Why English Makes No Sense & How to be Respectfully Assertive - SYSK Choice

0:00Do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world? People working in conservation, exploration, science and tech, alongside storytellers imagining and creating a better future. I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation, bringing you season six of Planet Visionaries. This season, I speak to guests like National Geographic photographer Tom Pesek and Anna Rathman, Executive Director of the Jane Goodall Institute USA, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Watch Planet Visionaries on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, if your doctor wears a necktie, stay away from it.

0:36I'll explain why. Then, why is the English language so weird? There are rules and then words that break those rules, and we sometimes have two words that used to be one word. One of the oldest is of and off, O-F and O-F-F. Those were the same word, and now they're two separate words. Also, ever try to stop a sneeze? I'll explain why that's a really bad idea. And the world is full of passive people, and they often get taken advantage of. I always say passive people will think like this, that I know this well. I don't like conflict. I don't want to rock the boat. I probably won't change your mind anyway, so I'm not going to really tell you what I feel or think.

1:20However, if you have reactive people in your life, they tend to roll over the top of you. All this today on Something You Should Know. I imagine most of us shop for clothes online, at least some of the time. And there's always that little mystery. Is what shows up at your door actually going to look like what you think you ordered? We've all had that experience. I know my wife has ordered dresses that look beautiful in the pictures, but when they arrived, not so beautiful. Cheap looking, disappointing, and that's one of the reasons we've become such big fans of Quince. When we order from Quince, we are confident we're going to get something really nice.

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2:47Give the gift of quality this holiday season. download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to Quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, please let them know it was Something You Should Know. It's the best way to support the show. Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. You know, I seldom wear a necktie, mostly because we're pretty casual around here, and I haven't been invited to too many dressy events, what with the pandemic at all.

3:43And it seems to be the norm now, fewer people wear neckties. However, doctors, male doctors, often wear neckties. And if your doctor does, you may not want to touch it. Several years ago, a researcher, Stephen Nurkin, with New York Hospital Medical Center of Queens, he and his people sampled neckties worn by male doctors, physician assistants, and medical students in a New York hospital. All of the volunteers in the study were known to have daily contact with patients. They also collected neckties worn by hospital security guards, people who seldom interact with patients. Laboratory testing showed that 20 out of the 42 clinicians' neckties carried bacteria, compared with 1 out of 10 worn by the security guards.

4:34In fact, a doctor was 8 times more likely to carry potential disease-causing bacteria on his necktie compared with a security guard. I guess this is partly because neckties are washed infrequently compared to other clothing. So hopefully by now doctors have gotten the word to wash their neckties. But if your doctor is wearing a really nice necktie, admire it from afar. And that is something you should know.

5:07Every day, you and I use the English language to maneuver and navigate through the day. We talk to people in English, we write things in English, and probably very early on in your journey through the English language, you realize there are a lot of things about this language that make no sense and are inconsistent. So why is that? Well, that's something Erica Okrent has spent a long time looking into and trying to understand. Erica is a linguist and author of a book called Highly Irregular, Why Tough, Through, and Doe Don't Rhyme and Other Oddities of the English Language. Hi, Erica. Welcome.

5:49Hi, thanks for having me. So this idea and this belief that English is a very strange language with a lot of oddities and quirks, is that a fair assessment of English? Well, I hear about it a lot. You know, people accept, oh, English is so weird, all these strange spellings. What are you doing, English? What's going on here? And then we kind of shrug and say, oh, that's English. What are you going to do? But it's not the case that it's just English. There are reasons for the weird things in English. And so I started looking into what are the specific reasons for the specific things. So we don't just have to shrug and say, ah, that's how English is.

6:32we can actually say, here's why it's like that. So let's start with something that I find interesting. And that is, if you go into a restaurant and you want a small drink, you order a small drink. But if you want a big drink, you don't order a big drink, you order a large drink. So why is that? Why don't we order big drinks? Well, this is a great question that you don't necessarily think about while you're speaking English. But then a child will ask you or a non-native speaker will ask you, well, why can't I say I'll have a big drink or I'll order a big pizza? Why does that sound so wrong? And this comes from the way that words carve out meaning through history and they keep a little bit of their original motivation that we don't even see.

