 Susan Cain, welcome to the show. We are very interested in what brought your interest to write the bittersweet. Yeah. Well, first of all, it is so great to be here with you, Johnny and AJ. Thank you for having me. What got me to write this book? I mean, so many things. I've been thinking about these questions all my life, but one specific catalyst is something that I now know, Johnny, you and I share because you mentioned this right before we came on air, which is a lifelong love of all music, but particularly of sad music. This curious reaction that I've always had to sad music and I'm curious if this is how you feel to Johnny, which is I listen to this stuff and it doesn't make me feel sad. It makes me feel uplifted and connected with humanity. And I feel like this giant, tidal-way wish of love and a kind of connection with a sublime. I mean, it's really, it's like a near-transcendent experience reliably listening to this music. And I wanted to understand how that could possibly be so. And so at first, I just wanted to answer that specific question, but I started realizing as I looked at that question that there's actually this bittersweet tradition in all our art and philosophy and poetry and religions. And it goes back centuries and it's all over the world. The idea of this bittersweet, almost melancholic way of being as leading us to creativity and connection and transcendence. And yet there's nothing in our culture telling us this, you know, our culture just says, like, get the hell away from anything that resembles melancholy. It's bad for you. And that's not true. It's just not true. I agree. And that's an incredibly important question to ask. I've been wondering it myself for a long time. And in reading the book and listening to some of the podcasts that you've done, there is an articulation of very complex emotions that I think it is difficult for us to speak about or reach or convey. But yet art, music, architecture, writing, it has a way of not only bringing these emotions out of us, but connecting us with other people who might be experiencing that same thing. And also, I don't know if for you, Susan, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. I've tended to have gotten more sensitive to more art and music over the years. And I think part of that is the older we get, the more we're lost, that we're experiencing, and the more longing that comes with that. And so that music is our way of touching those moments, being in those moments, reflecting in those moments, thinking in those moments. And for myself, the obsession is finding the next gem on Spotify or through a YouTube rabbit hole that touches me in a way that I can't articulate in any other way. And as you said, I get empowered by it. It lifts me up. It's transcendent. It makes me feel powerful. And you can do this on YouTube. You can find these songs and the music that you love, and it does this for you. You can watch reaction videos of other people hearing and experiencing some of this for the first time and seeing that their emotions being pushed and stirred and having a visceral guttural reaction to it, that you so much enjoy and watching them squirm because it might be something they've never experienced before in their lives. And I know for AJ, the last time he was here in Vegas, I had played him some new music that I was listening to and watching him squirm, having to deal with it and his exact reaction, his words were, this music is making me feel like I'm being loaded onto a train heading to a gulag. And of course, I'm just, I'm reveling in it. I'm just all smiles. There's just so much there. What have you found out in doing that research and writing this book that has surprised you? Oh, wow. I mean, there's so much, but you have felt more connected to this type of music as you've gotten older and experienced more losses or, you know, life's kind of ups and downs. We actually, for this book, developed a bittersweet quiz. I say we because I did this in collaboration with the great psychologists, Scott Berry Kaufman and David Yaden at Johns Hopkins. And this quiz asks you questions like, do you love sad music and do you draw comfort or inspiration from a rainy day? Do you react very intensely to music, art and nature? So it's questions like this. And what we found is that who score very high on this quiz, there's a high correlation between scoring high on the bittersweet quiz and scoring high for a trait known as high sensitivity, which means that you kind of, you're born into this world reacting more to everything that life throws at you, the good and the bad, you know, so you're much more bothered by, by like annoying sounds outside your window. Like if there's a lawnmower that's driving you crazy, it'll probably drive you a little crazier, but you're also more blown away by a beautiful sunset. What we found is that people who get this bittersweet way of being, it's either because they were born with this highly sensitive temperament and they've known it all their lives. Or it's people who, as you say, are like a little farther along in life and they've experienced life's triumphs and also its trials. They're more attuned to how impermanent everything is and to the fact that everyone we love best will not be here forever and that there's a kind of intense beauty in that at the same time. So that's all to say, some people get to this bittersweetness because it's just written into their temperaments. I think all of us get there eventually through just living. And is there a link between creativity and this bittersweetness that we're discussing? Because Johnny's an artist. I don't consider myself an artist. I'm very analytical. At first blush, second listen, third listen, I don't find myself having that same emotional reaction that Johnny has to this music. And as excited as he gets to share his latest obsession with me, he often is disappointed in my reaction of trying to get in the Uber to the dinner reservation a little bit earlier to get away from his latest obsession. I just like watching the reaction. You just like watching AJ's reaction or the reactions online? Do you mean the reaction videos? I just love to see how others react to that music. And as an artist myself, I mean, my favorite medium is music. I've been playing music in bands since I was a young kid. And of course, the genres of that music has reflected my attitudes, my feelings of the world around me. I've always had a soft spot for very sad music, but it has never been so dominant in my life as of, I would say, the last seven years. There is, in fact, to AJ's question, a real link between this bittersweet outlook, which I define, by the way, as being a kind of acute