Harvard Business School Professor on Building Trust, Reducing Regret, and the Underrated Power of Oversharing | Leslie John

Hello my fellow suffering beings how we doing today.

Many of us quite justifiably worry about oversharing. There's a reason why we use the expression TMI too much information. But today you're going to hear a Harvard Business School professor make the case very convincingly in my opinion that the real danger is TMI to little information. There are, she says, steep costs to staying bottled up.

It can have all sorts of negative health implications. Conversely, there are immense benefits to self-disclosure, even if it's scary. There are huge benefits both physiological and psychological. Of course, then the question is, how do you do it successfully and strategically without oversharing?

Now, we're going to get into that in a very big way today. We're going to get super practical for you. My guest is Leslie John. She's the James E. Burke professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. She's got a new book and it's called Revealing, the underrated power of oversharing.

In this conversation, we talk about why self-disclosure can feel risky, but is often extremely rewarding socially. And psychologically, we also talk about the psychic and somatic costs of keeping secrets. How putting feelings into words can reduce both rumination and anxiety. Why validation is often more helpful than advice.

Why undersharing leads to missed opportunities in relationships, work, and life, and much more. Real quick, before we dive in, a reminder to check out my new app. It's called 10% with Dan Harris. We've got a growing body of meditations from many of the world's greatest teachers.

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Leslie John, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. Pleasure to have you here.

I am always curious, I feel like a bit of a fraud, or I feel a bit unoriginal for always asking

this question at the beginning, especially when I'm talking to people like you, or researchers who go deep on a subject, but I'm going to do it anyway, which is, so here

“I go with the unoriginal question, why this subject, I'm curious, how you got here?”

Oh, it was a journey. It was a combination of what I was seeing in data, but also it was my own personal life. What was happening? And part of it was a disconnect, so as a baby academic, when I first started my research journey, I was studying kind of the mistakes we make in opening up, like how online.

We overshare, for example, the virgin flight attendants that vented about their employer and got fired based on what they posted, so all of these things we do online, and we get ourselves in trouble.

We literally would stand in front of thousands of people, giving talks saying, no, no, we're

sharing too much, but then my personal life, I was keeping it suppressed and separate from the professional life, but then in my personal life, it could no longer ignore the fact that I was kind of a card carrying oversharer, like, I love taking those Buzzfeed quizzes to my encryption. I have spoiled surprise parties before it.

I do all kinds of things that are foolish with respect to like my online privacy, but I also had a lot of fun doing it, like I have fun filling out Buzzfeed quizzes, so there was this disconnect, this increased dissonance of like what I was saying in my professional life. And then personally, I was experiencing these joys of disclosure and being kind of reckless.

And so that got me really interested in how what the upside might be to revealing. And when I looked at my research, you know, at that point, it was about 10 years of research. When I looked at it from that perspective, I thought, well, yeah, we make mistakes online. That's not wrong, but it's not right, because the one single thing that was coming across in my work, if I put it all together, was that when I made people feel safe and

put them in a space that was maybe fun or safe, they were overwhelmingly happy to share and happy to do it. So there were several different studies, some of my own, and some that others did that really, really changed my mind on that, that really popped like, wow, there's a lot of upside that we're not capturing.

For me, the study that changed everything was a thought experiment, I ran. So listeners, if you suppose you're in this little thought experiment, let me ask you this. Imagine that you're choosing between two different people to date or two different suitors.

“And you talked to one of them, and you asked them, have you ever had any STDs?”

Now, I know that that's not going to be your opener. I'm boiling this way down for you, because you're busy people, but like, you get to this question. Whenever you do, that's a whole other story, but you ask, so have you had any STDs? And the person says, I have had so many STDs I can't even count.

Ooh. So then the other suitor, you ask the same question, and they say, I'm not answering. And so we put people in this super awkward choice. Now admittedly, as my father would say, neither of these is exactly a fine specimen. So like, you'd rather not date either of them, but if you had to choose, who would you

choose? And again, and again, we found that people preferred, but grudgingly, but nonetheless, they preferred the revealer.

stays mom.

And we found it with thousands of different people, different contexts.

Another one is, if you're deciding who to hire, would you rather hire someone who, on the application they admitted to having had really bad grades, or the person who opted out of answering? In that situation, 89% of people prefer the revealer.

“And so these kind of jaw-dropping results to me made me think, well, why?”

Why are we doing this? And what I realized is that the person who doesn't reveal, like the person who holds back in a really salient way, we don't trust them. We view them with contempt, so much so that we'd rather date someone higher, someone who says the worst possible thing, relative to someone who just keeps mom.

And now the person who says I'm not answering the SD question, they could just be like, saying, look, that's not cool. That's not a cool question. And so then I dug even further into this, okay, trust, why? Why is it that we distrust hiders?

And why do we trust reviewers? And what I realized is that opening up, sharing something sensitive, is a really key way we build trust with others, because we're relinquishing control to the universe. And we're saying, we're implicitly saying, I trust you to not make a fool out of me. And so when we show we trust others in this way, it causes them to like us and trust us.

And you know, when you think about it, trust, it's really the currency of social relationships

“and as herd creatures that's an incredibly important thing.”

That was one. Then there was another study that is kind of real science. I shouldn't joke about my own discipline, behavioral science, I love my job. We get to put people into these strange but illuminating situations, many thought experiments. So this was a neuroscience study, so a hard science.

They put people into a brain scanner, because they wanted to see what areas of their brain were activated when they did different things.

The key thing was what happens when they give people an opportunity to reveal to answer

questions about themselves, to self-disclose. And what they found was that relative to when they don't get to share personal information, the ones who get to reveal the pleasure centers of their brain lit up. So to speak, we're activated, right? So it suggests that self-disclosure is intrinsically rewarding and motivating.

So it seems like it's fundamentally important. It's the same area as activated when you have sex, like so it's really core. And then the third study that really blew my mind was this was a study that I actually only encountered as I was writing the book. And it's an old study, it's an oldie but a goodie, or badie, depending on how upsetting

the result is too, but in this study what they did was they videotaped preschoolers, as they were watching a scary video. And they videotaped their faces and then they also measured how sweaty their palms were. So this is called in psychology, all galvanic skin response, essentially how physiologically stress you are, right, because when you stress your palms and your fingertips get sweaty.