7:28So big was a word we got long, long ago from the oldest layer of English. And it has the sense of large size, but it also had the sense of power. So you would be big in battle meant you were forceful and powerful in battle. Where large came from a different pathway. We borrowed that from French, and large had more of the sense of openness and freedom and generosity, as we still have in words like largesse and at large when you're roaming free. So those words still carry the old senses. So when we say to a child, oh, you're such a big boy, we don't mean just size. We also mean power and competence.

8:22We don't say, oh, what a large boy you are. That sounds strange. So big still has that sense of power. And large, because it had that sense of generosity, became attached to consumer goods. So in the early years of industrialization and consumer goods, you had large coal, large salt, things that were in bigger pieces. And that continues in when we buy things, we buy them in large, medium, and small, because large still kept that pathway. And so that's why we order a large drink and not a big, powerful one. Why do we say, what the hell? Well, when you see English and you say, what the hell, what is going on here?

9:15And then you start to think about that phrase, and it's very strange that we say, what the hell? That's a very strange syntax. We don't say the hell. Where does that the come from? And that also comes from a long meaning pathway where we used to say the devil or to emphasize something or question something. And it didn't come from a longer phrase. It sounds like it should be something like, what in the world? And then becomes what in the hell? It didn't come from that longer phrase. Those longer phrases came later from people trying to be polite. But the move from the devil to the hell to what the hell to nowadays, you can just kind of say what the and be understood as saying that phrase.

10:12And my theory as to why some people have replaced the word hell with the F word is that hell, the word hell has become much more acceptable. It doesn't convey the outrage that people that it once did and that people are trying to say when they say what the hell. So they replace hell with the F word because that's more outrageous. Yeah, it's meant to convey a sort of flabbergasted shock and dismay. And if you need to up that emotional part of it, you need to come up with some stronger words. I think everyone has wondered about words like tough and doe and through that all look like they end in the same few letters, but they're not pronounced the same.

10:58So why are they not pronounced the same? Well, from the very beginning, the oldest layers of the language, they were not pronounced the same. They had different vowels, but they had the same ending, this sound that we don't use in English anymore, a sort of ugh sound, like that blch sound you make in the back of your throat. that was one of the sounds of English that when the Roman missionaries arrived, had to figure out how to spell with the Latin alphabet. What is this? We don't have that in Latin, and we don't have a letter for it. How are we going to spell it? And they tried various things and eventually ended up in GH.

11:40So that GH stands for the old, old fact that tough and doe also had that sound at the end, but then that sound disappeared. We don't use it in English anymore, but it's still there in the spelling. Meanwhile, the vowels were undergoing dramatic transformations through history, but specifically in the couple of hundred years that the printing press was arriving and sweeping through the nation and spelling was being established. It hadn't been established very well. And at the same time, printing press is doing this and establishing spellings, the pronunciation is changing. We are going through something called the great vowel shift, which changed the vowels of English.

12:31So we ended up with these three different vowels in the oldest pronunciation came to be spelled the same way, but not because they were pronounced the same way, but because there was so much variation and back and forth in the pronunciation and in the spelling that it ended up stuck in a particular spelling by accident. And that's, we still use it because it's too entrenched now. We can't change our spelling to go with the pronunciation. The spelling has a life of its own and an influence of its own. I think I'm glad that we've lost the sound. It's rather uncomfortable and it just feels weird to try to do that.

13:18Well, they do have it in other Germanic languages. So in German, you still have that sound and it's, you'll hear it in exactly the same places where you'll where you will see a gh in english so the word for eight and eight has that gh in there because we used to have that sound in that position we got rid of it they didn't get rid of it in german and but we can see the connection there because of that spelling that spelling is a little window into the history of the language and it does have a reason to be there. It's not just a, English is weird, what are you going to do? It's a, English is weird because of its history.