awareness of impermanence and also of the fact that joy and sorrow are forever paired. They go together. So we did find that there's a link between people who score high on the bittersweet quiz and a state that's known as absorption, which predicts creativity. And there's also a real correlation between the bittersweet state and experiencing in general awe and wonder and spirituality. And then there's all these other connections, like there's this one guy who's an economist at MIT, and he got it into his head to analyze all the letters that Beethoven, Mozart, and List wrote throughout their lives. And he took all their letters and kind of coded them for emotional affect. So some of the letters showed that they were like in a more upbeat frame of mind, and some of them showed that they were in a more sorrowful frame of mind. And then he like, you know, correlated all of that with the music that they produced throughout their lives. And he found that the only emotion of all the different emotional states, the only emotion that reliably predicted their greatest and most profound works was the emotion of sorrow. That's like one study of many that I could tell you about. There just seems to be some kind of connection. I think we all know this instinctively. There's almost like a cliche in our culture about this link. And then some people say, well, that's just a cliche, and we shouldn't really go there. But I think the reason we're afraid of going there is because we assume that bittersweetness and melancholy must mean depression. And that is a total myth. They're not the same thing. They are distinct states. And they may in fact be cousins of each other. They may be relational. They may be related to each other. Yes. And yet they're completely different. Can you unpack those differences for our audience who maybe aren't aware of them or seeing them? So with depression, you know, there's a sense of hopelessness, of despair, of numbness, of being checked out completely, you know, being unable to like be forward leaning in any way. And it's actually incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to be creative when truly depressed. Whereas the state of bittersweetness is a state that you can enter or exit kind of at will. It's not that feeling of stuckness is not is not a part of it. It's more a sense of being just like acutely connected to all emotions and to everything that life is. And of course with that can come a kind of vulnerability to more extreme states of sorrow and longing. And I think that's where the fear comes from. People are like, you know, if I lean too much into this bittersweet state, maybe I'm just going to like fall down into a pit. What I would say to somebody who's worried about that is it's bittersweet. It's joy and it's sorrow and joy. So you're like opening up to both, not only to one, not only to the other. The epigraph of my book comes from the Leonard Cohn song, Anthem, and it goes, there's a crack in everything. That's where the light gets in. It's not only about the crack, it's about the light equally. What I've noticed is when people are experiencing that bittersweet feeling and it making them uncomfortable, it seems to be that the more they try to fight it, the worse it gets. But when you surrender yourself to the emotions and leave your, that earthly body and just drift off into it is where you get the experience, all of the joy that is in it. But until you surrender yourself to it, you're only being bashed with all of the tones that are pushing your emotions around. And it certainly has been that way for myself. Because when I was younger, I wanted to hang out and go out and party and be happy all the time. So of course the music that I was, that was predominantly in my life reflected that. And when I would hear sad music and I would try to leave or turn it off or fight it, it only made me resent that music more. And then of course later or at times where I have been so emotionally moved where I've just surrendered to it is where I feel like I experienced its full wholehearted worth. No, that makes total sense to me. And in the book, I tell the story of Susan David who, she's a dear friend of mine and a great psychologist. She does a lot of work on emotional agility and the idea that the true emotional strength comes from being able to accept all of our different emotions. The reason she came to this, so Susan Sue, I call her, she's a very temperamentally, she's like a really cheerful, upbeat, optimistic person. That's just her nature. And when she was 14, her father died of cancer. And she felt all the, I don't know if she would have put it into words at the time, but she felt all the cultural pressures to act as if she was okay. So literally, like the day her father died, she went off to school and she went to math class and biology class and had lunch and smiled throughout it all. And all year long people were saying to her, are you okay? And she always said, yep, I am, I'm doing okay. But what she was really doing was smashing it all down. And so she would, a smiling lunch with her friends, and then she would go into the bathroom and vomit up her lunch because she developed bulimia. And it was only when she had this English teacher who had also lost a parent at a young age and the English teacher one day said to the class, I'm now going to be handing out blank notebooks. And she looked at Susan directly in the eye as she was saying this. She said, I'm handing out these notebooks and I want you all to just write down what you're feeling and what you're experiencing. And these are your notebooks. She said, I'll read them, I'll comment a little bit, but these are really for you. And she says, that's the very first time that she was ever invited to really accept and name what she was going through. And she calls it a revolution in a notebook. And it didn't send her into a pit of grief and mourning and despair and depression. It rescued her. It rescued her because there's something about just like the act of naming what's happening that allows us to process it and be with it and move forward with it. Yeah, I think obviously talking about loss and grief is an area we want to unpack for our audience and I have an experience in that. To me, I just want to put a sort of pin in what we were talking about because maybe there are a lot of members in our audience who don't resonate with sadness in audio form. But when we think about art, there's visual mediums, there's film, there is this bittersweet element in a lot of stories that we read that we enjoy and movies that we seek out and paintings that we're drawn to. In your research, did you find that this sort of bittersweet reaction was tempered