In this episode, we talk to Dr. Laura Gallaher about self-awareness, how to re-examine when we feel ourselves getting defensive and the “beautiful intentions” of the inner critic (and how to get her to quiet down!).
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Dr. Laura Gallaher is an Organizational Psychologist, Speaker, Author and Leadership Coach. She began her career at NASA Kennedy Space Center. After the Space Shuttle Columbia exploded upon re-entry in 2003, killing everybody aboard, Kennedy Space Center hired Laura and a team of organizational psychologists to change the cultural influences that were deemed to play a role in the tragedy. She worked for 8 years with NASA to positively influence culture, develop leadership capacity, and improve organizational performance at Kennedy Space Center. Laura’s company, Gallaher Edge, applies the science of human behavior to organizations so they can get their edge, achieve together, and enjoy the journey. Follow Dr. Gallaher at @drlauragallaher (twitter and IG) and @gallaheredge (IG).
Memorable Moments:
6:40: The more I can be okay with my own imperfections, the more effective I end up being.
18:35: You're never responding to the world around you, you're only responding to the story you're telling yourself about what it means.
19:57: Becoming more self-aware by surfacing the story inside your head is really powerful because you can really check the story you're telling yourself and explore where that's coming from.
27:00: The more I'd ask my inner critic, "Is there anything else you'd like me to know?", she started to change her tone.
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This podcast is hosted by Allison Walsh and Dr. Angela Phillips. It is produced by Allison Walsh, Ashley Tate, and Nicole LaNeve. For more information or if you’re interested in being a guest on this podcast, please visit www.therecoveryvillage.com/dearmindyoumatter
Allison: Hello, welcome to the Dear Mind You Matter Podcast. My name is Allison Walsh, I am a long-time mental health advocate and Vice President at Advanced Recovery Systems. On each episode I will be joined by my colleague, Dr. Angela Phillips. This show along with our mental health and wellness app, Nobu are just some of the ways we're working to provide you with actionable tips and tools to take really good care of yourself each and every day.So sit back, relax, and grab your favorite note taking device. It's time to fill your mind with things that matter.
Angela: Dr. Laura Gallaher is an Organizational Psychologist, Speaker, Author and Leadership Coach. She began her career at NASA Kennedy Space Center. After the Space Shuttle Columbia exploded upon re-entry in 2003, killing everybody aboard, Kennedy Space Center hired Laura and a team of organizational psychologists to change the cultural influences that were deemed to play a role in the tragedy. She worked for 8 years with NASA to positively influence culture, develop leadership capacity, and improve organizational performance at Kennedy Space Center. Laura’s company, Gallaher Edge, applies the science of human behavior to organizations so they can get their edge, achieve together, and enjoy the journey.
Allison: Okay. Well Dr. Gallaher, will you please share more about yourself with our audience? We're so excited to have you on the show today.
Dr. Gallaher: Of course. Thank you for having me, Alison. So I am an organizational psychologist, which means I apply the science of human behavior to organizations. So I largely work with leaders to help them figure out how we actually tap into our humanness rather than trying to get people to be anything other than who they are.
And it's a really powerful way to create. So that's my primary focus and my passion is helping any individuals become more self-aware and more self-accepting. So they feel that much more empowered in their life and are more self-aware and self-accountable.
Angela: Laura. Thank you. First of all, for telling us what an organizational psychologist is, that was actually going to be my first question for you to explain to the audience.I get so many questions about that. I remember when I took my first psychology or my first kind of series of psychology classes and undergrad, and that was one of them and I definitely thought it was going to be something very different.
Dr. Gallaher: I've gotten some like, really funny responses. I think my favorite one that made me laugh was, oh, so do you help people with the psychology of organizing closets?
It's like, oh man. I mean, there's probably something there, but no, not so much my specialization.
Angela: Yes. I think there is an app for that as well. Um, but Laura, thank you again so much for joining us. You have such an interesting background and there's so much amazing content out there that you've shared, and I know our listeners can find, but I'm really curious, you know, prior to your professional career, really taking off.
Was there a significant piece of advice or experience, or maybe even a role model that really helped you gain, you know, sort of the tools you needed to move forward to where you are today that you might be able to share with us?
Dr. Gallaher: Yeah. I mean, I feel so fortunate to have had so many extremely powerful, you know, mentors and leaders who have guided me in my career in so many ways.
I think that some of the advice that has probably been the most powerful is actually the kind of stuff that I heard when I was like five years old, but I didn't get it. I didn't get it. So it was about like internalizing some of these really core seemingly overly simplistic ideas into what does this actually mean?
