Wired for Story with Lisa Cron

Apr 20

About This Episode

"If you can't see it, you can't feel it. And if you can't feel it, you won't be inspired to take action."

So says our guest this week, Lisa Cron. Lisa is a story coach, a teacher, a speaker, a former literary agent, and the author of many books, including "Wired for Story," "Story Genius," and most recently "Story or Die: how to use brain science to engage, persuade, and change minds in business and in life."

Her decades in publishing, exploring the universe that exists in the craft of putting words to story, has illuminated so much more brightly the value of the stories that exist between each of us as complex human organisms. "All stories are actually about the cost of human connection," she says. "In order to connect with someone else, you have to be vulnerable."

We are communicators. We hold as truth that our power to craft a story is directly connected to our power to bring about change. If you've ever been moved to change something in your own life after watching a movie, or episode of your favorite show, or even a podcast, then you'll understand just how important Lisa's craft is to our own industry, and our own craft as communicators in mastering the power of story.

Our great thanks to Lisa for joining us this week on Mission Forward.

Lisa Cron:
All stories are actually about the cost of human connection. What will it cost us to connect with someone else? In order to connect with someone else, you have to be vulnerable. If you can't be vulnerable, it's like saying, "I trust you enough to show you this. I trust you enough to let you know this, because I know you're not going to slam me." When you are doing that, they're thinking, "Oh my God, me too. I do that too."

Carrie Fox:
Hi there, and welcome to the Mission Forward podcast, where each week we bring you a thought-provoking and perspective shifting conversation on the power of communication. I'm Carrie Fox, your host and CEO of Mission Partners, a social impact communications firm and certified B Corporation. In just a few short weeks, my friends, my new book, More Than Words: Communications Practices of Courageous Leaders, will finally be available for sale. I'm thrilled to share this book with you, which includes stories from my 20 years as a social impact communicator and details the four key practices that can help you become a more courageous communicator and storyteller. Best part, for a limited time, we are giving away a free chapter of the book, so you can see what it's all about. Head over to missionforward.us/morethanwords to access your chapter. Now, onto the show.
Today's conversation is a very special one for me, because it's with someone who has directly influenced and inspired my work as a writer. For the last 10 years in nearly every media training I have facilitated, I have used this guest's words and insights to help executives and communicators inform how to think about crafting their stories. It was Lisa Cron who first planted this concept in me, that if you can't see it, you can't feel it. If you can't feel it, you won't be inspired to take action. I'm so excited for this conversation. Lisa Cron is a story coach, a teacher, a speaker, a former literary agent, and the author of many books, including Wired for Story, Story Genius and most recently, Story or Die, how to Use Brain Science to Engage, Persuade and Change Minds in Business and in Life. I reference Lisa directly in my new book, which makes today's conversation even sweeter as this is my first time meeting her. Lisa, welcome to Mission Forward.

Lisa Cron:
Oh, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Carrie Fox:
I am excited. We've got just a little less than half an hour to dig into a lot about storytelling, and we'll get into this new book that you've just recently put out. But first I would love if you just ground us a little bit in your story. Tell us a little bit about how you got into this work and who you are.

Lisa Cron:
Okay. I have worked with Story frankly as I've worked in publishing as an editor. I worked as a literary agent. I've worked with the studios, reading books to film. I've worked with story frankly for more decades than I want to admit to being alive. What pulled me into this part of it, the realization that, first of all, what a story actually is, and why it is and how it is that we make sense of everything because we do think in story, we make sense of everything through story, stories wired into, built into the architecture of our brains. The way it came to me, especially when I was reading books to film for the studios, and I would read, I mean, thousands of manuscripts. I would try to figure out, I couldn't just go, "Yeah, this would be a great movie," or, "This would be great to be published." I had to tell them why.
I had to dig in. What I realized really pretty soon is that everything that I had been taught, I mean, I was an English major in college, that everything I'd been taught about what pulls us into any kind of a story, and now this isn't just novels or books or TV shows or movies, but stories that we hear around the water cooler, stories that we tell other people. Everything we've been taught about what pulls us in was wrong. Because when I had to go in to say, "Why does this work and why didn't it?" I realized that what was pulling me in had nothing to do with "how well it was written", if the person was a wordsmith or not, whether there was a ripper oring plot, meaning all sorts of big exciting things were happening out there in the world.
It had to do with one thing and one thing only, which was what was happening out there affecting somebody internally, that protagonist, how was it making them reevaluate what they believed? I thought at that point that that was... I mean, not that, "Oh, I made it up, it's my theory," but nobody was talking about it and nobody was teaching it. Luckily for me, talk about serendipity at that same time, neuroscience was burgeoning. Then I started to read neuroscience, because what's more interesting as the news real producer says at the beginning of Citizen Kane, there's nothing more interesting than finding out what makes people tick, and that's what neuroscience is. In diving into the neuroscience, I realized that what I thought of as well, my theory or this is what I am thinking, it's like, "No, no, no, wait a minute. This is biological fact. This is not just what pulls us into any story, anything that we're watching.
But this is what engages us when we're listening to other people. This is what we need to do if we want to both not just engage other people, because we're telling them a story that we're hoping they're paying attention to, but even more if we're trying to enlighten them in some way, if we're trying to get them to see something from another point of view, or especially if we're trying to get them to donate or to come in and to pay attention and to take action, to hear our call action." It all is the same thing and comes around to the same thing, and believe it or not, is biological.