by whether it was auditory reaction like you and Johnny and maybe other people found more visual stimulation in it? Were there differences in the way the bittersweet was conveyed and the way that it encapsulates our emotional response? No, I mean, it really manifests in all the different ways that you were just talking about. And in fact, philosophers for hundreds, really thousands of years have been talking about what's called the paradox of tragedy. Like really just like asking this question of why would it be that we would choose to spend our time watching a drama that would make us weep, which the ancient Greeks were doing thousands of years ago. Why is it that the Japanese revere cherry blossoms the way they do with these festivals and knowing that there are many other flowers that are equally as beautiful but they're choosing cherry blossoms for their special honor because they're incredibly short-lived ephemeral flowers? That's why they love them. And why do we do these things? Aristotle asked 2000 years ago, why is it that so many of the great poets and philosophers and politicians of his age seem to have melancholic personalities? What's up with that? I think that the answer that threads through all of these different media, whether it's art or drama or flowers, is that at our core, we are all beings who come into this world in a state of spiritual longing for another and better and more perfect and more beautiful world. You see this expressed in religious terms through the longing for Eden and for Zion and the longing to be with God and the longing to be with a beloved. And you see it with Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz longing for somewhere over the rainbow. This is who we are, whether we're atheists or believers is completely beside the point. And so these art forms touch us at this very deep level because we're not attracted to sadness per se. Researchers done studies where they'll show people a series of pictures of people with sad faces and that doesn't thrill us to these sublime emotions that we're talking about. It's the combination of sadness and beauty that really speaks to us because it's that feeling when you see something really beautiful so much that it makes you cry. You're crying because at that moment, you're glimpsing the Garden of Eden, which we no longer belong to but yearn for with all our nature. But there's something about the longing for it that makes us draw a little bit closer. That definitely resonates with me in the movies that I seek out, the encapsulation I have with TV shows that have that tragedy woven through it and the character development that has that bittersweet nature. I think about some of the dramas on TV right now or character development and showing those character flaws, not just presenting this happy successful person for 60 minutes on this happy go lucky journey till the very end of the movie. That certainly doesn't hold our attention and get us talking with our coworkers. And when we think about emotional agility, much of the modern world labels these emotions as good and bad. And with that labeling, we then feel like we should avoid feeling them. We should avoid communicating when we're feeling them. And we feel trapped in less than when we are in this state of melancholy, where we're fully feeling into our emotions. Where do you think we go wrong in the labeling these emotions and then our inability to communicate them with others? Will we really need it? Well, I think there's, for one thing, there's a kind of emotional burnout that comes from not being able to express or even inhabit the emotions that we actually feel. There's a lot of labor that's involved in suppressing what we're actually feeling. And also, you know, there's a reason that we talk about truth and beauty as the highest values. And we want to be able to tell the truth to ourselves and to others about what we're experiencing. But when every message you're getting is don't tell the truth, you know, someone says, how are you, you say, great, you're going out in public, wear a smile. These are all ways in which we're not telling a kind of emotional truth and that takes a toll. But the other toll it takes is not only on ourselves, but on our ability to connect with each other, because we have a bunch of different ways of connecting on profound levels. And some of those ways have to do with joy, you know, like if you think of people coming together to dance in a festival or dancing in general, that's like a bonding through joy. But there's another kind of bonding that we do that's through sorrow. And we're designed to do this. We're designed evolutionarily to respond to each other's sorrow. Someone tells their story, something sad they're feeling or that's happened to them. Other people are going to react with compassion almost despite themselves. We have the vagus nerve. This was discovered by Dacher Keltner at Berkeley, this amazing psychologist. And our vagus nerve, it's an incredibly important part of our bodies. It governs our breathing and sex drive and digestion. And also our compassion. So when you see somebody expressing distress in one form or another, your vagus nerve is going to become activated and like long to be closer to them and help them and be with them. So a culture that's telling us not to express any of this is a culture that is leaving on the table all these chances that we have to come together. The story you told earlier about the girl who had, was it her father that she had lost? And then she went to school and where she tried to play it off and put on a happy face socially for those around her. It seems to me, I don't know if there was any correlation that suppressing those feelings had impacted her in other ways such as developing bulimia. And if we're unable to express ourselves properly, how are all those overwhelming emotions going to come out? If you don't have a proper medium to express yourself in that way, it can impact you negatively to you. It can make you sick. Or you could end up taking it out on other people around you and sometimes without even realizing that that's what you're doing. You're not quite aware of it like the way Susan wasn't. She wasn't making a connection at the time between throwing up in the bathroom and suppressing her emotions. It wasn't until the notebook was handed to her with the invitation to write things down that she realized what had actually been happening. I think what happens is there's the idea of fake it till you make it, right? And there is truth in that. And yet it kind of works in the short term but not in the long term. And I had this experience myself. I used to be a corporate lawyer like way back in my