovered at that moment, oh, I’m pretty socially anxious when it comes to talking to girls. And I did not know what to do. And so I suffered a bunch. And then over time, I’m very curious and very scientifically minded.

I did wanna understand what was going on. So I couldn’t find much just from therapists. I couldn’t get much from the internet that was of particular help to me. So I went about trying to figure it out for myself by going into research. ‘Cause I like science versus just some random person’s opinion. So I went sort of collecting it and trying to put it together for myself. And yeah, over the course of many, many years, basically it was a big obsession. It still is. I’m 20 something years into obsessing over this. But yeah, this, it became really my focus and I developed a bunch of expertise and helped myself. I was my own Guinea pig. And then I very quickly started helping a lot of other people. ‘Cause it drew me very quickly into studying psychology as a clinician.

Brett McKay: So you are a clinician, you don’t just do research, you actually work with patients.

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m a clinical psychologist. Yeah. So I’ve been treating people for… Yeah. I guess, 20-ish years. And I treat a lot of people with social anxiety and I have for a long time.

Brett McKay: Are a lot of your clients men? Primarily men?

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. They are. Which I think is, it’s partly because I think it’s kind of rare to find psychologists that are relatively young men. And so I’m not excluding women. I do have plenty of women that come through, but guys, I see majority guys.

Brett McKay: Okay. So yeah, you talk about your history in the book when you got to the United States and you were, in your 20s trying to figure out how to interact with women because you didn’t have that experience in high school. You fell in at this time. This was like when the pickup artist stuff was really big. Correct? And you kind of got into that stuff, right?

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Yeah. And I was… That’s what there was, if you looked for information. And obviously it was very appealing, like the promise of it. It was like, really, Hey, here’s these people that have figured it out. They’re gonna tell you the answers. This is how it works. ‘Cause really, that was my, I felt, was my struggle. I didn’t understand, I just didn’t understand how it worked. I didn’t have a model for it. And I was very aware of, I had a lot of anxiety in dating situations. I had some in other situations too. So I was interested in general, but I didn’t understand what was happening. I knew that there were times where I was, what I thought of as just my normal self and I had access to all of my normal traits and I had a great time socializing. And then there were times where I just suddenly did not have the ability to do it, and I didn’t know what was going on. So I was pulled into like, Hey, these guys are promising the answers. And yet when I actually explored it, it just kept not being a good fit for me as a person.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And we will talk about this later on in our conversation. Sometimes if you follow this, the advice of like the pickup artist guys, it can actually backfire and make your social anxiety even worse. We’ll hit talk about that here in a bit.

Thomas Smithyman: Yes. Very much. Very much.

Brett McKay: But let’s talk about social anxiety in general. What is it, what are the symptoms of social anxiety and how does it differ from just like regular, general anxiety?

Thomas Smithyman: So rather than I guess sort of doing a full DSM diagnosis download, the way I think about it is, diagnostically really, it’s fear of being scrutinized, judged, rejected, and basically the extent which that interferes with your life. My way of looking at it is you have an underlying sense of, in some way, on some level, I am flawed, I’m not good enough. And if I enter a situation, whatever those problems are, are gonna be revealed. Other people are gonna see them and then they are gonna harshly judge me and it’s gonna cause all these problems. And therefore I either will feel a ton of distress about it, or I’m gonna avoid doing important things in my life. So that’s kind of the core of this. And then, it’s almost like there’s a scale for this because these are very human experiences.

Humans, we have this. This is part of the struggle of being human is we worry that we are not good enough. People will find out and they’ll be rejecting consequences. And so I kind of think of it as being on a scale, where some people don’t experience it very often as you move up the scale… It takes special circumstances to some people, they might consider themselves shy, but it’s happening a little more often. You start to move up to having kind of more regular social anxiety. Maybe it’s happening in just one situation or it’s happening across quite a few, but get into disorder territory. It’s really having an impact on your life. And then if it gets extreme enough, there’s avoidant personality disorder, which is sort of the end of that spectrum.

Brett McKay: Okay. That makes sense. So it is a scale…

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah.

Brett McKay: It can go from just, I’m really feeling uncomfortable about meeting new people, ’cause I’m afraid of what they’re gonna say about me, but I can still power through it and kind of overcome that and I’ll be fine. And then there’s, it can increase where you, those feelings of… Like those feelings of fear and anxiety, of reject social rejection, get to the point where you try to avoid the situation, any social situation completely. And that’s when it can become a problem.

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Yeah. And basically the more either like if you’re having enough to stress, hey, then it’s problematic. Or if you are what I see as kind of the bigger problem I’m giving up on things that I care about. I’m avoiding things that I want to do that matter to me. I’m not connecting when I really wanna be connecting.

Brett McKay: Diagnostically. Do you make a distinction between shyness and social anxiety? When someone comes to you like, oh, I’ve got social anxiety. Do you sometimes say, well, maybe you’re just kind of shy and you don’t actually have social anxiety?

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. I don’t differentiate it that way since there’s a scale, if they’re coming to see me, then I’m trying to figure out what is missing. Like, what’s the problem here, what are you not getting and how do I get you there? A lot of times I’ll find when people come in, if we are thinking really like clinical psychology by the book, someone might come in and be like, okay, you are above the cutoff for social anxiety disorder. And then after a bit of treatment, people will be down below the cutoff. And some people are like, okay, yeah… I’ve moved myself down that scale. This is okay. But most of the time people are like, okay, well I’m down below the cutoff, but there’s a lot more that I still wanna do and the amount that I’m having is getting in the way.

Brett McKay: Okay. Do we have any ideas as to what causes social… Like someone to develop social anxiety, whether like that mild form or extreme form, is it nurture nature? What’s going on there?

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it’s gonna be a combo. So I think part of it is, like I mentioned before, this is a human experience. So part of it is that the evolutionary background of we are primed to be this way. There’s certain things that as humans with our preexisting preloaded threat system is designed to protect us from things. And there are certain things that it is very ready to activate and try to protect us from snakes, but also social injuries. So we are already primed to be worried about whether we are acceptable in the group, whether we are performing correctly, whether people approve of us. So we have that kind of background. And then, we all have that, right? But obviously there’s individual differences. And so there are differences in temperament. So some of us are born, like myself, more behaviorally inhibited basically, where our nervous system is more sensitive and we are gonna be more reactive to stimuli.

So that’s one piece of it. But also what happens over our time growing up, it tunes that, it either turns our sensitivity up or it helps it to calm down. And then where I find it gets really interesting is in that nurture piece, in the experience piece, we’re trying to figure out, like someone comes in for treatment, we want to have a model and we want it to be individualized because people will not agree on what situations are threatening. This basically will come out of, we’ll look at the nurture piece. We’ll look at what are you specifically afraid of happening? In what situation, what is it that you’re afraid is gonna be discovered about you? What will you be giving away? And people are judging and we’ll be able to say, this didn’t come from nowhere. If we look for it, we will generally, we’ll be able to find, oh, this has been happening for a while. Where would this idea have come from? Because at some point a part of us, part of our brain learned that a particular situation was threatening and we learned at that time, here’s how I’m gonna cope. I’m gonna come up with a survival method for this. So I do think having that background is really useful for self-compassion to know, oh, there’s not something wrong with me. We have tricky brains as Paul Gilbert says, we set up this way and we’ve been through experiences that have trained us to be afraid of certain circumstances.

Brett McKay: Okay. That makes sense. So we might… You might be born with the more sensitivity to social or status defeats of being socially rejected, and then your upbringing could fine tune that. Or even if you sort of are naturally an extrovert, you enjoy being around people. If you had an upbringing where you didn’t have the opportunity to socialize, you might develop some social anxiety. Like in your case, you grew up… You went to that all boys high school didn’t really interact with women. So when you finally had to, you obviously had some anxiety ’cause you didn’t have any practice with that.

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah, yeah. So that’s definitely would have a piece. If we… It depends, we can go way far back, like early childhood, all we can look at definitely the teen years, right? And the puberty. And then when people start to shift from seeing other people as being like on the same level to suddenly, like I’m friends with that person, not that person. And then that sudden shift to hierarchies that kick in. Once you’re in the teen years and what you’ve learned, all this historical stuff, you are picking up these models. Of like, this is who I am, this is where I fall, this is how loved I am, this is what’s wrong with me. This is what’s good about me, this is how people are gonna respond. This is what the world’s like.

Brett McKay: And going back to personality, a lot of people talk about, well, I’m an introvert, I’m an extrovert. And I think with this idea of social anxiety, introversion, extroversion can be related to it, but I think it’s possible you can be an introvert but not have social anxiety. I think that describes me like I’m an introvert. Introversion is just, you enjoy being by yourself or just smaller groups, like being around lots of people just wears you out. That’s how I feel when I have to go to a party and press flush and hobnob afterwards, I’m like, oh man, that was really tiring. But I like to, like smaller groups, I’m fine, but I’m not shy. I have no problem introducing myself to people. I don’t know going to places, I don’t know, public speaking, calling people on the phone that I don’t know, I don’t have a problem with that. Is it possible for you to be an extrovert but also have social anxiety? So like you enjoy being around lots of people, there’s something in your temperament, but then you also, it makes you anxious. Have you encountered patients like that?

Thomas Smithyman: Oh yeah. Totally. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Think of them as being like, it’s easier to think about them as being two separate factors. So yeah, you are right. You can be introverted and just want a smaller group of friends, but you’re not experiencing a fear of being judged, a fear of being seen as deficient and having that get in the way. You just don’t want that level of stimulation all the time. And yeah, you’ll have introverts not socially anxious, not gonna come in and try to get it treated. ‘Cause they’re like, I’m doing fine, I just want a life that’s set up in this particular way. What’s interesting yeah, is you do get obviously introverted, socially anxious people. But yeah, you’re right, you get those extroverted, socially anxious folks. And that’s actually where I see the most pain. Because you are somebody who wants a full social life. You wanna be kind of the life of the party. You wanna be around people all the time. You wanna be thinking out loud, connecting with people, and yet you are being really inhibited by the fear of not being good enough and you’re shutting down even though you wanna be connecting desperately. Those are the ones who suffer the most. And that probably was what I was like when I was younger and going through this.

Brett McKay: And I think I’ve noticed this that people do this because I think one of the downsides of, we say democratizing therapy speak or psychology speak is that people start self diagnosing. And there’s people who they might have like social anxiety because they just don’t have the practice of socializing, but they’re like, well, I’m just an introvert. It’s like, well maybe, but maybe not. Maybe you would actually enjoy being very social, except you just don’t know how. And so it gives you anxiety. And so to avoid the anxiety, you just don’t go out and you’re like, well, I’m an introvert.

