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Welcome to the Healing Our Politics podcast!
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Guest: With over 40 years of experience in social science and relational dynamics, Diana holds a Master of Education and Doctorate in Consulting Psychology from Harvard University and is the author of Remaking the Space Between Us, her fourth book. Dr. Smith has spent 25 years teaching top executives, educators, and leaders to build relationships to master tough challenges.
About the Episode: In this episode, we explore that relationships must be fixed before policy to heal our politics. Diana breaks down the science of in-group–out-group thinking, extreme partisanship, and repairing relationships. We discuss leveraging biases for connection, historical decline, and how to reverse the trend. She provides playbooks to test if you are unknowingly under the influence of malevolent leaders, media, and profiteers, how to engage those you disagree with, and how to beat conspiracy theories.
Diana shares techniques for building stronger teams, reviving trust, and cultivating support, along with the behaviors of bridge-building leaders like Abe Lincoln and Nelson Mandela that you can cultivate in your leadership.
Key Topics Discussed:
· [00:01:48] “HOP” introduction
· [00:03:29] Dr. Diana Smith guest introduction
· [00:05:30] Relationships before policy to heal our politics
· [00:08:02] Healing of South Africa
· [00:09:52] Cultivate the approaches of transformational leaders
· [00:12:19] The power of curiosity
· [00:13:54] Constructive Vs. destructive challenge
· [00:16:02] Building “failure muscles”
· [00:19:37] Power of radical ownership
· [00:23:00] How to give constructive feedback
· [00:25:00] Michael Caine “Use the difficulty”
· [00:27:57] Dr. Diana’s upbringing
· [00:32:12] Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)
· [00:34:14] Root of extreme partisanship
· [00:37:18] Defining “the space between us”
· [00:39:36] Environmental contributors to authoritarianism
· [00:46:44] The “problem with democracy”
· [00:53:06] Leveraging hot and cold brain systems
· [01:03:22] Benjamin Franklin on “constitutional imperfection”.
· [01:07:33] Impact of loneliness and isolation
· [01:13:51] How to beat conspiracy theories
· [01:14:40] Curate media consumption for well-being
· [01:21:26] Leveraging media for healing
· [01:24:12] Is evil real?
· [01:28:45] Test: Under the spell of a malevolent leader?
· [01:35:15] How to: Engage with those you disagree with
· [01:39:10] How to: Reform a White Nationalist
· [01:48:54] Redefine winning
· [01:53:14] Citizen’s call to action
· [01:54:12] New non-violent resistance movement
· [01:56:13] How to: Proceed through pushback
· [01:59:20] Final Takeaway: Stockdale’s Paradox
Key References and Resources Mentioned:
· [00:10:06] Amanda Ripley, Solutions Journalist, formula for hope: “This element is critical to human flourishing — yet missing from the news
· [00:25:20] Michael Caine “Use the difficulty video”
· [00:32:12] Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)
· [00:48:41] Billings MT. Not In Our Town.
· [01:44:22] 500 Groups bringing hope into existence
· [01:47:52] Sharon McMahon - Sharon Says So
· [01:59:20] Final Takeaway: Stockdale’s Paradox
Where to Find Dr. Diana Smith:
· Remaking the Space Between Us - We, the People, have become the problem. Let us become the solution. Join the tens of thousands of citizens working together across our nation to build a future that works for all. Learn how you can become the solution: The essays in Remaking the Space Between Us will inspire and empower you to work across divides for a better future for all, not just some. That may strike you as a stretch, but the stories you read in this book prove that it is possible; indeed, it is already happening, as the tens of thousands of citizens showcased in this book demonstrate. A powerful new movement is afoot. Join us!
· Action Design - Action Design LLC is a consulting and education firm specializing in organizational learning and leadership development. We help leaders build the capabilities and relationships needed to sustain high levels of trust, commitment, and learning so that they are able to master their toughest challenges.
· Remaking the Space - Substack Newsletter
· LinkedIn
· Facebook
Where to Find Host Skippy Mesirow:
· Receive Support at the Elected Leaders Collective
· Follow on Instagram
· Book a free Clarity Call to see if coaching is right for you
Episode Sponsor:
Helping You Heal Our Politics
The Elected Leaders Collective (ELC) organization is the leading US-based provider of mental well-being training for public servants, conducted by public servants and the world's best mental health and human optimization professionals. With ELC Training, you will learn to rise above and become the political healer you were meant to be, improving your well-being in the process.
Contact the HOP Team:
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Creators & Guests
Host
Skippy Mesirow
Skippy Mesirow is a prominent leader, certified Master Coach, and founder of the Elected Leaders Collective (ELC) and ELC Foundation. ELC leads the US in mental health and well-being training for public servants, recognized in The Apolitical Foundation's Mere Mortals report, and named as one of 26 worldwide political well-being "Trailblazer Organizations." A transformational leader in political innovation and wellness, Skippy serves on Gov. Polis’s Natural Medicine Advisory. Skippy’s work has been featured in numerous podcasts and publications, as well as main-stage speaking engagements for organizations NLC, YEO, CML, MT2030, Bridging Divides, and Fulcrum, highlighting his significant contributions to mental health, community, and policy reform. Alongside his professional achievements, Skippy lives in Aspen, CO. with his partner Jamie where he enjoys running ultra-marathons, road biking, motorcycling, international travel, culinary arts, Burning Man, and lifelong learning.
Producer
Aaron Calafato
Aaron’s stories are currently heard by millions around the globe on his award-winning Podcast 7 Minute Stories and on YouTube. Aaron is a co-host of Glassdoor's new podcast (The Lonely Office) and serves as a podcast consultant for some of the fastest-growing companies in the world.
Editor
Jesse Link
Jesse is a strategy, research and partnership consultant and podcast enthusiast. A 2x founder, former Goldman Sachs Vice President and advisor to 25+ businesses, Jesse brings a unique and diverse background to HoP, helping to elevate the range, depth and perspective of HoP's conversations and strategy.
What is Healing Our Politics?
Hello,
I’m Skippy Mesirow, host of “Healing Our Politics,” the show that shows you, the heart-centered public servants and political leaders, how to heal our politics by starting with the human in the mirror.
Healing Our Politics, “HOP,” is a first-of-its-kind show that provides tools and practices for mental well-being, health, and balance, specifically for public servants so we can do good by feeling good and safe in our jobs.
HOP brings together experts, scientists, doctors, thought leaders, healers, and coaches to share their insights in practical, tactical, actionable ways specifically tailored to the public service experience for you to test and implement with yourself and your teams. Episodes feature intimate conversations with global leaders about their self-care practices and personal challenges, providing insights for a more holistic, connected approach to leadership. Whether you're a Mayor, teacher, police officer, or staffer, this podcast will guide you to be the best version of yourself in service to yourself and the world!
Sign up for our once-per-month Leader’s Handbook newsletter to receive an actionable toolkit of how-to guides on topics discussed on the podcast that month to test and implement in your life and with your team: https://leadershandbook.substack.com/
Hello. My name is Skippy Mesirow,
Skippy Mesirow:coach, former elected official, and lifetime public servant. Welcome to Healing Our Politics. The show that shows you, the heart centered public servant and political leader, how to heal our politics by starting with the human in the mirror. It is my job to sit down or stand up with the best experts in all areas of human development, thought leaders, coaches, therapists, authors, scientists, and more, to take the best of what they have learned and translate it, specifically for the public service experience, providing you actionable,
Skippy Mesirow:practical, tactical tools that you can test out today in your life
Skippy Mesirow:and with your tactical tools that you can test out today in your life and with your teams. I will also talk to leaders across the globe with self care practice, getting to know them at a deeply human and personal level, so that you can learn from their challenges and journey. Warning, this is a post partisan space. Yes, I have a bias. You have a bias.
Skippy Mesirow:We all have a bias. Everybody gets a bias. And I will be stripping out all of the unconscious cues of bias from this space. No politics, partisanship or policy here. Because well-being belongs to all of us.
Skippy Mesirow:And we will all be better served if every human in leadership, regardless of party, ideology, race or geography, are happier, healthier, and more connected. This show is about resourcing you, the human doing leadership, and trusting you to make up your own damn mind about what to do with it and what's best for your community. So as always, with love, here we go. In this episode, I sit down with expert in human dynamics and the author of the new book, Remaking the Space Between Us, How Citizens Can Work Together TO Build a Better Future for Us All. Diana Smith and you as leaders are the ultimate citizens to lead this charge.
Skippy Mesirow:Diana has been an expert in social science and relational dynamics for over 40 years, longer than I've been on this rock 3rd from the sun, folks. She holds a master's degree and an educational doctorate in consulting psychology from the Harvard University, you may have heard of it, and has spent the past 25 years studying and teaching the world's top leaders to build relationships strong enough to master their toughest challenges. Sounds applicable. No? Her research based approach zeros in on human dynamics of strategic choice and organizational change.
Skippy Mesirow:She is the author of divide and conquer, elephant in the room, and coauthor of action science with Chris Argus, I hope I'm saying that correctly, and the legendary, at least to me, Robert Putnam, as well as her most recent release, remaking the space between us. In case you thought Diana was born in her free time, Diana is also a partner at Monitor Group, the founder and president of the Action Smith Network and a founding partner of Action Design, which focuses on learning and leadership development teaching programs at fabled institutions such as Columbia, MIT, Harvard, Oxford and HEC Paris. So someone worth listening to. In this episode, we dig into so much, starting with the provocative thesis of her new book, which is to heal our politics. We need relationships before policy.
Skippy Mesirow:We delve into the history of in group, out group thinking and check-in on the reality versus the myth or the fun house projection of extreme partisanship. What is a mirage? What is real? We build how to guides for you to determine if you are unknowingly under the spell craft of a malevolent leader, and we provide you a path out. We get into conspiracy theories.
Skippy Mesirow:How do they work psychologically, and how can we help reduce those behaviors and others by changing the way we respond to those individuals into one that is effective rather than one that just lets us feel good. Techniques to build stronger teams, revive trust, and cultivate support to proceed through pushback and public hate. And finally, not finally, the common behaviors and experiences of our most lauded bridge building leaders such as Abe Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, Maya Angelou, and more. With great enthusiasm and possibility, I hope you enjoy this wide ranging and deeply interesting conversation with doctor Diana Smith. Diana Smith, welcome to the Healing Our Politics podcast, the show that shows you, the heart centered leader, how to heal our politics by starting with the human in the mirror.
Skippy Mesirow:And I am so sure that all of those humans will be infinitely better resource to do precisely that following this conversation. So I'm super excited to have you here.
Dr. Diana Smith:It is so great to be here, Skippy, and I'm so grateful to you for having me.
Skippy Mesirow:I've extracted a thesis from your most recent work, and I wonder if you would agree with this. But as it relates to the topic of this podcast and of our work at ELC, which is the healing of our politics, and that thesis is to heal our politics, we don't actually need better policy. We need better relationships.
Dr. Diana Smith:Couldn't agree with it more. I I think we overlook the extent to which relationships drive the politics. Rob and the politics also it's not like the politics don't have an effect on the relationships they do. It is a mutually reinforcing dynamic, but the relationships are within our power to change. Yes.
Dr. Diana Smith:And so that's a great lever. So I'm always as someone who tries to change systems, I'm always looking for toe holds. And the thing about relationships is they not only affect larger systems, they also put a ceiling on the growth and learning of individuals because they can take on a life of their own. They have they have identifiable patterns that make it very difficult for people to break out of them if they don't see them. But if they see them and they see their role in contributing to them, then they can actually conspire with the other person to change the pattern.
Dr. Diana Smith:They're no longer trying to get the other person to change. They're collaborating with the person to change a pattern that's not serving either one of them.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. And it's actually not mutually exclusive in my experience. You actually need both the change in relationship and change in the policy or system. Yes. But there is an order of operations that seems to be an immutable law of human dynamics for lack of a better framing.
Skippy Mesirow:And the examples that come to mind are maybe 2 of the most famous in recent memory. But if I think about World War 2 Germany or I think about apartheid South Africa, when the relationship was broken, when we were in apartheid or when we were in the war, There was no healing. There was no national or universal benefit to be had. It was afterwards when we move into the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa or the Nuremberg trials following World War 2 in Germany, and the individuals are taking ownership of their part in the relational problem from that place. New policies, prescriptions and frameworks and systems were then able to be put into action.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yes. It's a great example, South Africa. And what you say is true. So I don't want this to sound like a counterpoint, but it's a adds a wrinkle that's an important wrinkle, I think. And it's something Nelson Mandela said.