So things like, you can't control anybody, but yourself. Like that is something that continues to take on new meaning. Right. As I continue to advance through life and through my career, really factoring that in meaning, oh, so no matter what's happening, I can actually, I'll be most effective if I can turn the microscope back on me. Instead of trying to put energy into getting other people to change. What can I really do differently? So I know that kind of stuff that I seriously heard when I was like a tiny child. Um, that's probably, I could, I could stop with that one cause that's probably really big.
Allison: And I think there are so many great principles and pieces of advice that we hear early on.
And then we go about our lives and it gets magnified. And sometimes we start to shift the way we see ourselves. I think you've done so much work around this and that just people really getting in touch with who they are. Would you mind sharing more about it?
Dr. Gallaher: Yeah, well, so I'll just, I'll briefly talk about how my career got started and I'll do the short version.
I promise, but I was working for NASA at Kennedy space center after the Columbia accident, um, in 2003, because they found that culture was as much to blame for the accident as the actual technical components of the foam hitting the orbiter. And therefore it couldn't withstand the Earth's atmosphere upon reentry.
So they said, come in and help with culture. So a big part of what I was doing was helping the leaders create a sense of psychological safety and understanding what that meant and their own contribution to it. One of the things that was extremely hard for me, at the time, was a couple of years into my career when I really started to go deep into myself and not just sharing conceptual ideas about psychology, but doing the deep work.
I actually learned that I was exhibiting some of the same exact behaviors that I was coaching leaders to not do. So my interactions, the way that I was showing up with my internal customers was great. It was on point, you know, I was showing up as a listener and I was non-judgemental and non-defensive and all these wonderful things.
Then within my own team, there was something, but I was taking it for granted and I was actually falling into some of these subconscious defense mechanisms where I was shutting people down on my team and had no idea what I was doing it. So I've had a lot of really powerful, awful moments of my own self-awareness.
Where I've been able to see like, oh my gosh, I didn't even see how much I was getting in my own way. Um, a very humbling experience is very, very difficult. I would get stuck sometimes in a lot of self judgment around like, oh my god, I'm supposed to be better than this. Right? And so it's been this journey of self-acceptance to realize this is part of the human experience and I'm allowed to be imperfect and I'm allowed to make mistakes.
And actually the more I can be okay with my own imperfections, the more effective I end up being. So that was hugely transformational for me. That was when I was like mid twenties.
Angela: Wow. I'm so glad you mentioned that too, because I know that you've spoken with so many folks about this inner critic and how to cultivate self-awareness and gain self-acceptance and self-love, but you know, based on sort of this example, you're already pulling from, for listeners who just aren't at that stage, or might really be, you know, struggling to break some of these cycles or habits.
What suggestions might you give them, you know, more concretely toward maybe building that initial muscle of just opening up and even recognizing the blinders that we have when we're really trying to get to that point. So what was helpful for you? Or what do you typically suggest?
Dr. Gallaher: So the inner critic, right?
That so many of us have, we know this voice all my gosh, it just finds every single thing that we do wrong. Right. And even when things go, well, the inner critic is like, but what about always something to pick on? Always something to say like, well, but you should have done this. And so when I realized how potentially detrimental my inner critic was, my impulse was to fight it.
I wanted to resist it. I was like, oh, there's an inner critic's voice. I was like, I will defeat this voice, you know? And that was just, that seemed logical. That didn't work. I would actually end up just cycling in this spiral of judging myself. That's the inner critic. I'm judging myself. And then when I became aware and I could notice it, I was judging the fact that I was judging it and it was just this horrible, horrible spiral.
So the thing that was extremely counterintuitive and felt really weird to do was actually practice acceptance of my inner critic. So that became okay. I have this voice in my head. Realistically, I can understand that this inner critic wants good things for me. My inner critic is pointing out things that I'm doing wrong because she thinks that that's how I can improve.
She is pointing out things I can do better next time, even when it did go well, because she wants me to be the best version of myself. So if I can stop villainizing her and making her out to be this enemy, I can recognize that her intentions are actually really beautiful. Maybe I can form a relationship with her. That's not based on resistance and fighting, but I can actually lean into what it is that she really wants me to know here. So there's an element of actually honoring the inner critic. Practicing acceptance of her existence that tends to quiet her down. It's just like a relationship you'd have with other human being in your life.
