The Sex Expert (Esther Perel): The Relationship Crisis No One Talks About That's Killing Your Sex Life!

25:55So you can imagine everything hits me at once. Yes, I go with my team, all the to -do lists, everything. Steve, we need you to sign this off all at once, but then I'm back in front of her. So she's experiencing that ambiguous loss. And the expectation was that we haven't seen each other for a while. So this is, you know, so the question is, can you carve out a half an hour that's clean, an hour that's clean? So connects. Yeah, but don't do that just for her. You have to imagine that when you do what you do and it's always bleeding into each other and all your roles collapse into the same space, that it actually is doing something for you, to you, not for you, to you.

26:43And that to actually close the phone, tell people to call you in an hour, you want me to think and to actually drop in, is going to give you a level of energy, of oxygen, of well -being that is way more important or as important as every supplement you may be swallowing. Yeah, because it's true. It's not just for her. Yeah, I am excited to see you, and I'm excited to connect in here. You said it correctly, like I just multitasked. I tried multitasked. Yes. I let everything down. Yes, the bus, the buttcaster, the disc, the dad, and the boyfriend, that's all in the same thing. It's an indigestion.

27:25So you're a fine of scheduling, clean time to do things. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You can call it scheduling. You can call it the medication. You can call it delineation. We are social creatures who really orient ourselves in time and in space. When everything happens to us at the same time, we get headaches. They not always experienced as headaches, but in fact, we get a confusion inside. We're not here, we're not here, we're not here, we're not here, we're just okay. So you can call that scheduling, or you can call it that, you know, when you go to place, when you go to the gym, you basically put on certain clothes, you prepare yourself for that.

28:02It's an activity that comes with a role, that comes with a set of things that comes with a delineation of time, that makes you go to a certain space. Where you're going to go do that thing. And this happens when you go out at night, this is going to go out for dinner, when you... The same thing is for home. It's a... If you are going to spend the moment with her, however short it is, if it's clean and present, not just kind of semi there, ambiguously present, it will change a lot of things for you, for her and for the two of you. Before we sat down today, I messaged a group of 10 of my closest friends.

28:42I put them all in a group chat and I told them I was going to be speaking to you today. So I said to them, can you tell me what question you have for Esther Perl? These are all my 10 of my best friends that you wouldn't ever say out loud. How can I be satisfied with just one sexual partner? I have been unfaithful with my partner in the past. And I feel guilty about it, should I tell them? I no longer find my partner attractive, but I don't know how to tell her. I love her, but I don't find her attractive. Is it probably the most interesting one? I think the one that I would probably address is also about the infidelity and about you, guilt.

29:31That's... That and also to this person read state of affairs because I spent many years writing this book about infidelity and trying to offer a very nuanced perspective on this very subject. But here's the thing. To tell somebody something just because you don't have a clean conscience and you feel guilty isn't always the kind thing to do. Ask yourself what will happen to your partner or to your relationship for that matter. If you speak about this now and who you're doing it for, I think honesty sometimes is extremely caring and at other times can be very cruel. It cleanses you and it destroys another person.

30:18Deal with your responsibility and deal with your guilt and face the consequences of your behavior and treat your partner with all the good things that actually say, I now am willing to really invest in here and make up for what I did without having to destroy the narrative of the relationship because everybody has a story about their relationship. Everybody has a set of shared assumptions about their relationship and you are going to come in and just say last year or two years ago or five years ago I did X, Y and Z and from that moment on you robbed the other person of their narrative. You may think you did something that was honest and sometimes that is the case, but many times you actually create an enormous amount of hurt.

31:09If you feel guilty, it's not bad. Deal with your guilt. Face it, take your responsibility and make your relationship the best relationship you can and honor your partner in that way. Don't honor them by putting your dirt onto them. That is a different way of saying and that is not for everyone but I think that it is an important perspective to include here because we live in this era where transparency supposedly is the best model for everything and people dish stuff out on other people that destroys them in the name of and when you are not longer attracted to your person, ask yourself what is that about?

31:52Are you paying attention? I think people often just think that attraction is something like I look at you and I should just instantly have a response.

32:07Sometimes it is also because I haven't really taken a good look and sometimes it is because what I am looking at isn't necessarily anymore what draws me in. Attraction is a very fluid thing. It comes and goes. When I am angry at you, I am not nearly attracted to you as when I am looking at you being so kind to someone and I say what a great person you are and I just want to come in and I run over and I want to hug you and I want to hold you. That is attraction too. We are not just talking about the attraction to have sex with somebody. Attraction is part of a story. It is part of a context. If you think that you are just going to watch Netflix for three hours, scroll on your phone for another two and then turn around and say you are so attractive and I am so turned on by you.

32:55You are off. This is not the way that it works and then it is easy to replace the person and to just think, you know, no shiny object, we will be very attracted again. But attraction is a part of an interaction. These two words have the same etymological root. If there is zero interaction, now if you have a partner who neglects themselves, a partner who, you know, there are lots of things that people also do that diminishes them. There was a woman in an event I just did and you know, there had been some hurt in the relationship and so she said I am no longer attracted, which is not the same as I have no desire.