14:00Of all these little quirks that people are aware of, what's your favorite if you have one or one of your favorites that you think is particularly interesting? One of my favorite weird things about English is the way we'll take a word and make it into two words in a sort of, for sort of no reason at all. One of these is the word discrete. This is when we have two spellings, D-I-S-C-R-E-T-E or E-E-T. And this is something you have a drill on in school. You have to learn it when you write it. You always have to pause for a second and say, which discrete am I writing here? Oh, yeah, E-T-E or EET. And that spelling difference is relatively new.

14:48It was, well, 19th century, which is new in language terms. That was one word. We had one word, discrete, and it had various meanings and connected meanings and connotations. And at some point, someone decided to start spelling one of those meanings with E-T-E and the other with E-E-T, but in a pretty random way. It wasn't a rule. It wasn't something you've learned in school. It was kind of arbitrary and a matter of taste, a matter of style. And we still, we have some like this now. So, So you might see the word aesthetics written with AES to start with, or with ES aesthetics. And it tends to be if you're in the beauty business, it's the E version aesthetics.

15:41And if you're in doing art history or something, it's with the AE. But they're the same word. And we know they're the same word. but they're separating into two kind of senses, two kinds of uses. And that's what happened to discrete. They're not two separate words. They're the same word. We decided to make these two spellings, or we didn't really decide. It just sort of happened over time and became the established standard. And now they're two separate words. And there's a number of words like this in English that used to be one word and now are two. One of the oldest is of and off, O-F and O-F-F.

16:21Those were the same word. And now we wouldn't even think they're the same word, of and off, but we pronounce them differently for various reasons. And now they're two separate words. And it's interesting how that can happen over time. We're talking about the English language and why it's so weird. And my guest is linguist Erica Okrentz. She's author of the book Highly Irregular, Why Tough, Through, and Doe Don't Rhyme, and Other Oddities of the English Language. This episode is sponsored by Vinted. You know, I remember interviewing an organizing expert who offered this really clever trick for figuring out which clothes you should get rid of.

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19:53That's shopbeam.com slash S-Y-S-K. So, Erica, one of the things I think drives a lot of English purists crazy, kind of drives me crazy too a little bit, is how figuratively and literally get mixed up when, you know, you say, you know, my head hurts so bad, literally my head's going to explode. And was it just people misusing the term literally and it just became acceptable? Well, this is one of those that it's not acceptable yet in the sense that people really notice it because there's a lot of jokes about it, memes about it, comedy routines about it. And that will keep it from becoming completely standard for a while.

20:40But one day it will be. So when a word gets tired, you come up with another word that brings the punch back. And there's one thing, one way we did this a long, long time ago that we don't notice anymore was with the word really. So you have very, oh, I'm very tired or this is very interesting. That becomes bland and boring. How do we punch it up? I'm really tired. Well, what is really? It means in reality. I'm not just saying this as an expression or a figure of speech. It's I'm really tired or this is really interesting in reality. And that's exactly the same thing as what literally does. people say, oh, no, no, you mean figuratively, you mean metaphorically.

21:31No, I mean, literally, what you're doing there is punching it up and bringing it back into a more tangible, a more physical manifestation. What about 11 and 12? Why aren't they one teen and two teen? Seems like they should be because what's a more logical system than the number system? You know, We accept language is going to be a little strange and here and there because we're talking about meaning. It's not that specific. But numbers, I mean, numbers don't change. Numbers are numbers and they have a system. And 11 and 12 should be one teen and two teen if we're doing the system. But they aren't.

22:16And a long time ago, I mean, a thousand years ago, they did have more of that kind of structure. So 11 was something like an lief and 12 was something like tvål lief. But at the same time, they were said much more frequently than the numbers above them. So the numbers from 1 to 12 are very important. We have 12 months. We have 12 is a common way of dividing time. It's very mathematically important for the things that humans do. And so we would be saying the words for 11 and 12 a lot more frequently than we would for 15 and 16 and 25 and 110. And when you get up into those really big numbers, there's no irregularity at all.

