Kelly welcomes Yael Schonbrun back to the podcast.  Yael is a clinical psychologist, assistant professor at Brown University who first joined the podcast to talk about her book “Work, Parent, Thrive.“ In her research, private practice, and writing, Yael draws on science, philosophy, and clinical practices to share practices proven to foster healthier relationships. Yael is a frequent contributor to The Washington Post and her writing on work, parenting, and relationships has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Greater Good Science Center, and Behavioral Scientist, among others. Her new book is called “Why Don’t You Understand Me? The Surprising Science Behind Connecting in a World of Missed Signals.” 

One of the things improvisation teaches you is to become comfortable with discomfort. But the world right now seems to feel very uneasy with that concept. 

“We as humans have very complex ways of navigating the world, right? Our relationships are complicated, our motivations are complicated, our modern world is extremely complicated. And so much of what motivates us these days is to make things easier, but you can’t actually make relationships easier, not if they were to have any depth or growth or if you’re going to have any opportunity to be really known and understood because you are complicated. And so, if we can’t sit with the discomfort of difference, of having different experiences, of seeing things differently, of wanting different things, then it becomes increasingly hard to feel close and comfortable in our connection. There’s something paradoxical: we have to be willing to sit with the discomfort in order to feel confident and comfortable in our connections. And that sort of goes against what we’re trying to work towards often, right? What our consumer-driven society and what AI is all trying to do. But in order to feel close and deepen our connections, we really have to sit with discomfort. It’s a necessary ingredient.” 

It’s almost as if improvisation knows that humans will not work in their own best interest, so the rules push you towards a more graceful way to live. 

“I went onto Alan Aldo’s podcast, ‘Clear and Vivid,’ and I know you’ve had him on, and you know each other. And we got to talking about improv. And he said this thing that really I’m sure it’s very core and obvious to you, but it until I chatted with him about it, it wasn’t as obvious to me. But he said, one of the ground rules of improv is that you want to make the other person look good, and you want the scene to move forward. So, in a sense, there’s this positive regard that is embedded in the activity that doesn’t feel as obviously available to us in our everyday interactions. And I think that changes everything. And I know that that’s a bit at the core of what your work is, is to embed some more of that positive regard, that generosity of spirit, and to do it with intentionality. And that’s another piece that we imagine: it should just be obvious and automatic. But there is real magic to being intentional about injecting more positive regard and more beneficence into our interactions. And we’re too quick to just say, ‘Well, that’s kind of effortful. I don’t feel like it.’ Or ‘The other person didn’t do it as much as they were expecting me to. So why bother?’ But our willingness to do that is a huge piece of what allows interactions to unfold, even in the face of mistakes, right?” 

I recently had this experience where I met someone and immediately identified them as being a bad person, only to realize I was completely wrong once I got to know them. 

“Whenever we find our minds telling this simple villain victim story, you have to remind yourself: people are complicated. All people have good parts, all people have bad parts, including us. And goodness knows, I have that same experience all the time. When I read an email, like in a particular mood, and I’m like, this was nasty. And I get all up in my head and only to realize later that I misread it. And that’s another point that I dig into in some depth in the book, which is our social perception is often colored by a variety of things, how hungry we are, whether we’ve slept well, whether we’re distracted.” 

Photo Credit: Edson Demura