From "What's wrong with me?" to "What's up with us humans?" - with Jeremy Sherman PHD, Researcher & Psychoproctologist

What if your panic was organic? What if struggling to say the things you want to say, means you could actually be on the edge of a Word Wise Spiral?

What does it mean to be 'Calm-fident'? And what if we’re all learning how to navigate and steer the wheel along a winding road with limitations and obstacles to look out for, and perhaps sometimes oversteering just a little bit too much? 

Sounds interesting right? It is! In this episode, Stacie explores this and more with Origins of Life researcher, and pioneering Pyschoproctologist, Jeremy Sherman, PHD.

Shy until his mid-30s, Jeremy has his own story to share around how he overcame being tongued-tied and feeling anxious. Moving from “What’s wrong with me?” to asking the fundamental question of “What’s up with us humans?”. 

Jeremy was truly fascinating to chat with, and we're sure this episode will leave you with some intriguing questions and thoughts to explore and consider for yourself!

About our Guest
Jeremy Sherman, PHD
Researcher & Psychoproctologist
www.JeremySherman.com
Jeremy Sherman, PhD is a cradle-to-grave science researcher and writer studying the unbroken chain from the origins of life from chemistry to humankind's grave situation today. He's the author of the Columbia University Press book Neither Ghost Nor Machine: The emergence and nature of selves but also 1000 articles with 9 million readers for Psychology Today on everyday practicalities, including how to deal with Total Jerks. For 25 years, he has been a close research collaborator with Harvard/Berkeley neuroscientist Terrence Deacon. His latest book is called "What's up with Assholes? Advanced psychoproctology for beginners. Sherman's all about making advanced ideas intuitive, practical, and funny, because from a natural science perspective because the human condition is pretty ironic. 

Transcript

Stacie Clark
Hello! And welcome to the Quiet Connections Podcast. I’m Stacie.

What if your panic was organic? What if struggling to say the things you want to say, means you could actually be on the edge of a Word Wise Spiral?  What does it mean to be 'Calm-fident'?  And what if we’re all learning how to navigate and steer the wheel along a winding road with limitations and obstacles to look out for, and perhaps sometimes oversteering just a little bit too much?

Sounds interesting right? It is! And today we’re going to be exploring all of this with Origins of Life researcher, and a pioneering Pyschoproctologist, Jeremy Sherman, PHD.

Shy until his mid-30s, Jeremy has his own story to share around how he overcame being tongued-tied and feeling anxious. Moving from “What’s wrong with me?” to asking the fundamental question of “What’s up with us humans?”.

Jeremy was truly fascinating to chat with, and I’m sure this will leave you with some intriguing questions and thoughts to explore and consider for yourself! So without further ado, let’s hear from Jeremy…

Stacie Clark
Hi, Jeremy, welcome to the show. It's so nice to have you join us today. How are you doing?

Jeremy Sherman
I'm doing good. And it is so nice to be here with you.

Stacie Clark
It's always a good place to start by hearing a little bit about our guests. So if you'd like to share a bit about who you are? What do you do? And, what are you really passionate about?

Jeremy Sherman
Sounds good. And since this is, this is Quiet Connections, I'll put it in that context. I was shy and anxious growing up, I would say until I was about 37. A lot of my thoughts were about what was wrong with me. And I wasn't always quiet. I threw a lot of tantrums, too. But I asked my parents to send me to a psycho analyst at age eight, I did four days a week, 1000 hours total on the couch with a Freudian analyst, and then went back at 34 or so and did some of that.

But, there was a transformation, and now I'm a famously mouthy person. So in that context, that's useful context for this, how did that transformation come about?
Yeah.

And also, it makes me in some ways, not an authority on what it's like to live late adulthood with a quieter temperament. I'm not like that, in fact, I decided about five years ago that I wasn't good company in partnership. And the way I described it was that I was glad my lack of appetite finally caught up with my lack of aptitude. That I was just too much at close range, that I make a good friend, but you want to take me in small quantity, or at least have the power to leave the residence in a way that is prohibited by partnership anyway.

But I will say the transformation for me, to get back to biography a bit, came about because I started to realise I got less interested in what was wrong with me, then I was in what's up with us? What's up with humans? I turned my attention. I had been a environmental activist. That was my first career. And feeling stymied, like I wasn't making much progress, that we weren't getting leverage and in fact that there was a big backlash against the movement that I thought would simply over take the world. I kind of sobered up and got interested in us, in psychology, and then in evolutionary psychology, and then in evolutionary theory.