23:07Those are formed by system because we're not using them very much. So we form them from the system when we use them. When it comes to 11 and 12 and the lower numbers, those have been used in history so much more frequently than the higher numbers that they're able to get irregularity just through repetition. The more we say something, the more liable it is to be irregular because the saying of it entrenches it and solidifies it and keeps an old pattern when a new pattern comes along. and that's why we have many irregularities in English. They're fossils of the old way we used to do it, but they were so frequent that they became embedded and we can't get them out.

23:54What about these silent consonants that pop up like the P in receipt or the L in salmon or the B in debt or doubt? Why are they there? Well, yeah, there's silent letters all over the place And some of them have a good reason to be there, like the K and no, that we used to actually pronounce that. And then we stopped pronouncing it, but it's still there in the spelling. There are some like that. But the salmon and receipt and debt, those type, we didn't have them. We had them in the spelling without those letters in the beginning of spelling in the printing press and for 100 years or so. And then we decided to put those silent letters in when we never said them at all because of a fashion for fancying up the language to make it look a little bit more like Latin.

24:50So, we had the word receipt, and we spelled it something like R-E-C-E-I-T, something like that. And we said, oh, well, that word, you know, obviously, if you're in the know, you know it goes back to the Latin receptus. and English is a fancy language that goes back to these glorious roots and we're going to show that it does and put that P in there. So, we never said the P. We borrowed it from French originally. They got it from Latin, but we decided to Latin it up, put the P in. We did that to salmon, we did that to debt, we did that to a number of other words, but we didn't do it very consistently.

25:38So, some words got their Latin letters back, and other words didn't, and so it doesn't look like a very regular system. You know, I never thought about this until I saw it in your book, that when something isn't going to take long, we'll say this won't take long. But if it is going to take long, we never say this will take long. So why don't we ever say that? Yeah, there are certain phrases that only show up in negative contexts. And these are called in the linguistic literature, they're negative polarity items. And there are a number of them. They're interesting to discover because we don't think about them as only having negatives until we try to say it in the positive or someone who's not a native speaker tries to say it in the positive and it just sounds weird.

26:35And then they ask, well, why? Why is that not correct? And the answer is kind of, it is kind of a shrug. It is a, oh, well, what are you going to do? Negative polarity items. But all languages have some expressions like these that tend to only show up in the negative or in question context. So, this won't take long. He doesn't have a red scent to his name. We don't say he has a red scent to his name. That just sounds strange. And a number of other phrases. Mr. and Mrs. And why is there an R in Mrs.? And where did they come from? Well, this was a great question that my daughter asked me that I had never thought about it or thought it was strange at all.

27:23Mr. Mrs. And why is there an R in Mrs.? Well, because we don't say it when we say Mrs., but we write it. Where does that come from? It's not a shortening of something with an R in it. but if you look at the history, it actually is. It was a shortening for mistress. So, mistress became Mrs. in the pronunciation, and it became MRS in the writing, and those things don't match, but they're, again, holding on to an older pattern in only one of the places and not the other, only in the writing and not in the pronunciation. And it gets stuck that way the more we use it. I did want to ask you why there are words in English, English versus American English that are the same word.

28:18They mean exactly the same thing, but there's a U like in color in the English version of the word that is gone in the American version of the word color, flavor. there's others. Yeah, that, the O-U-R to O-R was somewhat intentional. That was Daniel Webster and his first American dictionary decided to change some spellings with the intention of making it easier, making it more regular. And one of his ideas was to take the O-U-R and make it OR instead. But that wasn't because he came up with it and said, we have to get rid of this extra letter. Both of those ways of writing it were already in play in England and in America.