old life. And I remember so distinctly the feeling of like some days I would show up at work and maybe I was going through something in my personal life at the time having a bad day or whatever it was. But I remember feeling like, okay, it's time to put on my superman, superwoman costume. And I'm putting on the facial expression that looks okay. And I'm putting on my suit and you go through your work day acting as if nothing is wrong. And in the short run, you also feel as if nothing is wrong. Like your mood lifts when you're doing that kind of thing. And you actually can fake it. But over a period of time of doing that, you start to burn out. That's what we need to be really mindful of that distinction between the short run faking it and like the deep and profound being who you are. Well, I think for myself, one of the key points you made there is you if you eternalize it, you take it out another people. And I think when you hear that, you're like, oh, you know, anger outbursts, yelling, arguing with people. But there's also another way. And for me, when I lost my dad in that grief process, I actually withdrew from people. So not only did I internalize the emotion, but I shied away from communicating with people and connecting with people even when they were asking me to express the emotion and share. And that was really my first big life struggle with the bittersweet. I felt that the grief that I was feeling, you know, my dad passed and none of my friends or family members at that point had gone through a loss of a parent. So I felt that I not only had to show up in a certain way, because I felt emotions were contagious. And if I were to showcase these negative emotions, I'd make other people feel these negative emotions, which I was afraid of feeling. And then also, a lot of my friends and family didn't know what to say because they'd never experienced that. And there's this weird dance around how do you communicate around it? How do I express it if I don't feel comfortable expressing it? And how do they manage my grief if they've never experienced that loss? And they don't know exactly how to talk about it. And, you know, I think grief is that one moment for all of us that either you felt it or you're going through it or it will happen in your life where it's this real expression of bittersweet, not what's shown in TV and movies, but really inside of you. And in that example with Susan of, you know, going about it, keeping that smile on internalizing and then having that one moment where someone had that shared experience where you could get vulnerable and they could offer up that vulnerability to kind of showcase it, allowed her to express this emotional agility. But, you know, what does science say for those who are feeling grief right now to process it in a more healthy way? Obviously, we don't want to have bulimia or this damage to our relationships and pushing away our loved ones, which doesn't help the grief process. And the flip side of that is how do we communicate with those who are in that bittersweet melancholy if we ourselves are not and we don't necessarily know how to do it or we haven't experienced that before? You know, there's no one right way to go through grief. And for some people, a kind of withdrawal might be what they actually want to do. It sounds like what you're describing is maybe you wouldn't even have wanted the withdrawal, but you kind of felt like you needed to because you were afraid of your contagious emotions, negative emotions. But I do want to be clear like for anybody who's listening that there's no one right way to grieve and everybody's going to do it differently. So, part of it is just figuring out what do you need at a given moment. I think it's also helpful for people to know there's research by George Banana at Columbia. He's a grief researcher. And he's actually found that humans really are way more emotionally resilient than we think we are. We have been bereaved for as long as we have existed. And so we kind of know how to do it. For most people, they may mourn their lost beloved forever, but they also move forward at the same time. Ultimately, there is a subset of people who go through what he calls chronic grief, where it really doesn't subside at all. But for the vast majority of people, it does. There's a great formulation that comes from the writer Nora McKinnerney, who lost her husband when she was still a young woman. She says that she kept feeling like she was getting this message from people around her, that she should move on and get over it, move on, move on, move on. But she came up with a different way of doing that, which was not to move on, but to move forward. And the distinction is, she did go on to remarry and now has a blended family with the child she had had with her first husband and her new husband's child. But she says her lost husband is still with her, and the person that she is today, she is who she is because of that relationship she had had. So she's not leaving behind that person. She's not leaving behind her grief. She's moving forward with it. And I think that that's a much more palatable way for most of us to handle our losses, because it's getting away from the false dichotomy, I think, that our culture asks of us, which is detach completely, move on, be done. Instead, carry your past with you, even as you're embracing the future. I think that's a healthier approach for most of us. When we think about these shared experiences, and we think about developing these connections, I see this pattern of this emotional state change, whether it's joy to sadness or sadness to joy or whether it's going to the concert and then having this just outburst of pure joy, sparking joy. It's that transition between the emotional states when you do it in the presence of others who are experiencing that same transition that I feel more connected to one another and opens up this ability then to communicate more after you've seen the other person emotionally transition, just like Johnny loves those reaction videos, and then that moment of discussion after, around that emotional state change. I think that's such an important part of connecting. But what we see with this idea of labeling emotions and then also what's now happening in the workplace, and we've been caught up in this too. I'll give you an example. We like to start meetings with, hey, what's a big win for you over the weekend? What are you celebrating? It puts this pressure and this onus on you, if maybe you don't have a win or maybe there isn't anything positive in your life right now to put that face on and be like, yeah, I completed this task over the weekend. I went to the farmer's market, even