How couples can sustain a strong sexual connection for a lifetime
I'm sitting in a bar with a couple of friends literally, a couple, married couple. They're the parents of two young children, seven academic degrees between them, big nerds, really nice people but very sleep-deprived. And they ask me the question I get asked more than any other question. They go, "So, Emily, how do couples, you know, sustain a strong sexual connection over multiple decades?"
I'm a sex educator, which is why my friends ask me questions like this, and I am also a big nerd like my friends. I love science, which is why I can give them something like an answer. Research actually has pretty solid evidence that couples who sustain strong sexual connections over multiple decades have two things in common.
Before I can tell my friends what those two things are, I have to tell them a few things that they are not. These are not couples who have sex very often. Almost none of us have sex very often. We are busy. They are also not couples who necessarily have wild, adventurous sex. One recent study actually found that the couples who are most strongly predicted to have strong sexual and relationship satisfaction, the best predictor of that is not what kind of sex they have or how often or where they have it but whether they cuddle after sex. And they are not necessarily couples who constantly can't wait to keep their hands off each other. Some of them are. They experience what the researchers call "spontaneous desire," that just sort of seems to appear out of the blue. Erika Moen, the cartoonist who illustrated my book, draws spontaneous desire as a lightning bolt to the genitals kaboom! you just want it out of the blue. That is absolutely one normal, healthy way to experience sexual desire. But there's another healthy way to experience sexual desire. It's called "responsive desire." Where spontaneous desire seems to emerge in anticipation of pleasure, responsive desire emerges in response to pleasure.
There's a sex therapist in New Jersey named Christine Hyde, who taught me this great metaphor she uses with her clients. She says, imagine that your best friend invites you to a party. You say yes because it's your best friend and a party. But then, as the date approaches, you start thinking, "Aw, there's going to be all this traffic. We have to find child care. Am I really going to want to put my party clothes on and get there at the end of the week?" But you put on your party clothes and you show up to the party, and what happens? You have a good time at the party. If you are having fun at the party, you are doing it right.
When it comes to a sexual connection, it's the same thing. You put on your party clothes, you set up the child care, you put your body in the bed, you let your skin touch your partner's skin and allow your body to wake up and remember, "Oh, right! I like this. I like this person!" That's responsive desire, and it is key to understanding the couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term, because and this is the part where I tell my friends the two characteristics of the couples who do sustain a strong sexual connection one, they have a strong friendship at the foundation of their relationship. Specifically, they have strong trust. Relationship researcher and therapist, developer of emotionally focused therapy, Sue Johnson, boils trust down to this question: Are you there for me? Especially, are you emotionally present and available for me? Friends are there for each other. One.
The second characteristic is that they prioritize sex. They decide that it matters for their relationship. They choose to set aside all the other things that they could be doing the children they could be raising and the jobs they could be going to, the other family members to pay attention to, the other friends they might want to hang out with. God forbid they just want to watch some television or go to sleep. Stop doing all that stuff and create a protected space where all you're going to do is put your body in the bed and let your skin touch your partner's skin. So that's it: best friends, prioritize sex.
So I said this to my friends in the bar. I was like, best friends, prioritize sex, I told them about the party, I said you put your skin next to your partner's skin. And one of the partners I was talking to goes, "Aaagh."And I was like, "OK, so, there's your problem."The difficulty was not that they did not want to go to the party, necessarily. If the difficulty is just a lack of spontaneous desire for party, you know what to do: you put on your party clothes and show up for the party. If you're having fun at the party, you're doing it right. Their difficulty was that this was a party where she didn't love what there was available to eat, the music was not her favorite music, and she wasn't totally sure she felt great about her relationships with people who were at the party. And this happens all the time: nice people who love each other come to dread sex. These couples, if they seek sex therapy, the therapist might have them stand up and put as much distance between their bodies as they need in order to feel comfortable, and the less interested partner will make 20 feet of space.
And the really difficult part is that space is not empty. It is crowded with weeks or months or more of the, "You're not listening to me," and "I don't know what's wrong with me but your criticism isn't helping," and, "If you loved me, you would," and, "You're not there for me." Years, maybe, of all these difficult feelings. In the book, I use this really silly metaphor of difficult feelings as sleepy hedgehogs that you are fostering until you can find a way to set them free by turning toward them with kindness and compassion. And the couples who struggle to maintain a strong sexual connection, the distance between them is crowded with these sleepy hedgehogs.
And it happens in any relationship that lasts long enough. You, too, are fostering a prickle of sleepy hedgehogs between you and your certain special someone. The difference between couples who sustain a strong sexual connection and the ones who don't is not that they don't experience these difficult hurt feelings, it's that they turn towards those difficult feelings with kindness and compassion so that they can set them free and find their way back to each other. So my friends in the bar are faced with the question under the question, not, "How do we sustain a strong connection?" but, "How do we find our way back to it?" And, yes, there is science to answer this question, but in 25 years as a sex educator, one thing I have learned is sometimes, Emily, less science, more hedgehogs. So I told them about me.
I spent many months writing a book about the science of women's sexual well-being. I was thinking about sex all day, every day, and I was so stressed by the project that I had zero zero! interest in actually having any sex. And then I spent months traveling all over, talking with anyone who would listen about the science of women's sexual well-being. And by the time I got home, you know, I'd show up for the party, put my body in the bed, let my skin touch my partner's skin, and I was so exhausted and overwhelmed I would just cry and fall asleep. And the months of isolation fostered fear and loneliness and frustration. So many hedgehogs. My best friend, this person I love and admire, felt a million miles away.