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. I’m with you on that. Honestly, the way I think about it, anybody that comes in to try to treat things, it requires a ton of courage and it requires you facing uncomfortable things. And most people are not gonna do it because it’s really hard and it’s scary. And for a lot of people either it’s like, I don’t realize that’s what’s going on ‘Cause I have this narrative, or it’s easier to say I don’t like something rather than I’m scared of something.

Brett McKay: Yeah. That makes sense. And I think with social anxiety, the thing I’m maybe I’m picking up on is it can be context specific. So you might have social anxiety in certain situations, but not others. So here’s an example, some people do fine in face-to-face conversations, but calling someone on the phone just terrifies them. So they just avoid calling people on the phone, like even calling the restaurant to make an order or something like that. Even though they… Whenever I see people who have that social anxiety of calling people on the phone, it’s like there’s people at that place who are waiting, their job is to take your call.

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah.

Brett McKay: You don’t need to worry about it. And then there’s also, people could be fine socially with friends, with colleagues, with coworkers, but when it comes to dating and thinking about relationships romantically, that’s when the anxiety appears.

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Totally the case. I’ll have these like funny conversations with people because, we each have our theories. Like our implicit ideas of this is how the world works, this is what’s safe, this is what’s not safe. And a lot of change in that is I just identifying it and then trying to challenge it. But I’ll talk to people and somebody will be adamant, put me in a group, it is safe, I can hide. No one’s really paying attention to me. But if you put me one-on-one with somebody, that’s where the real danger is. Because then the person’s gonna look at you and they’re gonna realize, whatever your flaws are. And then I’ll talk to the next person and they’ll be like, Ooh, get me one-on-one. I can read what the person’s thinking, I can adjust myself, it’s fine, but put me in a group, I don’t know what to do. I’m gonna screw that up. And each one will be entirely convinced that one environment’s safe and the other one is very dangerous because we’ve each come to develop our own particular triggers and yeah. And so, like for me dating, but if you have me talk to a guy great.

It’s gonna go fine. Have me talk to my date’s mother. I was wonderful. I was the most charming guy you ever met. But it’s, yeah, the specific… Each person’s very specific. And like when, when you are trying to figure out how to help, it’s why you kind of can’t do just blanket broad things a lot of times. Like you wanna have a sense of like, what is it? What situation triggers me and why? And what do I think it’s bringing? What is it revealing about me? And what am I doing to try to protect myself in those situations?

Brett McKay: Yeah, that makes sense. I think I’m, if I remember correctly, a lot of the pickup artists stuff feels like you got to increase your confidence in general. And probably that’s probably not that useful. Instead, you should focus on like, what is it about interacting with the opposite sex that makes me anxious? And then like, figure that out. ‘Cause I don’t know if you can really just increase general confidence. I think confidence is very context specific. You can be confident in one situation, like we just talked about talking with the boys, but not so much with women. And in certain, and women in certain situations, like you probably be fine talking to the bank teller and just have this great conversation and it’s almost flirty. You don’t realize that. But as soon as you have an interest, like a romantic interest, that’s, that’s when it becomes a problem. So you got to focus on that.

Thomas Smithyman: Exactly. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So social anxiety, like general anxiety is based on faulty thinking. So when you have generalized anxiety, they just, you imagine these things in your head that probably aren’t gonna happen. And you use that fear to make excuses for yourself to just avoid life in extreme cases. What’s some of the faulty thinking patterns that people have about socializing in general that can cause social anxiety?

Thomas Smithyman: There are, there are so many, like you could write a whole book on it, which I did. I mean, I could honestly go on and on. For any kind of anxiety, like this is the simple version, for any kind of anxiety you look for, most likely you are some version of overestimating the likelihood that things will go badly and underestimating your ability to handle it. So that’s kind of the broad version. But once you get deeper into social anxiety, there are like commonalities that come up all the time. And so like I talk in the book about this idea of the, that comes from David Moscovich, but this idea of an audience that people until proven otherwise are hyper focused on you and the hyper focus on looking for flaws and things that are wrong with you.

And when they see them, they are going to be really critical, not kind, not thoughtful, not empathetic, not be able to put it in context. And They’re gonna be judgmental about it. And if that happens, we will be unable to go on. It will just shut us down. Our lives will be ruined. So I think, I think that kind of collection is really important. Like I have a thing, I get into great detail in the book about this thing I call the social anxiety equation, where I sort of point out, here’s a whole series of cognitive biases that socially anxious people have that triggers all of the symptoms in the end to protect you. And it’s kind of those pieces, right? ’cause in reality, we know from research and we go about testing this all the time in, in treatment, but like, we know that the flaws that we feel like we have, they seem much bigger to us than they are to other people. And so we might like, we, we get anxious when we’re gonna enter a situation and we think some imperfection, some problem we have will be revealed. But in reality, one, people are not super attentive and people don’t notice things particularly well.

A lot of what we experience, we notice ’cause it’s maybe internal to us or they don’t notice ’cause they are focused on other things. If they do notice it, but a lot of times they don’t think these things are problems. Like they might even like them. I remember I, in college, like I talked to this, to this woman and like, she had it like an interesting nose and I liked it. And I gave her a compliment on it. And she told me that it was the thing that she was most sensitive of. She saw it as her biggest flaw. And I, in fact, had a different perspective. I liked it. And that comes up again and again, when I work with people, their perceived flaws, there are some people who are into those things, but even if they’re not, people see things in context. Like we fixate on what we see as a problem. But meanwhile, when someone meets us, they are seeing the entire person, especially if someone gets to know us, they get to know us as a full complex human and they see whatever our downsides are in that context.

Brett McKay: And on top of that, people are way more empathetic than we give them credit for. We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay. So to kind of recap there, people who have social anxiety, one of the things that faulty thinking that they have is they think that whenever they’re socializing with somebody, the other person’s just looking for the flaws. Like they’re looking for you to mess up. They’re hyper focused on that. But the research shows, like actually when you’re interacting with someone, they’re not paying that much attention to you. And I think we’ve talked about this on the podcast before. It’s like the spotlight effect, right? Where you think everyone’s paying attention to you, but actually no one’s paying attention to you. And they’ve done experiments where they’ve had people wear Barry Manilow t-shirts.

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah, love that.

Brett McKay: Then they asked people, did you notice the guy wearing the Barry Manilow t-shirt? Like, I don’t remember the Barry Manilow t-shirt. So yeah, people aren’t… So that’s one of the cognitive faulty thinking. People aren’t really paying too close attention to what you look like or your flaws. And then the other one, faulty things that people with social anxiety, they catastrophize about if they do have a social misstep, what’s that gonna mean? They typically think, well, if someone’s just gonna hate me and they’re just gonna make fun of me and they’re just not gonna have anything to do with me. And what the research shows is that actually most people are pretty forgiving and empathetic. And they’re probably not even paying attention. If you did have some sort of social faux pas, it went over their head. But because people with social anxiety had that faulty thinking of catastrophizing and thinking everyone’s paying attention to them to avoid the anxiety, they just avoid social situations completely.

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Yeah. Like all of the things that we do to protect ourselves or avoid, those are the real problems, right? So this belief of, yeah, people are really vicious, they are looking for these things, they’re gonna catch them, they’re gonna judge me, they’re probably mean, makes it feel really risky, makes it feel really threatening. And so the natural response to risk and threat is to avoid those things. Or if you cannot avoid them, to try really hard to hide them. And I guess that’s actually one of the other for social anxiety, one of the really big biases in thinking is that you’ve got to perform. It’s this idea of, I’ve got to perform really, really well in order for people to be accepting of me or like me. And the research from just, I’ve pulled it from all over the place and it keeps coming back to, no, you don’t. Like social performance is not really demanding. It’s generally simple and it’s generally being warm, being curious and being basically authentic to the self or faithful to the self. And people aren’t demanding this incredible level of verbal performance and wittiness and humor. People basically want you to do just straightforward social skills. And if you do that, it goes really well a lot of the time, especially early on.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Those protective behaviors you take part in, when you do have to interact, like someone with social anxiety, they have to like, okay, I got to be social. I don’t want to, but I have to. And like you said, they typically, they’ll fall back to just tactics, techniques to get them through it. And this is like where that pickup artist stuff comes in. That’s what they offer. They go, well, here’s these things you can do when you’re interacting with a woman and you’re feeling nervous. You can do this so you know what to do, even though you feel nervous. But what your research suggests and what you’ve noticed with your clients is when you start performing, you actually become more aware of your social interaction. And that’s like, that’s gonna actually cause your anxiety to go up even more because now you’re just paying close attention. Like, oh my gosh, I said that wrong. I’m an idiot. And this person’s probably thinking I’m an idiot. And so that performative aspect just increases the self-awareness, which increases the social anxiety and it just becomes this death spiral.

Thomas Smithyman: That is, that is exactly it. Exactly it. Like it’s, and you got to think too about the, like what’s the underlying message that we’re kind of implying, right? When we are trying to perform. ‘Cause the underlying message is you as you are is not okay. You are not good enough. Your instincts are wrong. You are wrong. Therefore you need to perform and act in these ways in order to be good enough and acceptable enough, which that is like on a deep level that is really reinforcing shame, right? Which is gonna turn on the threat system and bring down self-confidence. The more you raise that performance standard, I’ve got to perform this. I got to come across this way. I got to make sure I do this and not that. The higher performance demands go, the more anxious we get. And especially as we have, there’s a gap between here’s how well I think I can perform. Like here’s who I can be. And here’s who I’m supposed to be in order to be good enough. That gap is anxiety. So we wanna be really careful about not demanding that we perform like to this really high level, especially that’s beyond our natural process.

Yeah. ‘Cause all that stuff will make us more anxious. And yeah, the more that we have to focus on ourselves to make sure that we’re doing it right, the more anxious we get, the more things we’re trying to remember at once, the more anxious we get. In reality, the good news is we don’t have to do all that. The social skills are simple and we can just focus on the core of like, be warm to people. We have a great response to that. People really like that. Be curious about people. People really like that. And it makes us less anxious and be slightly harder version. Like that self-fidelity, be faithful to the self, which can be a little more intimidating, but is really well liked.

Brett McKay: And you also highlight research in your book about when you do take part in protective behaviors during a social interaction. So that could be just going through the very rote performative things that you read on the internet or in some self-help book. People actually pick up on that. They’re like, well, something’s off about this guy. And so your attempts to protect yourself from social judgment is actually raising more awareness of your issues.