When you really sit down and you truly listen to them, you make time and space. You put your own defensiveness aside and say, just let me really understand where you're coming from here. They tend to mellow out because they feel heard. They don't have this sense of like, Hey, Hey, listen to me. Hear me. So that was very weird and very powerful, but I actually had this whole conversation with my inner critic and it wasn't just one conversation, but it started with just one conversation to go, oh, hi. Well, there you are. Okay. Thank you. So thank you for helping me see that error that I made. I appreciate that you're trying to help me. Is there anything else that feels important for me to know right now? And maybe she comes up with something else. Kind of still in her mean girl voice, you know, and I'm like, okay, great.
Thank you. Is there anything else that you'd like me to know? And it doesn't take too long before she like, No, that's it. I'm like, okay, great, thanks. And the more I would do that and actually practice acceptance of the inner critic, she actually calmed down, she stopped just being this like nonstop track in my head.
And she started to change her tone when she would point things out to me. So it was like my critic voice and the champion voice. That acknowledges like, Hey, you're doing some things well, too. They started to really like morph and collaborate. And so I could simultaneously start to feel just fine about where I was with all my flaws and imperfections while also still having a constant drive to grow and develop and improve.
So the coexistence of those two things was like this huge, profound mind blowing moment for me. And then the implementation of it has been. Literally, I have journey tattooed on my wrist as this reminder, like this is a journey. So sometimes I still want to fight the inner critic. It still happens.
And as soon as I catch it, I go, oh, okay. I'm finding that inner critic. Yup. I'm doing that thing. I do. Okay, cool. Let me just make a different choice. Now. I'm going to go back into acceptance.
Allison: Sometimes we are our own worst enemies, right. And we need to be our own best friends and champions instead. And I love that you say acknowledge it, right.
Accept the fact that this comes up for you to move forward. And even before that, I mean, just the fact of being self-aware and even knowing how you're feeling. Sometimes we are just so focused on whatever's next or getting through something that we don't necessarily check in with ourselves. Could you explain a little bit more about being self-aware and how important that is and everything that we do as leaders in our own lives and in general and how it plays a part in all of this.
Dr. Gallaher:Absolutely. Self-awareness has so many different levels. So one, one way to become more self-aware is really noticing what is that inner voice? Is this the inner critic that's raging or is my champion voice speaking up? It's the kind of thing that most of us don't think we're choosing. And so we don't think to do anything about it.
We don't think that we have any control over it when I can notice what's happening. With the inner inner critic or the inner voice in general, then I realized, okay, I actually can shift it. So I would invite everybody to, to just notice how often you've got this running track in your mind about what's going on and then just do a quick inventory of like, oh, is that do I think, is that the critic maybe?
Oh, that's the critic. So that's one way to become self-aware. Just really start to pay attention to this like constant monologue that we always have going on. Another way to become more self-aware that's really useful in this vein of reducing defensiveness and increasing, um, self-acceptance is to pay attention to your physiology.
So when we talk about self-awareness, I can pay attention to my thoughts and that's very powerful. But what is going on with my body? What is happening there? And I think that it's so common for us now with how busy our days are, how full we are, how much we overschedule and over plan. Everything is just back to back.
We're running around like crazy. The to-do list never seems to get any shorter. It only gets longer. And most of us don't pause to check in. With how am I actually feeling right now? Like physiologically what is going on even right now, if I invite the listeners to pay attention to your posture, like what's happening, are you like clenching your jaw?
Do you have like tension in your shoulders? Are you sort of hunched over, like, just check in and notice. What's happening, you know, take a breath, feel into different parts of your body. Your body is a huge source of information for you about how you're actually interacting with and experiencing the world.
So my body is going to be the first thing that tells me if I've got a defensiveness trigger, that's happened before I have any conscious thought of feeling defensive. My body will tell me if I'm willing to listen. So if this is a new habit, it's not something that you feel like you have had a lot of experience with.
I highly encourage you to choose a life trigger to then do a body scan. So I'll give you mine. Um, well I have a couple, but I, I drink coffee very slowly for whatever reason. So I have this habit of regularly going over to the microwave and like heating it back up for 30 seconds. Now, if anybody else does this, you probably bring your cell phone.
And during those 30 seconds, you're like, what email can I reply to you? Let me check slack, let me check teams, let me respond to this text, let me write like, Ooh. Letting other people external stimulus, be driving us, even in that 30 second increment. What if you use that 30 seconds to just do a body scan? You don't have to change anything about your body, but just check in, just notice.
