How you see yourself

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0:38We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Do you remember picture day at school? You step into an empty classroom, maybe a pastel backdrop set up with blazing bright lights. Okay, next up. And the photographer. Stand here, please. Who is in the middle of taking dozens, if not hundreds of kids' photos. All right, shoulders back. Starts posing you like a doll. Get your chin. Turn your body. Fading your back. Adjust your shoulder.

1:23Head to the side. Now sit up straight. Okay, now look at the camera. Before you know it, a moment which feels so incredibly forced, awkward, and unnatural Smile. is captured for all time. And then you go back to class, never wanting to have your photo taken ever again. To many people, getting their photos taken is a very traumatizing experience. This is David Suh. When you bring up a camera to someone, like a lot of people just shrivel. Like their body just reacts immediately without them even commanding it. David is the guy on the other side of the camera. He is a portrait photographer. And I think a lot of people as young children who didn't want to be photographed and were put through that, I don't think many people realize that we hold that sort of grudge, whatever it is.

2:22I think a lot of people hold that in their bodies and it shows up in front of the camera. And when we internalize that, it shapes how we act. It shapes how we show up in the world. David sees this all the time with clients. Confident, interesting people with incredible careers and hobbies don't know how to feel natural in front of the camera. And so David has made it his mission to reject a culture of awkward scripted poses. Are you tired of being stuck doing the same poses over and over again? And instead found a way to help people feel more confident, more themselves. My name is David Saw. I'm a professional photographer and I'll show you how to go from that to this.

3:07He has millions of followers on TikTok and Instagram, where he dishes out practical and thoughtful advice. From how to pose in direct sunlight at the beach without getting washed out. Yeah, are we the two friends here? To how to take a photo of two friends who are of very different heights. When you see a stranger photographing something, our human tendency is to find out what's happening. To how to take pictures in public without being that obnoxious person taking up the whole sidewalk. Speaking of attention, don't bring unnecessary attention. So how do we take this want of looking good in photos and then meet ourselves where we're at with how we perceive ourselves?

3:46And now it's about moving our bodies and saying, how do we find comfort in our body when we're so used to tearing it down and saying, oh, it looks terrible. It's not perfect. How do we do that? How do we reconcile the image that we have of ourselves with the one that we show to the world? That's what today's episode is about. Self-perception. From why we want to think of ourselves as good people to definitions of beauty that have been exported from the plastic surgery capital of the world. How can we make peace with who we are on the outside and inside? For David Sa, a good portrait marries those two things, inside and out.

4:34But this kind of thinking was not obvious to David when he first went to college. At that time, I was doing a lot of college grad photos. David had wanted to study dance, but that didn't work out. So instead, he majored in design at UC Davis. Taking photos was a great way to make some extra money. I was like, OK, like I have a nice camera and I can take decent photos and everyone's everyone's offering to do it for X amount of price. So let me just get myself some money to go to dinner a few times a week. In the beginning, it was very cookie cutter. David says he Googled grad school photo poses for inspiration.

5:19Right. Like there is a sense of style to it. Maybe it's a girl graduating, she's got her hands on her hips, and then she's got her arm up in the air. Maybe it's like throwing the cap or something like that. If anything, it was a big roadblock for me. I didn't want to think about poses. The only reason I was posing people was because I knew I had to. They weren't professional models. And I'm glad I came across my mentor, Sue Bryce, at that time, too, because Sue was the one who really taught me that we can't be put into boxes. And I think a lot of us feel comfortable when we are in a box and we look like other people and it's safe.

6:00but you know we as photographers can be in control and we can we can control the outcome of how photos come out for everyone and how people experience being in front of the camera and so when he realized he was responsible not just for taking composed pictures but for making his clients feel comfortable David threw out his list of poses and and then people started realizing, oh yeah, like David doesn't just do cookie cutter poses. He's really thinking about each individual. He started having fun with his clients, moving with them, dancing with them, and kind of inventing new poses on the spot, whatever felt natural.

6:45And now he has his own ethos. Posing is, it's a practice of being present in your body and communicating who you are through body language. Today, when David starts working with a client, he asks them a few questions. How do you want to see yourself? How do you want to feel in these photos? How do you define feeling like yourself? Then they look into clothing options. Let's look at fabrics. Let's look at structures and silhouettes. And let's also deconstruct what some of these clothing, the association that's tied to these clothing. I could really just redefine this and I could wear and don this suit.