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s many downsides to protection. Like honestly, you could say that the protection attempts themselves are the biggest problem out of this whole process because pretty much any protection strategy we use raises anxiety, but it also makes us harder to connect to. And yeah, oftentimes it comes across weird ’cause it’s not natural, but like all of this stuff, like all of those protective behaviors, like it’s protection, like it’s armor. And just from all the years of working with people on this, so much comes down to this. It comes down to like, I am sitting, interacting with people. I’m hearing about belief-wise what’s driving them, but I’m also looking and hearing about how they’re trying to survive those concerns. Like what are these different strategies that they’re doing to try to survive and still connect? And sometimes it’s like the connection is just not happening because there’s so much protection. And other times it’s like, you’re present, but I’m not actually seeing you. No one’s actually getting you. Like you can’t actually connect with someone unless you have access to them.

And so this is like in going out and kind of pushing boundaries and testing out these social theories. So much of it is looking at like, what protections are you using and why are you using those? And what are you predicting would happen if you did not use those? So for example, most people that I’ve worked with, they will either be a, I don’t like asking questions person, or I don’t like self-disclosing person. But the act of expressing social curiosity, asking people about themselves, asking follow-ups, being interested, that piece or self-disclosure, which is this is who I am, this is me. Those two sides, curiosity and self-disclosure, those are the engine of connection. Like that’s how we connect to people. That’s how we start up really shallow and we work our way down to really knowing and being known. And so if you’ve got a, due to fear, you have a protection strategy that is cutting off one or both of those, then you’re literally cutting off the any ability to connect.

Brett McKay: So I mean, yeah, another protective behavior you talk about in the book, I think you mentioned is, especially in dating, guys will be like, I’m just going to play hard to get. Like I’m gonna just pretend, I’m gonna act like I don’t, I’m not actually interested in this girl. So that if she does reject me, it’s like, well, you can play it off like, well, I just, I wasn’t really into you anyways.

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Like when it comes to dating anxiety, this is the biggest one. Basically not taking the risk of showing any interest. Yeah. And like I’ve, there’s pretty many stories in the book about this because you see it all the time. And it, I mean, that’s exactly what it is. It is vulnerable to show interest in somebody because you are opening yourself up to that interest, not being reciprocated, which it will not be a solid percentage of the time. So that takes courage. That is brave to do. And so, because it’s vulnerable and we don’t like feeling vulnerable. Yeah. The most common thing to do is to feel it, but try really hard not to show it. And if you have a rule of like, oh, I cannot show someone my interest. I’ve got to seem cool and calm, disinterested. I’m gonna wait for them to show it to me. Then the burden’s all on them, which is not very thoughtful to them.

But also that’s asking them to take a massive risk, right? Like they’re not gonna take this massive, and some people will, but not many people are gonna take a massive risk of saying, Hey, this guy’s really communicating. He doesn’t like me, but I’m gonna try to show him how much I like him. That’s a hard ask.

Brett McKay: Right. And it doesn’t work. Like you said, like most, if someone thinks that you don’t like them, they’re not gonna like you. The thing is though, I mean, everyone’s experienced this. As soon as you realize someone’s interested in you, like, oh, they like me or it doesn’t have to be romantic. You just be like, oh, that, that guy thinks I’m cool. All of a sudden you think, well, that guy’s cool. Or that I really like, exactly, I like this girl too, because she’s interested in me. So, I mean, the takeaway there is if you have social anxiety, whether it’s like making friends or dating, express, like show that you’re interested because that will likely cause the other person to be interested in you.

Thomas Smithyman: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. This is reciprocation. Like we know from research, warmth is reflected. If we put out warmth, we get warmth back for the vast majority of people. If we put out being cold, we tend to get cold back from other people. And especially if we’re authentic, right? If we like a person in particular versus we just like everyone, people feel that. And that makes you like even more likely to reflect it back. And like, if you think about it too, the model of flirtation, like flirtation is basically, I’m gonna display, I have all of these psychologically attractive aspects to me. And I am suggesting that maybe I’m interested in investing those in you. Those two things together are flirtation. If we just have, I am so great, look at all these cool things about me, but no indication that we’re interested in investing in a person, it’s not flirtation. Like you’re just existing.

Brett McKay: Yeah. When you talk about flirtation, I thought this was interesting. Flirtation, we’re getting more into the dating anxiety stuff here, but flirtation, there’s ambiguity in it. You’re not going out and saying, hey, I really like you. You don’t do that right off the bat.

Thomas Smithyman: No.

Brett McKay: Instead, you’re like, I’ve got these great qualities and maybe I like you. Because I think ambiguity is really underappreciated. People really enjoy the ambiguity in a relationship ’cause it’s interesting, it’s intriguing, it’s exciting. I think people’s brains, they’re really engaged by uncertainty. And They wanna figure out, does this person like me? Do they not like me? You don’t wanna play hard to get, but you wanna make your signals mixed a little bit. And that generates some chemistry. Am I explaining that okay? Yeah.

Thomas Smithyman: No. I say the exact same thing as you. So I think what’s interesting about it too is the reason that what you’re saying feels right is because that’s organically exactly how things work. Not just for dating, but for all relationships, right? When you first meet somebody, you know very little about them. So you are not gonna be super sold on that person because authentically you just know a sliver. It’s thin slice, there’s a little bit of them. And you also probably know from experience that the deeper traits of people don’t come out until you’ve known them for a while. So if it’s friendship, you meet somebody, you’re not gonna be like, oh my God, you’re amazing. You’re my best friend. You’re gonna have probably a initially polite and then maybe more enjoyable of a conversation with them.

And over time, as you get to know more about them, maybe there’s more of a friendship connection, and you become more obvious that you like the person. It’s the same for dating. You meet a person, at first you don’t know them. The stage one of flirtation is you treat someone the same, that you treat any other person, you basically polite to them and you do your basic social skills. You are not, oh my God, you’re amazing. You just met them. You don’t know that. Maybe they’re not amazing. And over time you are gathering information. And as you gather information, that mixed message, which originally was just basically politeness becomes more and more overt as you become more and more sold on them. Does that make sense?

Brett McKay: That makes. That makes perfect sense. So you’re taking your time to reveal your intentions or your actual feelings. That’s what a natural social development looks like.

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Like you said, you start off, you’re gonna kind of have these niceties, you engage in polite relying on etiquette and manners and rules. But as you get to know this person, you start revealing a little bit more, a little bit more. And really that’s the best thing about a relationship is getting to know somebody. That’s my favorite part of a relationship, is getting to know the person.

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Which by the way, probably makes you a great person to socialize with because that’s people’s favorite thing, is slowly becoming known.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay, let’s talk about what we can do to alleviate, if you have social anxiety, or even if you don’t have social anxiety, you just, maybe you have shyness every now and then how maybe don’t want to be as shy. Some things we can do to mitigate that or alleviate that, one piece of advice you give… Well, I think the one thing is just understanding these, this faulty thinking that we often engage in. If you have social anxiety, or even if you’re just shy, again, reminder that people aren’t really paying that much attention to your flaws. Even if they do notice your flaws, they probably don’t care. And then this idea that you have to perform and, you know, socialize in a certain way for you to have a good social interaction, that will actually just make you more anxious because you’re just so focused on yourself. So one bit of advice, and you’ve kind of alluded to this already, is instead of thinking about making a great first impression, so this, let’s say you’re going to a party, a new gym where you can meet some new friends, maybe a potential romantic partner, instead of thinking about how to make a great first impression, you argue you should just make a mediocre first impression.

Thomas Smithyman: Yes.

Brett McKay: So what does a mediocre first impression and mediocre social interaction look like?

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. I’m being deliberately a little bit kind of tongue in cheek about it.

Brett McKay: Sure.

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. But the idea is that, the reason I mention that is ’cause people, whenever they are coming in and talking to me about this, they do tend to have these elevated demands. I must perform this well, I must seem witty and I must seem this, and I must seem that with all these rules. And having those high demands, makes us more anxious. But it also very much makes us less likely to actually talk to people because it’s hard to be super witty and cool and intelligent and whatever else. So part of it is that it reduces our anxiety if we can find a way to lower the demands and it makes us more likely to act and it’s likable. So my argument of what a mediocre first impression means is you are going back to that simplicity principle of social skills, which is be warm, be curious, and be authentic to who you are.

And that is doable for us. So this means just those basic social skills of smile make some eye contact. Ask whatever natural easy curiosity questions you have. Try to understand the person a bit, try to get to know a little bit about who they are, what makes them interesting, what might you like about them. ‘Cause that’s really positive surveillance. And then reveal some about who you are, but you are not trying… I think the important thing is a lot of people I talk to feel like when they first meet someone, whether it is social or dating or whatever, that you are trying to make some great leap in your relationship with that person when you first meet them. That’s really demanding. Instead, my model is your goal is to take somebody from being a stranger to being a non-stranger, not being a friend, not even being an acquaintance.

Just like it’s a person that you have interacted with on some level. So you are no longer absolute strangers. What it means is, people really connect through repeated contact. That’s just how we are sort of, we naturally form connections. So we’re just trying to… The next time you show up in some social event, you’ve actually met some people. And hey, if you go beyond a simple introduction to have a bit of a conversation, great. So this is what kinda what I mean by a mediocre self impression, allow things to happen over time through repeated investment.

Brett McKay: And then another bit of advice that you give is just to quit thinking about yourself so much. Because as we talked about self-consciousness is what is getting in the way of you having a good social interaction. So just put the focus on the other person, be interested in the other person, ask them lots of questions. I think the trick is though, is you don’t want the question asking to become a protective behavior, right?

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah, exactly.

Brett McKay: Where you’re not revealing things about yourself, there’s none of that give and take. But if you’re feeling just really shy and just really self-conscious in a social interaction, just shifting the focus away from yourself by asking the person lots of questions, that can be a great way to get over that initial hump.

Thomas Smithyman: Definitely. Definitely. Yeah. And people generally, we do want to over time have a 50/50-ish balance of how much is curiosity about the other person and how much is self-disclosure about ourselves because we have to self-disclose for them to connect to us. But both sides of that are important and they don’t have to happen one-to-one. One question, one statement. It can be like at sometimes it’s we have a chunk of time that’s all about the other person. And then that brings up, if we are externalized really interested in them really wanting to understand what are they feeling, why are they feeling that, why is this important? We’ll probably find at some point we have these light bulbs go off that it really reminds us of like our own story or we, we see some similarity like, “Oh, I also have that and that will naturally lead us to self-disclose as well. Or the other person will often ask us questions too.