Carrie Fox:
I love that. What I've always wondered about you, Lisa, and you answered a bit of it here, but is your science background, I mean it really is. It's so steeped in science, your approach. How did you get there from your literary background first?

Lisa Cron:
I have to credit something that terrifies me now, which is the internet. It was truly that I could go from... I mean, first, I was just interested in it. I was just reading books. I was reading any article in Washington Post, New York Times, Atlantic that I was reading, was pulling me toward it. In these days, you could go, you could take a look and you could see, "Okay, wait, they're quoting this study." Usually, within two or three minutes I could be reading the PhD thesis paper that the study came from. I could be reading the scholarly article that it came from. It was just doing a lot of self-guided research. I'll tell you something really interesting. When I was writing my first book, Wired for Story, and I was diving into cognitive science and I was diving into the neuroscience of it and I thought, "Let me look at a cognitive science textbook. Let me see what they're teaching in universities."
I went and I bought a textbook, which I mean it was... That's so expensive, like 150 bucks for this book. Here's the really interesting thing. I started to read the places that I'd been interested in, and what I was reading, I realized in those textbooks, most of which were four or five, some 10 years old was literally wrong, that the studies that had happened from when they were published to what I was to the current day had literally been overturned. We have learned so much about the way that the brain processes information and the way that we make sense of things. I mean, the scary thing to me on that level is that most of the psychology out there, most of what Freud or Jung or Adler said is just wrong, I mean, literally built on models that we now know are not true, the way that we treat ourselves is wrong.
That's why my goal here has been to take all of this and to bring it out to have empathy for other people and at the same time have empathy for ourselves, have empathy for a lot of the things that we blame or shame ourselves for. That's just the way that we process information. Because interestingly, and for better or for worse, we are biologically hardwired to live in a world we don't live in anymore. The way that we take in information and the way that we take in and decide the way the world works was very effective 100,000 years ago and is no longer as effective now. I think that's why we have so much of the way that we're battling each other out there, such a huge way now, not to mention the problem of social media, because it's bringing in information and giving people platforms and I don't just mean platforms, right, left or whatever, but just we're not geared to take in, we're geared to deal with people really pretty much one-on-one. It's an interesting and scary time out there.

Carrie Fox:
You know what, you've delved into something that is a forever career, given that there is so much to learn about the brain and we are continuing to learn how it works and understanding it. Tell me a little more. You've talked about what doesn't work. I want to go deeper into this practical empathy side of your work. What we do know about what works in storytelling?