33:40Basically she had no desire. And she said, but I have worked talks. We have talked everything out. We have discussed it. I said, yeah, you may have discussed it, but your body shut down. Your body carries the anger. Your body carries the hurt. Your body carries the feelings and your body doesn't want to open. So obviously it is not over. You know, so that is two is attraction. It is one of the most popular things that men whisper to me in silence, which is they can't seem to get that. Listen, I am saying man because my majority of my good friends that whisper to me are men. So it might be the case for women.

34:16I just can't speak to that. Is that they are unsure how they could possibly be faithful for a prolonged period of time and have one partner for a prolonged period of time. I think that you would be an interesting thing to tell your men friends. Women get bored with monogamy much sooner than men. Really? Yes. That's not what men think. No, men think she is not interested in sex. And what they should probably replace it with is that she is not interested in the sex she is going to have. In order to want sex, it needs to be sex that is worth wanting. If a woman to remain interested, it needs to be interesting.

35:02And so the fact that women don't necessarily experience the same liberties, at least historically and culturally all over the world, that men do. So they remain in their homes and they are not as unfitful because there's been a double standard around infidelity forever everywhere in the world. For this particular friend of mine, where is that message? What should I say to him when he says, how can you be satisfied with one sexual partner? That's literally just so you know that I'm not just I believe you. But some people at home might think that it's like me as a proxy of but but maybe you're not, maybe you're not, maybe you want to have more partners, maybe you want your partner to have other partners too.

35:48That's not always so the case, right? He doesn't want to lose her. That's right. They've been together I think 25 years. So you know, it won't, you may have sometimes frustrations. There's a few options, right? You either say we have a relationship that can welcome other people. We're not exclusive. But she's going to leave then. Because she doesn't want that. Yeah. Okay. So then the next thing is as best as you can make it as interesting and as fun and as pleasurable as it can be. And my first question to you is have you been doing the same old for God knows how many years and with that in mind, I wouldn't be surprised that you know that attracted or that she's not that interested for that matter.

36:31So if you want to be satisfied or more satisfied, I mean, you have a dialogue, you know, and the more satisfied means bring more of yourself and and and make this experience more erotic, more pleasurable, more playful, more fulfilling. You may remain frustrated and you may say I would love to have other people. And for that matter, maybe your partner wants would want it too, but that's not the kind of relationship that she wants. That doesn't mean she hasn't thought about other people. And it's certainly what mean that if she fantasizes, she fantasizes about you. So everybody is keeping their secrets here, you know.

37:13And then the next thing is are you putting more emphasis on the fact that you're not as satisfied having one sexual partner or are you putting more focus on the fact that you're going to make this sexual experience with your partner as pleasurable and rich as can be. If you find yourself more on the complaining side, then you're going to be constantly more unsatisfied. I think much of it is actually he and many others want the best of all worlds. And in life, we're not willing to accept trade -offs. So in your saying, you're saying make a decision. If you want that life, then be honest about that life.

37:48If you don't want that life, then make it smiley and invest in that thing to make it better. Yeah, that's the other alternative. So more with the food you eat, go buy out the food and cook at home and make it more rich and more interesting if you don't want to have the same dinner every night in the house. The question is what are people doing to make their relationships more vibrant, more erotic, more alive? I mean, this is really, by the way, it's not about having more sex. You can have more sex and not feel much. It's about making it more alive and vibrant. That is what much of my work is about.

38:22It's cultivating the eroticism and the aliveness in relationships on the personal front. And you ask people, what do you do to make it rich and interesting? And you find the laziness, the complacency, the constant, same old, same old. And then the complaint about it. And then you say that is really self -defeating. Are you frustrated with people, Esther? No, I smile at you.

38:51I smile at the way that we can lie to ourselves. I smile at the way we can complain about others. And as if we have no implication. I smile at the way we don't want to take responsibility for actually getting the things that we really want. You must see the same patterns over and over again. Those ones I do, not all, but this kind of pattern, which is actually why I've expanded from only working in the romantic sphere to working also in the workplace. Because relationships are richer than just this. And I think that this friend, I would have a five -minute conversation with him. And I would ask him, there's very questions.

39:36I would ask the partner also those very questions. And I would have a few ideas. It's not Uber complicated. You're going to record me to him.

39:50What would you say to him? What's his name? I should be the answer. Let's call him John. John. So, yes, John, we are not necessarily curious only about one partner. Many people would like to have other partners in the context of your relationship. That is not an option for you as I understand. So if that is the situation and you really deeply care about your partner and your relationship with her, then the next question is, what do you do to energize your relationship? To bring playfulness, curiosity, imagination, eroticism, as in life force, as in aliveness, not as in sex, to your relationship.

40:39Are you bringing the leftovers home and the best of yourself goes to work? Or are you also bringing your creativity, your energy, your curiosity to your relationship? My sense is that if you do that, there is a good chance that you will actually have a more satisfying erotic connection with your partner. That doesn't mean you won't have interest curiosity fantasies about others, but it will give free you from this position in which you just kind of say, I'm bored, I'm not satisfied, I would like a little more diversity and all of that. And just for you, do not imagine that you're the only one in your relationship who thinks this way and wants this.