Brett McKay: One of the treatments for just general anxiety is exposure therapy. This is where you are actually, you have to face your fear. So if you have a fear of spiders, you have to like look at a spider, you might have to hold a tarantula. And the idea is by experiencing that fear response, but seeing that you’re actually not harmed, there’s no danger. You can reduce your anxiety about that particular thing. It could be heights, dogs, animal, whatever. How do you use exposure therapy in your work? Treating people with social anxiety?

Thomas Smithyman: Oh, it is fundamental. It is fundamental. As much as we would love to sit around just talking about cognitions and changing thoughts and thinking more realistically, honestly, all of that thought stuff is very, very important. But a lot of it is important because it sets us up to do the right kind of exposures. So our emotional brain, it will be a bit influenced by a shift in perspective, but it really learns through experience. So exposure is really just getting new experiences that give us a different understanding of the situation. We’re trying to teach our anxious brain that socializing is safe. And so what that looks like is you are trying to identify, “Which situations am I avoiding? How am I trying to protect myself in different social settings? Why am I doing those things? What am I afraid is gonna happen?” And then the exposure in… When I do it, I use the model of behavioral experiments, which I think makes sense where we’re experimenting with behavior to try to get new information.

We’re testing out the beliefs that are making us anxious. And so in social things that’ll mean, Oh, I am constantly hiding my hands when I talk to people because they shake and I think they’re gonna think I’m weak and reject me if they see it. Well, then an exposure or a behavioral experiment would be, “I’m gonna go out and I’m gonna try talking to people with my hands out and see do they notice? Do they care? Do they reject me? How bad is it?” So it’s finding whatever we believe is wrong with us and whatever protections we think we have to do and testing those out and then coming back and discovering, well, things actually went fine, or if I struggled a bit, it wasn’t that bad. Does that make sense?

Brett McKay: Yeah. That makes perfect sense. And then you talk about in the book, to get over your dating anxiety, you did just, you were brutal with it, with yourself. You just…

Brett McKay: Oh my God, yes.

Asked random women for dates and phone numbers, and just get it… Your goal is to get rejected as frequently…

Thomas Smithyman: Correct.

Brett McKay: As you can. Which, it works like that. That can work. But maybe if you don’t want to do that, I mean, you can gradually do some exposure therapy by, if you’re have a general fear of socializing, try practicing your social skills in everyday non-threatening situations. So talking to the store clerk, when you’re checking out talking to the post office clerk. ‘Cause you can have a social interaction. There’s no threat going on there. You can kind of just have, just some banter back and forth to practice that. And you’re like, oh, that actually wasn’t that bad. I can take this to the next level with another social engagement that gives me a little bit more anxiety.

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a great way to do it. Yeah. Just if you can find, how can I be this little bit more social than I normally would be? Yeah. Try to find where are those small opportunities for social snacks? I’ll just talk to this person a little bit and say more, where you might normally say less than you have an idea of like, I’m gonna practice saying more than next time, or I’m gonna focus on asking more questions this week. I’m gonna try to ask a question to each person I come across. Finding any little opportunities to just do more socializing. But also it’s like, with any of the protections, just really focusing on those where can I be less protected? So how can I undo that as well? And then on a deeper level, at the deepest level, is this belief of I’m not acceptable as I am. And so finding also, rather than just strangers, like people that you do know, the ones who seem the most accepting, starting to show maybe the parts of yourself that you hide not immediately and not a ton and don’t go super deep, but starting to reveal maybe some of the things that you struggle with to someone who’s safe. Because where you’d love to get to at the end of this whole process is where there are people that know who you actually are and they accept and love you anyway. That’s what we’re going for.

Brett McKay: Yeah. You talk about the goal with your treatment with the people you work with is to get to this what you call the warm social world.

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Where instead of seeing the social world as this scary place, you actually, it’s a place like, “Oh, these people are potential friends or potential romantic partners or a potential business partner.

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Yeah. That’s where we want to get to. And I feel like most people, they probably know this because I think everybody probably has times where they feel just like really socially comfortable where they are around the right people or things have gone a certain way and they’re just like, “Oh, I just feel like just connected and I’m talking easily to people. I met people that wasn’t that difficult.” We’ve probably had that. And there’s times where it’s the opposite. You might give us the same situation, but we’re really shut down. We feel really anxious. It’s hard to connect. And when we’re in these different states, the world looks completely different. And it essentially is because, our perceptions shape the world that we live in. And where we’re trying to get to, at the end of the whole process is we don’t want to be in a situation where our anxiety turns on, our threat system turns on, and we are fighting against it as we socialize. Where we wanna get to is where it just doesn’t turn on. So we have our natural social approach system is turned on, and that’s a system where we like, “Yeah, we see, people seem lack potential friends and allies where making sort of small comments to the people that we come across in our day, we are connecting. And it just, socializing feels easy. Dating feels easy, it all feels easy.

Brett McKay: And then if you get rejected, you’re like, well, not a big deal. That’s not a problem. They’re not for me. You tell, you learn. You’re like, oh, I don’t like everybody. That’s okay. If they don’t like me, that’s fine too.

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Yeah. You, you don’t need… And you’ve got… You wanna be at the point where you’ve got enough people that already know you and like you, where everything’s not riding upon what some particular person thinks or responds. You already feel good about yourself because you have a community, you have friends.

Brett McKay: Yeah. That’s a good point. A lot of guys who might be struggling with dating, one thing you talk about in the book in the beginning, instead of being so hyper-focused on meeting a romantic partner. Just focus on making friends. It could be, if you’re we’re talking about a guy here, like same sex friends, other dude friends because first, you learn some social skills in that process, but then you develop that social capital so that when you go out and you start approaching women, if you get rejected, well you have these guys you can go back to who can help you out. Like, Hey, you’re all right. Get back out there. So that’s some dating advice there I think you have in the book I thought was really useful.

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah, yeah. Definitely. People don’t, I think appreciate a lot of times how, just how much the friendship world and the dating world overlap. The same traits basically are attractive in both settings. What makes someone a great friend makes them a great dating partner and the skills, the social skills, you need of, they overlap a lot. So yeah, work on talking to everybody. Talk to people that are less intimidating if you’re intimidated by a certain sort of person, practice on people that are less intimidating at first. And yeah. And the bigger you build up that community, you build your own warm social world too, that you live in where you have your confidants and you have your friends. And that is such a big antidote to the anxiety as well.

Brett McKay: Well, Thomas, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks. Been great for me too. You can find my book Dating Without Fear: Overcome Social Anxiety and Connect. It’s on Amazon. There’s an, the audio book on Audibles my personal favorite, but there’s a soft cover book and a Kindle. But I also have a YouTube channel, just my name Dr. Thomas Smithyman. And I’m trying to put things out there pretty regularly, really, on all these social world and anxiety topics.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Thomas Smithyman, thanks for your time. It has been a pleasure.

Thomas Smithyman: Yeah. Thanks a lot. I appreciate talking.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Dr. Thomas Smithyman. He’s the author of the book, Dating Without Fear: Overcome Social Anxiety and Connect. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, thomassmithyman.com. Also, check out our show notes at AOM.IS/social anxiety, where you can find links to resources. We can delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website@artofmanliness.com. Find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for a newsletter. We got a daily option and a weekly option. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AOM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciative if take one minute to give View Apple Podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member you think we something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to The AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Note: This excerpt, condensed from the original, was taken from Masterful Personality by Orison Swett Marden, a book which was published in 1921 and is worth reading in its entirety.

“A man is not all included between his hat and boots,” said Walt Whitman.

There is something in a man which does not inhere in his flesh, which is not in his brain, not in his body, something which eludes the biographer and evades the camera, something we feel, something which radiates from his presence, a real vital force, as mysterious as that of electricity and as difficult to understand. We call it a man’s atmosphere, or magnetism, and it extends beyond his physical body.

In some personalities it is much more pronounced, more extended, than in others. When we go near some people who are very magnetic we positively feel their impelling presence before we get near enough to touch them. A subtle radiation of real force surrounds them like an aura.

There are people who claim that what they term the “human aura” is an electrical emanation from the body which takes various forms according to the character and personality of the individuals.

Call it aura, magnetism, or whatever you please, this indescribable, indefinable, mysterious, personal atmosphere is a tremendous power. It draws people to or drives them from us. A famous blind, deaf-mute said she could feel a distinct force when certain people came near her which either attracted or repelled her, according to the character of the person. She could sense their moral status and, her attendants said, would instinctively shrink, as though something was going to harm her, whenever an evil person came near her. She could feel their character.

Everyone has an atmosphere peculiar to himself, pervaded by all of his characteristics. We cannot radiate anything unlike ourselves or our ideals. The qualities you radiate will either attract or repel people. Your atmosphere will affect your career.

We all know how vividly we feel the personality of certain persons after they have passed out of our homes, or even have passed out of life. There remains in the homes of those who have left us and in the places they habitually frequented, a certain something, a presence which we cannot explain, but which we feel very keenly. The ideal mother lives long in the home after her body has been laid away in the grave. Members of the household distinctly feel her presence, sometimes for many years. A similar thing is true of a loved child after death. This is not mere imagination. There is something left from the personality which we feel for a long time after a dear one is taken from us.

Those of us who have visited the homes of great characters like Washington, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Roosevelt have felt their personality very decidedly. An individualized something seems to radiate from the furniture, the draperies of their sanctums—the desk, the chair they occupied, the library table, the silent piano, or other musical instrument.

There is, indeed, an atmosphere, an aura of personality around strong, magnetic characters which time cannot erase. With my children I have been privileged to visit the home of Theodore Roosevelt since he passed away (as I had often done when he was alive) and in viewing the wonderful articles in the celebrated Trophy Room, I could feel this great man’s presence among his treasures almost as plainly as though he were indeed present in life. His remarkable personality seemed to cling not only to everything about the home, but even to the great outdoors he so loved—the grounds, the woods where his marvelous energy was so often employed in wielding the ax and in athletic sports; it even pervaded the little church where he had habitually worshiped.

We all have felt the quickening of ambition, the subtle influence due to the active, forceful, positive vibrations which fill the atmosphere of the places of business of successful men. If a business office is dominated by a powerful personality, we feel the dominating force all through the establishment. If, on the other hand, the head of the concern is a weak, undecided, vacillating character, if he lacks force, energy, and push, everyone who enters the place feels the negative vibration.

Remember that the world will feel you if you are a real force. If you generate power you will radiate it. Others will know whether you are a little picayune dynamo or a powerful one, whether you can pull a big load or a little one, whether you are a giant or a pygmy, a winner or a loser. You can only radiate the force which you generate.

Nothing but weakness can come from a weak man, no matter how much he poses or tries to make a favorable impression.

