A Member Snippet: “How do you help others at transitions when you suck at it?”
We had something of a scheduling snafu this week and our guests didn’t show! Don’t worry, they’ll be back. Bun in the meantime, Nikki and Pete carried on an impromptu AMA-QA show with members in the live chat and we decided to share a piece of it with you.
The question that sparks the answer is, “how do you help others with transitions when you suck at them yourself?” Great question, and that gets us talking all about Bandura’s thoughts on self-efficacy, how pride can help you learn hard things, and more!
If you want to hear the whole conversation, head over to https://patreon.com/theadhdpodcast and sign up to get your very own member-edition podcast feed! Thanks everyone!
Links & Notes
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Pete Wright:
Hello everybody and welcome to Taking Control, The ADHD podcast on TruStory FM. I'm Pete Wright. Well, Nikki will be here shortly. Let me tell you what's happening. We had a wonderful episode planned, with two fantastic guests who we love dearly. They are regulars on the show. You've heard them before several times and you will hear them again. But today, Nikki and I came into the live stream and started chatting with our members and talking about F-one and all kinds of things that we normally talk about with our members, and we realized that 10 minutes had passed and it turns out our guests weren't here. Well, there was a massive scheduling snafu and they never really confirmed amongst themselves after they confirmed with us that they were going to be on the podcast and they just didn't show up, they will be on again soon.
Instead, we just started taking questions from the people who'd shown up to the live stream, so I thought, you know what? We've got nothing else to post this week anyway, why don't I just let you know, if you go to patreon.com/theadhdpodcast, you can sign up for a few bucks a month and you will get things like this, the full episode, the full conversation of what we talked about when the guest didn't show up. It was essentially an AMA, Q&A and it was fantastic and fun, and thank you to everybody who was there, and I think we did some good in the world.
Anyway, enjoy this little snippet. It's not the whole conversation. If you were in Patreon, you would have your very own private podcast feed and you would see the entire version. The entire conversation was like 45 minutes or something. Anyway, great, thanks to everybody. Our thanks for rebooking, the guests that you will hear again in the future. Until next week, thanks for hanging out. We appreciate your time and attention. Now, a member snippet.
All right, coach, how do we help others transition when we suck at it?
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, I think that first of all, you let your kids know that it's hard, that it's hard for both of you so that they see you modeling that this is difficult, and not expecting it to be easy for them. I think letting them know that it is hard, it is difficult, it's hard for mom too, but this is what we need to do, and then being more clear about what has to happen within the transition. I think with kids, it's always good to have buy-in, so I think that it would be good to ask them, how much time do you need? Or how much of a warning do you want me to give you before we have to go do something else? Is five minutes good? Is 10 minutes... Now, asking a toddler or somebody that's young, that's not going to make any difference, they don't know what that is, but somebody that's older, they can say, well, can you just tell me in five minutes? Or something like that.
But it's so that they have some kind of empowerment to it, or they have some part of the decision, I think, is really helpful. I think you guys together say, yeah, we're using this alarm because I need it too, I need it just like you do, and then we're going to go outside. All of those things that we were talking about with transition treats, you share that with your kids and you do it with them, and then they see you doing it and it makes it more normal and understandable that it is difficult to do. That's what I was saying.
Pete Wright:
When I hear this, it all comes back to helping others around you develop their skill of efficacy, self-efficacy, how effective are you in actually moving forward toward the things that you know are most important and need to get done. Albert Bandura was the psychologist who came up with this sort of model of self-efficacy, and it comes from, according to his model, four different areas that actually create agency in your life. Performance outcomes are the ones that positively and negatively... The experiences that we have when we are performing, when we are doing good transitions, when we do it well, those outcomes actually help reinforce us being able to do it well later. The next one is vicarious experiences. Vicarious experiences, it's all about people developing their own internal sense of a skill, whatever that skill is. In this case, transitions, by watching how other people model transitions.
That's the one that's most challenging, I think, for those of us who want to help people with transitions but suck at it ourselves, right? Because we are struggling with it ourselves, we can't be great models when we don't feel confident doing it ourselves. But luckily there are still two more areas in Bandura's efficacy model. One is, physiological feedback, which is, I look at this where, when you hear a gymnast say, hey, when I'm in the air, jumping around and doing all my flips, I have a great sense of spatial awareness. My body is giving me feedback as I'm doing something well, that's reminding me, oh, I'm doing this well, and so you coach somebody to say, hey, when you make a great transition or when you're trying to learn this new thing, understand what the somatic experience is, when you've done a good transition, think about how it feels to make that transition.
Are you angry or are you happy? Are you calm? Your body will create a sense or somatic memory of that thing. The fourth area is verbal persuasion. That's the one where we have the most control, where we get to say, hey, I'm proud of you for doing that, what you just did was great. Creating that sort of verbal feedback that says, hey, you're doing the right thing at the right time, goes a long way toward influencing what it is that you're trying to accomplish. Those four things, performance outcomes, vicarious experiences, physiological feedback and verbal persuasion, that was all part of Bandura's model. There's this one other one, number five, that another psychiatrist came along and said, it was James Maddux, this was a little while ago, a decade ago or so, and said, you also have to add creative visualization. He calls them imaginal experiences, where you actually are practicing doing something over and over and over again in your mind.