41:21It's just that you may have a partner who doesn't want the consequences of it. That doesn't mean she wouldn't fantasize about the plurality herself. I'm going to send that. Please listen. To the ad hoc intervention. You just need a honest person. Have you ever done that? Any podcast? And Perrell said, we're even more quickly bored with monogamy than men. And that is the secret that people do not understand. That means that in order for her to remain engaged, it has to remain more engaging and interesting and fun and pleasurable. And if it's just to get it done and just to do it for the sake of doing it, then she really can often spare it.

42:17And while men are much more able to remain actually contrary to what he describes, to remain interested. That doesn't mean they don't want others as well, but they can remain more interested in their partner without having to change it like that. And it is interpreted as women are less interested in sex rather than women need more in order to remain interested. They need more of the emotional stuff. They need not necessarily. Not only. They need more imagination, more risk, more connection, more attention. More of a lot of whatever is her thing. Right. Okay. It's one of the most important things I learned, actually, that kind of turned it around for me.

42:59Because once you begin to look at it like that, it plays with this classic gender division, men want, women doesn't boring. It's like, it becomes true just because we say it all the time, but that doesn't mean it is. This is true for a lot of these gender things. As my friend replied, and the essence of what they said, he said, she's right, full stop. The intimacy in our relationship has died. And it died so long ago that I think part of me doesn't feel like I can revive it anymore. We're so used to the relationship being off. Okay. Put the mic on. All right. John, he's what I would suggest. I think that you can just simply say, Steve approached me and asked me if I had a question for a step rail.

43:49And I just threw out this thing. At first, I was just kind of flippant about it. I just thought, what do you do when you're, you know? But in fact, when she answered, I realized that this is a bigger thing between us. And this is an emptiness and a gap that we allowed to create and that I have contributed to. And I don't just want to leave it at that. So I thought, I'm going to sit down and actually write to you. I want to just write some of my thoughts because I think when we sit, we avoid the subject, we circle around it or I avoid it or I'm defensive about it. Or anyway, whatever I do is that I've done.

44:26I don't know you enough, John, to know the details of that. And then you just really say, you know, something died a long time ago. And I feel awkward about it. But I miss it. And I miss you. And I miss us. And I would like to know if you are willing to reengage with me and for us to rekindle, its desire goes through intermittent eclipses. It's like the moon. It disappears, but it can reappear. And I would love to invite you to reengage with me to bring back the light, the spark inside of us because we can do it. We are more than just this and because just living side by side, I don't think is going to be enough for either of us.

45:07And I'm prepared to do my part. Would you be willing to do yours? That was beautiful. That was beautiful. And then let's see if it still answers. I made the biggest investment I've ever made in a company because of my girlfriend. I came home one night and my lovely girlfriend was up at 1 a .m. in the morning, pulling her hair out as she tried to piece together her own online store for her business. And in that moment, I remembered an email I'd had from a guy called John, the founder of Stanstore, our new sponsor and a company I've invested incredibly heavily in. And Stanstore helps creators to sell digital products courses, coaching and memberships all through a simple customizable link in bio system.

45:53And it handles everything, payments, bookings, emails, community engagement, and even links with Shopify. And I believe in it so much that I'm going to launch a Stan challenge. And as part of this challenge, I'm going to give away $100 ,000 to one of you. If you want to take part in this challenge, if you want to monetize the knowledge that you have, visit stevenbartlett .stan .store to sign up. And you'll also get an extended 30 day free trial of Stanstore if you use that link. Your next move could quite frankly change everything. Are you hearing a lot of couples in your practice, increasingly say, either member of the couple that they don't like having sex?

46:34Not more than before. I wrote about 20 years ago that was all about the dilemmas of desire. You've always heard it. I always heard it. No, I don't think that they have fundamental changes around that. I think the changes are the fact that people are spending less time together where they are actually attentive to each other. They're half there. Their attention is fragmented. They're multitasking all the time. That's what is changing. And if you have less connection, less attention, less intimacy, less interest, why do you think that people are suddenly going to be turned on? But is the sex getting less interesting?

47:10No, their life with each other is less interesting. And this is last time when I spoke to you like this, you told me, what is happening at me?

47:22Their life is less interesting. The sex is the consequence of seven other things before. God, they haven't said anything interesting to each other. They haven't loved, they haven't kissed each other. They haven't looked at each other. They haven't barely touched each other. And suddenly the sex needs to be all hot and passionate on what freaking basis. Their life is not interesting. Their communication, their interaction, their conversations, their attention to each other. The fact that they matter, the fact that their presence means something in each other's lives. That's what is all connected to long -term sex.

48:00Long -term sex doesn't come just because I look at you and I'm all hot. It's a different mechanism. So you're asking a question that happens here. And I am telling you, if all of this is rather boring and unengaged, it's like at work. I'm doing a lot of this stuff around work. It's like if the engagement is low. On what basis do we think people are going to perform? The performance is here, but the performance is a response to the engagement, which is a response to the culture, which is a response to the quality of the relationships between the people who work together. It's the same in the personal realm.