But he was still there for me. No matter how many difficult feelings there were, he turned toward them with kindness and compassion. He never turned away. And what was the second characteristic of couples who sustain a strong sexual connection? They prioritize sex. They decide that it matters for their relationship, that they do what it takes to find their way back to the connection. I told my friends what sex therapist and researcher Peggy Kleinplatz says. She asks: What kind of sex is worth wanting? My partner and I looked at the quality of our connection and what it brought to our lives, and we looked at the family of sleepy hedgehogs I had introduced into our home. And we decided it was worth it. We decided we chose to do what it took to find our way, turning towards each of those sleepy hedgehogs, those difficult hurt feelings, with kindness and compassion and setting them free so that we could find our way back to the connection that mattered for our relationship.
This is not the story we are usually told about how sexual desire works in long-term relationships. But I can think of nothing more romantic, nothing sexier, than being chosen as a priority because that connection matters enough, even after I introduced all of these difficult feelings into our relationship. How do you sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term? You look into the eyes of your best friend, and you keep choosing to find your way back.
How can we support the emotional well-being of teachers?
Like many teachers, every year on the first day of school, I lead a sort of icebreaker activity with my students. I teach at Lincoln High School in Lincoln, Nebraska, and we are one of the oldest and most diverse high schools in our state. Also, to our knowledge, we're the only high school in the world whose mascot is the Links. Like, a chain.
And with that being our mascot, we have a statue out front of our building of four links connected like a chain. And each link means something. Our links stand for tradition, excellence, unity and diversity.
So on the first day of school, I teach my new ninth-graders about the meaning behind those links, and I give them each a slip of paper. On that paper, I ask them to write something about themselves. It can be something that they love, something that they hope for anything that describes their identity. And then I go around the room with a stapler, and I staple each of those slips together to make a chain. And we hang that chain up in our classroom as a decoration, sure, but also as a reminder that we are all connected. We are all links.
So what happens when one of those links feels weak? And what happens when that weakness is in the person holding the stapler? The person who's supposed to make those connections. The teacher.
As teachers, we work every day to provide support socially, emotionally and academically to our students who come to us with diverse and tough circumstances. Like most teachers, I have students who go home every day, and they sit around the kitchen table while one or both parents makes a healthy, well-rounded meal for them. They spend suppertime summarizing the story they read in ninth-grade English that day, or explaining how Newton's laws of motion work. But I also have students who go to the homeless shelter or to the group home. They go to the car that their family is sleeping in right now. They come to school with trauma, and when I go home every day, that goes home with me.
And see, that's the hard part about teaching. It's not the grading, the lesson-planning, the meetings, though sure, those things do occupy a great deal of teachers' time and energy. The tough part about teaching is all the things you can't control for your kids, all the things you can't change for them once they walk out your door. And so I wonder if it's always been this way.
I think back to my undergraduate training at the University of Georgia, where we were taught in our methods classes that the concept of good teaching has changed. We're not developing learners who are going to go out into a workforce where they'll stand on a line in a factory. Rather, we're sending our kids out into a workforce where they need to be able to communicate, collaborate and problem-solve. And that has caused teacher-student relationships to morph into something stronger than the giver of content and the receiver of knowledge. Lectures and sitting in silent rows just doesn't cut it anymore. We have to be able to build relationships with and among our students to help them feel connected in a world that depends on it.
I think back to my second year teaching. I had a student who I'll call "David." And I remember feeling like I'd done a pretty good job at teaching that year: "Hey, I ain't no first-year teacher. I know what I'm doing." And it was on the last day of school, I told David to have a great summer. And I watched him walk down the hall, and I thought to myself, I don't even know what his voice sounds like. And that's when I realized I wasn't doing it right. So I changed almost everything about my teaching. I built in plenty of opportunities for my students to talk to me and to talk to each other, to share their writing and to verbalize their learning. And it was through those conversations I began not only to know their voice but to know their pain.
I had David in class again that next year, and I learned that his father was undocumented and had been deported. He started acting out in school because all he wanted was for his family to be together again. In so many ways, I felt his pain. And I needed someone to listen, somebody to provide support for me so that I could support him in this thing that I could not even comprehend.
And we recognize that need for police officers who've witnessed a gruesome crime scene and nurses who have lost a patient. But when it comes to teaching professionals, that urgency is lagging. I believe it's paramount that students and teachers, administrators, paraprofessionals and all other support staff have convenient and affordable access to mental wellness supports. When we are constantly serving others, often between 25 and 125 students each day, our emotional piggy banks are constantly being drawn upon. After a while, it can become so depleted, that we just can't bear it anymore. They call it "secondary trauma" and "compassion fatigue," the concept that we absorb the traumas our students share with us each day. And after a while, our souls become weighed down by the heaviness of it all.
The Buffett Institute at the University of Nebraska recently found that most teachers 86 percent across early childhood settings experienced some depressive symptoms during the prior week. They found that approximately one in 10 reported clinically significant depressive symptoms. My interactions with colleagues and my own experiences make me feel like this is a universal struggle across all grade levels. So what are we missing? What are we allowing to break the chain and how do we repair it?