And what they found was that the children who revealed a lot in their faces who let it out, what they were feeling, they were very expressive in their faces, they were actually less physiologically stressed. So letting it out seem to make you less stressful. So that's pretty awesome, but the tricky thing is that by

the time these children reached kindergarten age, my eldest is that age, after boys, the were gender differences, the boys had started to hold back. So the boys had kind of learned, right, this cultural to be stoic and that males don't show emotion. And so they end up being more physiologically stressed.

So that really, really shook me as a boy mom. I have struggled with that so much, it's hurt my relationships, but it's hurt my relationship to myself to be the words that have been used to describe me are emotionally guarded. And yeah, I do think I picked that up from the culture. I have a very clear memory of being with a bunch of buddies and seventh grade, we're

forcing around with a lacrosse ball and I got hit in the head and I cried and everybody mocked me so hard

“that I think I just decided like, I'm never going to let myself get into that position again.”

Yeah, totally. Now here's hoping that things are changing. I like to say just like to say, every parent screws up their kids in a different way. The goal is to not screw your kids up in the same way that your parents did, although I did have a very happy childhood.

So my kids, I'm always saying to them, I think I may be overcracked and say, how do you

feel? Tell me how you feel, it's okay, how you feel. Let's work through it. Like I may be too aggressively tell me how you feel, but times are changing. I do think I hope so that it's becoming more okay.

Do you wish you shared more?

A little more than half say yes, I wish I shared more. So there seems to be a recognition or motivation at least. Let me back up a little bit, because you said a lot there is great, oh, I'll just throw in one random thing that I was just laughing about in my head that I'll just, I'll get it out, I'll let it out.

When you were talking about STDs, I was remembering there's a pamphlet at the Cold College Health Center in the early 90s. Yep. And the title was "Clim Media" is not a flower. It sounds like a flower, doesn't it?

Yeah, it does.

I always thought it was hilarious, not "Clim Media," the pamphlet.

“Are you going to ask a question or are you saying more on the story?”

I was going to ask a question, but go ahead. Okay, good. Because I wanted to get in my funny STD story, which is it's so funny because it goes right back to college too. So for me, I went to the College Health Center and I wanted to get an STD test.

So I go there, I walk in and, wonderfully, they have a form there where you don't have to say, you know, it's a busy way in the nurse asks you, you don't have to say what your problem is, you fill out the form, which is a godsend, right? So I'm like, you have this privacy in front of everyone, I'm filling out the form, I would like an STD test.

Well, I thought I was through, but then when it was my turn to go back, the nurse,

in clipboard, Leslie John, here for STD test, take my call. You were so close to getting it right of the VA real design of this. So the lesson is disclosure feels good, but not when somebody else does it for you. In some ways, yes, when it's something that's really embarrassing and stigmatizing, you want to have control over your story, right?

Yeah, that was, I mean, I lived through it. Maybe I'll live through embarrassing things, but yeah.

“So like I said, I do want to go back a little bit, and what I think is the order of”

operations logically that you follow in your book, called Revealing. So in revealing, you talk about the fact that we as humans tend to prefer sins of omission to sins of commission, in other words, we think, even though your data is showing that other people will trust us more if we reveal in the right way and we'll get to the right way eventually, but we tend to think it's better to keep a lid on things.

Why? Yes. Well, when we do think about whether to open up, when we do think about whether to share, the number one thing we think of is the risk of revealing. We fixate on the risks of revealing.

And then we stop there. We just stop there. We stop risk of revealing, and there's plenty of risks of revealing. The problem, though, there's a few problems. One is that we overestimate the risks of revealing. So there's a cognitive bias, which your listeners may already be familiar with. You probably talked about it for, called impact bias, which is that we overestimate how

long we're going to feel badly when something bad happens. So yeah, we've all had embarrassing moments, and then we cringe afterwards, but you know what, the cringey feeling goes away. But we want to avoid that feeling so much because we forget that it goes away. And what we don't consider meanwhile, we don't consider the costs of keeping mom.

We don't consider, if we don't say what's on our mind, like if a colleague keeps showing up late for meetings and it's really bothering us and we just keep letting it go, one they won't change probably. But two, it consumes our mind, not saying something is a very reactive thing, right? We get annoyed, we re-reminate. That's annoying. It's bad for our well-being. And then it often seeps out in other ways with passive aggression, with

testingists or with avoidance, right? So I want us to realize that not saying the thing is a choice and it's a choice that has consequences just like saying the thing. It's a choice that has consequences just like saying the thing. So on a physiological level, what are those consequences of not saying the thing? Yeah. Yeah. And actually on both sides, like what are the benefits of self disclosure and the costs of staying mom? Right. Well,

“so many, if we were to think of something like a secret you're keeping, the costs of that”

are rumination, mental load, and actually in studies where people are asked to keep a secret. So even as simple as like, don't say the word white elephant. And then you get an IQ test, your IQ actually temporarily decreases. You become less intelligent when your mind is preoccupied. And then because of the mind body connection, there are also been studies showing that people

On the flip side, if you have there's amazing studies of, for example,

these are old school classic studies by James Penabraker where he randomizes people with HIV to write a diary about their thoughts and feelings or to not do that. He draws blood and they measures the health of their blood. And sure enough, when people open up, even to themselves, it has this physiological benefit. There's lots of reasons why, but the other side of it is when you say the thing that's on your mind, you often fail to anticipate the benefits of saying it. And so

one thing that I like to do when I'm trying to help people think through disclosure decisions better, right? What's a disclosure decision? That's even a new thing, right? It's the decision to reveal or not. What I do is I say, okay, what are you thinking about? So you're thinking about something. I'm thinking about a really big meeting that I have coming up and I'm stressed about it. Okay,

“so I'm thinking about it. It's not like a secret meeting or anything. I'm not even keeping a secret.”