Dr. Diana Smith:Mhmm. Because apartheid didn't end out of nowhere. It ended because of a choice on his part to forge a new kind of relationship with their clerk. And he said, if you make your enemy your partner, then you can have a partner with which to work. And so the question is, how do you build a relationship in which people are held accountable for what they do, but you're also in a position where you're trying to help them do better.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. There's an Abe Lincoln quote that really stood out to me in your book, which was, I I don't like that person. I need to get to know them.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yes. Again, these are people who are extraordinary, and I think it's easy for us to say, well, we can't expect one another to be that way. No. But we can learn from them and go closer towards that direction.
Skippy Mesirow:If what we're interpreting about these figures, and actually, this is something that I just I noted when reading your works is, like, Abe Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Frederick Frederick Douglass. Okay. I can speak on Tuesdays. Oh, today's Monday. Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, JFK, these are the most highly cited figures.
Skippy Mesirow:I think that they're pretty close to universally admired. Nelson Mandela comes up a lot as well. If we're characterizing them by their fame, then no. We can't expect all to do that. But if we characterize them by their wisdom and their choice of action, not on the podium in front of a 1000000 people, but by the small acts of kindness done at the lunch counter, then I think it's a 100% available to all of us.
Dr. Diana Smith:Absolutely.
Skippy Mesirow:These people come from different times. They're fighting different movements or for different things. But there's a through line. What are the characteristics, the mindsets? What are the commonalities between these folks that you identify?
Dr. Diana Smith:I think one is just a refusal to give up, a persistence and grit. I came across an interesting article, Amanda Ripley, wonderful author of high conflict journalist, a solutions journalist. She wrote about hope. I think it was in March 2023 in the Washington Post, and she referred to a formula for hope. And it was, I think it was purpose, path and willpower.
Dr. Diana Smith:Okay. And you need a purpose. You need the willpower and, you need this sort of unbelievable determination. These guys all had determination and no matter what was going on. So that was 1, a second is extraordinarily curious people.
Dr. Diana Smith:It's not like they were well read. They were well read, but the well read was a product of their curiosity and it didn't stop at reading. They were curious about people. They asked people questions that ordinarily wouldn't ask. One of the things that I would say would be the antithesis that we all need to identify in ourselves and resist the urge.
Dr. Diana Smith:And I do it myself. It's just stereotype people. And it, nothing cuts off your curiosity more than thinking. I know what's going on. He's just a jerk or he doesn't care about people.
Dr. Diana Smith:He's a bad actor. Okay? And in in literature, John Forrester refers to that as these are flat characters. Their only role is to play a role in your narrative. Okay.
Dr. Diana Smith:They're not rounded. They're not, you don't understand what they're up against. You don't understand their intentions. You don't understand their suffering. And so I think all of these people have been immensely curious.
Dr. Diana Smith:John Kennedy wanted to figure out why did England sleep before World War II? And his dad was implicated in that, but that didn't stop him from trying to figure that out. He was infinitely curious.
Skippy Mesirow:So was he Sleep in that context means taking a passive role?
Dr. Diana Smith:It was, yes, passive role. Not interventionist role. Yes. Yeah. It was I think he it was a product of his college thesis.
Dr. Diana Smith:He wrote it as his first book.
Skippy Mesirow:This comes up so much in our conversations is curiosity. And is that something that is inborn? Is that a trait of initial temperament? Is that something that is cultivated or both, do you think, or do you find in your work?
Dr. Diana Smith:It's always a question of nature and nurture. And some of the most recent research on genetics talks about how it's a joint venture. You do have certain genetic predispositions, and then circumstances can activate a gene. Mhmm. You might have person a who's got a gene of sort of mild curiosity and intellectual stuff going on, and you got somebody over here who's got a lot going on.
Dr. Diana Smith:So you might need to stimulate someone more if they don't have as much. Right.
Skippy Mesirow:Okay?
Dr. Diana Smith:So it might not take much to get one person going. It might take more to get another going. Some people are curious about some things and some people are curious about others. Right. When I was a child, I was curious about how people operated.
Skippy Mesirow:Right.
Dr. Diana Smith:So my dad wrote me off as an intellect.
Skippy Mesirow:Mhmm.
Dr. Diana Smith:And so when I got to Harvard, I said, Hey, dad, I must have had something going on. I made it to Harvard. I said, how come you didn't see that when I was a kid? And he said, well, to use your language, the data weren't there. And I said, you weren't looking for the right data.
Dr. Diana Smith:Okay. So we, so pay attention. I bet people are curious. They're just curious about things that are different than what we might be. And so then they, then the question is how do you expand that to other things?
Dr. Diana Smith:The other thing is we live in a culture where people don't often challenge how we think in a way that is constructive, but if they did, then we might get more curious about how other people see things right now. People challenge things in ways that can be destructive, which doesn't nurture curiosity. So an example of a destructive and constructive challenge, a destructive one would be, oh, that doesn't make any sense. You're missing the boat here. Another one might be, you know what?
Dr. Diana Smith:I see it differently. It's interesting. You see it the way you do. Here's how I think about it. Tell me what your reaction is.
Skippy Mesirow:And this is something that I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but from my observation is another key shared characteristic of these people that you quote is even when they're sharing their point of view, the union must stay the mistreatment of homosexuals, James Baldwin. I'm just looking at this list. Yeah. They're always couching it in terms. Well, I shouldn't say always, but when I read the quotes, the ones we've chosen Yes.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yeah. Sure.
Skippy Mesirow:They are always couching it in terms of recognizing the other side's point of view as valid in some way Yeah. And and at least indicating that they understand and they've considered it.
Dr. Diana Smith:It's a capacity to understand and empathize the other with the other person, even if you do not agree either with how they think or what they do. And I do think Mandela and Lincoln were the masters at that. And because of that, they were remarkably good at making relationships with people who think and acted differently than them. There were limits to that. Obviously Lincoln couldn't befriend the Southern leaders and the Democrats in the South.
Dr. Diana Smith:Okay. But he had a lot of people in his cabinet who had been running against him prior to the civil war, who he befriended, including Stanton, who couldn't stand him.
Skippy Mesirow:And Mandela is a great example of how this is cultivated. And granted, his cultivation was certainly a forced cultivation, as I think he would talk about in his
Dr. Diana Smith:time of prison. Yeah. It wasn't forced cultivation.
Skippy Mesirow:But this was not how he he was a prominent leader as a young person, and this was not his modus operandi.
Dr. Diana Smith:What allows people to cultivate these characteristics, particularly the empathy, also the curiosity and the persistence, particularly the persistence. I think it's a unusual combination of adversity and enough emotional support to handle the adversity. How do you
Skippy Mesirow:think about the adversity piece? It can be a well, not hard. In manufacturing adversity, oftentimes, you're not getting real adversity, you're getting performative adversity, and yet we're all in often undesired adversity. So I guess the question is, how do we meaningfully take the adversity that's present and use it for growth of ourselves as opposed to, I don't know, whatever we're doing with it currently.
Dr. Diana Smith:A trend I've seen in terms of schooling and parenting over the past 50 years. And that is we tried to eliminate adversity.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah.
Dr. Diana Smith:The number of I I was in a psychology program. I was in a political science program. I was, I, I did, I had a multidisciplinary program, but when you were in the fields of education and psychology and even in Okay. And I'm so grateful. Okay.
Dr. Diana Smith:And I'm so grateful that I failed as a kid. I failed abysmally until I got to college And that gave me failure muscles. And my parents did not cushion me from that. My school did not cushion me from that. I mean, when parents go, oh my God, my kid's gonna be on the couch for 30 years because I didn't do this.
Dr. Diana Smith:I go, don't worry about it. Mhmm. Adversity is good. Just make sure there's enough emotional support there and a context for making sense of it, that they can make something good out of it. So then the question is, how do you use the difficulty?
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. Okay. And as a, as someone who's thinking about children, but doesn't have them yet, I think about, and as a coach, I think about what message you're unintentionally, unconsciously sending your kid because effectively, you're demonstrating them that you don't believe that they can respond from failure, that they are fragile, that they are non resilient and they're going to buy into that belief.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yeah. And that, you know, one of the things I used to say a lot is we are taught that when we're wrong, we're not just wrong, but we're wrong for being wrong. So we have to cover it up. Mhmm. We can't take a look at it.
Skippy Mesirow:Right.
Dr. Diana Smith:We can't examine it. And, you know, I've had I've been trying to change systems for decades and sometimes I my brother used to put it this way. Sometimes you get the bear and sometimes the bear gets you. And I found the times when the bear got me to be the most fruitful in terms of my learning. The question I think that's always important to ask and that that has helped me so much over the course of my life is not either to overly blame myself or blame them or whatever.
Dr. Diana Smith:It's to say, what is this telling me about myself? Yeah. What is it telling me about the other person or the circumstance? And what is it telling me about my relationship with that circumstance or my relationship with that person? How am I positioning myself?
Dr. Diana Smith:Am I seeing myself as a victim? Am I seeing myself as powerless? Am I seeing myself as not having any recourse? And if so, how can I shift that frame to give myself more degrees of freedom?
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. My partner and I were both coaches. We worked together sometime, and this morning, she was reaching out to actually, the the person who we both trained with, who we did our master's coaching program with, and she was just giving she was opting out of an opportunity with this person. And I heard her saying it, and she said she was opting out, but she didn't explain why. And I just gave her the little pause on the voice note, and and she paused and I said, can I share something with you?
Skippy Mesirow:Yes. Yes. I said, you're always talking about this in and out nature with women you look up to, and you just asked for something, and then you're rejecting it, and you're not explaining your growth along the way or how you got there. Like, you need to take ownership of how you're contributing to this. And she's gonna see that growth and appreciate it, but, like, you need to take ownership of that.
Skippy Mesirow:And she was like, you're totally right. And it's just an example of in my mind, ownership is the single biggest key to success, which I think is what you're talking about.
Dr. Diana Smith:Is huge. And you owned your responsibility for helping her see that she wasn't owning hers. And we do these things, as you said at the beginning, so unconsciously that we need one another. This is again where relationships come in. Relationships at the place where we have learning occurs because we can't see everything.
Dr. Diana Smith:We see ourselves from the inside out. Others see us from the outside in. She didn't see what you saw. And so you gave her a gift. A lot of people are worried about causing adversity or making somebody feel bad or causing them not to be able to save face or and yet you didn't let that get in the way of saying this, which is hugely important.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. And just to drive home the point, unless this become a therapy session for me, but 2 days ago, some of my core insecurities are around money. I grew up in a relatively wealthy community, and I watched a lot of poor behavior. And so I built the unconscious belief, which has become conscious that if I are to make a bunch of money, I'm gonna become a bad person in some way. And so she called me out on that the other night.
Skippy Mesirow:I went into a full trigger response, shutdown, disassociation, the whole thing. She knows that she sees it. She calls that out. She welcomes it. I take the effort to, like, talk through it and move through it, and it was hard and it took more than 2 days for that to start to wear off.
Skippy Mesirow:But I'm so grateful for her doing that. And I've already been able to see a slight but meaningful change in my behavior, and I just I'm I am so grateful to her for doing that. I just think it's another great example of the mutuality and the importance of being able to directly communicate in relationship. In this case, it's romantic, but it certainly doesn't need to. You could do this
Dr. Diana Smith:with a colleague. You could
Skippy Mesirow:do it with a friend.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yeah. You can do it with a friend, a professional colleague. But this is really important because well, first of all, it's a tribute to your partnership that you were able to raise something with her that could have pushed her button. She was able to raise something with you that actually goes quite deep. Yes.
Dr. Diana Smith:So definitely, you know, did push your button, but you had enough trust, in one another that you were and this is very important. Oftentimes, when people give people feedback as if it's objective, they see it as I'm telling you what ought to happen because of how it affects me. As opposed to, I got your back. Yeah. You're doing something that could limit you or get you into trouble.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yeah. I don't believe you see it. Yeah. That matters to me because you matter to me. So that way of raising something that could be difficult for someone to hear, it communicates that the person is caring about you.