Lisa Cron:
Well, what works, and this is what... I mean, it was what I really tried to dive into in my first two books, Wired for Story and Story Genius, which were for writers, and really dove into more in story or die, which is for everybody. Because before you can even create a story, you have to really understand who you are creating that story for and how they see the world, and really understand how we, them and you, me and everybody make sense of everything, because it's very different than what we've been taught.
In order to create that story, you really have to know, first of all, what point you want to make, what point you want to make you that your story will make, because all stories make a point beginning on page one, but you also are word one or sentence one. But you also have to know how does that other person, how is it going to land with them? What in their belief system is going to have to shift in order for them to hear your call to action, in order for them to realize that your call to action, what you want them to do actually isn't going against something they believe it's actually going to help them become, and this is such an overused word, I hate using it, but their most authentic self?
In order to do that, you have to do so much work in terms of really understanding who your audience is, whose mind you're trying to change, who you're trying to get to do something different from what they've already done. The only way to do that is through story, is through really understanding that, because when you give someone facts, I mean, the two mistakes that people make, if you don't mind my diving into that, is one, when you want to tell somebody why something is important or why they should donate to a cause when you're fundraising, we tend to give people the same reasons that would pull us in and they're not us and they don't care why we think it's important.
They only care why it would be important based on their belief system. It's really important to step out of that and dive into their belief system and go, "Why would they think this is important?" Based on who they are, what matters to them, and what literally group that they are in, what, for lack of a better word, tribe they belong to. That is so important first, and that means you have to empathize with them. That can be really hard. It's really easy to look at people doing something that you wouldn't do and roll your eyes or think what's wrong or worse. The worst thing you can do is try to explain to them why they're wrong and give them facts. You are going to alienate people so fast if you start giving them facts, because facts do one of three things. Either you're giving facts to people who already agree with you, and at that point you know what difference does it make?
They already agree with you, so they're not your audience if you're trying to fundraise, or two, you're going to give them facts and they can't unpack those facts. They can't see how... The only way we can unpack a fact is to go, "Okay, I see this in general. How is it going to affect me boots on the ground in my life?" Because you, me, everybody, we unpack everything based on one really simple metric. How is this going to affect me given my agenda, is it help me or is it going to hurt me? Is it going to keep me safe? So they have to be able to unpack it, see it that way. Then they also have to, which is the assumption that we tend to have, read the same meaning into it that we do. Oh, that's a good thing. They have to be able to do that and agree with you.
If you give them a fact and they unpack it, but it's something that they disagree with that really breaks their belief system, they are going to get angry. They are going to sit there and not take it in and go, "Let me take a look at this. Let me see if this is right." What's going to happen is they're going to start thinking of counter-arguments. Here's the thing, though. I mean, the really important thing I think to understand, and this really goes to brain science, is once we believe something, once something becomes part of our belief system, it becomes part of how we see ourselves, and anything that challenges that is seen by our brain as an attack, because our brain is hardwired to protect us, that is its school to keep us safe, not just safe if a dog is coming at you on your bed like duck or run.
But it considers our psychological self how we see ourselves, our sense of self to be just the as important and just the same thing. If somebody's attacking your belief system, it's why you get angry. You don't decide to get angry. You don't get angry because you're dumb or self-centered, whatever you want to say. Your brain takes that decision out of out of hands. It gets angry for you. It's like you don't decide that your blood is going to boil. It boils. I mean, here's a fun fact. When somebody says something that you strongly disagree with, blood rushes to your thighs in case you make a quick getaway, because your brain is reacting as if they've come at you with a baseball bat.

Carrie Fox:
Lisa, there is so much that you've just said that I love, and what it's sticking with me is validation. We tell stories in so many ways for our own self-validation to be heard that someone will hear our story. Yet if we are coming at it from that position that this is our story and we want to be heard, we're not leaving a whole lot of space to actually then hear the person that we are hoping to connect with.
Where you and I have some similarities is I talk a lot and train a lot on radical listening and how important it is to understand that we all have our own worldview based on where we've been born, based on who our parents were, based on who our ancestors were, that we have a set of stories that have carried us forward. There was a way that we have understood those stories. I had this aha moment when I was coming into college that I realized that my worldview was really far too insulated and I had to break the walls down of that story to understand the way the world really existed, to understand the full truth of stories. That was a moment of release in some ways to start to understand the power of a full story rather than the narrow story. I see this a lot in your books too, as you think about how to push out the possibilities of what a story can do.