29:11There was inconsistency, sometimes O-U-R, sometimes O-R. It went back and forth. And he enshrined in his dictionary, the O-R is the way we're going to do it. And what that did was make it become associated with the American way of spelling. And it made what happened across the pond, they were also using both. But once that OR version had been claimed for the American way, they went the other way, said, oh, well, that's the American way. We do it this way. Even though before that, there had been a lot of back and forth between the two forms. And that's what caused the split in the end. The decision of this dictionary and then seeing it from the English point of view as two Americans, so we're going to do it the other way.

30:09Well, it's fun to talk about this because, like you said in the beginning, there's this sense of, you know, English is quirky and oh, well, that's English. But there's actually stories and reasons behind some of these quirks and oddities in the English language, and they're really interesting to hear about. Erica Okrent has been my guest. She's a linguist, and the name of her book is Highly Irregular, Why Tough, Through, and Doe Don't Rhyme, and Other Oddities of the English Language. And you'll find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Erica. Thank you so much, Mike. This has been fun.

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33:57Would you describe yourself as a passive person, Someone who lets things slide, you don't want to make waves? Or are you the kind of person who speaks up when something's bothering you? You speak your mind. I ask because, well, it matters. If you're a passive person, for example, how many times have you let something slide, not said anything, and then later wish you really had spoken up? Or if you're the other way, how many times have you said something and done it in a way that's caused more trouble than if you hadn't said anything at all. All of this impacts how we feel about ourselves and how other people see us and how we navigate through our lives.

34:41Dennis Adams is someone who's taken a hard look at this. He is, or was, a self-described passive person, a former minister, who wanted to find a better way. He didn't want to be that passive doormat, But he didn't want to be an in-your-face kind of jerk either. So he really did his homework and came up with a better way. Not passive, not jerky, but honest, direct, and respectful. Which is the name of his book. Honest, Direct, Respectful. Three simple words that will change your life. Hi Dennis. So when you say you were a passive person, you mean you were someone who didn't like rocking the boat, you didn't want to make waves, you kept your mouth shut, avoided conflict, that kind of thing?

35:26Yes, that's exactly it. I always say passive people think like this, and I know this well. I don't like conflict. I don't want to rock the boat. I probably won't change your mind anyway, so I'm not going to really tell you what I feel or think. But I'm going to be very respectful. But I'm not going to be honest and direct. And when people do that, when they take that passive approach, what's the impression they leave with other people? Well, I thought early on the impression I was leaving with other people was that I was a peacemaker and I was a great guy, and people actually liked me very well.

35:58However, if you have reactive people in your life, they tend to roll over the top of you. And just a quick example, my brother's probably reactive by nature. In fact, I'm sure he is. And I'm passive by nature. And I remember one night when he called me and went up one side of me and down the other, I asked him if we could meet for lunch, and he said, sure. And I said, John, last night, before we started, I said, last night, were you honest with me? He said, yes, I was. I said, were you direct with me? And he goes, yes, I was. I said, were you respectful? And he goes, well, I have a little trouble with that one, but I knew you would take it.

36:27So that was a huge insight to me. And so I was able to tell him, you know, John, if you call and talk to me that way again, it really jeopardizes our relationship. And I'll probably hang up the phone, which really shocked him because he'd known me as a passive person for so long. But then I asked him, I said, was I honest with you? And he said, yes. I said, was I direct? And he said, yes. Was I respectful? And he goes, yes, you were. And I said, well, you know, I learned how to be honest and direct by watching you, but you could learn how to be respectful by watching me. What I find is people tend to fall either into one of the two camps, either passive or reactive.

37:01People who are passive, who don't speak up when really they might really want to speak up, don't do it because they're afraid of something. They're afraid something's going to happen. What is it they're afraid of? You know, I think it can be a multitude of reasons for folks. You know, I am a therapist, so I've seen a lot of reasons. But for me, it was my fear of being rejected or not being liked. I always say to people, you can know if you're an approval addict if 100 people like you and one doesn't, and you focus on the one. And I think about a workshop I did for about 300 people where there were 10 people in the back of the room talking during the workshop.