Dr. Diana Smith:You see the difference Tense?
Skippy Mesirow:100%. And if I think about the constituent parts of our behavior, because I get annoying on the show about trying to make things actionable. Yes. You know, first there's a permission piece, like we both actually asked if the other person wanted to and was ready to receive that. We then deliver it from the place that you're talking about, which is in service of the other person.
Skippy Mesirow:There's truly non attachment to it. We're not trying to get the other person to change. So we say high investment, low attachment. So if that person takes none of the advice, that's okay. That's their choice.
Skippy Mesirow:We're sharing for their benefit not to receive an outcome. And then that kind of unspoken piece here, which I think what we're definitely gonna come back to as it speaks to political systems is, you know, for over a year now, we've been in a place in our relationship where the unit comes before the individual, that all of this is within the scope of what's best for the relationship Yeah. Not me or her. And so and this is why I say we'll come back to this is the opportunity to break out of this is for me or you, republican, democrat, in most cases, but not all. But, actually, what's best for the nation, what's best for democracy, what's best for the system, not me personally.
Skippy Mesirow:And so I think there's a unspoken agreement in it that's important as well. So I'm gonna come back to the identifying the quote unquote challenge, maybe say problem, I don't like that word. But before we do, you asked me to bring you back the or the use of difficulty as it relates to Yes. These kind of archetypal leaders who maybe we can model some more of our behavior on. So if there's anything you wanna say on that.
Dr. Diana Smith:I I wanna you can probably find this on YouTube, but there's a little YouTube video of Michael Caine talking about when he was starting out acting and he was on stage and he had an entrance that he was supposed to make through a door, and there was a chair in the way. And it wasn't it was rehearsal, and so he got flummoxed and he stepped back and he didn't come in. And the director said, what's going on? You're supposed to come through the door. And Michael Caine goes, but there was a chair there.
Dr. Diana Smith:Well, use the chair, use the chair as part of the intro, use the difficulty. Okay. And Michael Cade said, you know, that stayed with him his entire life because he thought that was something he really could make work. And I don't think any of the people we've, we just mentioned would have necessarily said about themselves that they used the difficulty. Mhmm.
Dr. Diana Smith:But being in prison for 28 years, growing up in a very impoverished situation at Lincoln's case, these are not easy situations. Martin Luther King being up against racism his whole life at a time when it was more dangerous than it is today. And it's very dangerous today. These are people who chose to learn from that experience and to help others do the same. So they used it in order to grow their character and to help others.
Dr. Diana Smith:I grew up in a family that was predominantly male. I had 3 older brothers. I had a father who was very tall, very sharp, very intellectually aggressive, a good, great guy in a lot of ways. But the dinner tables were these knocked down debates about politics every night. And the women at the table were basically elbowed out of the conversation.
Dr. Diana Smith:And I watched my mother get dismissed and I saw myself get dismissed and they would sometimes call me nasty names. And, you know, there was something in me and I, this, who knows where this totally this came from. But at 12 years old, I just said enough. I said, you guys gotta stop. There is something about asserting as a marginalized person with less power, asserting your own power and not asking for permission to do it.
Dr. Diana Smith:That is fundamental to equalizing the world.
Skippy Mesirow:Can I just take a stab at some armchair coaching slash therapy? Tell me if I'm I'm right or not. But so dad's exhibiting this domineering behavior. Mom, if I've prepped correctly, suffered from alcoholism. Is that true?
Dr. Diana Smith:Yes. How'd you know that? Came up in some research. Oh, okay. Yeah.
Dr. Diana Smith:And but if I were to dad was it was during the Vietnam War. Dad was a conventional fighter, warfare fighter. My mother was a guerrilla fighter. Oh. She had a lot of power.
Dr. Diana Smith:Wow. And she exercised it through her alcoholism.
Skippy Mesirow:Say more about that.
Dr. Diana Smith:So I don't wanna I don't want to
Skippy Mesirow:What does that mean?
Dr. Diana Smith:She would act out as a way of getting back, and it would get the system going, and it would get a reaction, and all of a sudden, all hell would break loose. All of that was a product of her power, badly used, so was my dad's. Both of them exercised power profoundly destructively, but I would never have seen my mother as powerless.
Skippy Mesirow:Sure.
Dr. Diana Smith:Although I think everybody else did.
Skippy Mesirow:It it actually changes how I think about it slightly, and this is a total guess, but so you have these parental figures that demonstrate to you that to you that you have the power of your voice, but you also see the downside of how they're doing that. And so rather than taking a, let's say, perceived as destructive tack, shutting others down, being belligerent in some way, or using alcohol, which has its own, I'm sure, downsides. Yeah. You decide, okay, well, I'm gonna exercise my agency, but in a much more neat fashion in the research.
Dr. Diana Smith:That that's really fascinating. I mean, you you couldn't have been yep. Very good peer counseling. I feel understood and heard. I pre I really appreciate it.
Dr. Diana Smith:I mean that genuinely. Yeah. And and I would say that there are 2 things that were unacceptable to me as a kid as this is where I learned all about systems was at that dining room table. But there were 2 things that were unacceptable. One was to give away my power.
Dr. Diana Smith:It wasn't going to happen Over my dead body. Mhmm. Okay? And I wish there were more people who were in my position as a woman who felt that way. It's just not gonna happen.
Dr. Diana Smith:Okay? Yeah. I might lose a job, but I'm not gonna lose my self respect and my integrity. Not going to happen. Okay?
Dr. Diana Smith:That's number 1. Number 2, I'll be damned if I treat other people the way I was treated.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah.
Dr. Diana Smith:My job is to help empower people, help them see that they have that power. I just said, I know it gets beaten out of people. I know it gets beaten down. I know people don't see it. I'm endlessly empathic of that.
Dr. Diana Smith:Okay? Totally empathic. And we've got to take a stand. And so my job is to help people see how and that they can take a stand.
Skippy Mesirow:Yes. And I'll also note, and again, correct me if I'm wrong in my interpretation, but this orientation to how can not just I be happy that you've talked about, but also I think the pluralistic is how can we be happy? So how can we engage in that
Dr. Diana Smith:Yes. Very much.
Skippy Mesirow:Without being miserable in it, Enjoying it.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yes. If I had my druthers Have them. I would have saved the whole system.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah.
Dr. Diana Smith:Okay? I I wasn't able to do that. I was a little kid. Okay? Yeah.
Dr. Diana Smith:And so I've been trying to save systems ever since, and that's my
Skippy Mesirow:That's right.
Dr. Diana Smith:Life story.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. That's it's deeply relatable to me. I, you know, I grew up part of a almost decade long divorce. It was very chaotic. I remember
Dr. Diana Smith:Yeah.
Skippy Mesirow:Being 4 or 5 years old and looking up and being like, are you guys fucking idiots? Can you please be adults? And I think
Dr. Diana Smith:that it's hard.
Skippy Mesirow:I'm super grateful for it now. But in so many ways, I think my attraction to public service has been trying to play a role in cultivating a more adult conversation at the table.
Dr. Diana Smith:They've done studies of people who are unhappy and how they vote. I'm curious if anybody has ever studied people who've suffered trauma as a child.
Skippy Mesirow:I'm curious who the samples that would be. Politics. I don't know the answer to that. I'd love to see that too, but my immediate retort is, like, what would the sample set be of people who have not had trauma as a child?
Dr. Diana Smith:I I have always said I've yet to meet somebody who had a happy family. I've since met 2. Okay? Right. Okay.
Dr. Diana Smith:So it's a it's a spectrum, but Kaiser Permanente has this study they did of people who had adverse childhood events. Right. And how it correlates with life expectancy. And the problem with this, they won't say it's a problem with the study, but it is a confounding variable is that if you've had a lot of ACEs, as it's called, adverse childhood events, there are a lot of mediating variables that come into play to affect your life expectancy like obesity or alcoholism and so on. But even people for whom that's not true, it still affects their life expectancy.
Dr. Diana Smith:And it depends on how many adverse childhood events you have. So if you're counting up to 6 or 7, that's different than somebody who's had 1 or 2.
Skippy Mesirow:And I'm trying to remember there's 9 on the scale. Is that true?
Dr. Diana Smith:I think it might be 9. It's up there.
Dr. Diana Smith:We'll we'll we'll put
Skippy Mesirow:it in the show notes, but I think it's 9. And these are things like, yes, it's divorce, it's violence in the home, it's alcoholism, it's physical abuse. There's a number of them, and we I was doing an event couple years ago, and, you know, it was a political event, and we all stood along a line, we're gonna play Red Rover. No one knows what's coming and they ask you to take a big step forward for each one that you experience. And it's pretty interesting because most people who are in those roles get pretty far out there.
Skippy Mesirow:And I think my upbringing looking outside in, you'd think, oh, this is pretty idyllic. Right? Like, nice suburb, north of Chicago, blah blah blah blah. But you definitely noticed that although we all scored more than the mean for the most part, or we definitely averaged more than the mean that those who also came from historically disadvantaged communities were, like, near the end of that scale.
Dr. Diana Smith:If you had a great teacher, a great educational system, you have the emotional support of peers.
Skippy Mesirow:I was so privileged in that way.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yeah. Exactly. At the same time, I do wanna say deprivation comes in all forms, and emotional deprivation is one of them.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. And it can be the hardest one. Devastated. We certainly see from, say, armed conflict that it's harder than the physical often.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yeah. Yeah. We lose
Skippy Mesirow:more people coming home than we do in battle most times.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yeah. Exactly. Okay. Yeah.
Skippy Mesirow:So that was awesome. I really appreciate you sharing some of your story and how you got there, because that's always amongst the most interesting to me. I wanna go back to defining this challenge. I'm gonna try to say challenge and not problem. Let's just start by talking about this moment of extreme partisanship that we are in, or at least we define ourselves to be in.
Skippy Mesirow:In the book specifically, you say that 87% of us are not involved in that and 13% are, and I wonder if you could share, where does that come from? Like, is that true?
Dr. Diana Smith:Well, I mean, whether it's true now is a question in my mind. That research was done in 20 18. Got it. The the research is more in common research 2018. They studied the political tribes in America.
Dr. Diana Smith:They discovered that 87% of us belong to tribes that differ along the political spectrum from left to right, But they're more flexible and are open to changing their mind and more pragmatic than the 13% on the left and right wings, the extremists. But since 2018, my worry is that the conspiracy of hyper, hyper wealthy people like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, in con conspiracy with the media that needs to make money by capturing our amygdala and the extremists in congress and on the ground are causing people within that middle to take sides more and to move more towards the extremes. Yeah. That's my worry.
Skippy Mesirow:Yes. And the way I think about this is there's sort of a root challenge. There are solutions. Between them, there are accelerants. And so those are the things you mentioned.
Skippy Mesirow:The politicians who are taking advantage of the media, that's taking advantage of for their own reasons. I'm gonna come back to each of those because I wanna think about how we as leaders, whether we are because I will also say later on, you talk about what is the term you used? Inalienable responsibility. All these. I just loved that.
Skippy Mesirow:Right? We don't just get the inalienable well, I really can't speak today. We don't just get to passively receive inalienable rights, but we guarantee our own rights through inalienable responsibility. And in so many ways, in my experience, the people most exercising that responsibility are actually the elected officials. They are the people working in government.
Skippy Mesirow:They are the people on the front line. And so the tendency, and for good reason, is to call up the 2% of people who are using those things for personal gain at the expense of demonizing the 98% and actually keeping future people from entering that arena who we really want there. And so
Dr. Diana Smith:Very very important. Yeah.
Skippy Mesirow:So I wanna come back and, like, resource the 98%. But let's first just define the space between us. Right? This is the notion of relationality. What is the space between us mean?
Dr. Diana Smith:We have these people who are intent on manipulating. What can we, the people, do to inoculate against that? And what makes us vulnerable to it? I think there's a structural relational issue, not a structural meaning formal, but, the the structure of our relationships
Dr. Diana Smith:Mhmm. In
Dr. Diana Smith:this country. And not just this country around the world, but I'm gonna stay confined myself to the US that has always existed from the time we were founded. It's not new. Just as you were saying, we're seeing a new manifestation of an old challenge, which we've tried to fix in different ways. Okay.