In my career, I've experienced the death by suicide of two students and one amazing teacher who loved his kids; countless students experiencing homelessness; and kids entering and exiting the justice system. When these events happen, protocol is to say, "If you need someone to talk to, then ..." And I say that's not enough. I am so lucky. I work in an amazing school with great leadership. I serve a large district with so many healthy partnerships with community agencies. They have provided steadily increasing numbers of school counselors and therapists and support staff to help our students. They even provide staff members with access to free counseling as part of our employment plan. But many small districts and even some large ones simply cannot foot the bill without aid.
(Exhales)
Not only does every school need social and emotional support staff, trained professionals who can navigate the needs of the building not just the students, not just the teachers, but both we also need these trained professionals to intentionally seek out those closest to the trauma and check in with them. Many schools are doing what they can to fill in the gaps, starting with acknowledging that the work that we do is downright hard.
Another school in Lincoln, Schoo Middle School, has what they call "Wellness Wednesdays." They invite in community yoga teachers, they sponsor walks around the neighborhood during lunch and organize social events that are all meant to bring people together. Zachary Elementary School in Zachary, Louisiana, has something they call a "Midweek Meetup," where they invite teachers to share lunch and to talk about the things that are going well and the things that are weighing heavy on their hearts. These schools are making space for conversations that matter. Finally, my friend and colleague Jen Highstreet takes five minutes out of each day to write an encouraging note to a colleague, letting them know that she sees their hard work and the heart that they share with others. She knows that those five minutes can have an invaluable and powerful ripple effect across our school.
The chain that hangs in my classroom is more than just a decoration. Those links hang over our heads for the entire four years that our students walk our halls. And every year, I have seniors come back to my classroom, room 340, and they can still point out where their link hangs. They remember what they wrote on it. They feel connected and supported. And they have hope. Isn't that what we all need? Somebody to reach out and make sure that we're OK. To check in with us and remind us that we are a link. Every now and then, we all just need a little help holding the stapler.
Thank you.
How changing your story can change your life
I'm going to start by telling you about an email that I saw in my inbox recently. Now, I have a pretty unusual inbox because I'm a therapist and I write an advice column called "Dear Therapist," so you can imagine what's in there. I mean, I've read thousands of very personal letters from strangers all over the world. And these letters range from heartbreak and loss, to spats with parents or siblings. I keep them in a folder on my laptop, and I've named it "The Problems of Living." So, I get this email, I get lots of emails just like this, and I want to bring you into my world for a second and read you one of these letters. And here's how it goes.
"Dear Therapist, I've been married for 10 years and things were good until a couple of years ago. That's when my husband stopped wanting to have sex as much, and now we barely have sex at all." I'm sure you guys were not expecting this.
"Well, last night I discovered that for the past few months, he's been secretly having long, late-night phone calls with a woman at his office. I googled her, and she's gorgeous. I can't believe this is happening. My father had an affair with a coworker when I was young and it broke our family apart. Needless to say, I'm devastated. If I stay in this marriage, I'll never be able to trust my husband again. But I don't want to put our kids through a divorce, stepmom situation, etc. What should I do?"
Well, what do you think she should do? If you got this letter, you might be thinking about how painful infidelity is. Or maybe about how especially painful it is here because of her experience growing up with her father. And like me, you'd probably have some empathy for this woman, and you might even have some, how should I put this nicely, let's just call them "not-so-positive" feelings for her husband.
Now, those are the kinds of things that go through my mind too, when I'm reading these letters in my inbox. But I have to be really careful when I respond to these letters because I know that every letter I get is actually just a story written by a specific author. And that another version of this story also exists. It always does. And I know this because if I've learned anything as a therapist, it's that we are all unreliable narrators of our own lives. I am. You are. And so is everyone you know. Which I probably shouldn't have told you because now you're not going to believe my TED Talk.
Look, I don't mean that we purposely mislead. Most of what people tell me is absolutely true, just from their current points of view. Depending on what they emphasize or minimize, what they leave in, what they leave out, what they see and want me to see, they tell their stories in a particular way. The psychologist Jerome Bruner described this beautifully he said, "To tell a story is, inescapably, to take a moral stance." All of us walk around with stories about our lives. Why choices were made, why things went wrong, why we treated someone a certain way because obviously, they deserved it why someone treated us a certain way even though, obviously, we didn't. Stories are the way we make sense of our lives.
But what happens when the stories we tell are misleading or incomplete or just wrong? Well, instead of providing clarity, these stories keep us stuck. We assume that our circumstances shape our stories. But what I found time and again in my work is that the exact opposite happens. The way we narrate our lives shapes what they become. That's the danger of our stories, because they can really mess us up, but it's also their power. Because what it means is that if we can change our stories, then we can change our lives. And today, I want to show you how.
Now, I told you I'm a therapist, and I really am, I'm not being an unreliable narrator. But if I'm, let's say, on an airplane, and someone asks what I do, I usually say I'm an editor. And I say that partly because if I say I'm a therapist, I always get some awkward response, like, "Oh, a therapist. Are you going to psychoanalyze me?" And I'm thinking, "A : no, and B: why would I do that here? If I said I was a gynecologist, would you ask if I were about to give you a pelvic exam?"