48:45What element of responsibility do I have in making sure that my relationship with myself is great in order to have a great relationship with someone else? Because a lot of people like to play in... I think the premise is inaccurate. Okay. Fixed my premise. The premise is that it's time for us to begin to question the intense level of individualism and self -thinking, self -love, self -care, self -fulfillment, self -awareness. It's all about the self -infront. And the presumption is that if all those levels of the self have been attended to, we will be better able to attend to other people. So what do you think about this culture of self -care and self -love?

49:26I think it's gone overboard. I think it's a distortion. I think it feeds consumerism. I think that there's a lot of elements of it that are highly important, but we have completely lost the fact that what actually is at the root of well -being, happiness, longevity, meaning is in our relationships and our connections with others as well as with ourselves. When you give to others, you will, it's depressed. When you feel like you make a difference in other people's life, it makes you feel better chemically too. If you go on the street and you make some, you give compliments to people and you tell them that they look really great or this is beautiful what they're wearing and you've made a smile on someone's face, your oxytocin levels go up too.

50:15Doing for others makes us feel better about ourselves as well, not all the time, not every circumstance, but that voluntary connecting and being engaged with other people, whereas being engaged with oneself. Have you seen how to gym how people are super engaged with themselves lifting and but nobody is interacting with anybody? And many of these people go home and there's nobody there, it's not like they're doing this for someone that's waiting for them. Relating to yourself is not a goal in and of itself. It is a step to something, but it's not in and of itself an achievement. The goal is relating to others.

50:55The goal is, yes, is having meaningful relationships, meaningful connections with other people and other causes that are beyond yourself. Part of why we are so miserable and so unhappy and so is because we are so constantly focused on ourselves. There's a world, there's nature, there's politics, there's climate, there's people, there's poverty, there's a ton of things to be interested in, there's art, there's creativity, there's a lot of things that are beyond us that is beyond maximizing and optimizing and hacking and focusing on myself and naval gazing. And I am a therapist and I work with individuals who I am helping to have a better relationship with themselves and deal with what stands in the way to relate to others, not what stands in the way to feel good about me, period.

51:48With gender roles, have you seen men get increasingly emasculated by the success of women in your practice and have you seen also the women get sort of frustrated with the man because he's now not the breadwinner, there was the start I saw that said again, rough numbers, 70 % of women expect the man to be the breadwinner. But then there's this bigger social narrative that actually know 50 -50 or you know, equality is the case. And I was sat here with a guy who runs the men and boys clinic, I think it's called the men and boys institute or something, Richard Reeves. And Richard Reeves was a stay at home dad and then his partner, and doing all of this work about men and equality, the self -proclaimed feminist I believe.

52:35And then his wife turned around and one day I was like, you know, and I've heard this quite a lot, I've heard from my successful female friends that part of the reason they think they can't find a man is that men feel emasculated by their success. And on the counter point, I'm wondering if it goes the other way. Can I take this a little differently? Sure, please, whatever. Emasculation is a word that doesn't exist in the feminine. It's always been a masculine concern, which is part of why I said to you that masculinity is an identity that constantly has to prove itself. If it was so solid, it wouldn't have to constantly have to show you that it really is serious and it's the real thing.

53:22There is, you know, those things do not translate on the feminine side. The word loser doesn't exist in the feminine either. And this is historical, this is not new. That men have had the challenge with powerful women is not new. That women have wanted men to be both powerful and nurturing is not new. That fathers have often been ascended to it there. I think that there's a, for me, the engagement with some of your question is that it plays into a whole discourse about men and women that at this point somehow puts them completely apart, each one kind of more and more angry at the other side. And I don't really want to participate in that.

54:09The women are talking about the uselessness and the men are talking about the bitches that and I don't find that helpful. People, I don't think it's true. I think there are fathers and men all over the world doing everything they can to save their family, their wives, they're, you know, it has nothing to do just with how much they earn. The world is filled with people who want to give a better life to their family and to their children, men who work day and night in order to provide. And I think that to turn this conversation into that section that we are referring to is true. It exists, but it is not a fair rendering of men, of masculinity, of fathers, of brothers, of husbands and of wives.

54:58That there is a group of women who are out earning the men. Yes, women have earned men for a long time in all kinds of industries, not just at the higher levels. That men have stayed, have not been home as primary parents. I think gay couples have shown us a whole new range. It's like it's time to kind of move on a little bit. When you say that we know how to relate to each other, and I think you said that it starts with being aware of ourselves. Is that roughly what you said? That it starts with having a sort of a self awareness of yourself? I think that it's a constant combination, because what I'm saying is that in order to have self -awareness, you need to understand your connection with others.

55:44Your self -awareness is not developed here, alone by myself. You get to know yourself through your relationships with people. It is in the presence of another that we discover ourselves. This is in part why I'm asking these questions, because I think for a lot of men, we've understood who we are by how we relate and the role we play for others historically. I understand much of who I am when you see me with my partner. Because I will grab the door. I will grab the bags. I will help solve problems in a more logical, I'm very like, tell me how to fix it. I understand myself by being how I relate to her, taking care of her is part of my identity to me.