though there was a bunch of grief going on or things in your life that weren't positive. In that, we don't feel comfortable expressing ourselves both sometimes with our personal relationships and now it's getting into our professional relationships and putting that strong face on like you said at work, having to put on the superwoman cape and present yourself in a way that I have it all together and I'm not dealing with any sort of struggles. You talk about in the book that there are the blips, but then there also are the underlying struggles of the burnout and just the exhaustion and the mental toll that the work takes on our lives that we don't feel comfortable opening up and sharing and we talk to many leaders or aspiring leaders and how do we get this balance so that we can express the bittersweet that comes along with our work life, which is present for all of us and I think coming out of the pandemic, even more present in the challenges of working from home and the change in environment and the lack of in-person communication and what can leaders do to create a safer environment for this expression so that there isn't the burnout, there isn't this struggle and suffering going on in the workplace. As you asked that question, what just popped into my mind is so our two boys have been away at summer camp for the first time this summer, like a sleepaway camp. It's just this funny situation where they can't really communicate with us except on one appointed day, you know you get like one five-minute phone call with them and my husband's been doing this thing on those moments where he'll say like, okay, what's the best thing about camp? Tell me two great things about camp and one really annoying thing or thing you don't like and I feel like framing it that way gives them the space to open up about the things that they don't like instead of feeling like they only have to give the positive version and I think that we could be doing something like that when we start those Zoom meetings or whatever it is, you know, instead of like what's a one win you had over the weekend, like we could be asking what's something good that happened and something that's bothering you right now because the idea is really just to normalize those experiences and then I think also of a conference that I went to once where the organizer, he asked everybody to write down on a piece of paper something that they were struggling with in their lives, like a real struggle in their lives and then someone went around and collected all the pieces of paper and then the host sat quietly on the stage and took this collection of pieces of paper and just started reading them out loud and you started hearing about everybody's struggles, you know, people dealing with illnesses and divorces or depression or like whatever it was and it completely transformed that room and our understanding of each other because until that moment we had all been a group of smiling faces, you know, one face smiling and another face and then to understand that actually behind each of those smiling faces was some incredibly profound struggle and like the evidence was right there on those little slips of paper to be working in these kinds of exercises is an invitation to greet each other in a little bit more of a real way and again this is about the bittersweet not just about the bitters so we need the invitations also to open up to each other like about the great things that are happening, you know, the joys and the victories that we might be too embarrassed to talk about like it might seem like bragging and I think as leaders that ability to share your own struggles to lead by that example too, you know, many times leaders feel like they can't drop that cape, they can't show that they're Clark Kent and they're human and they have these other experiences, they have to just show the superhuman ability to stay positive, stay optimistic and focus on that when in actuality there are struggles even at the highest levels of leadership that we're often blind to and we're trying our best to understand and recognize them but it's that connection piece that I think is just so important that creates the space for that vulnerability to come after the meeting and be honest maybe you don't want to announce it in the full Zoom room that you have that struggle but to open up that opportunity for a coffee break or something to share hey I'm going through it or I've been through it and really on that level I think it's just another important piece as the workplace communication of this often doesn't give us that ability for emotional agility it forces us into this box to pretend that everything's okay until we get to that state of burnout where we can't do this anymore. Yeah that's right, that's right and I would say for leader like if there's a leader listening who's feeling like I mean I get that but I also feel really uncomfortable you know like disclosing these kinds of things maybe to think of something a struggle that you had been through in the past that is now resolved that you may be able to share about you don't have to feel that it's impacting people's view of your ability to perform in the present I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to talk about present struggles I'm just saying this this is kind of a hack if you feel uncomfortable with that. We led a training yesterday on quieting your inner critic and we asked everyone in the room to just state what their inner critic says to them what is that voice and what was interesting is you know the first few responses where I don't really have that I'm not dealing with that and then a few people come forward and say it says I'm not good enough or I'm not smart enough or nobody likes me and what was interesting as the chat started to fire with all these inner critic announcements then there were people admitting to well I struggled with imposter syndrome in the past or I had that struggle I had that inner critic right and it just opened up the space to even share like I've been through that not necessarily that I'm going through that or dealing with that right now but I can relate because I had that same inner critic saying that in graduate school or holding me back at the start of my law career you know we found in a lot of the clients that we work with they are on this path that I like to call box checking where their parents are telling them get the degree and then that degree only leads to real three paths of success doctor lawyer engineer and you got to keep okay now you got the career now you need to get the house now you need to get married now you're expected to have kids and I just got married and immediately the question