But the main reason I say I'm an editor is because it's true. Now, it's the job of all therapists to help people edit, but what's interesting about my specific role as Dear Therapist is that when I edit, I'm not just editing for one person. I'm trying to teach a whole group of readers how to edit, using one letter each week as the example. So I'm thinking about things like, "What material is extraneous?" "Is the protagonist moving forward or going in circles, are the supporting characters important or are they a distraction?" "Do the plot points reveal a theme?" And what I've noticed is that most people's stories tend to circle around two key themes.
The first is freedom, and the second is change. And when I edit, those are the themes that I start with. So, let's take a look at freedom for a second. Our stories about freedom go like this: we believe, in general, that we have an enormous amount of freedom. Except when it comes to the problem at hand, in which case, suddenly, we feel like we have none. Many of our stories are about feeling trapped, right? We feel imprisoned by our families, our jobs, our relationships, our pasts. Sometimes, we even imprison ourselves with a narrative of self-flagellation I know you guys all know these stories. The "everyone's life is better than mine" story, courtesy of social media. The "I'm an impostor" story, the "I'm unlovable" story, the "nothing will ever work out for me" story. The "when I say, 'Hey, Siri, ' and she doesn't answer, that means she hates me" story. I see you, see, I'm not the only one. The woman who wrote me that letter, she also feels trapped. If she stays with her husband, she'll never trust him again, but if she leaves, her children will suffer.
Now, there's a cartoon that I think is a perfect example of what's really going on in these stories. The cartoon shows a prisoner shaking the bars, desperately trying to get out. But on the right and the left, it's open. No bars. The prisoner isn't in jail. That's most of us. We feel completely trapped, stuck in our emotional jail cells. But we don't walk around the bars to freedom because we know there's a catch. Freedom comes with responsibility. And if we take responsibility for our role in the story, we might just have to change.
And that's the other common theme that I see in our stories: change. Those stories sound like this: a person says, "I want to change." But what they really mean is, "I want another character in the story to change." Therapists describe this dilemma as: "If the queen had balls, she'd be the king." I mean --
It makes no sense, right? Why wouldn't we want the protagonist, who's the hero of the story, to change? Well, it might be because change, even really positive change, involves a surprising amount of loss. Loss of the familiar. Even if the familiar is unpleasant or utterly miserable, at least we know the characters and setting and plot, right down to the recurring dialogue in this story. "You never do the laundry!" "I did it last time!" "Oh, yeah? When?" There's something oddly comforting about knowing exactly how the story is going to go every single time.
To write a new chapter is to venture into the unknown. It's to stare at a blank page. And as any writer will tell you, there's nothing more terrifying than a blank page. But here's the thing. Once we edit our story, the next chapter becomes much easier to write. We talk so much in our culture about getting to know ourselves. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself. To let go of the one version of the story you've been telling yourself so that you can live your life, and not the story that you've been telling yourself about your life. And that's how we walk around those bars.
So I want to go back to the letter from the woman, about the affair. She asked me what she should do. Now, I have this word taped up in my office: ultracrepidarianism. The habit of giving advice or opinions outside of one's knowledge or competence. It's a great word, right? You can use it in all different contexts, I'm sure you will be using it after this TED Talk. I use it because it reminds me that as a therapist, I can help people to sort out what they want to do, but I can't make their life choices for them. Only you can write your story, and all you need are some tools.
So what I want to do is I want to edit this woman's letter together, right here, as a way to show how we can all revise our stories. And I want to start by asking you to think of a story that you're telling yourself right now that might not be serving you well. It might be about a circumstance you're experiencing, it might be about a person in your life, it might even be about yourself. And I want you to look at the supporting characters. Who are the people who are helping you to uphold the wrong version of this story?
For instance, if the woman who wrote me that letter told her friends what happened, they would probably offer her what's called "idiot compassion." Now, in idiot compassion, we go along with the story, we say, "You're right, that's so unfair," when a friend tells us that he didn't get the promotion he wanted, even though we know this has happened several times before because he doesn't really put in the effort, and he probably also steals office supplies.
We say, "Yeah, you're right, he's a jerk," when a friend tells us that her boyfriend broke up with her, even though we know that there are certain ways she tends to behave in relationships, like the incessant texting or the going through his drawers, that tend to lead to this outcome. We see the problem, it's like, if a fight breaks out in every bar you're going to, it might be you.
In order to be good editors, we need to offer wise compassion, not just to our friends, but to ourselves. This is what's called I think the technical term might be "delivering compassionate truth bombs." And these truth bombs are compassionate, because they help us to see what we've left out of the story.
The truth is, we don't know if this woman's husband is having an affair, or why their sex life changed two years ago, or what those late-night phone calls are really about. And it might be that because of her history, she's writing a singular story of betrayal, but there's probably something else that she's not willing to let me, in her letter, or maybe even herself, to see. It's like that guy who's taking a Rorschach test. You all know what Rorschach tests are? A psychologist shows you some ink blots, they look like that, and asks, "What do you see?" So the guy looks at his ink blot and he says, "Well, I definitely don't see blood." And the examiner says, "Alright, tell me what else you definitely don't see." In writing, this is called point of view. What is the narrator not willing to see?
So, I want to read you one more letter. And it goes like this.
"Dear Therapist, I need help with my wife. Lately, everything I do irritates her, even small things, like the noise I make when I chew. At breakfast, I noticed that she even tries to secretly put extra milk in my granola so it won't be as crunchy."