Many people are like the moon, cold, lifeless bodies with no atmosphere, nothing which attracts. They do not radiate warmth or soul sunshine. Their personalities seem to be auraless. Other personalities are like the sun, radiating warmth and light, joy, and gladness.

William Dean Howells said of Longfellow, “He never came but he left our house more luminous for his having been there.” This radiation of spiritual warmth and light that characterized Longfellow was true also in an eminent degree of two of our greatest and best loved American divines, Henry Ward Beecher and Phillips Brooks.

One could not be in the same room with Beecher without feeling that he was in the presence of some powerful, spiritual force that radiated good cheer, hope, courage, love. It used to be said in Boston that no matter how gloomy or depressing the weather, when Phillips Brooks passed by on the street people felt as if the sun had shone out and dispersed all the clouds. There was something that radiated from this marvelous personality which was felt by everyone who came near him. I have often seen strangers passing him in the street, turn round and look at him, with wonder and admiration in their faces, conscious that they had seen a magnificent specimen of manhood.

“What a gift it is,” said Beecher, “to make all men better and happier without knowing it! These roses and carnations have made me happy for a day. Yet they stand huddled together in my pitcher, without seeming to know my thoughts of them, or the gracious work they are doing. And how much more is it to have a disposition that carries with it involuntary sweetness, calmness, courage, hope, and happiness. Yet this is the portion of good nature in a large-minded, strong-natured man. When it has made him happy, it has scarcely begun its office. God sends a natural heart-singer—a man whose nature is large and luminous, and who, by his very carriage and spontaneous actions, calms, cheers, and helps his fellows. God bless him, for he blesses everybody!”

We all know people in whose presence we experience a sense of peace, of harmony and well-being. We feel the benign influence of these poised, radiant souls enveloping us. Everybody who comes in contact with them is enriched by the graciousness and charm of their personality. If you have not developed such a personality, at least in some degree; if people do not feel the fragrance of a beautiful character radiating from you, then you have not lifted your life to the level of your highest expression. No matter how much money you may have piled up, or what you have achieved, you have not been a success in the fullest sense, because your character is not balanced, your life is not a real masterpiece. You may have made a success as a specialist, but not as a man.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

If you’re a parent, teacher, coach, or manager who lives, loves, and works with tweens, teens, and 20s-somethings, you know that young people sometimes act in seemingly head-scratching ways, that you don’t always feel like you’re being listened to, and that it can be frustrating to try to guide them in acting towards positive ends.

The source of these challenges is often chalked up to the underdeveloped brains and hormones that tweens through young twenty-somethings possess. But my guest would say that what’s more to blame is the ineffective way mentors often approach young adults.

David Yeager is a developmental psychologist and the author of 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People: A Groundbreaking Approach to Leading the Next Generation—And Making Your Own Life Easier. Today on the show, David and I discuss the “mentor’s dilemma” — the idea that you either have to be a tough authoritarian who holds young adults to high standards or a softie push-over who doesn’t crush a kid’s spirit — and how to navigate through this unnecessary dichotomy. David explains the critical importance of understanding what really drives young adults, what approaches cause them to shut down and disengage, and the best practices that parents, teachers, and other mentors can take to leave young adults feeling inspired, enthusiastic, and ready to contribute.

Connect With David Yeager

• Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute
• David’s faculty page

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Listen to the episode on a separate page.

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. If you’re a parent, teacher, coach, or manager who lives, loves, and works with tweens, teens, and 20-somethings, you know that young people sometimes act in seemingly head-scratching ways, that you don’t always feel like you’re being listened to, and that it can be frustrating to try to guide them in acting towards positive ends. The source of these challenges is often chalked up to the underdeveloped brains and hormones that tweens through young 20-somethings possess. My guest would say that what’s more to blame is the ineffective way mentors often approach young adults. David Yeager is a developmental psychologist and the author of “10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People: A Groundbreaking Approach to Leading the Next Generation and Making Your Own Life Easier.”

Today on the show, Dave and I discuss the mentor’s dilemma, the idea you either have to be a tough authoritarian who holds young adults to high standards or a softy pushover who doesn’t crush a kid’s spirit, and how to navigate through this unnecessary dichotomy. David explains the critical importance of understanding what really drives young adults, what approaches cause them to shut down and disengage, and the best practices that parents, teachers, and other mentors can take to leave young adults feeling inspired, enthusiastic, and ready to contribute. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/yeager.

All right. David Yeager, welcome to the show.

David Yeager: Thanks for having me.

Brett McKay: So, you are a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and you spent your career researching what motivates young people. How did you get into that?

David Yeager: Yeah, so I was a middle school teacher, initially out of college, and I loved motivating kids, getting them fired up, getting them excited to learn. And I at the time also coached basketball, and I ran the book club and so on. So, my main job at the time was to try to engage the next generation and I ultimately felt like a lot of the advice that I got wasn’t cutting it. I distinctly remember watching the science teacher next door, Miss Guilfoyle, and wondering, how in the world does she get her kids to line up and go to the assembly without punching each other? Like, that was… That’s the level at which I felt unprepared.

And I did have a couple moments where things went well in my class, and they were all moments where I created a project that caused young people to be in charge of their learning and do something creative. So, for instance, we read the book “The Outsiders” from S. E. Hinton. I taught in Tulsa, where I taught was down the street from the actual movie theater, the drive-in where the fateful climax of the book happens. And so we did a project where they had to come up with a conflict resolution set of workshops to give to the younger kids.

And that really worked well with my 7th graders. They felt like they had to really know their stuff in order to do a good job and to train up the younger kids in the school. And I just, I felt like most of the time I felt pretty incompetent as a teacher. But those moments where they were learning for a purpose and it was making them feel like they were valuable in school, those are the moments where I really captured their attention. And so I left the classroom to go to graduate school at Stanford and study child and adolescent psychology to figure out how to do more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff and hopefully give better advice to adults who really need it.

Brett McKay: So, one thing you’ve found when doing the research and talking to people who mentor young people in your own experience, is that one of the problems that these people face, like whether you’re a parent, a teacher, a coach, when you’re trying to help young people become the best they can be, is this thing called the mentor’s dilemma. What’s the mentor’s dilemma?

David Yeager: Yeah. The mentor’s dilemma is very simply the idea that anytime a young person is getting critical feedback or advice from an adult about how to change, it could come across in a way where the young person is offended or it just doesn’t feel good for them to be critiqued. And that creates a dilemma for the adult. And the dilemma for the adult is either I tell them the truth, but crush their spirit and maybe sacrifice their motivation, or I withhold the truth and I’m nice to them, but then they don’t improve. And so that’s a, it’s a hard choice because it feels like to help a young person along in their lives, you need to be a tough, almost authoritarian dictator, but be okay with their feelings being hurt or you need to be a pushover. And neither of those options are very good. And so it leaves a lot of adults feeling like they don’t know what to do and feeling ineffective.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And this shows up in all sorts of places. At school, obviously, when you want to give kids feedback on their essay, you don’t want to discourage them by saying, yeah, you’re just terrible. You need to do better. But at the same time, you want to tell them what they need to do to get better. You talk about, this happens at work, the source of a lot of conflict between younger generations and older generations, where the older generations like, well, these young people, they’re just snowflakes. They don’t know how to handle tough feedback. But you’re saying it’s not that they want to get better, it’s just that we don’t know how to talk to these young people so that we can give them the critical feedback they need, but in a way that motivates them.

David Yeager: Yeah. A big punchline in the book is the idea that you don’t really have to make that forced choice between being a jerk that crushes feelings or a pushover softie. You can uphold very high standards and be tough, but also be supportive so that the young person isn’t losing all their motivation and feeling offended. And the way to do that, it turns out, has a lot to do with communication. As you were saying, that all too often, if we’re upholding high standards and giving critical feedback and saying, you need to fix this or that, whether it’s at a performance review at work or, like you’re saying, an essay at school, we think it’s obvious that we’re trying to help the person. And so we don’t say anything about it. We’re just like, okay, here’s all the stuff to change.

But it’s not obvious to the young person that we’re on their side and trying to help them, because what they’re thinking is, does this person with power over me think I’m incompetent? And if the answer is yes, they think you’re incompetent, then almost everything that leader does to you is going to be offensive. So we’ve conducted research where we just clarify the intentions of the leader. So in one experiment we conducted with 7th graders, we had teachers provide a bunch of critical feedback on students’ essays. And then the students got them back. And then they were one of two notes handwritten by the teacher that were appended to the essays.

One of the notes conveyed something we call wise feedback. And wise feedback is just simply better communication. It’s where you say, I’m giving you these comments because I have very high standards and I know that you can meet them. So it’s still very high standards. You’re not being a pushover, but you’re explaining that the reason why you’re doing it is because you care about the young person and think that they have the potential to do it well in a controlled condition. The other half of students got a note that conveyed no information. And what we found was that that very short note doubled the rate at which students were willing to revise their essays. And that was great because it means that, you can still give critical feedback and have it turn into revised work and listening to adults, if you’re just a little bit better at communication.

Brett McKay: One of the big takeaways I got from this book, and I think really changed how I think about how I’m going to approach when I’m interacting with my own kids and also the young people I interact with at church or in sports, is that during this time period, you say it’s between ages of ten to 25, there are changes going on in a person’s brain where it makes them more sensitive to status and respect. Can you walk us through that change and then talk about how understanding this change can help us connect with young people better?

David Yeager: Yeah, I think that the main point is that when we see behavior of a young person like that, they get too offended when we give them feedback or, I don’t know, if they just can’t be independent and autonomous in the way we want them to be. It’s easy to look at that and say they’re being too sensitive and there’s something wrong with them, and they’re immature, and their brains aren’t fully developed, their hormones are in charge. We have a lot of cultural insults, really, to talk about young people. And what we found is that it really helps to think not about the adolescent brain and hormones as deficient in some way, but rather as just sensitive to different stuff than adults’ brains are sensitive to.

So it’s not like young people have a hormonally induced frontal lobotomy that makes it impossible for them to make wise decisions. It’s more like they’ve got a different set of priorities. Now, what are those priorities? What the neuroscience is saying, and I’m summarizing work by some great people, Adriana Galvan, Ron Dahl, many others, is that young people are really attuned to social experiences. So on the one hand, positive social experiences like pride and admiration, anything that signals that you have gained a measure of social status and respect in the eyes of people whose opinions you care about, but also negative social experiences, on the other hand, like shame and humiliation.

And the way I like to describe this is that the feeling of doing something really well and having other people notice that, that pride basically never feels as good as it does when you’re a teenager. And many people can think back and remember almost in the pit of their stomachs what it felt like to be taken seriously by a mentor or an adult or even an older, cooler kid, to have people legitimately acknowledge your accomplishments. A lot of those things, they feel awesome, you can remember them. Many people can also think back and remember a time where they were humiliated or falsely accused or unjustly talked down to by some adult or an older kid.