Dr. Diana Smith:Or tried to remedy in different ways. And that is a problem that, and I'll call it a problem because it is a problem does need to be fixed, but you're right. We can use it as a challenge and, and, and incorporate it. It has been around in plain sight forever. Mhmm.
Dr. Diana Smith:And it is that we have lived separate lives divided in groups along two lines. 1 is demographic. So this is not all political polarization. We've divided ourselves into separate demographic groups, and the others we tend to divide ourselves into separate ideological groups.
Dr. Diana Smith:Okay? And in times of high anxiety and high uncertainty, when people are looking to feel better, they tend to get more and more insular within their own group. They look to like minded people of the same ilk who will make them feel better, who will comfort them. Okay? And they grow more and more distant from those who are different.
Dr. Diana Smith:And that has happened throughout our history at different times. Civil war would be an example. Late a, 1800 would be another. Around the revolutionary war was another. We've done this at there was a big effort to end slavery before the constitution was finalized.
Dr. Diana Smith:And even after during the declaration of independence and before, But they didn't talk to each other.
Skippy Mesirow:And that's the So that's the American framing of this. And you do give in the book sort of these 5 epochs of this crisis coming up. Yeah. I get I've always been very curious about the environmental impact. So if we could take a second and just zoom out from America to kind of humanity or the world, there seems to be environmental conditions that lead to particular outcomes.
Skippy Mesirow:I'll give 2 examples that I think demonstrate this, but one is whatever's going on pre World War II, something is in the air, something is in the mix that is causing the rise of authoritarian leadership all around the world. There's some stimulus that's yielding a similar but not identical result across the world. I would say that that's happening again now. The other time, I think we saw this pretty clearly, is the time of the crusades and the homogenization of religious belief by force across the world, And I'm curious what if if you agree that those are these moments and what some of the contributing factors you might think. I've got some theories, but I'm I'm curious if you have any thoughts about that.
Skippy Mesirow:And if you're like
Dr. Diana Smith:I'd be interested in your theories too. I'm just I'm gonna throw something out just to get the ball in play.
Skippy Mesirow:Okay.
Dr. Diana Smith:Then let's bounce it back and forth. First of all, I see exactly what you're seeing. Authoritarianism is on the rise around the world. There have been environmental factors contributing to that. Globalization, climate change causing climate catastrophes around the world, contributing to increased migration of populations.
Dr. Diana Smith:The countries in, Northern Europe were basically homogeneous. They're not anymore. They're highly diverse now. Okay? I remember people criticizing the United States for racism back in the sixties seventies.
Dr. Diana Smith:My reaction then was, you're right. It really sucks. And just wait until you have more diversity. Let's see how well you handle it. Mhmm.
Dr. Diana Smith:Okay? So there have been huge changes globally that touch on our ability to work across groups that are different from us. Okay? We have not developed that capacity as a species. We are very good at cooperating within groups when we need to, especially if we're under threat.
Dr. Diana Smith:Okay? We're very good at that. We have not learned yet how to cooperate across groups. Okay? And that's what our era requires of us.
Dr. Diana Smith:Until we do that, we will our ability to solve urgent problems is diminished. We can't solve them. So people look to an authoritarian leader to solve them because we can't solve them ourselves. We can't work across groups to come up with solutions that work for everybody. So we're looking for an authoritarian leader to impose it.
Dr. Diana Smith:Okay? And that is a worldwide problem. But I think it's possible to take another evolutionary step and to move from learning how to cooperate within groups to learning how to cooperate across groups. And we have the motivation to do it now. We've never had the motivation, but with climate change, we have the motivation.
Dr. Diana Smith:Like we've never had it before. Climate change crosses boundaries. It requires us to work on this across groups.
Skippy Mesirow:If you're listening in an office in an unfamiliar neighborhood, don't worry. Someone's not trying to break in. That's just Diana punctuating her statements with her hand because she's so passionate.
Dr. Diana Smith:was listening to your wonderful technical advisor talking about being Italian. And I thought I'm I'm a wasp, but I'm an Italian wasp. What can I say? So sorry about that. So, anyway, I think we have the capacity to take that evolutionary step, and that's one of the things I talk about in the book.
Dr. Diana Smith:And you actually see it even in congress, it happening.
Skippy Mesirow:You see We're gonna talk about
Dr. Diana Smith:that too. Okay. So We'll get there. So if if it can happen in these contexts, it can happen elsewhere.
Skippy Mesirow:That's awesome. So what I hear, you're saying primary contributors to these moments, environmental factors that lead to authoritarian rule, or at least shift towards authoritarian, let's say, appetite by by public, mass migration and globalization, which I think makes
Dr. Diana Smith:And climate change.
Skippy Mesirow:And climate change.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yeah.
Skippy Mesirow:And I'm thinking in the way back machine. So it's hard for me to connect to what the effects of climate change were during the era of the crusades, for instance. Instance. So I'm not saying that's not a contributing factor, but I'm gonna just put that one to the side because it's hard for me to I don't have the source data to know that. The other 2 make great sense to me.
Skippy Mesirow:And the third one that I would add for your consideration Sure.
Skippy Mesirow:Is massive disruptions in technology, but specifically Yes. That's communication technology. Yeah. If you think about pre I mean, what really in many ways contributed more than anything to the Crusades is the printing press.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yeah. Exactly.
Skippy Mesirow:That's right. All of a sudden, we can widely distribute our gospel, and then through the use of state sanctioned force, impose it on you.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yeah. Absolutely.
Skippy Mesirow:Okay. So if the contributing factors are migration, globalization, then I think we have some hope of allowing this cycle to resolve itself over time because we'll simply get to a place that is so homogenized as to not have a next phase change in those root conditions. If, however, those are the leading factors and it's the resulting feeling of, you said, anxiety and what was the other thing you said? Uncertainty. Anxiety and uncertainty.
Dr. Diana Smith:People don't like either one too much. Yeah.
Skippy Mesirow:Then I think we're in for a very different challenge because it is almost guaranteed that the rate of change, technologically, is going to continue to grow and grow. And so the only way we will not be able to be in a constant state of responding in the desire for authoritarianism is to learn to be okay with uncertainty because it is never going away in the future.
Dr. Diana Smith:Oh, okay with uncertainty, and I'm gonna come back to understand that our best protection in the face of uncertainty is to learn to use uncertainty.
Skippy Mesirow:Yes.
Dr. Diana Smith:Okay. And make something good out of it. Uncertainty means we don't yet have the answer. That's a good thing from my point of view. I don't want the answer.
Dr. Diana Smith:Okay. But if I can work with people across boundaries who know things I don't know, see things I don't see, I'm much more likely to create something that works for all of us.
Skippy Mesirow:Yes. And you say something, I'm gonna paraphrase, paraphrase, but you say that groups on the far left and far right now openly prefer autocracy as our form of government because they believe that our current form of government, e. J. Democracy, cannot meet the needs of speed of response in the 21st century.
Skippy Mesirow:And so your commentary on that is this is not actually a problem of democracy. It's a problem of how we treat each other in this democracy, and I think that's just a really important thing to highlight here. And I can think of several examples in history where democracy has moved very expeditiously. The US prepping for World War 2, for instance, comes to mind very quickly. Absolutely.
Skippy Mesirow:So there and I'll tell you
Dr. Diana Smith:this is an example though of a group. We came together a fragmented nation. We were fragmented. We disagreed about whether we should go to war. We disagreed about what the threats were to democracy, whether they're coming from the right or the left.
Dr. Diana Smith:Racism was huge. Labor unrest was huge. Okay? There was a fragmented nation coming out of a depression, but man, when Pearl Harbor got hit, there was no question. We gotta deal with this.
Dr. Diana Smith:We are now 1 nation under God and we're gonna kick butt. Okay? Yeah. We've gotta learn to see the threats that exist if we don't work across boundaries now.
Skippy Mesirow:So you're making a claim effectively that democracy is actually the best system when treated well to respond to anxiety and uncertainty, which we're almost certainly gonna get more of in the Yes. Short and midterm and probably long term. And I thought maybe as a means of of just making this clear to people. We could sketch just some little vignettes that are in the book, and you could choose others if you like, of how this goes well or how this goes poorly. And the let's start with the how this goes right.
Skippy Mesirow:There's 2 examples in the book that stood out to me. You can pick 1 or you can go a totally different direction. Sure.
Dr. Diana Smith:Sure thing. Billings, Montana, back in the 19 nineties, was doing extremely well. It was economically vibrant. It wasn't a poor city. It was predominantly white.
Dr. Diana Smith:It was about as far away from the turmoil of racism as you can get that you would ordinarily think about. But I use the image of Mount Saint Helens, 100 of miles away. The dust fell on Billings. You can't run away from this stuff now, no matter where you are. And so what happened is, a native American family, was the victim of some people who came and wrote on the side of their house, die and a SWAT sticker.
Dr. Diana Smith:And then shortly thereafter, an African American church was terrorized by skinheads who came to intimidate them. And then during Hanukkah, a young boy, 6 years old, put a menorah in his window and somebody threw a brick through the window and also desecrated the graveyard. And the response of the town gave rise to a movement called Not in Our Town. And this is how they responded. 1st, the painters union went to the native American home and repainted it for free.
Dr. Diana Smith:Then white neighbors escorted the African American congregants into their church for the next weeks months so that they would not be terrorized by the skinheads. And then the local newspaper printed a picture of a menorah, and hundreds of homes hung the menorah in their windows. Patrice O'Neil, who's an independent filmmaker from Oakland, decided that this was worth filming. So she went to there. She filmed exactly what happened.
Dr. Diana Smith:She interviewed people and she wanted to tell their story. It's about a 13 minute film and she took it back to Oakland where she's from and she showed it in the Bay area. And people came from all over the town, law enforcement, faith leaders, educators, everyday people, parents, so on. They all came to see the film. And at the end, Patrice said, what do you think of what they did in billings?
Dr. Diana Smith:And they said, Oh, not so fast. We want to talk about what's happening in our town. We want to talk about how much are we helping people to feel like they belong in our town. Are we creating communities that are stronger than hate? Are we making people feel like they belong?
Dr. Diana Smith:So they don't hate. We want to talk about that. She said, wow, wasn't expecting that. So she started traveling around to town halls across the country, I think maybe a 100, showing the film, and people began thinking about their own town. And now there are literally hundreds of chapters of not in our town across the country and communities.
Dr. Diana Smith:And the thing that I want to emphasize here is when I pulled on that thread about not in our town, I uncovered 100 of 1000 of people working across the country in one way or another to rebuild our democracy, to redefine the space between us, to open up the insular spaces within groups, and to shorten the distance, close the distance across groups, literally 100 of 1000. The website is remaking the space.org, and you can find links to organizations that are doing this work if you want to join them. If you don't want to join them, support them. But there are things we can all do. We don't need to reinvent the wheel.
Skippy Mesirow:I think a couple of things come up for me. The first one that came up, just the observation of people responding to hate with love. Yes. Just chokes me up every time. Yeah.
Skippy Mesirow:And I have a core belief in myself and of others that we all want to be that person or those people, that we all believe that in moments of strife or perceived threat, we will respond with love and not hate. And I'm looking at my notes here about how it goes wrong, and the truth is we're all human. We're all just as capable of responding in a way that accelerates the hate as we are a way that reverses the hate.
Dr. Diana Smith:No question.
Skippy Mesirow:And so I'm also thinking about my known predisposition to play a harmful role, and I'm wrestling with the reality that's also true. It's a choice, but it's also true.
Dr. Diana Smith:I was driving along the other day, and somebody cut me off. And I said, you jerk.
Skippy Mesirow:And I'm really sorry about that, Diana, but I had somewhere to go. I just Yeah.
Dr. Diana Smith:Exactly. Exactly. You jerk. Okay. And then I said, okay.
Dr. Diana Smith:Well, there you are. You know, you've you've now characterized the person as a jerk. You have no idea what was going on with this person, blah, blah, blah. I said, what goes into saying jerk? So I'm going to say something very short about it, which is that our brain has 2 systems, a hot system and a cool system.
Dr. Diana Smith:And the hot system reacts when we're under threat. Okay? And it's reactive. It's quick. It's emotional.