I'm just like worrying about it in my mind. So I'm worrying. And when you worry in your mind, is you kind of loop around and sometimes like me or you think catastrophically or you imagine bad things, it's all in your head. It's all in your head. Now, suppose you were to write down just for yourself, write down on paper that things that are bothering you, that you're worried about this meeting. They were just write down what's in your head, write it down on paper. You would think that that

shouldn't really make a difference. That's just whether it's in my head or on paper. It's the same thing. However, it's fundamentally different because when you put feelings and thoughts into words on paper or spoken, that forces a kind of logic and a kind of structure. So the logical part of it is transforming thoughts into language engages the prefrontal cortex part of your brain. So it engages

“the more logical part of your brain, just doing that. And then secondly, when you put feelings and”

thoughts into words, whether you're speaking to yourself, writing down, you naturally give a story structure to it because human beings are really good at making stories. So you naturally kind of narrate and impose a story structure to it in a way that you wouldn't if you were just circling in your brain. And stories have a beginning, a middle, in the end. The end might not be a happily ever after, but there's a sense to it. The process of making a story of your swirling thoughts and feelings

imposes a kind of sense and certainty. So it gets rid of that uncertainty of things swirling. And now you have more concreteness, more certainty. And we all know that uncertainty is such a huge source of anxiety. But now you've made things much more concrete and certain and you can deal with it. You can cope with it better. And that's just if nobody's listening. Now if you have a friend, someone who cares about you, a spouse, a loved one, if you have someone there, a therapist, listening to you,

that takes the whole thing up and up because number one, you do it better. You are better at translating your feelings into words because there's an audience there, right? So you take it more seriously, but more importantly, that person can react. And I'm going to just give you the quick result here because, you know, we academics. There's a good Jillian variance on the studies here. But the finding is that when someone listens to you, the number one thing they can do to make you

feel better, increase your well-being, decrease roomination, make hard things more manageable, is to validate you. They don't even need to agree with you. They could just say, I hear you. That sounds like it's really hard. Things like that. That's a kind of validation. And just

hearing that is so comforting. The second thing, the next level, ninja thing. So validation is huge.

Just in if you can do one thing when you're listening to your spouse validate. But secondly, scientists have also tested different things that your spouse, partner, friend, therapist can say. So there's different categories, for example, bright-siding would be like saying, try to emphasize the bright side, the positive. There's another, it would be trying to say, well, maybe that person that you're arguing with, maybe they didn't feel the same way, trying to get the person who's

venting to you to take perspective. And then the third thing they tested is the old, with time things will heal. This too shall pass. And out of those, the thing that was most soothing to people

is this too shall pass, which reminded me of when I before our first baby, you know, people are

“very wonderfully and overwhelmingly happy to give advice. And I remember that my dear cousin Sue,”

she said, I'm only going to say one thing. The one thing I'm going to say, and I want you to say it

that out loud when our baby was, you know, screaming in the middle of the night, and I'm like,

“bobbing around, trying to cut them to calm down. So it's really powerful stuff. And I say this”

also because I'm an academic, so I'm a professional skeptic. And you know, it sounds good, open up, share your feelings. But I really wanted to do it because I wanted to see and doing is believing. And I really can say that the science stands up. I use myself as a guinea pig.

I want to get into your personal experiences in a second. And of course, I want to get into the

how of the successful strategic disclosure. But just on the study, you just referenced about the three options, right-siding, this two shall pass. And then what was the second? Trying to get the person to take perspective. Oh, cognitive empathy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Perspective cognitive empathy. I feel like it was missing one thing, the best option, which is that sucks. Oh, yeah. I love that one. And I wish they had tested that one. That would also make a great title of a paper. I think that that

sucks to me. That sounds like validation, right? Yes. It's validation. Yep. That sucks. So, yes, Dan. Number one thing. You're intuition. That sucks. And it's so helpful. In fact, a friend of mine, I write about her in the book. She's almost completely lost her eyesight. And I asked her, you know, what should people say to you? What's the most comforting thing? And she said,

“that sucks is the best thing. She said, when I go to my doctor's appointments, I love it because I”

feel so conscious. She's like, I know, this is weird. I go to the doctor. And every time I go, they tell me that my eyesight is worse thing. Yet, I love going because they're not trying to sugarcoat things. They're not trying to distract me. They just acknowledge, yeah, that sucks. We're going to help you however we can. But that sucks. And just feeling understood like that

is incredibly powerful. The greatest gift you can give people in it doesn't cost anything.

Completely. So, if I were to sum up the research that you've shared, and I'm going to sum it up with your words, the real problem, as you say, isn't TMI too much information. It's TLI to little information. It goes against a lot of our intuitions, but the science is clear. Does that sound like an app summary? Yes. Coming up Leslie John talks about how many disclosure related decisions we make every day without realizing it. Why not saying the thing? Can lead to rumination and

“resentment, a rule of thumb for sharing and how undersharing can quietly undermine relationships?”

All right. So, I'm sure that the vast majority of people listening right now are thinking, okay, yes, there's very smart professor seems to have the evidence on our side. And I'm sure they can interpolate back through their lives and think about the times when they've done it, and they felt better. But how do you know what to reveal and win? Yeah. I know that's the big question. So, revealing is not something we're born good at or bad at. I think of revealing as a skill

and something that we can all get better at. And so, as a skill, it's something that we need to practice and experiment with. I think the very first thing that we can do to do this better is actually realize just how many disclosure decisions we are actually making without realizing it every day. So, let me just quick like a day in the life. This is like an ordinary day, a day in the life of disclosure decisions. Okay, you wake up, you roll over to your partner and bed. You say,

I love you. Okay, you say that. But then you don't say, I slept like crap. I'm really miserable. I might be short today. You don't say that. You stand in front of the mirror. You're both brushing your teeth. What you think to yourself is, I look okay, but just okay. I really didn't think I would feel this old at this age. You just think that. You don't say it. You go downstairs. Your kids are frolicking. Your spouse is, I have small children. So, they're packing the lunches. They say,

you, hey, what did I put in for snack? You say, I don't know. Just make the decision. And then you're kind of in an argument. But what you don't say is, look, I really need a hug because I'm

exhausted. And when I'm tired, I have a hard time regulating my emotions. Right? It's never

about the stupid snacks. I mean, I could go on and on. But you can see that there's so many things that are unsaid. And in each of those examples, I bet you. I mean, the old me, I wouldn't have even considered the possibility of opening up more. But you can see already in this tiny example that the problems that arise when we don't open up. Like when I don't tell my spouse that I had a really crappy sleep and then I'm going to be short and then I'm going to need a little more space.

as we're getting into the how, too, is like realize, make visible what's typically invisible.