56:28In such a world, I think the question becomes, what is it to be a man? If I don't know what that is, I find it harder to relate to others. One of the things I love to do, but that's not on a societal level, that's me in my work. When I do retreat, relationship retreats, like I'm going to do in October in Greece. I do fishbolls, and I put all the men in a fishbowl, or all those who identify as men for that matter. And I have the women just listen to people around. For an hour or more or two, they talk about everything you just brought up. They're challenges, they're frustrations, they're hopes, they're aspirations, they're losses, they're self -doubt, they're shame, they're shadows.

57:17And people listen without judgment, without opinions, just receive the gift of having somebody be willing to expose themselves like that. It's extremely moving, it's very beautiful. And you learn a ton, and you learn how much of your projections are standing in the way, how much you make assumptions without really knowing how hard it is to truly listen. That's when it becomes to me beautiful, worthwhile, and things change, things become softer. And people start to weep in front of total strangers, and you realize humanity is bigger than gender. Gender is important, super important, but there is another layer that is just our humanity.

58:05And at this moment in our society where there's tons of uncertainties, that connecting on a human level to me supersedes some of these gender wars. There's lots of it. And I leave it to others to comment on that. But my work is to create alternative conversations, better conversations. Are you hopeful? In those moments I'm very hopeful. But are you hopeful when they leave the retreat and they get back onto the algorithms? I hope that some of them will do that, and some of them will actually experience a profound change. But in the moment I feel like I can do something. I'm hopeful when I can do something, when I can contribute, when I can create something that's really special.

58:53That's that I'm not hopeful when I'm helpless, when I'm passive. So in those moments I am hopeful because something really beautiful is happening. When people connect at a deeper level, it is very, very meaningful. Be it at work or be it at home. I mean, it's anywhere at this point where I can create these connections. People, I mean, it's a sentence that I take with me all over the time. It's the quality of your relationships will determine the quality of your lives. And my work is about helping you have better relationships, be more confident, be more connected. I can analyze a lot of these statistics, but I don't know what to do with it.

59:37Be more confident. Yes. What is confidence in that regard? Confidence is when you are able to see yourself as a flawed person and still hold yourself in high regard.

59:51That's from my fronterri real. But it is a great definition of confidence. It's not when I know when I'm sure it's none of that. It's actually when I see myself as flawed, but I still hold myself in high regard. That means I'm confident. And is there work one can do to get to such a place? Yes. Of course. Work and life experience and maturity. But for a lot of people, their work and life experience knocks them down to make them think they're just a flawed person. That's what I thought when I was in my 20s and 32. And I made a mistake. I could obsess about it for three weeks. Now it's three hours.

1:00:34Sometimes three days if it's really bad. But you know, you learn to accept, you make mistakes and life goes on and you try again. So there's no shortcut to confidence. No, no, no, no. There's only thing that I sell at least. It builds on itself. The nice thing about it is that it builds on itself. It adds layer by layer step by step. Is there anything one can do to accelerate that process? Why? So that we can become more confident quicker? No, that's called arrogance. When the 22 year olds, you know, sometimes it's arrogant. I mean, there are things you can feel confident about very early on. And you've tried them.

1:01:15And then there are other things. It's also not, I am confident. I'm confident about certain things. You can trust me on some things. You should not trust me to get you to a certain place, neither on time, neither without getting lost. So I have zero confidence in that area. But I'm quite confident in some of the things that I do. And confidence doesn't mean that I know or that I'm right. It's that I'm prepared to do things and be mistaken and not know and try again. Two different people can go through the same experience and one of their confidence can build and the other one can lose confidence.

1:01:51Yes, that is the biggest mystery question. Why two people with the same story? For one, it becomes what brings their resilience and what gives them the drive and what makes them be people that are engaged with life and the world. And for the other person, it's what broke them. It's what crushed them. It's what makes it so impossible for them to actually put one foot in front of the other. And if you can ever tell me why this and versus that, you know, why this person took it is one of the great mystery questions for any therapist for that matter. And in general, why the same circumstances build the strength of one and become the weakness of the other.

1:02:37There's clearly some kind of a pair of sunglasses in between what happened and how I perceived it or something. There must be some kind of... You know, there's a lot of things, but what we do know is that for many people who have major adverse circumstances but managed to turn use them and turn them and really make a beautiful life for themselves. It usually there was one defining factor that differentiates them from everybody else who had similar circumstances is that they had somebody who believed in them. A coach, a teacher, a neighbor, not necessarily a family member actually. Because the adversity is often in the family.

1:03:20So somebody who believed in you when you didn't believe in yourself and didn't give up even when you were fucking up. I had a lady called Dr. Lisa Feldman on the podcast recently who's a neuroscientist and one of the things she said to me has really stayed with me and I think about it a lot and I talk about it a lot, which is... She said to me, she told me the story of a young lady who grew up and had some an aggressive uncle who would like beat her. And this young lady, she was good in school, she slept well, everything was fine. And then many years later, this young lady was watching Oprah Winfrey's show and it was about domestic abuse.