"I feel like she became critical of me after my father died two years ago. I was very close with him, and her father left when she was young, so she couldn't relate to what I was going through. There's a friend at work whose father died a few months ago, and who understands my grief. I wish I could talk to my wife like I talk to my friend, but I feel like she barely tolerates me now. How can I get my wife back?"
OK. So, what you probably picked up on is that this is the same story I read you earlier, just told from another narrator's point of view. Her story was about a husband who's cheating, his story is about a wife who can't understand his grief. But what's remarkable, is that for all of their differences, what both of these stories are about is a longing for connection. And if we can get out of the first-person narration and write the story from another character's perspective, suddenly that other character becomes much more sympathetic, and the plot opens up. That's the hardest step in the editing process, but it's also where change begins.
What would happen if you looked at your story and wrote it from another person's point of view? What would you see now from this wider perspective? That's why, when I see people who are depressed, I sometimes say, "You are not the best person to talk to you about you right now," because depression distorts our stories in a very particular way. It narrows our perspectives. The same is true when we feel lonely or hurt or rejected. We create all kinds of stories, distorted through a very narrow lens that we don't even know we're looking through. And then, we've effectively become our own fake-news broadcasters.
I have a confession to make. I wrote the husband's version of the letter I read you. You have no idea how much time I spent debating between granola and pita chips, by the way. I wrote it based on all of the alternative narratives that I've seen over the years, not just in my therapy practice, but also in my column. When it's happened that two people involved in the same situation have written to me, unbeknownst to the other, and I have two versions of the same story sitting in my inbox. That really has happened. I don't know what the other version of this woman's letter is, but I do know this: she has to write it. Because with a courageous edit, she'll write a much more nuanced version of her letter that she wrote to me. Even if her husband is having an affair of any kind and maybe he is she doesn't need to know what the plot is yet. Because just by virtue of doing an edit, she'll have so many more possibilities for what the plot can become.
Now, sometimes it happens that I see people who are really stuck, and they're really invested in their stuckness. We call them help-rejecting complainers. I'm sure you know people like this. They're the people who, when you try to offer them a suggestion, they reject it with, "Yeah, no, that will never work, because ..." "Yeah, no, that's impossible, because I can't do that." "Yeah, I really want more friends, but people are just so annoying."
What they're really rejecting is an edit to their story of misery and stuckness. And so, with these people, I usually take a different approach. And what I do is I say something else. I say to them, "We're all going to die." I bet you're really glad I'm not your therapist right now. Because they look back at me the way you're looking back at me right now, with this look of utter confusion. But then I explain that there's a story that gets written about all of us, eventually. It's called an obituary. And I say that instead of being authors of our own unhappiness, we get to shape these stories while we're still alive. We get to be the hero and not the victim in our stories, we get to choose what goes on the page that lives in our minds and shapes our realities. I tell them that life is about deciding which stories to listen to and which ones need an edit. And that it's worth the effort to go through a revision because there's nothing more important to the quality of our lives than the stories we tell ourselves about them. I say that when it comes to the stories of our lives, we should be aiming for our own personal Pulitzer Prize.
Now, most of us aren't help-rejecting complainers, or at least we don't believe we are. But it's a role that is so easy to slip into when we feel anxious or angry or vulnerable. So the next time you're struggling with something, remember, we're all going to die.
And then pull out your editing tools and ask yourself: what do I want my story to be? And then, go write your masterpiece.
Thank you.
How you can use impostor syndrome to your benefit
So I've experienced a lot of success in my life. Over a decade ago, I started a business straight out of uni with my mate, Scott. Now, having no prior business experience and not really any grand plan in fact, our goals when we started were not to have to get a real job
and to not have to wear a suit to work every day. Check and check.
Today, we have thousands of amazing employees, and millions of people use our software around the planet. And technically, even outside the planet, if you count those that are currently on their way to Mars. So you'd think that I know what I'm doing every day when I go to work. Well, let me let you in on something: most days, I still feel like I often don't know what I'm doing. I've felt that way for 15 years, and I've since learned that feeling is called "impostor syndrome."
Have you ever felt out of your depth, like a fraud, and just kind of guessed/bullshitted your way through the situation -- petrified that anytime, someone was going to call you on it? Well, I can think of many examples where I felt like this. Interviewing our first HR manager, having never worked in a company that had an HR department -- terrified as I walked into the interview, thinking, "What am I going to ask this person?" Or attending board meetings in a T-shirt surrounded by suits, and acronyms are flying around, feeling like a five-year-old as I surreptitiously write them down in my notebook, so I can look them up on Wikipedia when I get home later.
Or, in the early days, when people would call up and ask for accounts payable, I would freeze and think, "Wait, are they asking for money or giving it to us?"
And I would cover the phone, cover the mouthpiece of the phone, and say, "Scott, you're in accounts," and pass it across.
We both did a lot of jobs back then.
So for me, impostor syndrome is a feeling of being well, well out of your depth, yet already entrenched in the situation. Internally, you know you're not skilled enough, experienced enough or qualified enough to justify being there, yet you are there, and you have to figure a way out, because you can't just get out. It's not a fear of failure, and it's not a fear of being unable to do it. It's more a sensation of getting away with something, a fear of being discovered, that at any time, someone is going to figure this out. And if they did figure it out, you'd honestly think, "Well, that's fair enough, actually."