Realize all of the times you're not saying the thing. Now, this is not to say we should always say the

thing, right? For good reason, we do not want everyone to say everything that's always on their mind. Like, you get to work that day or assist it says, how you doing? You say great. You don't say,

“I'm overwhelmed. I got a big meeting. You don't say that appropriately, right?”

But then if your bestie comes into your office and says what's on tap and you just say, I'm really excited for this meeting and you don't say I'm also nervous and hey, maybe you can help me practice the beginning of it, right? You can see that like your opportunities to develop personally to experience joy to have stronger relationships. Those are being held back because you're not saying the thing. So number one is realizing the opportunities.

Just to reflect back to your point, stoicism, not in the sense of the Greco-Roman philosophy, but as we modern's understand it, this kind of closed off, walled off, self-sufficient individualistic factory setting that many of us have. It's actually a losing strategy because you're denying yourself the resources that are all around you if people actually have access to your inner life. Right. Exactly. And you're denying yourself many other things, right? When

a life of undersharing is a life of missed opportunities. It's a life of friendships that never

blossom. It's a life of colleagues who, I mean, dramatic here, but these are all symptoms of undersharing colleagues that never quite trust you. Romance is that never spark relationships that fade apart instead of deepening one of the things that when you ask, how do I decide what to share and what not to share? One super basic rule of thumb is to go one layer deeper than you ordinarily would. So what does that look like? Well, imagine you're watching your kids play soccer

and there's another parent beside you and you make a small talk, which we all hate small talk. Small talk kind of gives us the illusion of connection, right? It has the trappings of real connection. There's like smiling and eye contact and shared reality, but without the risk, without the depth, without the sharing and vulnerabilities. These kind of small talks situations leave us feeling really socially tired, but emotionally not nourished. So how do you, how would you

know what to share? What does what it mean to share one level more in that setting? Okay, so this simple setting, what you could do is instead of commenting on what is happening or what happened like, hey, the kids are smiling, the kids are having fun. Take it one level deeper and comment on the meaning of it, what it means to you. So say, for example, the kids are smiling, you know, I don't even remember the last time I laughed. I don't even remember the last time I had like a really,

really, really great gut laugh. And then you can take it even further if you really want connection, you could say to the person beside you, what about you and ask them a question and there you're off to the races. But to answer your question of how do you know what to share? One, you got to experiment. There's no right or wrong. And when you experiment, you get a better feel for it. But as a

“rule of thumb, one thing you can do is to kind of go one level deeper than you might think you should.”

And then the bonus move is once you've pushed your comfort zone a little bit and gone a click deeper than you normally would. And in whatever the context is, you can, and I'm not sure what the right term for this meet, you may have a term in your book that I'm forgetting. You can then, you know, ask an appropriately probing question of right of your conversation partner. Exactly. And that's really how friendships, relationships, colleagueships begin. True ones, right? It's

by this back and forth. It's not necessarily in one session, but over time, the back and forth of gradually deepening self-disclosure. Now, people do this fairly naturally like one thing I often say, I teach a lot of executives. I teach negotiation a lot. And they're like, well, yeah, Professor John, you tell me I need to get information from them. I need to know their stance. But what if they don't say anything? What if they're not revealing? And I say, well,

revealing, it gets revealing. If you share something, share your value, share your interest.

It's almost instinctual for them to share back. But if they don't, you can always ask them a question.

That kind of gets to a key thing here, which is context. We just jumped from standing on the sidelines of a school. I know, it's a negotiation. Yeah. And so that's not a critique. It's just,

“this feels highly context dependent. Yes. It is highly, highly context dependent. I think that”

the people that are best at doing this, that are the most skilled at revealing, they're not the ones that always share and they're not the ones that are always reserved.

open, like with your life partner, like super open to being extremely reserved and guarded,

like in a very competitive context, for example. So it's knowing how to maneuver in between. And it starts with self-awareness. It starts with understanding your own internal state and understanding your own goals. So sometimes when people are chronically reserved, when they under share, there's two reasons. One reason is that they don't know how they feel. They're not in tune with their inner self enough. The other is, like, my husband, he's super in tune with

his inner self. But he's just a very reserved person. He has kind of a different threshold for revealing than I do. He's the end of my year. But it starts with self-awareness. And then

“part of that is understanding what's the goal? What am I trying to achieve? Why might I reveal?”

Right? And there's lots of different reasons why you might reveal. But thinking through what's your purpose here? What's your, are you trying to vent? Are you trying to get social support? If that's the answer, then you're going to choose one context and one person. You're going to make it a really intimate place with an intimate person. Or is it because you want to share your story to influence change? That would be something I call a catalyst confession where a leader

reveals something really sensitive because they want to maybe destigmatize something like the classic example there being magic Johnson. The day he retired from the lake, or he said, I mean, you can watch it on YouTube. It like gives me goosebumps every time. He says, I'm retiring effective today because I've contracted HIV. And you can tell he's really nervous. And that is a catalyst confession in the sense that it spurred positive change. There have been

studies that have looked at in the years after that. So pre magic confession post, it spurred at least 900 more people to get tested. Right? So the point is there's so many different goals of revealing and you got to think through what's your goal? Because that answers then the

“question of when? How to whom? And so on. That makes a ton of sense. And I believe in the book”

you refer to it as interrogating your why. And so if your question is, how do I know what to reveal and when? A great compass would be what's your goal? Yeah. And so if your goal and your marriage or whatever romantic configuration you've got is a healthier relationship, well, then the sky's the limit in that context. If you're in a harsh negotiation with shit bags on the other side of the table, then your goal is going to be to, you know, I think if you've got your head about you,

your goal is going to be to arrive at the best deal possible for all sides. So then your decisions about what to disclose and when will all be downstream from that? Right. Right. All of that is true. I would also say that my colleagues and I have tested kind of what's the line? People want to know what's the line between TMI and TLI? And I can't give you a clear answer because

the line is of course always moving because it depends on context. But what I can tell you is

we've tested all kinds of circumstances like a super contentious negotiation, a leader introducing themselves to new colleagues, someone on a date. And in all of those situations