And the idea is that one of the things that testosterone and estradiol and other gonadal hormones do is they sensitize your brain to those experiences and make them kind of like a flashbulb memory, something that the neuroscientists often call it one trial learning, that just one experience of humiliation teaches you, “Wow, I’m not going to do that again.” And one experience of pride that’s intense is like, “I want to feel that way again as soon as possible.” And so the young person’s brain is really paying attention to that information so they can avoid the negative experiences and find the positive ones again and again. And so that sensitivity to social status and respect drives learning, but learning about how to be a socially successful person in your culture.

So, to summarize all this stuff, when I say the adolescent brain is sensitive to status and respect, I don’t mean that they’re wandering around trying to get more likes on Instagram. But what I mean is that they’re not really just in search of frivolous social status, but that deeper, more meaningful feeling that I’ve done something of value in the social group that I care about, and they have acknowledged that, and I want to do more of that. And I think when we see a lot of frustrating behaviors in young people, the mental reframe we can do as adults is to say, “Alright, what’s the most generous possible explanation for their behavior?” in the sense that they’re somehow trying to meet their need for status and respect from their perspective. So what is that? And I think that’s a really useful frame to think about young people and how to motivate them.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I thought that was incredibly useful. Talk about here you quote Erik Erikson. “The central task of adolescents is to gradually become an independent social actor who can contribute to the community. ” So that’s what you’re trying to do when you’re in adolescence. And so whenever you see your kid do something kind of like, “What are you doing there? Trying to look at it through the framework, how is this helping him gain status or a feeling of competency as an independent actor and being able to do something in his peer group? I think that’s really useful because I think the typical way, like you said earlier, we approach adolescents, these young people, is like they’re deficient somehow. Like oh, you know, they do this stupid stuff because their prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed and their hormones are just causing them to be crazy.

David Yeager: Yeah. I think that the default narrative we have in our culture now is something I call the neurobiological incompetence model. And I’m not trying to be unnecessarily complicated. All I mean is that societally, we think they’re idiots, right? And you see this anytime a parent talks to a kid and they say, “What were you thinking?” Right. That’s not an authentic question. That’s just me saying that I think you weren’t thinking. And when you say, “What were you thinking?” we don’t wait for a real answer. Right. Whether it’s a kid who snuck out of the house and the parents berating them in the hallway, or a teacher who’s yelling at a kid for skipping class or whatever it was.

The main problem is we tend to not figure out what the status and respect need was driving a young person’s behavior. Like, why did they think that this behavior was going to help them with that need? Because we don’t ask. And the reason why we don’t ask is because we think there’s nothing to learn. If you start with the assumption that their brains are deficient and therefore they’re idiots, then it doesn’t make any sense to try to understand the world from their perspective, because it’s just fundamentally flawed.

And then the main thing the young person should do in that world is listen to me, the adult who’s worked it all out. My logic is sound and good because my brain works and yours doesn’t, therefore, you should listen to whatever the contents of my brain are. That’s the kind of logic that you see quite a bit, and then that leads to a really harmful practice that in the book I call grownsplaining, kind of like the grown-up version of mansplaining, where you just imply this massive status difference between you, the grown-up, and them, the young person, and also assume that if only they listened to everything you said, then they would make wise decisions.

But that ignores the fact that young people often have reasons that make sense from their perspectives to feel like socially successful people in the groups that they care about. And so the trick is to get out of grownsplaining and into better practices. And when we do that, then we stop offending this need for status and respect, and we start working with it and using it as an asset and a resource.

Brett McKay: And then you also have a study that was done to see what happens when parents grownsplain to their kids or when they nag at their kids. What did that research show? ‘Cause I thought that was really interesting.

David Yeager: I love this. This is not my work, summarizing other people’s. It’s Jennifer Silk. I was at Pittsburgh, and then I learned about it through my collaborator, Ron Dahl, who’s amazing, been a mentor of mine. And it’s a great study. It’s the kind of study where you’re like, how did they not do this 20 years earlier? So what they did is they asked the question, what happens in the teenage brain when your parent is nagging you? And to do that, they did moms and daughters, because that’s the sample that they had. They could have done dads and sons or dads and daughters, etcetera, but so they had moms record themselves finishing the sentence, “It bothers me when you… ” Okay. And then they had the daughters listen to that recording while they were in the fMRI scanner.

So they’ve got a huge magnet circling their brain, looking at blood flow in different regions of the brain. And that allowed the researchers to infer what’s happening in the brain as the daughter’s listening to the nagging. And the nagging in the papers, it’s kind of awesome. I can’t believe they got this into a real academic paper. But it’s like, “You get mad when I tell you to grab your shoes and come down the stairs, and you get mad when I say your room is dirty and needs as a little cleaning,” and yada, yada, yada. “You just need to calm that down.” And so what do you see? What you see first is an increase in the anger regions of the brain. So the affective regions. So the daughters are pissed, basically. Then next, you see a decrease in two important regions. So one region of the brain that decreased is the prefrontal regions, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is a region associated with planning and so on.

So I like to summarize that as the brains are not thinking about how to change their behavior. So it’s not like the teenage girls are listening to the nagging and saying, “You know, you have a point, Mom. Everything I’m doing is, like, not right. And because you’ve pointed this out, I’m going to now change everything.” That’s not happening, right?

Brett McKay: Right. So, yeah, I thought that was really interesting, because basically, a teenager’s brain shuts down when you show them a lack of respect. I mean, they’re just done with you. And the opposite’s true. When they get respect, they’re surprisingly open to listening and changing and being influenced. And there was another study, the Vegemite study, where you’re trying to figure out how to get kids to take their medicine, because apparently it’s a big problem, particularly with kids who’ve gotten organ transplants. They gotta take their immunosuppressants. A lot of them don’t take it.

And so what you did, you brought in some young adults, and you gave them a taste of Vegemite, which is this, like, really gross brewers’ yeast food that they eat in Australia. They got a taste of it and like, “Oh, this is gross.” And then you guys told them, “Now you gotta take a big spoonful of it,” and you said, “You gotta do it because it’s good for you. And then by eating it, you’re gonna help advance science.” But you gave those instructions in two different ways to get them to take that second serving of it. So tell us about that study.

David Yeager: Yeah, so that study, it’s one of my favorite studies we’ve ever done. I spent a year at Stanford on sabbatical, and we came up with this model of status and respect when I visited with Ron Dahl. And we’re like, “We need a study to test these ideas that the hormones, like testosterone and status and respect, are all related in the teenage brain to behavior.” And the challenge is, like, it would be great to study a behavior like, does a young person take their medicine? But you can’t really do that study because you don’t want to have your control group being a bunch of children with cancer who then die because they didn’t take their chemo.

So, like, it can’t be a real medicine for ethical reasons and obvious reasons. So you need something that feels enough, like it’s unpleasant, like you’re forced to take your medicine and could plausibly be good for you, but can’t have any real health consequences for the participants. So that’s why we picked Vegemite. And Vegemite is like the yeast at the bottom of the barrel after brewing a huge batch of beer. Imagine you then put that on toast, and there’s a great YouTube video that is called “Americans Eating Australian Foods.” and the absolute best part of that video is just watching people’s disgust as they eat a spoonful of Vegemite, and it cracks me up every time I see it.

So, we saw that video. We’re like, “Oh, my God, we got to do a Vegemite experiment. This is what we’re doing.” And the way the experiment is set up is we have 18 to 24 year olds come into the lab, they sample Vegemite, because most people don’t know how gross it is. In fact, there’s a philosophical principle called the Vegemite principle, which is that some things are so unpleasant and impossible to describe that you have to experience in yourself. And so, we have people sample Vegemite, and then they see two types of instructions from a medical professional.

On the one hand, the person asks you to take the medicine, which, again, is Vegemite, in a respectful tone and respectful words. In another condition, it’s disrespectful. And we wrote the disrespectful condition with doctors to try to match how they normally educate patients about taking their medicine. And it’s very much talking down to you. It’s like, “Based on my experience, what I know about medicine and disease, you should listen to me. If there’s a bad taste, try to ignore that,” et cetera, et cetera. In the respectful condition, though, it’s like, “Look, you know, you’re a college student, and I’m gonna tell you the real reason why you might want to take this.” And then they explain the logic. They use words that imply autonomy, so they say things like, “You might consider,” rather than saying “You should.”

Instead of saying, “Ignore that unpleasant taste,” they say, “Think of that unpleasant taste as you doing your part to help others.” Then at the end, they say, “Thank you for considering this,” rather than in the disrespectful condition, “Thank you in advance for your cooperation.” And then we leave the room. We have a camera that’s a hidden camera that’s recording whether people take the second spoonful of Vegemite. And we found that, in general, young people were about twice as likely to take the second spoonful of Vegemite if they were asked respectfully.

Brett McKay: That’s really interesting. And then you also experimented, like, what happens if you increase sex hormones like testosterone, which makes you more sensitive to status and respect. And what you found when you gave testosterone to low testosterone young people, and they got a nasal shot of testosterone, the respectful instructions had a whopping effect. I mean, just increased the amount of compliance when they were shown respect.

David Yeager: Yeah. And the disrespectful instructions became even worse for behavior whenever they got the nasal shot of testosterone. Yeah, it was really interesting. And that’s what we were trying to test, is basically if we can temporarily make you kind of 13-year-old that’s experiencing insane levels of testosterone for the first time, if we can temporarily put you in that state, can we make you even more sensitive to subtle differences in communication? And the answer was, yes, we can.

And what that suggests is that testosterone isn’t something that universally makes your brain idiotic just doing dumb stuff. It’s more like it’s sensitizing you to the social rewards and punishments in your environment and therefore, in the real world, what we need to think about is how are we creating social environments that are either supporting a young person’s drive for status and respect or not. And it’s not like their brains are universally and permanently broken. It’s like they’re just more sensitive to the context. And so we, the adults, need to be more sensitive to how we’re communicating in that context.

Brett McKay: Right. Make it more explicit. You’re trying to help them while maintaining their status, respect. Yeah, there’s an interesting point about testosterone. People have this idea that testosterone just makes people, makes, particularly young men, aggressive, hyper aggressive, and they just want to dominate. Its effect is context dependent. I think I read about, if you give testosterone to a bunch of Buddhist monks, they’re all going to see who can, out Zen each other, because that’s how you gain status amongst Buddhist monks. But if you give testosterone to a bunch of prison inmates, you might get something else.