And now I do what I call Cradle to Grave research. So I'm an origins of life researcher working on the chemical origins of organisms. So it's cradle, that's the cradle, the grave is our grave situation these days. So in a way, I still am interested in the environmentalist issues and other issues as well. So the the origins of life. The evolution of language.

And my recent work, a lot of my work has focused on a topic I call psycho proctology, which is the diagnosis treatment and prevention of a-hole behaviour. That is the behaviour of buttheads. And the fundamental question there is, what is a butthead since it can't just be whomever I happen to butt heads with? And there are quiet buttheads, too, so there is a bunch of quiet ways to be intransigent, to be a know it all, all of that, there are polite a-holes as well, from my perspective. But a lot of my work has gone into simply trying to figure out a more objective definition for the 'out of bounds' behaviour that people can engage in.

But one of the learnings along the way is that humans would be an uncommonly anxious species. We, if you just compare what a dog could worry about at night to what a human could worry about. I think of this as a product of us having language. We're a symbolic species. We're unlike other species this way. And that means that we can imagine all sorts of past and future threats, real and imagined, and missed opportunities. And it would make us an uncommonly anxious species. So some of my work is simple, and I think of being an a-hole as also a possibility afforded to us by language. And there are lots of predators and super predators out there, but being an  a-hole is a human thing. And it's also I think afforded by language.

Anyway, I spend my day writing and researching and publishing in all the mediums. I'm trying to keep up with you youngsters. I have three podcasts of my own. It's not easy at 65. And then in the evening, I play music, which is interestingly where I am most shy. That is I can talk fluidly. But I can't always solo fluidly. So last night, I played with a band that I had felt triumphant with a few weeks ago, because I had played with a calm competence, what I call calmfidence, like, calm confidence. And last night, I didn't, with the very same band. So that's where I work on my shyness issues , in playing music. I'm a bass player and singer in jazz funk soul bands. And it's funny because I never have that problem singing. I only have it playing bass, you know? So quirks. Everyone's got them.

Stacie Clark
I'm literally already sitting here in awe, like, I don't know where to begin with this conversation, because I feel like there's so many things that we could explore. But you sound so fascinating. And the types of things that you're exploring sound really interesting as well.
Seeing as I can't decide where we want to start, which part do you really want to dive into? What do you really want to share with our audience today?

Jeremy Sherman
Ah, well, anything useful? So, I was thinking about this. It's interesting, because one of the guys I played with last night, is very quiet by nature. He's a violinist. He plays beautifully, plays exquisitely. He was one of the reasons why I was shy last night. He's got fluency that I don't have playing music. But he's very shy and quiet. And I gave him a ride home afterwards. And he talked about how in his childhood, he had a very volatile Dad. He learned that whenever anyone asks him a question, his first response is silence and a wariness. Like what is the ulterior motive here? What's going on for this person? What are the landmines I better not step on? Because that's what he did with his father during his formative years.

And I was kind of surprised by how calmly he was answering my questions. He says, "Well, yeah, but you work in psychology. I know this is kind of an area of interest for you". So one thing, just just thinking about your audience is, I hope they know how intimidating quiet is for us mouthy types. I don't know if that comes up. But you have extraordinary power, we have no idea what you're thinking.

Stacie Clark
Never actually thought about it that way.

Jeremy Sherman
We have no idea what you're thinking, we assume the worst.

Stacie Clark
I mean, that's actually really fascinating. It doesn't come up very often. Because obviously, if I think about the type of clients that I work with, but also my own experiences, so I grew up feeling very shy, and very socially anxious, and would shut down when someone would ask me questions or strike up a conversation with me. And the interesting thing is that your assumption is that everybody else is thinking the worst of you. But it sounds like other people are also thinking that as well. It doesn't really make a difference what side of it you are on.

Jeremy Sherman
Anybody who's worth their salt has doubts about themselves and we all have anxieties. And I think they're healthy. In fact, if you don't want to be an a-hole expect some anxiety. Indeed, the kind of confidence that I seek these days, or calm confidence, is when I worry on opposite sides of the same behaviour. That is, am I too arrogant or not arrogant enough for the situation? Am I too honest or not honest enough? If I'm worrying in equal measure on opposite sides, that is close to centred as I think I can get.

I want to be equally anxious depending on the circumstance, because though we tout as moral absolute, something like honesty, we don't mean it. Nobody means that. Honesty is juxtaposed to tact or diplomacy. Just as realism is juxtaposed with hope. So we often talk about, that we should be totally realistic and totally hopeful. Because they both sound like virtues, so just maximise them. But no, that's their counterposed. They're in conflict with each other.