7:32I could wear this beautiful dress. And through this exercise at the end, they're realizing I am so much more than how I perceive myself. You look great. Okay, they've got an outfit that they feel good in. There's hair, makeup, and then like what actually happens in the session? Let me have you. How do you get them to loosen up to feel comfortable? The process I take everyone through is first just getting really present in the moment. Getting really present in the moment. And there's many different ways to do that, right? There's breathing, just breathing and slowing down. Feeling the toes that you have that's contacting your shoe then to the ground.

8:19If they're sitting, then I really help them feel like, what are you sitting on? And that just brings them back to the present moment and in their body. And I'm guiding her movements at that point, right? We've done our hair and makeup. She wants to explore in the way she wants to explore. And now I'm just trying to channel as much of the definition that she's given me. David gets his clients to mirror him His movements, his facial expressions He wants them to feel relaxed and at play And I'm just moving my arm over here And I say wave with me, that's awesome And the other side, wave with me You're dancing with them It's a dance, and not only am I physically mirroring them I'm also emotionally mirroring them Because I'm doing every step of the way with them sometimes we might need some help there you just look like you're having such a good time can you tell the story about where you decided to get into a dress because your client was wearing a dress um and and sort of an epiphany that you had yeah i love making things easier for people and helping them sort of unlock something new.

9:41And it's really important to be, especially as a guy, for me to feel that if I'm going to be creating a safe space for a lot of my female clients, I want to make sure I'm not operating a place again from judgment. And it's being curious, being playful and saying, yeah, I'm going to put on this dress and have fun. You want to be as in the skin of the person you're talking to as possible, it seems like exactly my social media following too uh the bigger bigger demographic is is women there as well so i get a lot of questions like david how do you pose uh for your pregnancy photos how do you pose in a miniskirt and i remember putting on my first miniskirt and i was like oh my gosh i feel so exposed yeah um and i realized yeah i definitely cannot suggest that pose i was about to do in my just baggy jeans right right right so there's there's like a practical, like technical sense to it of like, yeah, I need to really understand just like you said, like, if you're in a tight dress, you just can't physically move your body in a certain way.

10:47And there are feelings to it that we just would never know unless we try to be physically in their shoes. But David, do you think sometimes people have unrealistic expectations? They're going to think, you know, if I just can prove to myself that I can look amazing in a photo, or I can show the world how hot I can be, that's going to fix something. That's going to solve something for me. Well, of course. So that's why the reflection in the beginning is so important to say, this isn't for anybody else but you. And, you know, I can't control all of that. We do have our egos, right? And we also do, I want to make sure I tell my clients, Listen, many clients would say this is very therapeutic, but by no means am I a therapist.

11:39I'm not here to help you through just like different mental health issues, right? If that's the thing. So yes, it's acknowledging that as well. Are you a proponent or believer of the saying, fake it till you make it? no i've come to really distance myself from that saying especially in the world of uh posing i think it's a way to reflect how i think society defines posing like fake it right like suck in your stomach because you don't you don't want to see that because i grew up uh thinking that the one definition of hot was like chris evans with his six-pack abs coming out the ocean once we hit adulthood and the older we get i feel like we start to um create even more of a stubborn belief of who we think we are versus like oh yeah let's let's try this let's play with this and a session with me is almost like um breaking down your lego castle that you super glue together and really snapping your finger and saying you know what it's actually a sandcastle now let's rebuild it again.

12:52You want to see a picture? That's David Suh, the king of poses. You can see his full talk at TED.com and find his Instagram at David Suh Photo. On the show today, self-perception. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back. I can't believe that's me. Like, I'm still in shock.

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14:52Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click grainger.com, or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done. This message comes from WTTW. Join Jeffrey Baer as he tells the story of how railroads shaped Chicago. Riding the Rails with Jeffrey Baer premieres April 13th at 7 p.m. on WTTW. you. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, our self-image and why so many of us so desperately want to think of ourselves as good people. Let's say you're walking down the street and you accidentally bump against someone on the sidewalk you didn't mean to. You didn't realize they were going to tilt that way and they call you a name and makes you feel horrible.

15:44This is NYU business school professor and psychologist Dolly Chug. And I'm like, wait, am I a jerk? I was looking at my phone. I really should have been looking up. I guess I'm kind of a jerk. That exact situation has happened to me and it was upsetting. And Dolly says there's a good reason why. Many of us have what psychologists call a central moral identity. We care about whether we're seen as a good person and whether we feel like good people. And the idea in that moment is that you weren't intending to do harm to someone, but you inadvertently did. Now your self-view is being threatened because there's something you've done that doesn't match how you see yourself showing up in the world.