Dr. Diana Smith:And it's what you talk to. You just go, god dang that guy. What a jerk. Alright? And then the cool system is more reflective.
Dr. Diana Smith:It operates slower. It's reflective. Okay? Whereas the first is go slow. This one wants to know.
Dr. Diana Smith:Okay? Mhmm. So the first thing I think that might be that I found helpful is when I react that way is to just acknowledge. It's a very Buddhist notion. Just observe.
Dr. Diana Smith:I'm in my heart system right now. Not to condemn it. Not to say that, okay. I'm a jerk for calling him a jerk. Just observe that I'm in my hot system right now.
Dr. Diana Smith:It doesn't feel good to be there. So how can I migrate over to my cool system? And there's been a lot of research that the more you just stop interrupt your hot system, observe it and say, I wanna move over to my cool system and start reflecting on what might have been happening to that person. The more connections you make in your brain between your hot system and your cool system. So the more often you do it, the more often you create those connections.
Dr. Diana Smith:The more connections you create, the easier and quicker it is to move from your hot system to your cool system.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. That's right. And if you were in a session with me as a coach, we might employ mindset work around this and ask you that exact question, which is like, what are 3 explanations that could have been true in which you would have been extremely happy or prideful that person did that. And you might come back with something and I'll try one just for the listener. It's like there's a young woman in her mid twenties named Stephanie.
Skippy Mesirow:Her doctor told her upon getting married that she may never be able to have a child. She has thought since she was little that being a mother was amongst the most important things she will ever do. She's been trying with her partner in a committed relationship for 4 years. She's failed multiple times. She's had 2 miscarriages, and the doctor's been really clear.
Skippy Mesirow:It's super important for her the moment that she gets into labor, she's now pregnant again, to be under medical supervision so that the child has the best chance to survive, and she's 7 months pregnant. It's really early. And she just went into labor, and she needs to get to the hospital so there's any chance that this pregnancy takes. How would you feel about the person that just cut you off?
Dr. Diana Smith:Exactly.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. And what's amazing about that is it's irrelevant if it's true. Like, notice what just happened in your body if you're listening. Yeah. How much better is it for you?
Skippy Mesirow:Mhmm.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's so much better for you. This is it's so in our self interest.
Skippy Mesirow:And now, a quick break from our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is supported by Elected Leaders Collective Foundation Gold level donors, Bill and Wendy Spatz and Joshua Hanfling. We could not produce this content without you, and thank you for your contribution. If you wanna hear more of this content, you too can contribute by going to electedleaderscollective.com, clicking the donate button, and receiving your tax benefit. The Healing Our Politics podcast is brought to you by the Elected Leaders Collective, the first leading and most highly recognized name in mental health, well-being, and performance coaching for elected leaders and public servants designed specifically for you.
Skippy Mesirow:Now don't be fooled by the name. The Elected Leaders Collective is not just for elected leaders. It is for all public servants, staffers, volunteers, government, nonprofit, whole organizations. This is for you. If you are filled with passion for improving your community and world but are tired as I am of the anger, stress and betrayal, if you find yourself banging your head against that same wall, struggling with the incoming criticism and threats, arguing with colleagues who are supposed to be on your team and questioning if it's even worth it any more than the elected leaders collective programming is specifically for you.
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Dr. Diana Smith:The US is such a unique case in some ways. Again, you know, our hit we've always had a vulnerability to doing what we now see. It's not like it's created out of whole cloth. So where it can go wrong is if, for lack of a better word, behaviors, predispositions on the part of the electorate that have caused enormous pain in our past are not attended to. Mhmm.
Dr. Diana Smith:And not worked through. It's phew. We got through that. We got a constitution. Who cares if it almost blew up?
Skippy Mesirow:You don't have to forget about that. Yeah. Sorry. Just it's bizarre that I hadn't thought about it, but I happened to be listening to a podcast, unrelated, the other day. And since I've been reading all these great quotes from you, from Benjamin Franklin about the time of the Constitution, and then this other podcast just made a very simple point, which is 30% of the people didn't vote for
Dr. Diana Smith:it. Yeah, exactly.
Skippy Mesirow:And I forget that. I go, oh, this is It was really hard. We disagreed. We made the devil's bargain. We got to consensus, but then we were all in.
Skippy Mesirow:And that's just not the reality. True. Stuff works.
Dr. Diana Smith:No. And that compromise was a horrible compromise. It was a necessary one to get a constitution, but it got us a constitution that built into it in a qualities that have haunted us ever since.
Skippy Mesirow:Slavery, 3 fifths of a person.
Dr. Diana Smith:Exactly. Yeah.
Skippy Mesirow:That was the cost of America Yeah. In some ways.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yeah. And, you know, not to shift to the positive again, but my my point but the point I make from that essay that I remembering the forgotten road to now, the how we got to where we are, it is, if a very small group of homogenous people can create that kind of horror, slavery and inequality. Think of what a large pluralist group might be able to create today. In other words, this was a construction. It wasn't imposed on us.
Dr. Diana Smith:Okay. This was something we created. So if we created it, we can recreate it. And to me, that's the takeaway from history that we've never acknowledged because we don't want to look at how we created it, but we did create it. And people are, you know, white people are feel so shameful and other people are so angry at white people for what they did, that white people don't take a look at what they did in a way that's dispassionate.
Dr. Diana Smith:We ought to get over it. We got to look at it. Okay. There's a legacy in this country that we've never looked at. That legacy continues to haunt us.
Dr. Diana Smith:It came back in the civil war. It came back in reconstruction. It came back in the red scares in the early 1900. It came back in the depression. It came back right prior to World War 2.
Dr. Diana Smith:It came back during World War 2 in terms of how we treated black troops. It came back after World War II and how we treated black troops who were veterans. It came back when redlining it, it comes back again and again, we have not ever come back to deal with how we have defined and made the space between us, across demographic. And as a result of the demographic lines are defending the demographic lines. And until we deal with that fundamental problem in the US we're gonna have a vulnerability to authoritarianism.
Skippy Mesirow:To respond in a way that that many will maybe find a fronting. So they should be aware of that. As with the individual in, coaching or therapeutic dynamic to a society, like, ownership is the key. And we have to recognize and own the choice that we made knowing it was extremely harmful to many and imperfect, but also recognizing that it was the choice that set up set us up for better choices in the future. Yeah.
Skippy Mesirow:And the quote that I really connect with from your work is from Benjamin Franklin. It's a little bit longer one, but I think it's worth reading.
Dr. Diana Smith:Oh, I love that quote. Yeah.
Skippy Mesirow:I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I will ever approve them. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment and to pay more respect to the judgment of others. I doubt too whether any other convention we can obtain may be better able to create a better Constitution. For when you assemble a number of men, you have the advantage of their joint wisdom. You inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views.
Skippy Mesirow:From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, sir, to find a system approaching so near as perfection as this one does. He's doing so much in that quote.
Dr. Diana Smith:I agree. It's a stunning quote.
Skippy Mesirow:He's recognizing the imperfection of what they're doing. He's owning supporting something that is not just imperfect, but has some deep flaws
Skippy Mesirow:That will lead to the enslavement of human lives, but he's also recognizing that it's simply the best they can do at the time and that it is moving them forward. And so I think we have to take ownership of the fact that, yeah, we made this choice that confined a large group of people to truly heinous human outcomes whose shadow and long tail is still with us, And we also have to own and maybe this is wrong or right, we can't prove a counternarrative but had we not had that constitution, had we not had the first democracy, had we maintained monarchy and colonialism, would that have done anything to eliminate the practice of slavery, which was practiced all over the world, would we be in a position to now try to make amends and change our system to more fully bring, as we have several times in our history, a larger portion of humanity into the founding ideals of that document?
Dr. Diana Smith:That's a great question. I it's one I asked myself a lot when I read that quote and think about what happened. And then you could also say, well, the reason why that constitution ended up the way it did is the North realized they couldn't beat the British without the South, so they were constantly cajoling the South to stay with them. But let's say by the time of the constitutional convention, they could have cast the South aside. Okay?
Dr. Diana Smith:Yeah. And said, okay. So you guys go and have a slave state. Okay? And we won't appear.
Dr. Diana Smith:The question is, what would that have done? So it's not clear what the right answer would have been or if there even was one. Where I hold us as responsible as a nation is we didn't move fast enough to reconcile it. And when we did, we had a civil war that took the lives of 700,000 people. That's daunting.
Dr. Diana Smith:And then we went through reconstruction and because of the assassination of Lincoln, I hope he would have done better than Johnson, the return of slavery essentially by another name. I think it behooves us now to fix, not fix. I know you don't like that word, but to remedy or to reconstruct or to reinvent the space between us so that this doesn't continue into the future.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. As long as we continue to live in the fun house mirror version of reality, Yeah. Believe the worst of each other without actual evidence or truth behind it. We will project onto our reality the worst possible outcomes of those conditions. And so our opportunity as leaders and as citizens is to play an active role in turning that that negative feedback loop into a virtuous cycle.
Skippy Mesirow:And so I wanna shift into that and what we can do, and there's a lot there. I think it would be you you tell me if you think this would help. There's, like, a deeper root cause of all of this, and the hypothesis here is basically loneliness and isolation. And I wonder if it's worth outlining that before we get into solutions or if you think that would better come up naturally as we get into what those solutions or actions are.
Dr. Diana Smith:I think it's worth paying attention to it. I think the loneliness and isolation is one reason why I think we're driven to be more insular within our own groups as a potential remedy. But I don't think the space between us has caused the loneliness and isolation by itself. This is where I think the internet and the new media, parenthetically to go back to something you said earlier about the crusade, you said that was a time when technology also was introduced. Okay?
Dr. Diana Smith:Anytime you introduce a technology, it takes a while for society to figure out what its places in society, what our relationship to that technology ought to be. And we haven't yet figured that out. Okay. And meanwhile, while we're trying to figure it out, the technology is advancing at a rapid pace. It would be important for us to figure it out.
Dr. Diana Smith:So that it doesn't yeah.
Skippy Mesirow:Evidence of that, you say, there's a study, correct me if I'm wrong, but regular news consumers, when you ask them about their beliefs about people on the, quote, other side, whatever that is to them of the political aisle, their beliefs about reality are 3 times as Exactly. Inaccurate as people who are just passive news readers.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yeah. So if you're consuming 247, the odds that you're distorting are 3 times greater than if you were not. And then the other is this is, I thought, really fascinating because you think the internet would moderate our insular reality. Okay. It ends up that when people go on the internet, they do encounter competing views or conflicting views.
Dr. Diana Smith:What they don't have. And this gets to the loneliness issue and the unhappiness issue. They don't have as many face to face interactions with people to moderate what they're learning about on the Internet. Mhmm. So our connections are coming from the virtual reality.
Dr. Diana Smith:And I remember I had a social psychology professor, a wonderful man, Roger Brown, when I was a graduate student. And he talked about politeness strategies, how we look out for each other, save face and so on. He goes, the problem with being in your car is those strategies break down because you can't see the person. Mhmm. And he was anticipating back in the 19 seventies, the same reality that happens on the Internet.
Dr. Diana Smith:They're anonymous. We don't see them. Okay? Mhmm. So the kinds of things we would normally do for walking down a street and we bump into somebody and excuse me.
Dr. Diana Smith:Sorry. Okay? Those start to fade away. So without the same kind of face to face connection, and there's so much data on how young people aren't connecting with each other as much, you know, they're living in their virtual reality. Okay?
Dr. Diana Smith:And I think the product of that is that people are getting more and more polarized because they're entering a world like the fellow I talked about in the section on loneliness, who after his mother died of a stroke unexpectedly, he didn't wasn't close to his daddy. He started getting on the Internet and the place that was recruiting him were these hate sites.
Dr. Diana Smith:So I and and then I don't know if you noticed this, but in the misinformation chapter, I talk about this fellow who did a spoof on
Skippy Mesirow:conspiracy theories. It's one of my favorite anecdotes.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yeah. And, but he says, look, it's rather than talk about these guys as insane. Why don't you understand what they're looking for is a sense of belonging. And this goes back to not in our town. If we created more of a sense of belonging, if we reach I intentionally reach out to people who are very different from me in terms of gender, race, age, ideology.