“going a little bit further than you think you should is advantageous to the negotiation, to”

get in close. Like we even go to the level of in one study, we have managers and companies come up with like a little self introduction, say, okay, you're going to introduce yourself to new employees right down what you'd say about yourself. And when people do that, they only say their strengths. But then what we do is we did a series of studies where we had employees watch a video of a manager, one of a few different videos. In one, the manager said, expressed a weakness said,

I'm a little bit nervous at public speaking. Then in the next version we took it a little further. I'm a little bit nervous about public speaking sometimes my mouth gets dry.

And the third version, I'm a little nervous about public speaking sometimes my mouth gets

dry and I get full on panic attacks. Okay, so these three versions and we're like, what's the tipping point? At what point do you think this person is incompetent? And the line is further than you think. The first, when they say, I'm a little nervous about public speaking, people still they're really motivated to work for the person because they're being forthcoming. But the question is does it decrease their competence? Nope, it doesn't. They still think they're competent,

even the second level there. I'm nervous about public speaking sometimes my mouth gets dry. People still are like, yeah, this is still a competent leader, right? So you would think that you shouldn't say any of this, but the first two levels, actually, they build trust. All of these build trust because they're revealing sense to information. The question is as a leader when is it undermining

That's diminishing of your competence. But the reason I give this example is that we've done studies

like in all parts of context, you can see the line is a little further than you think. It's funny. I've built my whole career on having panic attacks. I know. I don't want to, I don't want to like trigger anything. Sorry to make light on it. But I've been wanting to talk to you for so long because I feel like for every, I peed myself on stage, story, lots of embarrassing stories in my book. I'm like, I don't know that I can top that.

It's so real and I just love the way you grew from it and made a career out of it in a way. Yeah, it's really admirable. I appreciate that. I have to say, I stumbled on it. I remember the moment when I decided to include the panic attack story, I can remember what I was looking at. I had decided years before that I was going to write a book about meditation because I got interested in it and I had read a bunch of books and they were all extremely annoying and I just

had this entrepreneurial feeling that I could write something that might appeal to skeptics and there were many more skeptics at this point than there are now because this was back in like '08 or '09 when I was coming to the decision to write this book and I wrote a bunch of bad versions of the book and they were mostly sort of like how two books and I have this memory of

“just sitting at the desk in our then apartment. The feedback I was getting was that you should”

make this more of a story than I thought, oh, maybe I'll tell the story of how I had a panic attack because that is what got me to meditation and my instinct wasn't I'm going to make a catalyst confession. My instinct was how do I make this interesting? I wasn't really trying to be brave. I was just trying to find a way to get people interested and then when I put it out or shortly before I put it out when I started to panic about the fact that I was putting it out, I realized

well this is actually either very brave or very stupid but what I found is that people love you if you make a confession the right way. Yeah, the right way totally. Preach. I mean it's interesting because as I wrote the book, I kind of fancy myself an overshare because you know in the book I have a lot of self-deprecating funny stories about myself but as I wrote the book so I was chapter 3. I'm like I need a story of someone that was

undersharing. They didn't realize it and then they did and then the life change. So I'm looking for a story because I realize like this book is going to be boring if I just study one. The story is really bringing to life and it was litter in the middle of the night that I realized oh my god.

“This is me. There is something that I a secret. Something I knew about my mom”

that deeply affected me my life course that I had felt a lot of rage about it and I'd been keeping the secret for 10 years and it was literally not until I was writing the book that I realized the impact of this ahead on me and my life and my relationship and then I'm like I can't not talk to my mom about this because I will be a complete hypocrite. I wasn't thinking about writing about it. I just was like I need to do this so then I told her and it was

one of the most meaningful conversations certainly with my mom possibly of my life and then I did end up writing you know I talked to her and then it was a whole level of like wow to make this point. The person who studies sharing, who studies undersharing herself, didn't realize she was trapped in until she was literally writing a book about it. Do you reveal in the book what the

“thing was about your mother that you hadn't shared? I did. I did. Do you want me to say it here?”

Yes. It's so meta. Yeah I mean it's like anything in the book you know you put a book out into the world and I've had many conversations with my mom and my family like

the most important thing is that we've talked about it and that we've grown from it and like

I am closer than ever with my mom but then she said you know I'm 75 years old. Who the hell cares? It's nothing to be ashamed of. I want people to know and I know you care a lot about this and I think it's going to be great so I did it. Okay so what's the story? So the month before my first marriage I had second thoughts. I called my mom the month before and I said mom what should I do? I really love him but I just don't feel like I want to rip his clothes off attracted to him.

I don't think I said it like that's my mom but you know and my mom said you know you know she was kind she let's she said it's funny because the month before I married your father

I also had second thoughts. I enjoyed my flirtations with other men as she would say

obviously she went ahead with it. She said I am so glad that I went ahead with it. I mean my parents have

a wonderful life together. Wonderful marriage. She said look at what we have and she said I know you you're in decisive you have the mature kind. The like super

“physical love that kind of goes away fast but you have the most important thing. So I felt really”

assured. She's like do what you feel is right but this is my perspective and so I was liberated and I got married and I was had a wonderful day and it was all great and then but it was not all great. So five years later I was divorced and once I was divorced it was all over. I came across an email from my brother. He forwarded it to me. He said hey last check this out dot dot dot dot dot dot and D. It was an email between my mom and father privately at the very bottom of the email.

They had added my brother because he does their finances at the very bottom of the email. The very first when I was just between my mom and my dad they were talking about my mom going to a lover's house and my dad obviously knew about it and it's like one of these things you can't unsee right? It was so shocking to me and my body filled with rage when I found that out because I immediately went back to this faithful phone call and I thought I only knew have the truth.