One of my favorite writers, Neil Gaiman, put it so beautifully in a commencement address he gave at a university, called "Make Good Art." I want to make sure I get his quote correct.
"I was convinced that there would be a knock on the door, and a man with a clipboard would be there to tell me that it was all over, that they'd caught up with me, and that I would now have to go and get a real job."
Now, when there's a knock on my door, I still feel like some sort of dark-suited clipboard man is going to be there to tell me that my time is kind of up. And being a crap cook, I'm quite relieved when it's just someone with a pizza for the kids.
But it's important to note that it's not all bad. There's a lot of goodness, I think, in those feelings. And this isn't some sort of motivational-poster type talk, a "Begin it now." It's more of an introspection into my own experiences of impostor syndrome, and how I've tried to learn to harness them and turn them into some sort of a force for good.
And a great example of those experiences is in the early days of Atlassian's history. We were about four years old, and we had about 70 employees. And at the advice of our auditors most good stories start with advice from an auditor --
we entered the New South Wales Entrepreneur of the Year competition. Now, we were surprised when we won the New South Wales Entrepreneur of the Year in the young category for entrepreneurs under 40. There were eight categories. And so surprised, in fact, having looked at the list of people we were up against, I didn't even turn up to the awards ceremony. So Scott collected the gong by himself. And then we traveled off to the national awards. I thought I should probably turn up to those. So we rented some suits, I invited a girl that I had just met we'll get to her in a second --
and off we went to the big black-tie gala. Now, our surprise turned to shock in the first award of the night, the young category, when we beat all of the other states and won the Australian Young Entrepreneur of the Year. When the shock had worn off, we got a lot of champagne to the table and the party began, and the night was surely over. We were having a royally great time.
Fast-forward to the last award of the night, and our shock turned into everybody's shock when we won the Australian Entrepreneur of the Year against all of the other categories. Now, so shocked was everybody else, in fact, that the announcer, the CEO of Ernst and Young, opened the envelope, and the first words out of his mouth were, "Oh my God."
And then he reset himself and announced that we had won.
So we knew we were in way too deep. And from there, the water got a lot deeper, because we jetted off to Monte Carlo to represent Australia in the World Entrepreneur of the Year against 40 other different countries.
Now, in another rented suit, I was at one of the dinners and sitting next to a lovely man called Belmiro de Azevedo, who was the winner from Portugal. Total champion. At 65, he had been running his business for 40 years. He had 30,000 employees. Don't forget, at the time, we had 70. And he had four billion euro in turnover. And after a couple of wines, I remember admitting to him that I felt that we did not deserve to be there, that we were well out of our depth, and at some time, someone was going to figure this out and send us home to Australia.
And he, I remember, just paused and looked at me and said that he felt exactly the same way and that he suspected all the winners were feeling that way, and that despite not knowing Scott or I or really anything about technology, he said that we were obviously doing something right and should probably just keep going.
Now, this was a pretty big light bulb moment for me for two reasons. One, I realized that other people felt this as well. And two, I realized it doesn't go away with any form of success. I had assumed that successful people didn't feel like frauds, and I now know that the opposite is more likely to be true.
And this isn't just a feeling that I have at work. It happens in my personal life, too. In the early days, I was flying back and forth to San Francisco every week for Atlassian, and I racked up a lot of frequent flyer points and got access to the Qantas business lounge. Now, if there's ever a place that I don't belong ...
It doesn't help when I walk in and they generally look at me in shorts and jeans, or jeans and a T-shirt, and say, "Can I help you, son? Are you lost?" But anyway, sometimes life happens in the Qantas lounge when you'd least expect it.
One morning, over a decade ago, I was sitting there on my regularly weekly commute, and a beautiful woman from way out of my league walked into the Qantas lounge and continued walking straight up to me in a case of mistaken identity. She thought I was someone else, so in this case, I actually was an impostor.
But rather than freeze as I would have historically done or chivalrously maybe informed her of her error, I just tried to keep the conversation going.
And classic Australian bullshit became some sort of forward movement and a phone number. And I took that girl to the awards ceremony a couple of months later. And more than a decade later, I'm incredibly happy that she is now my wife, and we have four amazing children together.
But you'd think that when I wake up every morning, I wouldn't roll over and look at her and think, "She's going to say, 'Who are you, and who gave you that side of the bed?'
'Get out of here.'" But she doesn't. And I think she sometimes feels the same way.
And apparently, that's one of the reasons that we'll likely have a successful marriage. You see, in researching this talk, I learned that one of the attributes of the most successful relationships is when both partners feel out of their league. They feel that their partner is out of their league. They feel like impostors. And if they don't freeze, and they're thankful, and they work harder and they stretch to be the best partner they can, it's likely to be a very successful relationship. So if you have this feeling, don't freeze. Try to keep the conversation going, even if she thinks that you're somebody that you're not.
Now, feeling like, or people thinking I'm someone I'm not actually happens quite frequently. A great example from my more recent past, a few months ago, I was up late at night with one of my kids, and I saw something on Twitter about Tesla saying that they could solve South Australia's rolling series of power crises with one of their large industrial batteries.
Without thinking, I fired off a bunch of tweets, challenging them and saying were they really serious about this. And in doing so, I managed to kick a very small rock off a very big hill that turned into an avalanche that I found myself tumbling in the middle of. Because you see, a few hours later, Elon tweeted me back and said that they were deadly serious, that within a hundred days of contract signing, they could install a 100-megawatt-hour facility, which is a giant battery of a world-class size, one of the biggest ever made on the planet. And that's when all hell really broke loose. Within 24 hours, I had every major media outlet texting and emailing and trying to get in contact with me to get opinion as some sort of "expert" in energy.