And this even came up last night, the guy I was talking to was talking about how he was wary as if it was a bad thing. And I said, "it depends on the situation". You know, there are parts of this world, let's say Red China back in the in the 50s. Or any place that's overrun by con artists where you would not survive if you weren't wary, only the Paranoid survive in such situations. We can live in a society that happens to be safer. I do. I live in Berkeley, California. And so we can down calibrate our awareness. And then people will talk as though that's the formula everywhere. It's not the formula everywhere. We want to avoid being too wary and not wary enough, obviously.

And notice this difference, we think of the accusation, you're arrogant, and you're too arrogant as synonymous, they don't actually mean the same. Because the first one, to say you're arrogant, is a claim that arrogance is always bad. Well, arrogance is a pejorative term for what we also call self assertion, boundary setting, any number of things. And it is worth noting that it's rather arrogant to declare yourself the judge of who is arrogant.

Stacie Clark
It's all a big paradox really isn't it.

Jeremy Sherman
And that's actually fundamental here. That is, any time a moral principle can be described as a paradox, it can be rephrased as a paradox. It exposes that it's actually a moral dilemma, not a moral principle. This is fundamental in my thinking. So for example, intolerance is bad, be intolerant of intolerance, you shouldn't be negative, you shouldn't be judgmental, which is a judgement, do not be negative, which is negative, all of those points to the fact that these are dilemmas that we will deal with lifelong, you know. When should you be intolerant? And when should you be tolerant? So that's why my confidence comes from worrying equally about whether, you know, I'm too judgmental or not sufficiently judgmental for the situation, too intolerant or not intolerant enough for the situation?

Stacie Clark
I think I'm getting it because they almost balanced each other out. But then you become kind of centred in the middle of the two.

Jeremy Sherman
Yes, but I would phrase it a different way. And this actually comes this is a this is a standard metaphor for life as a winding road. But it's actually, I came back to it through my understanding of what selves are. This is the origins of life research, selves and trying our mysteries. to us. We don't have a scientific explanation for them. That's what I've been working on for 25 years in collaboration with a Harvard and Berkeley neuroscience professor, who I've been working with, I just had the good luck to fall in with a guy, who though I didn't have his credential was happy to explore the real questions with anybody who's really engaged, and I was totally engaged.

This guy's the love of my life. He's a frumpy Professor here in Berkeley, we take dog walks every week, and we think through other elements of the research, but the core question is this: inanimate things are not cells and they're not trying to do anything, not even computers, not even smart computers, not even AI. It's not trying to do anything. Organisms try. Their selves that try on their own behalf. They work, they make effort on their own behalf. And nothing we do defies the laws of physics and chemistry. And yet we get something different out of us than what we get out of inanimate objects or not trying to do anything. We exist through hustle.

Like, I'm going to today I have every intention of regenerating 240 billion cells. I'm gonna do that.  It's impressive, right, but that's one of the things on my agenda. Apparently. And I'm gonna do this silently without feeling it, without noticing that I'm doing it other than mentioning it here. Do it without thinking or feeling, thinking about or feeling it. So all organisms do that. That's what we have in common. So what is trying? And how did it start? What is it? I would argue it's a constraint, and constraints relate to roads.

And that is, we are limitations on what happens in physics and chemistry. And so, our work yields a perfectly physical chemical explanation for how the first self regenerative constraints emerge from simple chemistry. And I think of myself as constraints that happen to channel energy into work, that regenerates the self same constraints. That is I am a constraint. So I am a constraint riding on the external constraints. And they're changing. That's why it's a winding road.

So if you think about what it takes to drive on a winding road, it takes self control or self discipline. Interacting with external controls are constraints on your ability to stay alive. That is imagine that there's brick walls on either side of this road. And it's winding, which means that you have to turn the wheel in order to stay more or less centred on the road. And so another thing about it, I'm not on a train track. I'm on a road. I can do a variety of different things, and still stay on the road. I'm not arrowing, I'm narrowing. That is I'm limiting, but I'm not limiting to an absolute fine point what I do. So for someone to say, never be arrogant is a little bit like saying, never turn your steering wheel to the left, always turn it to the far right and keep it there. That's no way to ride a winding road, your circumstances change. And you change in response to them. So that's how I think about that these days.