Lisa Cron:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, nobody listens until they feel heard. You haven't heard them and make them feel like you understand them and their point of view and you respect that, nobody is going to listen to you. The minute they feel attacked, the minute they feel like you're even saying, "Let me let you know this," the implication is they've made some a mistake, they've done something wrong, and that turns people off so fast. I mean, it's that expression that way that we all know the bias, the way that everybody's got the implicit bias and everybody's got that when they hear something immediately, they're only going to hear the parts that they agree with and something they don't agree with. They're either not going to hear or really be coming up with a counter-argument. You really have to understand exactly how they are coming at it.
That's hard. What you just said, Carrie, that is really hard to do, because the one place, the person who talks about, and this is the key thing when you've got in the word a courageous communication in your subtitle, part of what makes communicators courageous, part of the really hard part about it is allowing yourself to be vulnerable. Because when people tell stories and they do tell stories about themselves, they're really afraid to be vulnerable. They're afraid to show that they made a mistake, they're afraid to show that they needed to learn something and that whatever happened out there in the plot or the world or whatever, the external thing they're dealing with had to cause an internal change, which means that there was something they didn't know. Being vulnerable is really, really hard, and that really is the key.
That is the thing that ends up pulling us in. That is I think where that courage comes in, because in order to change somebody, in order to pull them into a story, there's a chemical cocktail that needs to be unleashed from the very beginning. That chemical cocktail, it's three hormones that come in unison and it's dopamine, which is I think largely misunderstood. People think of dopamine as a pleasure hormone, but it isn't. It's curiosity. Dopamine is the curiosity to go forward because something good might happen. It's dopamine, which pulls us in a story like, "Oh oh, something grabbed our attention, a surprise. I thought this one thing was going to happen and something else happens instead, so there's surprise." The next one is cortisol, which as we all know is stress, we know that now than we ever knew before. We've got the stress. Something is at stake, something might happen, something maybe negative.
The third one, and this is the one that goes missing a lot, is oxytocin, which is the empathy hormone. You have to make us care, and that comes from vulnerability. That comes from a bad thing can happen from being willing to admit something. Because if you can be vulnerable, if you can show them, I mean being vulnerable means showing that you're human, people will respond to you. Reminds me, I once was teaching a class at UCLA and a student said, she said, "I know on the surface I look really put together." I mean, she did. She looked like somebody like 100% had it together inside and out. She said, "Inside, I'm a raging mess, and I'm trying to keep all of you from seeing it." Stories about that raging mess. If you can't go into the raging mess on the inside and show it to us and show us who you really are and that vulnerability, we're just going to going to turn away, we're just going to turn away. That really is the key.

Carrie Fox:
We talk a lot, Lisa, here about owning your stories and how owning a story requires vulnerability. It requires letting someone understand who you are, even the parts that make you a bit uncomfortable. Again, finding the right balance on what you share and what you don't, but I so deeply agree with you is that when you practice that vulnerability, the depth of relationships that we are then able to form as a result of it are so much deeper that we're able to unlock this depth of relationship and understanding and humanity, because we've allowed ourselves to put that guard down.

Lisa Cron:
Exactly. Society tells us from when we're tiny not to do it. It's something we learn in kindergarten. Don't let people see who you really are.

Carrie Fox:
Lisa, do you think that that's a western culture society or do you think that's universal?

Lisa Cron:
I think there's a universal to it. I do. I definitely think there's a universal to it. I think yes, 100% a universal. I think a lot of it, most of it on one level is very gendered. I think it's very gendered. I think with men, with males, it's don't let anybody see how you feel. Don't feel emotion. The only thing you can be as strong and emotion is a bad and negative thing. With women, I think it's definitely, don't let people know who you really are, because you could get slammed. It's what cognitive psychologists and evolutionary biologists will tell us now is that when you think of who is the most intelligent, it has nothing to do with how much data do you know? How school learning do you have? The most intelligent among us are people who have emotional intelligence, people who can read the room, people who can even do what we're talking about here, which is understanding someone else enough to understand why what you're asking them to do would matter to them without rolling your eyes?
I mean, that is what it is. Women tend to be much better at that, because let's face it, if you're female from the time you realize and you're a little kid, you realize boys want to see your underpants, you have to be able to read the room. Am I safe or am I not? So yeah, I do think that it is something that is everybody has on every level. I do think so.

Carrie Fox:
Fight or flight, it's such a core component to story. I want you to maybe double-click on that, because it's an important part of your research and something that I want to make sure the audience hears on how important it is when they are thinking about their own stories, that that is a really important element of what's happening behind when we are taking information in.

Lisa Cron:
Well, absolutely on that level. That's where the vulnerability goes missing. Because if a story is there to make other people think that we know what we're doing, what we don't realize is that what we're actually doing is shutting them out.

Carrie Fox:
Right.