Thinking about the other four performance outcomes, what have you gotten through verbal persuasion? How does it feel in your body to do this thing, and vicarious experiences? Between those five, that's what goes into building self-efficacy and removing doubt in your own ability to do a thing. Once you can do that, once you can help somebody else feel confident, even if you aren't great at it yourself, if you can help them feel confident that they're chipping away at their own doubt, then you can go a long way toward helping others make change in spite of the fact that you might suck at modeling it yourself. Okay, that's my-
Nikki Kinzer:
What was the reference that you used? I want to check that book out.
Pete Wright:
Albert Bandura is the...
Nikki Kinzer:
How do you spell the last name?
Pete Wright:
B-A-N-D-U-R-A. This is an old thing, it's been around forever. He came up with this in 1977 and it's his determining efficacy judgments, and I can find the original link.
Nikki Kinzer:
That's good. I mean that definitely-
Pete Wright:
Yeah, I mean I think that model-
Nikki Kinzer:
Makes sense even today. That makes sense, I like that model.
Pete Wright:
I think that model works really, really well. One of the things that I like so much about it is because of Shoshana's question, I feel this too, that how could I possibly be a resource to help others when I'm bad at something myself, right? Sometimes that's interpreted as failing up, or I'm terrible at this thing, why did I get this promotion? Well, it's because not everything in developing a skill or developing confidence is about just being able to model good behavior, there's so much more to building a skill than just being able to do it. The other piece we did, we just did an episode on pride, on all the feelings, and the research in pride is actually an incredible thing. It was absolutely eyeopening on what it means to give somebody a sense of pride in what they do, no matter how good it is.
We had the same conversation about dopamine redirection, where dopamine is not just about, hey, it feels good to do this thing. It's the reinforcing chemical that tells you you're on the right path. Pride is the outward or inward expression of that, in emotional language. It's, I'm proud of what I just did, therefore I will continue to strive in that direction. I will continue to work hard to do the thing that you just told me I was good at and close the gap between my taste in a thing and my ability to do the thing at a high performing level. Because we know that when we create... When your kids come home and they give you their first ashtray, we love it because they did it and they should be proud of that work at that time, and objectively it's not going to win any awards.
But if you tell them how proud you are of that thing and you tell them that the work they did matters, then the next time it will be better because they're striving toward that piece. I look at Bandura's model as a follow-up to that. This whole thing about verbal persuasion is exactly bullseye on helping somebody feel proud of the work that they've done. You have so much power in impacting somebody else's trajectory with the words that you use and the time that you use them, and it has made me second guess the last 20 years of my parenting.
Nikki Kinzer:
Wow. I have a question about pride, because, did you guys talk about or when you were doing your research where you can be proud of something, but you almost don't want to share the pride because you're... you're not embarrassed, but maybe you don't want to sound like you're bragging or that you don't want to highlight it for some reason?
Pete Wright:
Yeah. There are two kinds of pride, as it turns out. There's authentic pride and hubristic pride, and you can feel the difference between those two, especially when you start looking at the words. Accomplished, confident, triumph, winner victorious achievement, honor, honorific, right? Those are authentic words of pride. Arrogant, conceited, cocky, stuck up, boastful, haughty, egotistic. Those are hubristic pride, right? That's the pride we don't want to showcase. What is such an interesting thing is that narcissism is associated with that gap between low self-esteem and high self-esteem, right? If you feel good and proud and you're using those authentic words of pride, then you are likely not a narcissist because you have nothing to prove, you are genuinely proud of the work that you do. If you have very low self-esteem, you are much more likely to be cockier in a public situation, to be the annoying person who is reflected on as the person who is cocky and conceited and stuck up.
It's because they have nothing else in their sort of foundational... Their ego is so fragile because they don't know what it feels like to be proud, and so all they have are the words, like the trappings of pride, what pride looks like to them and what they want to achieve. That is a pitiable place, that's a pitiable praise. It's all wrapped up in like, oh, you just bought a $200,000 sports car, I wonder what you're making up for, right? That's the joke, right? It turns out it's not a joke, it's just the ego that's small, and so you have to make up for it with externalities.
I think this research on authentic versus hubristic pride is fascinating, and the power that it has to teach. That was fun. Look at that little rabbit hole we went down. That was one question, bring it, I'm liking this.
Nikki Kinzer:
And a show, in itself.
Pete Wright:
Okay, that's it for this little snippet of the show. It was a great conversation though. We talked about me walking around in my deceased uncle's shoes. Well, we talked about a whole bunch of other stuff. Again, patreon.com/theadhdpodcast. Thanks for your time and your attention. We will catch you next week, and I promise there'll be a real show. I just, I am sure of it, there will be a real show next week. On behalf of Nikki Kinzer, I'm Pete Wright. Thanks everybody.