Stacie Clark
Yeah, that helps really clarify that. To me, that sounded like it's all about responding to our environment.

Jeremy Sherman
Yeah.

Stacie Clark
So whatever those external circumstances are around us, all depends on actually what response is needed in that moment.

Jeremy Sherman
That's right, though. And that's quite right. But it's important, when you're dealing with somewhat shy people to point out that you're doing it on your own behalf. All selves are a bit selfish, we have to look out for ourselves or we die. So it's basically how do you use your environmental circumstances? How do you take in what's useful, and keep out what's not useful? How you're attending to the threats and opportunities, the openings on the winding road of life, and the constraints on the winding road of life, road of life that could kill you, or damage your status or all of that. So realistically, if you step back, if you zoom out from the from all of this, and then contemplate that shy people, that's a perfectly appropriate response. It's a shock that we drive so adeptly.

But if it takes you a while to think of what to say, I think that's natural. It's a total cluster flux, what we're dealing with in reality, I mean, because imagine, not only are you watching out for the brick walls on either side of the road, you're watching out for other drivers, and who knows what's going on with them. They could be lost in some word fueled imagination that has them veering into you on the road, or out to get you or anything. So yeah, it's a natural response. Don't panic, it's organic.

Stacie Clark
I like that. Yeah, that was a really nice reframe, actually, because I do feel like a lot of us who are shy, and who experience a lot of anxiety in social situations, we do tend to really judge ourselves on that shyness, when actually, it is a very natural response. But there are also things that we can do to help support ourselves and change how we're responding in those situations as well.

Jeremy Sherman
That's right. And there's a paradox, from what I just said, don't panic, your panic is organic. Don't panic about panicking.

Stacie Clark
So allow yourself to panic.

Jeremy Sherman
In general that's my game. It's recursion. It's folding things back in on themselves and finding what's underneath that. And I want to say one more thing about what helped me get over shyness. But mine was probably a peculiar version of it. So I was the third child of four boys. And my father and my older brothers were shockingly verbal. They were good at it. And they knew it. They had a swagger about them. And I was not, I was really slow waking up, I was incredibly late starter, I mean, dim to the point where I had to find my status by other means. I became the problem child of the family. I even have a recording of my father describing me in an interview as the runt of the family, bless his soul.

I'm grateful for it. In retrospect. I was Tongue Tied through most of my childhood and my brothers could dance circles around me. But it did motivate me in my case, and I had the the luxury, the freedom, not afforded to everyone, to be able to manifest that anxiety in study. I do the same with music now. When I have a bad musical performance, like I did yesterday, or one that doesn't meet my standards - they were okay with it, they were too busy thinking about whether they were playing okay, we had actually a wonderful conversation about that at the beginning, it was delightful, about how anxious everyone was, as we sat down to play together.

Stacie Clark
That seems to usually be the case as well.

Jeremy Sherman
This is the thing, we are this, we are all human. Everybody's going through this stuff. But when I am punked in some interaction. These days, it motivates me to try to get better. So I came home and woodshed yesterday, that's I practiced, the term from jazz you go out to the woodshed to practice. So I woodshedded last night, inspired by my inadequacy at the gig. And I think I did that long term about feeling so Tongue Tied as a child.

I got really into words. And when I've taught, there are Tongue Tied students, who are trying to spit something out. And other students might smirk at their inadequacy. But I look at them as the most promising students around, because I think they're on the lip of what I'll call the word wise spiral. Which is you're trying to spit out something that's just beyond your vocabulary, which motivates you to get more vocabulary. And words are not just how we communicate. They're also how we think. So the better vocabulary and grammar you get. I don't mean just proper grammar, but the grammar by which you can handle switchbacks. Like the, although's, neverthelesses, still, and yets, all those terms that allow you to put together more complicated ideas, the wiser you get.

Because my definition of wisdom actually comes from the Serenity Prayer. I've been meeting people lately who don't know it, which surprises me.

Stacie Clark
I don't know it!

Jeremy Sherman
Fabulous, this is wonderful. No, it's a big deal. You might know it by just hearing it. God grant me, and I'm an atheist, but: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Well, these are two opposite moves. That is the serenity to accept and the courage to try to change something are opposites. If they weren't opposite, they sound like they're not opposites. You should always be serene, you should always be courageous. You could never be too serene, you can never be too courageous. You hear arguments like that, for one side or the other side. Buddhism, for example, tends to promote the serenity, and a lot of business texts and political speakers will talk about you know, "we can do it, you can you can do anything", all that sort of stuff, which is the courage to try to change things. But if you could do both all the time, you wouldn't need the wisdom to know the difference between when to do which.