37:41And during the workshop, I paused and I looked at them, and a number of other people looked at them, and they got quiet. But after I started talking again, not only did they start talking, but they got louder. And I remember this was one of the first times I really had to challenge myself out of my passivity, because what I wanted to do was walk away and take it home. And if you were to ask my kids if I were passive or reactive when they were younger, they would say reactive because I took all that stuff home. But what I did is I walked back in the door with a lot of fear and anxiety, and I walked back to that table and said, Matt, can I share something with you folks?

38:19And they said yes. And I said, I want you to know when I was doing my seminar it was really distracting. And when I paused and looked at you and a number of other people looked at you and you continued to talk and got louder, then it was really frustrating and I was upset. And I hope you don't treat other speakers this way. And I was able to walk out of the room and truly let go of it. And, of course, when I share this example in seminars, people always say, the passive people always say, what did they do? But at that point, it wasn't that important to me. The important thing was I was leaving it where it belonged.

38:52And I was able to process it in real time without being rude, which is one of the concerns I had when I started this work. That is, I think some of the assertiveness classes that are taught are really taught by what I call tops, ticked-off passes. that are really telling you how to confront people in an honest and direct way without being respectful, and really blaming other people for your passivity. It's interesting what you said, that passive people want to know how they reacted, because that's what passive people are worried about. They're worried about how people are going to react to someone standing up to them.

39:29But also, just out of curiosity, how did they react? Actually, three people called me the next day and apologized, which was sort of the icing on the cake. But whether they did or didn't, I did the right thing. I call it coming from a place of strength and becoming a truth teller. Now, let me say this. I think there are times when it's okay to be passive or reactive. When I was managing the psychiatry department, because I wasn't reactive most of the time, probably 99 % of the time, the one time I did react over an important issue, it really got everybody's attention. And I think that's important.

40:05And I think there are times to know when it's perfectly acceptable to have an unexpressed thought and to go to the passive place. But I think the majority of time, if we can spend our time being honest, direct, and respectful, not only do we gain self-respect, but we gain the respect of those around us. The problem, I think, for a lot of people, though, is it's one thing to have this conversation in this very unemotionally charged environment of, here's some advice on what you should do, the next time this happens. But in the moment of when it happens, it's hard for passive people to step up because they think, I just want this to go away, I'll just wait this out and not say anything, and it's probably just as hard for reactive people to stand down, step back, and not get overly reactive.

40:56I think that in the work I do, I find that 80 % of people in any given population are passive and about 20 % are reactive. And actually, I have an easier time getting reactive people to move to the middle because they'll say to me, wow, I really like this. I can do this. You know, I'm honest. I'm direct. And I said, well, the first thing you need to do is lower your intensity because your intensity denotes that sort of reactive behavior. And so they tend to come to the middle. But to encourage a passive person to come to the middle means they have to be honest and they have to be direct and it's very difficult.

41:29I know it was for me when I was walking back to that table in the pharmacy convention, my heart, I could see, I thought everybody could see my heart beating and you know my voice was like two pitches higher when I started to talk to them. But it's the right thing to do and to try to find that balance. But I do think that reactive people have an easier time coming to the middle, although they're really put off by passive people, because passive people don't talk to them. They talk about them. What do you mean by that? Well, what I mean by that is, I'll give you a good example. I was doing a seminar up in Canada, and I had a two-day seminar, and the managers came in the next day.

42:07There were about 25 of them, and I said, well, let's divide up into passive and reactive, and it was about 80-20, 80 % passive, 20 % reactive. And so I asked the reactive managers, I said, you understand the concept. We spent the whole day talking about it yesterday. what would you like to say to the passive managers? And they really let them have it. They told them, why don't you just be up front? Why don't you put your cards on the table? And just went on for about 10 minutes. And then when I asked the passive managers, it was a real eye-opener because they said, yes, we would like to say something to the reactive managers.