My mom undershared with me if she had told me the whole thing the whole way that their marriage works

I would never have married this guy. So it felt like undersharing telling half the story was worse than

saying nothing at all. Well then the years I tempered down I did marry the love of my life as she says is to say and you know I realized like it was more mean. What's my mom supposed to say? It's the month before the wedding. Like what she's supposed to do? I'm the one that married him. It's all on me. But I did have this secret. She didn't know that I knew this about her and I'd always felt really really it was a big wedge between us. So I brought it up to her literally as I was

writing the book. I had a conversation with her and she said you know I've always wondered if I said the right thing and it was just like the most loving, wonderful. We talked about so many things and we

achieved this new level of understanding and yeah I hear that story makes me like your mom a lot

“honestly not a lot of levels. She's the best. Did you mention before that you peed yourself on stage?”

I could think you made a quick reference to that. I did 10 minutes ago and I've had a little mental note in my mind of like come back to that. Oh it's so funny. In college I acted in a play. The visit of the old lady Friedrich Dunmut, the Uzukda Undamit. It was in German and I played there's this school teacher who is very, very, very uptight and school teachery like, very typical. And there's a scene where she lets loose and she gets super drunk in a bar.

And in that scene I got really into it and I had this bottle of vodka water and I was wearing a dress with thin pantyos and all of a sudden like everyone's laughing so hard that I just peed myself like a waterfall. And I was so nervous that people would see the like, just a waterfall coming between my legs. You know in my mind I'm like it's like gosh I'm guessing that then for whatever reason in that moment I thought it would be a good idea to try to

cover it up by deluding it by throwing the vodka so I'm dropping the vodka the water everywhere on stage. So that's by peeing on stage sorry but I told it so when I was a grad student this was maybe I don't know eight years after that event it was late at night I was at a conference party we were sitting around with mostly junior people but a few super fancy Grand Puba academics so people that you really want them to know who you are and you want to impress them and someone

had the idea of hey let's go around the circle and share our most embarrassing story ever and so most people resorted to these like humble brags such as oh my god there was a typo in my abstract but I I may have been drinking because it was not a strategic choice although knowing what I know now I would have done it again in a heartbeat but I decided to go for it and share my actually most embarrassing story which I've now also shared with you in the book and so the next

day I just had the worst it was a disclosure hangover right it was that got wrenching post reveal rumination of what did I do but then the thing is the two super fancy schmants professors they became some of my closest friends I got the job at Harvard in part because one of the guys there we became very very good friends I call him he's my academic big brother and it wasn't in spite of

“that it was I think partly because of it and that's some of the things like yet sucked in the”

short term but in the long run like getting a bit edgy sometimes it makes people trust you and like you and it's fun yes and it is a risk and I think if you're going to take the risk you

call and my hubby is the end of my young because I remember when I was first pregnant in a spirit of joy and transparency whatever that means I decided to tell our landlord and then it led to a series of things that basically required us to move out because I think it was something to do with there's lead paint and we could force them to delay it in the landlord knew this and I didn't because I'm clueless and so they just like kind of kicked us out these things can bite you for sure

it's not like we should always share everything but I encourage people to try a little bit just

“go a little bit further than you think you should and see what happens”

coming up Leslie talks about some practical principles of disclosure some down to earth guidance for difficult conversations and why sharing your feelings is linked to having fewer regrets later in life let me ask you at some terms I believe are in your book the Goldilocks principle yeah so that refers to not too much not too little just to write and the amount of disclosure that you want that is appropriate in any given situation you can go over which is TMI you can go under which

is TLI and the point is the line is always changing so one of my favorite stories with that is so it was Miss Universe 1997 I love beauty pageants I know they're super misogynistic and terrible in many ways but they're also super fascinating and so in Miss Universe 1997 the three people at the end there's three contestants and what it boils down to is the final question right which is super dreaded by the contestants because it's very anxiety inducing right random question in front of

“all these people that's really important scary but very entertaining the question was if you could do”

anything for one day what would it be the first contestant she says I would magically fly from place to

place and travel that was TLI right there's no real vulnerability not the most original that's TLI one another three candidates said I would not wear clothes and that was TMI because a conservative beauty pageant crowd is like whoa whoa whoa but then Goldilocks Miss USA of course Miss USA I just became an American citizen so I'm very so Miss USA says Miss Brooke Mahalani Lee she comes out and she says I would eat everything in the world rage is laughter she says you do not

understand I would eat everything twice and she wins and so that is the sweet spot right and you can think like in other contexts if people are like really struggling with their weight that would be

like kind of a dick move right but in that place it was just right and the super cool thing was

that I managed to track Goldilocks aka Brooke Mahalani Lee I managed to track her down as I was writing the book she walked me through that moment which is like 30 years ago now and she said yeah it was an unfiltered kind of unfiltered block but also she didn't use these words in my words it was a catalyst confession because the backstory was that Donald Trump had just bought it and he was thinking about imposing a weight clause on the winter so that if Miss Universe gained weight they

“would not be Miss Universe anymore and so that was like so important to her that she said that”

partly to make a statement right to make change and yeah pretty awesome I want to keep going down my list of terms from the book that I'd love to hear you explicate but I like that one and I like that story the next one is the Ben Franklin upgrade oh yeah this is when we think about disclosure decisions when we're deciding whether to reveal or to not reveal to these that we are but now that we're aware that the opportunities we're gonna we realize these the number one thing

we think about are the risks of revealing but what the Ben Franklin upgrade does is it forces us to consider all four quadrants what I mean by that is to make a good decision we need to consider the pros and cons of doing the thing revealing and the pros and cons of not doing the thing of not revealing so it's actually two by two matrix right and Ben Franklin is called the Ben Franklin upgrade because it's based on there's an old story of Ben Franklin who was helping his

friend make a decision of maybe it was weather to move to America or something I don't know and he helped his friend walk through like okay we want to think about it in this way with the pros and cons and so we want to upgrade our disclosure decision making so that we consider not just the risks of revealing but fundamentally also the benefits of revealing the downsides of not revealing

but I'm just gonna come back to it like one of the key things I think is to read the room is there more to be said about how to read the room are there any what's that fancy academic term you guys like heuristics so fancy things to read the room well I do think that knowing who is in the room is really important and that's a mistake we often make on social media I mean not as much