1:03:54And there was women on there crying and talking about their trauma and all those things. And essentially, this young lady suddenly started to experience the symptoms of trauma. Unproductive in education couldn't sleep as well and visibly traumatized. The trauma hadn't appeared, hadn't... There wasn't symptomatic up until she watched this show with Oprah. And it made me think that is there a possibility that some of our trauma, not all of it, but some of it, is like contagious. Are we giving meaning to it when someone tells us the meaning of what happened to us? Like, are we giving meaning to the things that happened to us?

1:04:34And it goes to what we're saying here about you can go through the same thing, but into our credit differently, do we inherit the meaning externally from somewhere? You know, it's interesting because I think about this a lot with that things like anxiety. I'm like, it feels like, you know, the other world has changed and it does feel like, had I not known that anxiety existed, I probably am unsure whether I would have personally experienced it. I think that the anxiety culture actually kind of made me anxious, it made me label the feeling. And I'm just wondering if you have a perspective on this idea that we like give meaning to our experience and then that?

1:05:14Yes, of course, all the time. We give meaning to everything. We are meaning making machines. And if you don't do an individual meaning attribution, you get a collective cultural social attribution. In our society, we may call it anxiety. In another society, we may call it, the ancestors are unhappy. Somebody is a spirit, is knocking at your door. Somebody has not been properly mourned. Somebody is being degraded. So there's every ill -ease, every disease has a story, has a meaning, has an attribution. The words change. That's on a cultural level. I think it's very important to not just individualize these things and think, I give meaning.

1:06:07We give the meaning that our culture has taught us to give. So you've kind of become, you're part of the anxiety generation. So you give words of anxiety, stress, burnout. There's a whole lingo that didn't exist 40 years ago, by the way. I mean, there was words existed, but they were not nearly in the TikTok. So there were other words that people who used. And every century has certain names. Historia, we don't hear much about hysteria, there was a 19th century thing. It's mental health now. You know, so we change the words, but we still are trying to give meaning to our ill -ease. I guess this is a question of identity as well, which is, who do I think I am?

1:07:00And who I think I am? We'll probably become who I am, at least as it relates to relating to people. No. Who do you think you are? It's part of who you are and how other people see you is also a part of who you are. We are constantly looking at ourselves from the inside and from the outside. We do not exist without the integration of also the gaze from the outside in. And it's a two -way street all the time. So if I think I'm a late person, you said, you know, get there on time, then I'm likely to be late off more because I've identified with that, becomes part of my character, it starts to become how I predict my future.

1:07:46And Lisa Firmall was saying to me that the brain is this prediction machine. So it's like predicting what it will do next based on the past. So my identity is like a prediction of what I'll become. You know, maybe the same in relationship. You behavior may be a prediction, but that doesn't mean your identity. Don't confuse identity with behavior. They are connected, but your identity is a lot more than your behavior. You know, at JFK, there are three lines at the airport. One is for the tourist. One is for the American passport holder and one is for the resident alien. The tourist may have been living in the States for years, but they don't have the papers.

1:08:34So the internal definition is not recognized by the external. The American you may have been living your whole life abroad, but you're born in the US. So you have the papers, you have the external recognition, but the internal one doesn't match. And then the resident alien is the one who has been there a long time, but doesn't have the is a guest of some sort, right? And I find that a fascinating moment to understand identity when you stand there. What is internal? What is external? What is seen from how others recognize you and think and how others define who you are and how you define who you are?

1:09:14And these are conversations. The question that you're asking about, trauma is a whole it's a different question because the trauma is not the event itself. The trauma is often in the experience of the event without an empathic witness. Without an event. Yes. What makes an event traumatic is often the fact that you experience something without an empathic witness. Well, it's not the fact that the event itself, and so what happens is she sees the Oprah show and it's not just that she sees the women tell their stories, but she sees Oprah with unique kind of empathy, respond to the women and give value to their experience and acknowledge it and express the sadness that comes with it and the devastation that they may have experienced.

1:10:12And she is the consummate empathic witness who gives not just meaning to your story, but because before you can give meaning you even have to acknowledge it. You have to recognize that it even happened and in many of those situations it's the lack of acknowledgement that is the most traumatic, not the thing itself or not only the thing itself. It's the fact that nobody even admits that this took place. So as she is watching this empathic resonance in front of her, something opens inside of her that allows her to finally recognize weep cry, you know, do her own acknowledgement and realize what was done to her.

1:10:57That's a different way of interpret it and I have no idea if that is true, but just to give you another reading of what may have happened to this woman. And for a while she will not sleep and for a while she is because suddenly in order to finally come to admit something you need to feel safe to let it happen. And when you watch the opera show with those women, this is I just did the opera. So I had the people and I see how it's an amazing moment of being held and experiencing a container that allows you to experience the pain that you've been holding in. Interesting. I was, it's a very interesting alternative perspective, especially this idea of the empathic witness and the minute you see empathy shown to your experience in such a way, maybe you have permission to feel in a way that you didn't get to feel, but also in that environment I imagine there was a studio audience and they were providing empathy and there was Oprah and there providing empathy and then you had someone she could relate to who in that scenario was being held and had a label, like an implicit label attached to their experience.