42:39But in fact, what they did is they turned to each other and started saying things like, why can't they be nice? Why can't they just say it in a nicer way? And why are they so mean and so angry? And of course, the more they were doing that, the more angry the reactive managers were getting. What I was able to do in that company was to help them to learn to communicate from the middle place, from the place of strength. So Dennis, what do you say to someone, passive or reactive? What do you say to them when they say, hey, look, this all sounds great and I wish I could do it, but in the moment I can't.

43:14I mean, the way I handle those situations is the way I handle those situations. I react that way, whether it's passive or reactive. It's just a reaction, and that's how I do it in that moment. I think reactive folks are so used to reacting without thinking. So for a reactive person, what I'd say is, remember, it's perfectly acceptable to have an unexpressed thought. Take a time out. Think about what the real issues are. I think for a passive person, it's choosing whether you want to stay in the victim role or you want to truly come from a place of strength. And I think it is harder for passive folks because, and one of the concerns I have is in a lot of the communication and conflict management workshops I went to, trying to find the middle place, really taught people how to pull up their dump truck, load it with all the stuff they've never said to anybody, back up to them, and then pull the lever.

44:07And I think that's unfortunate because one of the things I had to realize early on is that I can't blame other people if I chose to be passive all these years. And so what I have to do is find some way to let go of that anger, that bitterness. And once I let go of it, purpose to be honest, direct, and respectful. It sounds simple. It is not easy. It was very difficult for me because I was in this cycle of being passive for a while, filling with anger and tension, then reacting, and for that brief moment feeling okay, but then 10 minutes later feeling bad and going back to being passive. And I just kept going through this cycle.

44:44So it's simple, but it's not easy. I would imagine it's easier to start with the smaller things than the bigger things. It is. And I think, you know, I remember one patient called me one day and said, I picked up the phone, and he said, I did it. I said, you did what? And he says, I shared the message. And the important thing, I knew he got it because the important thing to him wasn't how it changed another person or it fixed the circumstances, although it has a better tendency to do that. His focus was, I was able to do it, I was able to let it go, I was able to come from a place of strength and be a truth teller.

45:21It is interesting that there are so many, according to your statistic, there are so many more passive people than reactive people. Yeah, I think that 80 % of people in any given population are passive by nature, and I think 20 % of people in any given population are reactive by nature. And it's not scientific, but I've tested this out with groups all over the U.S. and asking them to divide themselves up in large groups, and it tends to be that way. Typically, when I get called to a company to do some sort of an intervention, the people they're focusing on are the reactive folks. and the real issue are the passive employees who talk about the reactive employees but don't talk to them.

46:10And there are many passive managers that truly struggle managing people because they want to be liked and they don't understand that they have to balance between their productivity and their fair treatment of employees. They just don't see it or understand that. Well, I want to talk about this idea that it's your experience that passive people don't talk to reactive people. They talk about reactive people, that they don't talk directly to them. They talk to other people about them and that maybe there's a reason for that. Maybe the reason is that if you talk to a reactive person, you may get a reaction that you're not going to like that's going to make things worse and blow up in your face.

46:52So what's the upside? What's the benefit for a passive person to talk directly to a reactive person when the reaction may be terrible? Well, first of all, I think if enough passive people hold a mirror up to reactive people and help them see themselves, they're going to look for a better way to communicate, which typically doesn't happen. But I think for a passive person, what happens is that talking to people about a situation or somebody else typically doesn't help us to feel better about it. It just sort of is a fertilizer for more self-doubt and anger at the person and feeling in the victim role.

47:32What Honest Direct Respectful has done for me is it's helped me to deal with issues in real time and let go of them. And when I was managing a department in this medical center that I work in for five and a half years, from the very first day I walked in, I said, let's talk to people. Let's not talk about them. And I can remember one day walking into a room where there were five employees, and it was very clear they were talking about somebody in the department. And I overheard a little bit of it. And I walked in and I said, you know, how would you like to be the topic of discussion in a room with five other people?