Lisa Cron:
Here's the thing, all those things, I say this to writers all the time, all those things that you're afraid other people are going to find out about you, the weirdo things that you do, and let's face it, we all have weirdo things that we do that we would be mortified if other people knew. Guess what? They do those weirdo things too. They all do it. I mean, I say to people on that level, think about just making it impersonal on that level, the TV shows you watch, the books that you read. You realize what pulls people in is admitting to that, because what pulls us in a story, forget what's going on with the characters on the page, we've got that. Stories are these Vulcan mind melts, where we really are literally in the mind of the protagonist, or vice versa. They've done FMRI studies that show when you're lost in a story, same areas of your brain are lighting up as would light up if you're doing what the protagonist is doing.
Those insights, that vulnerability that they've got, we're feeling it and we're thinking, "Oh my God, I do that too. I feel that too." Then when we see the story, the way when they can finally open up, the good thing happens. They've got that aha moment and they can solve whatever problem they're facing in the story. We think, "I guess, isn't what makes me weird. I guess, I can open up and say that," I can see that that is what brings people close. Because I think every story, I mean, especially the stories out there in terms of movies and TV and really stories that we share with our friends, all stories are actually about the cost of human connection, what will it cost us to connect with someone else? In order to connect with someone else, you have to be vulnerable. If you can't be vulnerable, it's like saying, "I trust you enough to show you this. I trust you enough to let you know this, because I know you're not going to slam me." When you're doing that, they're thinking, "Oh my God, me too. I do that too."

Carrie Fox:
Trust and respect, right? I want to go back to what we were talking about a few moments ago around political conversations that feel impossible, particularly in many families right now, that families feeling unable to have conversations among themselves because of such differing views. We had someone on the show not too long ago named Jennifer Brandell who works in the space of democracy and building better democratic spaces and places. She talked about how she needed to model her work on a very personal level because she often found she couldn't talk to her own father about the work that she did. She went through a process of literally recording some conversations with him to think about how she could practice different techniques for them to come closer together. It worked. I mean, it really deeply worked and it was such a great example, Lisa, of how sometimes the most uncomfortable conversations, using the right techniques and leaning into the vulnerability and the empathy truly allows us to connect to the level that we sometimes don't even think is possible. We write off each other because we don't think it's possible.

Lisa Cron:
We don't think it's possible. Also, we do tend to vilify. We tend to go to the thing that grabs our attention the most and makes us feel the most unsafe, which is the beliefs that we're hoping maybe we can change. Maybe someone who's gone down [inaudible 00:25:27] on rabbit hole, and it's terrifying. It's very easy to 100% vilify and think that person's 100% awful all the way down to their core, because we see it as only that one layer or level. I mean, yeah, that's absolutely true. I was listening the other day to, it was a piece on NPR, and it was a school district, I think it was somewhere in Virginia, where, I mean, as we all know now, school board fights when they bring the public in and people are yelling and screaming. This one school thought, "Okay, how can we get people to at least talk to each other so they're not yelling?"
I'm going to mangle this, I should go back and listen to it again so I can say it more clearly, but basically they got a group of people together, some from the right and some from the left. They bonded first over just human stuff. One of the stories they told, and I can't remember exactly why this was, but one person was talking about how their child had tried to commit suicide and not succeeded, thank God. I can't remember if it was because of something that had to do with being transgender or being gay, but whatever it was, it allowed the people on the other side to empathize as opposed to vilify. It brought them together and they were able to, if not change other people's point of view. They interviewed a few of them who went, "Yeah, I don't believe that, but I can completely see why they do, that is completely okay. They have the right to believe that."
I mean, when you think about all the yelling and screaming that we hear about at school board meetings these days, that seem like a massive step forward, because they saw each other as human. I think it's hard to see that sometimes. It's easy when you see the bad thing to assume it's that all the way through to their core and isn't all humans down there. I think if you don't mind my saying, it goes down to, "Okay, but why is it that on the left we have a hard time convincing people that vaccines work and on the right they can convince people that Stevie Wonder isn't really blind, he's just doing it to advance his music career? Why is that? What is we don't know and not being snarky or snide about it?"
I think the answer is because it has nothing to do with Stevie Wonder being blind or not or any of that or about vaccines. It has to do with what matters to those people. It has to do with so often what brings people to [inaudible 00:28:09] or before that could get them radicalized into whatever it is. It's that sense of being helpless. It's that sense of not being heard, of not being seen, of not having any power, not having any ability, any purpose to go and make a difference. The minute somebody comes in and says, "Yes, you do, you're part of us, and we are going to make this difference, and look at those horrible people who are telling us we are bad basket of [inaudible 00:28:35]," that's all it takes to pull someone in. Then the way that we're wired is we're wired to want and to need to belong to a group.
The problem is, once we come into that, to question even one piece of one belief, it's like pulling on a thread and then the whole fabric falls apart, that is a big reason why, even with the most egregious things that people believe and you go, how can you possibly believe that, if they question that, they're going to have to question all of it. That then turns around and means that their allegiance to their group and their group is going to turn on them. There are so many reasons beyond just the logic of telling them why that Democrats weren't trying to sell children in the basement of a pizza parlor that by the way didn't have a basement. It's like that fact doesn't matter, because that isn't what it was about. You have to go down and figure out what is their resistance really about. That's a key question.