16:33How do different people define good. What are some of the different definitions that you've heard? Sure. Well, some people define being good as holding a door open. Other people might define being a good person as being someone who treats everyone the same, no differences based off of gender, perhaps. Other people might define good person as someone who does no harm to others, just manages themselves and doesn't cause any problems. Someone else might define being a good person as someone who goes above and beyond, who is making things better, not just doing no harm. So when we wake up every morning, we each have this sort of self-image of who we are in the world.

17:22And generally, we're trying to stick to a moral code that we've set for ourselves. Well, the way I would think about it is people do vary in how central their moral identity is to them. And so do people wake up, as you said, thinking, how am I going to be a good person? I think some people do, but I think most of us think about how are we going to get the kids off to school and how am I going to get to work on time and is there traffic and what's the weather? That said, our moral identity is often guiding how we react to what we call self-threat, to anything that makes us feel like we are not a good person.

18:04We may not all have the same definition, but within whatever our definition is, that moral identity is important to many of us. Dolly Chug continues from the TED stage. Now, if somebody challenges it, like they question us for a joke we tell, or maybe they say our workforce is homogenous or a slippery business expense, we go into red zone defensiveness. I mean, sometimes we call out all the ways in which we help people from marginalized groups, where we donate to charity the hours we volunteer to nonprofits. We work to protect that good person identity. It's important to many of us. But what if I told you that our attachment to being good people is getting in the way of us being better people?

18:56What if I told you that our definition of good person is so narrow, it's scientifically impossible to meet? So that is a big statement that it is impossible to meet our own definition of what a good person is. And you have done studies on this. Walk us through your research. What have you found when it comes to trying to be the good person that we think we are? Yeah. So we looked at things like why do we sometimes not even notice a decision we are about to make has ethical implications? Or why are we so able to overlook an ethical failure in ourselves that we would jump all over if it was in our roommate?

19:44Or if I do something sketchy earlier in the day, do I kind of compensate later in the day and do something particularly pro-social? But other times I do something sketchy earlier in the day and I get sketchier as the day goes on. So in other words, like, why do these spirals sometimes go downward and sometimes go upward? So there is lots of literature by a number of extraordinary scholars that have shown all of those effects. And we were able to map out a theory that elegantly made sense of all of it. So the theory that you're talking about is what you call bounded ethicality. Explain. So bounded ethicality refers to the idea that sometimes we behave ethically and sometimes we don't.

20:35Sometimes that's intentional and sometimes it's not. And this model of bounded ethicality challenges ways of thinking where you're either a good person or you're not. Either you're a racist or you're not. Either you're unethical or you're not. But that binary idea, it's quite seductive, but it's misleading and it's scientifically and psychologically inaccurate. Okay, so we may think we're a good person, but you're saying there is no such thing. It is a sliding scale. And throughout the day, we are making decisions, taking actions that affect that self-view, that push it up and down that scale.

21:15Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes that self-view is validated by others. You hold the door open. Oh, you're so kind, someone might say as you go into the office. So now I'm like, oh, OK. I don't feel threatened. Right. I feel bolstered. Speaking of the world. Yeah, yeah. So I'm not looking like I need to protect that self-view. So now I'm in the office and, you know, I don't know that they really need this extra keyboard here. And I could really use one at home. It's just sitting here. Nobody's taking it. And the keyboard ends up in my bag heading home. And, okay, let's go back to that scenario that we talked about earlier that I bumped into someone on the sidewalk.

22:01I didn't mean to, but the person calls me a name and I'm thinking, oof, maybe I am rude. Maybe I'm a bad person. Yes, you're not feeling like a good person. And in this case, you're also being told by others that you're not a good person. And so now I'm going to spiral more towards something that will bring me back up to that positive self-view. you know, oh, when I get in, I, oh, the security guard looked like they'd had a tough night. I'm going to go grab him a cup of coffee when I get my own. To sort of make up for it. Yeah. And our brain is a gold medal gymnast when it comes to the gymnastics necessary to make our thoughts, our perceptions, our beliefs, what we want them to be.

22:51We don't realize how much our self-view as a good person is affecting our behavior. That in fact, we're working so hard to protect that good person identity that we're not actually giving ourselves space to learn from our mistakes and actually be better people. So what I've been thinking about is what if we were to just forget about being good people? Just let it go. And instead, set a higher standard of being a goodish person. A goodish person absolutely still makes mistakes. As a goodish person, in fact, I become better at noticing my own mistakes. I don't wait for people to point them out. I practice finding them.

23:39And as a result, sure, sometimes it can be embarrassing. It can be uncomfortable. We put ourselves in a vulnerable place. But through all that vulnerability, just like in everything else we've tried to ever get better at, we see progress. We see growth. We allow ourselves to get better. Being a goodish person is someone who has a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset. In other words, they view issues of morality as skills, as knowledge, as things that are a work in progress and that I can get better at. Just like I can get better at pickleball, I can get better at being an ethical person with practice.