48:07And, you know, just to help them to understand what was happening there. And over time we were able to change the culture to one where people talked about each other to a culture where people talked to each other. and it truly changed the culture of that environment, that department. I would think, and I want you to respond to this and react to this, that passive people, if they thought about it, would realize that the passivity, their reluctance to be direct with someone about a problem or something that they're doing or whatever, that by avoiding it, they're dragging the whole thing out, whereas if they were much more direct and respectful but direct they could deal with the problem dispense with it be done with it and move on and that in fact by being passive they're just causing themselves a lot more grief over a longer period of time absolutely i remember i had a physician in my office one day telling me that they were having a problem with one of our therapist and going on and on and I and I looked at the physician and I said have you talked to the therapist about this oh that's right we're doing that now which I found really uh amazing that uh that a medical doctor at that level could not understand the concept but what I shared with the physician was do you understand that if I go to this therapist and say this is how this uh psychiatrist feels about you, what is that going to do to the relationship?

49:44And so I think that indirectness really creates more problems, as you say, than it does help to resolve those problems. It would be better for the two people to get together and agree to disagree and stay professional than it is if they are trying to indirectly deal with a person's behavior or problem. What typically do you think is the reaction when a passive person musters up the courage or whatever it takes to be honest, direct, and respectful to a reactive person? Do you think they respect the passive person more? I absolutely do. I remember a situation walking into a room with a bunch of other people where a person was talking about a decision I made and was very angry.

50:31And so the first thing I did to them was I said, can we go to my office and talk about this? And they said, no. And so I used an honest, direct, respectful skill, and here's what I said to the person. I said, have you already made up your mind about why I made that decision, or would you like some additional information? Which stopped them dead in their tracks and in front of all the other people. They said, okay, I want some additional information. Now, when I began to explain to this person why the decision was made how it was made by the group, within 30 seconds they were angry again and in my face.

51:03And so I simply looked and said, I'm a little confused because a minute ago you told me you wanted to hear an explanation of how this decision was made and now you seem angry and are in my face. And the person said, I don't want to hear from you. And so I walked away and every bone in my body wanted to go back and defend myself, but I didn't do it. I resisted that temptation. Every person that was in that room came to my office that day and said, we really thought you stepped up to the plate and handled that very well. And the person that was creating the problem came to my office the next day and apologized for their behavior, and we were able to come to a resolution.

51:45So I do think it builds respect, not only internal self-respect, but respect from other people. Well, if your statistic is true that 80 % of the population is passive, then this is a lot of good information for a lot of people to consider because, as you've clearly shown, being passive, as well as being at the other end of the scale and being reactive, both of those extremes have real consequences that aren't particularly good, and there is a path to fix it. Dennis Adams has been my guest. His book is Honest, Direct, Respectful, Three Simple Words That Will Change Your Life. There's a link to his book in the show notes.

52:27Thank you, Dennis.

52:32Ever feel a sneeze coming on and then try to stop it? You probably shouldn't do that. A medical journal reported the case of a 34-year-old man who ruptured his throat when he pinched his nose and clamped his mouth shut in order to stop a sneeze. He suffered significant pain, was barely able to speak or swallow, and spent seven days in the hospital. It seems that halting a sneeze by blocking your nostrils and your mouth could be a dangerous move and should be avoided, according to the authors of this study. They say it can lead to numerous complications, including air trapped in the chest between both lungs, perforation of the eardrum, and even rupture of a cerebral aneurysm.

53:20So I guess if you feel a sneeze coming on, let it rip. And that is something you should know. You are listening to this podcast on some sort of podcast platform. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, CastBox. And some of the platforms that you listen to podcasts on allow you to leave ratings and reviews. So since you're there anyway, listening to this podcast, leave a rating and review. A five-star one would be nice. And tell a couple of people you know to give this show a listen. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Pink Panther us here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it.

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