Now, at the time, I couldn't really have told you the difference between a one-and-a-half-volt AA battery that goes in my kids' toys and a 100-megawatt-hour industrial-scale battery facility that goes in South Australia that could potentially solve their power crisis. I was now feeling a chronic case of impostor syndrome,
and it got truly bizarre. And I remember thinking to myself, "Shit. I've kind of started something here and I can't really get out. If I abandon the situation, I'm going to sort of set back renewables in Australia and maybe just look like a complete idiot because of my idiocy on Twitter."
So I thought the only thing I could do was to try not to freeze and to try to learn. So I spent a week trying to learn everything I could about industrial-scale batteries and the electricity grid and renewables and the economics of all of this and whether this was even a feasible proposal. I talked to the chief scientist, I talked to the CSIRO, had multiple ministers and premiers trying to give me their side of the story from both sides of the aisle. I managed to exchange tweets with the prime minister. I even managed to pull off a passing impression, let's say, of an energy expert on ABC Lateline.
But as a result of all this, South Australia did put out a battery tender, and they had more than 90 applications for that battery tender. And the national conversation over a period of a few months moved from the sort of theatrical lumps of coal in the parliament to discussing kind of which industrial-scale battery chemistry was the best for building large-scale renewable batteries.
So I think that the important lesson is by that time in my life, I knew well that I was an impostor. I knew I was miles out of my depth. But instead of freezing, I tried to learn as much as I could, motivated by my fear of generally looking like an idiot, and tried to turn that into some sort of a force for good.
So one of the things I've learned is that people think successful people don't feel like frauds. But I think, especially knowing a lot of entrepreneurs, the opposite is more likely to be true. But the most successful people I know don't question themselves, but they do heavily question, regularly question, their ideas and their knowledge. They know when the water is way too deep, and they're not afraid to ask for advice. They don't see that as a bad thing. And they use that advice to hone those ideas, to improve them and to learn. And it's OK to be out of your depth sometimes. I'm frequently out of my depth. It's OK to be out of your depth. It's OK to be in a situation where you just can't push the eject button, so long as you don't freeze, so long as you harness the situation, don't be paralyzed and try to turn it into some sort of a force for good. And it's important that I say "harness" here, because this isn't sort of pop-psychology BS about conquering impostor syndrome for me. It's merely about being aware of it. In fact, I'm extremely aware of feeling like an impostor right now, as I'm up here, some sort of pseudo-expert on a feeling that I couldn't even put a name to a few months ago, when I agreed to do this talk. Which, if you think about it, is kind of the point, isn't it?
Thank you.
7 beliefs that can silence women and how to unlearn them
Shah Rukh Khan: "A girl should be seen, not heard." "Be quiet," or, "chup." These words are often used to silence girls right from childhood, well into adulthood and deep into old age.
I'm proud to introduce our next speaker, a true champion of the female voice, an advisor on poverty, gender and development for the World Bank, United Nations and several NGOs in India and the world over. She calls herself a cultural detective. Let's raise our voices to welcome renowned social scientist and author Deepa Narayan.
(Music)
Deepa Narayan: The goal of every loving parent is to raise good girls, but what parents actually do is to constrain, confine and crush their girls. So as they crush their girls, they prepare them for abuse. This would be so devastating that no parent would be able to bear it, so it's disguised.
In India, we call this "adjusting." I'm sure you've heard the word. "Darling, just adjust a bit. Just adjust. No matter what happens, just adjust." "Adjust" trains girls to be powerless, not to exist, not to be seen, not to have a self, and it trains boys to claim power and authority over the world. And in the meantime we keep talking about gender equality and women's empowerment.
After 2012, after the gang rape in a moving bus in Delhi, I really wanted to understand the roots of abuse. So I started asking a very simple question: what does it mean to you to be a good woman or a good man today? And I was so surprised by what I heard, the answers particularly that young people gave, that the project became a research project and it took over my life.
For three years, I listened to over 600 women, men and children, educated, middle class, and it led to 1,800 hours of listening and 8,000 pages of notes, and it took another year to make sense of it.
Nowadays, we see well-dressed, educated women like many of you in this room, all of you in this room, and myself, and we think the world has changed, but these external changes are extremely misleading, because on the inside, we have not changed.
So today, I'm not going to talk about poor people. I'm going to talk only about the middle and upper classes, because we are the ones most in denial. We are the ones who have said over and over again that when women are educated, when they're employed and they earn incomes, they will be equal, empowered and free. They're not. Why?
From my research, I identify seven habits that delete women, that make women disappear, but these habits persist because they're so familiar to us and we've made them good and moral. Why would you change or drop anything that's good and moral? So, on the one hand, we love our children, we love our daughters, and on the other hand, we crush them.
Habit one: You don't have a body. The first step to make a girl a ghost is to make her body disappear, to pretend that she doesn't have a body. Akangsha, who is 23, said, "In my family, we never spoke about the body, never." And it is in this silence that millions and millions of girls get sexually molested, and they don't even tell their mothers. And it's the negative comments from others that leads to 90 percent of women saying that they dislike their bodies. When a girl rejects her body, she rejects her only house and invisibility and insecurity become her very shaky foundation.