That's becoming more mindful and so choose a trigger for you, something that you already do. So it doesn't feel like an added thing, but you're just using 30 seconds differently. I also say you can do this at like a red light. Just keep your eyes open because you know, you're on the road, but find those places where you're not just immediately jumping to a device and allow yourself to just rebuild that brain, body connection. .
So she can have more self-aware of how you're actually feeling at any given moment. It's going to let you know if there's something where you feel out of alignment. And even if you don't know the answer yet, of like exactly what to do to bring yourself back into alignment, you can use that as a starting point to get curious, like, okay, what's going on for me here?
Angela: I love that example. And it's funny, I was talking with some friends the other day about how, when we notice, you know, people taking their cell phones into the bathroom with them and how that's such a great opportunity, if there's not a better opportunity or maybe a more hygienic opportunity and maybe taking some more mindful minutes there.
But no, I love that. You mentioned, in this example too, uh, about, you know, defensiveness and sort of that whole mechanism. So one of the things I was thinking about earlier and wanting to chat with you more about is, you know, we all get defensive from time to time and a lot of us, you know, just sort of respond or react and then don't really go back and think through where this originated or, or really kind of processed that.
Right. We just sort of plow through it and then we’re, on our Merry way at the end of the day, Um, but you know, I'm just curious, is there something that you sort of utilize to talk through with folks, you know, where this comes into play? Maybe some tips as to how we can, you know, become less defensive or just how to respond to that.
When we start noticing it, come up for us.
Dr. Gallaher: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for asking about defensiveness.I know, I just kind of like dropped it in there. So yeah, defensiveness is part of the human condition. So first and foremost, if you think that you don't get defensive, I invite you to explore denial as a defense mechanism, you guys, defenses are just, there's something that happened to all of us.
Even those of us, like me, who studies psychology and talk about this work all the time. So defensiveness, this blew my mind when I learned this, I always thought defensiveness was, I feel like somebody is, you know, criticizing me or attacking me. And that's why I'm defensive. And actually the only thing that we are defending against when defensiveness happens is our own internal, harsh judgements.
So if you think about it, every single time you are responding or reacting in a conversation, whether it's positive, negative, benign, you're not responding to the person in front of you. You're actually responding to the story in your head. The meaning that you're putting on the interaction. This is how miscommunication happens.
This is why you have three people standing together having the same conversation. One person walks away and then. The other person left is like outraged about what just happened and you're clueless. Like what, what, what just happened? I don't understand because there's a different meaning that we put on all of our interactions, everything that's happening.
So if you can recognize that you're never actually responding to the world around you, you're only responding to this story that you're telling yourself about what it means. That for me was like, just mind blown. And I was like, okay, so this is a story in my head. Do I know what the story is in my head that I'm responding to, this is another way to become more self-aware.
So if I can look back at an interaction, maybe it's a hindsight thing and go, Hmm. Yeah. I was probably defensive in that conversation, allowing myself, like you were saying, Angela, instead of blowing past it, take a few minutes and just think about that. Like, well, when, when she said that, what was the story in my head?
What, what did I think that she was actually saying or suggesting about me? Based on how that tone happened or her body language or the word choice? Like whatever it is, what was the story in my head? And if this is new, be patient with yourself and don't be afraid of “getting like the right answer.” I'm putting that in air quotes, right.
Just allow yourself to explore what is the story in my head. But what that really means that that person said that, that, that internal story that's actually what we are wanting to defend against, because there's some kind of internal, harsh judgment that's buried in there. So becoming more self-aware through surfacing, the story in your head is really powerful because A. I can reality check the story in my head.
If I think that when somebody was suggesting that maybe it'd be more effective to have Kayla lead that project instead of me. Was the story in my head, that they think that I'm not doing a good job. I can share that. Right. I could say something like, Hey, you know, Alison, I noticed I have this story in my head that when you suggested Kayla, take that on.
Instead of me, I, I was concerned that meant that you didn't think I was doing a great job. And maybe what I find out is Alison says no, oh my gosh, you just have so much on your plate right now. I really wanted to do whatever I could to help you out. And that's why I wanted somebody else to take that workload off of you and go, oh, oh, thank you.
That helps a lot. Right. And so I can just move past my own insecurities around it. The second benefit to surfacing the story in my head, which is the thing that's actually triggering defensiveness is I get to explore. Where does that come from for me? Cause I'm the one that's writing that story. Nobody else is writing that story.