David Yeager: Yeah. There’s a famous study I didn’t write about in the book, but they looked at testosterone in high schoolers and then tracked a relationship with deviant behavior versus leadership. And what they found was that if you had friends that already got in trouble a lot, then the more testosterone you had, the more you were getting in trouble and going to juvenile detention, etcetera. But if you had friends that were very pro-social and in sports and leadership and stuff, then the more testosterone you had, the more you were out volunteering in the community, the more you became a president of a club. So it was like more of a positive leadership.

So you can think of testosterone as just one indicator of a huge cascade of what’s happening in puberty in both boys and girls. And it’s about sensitivity to what counts for high social regard in your community. And so we, as the adults, should try to structure environments where we’re going to capture those positive leadership, pro-social type qualities rather than more deviant ways to get a good reputation.

Brett McKay: Your book’s called “10 to 25” because these changes start happening around age ten. That’s when a lot of kids start… Girls start puberty. Then it goes until 25. We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. I want to talk about this, going back to that neurological incompetence model you talk about in the book. When you have that view of young people that are sort of these broken, not fully formed adults, the way you approach them is you can either take that very authoritarian approach where you just nag them to like, hey, you’re just a dummy. Here’s what you need to be doing. Or you can take a more like a softie approach, like, well, you know, kids are just kids. They’re dumb, so we can’t really hold them to high standards. And as you said earlier, that’s not a good approach. You’re not going to help a young person if you take that approach. Instead, you recommend with this knowledge that young people, what they’re looking for right now in this ages ten to 25, they’re looking for status and respect. You recommend taking a mentor mindset. What does a mentor mindset look like?

David Yeager: Yeah, so that is a great summary. I think that if you think… Go back to the mentor’s dilemma. It felt like there were only two choices. Either you are a tough, demanding leader that enforces all the rules. We call that an enforcer mindset, or you’re a kind of soft, but caring and affectionate, more or less pushover. And I call that a protector mindset. And it’s important to point out that you can be a good person and have either of those approaches. And in fact, I think most people, even when they get it right, sometimes fall into one or the other of those two approaches.

So an enforcer, you could feel like, look, society is going to hell in a handbasket, and someone’s got to protect everyone from the insanity that’s happening. And that’s why I have to maintain standards, and I can’t let your feelings get in the way of me doing the right thing. I think a lot of people in the enforcer bucket think that way, and it makes sense. On the protector side, they say, well, look, society is so hard right now. Kids are just way too stressed. You know, young adults, they went to college through COVID, and they missed so much, and they’re kind of feeble and there’s a mental health crisis, and I just need to protect them because I care about them. I can’t possibly load them up with more stuff that they can’t accomplish because that would be cruel.

So I think you can go to bed each night and put your head on your pillow and feel good about yourself in either the enforcer or the protector mindset. And what I want to say to people is, look, if you’re super high standards, high demanding, great, keep that. Just add the support. Make it so that everyone that you’re mentoring or working with, whether you’re a parent or a manager or a teacher, make it so that they can meet your high standards. If you’re on the protector side, if you mainly prioritize removing stressful experiences so that young people aren’t crushed by them, well, maintain that concern and that support, great. But then add the standards and what you get when you have the high standards and the high support, the best of the enforcer and the best of the protector. That’s what I call the mentor mindset.

And what I’ve found is that when I’ve gone out to look for the best managers at Microsoft, the best K-12 teachers, the best college professors, the NBA’s best shooting coach, when I go look at what they do, these are people who don’t have the problem of kind of wimpy, helpless, non-independent young people. They have young people doing amazing stuff year after year, again and again. And they do it without crushing the young person’s spirit and making them feel overwhelmed. And what all of them are doing is they’re maintaining very high standards, like legitimate standards, not a fake standard just to make someone feel good, but they make sure that the young person can meet it, that they have enough support to meet it. And so they’re all doing mentor mindset, I found.

Brett McKay: And then you talk about practices that you can do to develop this mentor mindset and one of the practices you offer is be more transparent when you’re interacting with young people. What does that look like?

David Yeager: Yeah. So the simplest and easiest thing you can do, if in your mind you’re saying, “Yeah, I want to have high standards, I want to be supportive, and that’s going to work with a young person’s desire for status and respect rather than against it,” the simplest thing you can do is just be clearer about what you’re doing and why. And what I found is that the reason why we need to do that is because young people come to interactions with us with a little bit of suspicion. They start out thinking, “You know, most adults have talked down to me and not treated me with respect. And so I’m going to assume that that’s what’s happening until further notice.”

And that’s fine. But it causes lots of frustration for adults because they’ll do things like, be a surgeon and giving medical residents critical feedback to help them be better doctors. And the junior doctors will say, “This person thinks I’m a terrible doctor and they hate me,” rather than “They’re caring for me and they’re trying to help me to be a better doctor.” So where we’re over young people, whether it’s a parent or a teacher or a boss, and they could reasonably feel threatened by what we’re doing, if you just explain your intentions about two to three times more than you think you need to, then that can go a long way.

If you just explain yourself, “Here’s what I’m doing and why. Here’s why I thought it’s in your best interest. And also, here’s how I’m going to support you to do the following.” Just that little explanation can cause them to view our behaviors in a more positive light.

Brett McKay: And that goes back to that wise feedback you talked about earlier. So instead of just giving the critical feedback, “Hey, here’s what’s wrong with your essay,” or “Here’s what you did wrong during the operation,” before you do that, you’d say, “Look, I have really high standards of what I expect, and but I think you’re capable of doing it. So I’m giving you this feedback so that you can get better.” Like, you’re being incredibly transparent about why you’re doing this because it’s not obvious to the young person.

David Yeager: Right. And I write about a manager at a supermarket named Olay [0:30:48.8] ____ in Norway, and I interviewed him and all of his employees, and it’s just amazing what he does. He says stuff like, “I care about you too much to hold you to low standards. I want you to be the best version of yourself at this job. And I then want to brag about you to my boss so that you’re in line for promotions, so that you’re getting training, etcetera.” So he makes it about them earning a high-status reputation, a prestigious reputation, for having done a good job, and that’s motivating to people.

And so I talked to this one woman who she was like, “Yeah, I got called into the manager’s office for goofing off in the back room, and he really laid into me,” and I was like, “Oh, man, were you offended? Were you gonna quit? And did you yell at him? Did you complain to your colleagues?” She was like, “No, he was looking out for me.” Like, he more or less yelled at her, but she was like, ‘That’s because he thinks I could be better at this job.” And she didn’t have a college education. She wasn’t going to do anything else besides retail. She didn’t have ambitions for anything else. But her boss took her seriously, and now, five years later, she’s still with the company, and she’s in a leadership track.

So, yeah, I think that just clarifying what we’re doing sometimes takes the sting out of the negative experience of being critiqued, and it can turn it from something that young people hate to something that is a turning point in their lives.

Brett McKay: You also talk about asking better questions. What are some mentor mindset questions we can start asking to help young people work through their own problems?

David Yeager: Yeah, I think asking questions is one of those things where I studied all these exemplary mentor mindset leaders, and I was surprised that they’re almost always asking what the young person was thinking and where they were headed and so on, rather than telling them what to do. I mean, I think in my own kind of mediocre life as a teacher, if I saw a kid make a mistake, I’d be like, “Oh, you just missed this part. This part is easy. You got it. Go do this.” And I would just kind of tell them what to do and think I was doing a great job because I told them that they should be confident.

And the great teachers I watched never did that at all. They would just be like, “Huh? What? That’s your answer? That’s interesting. Where did that come from?” And then they explain their logic and they’re like, “Huh? Well, what would happen if you did this?” And then they would change something and then they’d be like, “Oh, my God, I get it.” And there would be these moments where the kids piecing it together in their head rather than the teacher troubleshooting it in their head and then telling the kid what the problem is. And so questioning is this way of kind of building autonomy and agency and expertise in the young person so that they have to do the thinking.

The NBA coach that I followed, his name is Chip Engelland. He was the Spurs shooting coach for 17 years when they, the San Antonio Spurs, when they won a series of championships for the NBA. And he’s always kind of asking questions, and I asked him why, and he said, “My goal is to give them a coach in the head, that maybe they shoot with me for an hour, but they’ve got dozens of other hours in the day. I want them to be applying the same thinking even when they’re not with me.” And I think that questioning is a way to give that to a young person while also implying that they have it in them to think for themselves. So the secondary purpose of a question, of course, is that it’s just more respectful than telling someone what to do.

Brett McKay: How do you ask questions so it’s not patronizing? ‘Cause, you know, okay, I’m gonna ask my kid a question, like, when they mess up, “What were you thinking?” The kid’s like, “Okay, I’m shutting down.” So how do you ask these questions so it shows respect?

David Yeager: Well, there’s a lot of interesting science on this. The linguists distinguish between different types of questions, and the style that seems to be most effective in this kind of case is what is called an authentic question with uptake. So an authentic question just means that the asker is legitimately curious about the person’s response. So, like, “What were you thinking?” is not an authentic question because you don’t actually want to know the answer, what they were thinking. But you could ask something very similar. You could be like, “Huh? What was your logic here? Like, you know, walk me through.” And there’s a way of doing that where it feels like an accusation, but there’s also a way of doing it where the young person’s like, “Oh, okay, well, they’re kind of curious about what my thinking was.”

So authentic is the first part, and the second is uptake. Uptake just means that your line of questioning builds in some way on what the young person has said. So again, if you say, “What were you thinking?” and then you already know that you’re just going to prosecute a case, like you’ve got a series of questions you’re going to ask, no matter what they said. That’s not uptake. The other person isn’t contributing to that conversation. It’s a one-way conversation. But uptake, in its very simplest form is, I mean, you can even do it with the old negotiation tactic of mirroring to say, you can just repeat back to the young person what they said, but with an inquisitive tone.

There’s great research on this. It’s called a repeat sometimes in the literature, like if a kid says, “1, 2, 3, 5, 9, 10” and then you could say, “That’s incorrect, it should be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,” but you could also say, “5, 9, 10?” And then the young person would immediately know that you’re questioning their logic there. And then they would correct it. They’d be like, “Oh, yeah, you’re right. It’s 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.” You can do the same kind of thing in dialogue with a young person by just mirroring back to them what they said in an inquisitive tone. And then that starts the conversation.

Brett McKay: We also talk about the importance of belonging and helping kids get motivated. Talk to us about that research.