Wisdom to know is a peculiar statement. What do we mean by the, wisdom to notice is what I think. I mean peculiar statement because what is wisdom to know? Is it knowledge or is it wisdom, those things are basically assumed to be different. So I think of it as witness with wisdom and to keep trying to notice the differences that will make a difference to when you should do one thing or its opposite. And that manifests across all sorts of different tough judgement calls we're all dealing with. Like tolerance and intolerance or judgement and non judgement. All of those. So it's the cultivation of that wisdom that I think goes hand in hand with gaining vocabulary.

I don't read books sitting down anymore. I gave that up after my PhD, I had read a lot of them that way, I'm a very restless person, I fidget. Which probably goes along with my mouthyness. But I listen to a book, at least a book a week. And that flow of words over my ears has enhanced my vocabulary. It's much easier than sitting down to read, at least for a guy like me, if you're a quiet person, you can connect with a book probably more effectively than someone like me.

But one way or another, mainlining, just taking in huge quantities of well formed pros, I think helps, at least in my case, and it wouldn't have been motivated in me if I weren't punked so completely in my childhood, and just tongue tied! I could never keep up with these guys. I think we're all balancing three different kinds of fittedness we're trying to achieve, we have to fit reality, or we die. We have to fit society. And we have to fit ourselves. That is we have to feel comfort in our own skins.

Stacie Clark
And there might be a lot of conflict between those three.

Jeremy Sherman
Yes, there are. And in the long term adapting to reality matters most. In the short term for all of us, adapting internally, that is trying to come up with interpretations, conceptual language based interpretations that reconcile ourselves so that unpleasant emotions don't come up, that's the most vivid and visceral for all of us got to face it.

Stacie Clark
So the other question I want to ask is, then what paradoxes can you see within social anxiety or shyness?

Jeremy Sherman
I bet we can come up with one.

Oh, well, there's this one, straight off. Any movement that is asserting the the right to be shy, is making a bold move on behalf of shyness. Right? And so the shy people's rights movement, has that paradox built into it.

Stacie Clark
Okay, okay. Yeah. So Quiet Connections, I guess is part of that.

Jeremy Sherman
You asked the question, I can phrase it "Be bold about your shyness", as a simple example of it. Assert your shyness. But anyway, that that would be one way it would manifest is that there might be shy people and I could actually be one of them. Come on, come to think of it. Who gets mouthy with a vengeance? Wouldn't put it past me.

Stacie Clark
Amazing. Okay, so what would be one top strategy that you wish to share with our listeners today?

Jeremy Sherman
I guess. I want to highlight three, and the first, one of them is, the first thing I said, and I don't remember it, but it'll come back to me. Or maybe you. No, actually I'll simplify down to one.

This tweedy guy I described as a love of my life a while ago, is a quieter guy. His effect is quite flat. And dealing with him reminded me of the way my father described his first dinner with my mother's parents. My mother came from a quieter family, and they didn't talk much at the dinner table. My father came from a rollicking, rousing family and my father had a bloody nose over the first dinner. And I always imagined that it's like some kind of strange vacuum pressure that suck the blood out of his nose. So there was a way in which being around this guy, because I came from a melodramatic family, verbal melodramatic, we were living in the 70s. in Marin County, California, where your feelings were truth.

And so everybody was going around asserting themselves. My mother especially because she was finally coming into her own that way. And so I had no idea where this guy stood. And over 25 years working with him, I have learned the power of silence, the power of flatness. I was always worried this guy was going to stop giving me his audience, I found his company so important to me. And yet I was worried that he was thinking disdainful thoughts about me, I suffered from imposter syndrome. He was a Harvard neuroscientist, and I wasn't by a longshot. It turned out that his love was reliably presently steadily there and never mentioned. I think the closest to a warm thing he's ever said to me is that our collaboration has been excellent. And every year, I allow myself one cheesy remark to him about how much I adore working with him, and how I adore hanging out with him. So that may be more relevant for a person like me, unfortunately, and I can take another crack at it.

Maybe the word wise spiral is another thing I would recommend. Spend some time with words, get some fluency if you can. It doesn't come naturally to everybody, but try to get it because you'll think more interesting thoughts. And I also want to say that as a guy who lived a very public life for many years, getting comfortable with my solitude has been among my greatest joys, and a lot of us are figuring this out now.