started okay are you working on the next check in the box of kids and there becomes a point where and you write about this in in your own experience in your law career where you're following the path you're checking the boxes you're making your parents happy they're telling you like this is where you should be and then you're sitting in the office and going this isn't me this isn't what I need and you experience that longing and for many that we work with our clients they don't even know how to find that like they're so caught up and wrapped up in other people's opinions not letting their friends and family down not appearing like a failure and that idea of jumping into writing if I have a law career like what if I fail what if I don't get a book right we often hear from people on the other end of that experience well it did work out for me I was successful became a bestseller but that moment of contemplation that decision to take that step to leave that safe path I'd love if you could just unpack that your experience with that for audience and if there is any science or research to share on how to start to tap into that longing that you know might be covered up by everything society and our family tells us around checking these boxes yeah oh god so much to say here I mean so my experience was that I as you say I wrote about this I was a corporate lawyer for many years for about seven years and I did it you know just out of the desire to have a safe and stable way of supporting myself and I got kind of into it while I was there so I mean I was into it enough that I was really trying quite hard to make partner and I had wanted to be a writer from the time I was four years old but I had completely forgotten about that for the first few years I really quite liked it then I started to struggle and I was working like a maniac 24-7 but anyway this day came when one of the senior partners walks into my office and tells me that they're not actually going to be putting me up for partner that year I'm not sure maybe never was unclear but I had expected it to be that year and my first response was to burst into tears my second response was to leave the office that very day like I just asked for a sabbatical and left three hours later the next thing that happened is once that space was opened up because like here's the thing that we don't realize when we're in any kind of like intense type of career you're living in a hermetically sealed box and it's very hard to imagine that there's another way of life you might know it technically but you can't quite believe it or access it but this senior partner came into my office and handed me this huge gift which was like everything the box you were in just exploded so you need a new box you need like a new something after that week or two later I ended a seven-year relationship that I had been in that had always felt wrong and I was suddenly like floating around without a career and without a love and without a place to live and I remember my mother saying to me you're in freefall you know that's what it felt like freefall and I fell into this relationship with a guy who was a musician and a lyricist who's a very lit up type of person and I couldn't free myself of this obsession until a friend said to me one day if you're this obsessed it's because he represents something that you're longing for so what are you longing for that opened everything right up because it was suddenly crystal clear to me that this guy that I was so obsessed with that he represented the artistic life that I had been longing for from the time I was four years old I'd wanted to be a writer and as soon as I understood that I was free of the obsession like melted away cinematically I could start writing but to the question AJ that you also asked about like will people hear about someone leaves the career they were in and then they get the bestseller at the end of it I think that's really the wrong way to think about these things I feel like it was a strike of lightning that I ended up with the bestseller I did not expect it I truly truly didn't expect it I said to myself that the goal is to publish something by the time I'm 75 and if I meet that goal that's okay it was just that I really loved the writing life so I just like kind of reorganized everything and I came up with this sort of freelance way of paying the bills I was teaching people negotiation skills just as a way of paying rent but writing was going to be the center of my life but I really thought it was always going to be just a hobby and I think that's important because people are given this narrative of like living the life you want is only justified if it ends up in some grand public success and that's the wrong way to think about it though I do believe in being able to pay the bills yeah I was just going to talk about that piece of creating the space so you write in the book that there was this Greenwich Village Brownstone townhome vision of success like okay become the partner then I get this house and it's this it's always like this next thing I acquire this next thing and then it makes it all worth it all the burnout all the hard work all the me wearing the cape and pretending like I'm getting by when I'm not that next thing will be there and it does create this trap where you never have the space to think about well what are these other things that truly light me up that I long for and I think the common advice that we hear is like well just turn your passion into your career just turn your passion into your career and honestly it's great when that works and it's a wonderful success story when you can do that but for many of us we need to pay the bills we need a roof overhead and food and we don't necessarily have that space in my experience of leaving graduate school starting the podcast and moving to New York City to start the coaching company 15 years ago it was not like well I'm just taking the sleep of faith and and maybe I'll end up being homeless in New York it was me saving in graduate school not going out understanding that I'm going to make the sleep but I got to build a little bit of a financial net and some runway and if it does fall apart then I'll come back to Michigan I'll come back to live with my dad if I have to I'll re-enroll in graduate school or I'll find some other work in biology but it was being thoughtful and I needed some space outside of this graduate school experience like there was a bit of longing and I needed to create an opportunity to explore it in my life and for some that might be writing and creating music and just creating that space in your life I think it's such an important part of that process that often gets glossed