24:23On the other hand, good is fixed in time. It's static. It forces me in a corner because there's nowhere to go. I actually, I've been watching, there's all these Saturday Night Live documentaries. And Bowen Yang, the first Asian actor on the show, said like there was a moment where somebody wrote something that made him feel super uncomfortable. And he just went and talked to them and they said, noted, it will not happen again. Thank you for telling me. I love that. I mean, one of my closest friends from grad school, he was introducing someone, another researcher at a seminar. And in his attempt to be funny and personal, he had put time into putting a lovely introduction together.

25:08But he also said something that inadvertently highlighted a stereotype around her gender and racial identity. And he didn't realize he had done that. But when I heard it, I immediately was, oh, my gosh, that is not how I would want her to be introduced in that setting. So I did what any self-respecting virtue signaling person would do is I went back to my lab and I just ranted. And finally, my office mate at the time said, you know, why don't you tell him? And I was like, I literally laughed in her face. I was like, what? Like, no, I'm not going to go tell him what I just said. I don't even know him.

25:48She says, no, no, I do know him. And I think he'd want to know. I was like, okay, I will go walk by his office in case he happens to be there. And sure enough, I walked by his office. I kind of poked my head in. And I was like, well, it was just something about that seminar earlier today. I don't know. It just made me uncomfortable. This is the moment where I expected him to be like, well, thanks for coming by. I got to get back to work. And instead he said, hey, hey, just wait a minute. Let me go grab another chair so you can sit down. and he ran down the hall, got a chair and brought it into his tiny little cubicle office thing.

26:25And he said, please sit down. I really want to understand this. Can you tell me more about what you heard me say? He's now one of my closest friends. So that's a great example of what we've called being an ethical learner. They're goodish. They're trying to get better. If someone was confronted in that moment, a fixed mindset or a good person response often starts with, that's not what I meant, or I'm sorry you heard it that way, or what I really meant was. Every statement I just made was some form of trying to protect oneself. In a growth mindset, the response would be something like, wow, I didn't know that.

27:08Please tell me more. There are some who might say, well, this has been taken too far. Yeah. That there's a generation of people who act as the morality police, that you can't have a meeting without there being a ton of people wanting to show off how good they are and how thoughtful they are about their fellow colleagues. When really, based on what you just taught us, a lot of it is about their own self-image. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's some truth to that, right? I mean, what they're picking up on is sometimes this virtue signaling is less about being better and it's more about feeling better.

27:48And it's less about looking at ourselves and it's more about critiquing others. And I would also say that what that individual is shortchanging themselves on in that moment is one of the greatest joys of being a human being, which is learning. Learning is thrilling. It's uncomfortable. It's exciting. It's painful. It's pride-inducing. It is one of the things that is most gratifying. You know, the next time you encounter that situation, when you feel a little more in the know, that feels really good. That was NYU business school professor and psychologist Dolly Chug. Her most recent book is called A More Just Future.

28:38You can see her full talk at TED.com.

28:45On the show today, how we see ourselves and why we so often want to change the way we look. Women have been pressured to keep up with evolving beauty standards for millennia. But we're going to focus on the past decade and where the latest ideas of what women should look like are coming from. South Korea. Have y 'all heard about that Korean skincare routine that everyone's been doing? It is so much better than everything in the U.S. I've been using Korean skincare for years. So the notion of having a skincare routine that is multi-step, that is really rooted in Korean culture, skincare culture.

29:27This is journalist Elise Hu. The idea of having glass skin or dewy skin. It really cleanses my skin and makes it feel so good. Having such a beautiful canvas that you don't need to wear much makeup and you can kind of do the no makeup makeup look. My pores are like basically invisible. No acne. It's amazing. That ideal is also from Korean culture. So there's a lot that we're sort of used to and normalized to as just skincare these days that is tied to stuff that Korea has been doing for decades. Through TikTok and other social media, Korean beauty trends have gone global. They've also created a massive industry.

30:08Yeah, South Korea is exporting more cosmetics than they export smartphones, sending out sheet masks, foot peels. They're also huge on all the wands and the injectables that are getting used in med spas across the world. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people also travel to South Korea for cosmetic procedures. I'm flying 15 and a half hours to Seoul, South Korea for my surgery in Gangnam. It costs me less to fly to Seoul, stay at a hotel and get all of my beauty treatments done than it does for just the treatments in the U.S. And now South Korea has the world's highest concentration of cosmetic surgeons.