Dr. Diana Smith:Okay? And I create my sense of belonging there, and we should all try to do that.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. You say something that I think is is true, which is when we think about conspiracy theories or conspiracy theorist, is this actually a problem of belief, or is it a problem of belonging? Belonging.
Dr. Diana Smith:I think that's so important. Yeah.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. And the more extreme the belief, the deeper the sense of isolation is. Exactly. I think of the also, I grew up in my like middle years in Highland Park, Illinois. The 2 years ago now, the 4th July shooter was in my hometown.
Dr. Diana Smith:Oh boy.
Skippy Mesirow:That the parade, I wasn't, Yeah. I wasn't I was not there, but the first shots hit literally where my family and I set up every year when I was still there. Luckily, they didn't go that year. They were in town. They went to the one in Glencoe because my grandma had just died, and they wanted to go there instead, And I'll tell you my first reaction when I got that news.
Skippy Mesirow:My first reaction was disbelief. My second reaction was, oh my god, are people okay? Let me check out. But once I started to sit and process, the thing that came through for me was just overwhelming sadness. Yeah.
Skippy Mesirow:And not just sadness for the victims, sadness for the shooter. How horrifically isolated and sad must
Dr. Diana Smith:And desperate.
Skippy Mesirow:This This young boy have been that this was his best option Yeah. In his mind. Yeah. And it's so that is to me, like, the the far end of the spectrum of what happens in in loneliness. And I think it's so important because the natural inclination when we hear someone say something that we think is if we're being honest, stupid, outrageous, crazy, probably the words I would use in my own head at first before I go, oh, wait, wait, wait.
Skippy Mesirow:It's like, well, what's what's the humanity under this? How can I meet this person with kindness? Not just because it's the quote unquote right thing to do, but because it's actually the thing that stands the best chance of bringing this person back into society as a contributory member Yeah. That's gonna benefit them. It's gonna benefit me.
Skippy Mesirow:It's gonna benefit the system. We got here because of the, how would we say, these distortions of much of the media of reality.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yep.
Skippy Mesirow:And I wonder you as a person who is aware of this, what do you do? How do you source media and information to inoculate yourself from those that others could copy?
Dr. Diana Smith:I have a Substack newsletter, and I wrote a recent post called Lost Your Mojo. Here's who took it and how to get it back. You have the dominant media. It's focused primarily on what's wrong. It investigates the causes and blames.
Dr. Diana Smith:It doesn't offer solutions. It appeals to your amygdala because its tone is usually angry and is intentionally trying to cause outrage. It's based on Roger Ailes theory of politics. Got 2 2 guys on the stage. One guy gives the 3 point plan for peace in the Middle East.
Dr. Diana Smith:The other guy falls in the orchestra pit. Who's the Met press gonna cover the orchestra pit? It subscribes to the theory. If it bleeds, it leads. Okay?
Dr. Diana Smith:And that's what I'm calling sort of the dominant mainstream news. Okay? There is an emergent news media coming up, and that's where I get my news. And I wanna talk about it because it's pretty cool. Okay?
Dr. Diana Smith:Mhmm. It's just as investigative. It when it first started to emerge, the reaction of mainstream news was to call it all opinion pieces, fluff pieces, positive story pieces. Okay. But it's just as investigative.
Dr. Diana Smith:It investigates not only does it investigate problems, but it investigates the root causes. It also investigates solutions that people are creating to solve the problems. The tone is a tone of observation, warmth, interest, curiosity, and the the difference in impact in terms of the reader is just fundamental. And so, I get my news from an organization called Solutions Journalism Network, and they have already trained 60,000 journalists around the world, in mainstream news. And if you go to their website and click on their story tracker, you can find their stories.
Dr. Diana Smith:So I get my news there. I do get my news elsewhere. I get my news from the New York Times, The Washington Post. I check out Fox News. I check out conservative.
Dr. Diana Smith:There's concern I go to Substack a lot. Substack has a direct incentive to cultivate readers. You you're not paying for the New York times apparat that New York times, the Washington post, Fox news. They mediate between the reader and the writer and they mediate between the reader and the world. Okay?
Dr. Diana Smith:So Substack takes that mediating force out and directly has writers cultivating a readership. So I get a lot of my news on Substack and the dispatch, which is a center right newsletter started on Substack is now elsewhere, but it's it's not just people on the left who are on Substack. In fact, one of my favorite ex Substackers, Jonathan Katz, who's a good progressive, left Substack because Substack was supporting people so far on the right that they hung out with Nazis. Now I won't leave Substack because I believe what he originally said, which is they can go, but I'm not gonna go. So there are alternative news sources out there.
Dr. Diana Smith:But the important thing is when I read the New York Times or I read some sensational piece and I say to myself, that's their job. They're making money. That's their job. They're making money by appealing to my emotional outrage. Okay?
Dr. Diana Smith:They can do their job. My job is not to be victim to it. So I'm gonna go look at these other sources and see if I can triangulate what I'm reading here and find out more stuff. That's the other thing I wanted to say is they actually don't report the data of what people say and do much of the time. They report people's attributions, accusations, and counter accusations.
Dr. Diana Smith:So that I myself don't know what actually happened and that bugs me. So I go and try to find out what actually happened.
Skippy Mesirow:I'm curious about the frequency and quantity of use because I know many people who have said, who've come to the recognition that reading news all the time is having a negative impact on them, and their solution has been, Oh, I'm just not gonna listen at all, which I think comes with its own set of downsides.
Dr. Diana Smith:Probably. Definitely.
Skippy Mesirow:But but you've also said reading more can further distort, and I wonder if that's because you're not reading it the right way, or do you limit how much content you're taking in in any way?
Dr. Diana Smith:I actually don't limit the the amount of content. I definitely limit the quality of the content. Going to Solutions Journalism Network helps a lot. So, like, when I was doing the research for this book, I was reading about all the things people were doing across the country to turn things around. Okay?
Dr. Diana Smith:I was consuming a huge amount of information, so my quantity was very high. Mhmm. But it was motivating and inspiring, and it was generating ideas about how we could help each other and how we could work this out and what could be done, what I could do, what others could do. So that wasn't a problem. When I stopped writing the book, started promoting the book, that was a bummer.
Dr. Diana Smith:Not as much fun. You send messages out into the ether, and you don't get anything back. Okay? Mhmm. And I was starting to read the news more and the election cycle's ramping up, and I find my own anxiety and my own emotional state starting to plummet.
Dr. Diana Smith:And so I said, yeah. You gotta you know what to do, Diana. You you have to moderate what you're taking in and observe for others so you could be helpful. And so the Substack has helped me with that because it requires me to go after the the better stories and to help others.
Skippy Mesirow:A lot of our listeners are gonna be constituent contributors to the journalism. They're gonna be congresspeople, mayors, state representatives who are being asked for interview. They will be staffers talking about the most recent policy that's been released. They'll be executive directors at nonprofits who are promoting structural changes to democracy. What would be a if you were to give them a 1 page handbook on the best way to interact with media that would make it most likely granted they're not the editor of that piece or the writer of that piece, but they would make it most likely that the resulting content would be both published and constructive as opposed to either nonpublished or destructive.
Skippy Mesirow:What might be some of the things that you'd put on that page?
Dr. Diana Smith:The media, quite rightfully, is more attracted to a human bites dog than dog bites human. Okay. So anything that sort of introduces a way of thinking that's not typical or an, a fact or an idea, which requires by the way, the political candidate and the elected official to think so. Okay. And it's very easy when you're busy to fall into scripts.
Dr. Diana Smith:So I understand what I'm about to say is not easy, but it may be doable. So I'm going to give an example. There's a wonderful film. I recommend everybody get a chance to see it. It's called common ground and it's all about regenerative farming.
Dr. Diana Smith:Anyway, so great movie. There was a conservative elected official in Congress interviewed about regenerative farming sound bite, Mike in the face. What do you think of regenerative? Okay. Because they were testifying at Congress that day.
Dr. Diana Smith:And he said, I'm a Republican and I'm conservative. And I'm actually quite surprised that more conservatives don't get behind it because it's all about conservation. Sound bite. Okay. He was supporting something that people think of as a progressive agenda And he was reframing it as a conservative agenda and one around which we could all get behind.
Dr. Diana Smith:That was an interesting move on his part. And we ought to be thinking about how can we say things that are interesting, counterintuitive, not necessarily alienating. Now in the world we live in today, if you look at the number of Republican Congress, people who have gotten behind Trump after the trial and called the trial a charade, we're talking about a deeper problem than I right now know how to solve. If the only thing I would commend people to, and I would commend all of your elected officials to is to listen to a post. Adam Kinzinger recently did, a video post.
Dr. Diana Smith:It's on Substack and it's his response to the trial and to how elected representatives are responding. It's a very important video for all of us to listen to. And it's about putting our country first. And it's humble, it's pointed, and it's affecting.
Skippy Mesirow:So we've talked about these malignant forces of accelerating these negative circumstances for personal gain, whether that's media or particular leaders. And I wanna understand there's, like, the famous 21 questions, right, where you go on a date, you ask these 21 questions, they're well studied to build love. Right. One of the questions is you could have a dinner party with only 1 person, dead or alive, who would it be? And I remember the first time I went on a date and used that, my response to it was Stalin.
Skippy Mesirow:The reason I chose Stalin, he was like, I know enough about him to make him seem real, and he's archetype for the evil genius. Right? Who's responsible for the death of many people. But what I wanna know at that dinner is, did he think he was doing a good thing? Yeah.
Skippy Mesirow:In all of our minds, do we actually think we're doing the right thing, or are there true known evil, quote, unquote, I don't believe in evil, but bad actors? Or are all of us along for the ride? And I think that's important to understand as a precedent for where we'll go into next. And I wonder if you have a thought about that, whether that's the person who is manipulating the environment as the, let's say, director of the news company or as the politician leveraging division, And then also the level under that, which is the people who are supporting those individuals either as a newscaster at that organization or a supporter of that politician, for instance?
Dr. Diana Smith:It's an important question. I tend, as somebody who thinks from a psychological, political, relational point of view, I, I put, I would put someone like Stalin in that context. Stalin couldn't have been Stalin without the people around him. Same with Hitler.
Skippy Mesirow:Selected.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yeah. They were elected to go back to his youth. I mean, you know, the seeds were there for that person. Look at Trump, who I know they're probably listeners who support Trump. I don't see this as an anti Republican statement.
Dr. Diana Smith:I think that Trump has taken the Republican Party in a direction that is new as a whole new party. And, you know, what led him to do it? And so all of these people have authoritarian leanings. Stalin, I I don't know enough about to say this, but Hitler was an angry man, and Trump is an angry man. Okay.
Dr. Diana Smith:And Hitler felt quite victimized. And for reasons we never understand, Trump feels quite victimized. They're both very vindictive. There's probably a whole constellation of forces inside them and outside them that produced it. The question you raised about whether they thought they were doing good, you know, you go back to the Bolshevik revolution.
Dr. Diana Smith:There was a lot of things that happened then that were quite horrifying. And yet I bet Lenin thought he was doing good and thought that the bourgeoisie and the ruling class and czar family were at, there's a lot to be said for this were had produced enormous cruelty and horrors for the people of Russia. So they can imagine themselves to be doing something good. The question I always have is when will we as a species solve these horrors in ways that we don't replicate them?
Dr. Diana Smith:And every single time we replicate them, I actually believe we are on the cusp of not replicating them of actually, and I comes down to this, the space between us intergroup cooperation, being able to cooperate across groups that are very different from us. If we can learn to do that, we won't need to decimate them.
Skippy Mesirow:So this is a great place to go from, and I'm gonna invite the audience for the rest of the time to allow the stories or beliefs you have about another person and their intent to fall into the background. Let's just assume for the sake of this exercise, we're giving everyone the benefit that it out. Doesn't mean that what they're doing is good or will be helpful or non harmful, but it simply means that within the mind of each person, they're doing their level best, which also means that we might be completely unaware of the harm that we are causing. Let's put together a playbook of things that we can do within ourselves, like our own personal responsibility and agency around this to best yield best outcomes for all. And I think the place to start is how do we find out if we are one of these spell cast individuals who is under the spell of a actor trying to leverage this situation, How do we find out if we are unintentionally contributing or causing harm based on our beliefs?
Skippy Mesirow:What do we do to figure that out? That seems like a scary mission.