David Yeager: Yeah. So we now know there’s a fundamental need to belong, right? To be connected to others. The more that that idea has become popular, the more that ideas about belonging have become a caricature. So you see on college campuses, they’ll hand out “You belong” laptop stickers, as though that’s going to make students feel like they belong because the sticker told them. Or you see anti-bullying campaigns where it’ll say, “You belong,” and it’s like a kid in a jumpy house who’s alone, and they’re jumping for joy. And you look at the poster, the “You belong” poster, and you’re like, “Well, why is that kid alone? And also that kid’s way too old to be in a jumpy house.” And so maybe that’s why they don’t have any friends or whatever it is.

Those kind of glib belonging-by-fiat messages don’t really convince a young person that they can be accepted by a group that they care about. And that’s fundamentally the issue, is that to be accepted, you have to feel like you’ve added something of value to what the group cares about. And you can’t declare that by fiat yet young people have to show it. They have to get what the anthropologists call earned prestige. So in, like, our evolutionary history, you couldn’t just talk a big game about tracking down a deer and feeding it to everyone else. Or you couldn’t just because you’re tall, say, “Alright, that person’s going to get us lots of food,” or whatever it is they need to do to contribute. Like, you actually have to go out and kill the deer, help them kill the deer, and bring it back.

You have to show the group that you have something of value. And so the feeling of belonging and being accepted is intimately tied to feelings of competence. Where all this is going is that what we found is that a much better way to help young people with a sense of belonging, whether it’s high schoolers getting bullied or college students wondering whether they’re in the right place or new employees in their twenties, wondering if they’ve picked the right job is to help them deal with and, and by deal with, I mean tell themselves a better story about any worries about competence early on in their career or their role.

So imagine a college student who starts out in a calculus class and then bombs the first test. They’re like, “Well, I’m an idiot, I don’t know calculus and therefore I don’t belong in this class, or maybe even at this university.” Or an employee where they do their first major project, they give a presentation to senior management and it kind of bombs. And they’re like, “Do they think I’m an idiot? Like am I an idiot? Should I not be here?”

So, your competence worries are tied to your belonging. So, what we have found in our experiments is you can give people a different story about their competence early on in some role or career, and then they can reach a different set of conclusions about belonging. So, what’s the different story? The different story is basically that early difficulties are normal. That they’re struggling in a first presentation or in a first exam is a normal part of doing something ambitious and hard that is legitimately challenging, and that not everyone is doing. And so, you should expect some level of difficulty. And it’s not a sign you don’t belong; it’s a sign that actually, you’re coming to belong because you’re starting to face the new, higher, more difficult standards.

And then the next step is to help them understand how that normal experience of difficulty improves. You can’t just say, “Hey, everybody goes through difficulty, and it sucks for everybody.” You have to also help them understand how it gets better. And the way it gets better ideally involves something that the person can do. You can take steps, you can talk to this person or that person, you can join this or that activity, and then over time, it can snowball into a better outcome.

And we’ve done a number of experiments where, with high schoolers and bullying, we found that this storytelling approach about belonging reduced levels of cortisol, improved health, even improved grades up to a year later. And in the college setting, in a paper that was led by Greg Walton and many others in science a couple of years ago, we found that you could reduce a portion of overall achievement gaps for entire universities if you could help young people tell themselves a better story about belonging, ideally early on in the process.

Brett McKay: That’s really interesting. I wanted to end with this anecdote. It is actually a really powerful story you told about how understanding that young people are motivated this period between the ages of ten to 25, they’re motivated by status and respect. How understanding that helped, like quitting smoking or stopping smoking campaigns.

David Yeager: Oh, yeah.

Brett McKay: Walk us through that.

David Yeager: Yeah, I mean, this is… I’m glad you came back. This is one of my favorite stories. And a lot of people have written about the Truth Campaign is what it’s called. But I did some original reporting on it. That was fun to do. So when the tobacco companies had to settle for a large amount of money with the state of Florida, because the science, especially on secondhand smoking, was super clear about how it was causing cancer and therefore a health burden for the state, they were required to pay for ads. The tobacco companies were, in a couple of different ways.

One, they hired their own firms to come up with anti-smoking ads, and also they had to put money into this other entity that would hire its own firm. So the smoking ads that the tobacco companies paid for were “Think. Don’t Smoke” and “Tobacco is whacko if you’re a teen.” And it’s just like, I mean, it’s so great. This is the best evil genius move I’ve ever seen. So “Think. Don’t Smoke.” I use this in my class a lot, and I always ask, okay, what does that imply? And it implies, of course, that you’re not thinking. Right? And so, it’s already nagging you. And then it says “Don’t Smoke.” So, it’s like grownsplaining to you. It’s just telling you what to not do. So it first insults you and second tells you what to do.

So, in three beautiful words, they offended everything about the teenage mind with “Think. Don’t Smoke.” So, that was pretty smart on their behalf. And what they found is that the more that counties were exposed to “Think. Don’t Smoke” ads, the more young people were intrigued by smoking and the more positively they felt about the tobacco companies. “Tobacco is whacko if you’re a teen” is the other one. I mean, so good, right? So, first of all, what does that imply? It implies that tobacco is not whacko if you’re grown-up. And the number one thing teenagers want to do is be like grown-ups. And so, it’s a subtle argument telling you to smoke more, therefore, you’re a grown-up. But also, it’s just dorky.

I mean, “Tobacco is whack.” I mean, can you imagine being like, 15 and you’re like, you know, after sports practice in a circle with four other kids, and one is like the girl you have a crush on and you’re just dying to look cool in front of her, and you would do anything, and then she hands you a cigarette and you’re like, “Sorry, unfortunately, I’m a teen, so this would be whacko for me to do.” of course, that wouldn’t happen.

And so, what Bogusky did is… He was the creative director at an agency called Crispin Porter + Bogusky. That’s now a very well-known agency, but at the time was kind of the upstart, newer agency. He was contacted by the other pool of money from the Florida settlement that was more run by a third party and the Centers for Disease Control, and he was going to create the anti-smoking ads with the tobacco companies’ money from the settlement. And the Center for Disease Control had a strategy that was very much in the grownsplaining vein of things and was destined to fail. And the reason Bogusky, who was just like an awesome, cool guy, and I got to meet him and talk with him and just like the most creative, fun person you’ve ever met in your life. And he had previously seen the CDC strategy and he sent a bunch of his creative staff out to skate parks.

So, he had employees who looked like 16-year-olds, basically, and they showed up with stocking caps and chain wallets at the skate park and then would talk to other teenagers and be like, “Hey.” And they would ask the three main points of the CDC strategy. And the CDC strategy was smoking will cause cancer, smoking gives you yellow teeth, and smoking is not sexy. And so, Bogusky’s team would be like, “Hey, did you know smoking causes cancer?” And then some kid at the skate park, while smoking a cigarette, could perfectly describe the science of how smoking causes cancer. So, there’s like no surprise there. And then he’d be like, “Yeah, but do you know it’ll give you yellow teeth?” And like, “Yeah, when I’m 60, but not now. And by the way, smoking makes me super sexy because I get laid all the time. And so, smoking is the best.”

So, everything about the CDC strategy was destined to fail. And so, Bogusky came back to the boardroom and was like, “This is not going to work.” And came up with an alternative strategy that’s now called The Truth Campaign. And the idea behind The Truth Campaign is to really work with the young person’s desire for status and respect rather than against it. And in this context, what that means is saying, look, the reason why so many teenagers smoke is because the tobacco companies marketed cigarettes to them at an early age in a deceptive way, only to exploit their desire to fit in or whatever so they could make money and get you hooked for the rest of your life, and then you’ll die when you’re old, and kind of just revealing the authentic marketing strategy of the tobacco companies.

And all this stuff is true, right? Joe Camel, Marlboro Man, they’re designed to appeal to teenagers, especially teenage boys. And so, they ran ads, initially in Florida, that showed tobacco executives walking through a hospital, talking to dying cigarette-smoking patients, thanking them for their years of service, and then wondering aloud, “How are we ever going to replace you?” And then the executives turn around and see, like a teenage girl in the waiting room, and then they creepily stare at the teenage girl, and the ad says something about how, you know, “What do a bunch of old men want from teenage girls?” is more or less what the argument goes. And so, that’s just so gross. Like, it’s an immediate turn-off.

The teenagers are like, “I’m not going to give money to these people. They’re a bunch of creepy old executives that are trying to attract teenagers.” So that series of ads reduced smoking in Florida. And then very soon after, all 50 states joined a settlement against tobacco companies. And then Bogusky’s group was hired to come up with another round of ads. Kind of funny in the second round, they made a new rule that they couldn’t attack the executives personally because his ads were too effective. So instead, Bogusky created ads where the teenagers would flood the streets around a tobacco company’s high-rise building without showing the faces of the executives, and they would yell into megaphones, they would organize demonstrations, basically rebelling against the tobacco companies.

But the ads never say smoking causes cancer or you shouldn’t smoke. They never tell you what to do at all. But they do imply if you want to join a large group of young people just like you, who are choosing of their own free will, to stand up for their autonomy and freedom against injustice, then one way for you to do that is to not smoke. And what they found over time was that smoking went from 20 or 30%, depending on the analyses, to less than 6%, sometimes down to 3%, within a few years. And it is the truth. Television ads, those anti-smoking ads from the early two thousands, are considered the most successful public health campaign ever in the history of the United States besides the campaign to increase seatbelt use, which now everyone wears a seatbelt. In the seventies, nobody did.

So basically, teen smoking and seatbelts are the kind of the only two successes of the establishment. And the way they did it with smoking was by being countercultural, not going with the establishment way of telling young people how to make wise decisions. So they did the opposite of grownsplaining, and it really tapped into a young person’s drive to be accepted by peers, to make a contribution, to follow a meaningful purpose, all these bigger things. So I think it’s a great way to end because it just perfectly encapsulates these themes and it also is counterintuitive. No one would have thought it. So if one good thing happens from this book, hopefully it’s that people stop using the old kind of disrespectful spiritual cousin of think, don’t smoke approach and start using more of the insights that Bogusky and his team developed for the Truth campaign.

Brett McKay: Well, David, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

David Yeager: Yeah, the book is for sale on Amazon. It’s called “10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People.” I run a research institute at UT Austin called the Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute, and we have lots of free resources and interventions and papers. And I would love to be in touch with people and hear what they think, and I do reply to emails, and I’d be happy to chat with people and share what we have.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, David Yeager, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

David Yeager:Thanks a lot.

Brett McKay: My guest today was David Yeager. He’s the author of the book “10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People.” It’s available on Amazon.com, and bookstores everywhere. Check out our show notes at aom.is/yeager, where you can find links to resources where you delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you’ll find our podcast archives, and while you’re there, make sure to sign up for our newsletter. We’ve got a daily option and a weekly option. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on in AOM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.