“anymore we're more aware but knowing who is in the room literally but I really think that going back”

to your core of like what's your why what's your purpose is a really key way to start and then thinking through these we can walk through and if you want but like an actual disclosure decision where you think about not just the risks of revealing but all of the other factors the other three quadrants yeah let's walk through one you want me to invent a scenario or do you have one in your mind that you can use I can do one so imagine that you did something super successful at work and

it was a team effort maybe you made a cool new ad campaign that was widely successful or a new product or in my business you wrote a new academic paper and so it was a teamwork it was collaboration but fundamentally you knew that the core idea was yours that you came up with the core idea and you remember pitching it to the team and everything so that's clear so the big boss asks your colleague hey whose idea was this who came up with this and they say it was a group effort

and part of you dies inside you're like but it was me it was my idea I loved working with you guys but it was my idea and so in the old me the old you probably wouldn't have even considered speaking up

right but the new you is gonna walk through this okay so the first thing that's gonna come to mind

are of course the risks of revealing like okay if I say something to my teammate I love my teammates they're gonna think I'm petty it's gonna be an altercation they're gonna feel badly I'm gonna feel badly maybe it wasn't even my idea to begin with self-gaslighting so that's super easy that comes to mind and then the next thing that comes to mind from that is the benefits of not revealing right okay I'm gonna avoid this altercation I'll keep the piece okay so that's those are the easy ones

“now the key is to keep going what might be the downsides of holding back okay so really really”

force yourself what are the downsides of not speaking up here well I'm gonna remanate I'm gonna be pissed and we all know that when we don't say the thing it can see about passive aggression distance avoidance so that's not good I will feel badly I won't be able to let go of this I'll feel resentment I won't be respecting myself because I'm not speaking up for myself so then there'll be some self-loathing like I'm being very dramatic but you can see that they're

really really are downsides to not speaking up here and then you think about okay what are the

benefits of saying something now at first they might just be the kind of I won't remanate anymore

but then real bonafide benefits are gonna come to mind for example my colleagues will understand me better because they'll know what I value because they'll know that I value ideas and that's important and maybe they'll respect me even more because having a good ideas are rare and the fact that I care about them and they they know I care about that is like super ball right so then suddenly

“it's like how can I not reveal and then it becomes a question of how what's the best way to”

communicate this right and that's another really important thing finding the right space finding the right time you're gonna want to do this in person you're gonna want to start with something really positive and then you're gonna want to say I feel right it's like how do you do this it's filling the blanks I feel and then I need so that's kind of a easy easy way to think about how to start doing this but the point is that you can see for any given decision the thing

that comes really naturally is the risk of revealing but keep going and you're not gonna do this a full four quadrant reckoning for every decision but I have found that even doing them for like not so consequential ones like this it's not so consequential in the grand scheme of things it actually is a really good practice to train your mind to do it I really like the decision matrix but let's keep going with the how to have the conversation because I agree with you that seems really

crucial and so maybe take us another click deeper on this I feel I need this is an area where a lot of

people get and I see it in my own life not only my own making mistakes but also watching my team make the right decision to self disclose and then sometimes people I work with or people on friends with they kind of flood the execution a little bit completely okay so I have many thoughts the first thing that comes to mind is on your point it's really hard giving people negative feedback constructive feedback as we youchemistically call it so how do you do this that's a thing that's

underperforming or whatever it is so I actually at HBS I am the official bad guy because I am the head of the academic performance committee at Harvard Business School I'm the head of the academic performance committee and what that means is that when MBA students don't do well in their courses when they get enough bad grades they come to my committee and we decide whether they have to take

“time off whether they can graduate and so on it really is supposed to be developmental I believe”

that at first I was like but it really is developmental we're trying to help them because

as I've done this role more I see all the reasons why there's so many reasons why people under perform at any rate part of my job is having conversations with these students breaking this bad news giving this really tough feedback and what I've learned is the first thing well the old me would they come to these meetings and they say what did I do wrong I was prepped and I'm like yeah that that that that that that that is what you did wrong but no matter how nicely I try to frame it

it's still a focus is on like eh that they underperformed and it's on this negative it's not a growth conversation and then they get defensive and the medicine doesn't go down so now what I do I spend the the majority of the meeting just listening just hearing them out getting them to reveal to me and then I understand them better and then I actually can even be more helpful because then I really know what's going on and then the fact that even if I know because they've written me letters

describing their situation even if I know what they're going to say them telling me the act of them revealing to me is really important because they need to feel heard right and that's the validation and then it's like completely disarming they're open and then I can be like okay let's work on this

so when you're talking to your teams you can get them to talk first and ask them how they're doing

because chances are like they're experiencing some negative things too one of the thing about feedback so I have long been skeptical of the feedback sandwich which is you know start with the positive say the thing and with something positive I've been skeptical about it because I thought like that's like bearing the lead they're going to forget the feedback so I did a bunch of studies the tested this the test it is it better to start with like compliment or expression of how you appreciate the

employee and then say the negative or is it better to just say the thing the feedback sandwich actually the first slice of it starting with the positive is vitally important so I just proved my own snark I thought it's really really important so that's important but then the other thing I want

“to say is to touch on the point about how if we take out feedback like if you need to say”

if you come home from work and you feel really crappy something bad happened and your spouse says what's wrong how do you do I feel right how do you enact that and so what you want to do is you want to say a feeling word and I'm saying this laughing leave because it can be surprisingly harder than you think because I am a recovering emotional illiterate what I mean by that is that when I was talking about my therapist a few years ago about something I don't even remember what it was and

he said okay how do you feel how did that make you feel and I was listing cognitions like this is sucky or like maybe I shouldn't be worrying about this like I wasn't listing actual

feelings and he's like no that's not feeling that's a thought that's a thought and then I finally

said what is a feeling and then he handed me this tool which I have in the book called The Emotions Wheel and what it is is it helps you to refine your feelings it helps you articulate remember early I was saying being a good reveal or means first understanding your inner state you don't understand your inner state you can't answer how you feel and so what this tool does like he handed me this tool and I have it in my book I actually have it even simpler version in the book because I had to

simplify it for myself but what it starts it's a wheel the core of the wheel in my book is good bad is the feeling positive or negative okay can do that and then the next band out is is it an arousing feeling or is it a calm feeling right so if you think of good bad you can have active good like joy, elation, excitement you can have low arousal good which would be like calm similarly with that stuff you can have high arousal anger you can also have like sadness which is low arousal

so those are the first two bands and then from there on out it goes into like okay are you disappointed frustrated it has all these different adjectives that are feelings you start at the core and then you zero in to what you're feeling and I found that's so helpful it expands your emotional