Dr. Diana Smith:That's why very few people get in that spaceship because it takes them some place they're not quite sure they wanna be. I think it's in our self interest to find that out. Let me start there. I think we'd be better people, better parents, better colleagues, better citizens, better political leaders. If we found out if there were things that we were doing to contribute to circumstances in our country that are jeopardizing its future and that we are potentially hurting human beings in the course of doing that, that I think we have a self interest in finding that out.
Dr. Diana Smith:I think our better selves would not want to do that. I think you're right. That when we do it, we're largely unconscious. Derek black, who I talk about in the book, white nationalists, godson of David Duke, son of Don Black launched the first hate site. He said that he never, that when he was together with his white nationalist community, they never, they just think about their impact.
Dr. Diana Smith:They just thought about how right they were and that they were getting a bum deal and that they had every reasonable right in the world to protect the deal they had. And they didn't think about it as hurting others. It wasn't until he went to new college and people told him how hurtful what he was doing was for them. And he actually cared about the people who said it and they didn't abandon him. They befriended him for God's sakes.
Dr. Diana Smith:Okay? That was when he began to reconsider his impact on the world and the impact of the white nationalist movement. That's an instructive story for what it takes for someone to understand their impact. And it took 2 things. It took friends regardless as he put it, who would stand by him and not disown him or reject him, but who would confront him with the consequences of his actions and challenge his beliefs in light of, I'm gonna use a language system that some people don't like, of data they all consider valid.
Dr. Diana Smith:So he forged a very close friendship, eventually a romantic relationship and eventually a marriage with Alison Gornick. And but initially she couldn't stand the guy, but then she got interested in how somebody who seems so curious and kind could be a white nationalist. And she decided to get to know him. And then at one point, she said, can we talk about your beliefs? And he said, okay.
Dr. Diana Smith:He was a little uncomfortable because he'd never talked about his beliefs with anyone outside his own group. But he said, sure. And then the 2 of them collaborated on collecting research they both considered valid to scrutinize their beliefs. She also never shied away from helping him see the impact of what he was doing. At one point, he was very hurt with some people on the Internet and his college were very angry with him.
Dr. Diana Smith:And she said, I don't think there's any nice way to say what they're saying. You were complicit. You did cause people pain. So I think the first thing we have to do is to be willing to befriend people who are different from us. Think differently.
Dr. Diana Smith:It would that's number 1. And really become friends with them, not just launch into a disagreement, but find out what they care about. Go out for lunch, talk about their kids, what they have in common, their shared values. Eventually get around to talking about your different beliefs and remaining open to discovering that you might be missing something. I don't know if that speaks to what you were wanting to know, Skippy.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah, I mean, what I'm hearing in that just as a recap is the steps to understanding if quote unquote, I'm contributing to the conditions that I claim not to want, or another way to say that is am I part of the problem unknowingly, unconsciously, unwillingly really, is first you have to recognize your own fallibility. You have to recognize you might be wrong and be willing to look at that. And I would also say that if you're not willing to accept that, the likelihood, although not guarantee that you are part of the problem, is probably much higher.
Dr. Diana Smith:Oh, it is higher. Yeah.
Skippy Mesirow:So just so just know that.
Dr. Diana Smith:There's no correcting mechanism. Yeah.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah, just know that if you feel that way, just something to look at. So the first thing is owning your fallibility. Second thing is recognizing that it is in your self interest to probe into this, to look at yourself. The third thing is to look outside yourself and to genuinely find a way to care about others who have differing points of view. The third is to build real friendships with some of those people, and those friendships are not likely and I'm pulling a little bit from the book, but those friendships are not likely to emerge if the approach is let's get together and argue about the things we disagree with, but rather if you can suspend the things you know that you agree with for a period of time and bond over points of mutual commonality, whether that's sports or cooking or something where you can find Mhmm.
Skippy Mesirow:Connective tissue to build emotional safety. And then thereafter to take the feedback from others with skepticism. But do your own research.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yep.
Skippy Mesirow:Figure out what they're saying is true or is not, and then begin an open exchange of ideas.
Skippy Mesirow:Is that
Skippy Mesirow:a fair summation?
Dr. Diana Smith:And the research and the open exchange of ideas, if they're done together, you're talking together, thinking it through together has a lot of power.
Skippy Mesirow:Okay. So I wanna talk about the flip side of this equation, which is now you recognize what you believe again, we're applying the best case assumptions for the other people. You recognize someone in a behavior that you think is harmful, but you recognize that's not how they're perceiving it, and you want
Skippy Mesirow:to engage with that person in
Skippy Mesirow:a way that's constructive. Right? So now we're going back to the loneliness piece a little bit, where the tendency is to judge and to other, where the tendency is to judge and to other, but in doing so and saying that person's fucking crazy, that person's stupid, don't you know better? What you're actually doing is you're entrenching the core condition that is going to not just make it less likely that person's gonna come out of the belief, but it's probably gonna harden their belief and make the outcome worse. So if you're willing to not make it about being right, but about opening the conversation, If you are the people at New College who opened the conversation to this person that they strongly disagree with, what's the playbook for that?
Dr. Diana Smith:You're touching on something that actually happened in congress in the committee for modernization headed by Let's talk about that. Kilmer. Okay. And and then the other one is what the students at New College did. And they're both instructed because they are very different contexts.
Dr. Diana Smith:Derek Kilmer, who was a representative is still is a representative from Washington state. His vice chair was Thomas Graves from Georgia in the first round before January 6th, and Timmons from South Carolina in the 2nd round after January 6th. So the committee lasted through 2 sessions. Kilmer was determined, and he decided to start by having Democrats and Republicans sit next to each other around a round table rather than on opposite sides of the days. Okay?
Dr. Diana Smith:He relaxed the constraints on time. He scheduled a retreat before they began their work, where they got together to define what they considered to be victory, where they got to know each other. He made sure that they broke bread, formed relationships with each other so they could increase their trust of each other. And so Amanda Ripley was one of the experts that they invited. And she said it was unnerving because I couldn't tell who was a Democrat and who was a Republican.
Dr. Diana Smith:And yet it was so liberating. So they passed 200 recommendations for things they could do to help congress become more functional. This is under a great adversity, by the way, before and after January 6th. And the committee before then that was charged with reforming congress didn't pass one recommendation. Now the recommendations were not earth shattering.
Dr. Diana Smith:They weren't things that went to the rules of Congress in a substantial way. In many ways, you'd say, where's the beef. But what they did is they passed recommendations that actually began to chip away at the dysfunction of Congress and its culture. So for example, orientation prior to what they recommended Republicans and Democrats would get on separate buses and go to a 3 day or 2 day orientation. And they were put in separate rooms and they were made separate from each other.
Dr. Diana Smith:So they recommended that they get on the same bus. They have the same t shirts they'd be on the same team. That's a huge recommendation. And they made other recommendations like that. It transformed how these guys operated.
Dr. Diana Smith:When January 6 happened, it really set them back. And it was really worrisome to Kilmer about how they were going to move forward. So they did something no committee's ever done. They act had 2 facilitators come and facilitate a conversation about what the experience was like, where they talked about their feelings. They talked about what they were worried about prior to that.
Dr. Diana Smith:They didn't even want to get in the room with each other. And afterwards they were ready to start the work again. Now there's nothing to prevent any committee in Congress from doing that. Nothing. Okay.
Dr. Diana Smith:They're free to do that. Has any committee done it? Not yet, but maybe some of your listeners or chairs of committees at the local level or at the federal level where they could start to do that. So that's 1. And then I'll just briefly mention the other Derek black went to new college for a year.
Dr. Diana Smith:No one knew he was a white nationalist. He made a number of friends when he was outed as a white nationalist. Most of the people on the far left came out against him. A lot of get him out of here. You know, his family should be killed.
Dr. Diana Smith:It was awful. But Matthew Stevenson, an Orthodox Jew, said, I wanna invite him to Shabbat. And so his friend, Moshe Ash, and he invited Derek to Shabbat every Friday, and a number of the students dropped out. They spent a year just getting to know him, and it was in that context that Alison Gornick got to know him and began to question his beliefs. The day after Trump was elected, he wrote an op ed page in the New York Times saying 3 years ago or 4 years ago, I would have been thrilled.
Dr. Diana Smith:And now I'm worried. And everybody should read his op ed. Derek Black, New York Times, the day after Trump was elected. It is a tribute to what people are capable of in terms of transformation. Does that get it?
Dr. Diana Smith:How many we're trying to get at?
Skippy Mesirow:Yes. And I'm going to try to take those 2 case studies and put this into applicable terms for a political leader who wants to engender better relational dynamics within their system, such that better emergent outcomes will be available to their community.
Dr. Diana Smith:Exactly, and that's the ultimate prize.
Skippy Mesirow:Imagine you're a mayor of a midsize city, and you want to think about how to set up parameters and expectations to build positive trusting relationship between council members or commissioners. But also if you're, say, a city county manager or a chief of staff for a state house representative within your staff, within your team as well. So these are the points that I hear from you. And, again, correct any of these if you think this is not the right prescription. But the first is to build relationship into the dynamic of the organization.
Skippy Mesirow:That might look like going on off sites, that might look like trust exercises with a hired coach or facilitator, might just look like going to baseball games and rooting together, but find ways to bond outside of work that don't have to do with work. And before you go, oh, oh, oh, open meeting laws, yes, they're different everywhere, and yes, we have several constraints to doing the things that would benefit us. Most of those are only the case when you're discussing policy. That if it's a social call, you don't have to disclose. And if you do, great.
Skippy Mesirow:Take the press along and let them be bored by you watching a baseball game, but do the work to show up and actually get to know each other as human beings. 2nd, you talked about altering the physical space to intentionally mix up what might otherwise be seen as opposed positions. So in the case of congress, it was sit Republican, Democrat, Republican, Democrat. Most localities won't have those distinctions because they're nonpartisan elections, but you guys know who's the pro and anti development side.
Skippy Mesirow:You guys know who's pro land use and pro whatever your local division is, mix those up side by side in some way. Or if you're at the staff level, make sure that the speaking arrangements, for instance, give equal time to those and alternate between them so that you have the benefit of that. A huge part of, and this is from my reading of the book, the success of the modernization committee was intentionally aligning around a shared goal. They suspended the goal of red or blue wins the next election, and they all agreed on a goal of getting shit done. Mhmm.
Skippy Mesirow:And so the same thing is true in your organization. Before you go out there into the public meeting, what is the shared goal that you can all agree on, that you can orient and judge your actions by? And as a leader, it's your job to bring people back to that at times when conflict arises. 4th or maybe 5th, I've lost track, inviting outside experts to be in service of those things that you are all genuinely listening to and trusting. And then lastly, not in chronology, but just in the order I took the note is have a really good onboarding.
Skippy Mesirow:Mhmm. Take time to build belonging in. Let people know that you're investing in their success when they show up. When a new person's elected, if they're on the other side of an issue, your job is still to make sure they're best resourced to be a constructive member of the team.
Dr. Diana Smith:I think that's a great summary.
Skippy Mesirow:And then
Skippy Mesirow:I'm going to embellish and just say the nurturing of the conversation is really important.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yeah.
Skippy Mesirow:To create space for divergent views and to make sure that when people are criticizing things, they're criticizing the policy, not the person, such that everyone feels not just safe, but they feel like it's their responsibility to bring their thoughts forward, especially when they're not popular.
Dr. Diana Smith:I think you really did a great job of summarizing. It's great to have you here because
Skippy Mesirow:Oh, good.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yeah. No. It really is. It's I really firstly, you're a great discussant. You're not just asking questions.
Dr. Diana Smith:You're a great discussant. You have your own point of view. It's fun to play around with that. And, you're also doing something that I think people do need that is not my strong suit, which is translating it into their world in a practical terms. And that's really helpful.
Skippy Mesirow:One of the last things I wanna talk about, we'll start to wind down. But before I do, I just have to ask one sort of out of place question and just also own one of my greatest fears in this whole thing.
Dr. Diana Smith:Sure.
Skippy Mesirow:Because you, as you said on your website, and we'll link in the show notes, list a litany of organizations doing amazing what I would think of as bridging work.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yes.