Habit two: Be quiet. Chup. If you're not supposed to exist and you don't have a body, how can you have a voice? So just about every woman said, "When I was little, my mother used to scold me and say, 'Don't speak, be quiet, be chup, speak softly, don't argue and never answer back. Jawab nahi Dena.'" I'm sure you've all heard that. And so girls become afraid, and they withdraw. And they become quiet and they say, "Let it go. Jaane do. What's the point? Nobody listens." Educated women said that their number one problem was their inability to speak up, as if there was a foot on their throat ready to choke them. Silence slices off women.
Habit three: Be a people pleaser. Please others. Everyone likes a nice woman who always smiles, who never says no, who is never angry, even when she's being exploited. Amisha, who is 18, said, "My father said, 'If I don't see you smiling, I don't feel good.'" So she smiles. So her father is teaching her, my happiness is more important than your happiness. And in this business of trying to make everyone happy all the time, girls become afraid to make decisions. And when you ask them, they say, "Anything, whatever! Kuch bhi! Everything goes. Chalta hai." Darsha, who is 25, said with great pride, "I'm highly elastic. I become whatever others want me to be." Such girls give up their dreams, their desires, and nobody even notices, except for depression. It moves in. Another slice of a girl is taken off.
Habit four: You have no sexuality. I think you'd all agree that with a population of over 1.3 billion, sex is not new to India. What is new is that more people now acknowledge that women, too, have a right to sexual desire. But how can a woman who has not been allowed to own her body, who hasn't been educated about her body, who may have been sexually molested, who cannot say no and who has been filled with shame, how can she claim her sexual desire? A woman's sexuality is suppressed.
Habit five: Don't trust women. Imagine how the world would change if women came together in solidarity, but as to make sure that this doesn't happen, our culture places high moral value on loyalty to men and family secrecy. Woman after woman said, "I know only one trustworthy woman, and that's me." Even Ruchi, who is 30 and who works on women's empowerment at Delhi University, said, "I don't trust women. They're jealous and they backbite." Obviously, then, in cities, women don't join women's groups, and when you ask them why, they say, "We don't have time for gossip." It's much easier to demolish a woman who is alone.
Habit six: Duty over desire. Muskan gave a very long definition of a good girl, and she's only 15. "She is kind, gentle, polite, loving, caring, truthful, obedient, respects elders, helps everyone unconditionally, and is good to others and fulfills duty." Tiring, isn't it. By the time you fulfill duty, whatever little desire is left is also lost. And when sacrificing mothers have nothing left to say except talk about food "Have you eaten? Khana kha liya? What will you eat?" men like Saurabh, who is 24, call them "boring." A woman becomes a residue.
Habit seven: Be totally dependent. So all these habits collectively crush women, fill her with fear and make her totally dependent on men for her survival, and this allows the system of male power to continue.
So all these seven habits that we thought were good and moral snatch life away from girls and position men to abuse.
We must change. How do we change? A habit is just a habit. Every habit is a learned habit, so we can unlearn them and this personal change is extremely important. I had to change too. But this doesn't change the system that crushes millions of other women. So we have to go to the roots. We must change what it means to be a good woman and a good man, because this a foundation of every society. We don't need elastic women, we need elastic definitions, for men too, and this big societal change cannot happen without men's involvement. We need you. We need men to become champions of change, to develop strong change muscles. Otherwise, it will be two more centuries before our girls, and our boys, are safe and free.
Imagine half a billion women coming together, with the support of men, to talk to one another for conversation, for change, both personal and political, and imagine men in their own circles, and imagine women and men coming together to just listen to each other without judgment, without blame, without accusations and without shame. Imagine how much we would change. We can do this together. Women, don't adjust. Men, adjust. It's time.
Thank you.
How well said, how wonderful. Everyone, Deepa, please. Listening to her, I realized that even in the simplest conversations that we have with women, we're actually being aggressive. For example, I do tell my daughter sometimes, "Yaar Tu hasti hai to mujhe accha lagta hai varna bura lagta hai". So sorry, I would never do that. Aaj Se main meri beti ko yahi bolunga. Whatever you're doing, mujhe accha hi lagta hai, aur accha nahi bhi lagta hai Toh mera kya, tum wohi karo jo tumhare ko lagta hai, right?
How did you feel, first listening to so many unfulfilled stories, desires, lack of independence, of girls that you normally would assume we think these girls are better off?
Very depressed. It was shocking for me, and that's why I couldn't stop, because I had no plans to do a study and no plans to write a book. I'd written 17 books before, and I thought, "I'm done," but when I went to St. Stephen's College and I heard, at most elite colleges you well know from Delhi, and the young women and the men, what they said about what it meant to them to be a woman and man sounded not like me but like my mother's generation. So then I went to another college and another college. The thing that was striking to me is that each woman felt she was alone, that she hides her fear and hides her behavior, because she thinks it's a personal fault. It's not a personal fault, it's training, and I think that's the biggest revelation is that, if we stop pretending, then the world changes.
Do you girls all agree with what Deepa is saying?
Already see that young girl saying, "Heard, heard what she said? You say this to me." Yeah, that's the way it should be. You, boy, you adjust. We are not adjusting anymore, OK?
Thank you so much. Have a good evening. Thank you.