1:12:12But she does it without audience now and it's it's I think it was a long time ago. So we choose to have actually many decades ago. I was my first time on the opera show in 87. 87 with a studio audience. Yeah. How was it? It wasn't a very powerful experience for a woman, a young woman as I was back then who's just like, well, this is quite embarrassing for me to admit. But if you know me well, there's something that you know about me, which is a function of my personality and that is that I lose everything. I've lost my wallet, I've lost multiple passports, I now actually have two passports because there's a high probability of me losing one.

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1:13:28You can use code Steven and you'll get 10 % off plus free shipping and a 100 day trial. That's extra .com and use code Steven at checkout. I think B2B marketers keep making this mistake. They're chasing volume instead of quality. And when you try to be seen by more people instead of the right people, all you're doing is making noise, but that noise rarely shifts the needle and it's often quite expensive. And I know as I was the time in my career where I kept making this mistake that many of you will be making it too. Eventually I started posting ads on our show sponsors platform LinkedIn and that's when things started to change.

1:14:02I put that change down to a few critical things. One of them being that LinkedIn was then and still is today the platform where decision makers go to not only to think and learn but also to buy. And when you market your business there, you're putting it right in front of people who actually have the power to say yes. And you can target them by job title, industry and company size. It's simply a sharper way to spend your marketing budget. And if you haven't tried it, how about this? Give LinkedIn ads a try and I'm going to give you a hundred dollar ad credit to get you started. If you visit LinkedIn .com slash diary, you can claim that right now.

1:14:37That's LinkedIn .com slash diary. So if I made you president of the entire world and you dropped was to prevent the the social atrophy, the decay of social connections and relationships and you've had to take three steps on a global basis to they can be drastic steps. You can delete mobile phones. Oh god. They can be any drastic step you want to take. I think that things are lived in the details, not in the big things. Okay. You know, where was I recently? I went to a place and I remember making the comment, everybody says hello. People said hello. People were friendly. When you went into a place, when you were on the street, when you went, who's like, I said, oh my god, I have not been in a place.

1:15:24It felt small enough, but it wasn't small. Where people kept saying hello. Have a nice day. This looks very good. You know, so it's that basic. So you make it a law. No, no, no, no, I don't like it. Let's just lay these things. At all. I think it's more of a, it's a cultural shift. It's a return to practices that still are prevalent in many other parts of the world. Talking to strangers. Yes, talking to strangers. Okay. So you're going to make it a legal motivation. It's an incredible thing to talk to strangers. So a step around makes it a legal thing to talk to strangers. No, no, I said, don't bring these things.

1:16:11These things can make people laugh or sing together is doing a holy work. So go sing with people or go. Because when you sing together, you create a collective resonance. You actually are bringing that resonance that is very empathic. It's very kind. It's compassionate. It's caring. It's playful. It brings out a whole set of other things in people. And the third thing would be teach people how to have conflict. You asked me before when when when you argue with your partner, I think I think that the majority of our arguments are about three basic things. This is based on how it Markman's work. But you know, it's not the issue you're fighting about.

1:17:02Actually, what you can often ask is, what is it that you're fighting for? And what people fight for when they argue whatever thing they're spout about, they fight for power and control, who makes the decision and whose priorities matter most, they fight for trust, for care and closeness. Can I trust you? Do you have my back and I lean on you? Can I rely on you? Will you show up for me? And they fight for respect and recognition. Do you value me? Do I matter? And does this will translate to work? You've you've now started doing a lot more work with businesses and companies around sort of their working culture and connection and relationships in the workplace.

1:17:45All of those things you just listed there, are they also the reasons why our relationships are successful or unsuccessful in a working environment? Absolutely. So I actually have been working with corporations and in the business world for quite a while and have been talking and speaking with corporations and companies. But what is new is that I became an advisor to a number of companies, in particular, in this case with Culture Amp. And the reason that became such a wonderful collaboration is because I brought my clinical expertise and they're bringing massive amounts of data science, people science, 1 .5 billion experience survey points.

1:18:26I mean, it's just like, so it's no longer just my intuitive sense. It's backed. It's and we created this card game because my original card game, people wanted the corporate was demanding for it. But every time they had to take out the cards with the pink triangles, which were the sex questions, in order to make it work safe. Safe for work. So I said, okay, let's create a game just for the workplace that will create meaningful relationships at work. And what's fascinating is that what the research showed is that there are four major relational pillars that actually sustain this quality of relationships in the workplace.

1:19:13And they are directly connected to these three things that I said we fight for. So one was trust. One was belonging. Okay, so on trust, how do I know what is trust in specific terms? What does that mean? Trust is a leap of faith. Trust is a sense that it's an active engagement with the unknown, says Rachel Botsman. It's like, trust is not, I know for sure. Trust is, I don't know for sure. And I'm willing to believe it. That's the definition of the word trust. And in the work context, what does that mean? It means that I can rely on you. On my team, on my manager, that you have my back, that you're not going to betray me, you're not going to put your interests ahead of mine.

1:20:07You are not going to take credit where it's not yours. That you care about me and that we are part of something together. So trust then connects directly to a sense of belonging, that we are part of a group of a company. And I get a certain sense of who I am by virtue of my sense of connection to this group. And the group defines me and gets my contribution. So it's a mutual experience. Mutuality is essential to living organisms, be it in nature or in social ecological systems. And there is recognition. It means that there is respect that I feel valued, that I feel that I contribute and that it is recognized.