I mean, the world has gotten so entertaining, there are so many things to do with yourself. And to just follow your nose as mark of, as Machiavelli described, but he's the founder of political science. He would be out in the world having frustrating conversations, he was exiled to the countryside. He would have frustrating conversations all day. At night, he would wash, put on his best clothes and go and have the best possible conversations with the greatest minds in history by reading. And so there is something to be said for that.

Stacie Clark
I love that. Thank you. And also actually just on the note of you talking about the words. It's quite interesting because I found that over the last year, I've become a bit of a nerd for looking up the meanings of words. It's so fascinating. What I've found is that I've experienced a whole other level of meaning, of what words mean, when you start looking at like the the root words.

Jeremy Sherman
Oh, yeah.

I look at eytomology almost every day. Yeah, they're endlessly fascinating. We should appreciate how weird life is for this midsize mammal that recently acquired language, which completely alters how we adapt to reality. Other organisms just have reality to deal with. We've got that and our imaginations. Just appreciate what a weird thing it is to be us.

Stacie Clark
And the fact that we are all weird!

Jeremy Sherman
Right. That's right.

Stacie Clark
Okay. Well, it has been so lovely speaking to you and listening to your thoughts. I feel like I need to go process everything that you've just shared now. It's been really, really fascinating, and I really appreciated your time.

Jeremy Sherman
Delightful to hear. I'm glad to hear. Have me back anytime. A pleasure to be here. Oh, and anybody who's interested. look me up on JeremySherman.com You'll find way too much of me there.

Stacie Clark
All right. Thank you so much, Jeremy.

Jeremy Sherman
Yeah, you're welcome.

Stacie Clark
How interesting was that! I want to share some final words from Jeremy that I recieved in an email after our call… some additional thoughts on what else helped him work through shyness:

“Fallibilism, the recognition that any choice could fail, that no behaviors or predictions or ideas can reach 100% certainty. We're all just guessing, not that all guesses are equally valid. Some guesses are better than others.

I'm a devout fallibilist ironist. My irony is my way of putting on the table that I'm just trying to make the best guesses I can. My mantra is "no matter how confident I am in a bet I'm still more confident that it is a bet.

I stopped being shy when I recognized and embraced fallibilism. I could stand corrected with my dignity intact. I've taken more comfort from fallibilism than from anything else I've ever discovered.”

Some food for thought. Not many of us are comfortable with ambiguity, with that sense of uncertainty in life - but we’re all just guessing! And we can learn how to get better at making better guesses.

I loved Jeremy’s metaphor of looking at like life as driving down a winding road - and how we have to navigate the obstacles to keep driving in the center of that road - that it’s about learning how to discern the appropriate responses to the appropriate situations and environments that we’re in - in that present moment.

The chances are, there were moments in your life where adopting a self-protective quieter, shy, withheld or avoidant response was the best approach for you to take in those particular situations - and this is often very true when we’re younger and have less ability to self-defend - it’s the rabbit playing dead when it can no longer outrun the fox.

This tends to become a problem for us, or we start to see it as a problem for us, when we continue to use that same approach in response to situations that don’t nesscasirly require that response. That’s when, I feel like, we start to wish we could do something else instead, that we could act differently. And this often shows up as us saying “I wish wasn’t anxious” or “I wish I was more confident”.

What if, that’s our way of recognising that we’ve been turning our steering wheel all the way to the left, and that there’s space in that, for us to practise using discernment to then explore what other responses we could adopt that are more suited to the present moment situations that we’ll be in. And sometimes that might require an anxious response, other times it could be appropriate to be quieter, or it might actually be safe to assert yourself, or speak up, or express an idea.

The other part of that of course, is then we might recognise that we need to learn and practise how to do those different things - how to speak up, when we know that it’s okay to.

And that’s where, I feel, the Calmfidence comes in! The Calm + Confidence - being the result of us reaching a level of competence with something that we feel comfortable with doing it.

It’s us learning new skills, new patterns of behaviours, and continuing to practise them. It comes with taking comfort zone stretches, or looking at how we are perceiving ourselves and what we’re capable of and challenging some of those interpretations and beliefs that were holding about who we are. We’re going to mistakes along the way, it’s going to be clunky when we first start learning, and that’s okay!

If you’d like to learn more about this, please do head on over to QueitConnections.co.uk/free-gifts to check out some of our free resources. Or if you’d like to reach out to Jeremy, then you can do so at jeremysherman.com

Tune in again soon…in the meantime, stay connected!