 other people can be really, really helpful when it comes to helping us manage our chatter or really harmful. In some cases, they can make it worse. And in fact, some of the messages that were often taught about how to use our relationships to help us are the wrong messages. Guys, we put out great content every week and we want to make sure that you're notified when those videos drop. So smash that subscribe button, hit that notification bell, and make sure you like and share our videos that helps other people find us. Words can be really powerful for influencing how we think about the world, how we think about ourselves. We're often thinking in terms of words. Now, we're not always thinking in terms of words. We could also think in terms of pictures and images. And we spend a lot of time doing that too. But I'd argue that we live in a world of words. Just to give you another example, since you're bringing up language and its power, distance self-talk, using your name to coach yourself through problems, you could think of this as one kind of linguistic shift. And just as an aside, I think it's fascinating that a lot of people stumble on this shift without even knowing it. You could see evidence of this all around in newspaper interviews. Jennifer Lawrence did an interview a couple of years ago at the Times, got flustered. And she paused and said, all right, Jennifer, get yourself together. This is not therapy. Lebron James, Julia Caesar, Henry Adams, and lots and lots of others. I think it's fascinating that there's this intuition that many of us have about ways of talking to ourselves that can be helpful. And we do it without even knowing it. Distance self-talk is one example. But let me give you another example of a different kind of linguistic shift that can be helpful. We call it the universal you. And to explain how it works, let me tell you a quick story about Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO, who several years ago tragically lost her husband on vacation, fell off a treadmill or had a heart attack, fell off a treadmill and died. Terrible, terrible story. She went into mourning and after a 30-day mourning period was over, she wrote a post on her Facebook page. I'm going to butcher the quote here, so don't hold me to it. But effectively, what she wrote at one point in the quote was she talked about her feelings and she goes, when you lose someone you love, you don't know what to do. Your heart just leaves you. You don't know how to move on. And what was really interesting about that quote was she was talking about probably the most personal kind of experience a person can have, like the loss of the love of their lives. But she's not talking about it in the first person. She's not saying, when I lost someone I love, I didn't know what to do. My heart left me. She's using a word you that we typically use to refer to others. What she was essentially doing there by using the word you, she's talking about her own personal experience in universal terms. She's effectively saying, when anyone loses someone they love, anyone would feel terrible. Anyone's heart would leave their body. And so we've done studies on this and what talking about your own experience in universal terms does. Number one, it gives you a little bit of mental space from your experience. It's not just about you. This is how the world works. Anyone would deal with this adversity the way that I'm dealing with it, right? So that's, it's pushing it away and it's normalizing the experience in ways that make it much easier for people to make meaning out of the experience and work through it. And so it's benefiting you, but it's also doing one other really important thing. When I talk about my experience, my own personal experience as relevant to the world, guess what? Johnny and AJ, you are part of the world. I'm sucking you into my experience. I'm connecting you. I'm establishing empathy. So it's a way of bringing people together as well. One word, you know, you instead of I, and that's the power of language. Well, it's also, it's very telling of how somebody, and you were mentioning about Jennifer Lawrence and this other example of how they feel or how they're filtering their experiences. But it also, this is what I was saying about the softening. So now you don't have to be vulnerable and say, I feel this way. You're using this universal, but my experiences are going to be filtered through different lenses. So of course, I'm going to feel something. You can't just attribute those experiences to me. That may allow you to speak about them from a distance and feel safer about it. But you can't then use that information or use that you to say, Oh, well, see, he's agreeing with me. He must feel that way because that's going to lead you in trouble because you're now attributing emotions to me that may or may not be there. Yes. Yeah. This is, this is a fantastic point. And in fact, there has to be a level of social sensitivity with these kinds of communications, right? Because it is possible that if you're talking about a particularly contentious issue, and you are attributing something not just to yourself, but others that that could backfire in, in the wrong circumstances. And so what's interesting about that to me is it might have benefit for the individual who's speaking, but it might have this social cost. And I think that's where you need social intelligence when thinking about how to use that particular mechanism. Well, I was just going to say, you can notice these things in copywriting or social media, certain platforms, certain language allows those messages and ideas to be shared easier than on other platforms. And so if I say something like I feel this way, I'm being as the, as writing copy, I'm attributing these emotions or these ideas to myself. But if I say that you universal, then other people feel that I am speaking to them. And it's easier for them to adopt these ideas. I mean, this is why copywriting is its own language in general, although we might have an understanding about it to be very good at it. It is a skill that takes years in developing. Absolutely. I mean, so, you know, if you were coaching a person through how to communicate well about certain kinds of thorny issues, let's say there's a situation in which someone does something really bad, right? In that instance, you might want to coach them to talk in the first person, not with the university, because you want them to take ownership of this. You don't want to say this is how the world works. There's an example of a previous politician who, we actually opened one of our articles with this quote, says something to like, I pay nothing in taxes. That's just what you do. You don't pay taxes to the American government. Actually, some of us do pay taxes, so don't draw me into your experience. So, I mean, I think that's exactly your point. And remember, guys, if you've learned something from this video and I hope you did, make sure you hit the subscribe button, hit that notification bell. That way, you'll