1:20:54This is essential because I could achieve and perform and meet the productivity goals and all of that. But if nobody pays attention to it, it doesn't really meet the need. But the biggest one is the collective resilience. To me, that's the one that really stands out because resilience isn't an individual matter only. It's not just a set of traits that exists inside of you and that you need to tap into in order to face adversity and all of that. Resilience is how we, at this point in particular, are able to respond creatively and adaptively and flexibly to all the changes that are happening. The workplace is in massive flux.

1:21:37Massive flux. And from a relational point of view, it's huge. And it is basically at this point becoming no longer just the soft skills. It's becoming the new bottom line, basically. Esther, thank you so much. Thank you so much for the work that you do. I, I want to make you the first time. I was convinced that you're in fact an alien from another planet because you have an ability to understand situations at a deeper, more intuitive level than anyone have ever met, specifically as it relates to just like the human condition in the way that we are, the excuses to make the patterns of a human. And it really like shocked me.

1:22:13You were able to see through me in a way that I did not like. But I appreciate this. And it's really remarkable. There's very few people I've ever met that are like that, that have that ability. It's a really, really special thing. And it's been the cause of so much healed and cured and fixed problems for so many of us. We have a traditional in this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they leave it for. The question left for you is, how are you going to adapt to a world of AI and robots?

1:22:52I am going to use AI as a tool, as I just did an hour before I came here. I was in a meeting and we were generating ideas. And one of us asked the AI exactly this. What would you see is the next step in the collaboration between what would be bold collaborations between a step or a rel and cultural amp, the very company that we know might create the cards. And the AI gave us incredible ideas. But it was both. We had AI and we had the people. The people could use the AI. The AI became way more relevant because it had the people. So as long as I can use it as a tool to foster the communication and to generate ideas between me and others, I think that I am still shaping it and it is helping me.

1:23:59I would hope that it doesn't just begin to shape me or us all and make us into a species that none of us can yet imagine. Some people are very much looking forward to that new species. I kind of like the ones we've been. We have perfect creatures. We are unpredictable. But there is something fascinating about human beings that has been the core of my work. Thank you. Again, I'll link the cards below for everyone to get a pound. I think I'm going to use them at the very start of the week with my teams. So just to create a bit of a space where we can connect with each other before we get into more difficult work.

1:24:42But also, there are other sort of work environments when I have new investments and stuff like that. It's really, you can do it one -on -one, you can do it onboarding, you can do it off -site. But there is something about the weekly meeting, all hands -on deck kind of meeting where we do a card, one person each. And I can tell you, and especially when it's remote, which you are not. But everybody knows the lackluster attention that you can get in a zoo meeting with everybody doing five other things at the same time. You just need to track the eyes. But once people start to tell stories like this, people get the others are interested and are listening.

1:25:22It changes the whole dynamic. So it's a beautiful ritual to have your weekly start with your cards. Esther, thank you so much for all that you do. It's so wonderful to see. I feel like you helped correct me in an important way. What was one of them today? When you were talking about the dementia and the outsideness and the legios loss. I felt that because I think sometimes, sometimes I create that impression. When my ex -girlfriend said that to me, she said, even if you're sitting next to me, I feel like you're a million miles away. It's such a horrible way to make someone feel. My girlfriend, it's what a wonderful thing it is for someone to want your attention and to want you to hug them and to want you to care about them and to look at them.

1:26:10What a wonderful privilege that is. And to insult that privilege by being a million miles away, I just thought, it's a horrible thing. It is that, you know. How often during the day do you send just a little sweet nothing? I know, I need to do that more. Do you know how much it changes the person's? Yeah, just to say what you're thinking about them as well. Because I do think about them, but I just don't, I don't, you know. So you're saying it to me? Yeah, exactly. I'm going to tell her now I start, okay? Life is lived in the details. It's all these small things. It's not, it's like when you ask about the changing of the world.

1:26:52I don't think in these big things. And this, you know, when it's done authentically, it's not big and it's not big. Yeah. Okay. That puts energy into a relationship. She said, oh, with a little heart face, she said sweet heart. And she's typing. Okay, you got it.

1:27:22The hardest conversations are often the ones we avoid. But what if you had the right question to start them with? Every single guest on the diave CEO has left behind a question in this diary. And it's a question designed to challenge, to connect and to go deeper with the next guest. And these are all the questions that I have here in my hand. On one side, you've got the question that was asked. The name of the person who wrote it. And on the other side, if you scan that, you can watch the person who came after who answered it. 51 questions split across three different levels, the warm -up level, the open -up level, and the deep level.

1:27:58So you decide how deep the conversation goes. And people play these conversation cards in boardrooms at work, in bedrooms, alone at night, and on first dates, and everywhere in between. I'll put a link to the conversation cards in the description below. And you can get yours at thedirey .com. This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53 % of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to this show. So could I ask you for a favor? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button.

1:28:28And my commitment to you is if you do that, that I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback, we'll find the guest that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much.

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