That's coming from my brain. So allow me to create a narrative for myself that serves me now today as an adult, rather than just relying on all of these stories in the ways that I've been programmed growing up to believe that I'm somehow not good enough. I know that's kind of a big, second piece that I'm dropping there, but that is a, a long-term strategy to overall just reduce how often defenses are triggered and it's life-changing.
Allison: I think it's been so helpful for me, especially recently, as I've learned more about how you help others and figure out where is this coming from, is that you make it really easy for people to kind of bucket it, right. Where is it? Like, is it because I don't feel like I'm good enough?
Is it, you know, is it because I am worried about what other people are going to think? Or what is it like, where is it coming from? So it's like identifying it and then isolating, like, where's the origin of that. It's a little bit more about that, because that I know for me, it has been a game changer just in even how I've approached problems and how I'm feeling towards people or situations.
So I think the audience would probably really love it too.
Dr. Gallaher: Absolutely. I found these buckets to be extremely useful, so, so all humans want to feel significant, competent and likable or lovable, I use them interchangeably. And so when I'm wanting to surface a story in my head and figure out in what way is my self-concept kind of threatened in this interaction?
I can use those buckets to say, do I feel like she wanted to take that project away from me because I'm not competent. Yeah. This is a fear on my own competence that's coming up, or it could be different. Like maybe I have a different story in my head. Maybe I'm like, you know what? I think Alison’s mad at me ever since I gave her feedback last week.
And I think she's taking this project away cause she doesn't like me anymore. Right? Like it could be a different story in my head for the same situation. And so I love the buckets because they were. For me, it was really, really broad, like, uh, how I feel about myself and the store. What do you mean? But significance, competence, likeability, I can see how, yeah, I do want to feel like I'm important to people and I can feel when that's threatened
Like if somebody is late or they're not responding to my messages, you know, that might threaten my significance. Competence is maybe I feel like they're not asking for my opinion, they're not letting me make my own decisions.
Right. They're taking a project off of my plate that might start to threaten, my feelings or my competence or likeability. If I feel like somebody is not being open or real with me. Right. Putting up some kind of a front, or they're just not sharing with me their honest truth that might trigger fears.
They don't really actually like, and trust me as a human being. And so those can be buckets that you can use as like a starting point. If it's helpful for you, use it. If it's not helpful, then just use whatever story you can surface. But these are human desires, and it's okay to want to feel those things.
It's okay. That you want to feel significant, whatever that means for you. It's okay. That you want to feel competent. These are huge human desires. And I invite you to think about what do those even mean for you? What does significance mean to me? What does competence mean to me? What does likability mean to me? And where do I feel that the strongest?
Angela: Yes, that's amazing advice. I love that. And it gets really easy for people to just, as Alison says, get your, get out your favorite note taking device and write that down, circle back to it because it's something you're going to need to sit with for a little while. And we just can't get into it today because we just don't have that much time left with you, Laura.
So I want to ask you, something we ask everyone who we're able to have on the podcast. Uh, you know, at this point in your life with exactly where you are in this moment, what matters most to you, and that can be anything at all.
Dr. Gallaher: What matters most to me truly is how I feel in most moments of the day. Do I feel alive? Do I feel good? And I don't mean that in a hedonistic way, It's a source of information for me. Do I feel in alignment right now? Do I feel like I'm getting my interests met? Do I feel like I'm getting what I need? Am I rested enough? Am I nourishing myself enough? And so what I really want to pay attention to, because it does get out of alignment for me is how do I feel right now?
Do I feel, and good is pretty generic, but do I feel. Good. When I do, then most of the things tend to fall into alignment.
Angela: I love that. And also, you know, something we were just talking about recently too, is, you know, it's also okay to say, if you don't feel good and you know, maybe you feel like crap. So like you were saying earlier, it's like we have to own that.
We have to move forward with that. So, um, I really love that. And, and just checking in with yourself and seeing how you feel. That's where you want to be right.
Dr. Gallaher: Use the emotion, feel it, process through it.
Angela: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I love that. And thank you again so much for joining us today. This has been an amazing conversation.
Can you share with our listeners just how we can follow you on social media or otherwise?
Dr. Gallaher: Yeah, absolutely. You can follow us on social media. The handle is @galhaheredge, that’s the name of my company. And so that's on, Instagram and that's probably the main one. Um, or you can just go to the Gallaher Edge website, if that's of interest to you as well.
Allison: Thank you so much for being on the show. You know, I am a huge fan girl of yours and the fact that you shared all of this wisdom with our audience and really actionable advice and tips means the world to me.
Dr. Gallaher: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
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