Skippy Mesirow:That yes. I'm lucky enough to be in the universe where those people are in my field.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yes.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. And when I have just come from a conference where they're all talking, I'm like, oh, my God, we're crushing it. Everything is great. And then I spend 2 days on the news, and I'm like, oh, God, it's all falling apart. Well, the reality hasn't changed at all.
Skippy Mesirow:My biggest fear is there's not enough of people working on the solution. And so do you have any sense of, like, how many of us it takes? Is there a percentage of the population involved in trying to solve versus unconsciously contributing? Is there a benchmark I could look to to be like, okay, I know I'm feeling bad today, but because there's this going on, I can feel okay. Like, how many of us does it take?
Dr. Diana Smith:Well, two thoughts. One of which is very optimistic, and the second of one, which is sobering. The the optimistic one is, as James Baldwin said, it takes passion, not numbers. If you look at Yeah. Revolutionary moments in history, they've always been the minority.
Dr. Diana Smith:I tell the story at the very end of the book. I talk about the Stockdale paradox, James Stockdale colonel, 8 7 years in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp. He survived it. He, and he said, there's a difference between optimists and those people who are hopeful. You can never lose sight of the ultimate goal, but you have to be able to face the brutal facts.
Dr. Diana Smith:The brutal facts are that it's you're right. It's not everyone out there trying to bridge divides. It's a relatively speaking small number. But so was it a relatively small number at the Delaware River in 17/76 on Christmas night, when Washington got to the river, he had, he had 5,000 men, 3,000 who were capable of victory. He crossed the river.
Dr. Diana Smith:He had a small victory in Trenton, small victory in Princeton, but it actually turned the tide of mobilization and people began to hope. And as people began to hope, they began to get involved and support the war, and that turned the tide of the war. So we need to to focus on small victories. Somebody said to me recently, on a podcast, it's pretty rare what you're talking about. And I went, actually it's 100 of 1000 of people and Sharon McMahon whose website Sharon says, so has 1,100,000 followers.
Dr. Diana Smith:Okay. And is carrying the torch for reasonableness on the, on the Internet. It's a lot of people out there. The sobering part of the conversation is the media and the internet are disproportionate in who they pay attention to. So we are up against that.
Dr. Diana Smith:So that's why I wrote the book. That's why I'm going on podcasts. That's why I'm happy that there's a Skippy in the world. Okay. That's why I'm happy that there are people out there conveying this message.
Dr. Diana Smith:We've got to be relentless in telling people it is not, it is a distortion of reality. And if we buy into that distortion, we will create the reality.
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah. Self fulfilling prophecy.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yeah. Okay. And so it's the biggest thing we've got going against us is the skewed filter.
Skippy Mesirow:Another quote in the book that I loved. Hope is like an old country road. Yes. It comes into existence after a large number of people have walked it.
Dr. Diana Smith:Exactly. Exactly.
Skippy Mesirow:And I think I, if I'm admitting it, can fall into the trap of wanting to be quote unquote victorious and believing the story that people just do whatever works. But then I remind myself that viewpoint is a projection of my ego talking because it's making winning, quote unquote, about what the story written about me is. And from that perspective, if I walk down that lonely country road and no one writes a news story about me, nobody celebrates me, I'm not the next MLK in history, then somehow I've lost. But the truth is the only person that defines winning is the person staring back from you in the mirror, in this case me. And if I choose to make winning about not what anyone says about me, but by did America win the war?
Skippy Mesirow:Did those 3,000 troops turn into a country of 330,000,000 people? Whether anyone saw me walk down that road is immaterial.
Dr. Diana Smith:It's immaterial. That's true.
Skippy Mesirow:Immaterial. And when I'm in that state of mind and I walk the road even alone, I recognize that my life is so meaningful and enhanced. My personal experience is better. And if I trust in the long term outcome, the universal experience is better, that I collapse the reality of my ego and get back into the collective. And so it's just so important for me to own that insecurity in myself and recognize that I am the one who chooses what winning looks like, and all of us have the agency to redefine winning in such a way that it's not about the clicks, it's not about the approbation, it's about our contribution to the long arc of history.
Dr. Diana Smith:Hope is a political act today, and, and we each have a responsibility to keep the light of hope alive so that the forces of darkness do not prevail. The first book I wrote was an academic book and I was trying to redefine the nature of science. When science is trying to understand how the social world works And the limitation of all science is that it only describes the world as it is. It never describes what people are doing to change the world. And so it can't uncover the defenses in the world that get mobilized when you try to change it.
Dr. Diana Smith:And therefore it's leaving out a large part of the way the world works. Okay. And we need to understand that if we ever want to really change the world, We do need to understand how the world depends itself. That was an academic book.
Skippy Mesirow:I'd actually I can I just push back slightly on that? Yeah. Yeah. Which is, I think what's true is that the published works of science describe the world as best we know it. But actually, the process of science and science is a process.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yes, it is.
Skippy Mesirow:It's a verb. It's not a noun. Yeah. Is actually the activation of our knowledge that we don't know, that we're learning, that we're moving. And I think where science has fallen so what you describe is correct, where science has failed to inoculate itself against criticism is not adequately explaining that fact and owning that everything it figures out is right is almost always disproven at some point.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yes. And people don't understand that any proposition is just an approximation. So, yeah, I would totally agree with what you're saying. I'm trying to get at the sad reality that we're not trying to study change more, But the other 2 books were basically geared towards leaders in organizations. Okay.
Dr. Diana Smith:And I was trying very hard for people who do my kind of work to understand what it takes to transform an organization. Okay? Mhmm. Which is a system. And I was trying to leave that behind.
Dr. Diana Smith:This book is a whole different ballgame for me. Okay? And I have extremely ambitious hopes for this book. I think citizens, at this point in time, need to rethink how we think about ourselves in terms of our inalienable responsibilities, not just our unalienable rights. We need to understand the importance of reaching across divides for the sake of the future of our country and our children.
Dr. Diana Smith:It's a call to action that I want everyone to understand and to take to heart. It means the world to me. If it fails, if I can't succeed in doing that, will I feel badly? Oh, you better believe it. But not doing it was not an option.
Dr. Diana Smith:And I made a bunch of choices along the way that were not in the interest of winning because I wanted the book to get out quickly. I decided not to go with a top 5 publisher. Penguins published me in the past. I went with a hybrid publisher that closes a bunch of doors. It makes getting the book out much harder, but there's no way I was gonna wait another 12 months for the book to get out.
Dr. Diana Smith:Okay?
Skippy Mesirow:Yeah.
Dr. Diana Smith:So I look to people like Skippy to help me get the word out. Mhmm. And your listeners, because there's no guarantee.
Skippy Mesirow:I'm gonna go back to something you started describing, because I think it's really the answer that I'm seeking to understand. You talk in the book about the need for a new nonviolent resistance movement.
Dr. Diana Smith:Yes.
Skippy Mesirow:The idea of the What's the equivalent of today's lunch counter sit ins where we're not there to look at those who are behaving badly and try to beat them with violence or hate, but simply to point out directly and clearly what we see, but do so with love inviting them in. And the people who are going to be on the front lines of this in many ways or who certainly have the best opportunity to be leveraged on the front lines, The random person in Selma sat down and played a huge role, and this couldn't have happened with them, but it was the leveraged impact of leaders like John Lewis, for instance, that really amplified these efforts. And so the same is true today, many of the people listening on this show right now are those people that are in those leveraged positions, either through their effects on policy or leadership in the community in a variety of ways. And hopefully at this point, they're charged up thinking I want to be part of the solution. And the truth is as they step into that, more likely than not, they are going to be shouted down, vilified, or criticized from some section of the public for that.
Skippy Mesirow:Examples that you give in the book are members of Congress who chose to speak their mind and have been excommunicated from party on both sides of the aisle, or the synagogue that chose to open write a pen open letter on Palestinian rights and had membership drop off. And so the question I have is knowing that that is going to come and knowing that we want to be able to proceed through that challenge, what can leaders do to cultivate support in such a way that the that pushback will not cause them to stop, but will allow them to persist through or at least improve the likelihood that they persist
Dr. Diana Smith:through. This may be oversimplified and please push back. Each of us has to find within us the courage of our convictions because people are going to push back and we are going to fail at times. We are going to be yelled down. We're going to be humiliated.
Dr. Diana Smith:So I think we need the courage of our convictions. I think it's unrealistic to exercise that courage in a vacuum. I think we need the courage of our relationships with others who stand next to us. I mean, these movements were never done solo. The communities were incredibly strong.
Dr. Diana Smith:And we need to be building, and I think we already are building community into not in our town and through these other organizations. We need to have a community and we need to have courage. There's nothing about where we are that is pretty on the surface in terms of the polarization. There's plenty of things that are positive and getting to a new place is going to take, it's gonna take all those characteristics we talked about before, plus the courage of our convictions and our relationships with other people. So we're not alone.
Skippy Mesirow:Simple is not easy, but it is truly simple. And this, I think, is one of those one of those things. That's why we're building a community off of this podcast so that leaders have a place to come together for peer support to unravel in these things in a productive way. So whatever that is, whether it's us or any of the organizations on your website, there are places to go to get connected where you don't have to feel alone. We always end on the same question, but before we do, anything that we miss that's really important for you to share?
Skippy Mesirow:And then also where can people find you by your book, interact, etcetera?
Dr. Diana Smith:Well, thank you for that. The book is available everywhere. We're making the space between us, how citizens can work together to build a better future for all It's on Amazon. I'm just starting to promote it. That's 1.
Dr. Diana Smith:2nd is I do have a Substack newsletter also called Remaking the Space. And then 3rd, I have a website called remaking the space.org scroll to the bottom of that first page. You'll see a subscription subscribe to Substack where you can get it. And I'm now out and about, you can contact me through my website or through Substack. I'm hoping to build a community on Substack.
Skippy Mesirow:Thank you so much for being here. This has maybe been my most fun interview, yet, and you have some amazing co interviewees. It's just really great and I think action packed and a lot of transferable knowledge here that I hope many people will use. But I will force you to consolidate that all because the last question I always ask is our audience, they are not passive observers. These are the humans in the arena making change.
Skippy Mesirow:And if you were to leave them with just one thing, one quote, one practice, one one anything, but only one thing that would best resource them to personally be a vector for healing our politics, what would it be?
Dr. Diana Smith:Well, first, they are doing God's work. So I wanna thank each and every one of you for doing it. It's a terribly difficult time to be in politics and people who have chosen to serve have my admiration and gratitude. I know you said one thing, I'm going to leave you the big thing, which is, I think it's Stockdale's paradox. I think it's very important that everybody understand that ultimately we will prevail.
Dr. Diana Smith:We will get to where we want to go and that it is not an easy trip from here to there. And so you need to take care of yourself. You need to build in the supports. You need to not lose your better self. It's very important that we not let others bring the worst out in us, that we continue to strive to bring the best out of them.
Dr. Diana Smith:You know, Skippy, this has been a lot of fun. I like the long form. You're terrific. I'm going to have to adopt you now.
Skippy Mesirow:I would accept that adoption. I'll sign the papers right now.
Dr. Diana Smith:I mean, no. You're very positive, which I really appreciate, but you're also grounded in reality. You have a grasp of history, which by the way, also helps. I would recommend that to everybody and that yet you don't let it get you down. And I had my down days.
Dr. Diana Smith:I have a lot of down days, but you gotta be bound. You're bouncing back up and I really respect that. So thank you.
Skippy Mesirow:Oh, thank you for that. I really appreciate that observation. That means a lot. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you wanna put what you've heard here today into practice, sign up for our newsletter, the leader's handbook, where each month you'll receive just one email with a curated selection of the most useful tools and practices discussed on this podcast today and over the course of the last month, delivered in simple how to worksheets, videos, and audio guides so you and your teams can try and test these out in your own life and see what best serves you.
Skippy Mesirow:And lastly, if you wanna be a vector for healing our politics, if you wanna do your part, take out your phone right now and share this podcast with 5 colleagues you care about. Send a simple text, drop a line, and leave the ball in their court. Because the truth is, the more those around you do their work, the better it will show up in your life, in your community, and in your world. Have a beautiful day. The Healing Our Politics podcast is brought to you by the Elected Leaders Collective, the first leading and most highly recognized name in mental health, well-being, and performance coaching for elected leaders and public servants designed specifically for you.
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