over and oftentimes is the most important factor to find that longing and my wife is going through it now in a career change and realizing that a lot of the box checking and pressures that she was feeling led her down a very narrowing path and felt like that hermetically sealed box like there is no success outside of being partner at a consulting firm and then all of a sudden well wait a second there are people who are entrepreneurial who are leading entirely different lights that have nothing to do with this but I still have the skill set how can I monetize this in the meantime how can I take the skills that I have like for you teaching negotiations to create the space for you to then write to stoke that passion of yours I'm so happy you shared that piece because that in my mind gets glossed over isn't really shared in a lot of these experiences of people thinking it is that lightning bolt and it's just this clear path opens up and now you know you made the right decision and everything sort of falls into place from there oh my god I mean I so agree with that I feel like there's this narrative that's sold that's like you know if you if you're truly passionate about this thing that you want you know you'll take the leap of faith you'll you'll make the you'll take the risk you'll put it all out on the line to make your dream come true and honestly I think that's a bullshit narrative for most people I really do it's like people need to be able to pay the rent number one number two you don't actually have creative emotional freedom if you're worried about paying the rent or if you're worried about what might happen you're not going to be as creative as you otherwise would you need to be able to have like open space in your head so like mapping out the plan b mapping out the safety net mapping out all of that is as much a part of the process as the creativity itself for sure I okay I will I'll make an addendum to this which is I said this to one person I said this to somebody and his reaction was like oh no no no for me you know it's the the feeling of walking the tightrope is itself energizing and it keeps me going it spurs me to action and to productivity so some of this is a little bit of self-awareness you know if you're the tightrope walker be the tightrope walker but I think most of us are not you have to like come up with these plans based on who you you actually are and what you need our experience in working with our clients is that they feel they're the tightrope walker until the rope snaps yeah interesting you walk further and further out onto the rope and you feel this false sense of security until it snaps and in many situations with our clients they find themselves lacking in those social relationships that they yearn for lacking in that romantic relationship that they yearn for because they made a bunch of sacrifices to check the boxes to get ahead in their career thinking that those other pieces would just naturally appear and when they don't and that rope snaps through burnout realizing that this was not the path that you wanted ultimately they do listen to my story they seek out from our guest this Eureka like moment and I still have doubts to this day 15 years later I still go back and look up my research lab and the work that they're doing it's not to say that it's like this clear delineation of paths and then once you're on the right path you just know it and there's never this self doubt there's never this inner critic that appears that says hey you know was that old path the right one for you that's still present and that doesn't get discussed in the sharing of these stories that's interesting you're reminding me so to stay in good standing as a lawyer you have to go through all this continuing legal education every two years and then certify you that you've done it and it's like hours and hours I think like 40 hours or something and for a long time I just did all the continuing education just so I could stay on as a lawyer in good standing just in case just in case and it took me like I don't know how long you know 10 years or longer of being out on my own as a writer before I finally said I don't have to be a lawyer anymore I'm not taking that training no more training let's talk a little bit about that so you started researching introverts for your book quiet in 2005 and the book was released in 2012 now in the past 10 years do you feel that anything has changed getting better getting worse what have you seen the impact of that book for empowering introverts and how we as introverts fit in on our career paths and assimilate in the workplace I know a lot of our show listeners are huge fans of that book because as introverts they started to see themselves in a different light and see all the strengths that come along with being an introvert what has changed for you over the last 10 years after publishing that book well I mean I'll talk first about the changes in the culture I feel like the changes have been kind of enormous it's been so gratifying to see because like the whole discussion of introversion and extroversion didn't really use to exist in the culture at large but particularly in the business world and now suddenly so much is processed through that lens you know so even like just the other day there was a discussion on twitter about whether companies were choosing or choosing to go back to work remotely or or in person and you know and people are asking well to what extent is that decision being made based on whether the person's an introvert or an extrovert so that's just one one tiny example that just happens to pop to mind because I just saw it and I get called into companies all the time to help them think about how to harness the talents of the introverted half of their workforce so this is now just like part of the consciousness that everybody knows about so that's the amazing news the less amazing news is as with any social change this stuff takes a really long time and there's still a lot more to be done and there's still so much assumption that to be a good leader requires being an extrovert or acting like one you know to advancement in general all of that there's still a presumption in favor of extroverted behaviors so so yeah there's still quite a bit more work to do well as an introvert what I found fascinating and we have a lot of authors on the show you know a lot of our authors would see themselves as introverts but then in order to promote the book to get the book to bestseller you have to go into this speaking interview tour around the book and you know many times writers are drawn to the fact that they can be introverted write their words down and get other people to to