“vocabulary which helps you understand yourself so that's a long way did but I think important”

answer to the I feel because I feel like say your feelings it sounds so cheesy but it really

important the reason why the I need is really important is because we often assume that our partners

that our friends can read our minds and I know that sounds crazy because like it's completely illogical but it's an implicit sneaky belief it's called mind reading expectations so it's the belief that others should just know how you feel and a lot of us are really high in that there's a scale to measure it called the mind reading expectations scale which I did again I was a guinea pig for all the things in my book and I found my mind reading expectations are off the chart one of the

items is something like the you believe in the fantastical notion that your partner should just know how you feel and so once I realized that that my score was super high real is oh my gosh he can't

read by mind of course he can't I need to say what I need so I need can be I need a hug I need you

to listen I need you to problem solve I need perspective I need you to be on my side like you can

“think there's all sorts of different needs you might have and you need to say it because otherwise”

they can't read your mind and one of the really really tricky things in relationships one of the reasons why relationships you know you wake up married to someone and after 10 years you feel like you don't know them one of the culprits of that is that you stop sharing which sounds so basic but what happens is that when you are in a long-term relationship friendship with someone the longer you're with that person the more you understand them that is true the more knowledge you

have about them the problem though is that your confidence that you know them massively outsizes your actual knowledge and you can see that that's where the problem begins because if we're more confident that we know our partners then we actually are that we actually do know them we stop asking we stop being curious we stop revealing but now that we know it now that I know I'm a mind reader

“and there's this gap what feels like over communicating it turns out is mostly just communicating”

take me back to the moment though where you're pissed off because your team members are taking credit for your idea and you're going to bring it up with them and you're going to do the I feel I need how would you broach that successfully right so I actually have had this situation there was a research paper and I talked to the one person that said the thing and I started by saying I know is in person I love working with you truly like you can't it's got to be really

like it is genuine I love working with you I'm so grateful for this project this project would not be the same without you I have to say because I respect you and I've been thinking about this and I owe it to you to tell you how this made me feel and I know you didn't mean anything malevolent in fact I love how collaborative we are but at the end of the day when you wrote down on that authorship form that it was a group effort the idea that didn't really sit well with me

and then she was like oh my gosh yes I was just feeling that I really quickly because I know we hate these stupid petty like some journals require you to attribute who did that that we don't like that I don't like it because we are lovely collaborators who we love collaborating and so we're not like credit hungry most of the time but you know when it comes to like writing and stone whose idea was it and it's inaccurate I was really worried about it and in fact we became closer as a result because

“she understood me more and that's another really important thing that I think people underestimate”

the value of is feeling understood for who you really are in relationships there are studies showing that so suppose I have low self esteem and on the one hand if suppose in one situation my spouse says less oh my gosh you're so confident all the time you're so sure of yourself I love that about you so not real the other version my spouse says oh I know you sometimes struggle with self esteem I know that about you I'm not even like validating or saying it's okay I'm just saying

I know that about you those relationships are associated with much more longevity much more intimacy much more love and when you think about it it makes sense right because if he loves me even though I have smelly feet and even though I have low self esteem like that's love so it's the same thing in like friendships when saying these difficult things they do say something about you and then they help your friend know you better I'm not saying

that this wasn't hard it is very hard I'm also not saying it's always going to go well but

if it doesn't go well you know you've thought it through so you're going to do it in a good way and if it doesn't go well that's information right you learn something yes we've done studies

I love you that's like one of the most vulnerable things we can say to say I love you to someone

we said did the person reciprocate or did they jail to you we didn't frame it like that but when you feel it's time like of these people which are just ordinary Americans 80% of the time

“was reciprocated which I think we can take a lot of comfort in right like I would a guest like my”

catastrophic thinker I would a guest it's way lower if I say I love you right that it will be

reciprocated now when you feel the time is right then yeah I think you have pretty good odds

and if they jailed you then because I've been there then you have information it sucks in the moment but it's freeing because you can move on I keep coming back to what you said earlier a life of undersharing is a life of missed opportunities and I think that sums it up very nicely you know if there's one thing that I think people should do more of it's share your feelings and now that we've gone through what that actually means it's not just some la la la la la so I don't

need to explain how but rather what I want to say to make the point is use data the first data

point is that Tom Gillivitch amazing psychologist at Cornell he studied regress and he has found

that on average about 76% of the regrets that people have in life are regressive things they did not do okay not sharing is a not do thing number two thing I wanted to tell you is that in a parallel universe there's a palliative care nurse by the name of Brani Ware and she wrote a book on what are the top five regrets of people who are dying because she's spent a lot of time talking with people as they were dying the number three most common regret

I wish I had shared my feelings more I mean wow right as we close it out here can you just remind everybody of the name of your book and then also anything else you want us to know about

“my book is called revealing the underrated power of oversharing and if you want to do any of”

those quizzes we talked about I have them on my website which is profflesslyjohn.com I'm also on socials linkedin insta same thing profflessly john we will put links to all of that in the show notes so listen or if you want to go deeper with Leslie have at it and Leslie great job thank you so much for making time for this thank you thank you so much thanks again the Leslie john great to talk to her don't forget to check out the new app Dan Harris dot com is the place to get the app

“there's a free 14 day trial if you want to check it out before you spend any money Dan Harris dot com”

last thing to say here thank you so much to everybody who works so hard on the show our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Visili are recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at pod people Lauren Smith is our managing producer Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer DJ Kashmir is our executive producer and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme [BLANK_AUDIO]