always know when we put up a new video. And if you have any questions, make sure you put them in the comments below. Well, I want to touch on the combining of these tools because for me, that cocktail has been one of the ways that I've gotten through the pandemic mentally, not only coaching myself, AJ through it, but thinking about historically that this is not the first time that we as a human species have gone through a pandemic. And here we are with even more advanced scientific technologies to help guide us through it. And zooming out from this, like every day of the pandemic is grinding to, well, how will I feel when everyone's vaccinated? We're back to normal. Am I going to be still sitting with this? Am I going to allow myself to live in this state? And in those inner conversations have been really crucial for me working through what's gone on in the last year around this pandemic. So, what I love about the book is not only do you highlight all the tools, but it really is a way for you to create a recipe that works for you and not look at a one size fits all model of just do this and you'll be better, which we know doesn't often work in these situations with the mind. Totally, totally. You know, I think this is where the self experimentation has to occur. And it's actually so the scientists right now where we are as a field is we've identified a universe of different science based tools that are that are useful. What we haven't yet figured out is how those tools combine optimally for different people in different situations. So we're doing that experimentation in the lab. And while we do that, I think there's an opportunity for readers and listeners to start doing some self experimenting on their own. You know, what you described AJ, the distant self talk, come on Ethan, how are you going to manage this and mental time travel? I mean, those are certainly tools that that I've used as well. Another set of tools that I've availed myself of involve other people. And I think that's another important bucket of tools to maybe spend a little bit of time talking about. I'd love to get your perspective on this because you do so much work coaching others. But in my experience, there are lots of myths surrounding the role that other people play in our lives and whether they can be helpful or harmful. My my read of the literature is that other people can be really, really helpful when it comes to helping us manage our chatter or really harmful. And in some cases, they can make it worse. And in fact, some of the messages that we're often taught about how to use our relationships to help us are the wrong messages. So for example, we're often told that when you're experiencing chatter, find someone to talk to you, let it out, venture emotions express. There's been a lot of work on this. And it turns out that when you vent to someone else, that can be really good for our friendship. So we're buddies now AJ and Johnny, I could call either of you up with a problem. I talked to you guys about it. You asked me about my feelings, what happened? That strengthens our friendship. It's good to know that there's someone I can share with you validate how I feel. But if all you do is ask me about what happened, it's like just pouring fuel on a burning flame, right? You're just keeping that negative experience alive. If you don't talk to me in a way that helps me reframe that experience or broaden my perspective, I leave the conversation and I'm just as upset as I was when I started. And so there's actually a name for this, a technical term called co-rumination, where two people go back and forth back and forth. And it predicts all sorts of bad things like anxiety and depression over time. So this is something that we often get wrong and there are ways to fix it. Well, this is funny because we literally had this exact conversation before you jumped on. So one of our clients in our group coaching program went on a date, had a negative response and was ruminating on what could have caused this negative response. In his mind, he did everything right. He was not anticipating that response. So what did he do? He didn't come to us first as coaches. He went to another member in the group and validated through co-rumination what was going on, not having the ability to take an outside perspective and look at, could there be things that are not having anything to do with you and actions that you took in this date that led to that negative reaction? Could it be something completely outside of you that you're not thinking about? Which is what we try to do constantly as coaches because we know the trap around co-rumination. It feels good to share those negative feelings. It feels good to be bound together by, oh, I felt that too. I've experienced that too. But it often leads you into this trap of staying with that feeling and thought and turning it into now a belief about how the next date is going to go or what to expect the next time you see someone. And of course, that leads us in a world of hurt when it comes to actually connecting with the people that we want to in our lives because now we have two people co-ruminating, bonding, feeling closer, but unable to get out of their own way with these mental hurdles that chatter is causing. And I want to add to that as well. If you are persuasive or able to influence the other person in a couple of the reaches to then begin ruminating on a couple of false premises, the end result can get quite bizarre. I mean, and we're also, to look at it on a grand scale, we're in a culturally messed up situation where we're finding people who will indulge these false premises online all the time. And we're ending up in crazy conspiracy theories in every direction that you want to go. I mean, there's somebody who's got a story to tell you. Yeah. And you often can see this happening in this kind of these echo chamber like bubbles that are happening on social media, which are giant hive mind co-rumination sessions. But you both put it very well, right? What's so fascinating about co-rumination is that it has a seductive allure. It feels so good in the moment to find that other person to just rant about what's worrying or depressing or anger at you. It feels great for the two of you, but if the goal is to move past it, then we need to do more than just vent. And so the formula from research is what you want to do is find someone who will let you share a little bit about what happened to you and what you felt like we have these social and emotional needs that we want to get satisfied by other people. But once you've spoken a bit about what's bothering you at a certain point in the conversation, ideally the person you're chatting with helps nudges you to try to broaden your perspective. All right, so this happened, but this has happened before, how I've dealt with in the past, or how might you do it differently, or here's how I deal with this, different ways of approaching this situation to broaden the perspective and ultimately help the person work through it.