read it without having to speak it into existence do you find that you've become more of an introvert over the last decade and talking about this book going into companies talking about extroversion and and all of the different pieces that go with unlocking the talent of introverts no I mean people ask me that all the time they're like okay you know now you have this career as a public speaker so now you're an extrovert right and I'm like no not at all I'm exactly the same person that I always was with new skills layered on top of that person so I now have the skill of being able to go and give a good talk and I also have the desire because I have messages that I truly deeply care about so I want to be able to disseminate them and all the different media that exist for that but if you ask me still what do I most want to do on a day in which I have no professional or social obligations I just want to hang out I want to hang out like with my laptop at home you know with my husband and kids or alone either way that's where I'm happiest and that's just how it is I love the feeling of connecting with people it's just I don't feel like connections have to be done face to face through oral communication you know so like to me the the connection you get through listening to the kind of music that Johnny and I were talking about at the beginning or reading in a book something someone's written where I'm like oh my god I felt exactly the same way I can't believe that person just wrote that down those connections to me are the best so yeah I'm still an introvert and is there any interesting new science around introversion anything that you found of late since the book's been published that's fascinating I mean there's been a lot of interesting stuff about introverts and extroverts in the pandemic there was sort of assumption on everyone's part including mine that the pandemic would be much easier for introverts than for extroverts especially you know during the lockdown phases for people who are sort of laptop people working from home and that wasn't necessarily true there were ways in which the pandemic was harder for introverts I mean partly it was true introverts in general they don't have uncertainty so all the uncertainty that came along and is still coming along with COVID can be harder for introverts so it's always more complex than you first think yeah I find that to be true in in my experience although it was nice to to show up to zoom meetings and not have to go through the conferences that just completely exhaust me as an introvert that uncertainty was in my mind sometimes even harsher on me than some of my extroverted friends and you know a lot of the science that we see around uh introverts responding more to stimulation and seeing just the the slight differences through the science behind introverts extroverts I think a lot of times again we put that label and we we sort of just build a whole bunch of assumptions based on whatever we are right so for the extroverts it's like oh this must be easy on the introverts because this is so hard on me we don't often see that there there still are these challenges going through the pandemic and the uncertainty around it again for people who are still working from home throughout that lockdown stretch I always thought what that really was was kind of opportunity to ask yourself the question of whether your before life was working well for you or not because like for me as an introvert I actually had a hard time at first because my before life had been in a perfect state of equilibrium I had crafted a life that was working exactly right and then it was like suddenly tipped towards too much alone time but then I knew other people who are extroverts who were thrilled with the lockdown because even for them they had been going too much 24 seven you know too much out there and it was a chance for them to realize that so we're all very complicated I believe in the power of understanding ourselves as introverts ambiverts or extroverts and at the same time it's crucial to understand how complicated we all are and there were all this grand mishmash I can identify with the extrovert who had had a moment to sit down and think for for once I consider myself an ambivert AJ would consider as being extrovert but for myself there was certainly a lot of reflection but luckily for me there was work to do which was great but the other thing was because I'm an artist I just threw myself more so into music and guitar and everything that I loved about it and I and I feel like I came out of the pandemic and I've always loved music but fallen in love all over again at an immense deeper level wow and that was because you had more of a chance to like really connect with it absolutely yeah at the beginning there was a lot of that uncertainty so that the only thing that I had through that fear was music and and for me it's like you've you've always been here for me when I was a confused teenager and parents are getting divorced and it's like that old Christian saying where you see the footsteps in the sand and it's like well during my hardest times I only seen one set of footsteps in the in the meme or like the saying is well that's because as god I had picked you up and carried you during those moments and for myself I saw music as that same thing like during the harshest times it's always been there for me well we love asking every guest what their x-factor is what you think has made you extraordinary maybe it comes back to the connection thing that we were talking about before from the time I was a kid and I came across that saying by E.M. Forster only connect I really believe in that like as soon as I read that I was like oh my gosh that's that's it those those are the two words that's all you need and again I believe that connection comes in introverted forms as well as extroverted forms but I think I'm always so motivated by that desire like the book I wrote bittersweet so much of the impetus for it was to say oh my gosh there's this like generative and transcendent state of being out there do you know what I mean do you know what I mean and like now I'm getting all these letters from people who are like oh my gosh I know what you mean I've been feeling this all my life and those letters to me are gold I love them. Thank you for joining us Susan it was a pleasure and I always appreciate sharing the science to raise our self-awareness not to be prescriptive of do this do that there's only one way but to recognize more about yourself and I know many in our audience found that through quiet and I hope they find it in your latest book the bittersweet. Thank you so much it was so much fun to talk to you both.