Carrie Fox:
I'm curious, your take, it does feel, at least in certain parts of society, that society is shifting in terms of how we think about challenging standards and norms. I'll say that more broadly as thinking about how I operate a benefit corporation. We are thinking very seriously about the role that a company can play in supporting the growth and support of an economy and thinking about what we call triple bottom line. We don't think about profit first. We think about people, planet, purpose, and all of the ways that we have power to change how systems operate as a way to support and improve people's lives and conditions, so you see certain systems starting to change.
I think as a result of that, we also see a generation of people who are starting to challenge how we tell stories, how we understand stories, how we dig into stories, how we don't take our stories for granted, how we question what's on the page and what's not on the page, that there is so much that is, there's a fire that's been lit under this generation to really challenge how we think about information as the basis of our society. You wrote writer for story in 2012, right? You're now on your third book, perhaps more, but third book. It feels like you were in so many ways ahead of your time thinking about how important this concept is to our ability to advance and progress as a society.

Lisa Cron:
Yeah. The scary thing to me is that this really literally is the way we make sense of everything. Any fact that you give someone, they're going to spin it into narrative. That narrative being, "Again, how is this going to affect me? Boots on the ground. Not just physically affect like climate change is going to cause my house to be washed into the ocean, but how is it going to affect me given my standing with my group, with my tribe, my community that matters to me? That's how we make sense of everything. You're absolutely right. I mean, stories affect us every minute of every day whether we know it or not, and most of the time we don't. It does come into that being able to pull ourselves back and go, "Wait a minute, am I believing this? This is what I'm now feeling. Does this challenge some belief where if you asked me point blank, if I believed it, I'd go, 'Are you kidding me? Never.' Yet, we've got so much of that."
But I agree with you, Carrie, and I don't know how we would do this. I mean, it is the terrifying thing is so many of the problems are so deeply buried, baked in systems, they're systemic. I don't know how you change that. I don't know how story by story you can do that. I mean, I would've thought that with the pandemic that would've brought us together and it did the exact opposite. Yeah, I do think it's really important. I think it's really interesting to understand it and to understand where the first story that we tell, because the only thing I would say, and I mean, I love [inaudible 00:32:48] Brown. I think she's great talking about being vulnerability.
But there's one thing, and in the story community, you hear it this way a lot, which is that notion of the stories we tell ourselves. I have a really hard time with that language, because it implies it's a choice. Choosing the story that we tell and we are not, the story that we live in is the story that was inculcated in our brains when we're small, because we have just have one minute, if I could just dive into this.

Carrie Fox:
Yes.

Lisa Cron:
Our brain had its last big growth spurt about 100,000 years ago or so. For a very long time, scientists thought that that was, because it was when we got the ability to think rationally, analytically. What they know now was that the real reason for it was the other thing that happened at that time. It was at that time our need to belong to a group became biologically hardwired.
We are all wired to need... We're all people who need people. The need to belong to a group is as deeply hardwired as is our need for food, air, and shelter. But at that time, our brains were also wired to be able to deal with about, and this is Dunbar's number, 150. Even now, that's how we came up with a number. We can tangentially be aware of about 150 people that is it for our brains, for our bandwidth. But then it was 150 people in our whole entire life, and not 150 now self-selecting people, but 150 people total. At that time, our brain was wired to take in information, the information that we get when we're young and encode it as permanent, because let's face it, that was the same 150 people we're going to deal with from birth until death and the world itself was not going to change.
I mean, think about it. If you were born 100,000 years ago or you were born 99,000 years ago, the world you were living in was going to be exactly the same. We didn't build buildings, we didn't have God from forbid religions, we didn't have money or cultural, it was all the same. It made total evolutionary sense that what we would take in as children, the meaning we would make of things, the rules that were there would be be biologically hardwired as this is the way the world is. We're still wired that way. I mean, that's amazing, Carrie, that you could come up and then come into a bigger world, because let's face it, when we're coming in and we're kids, it's like we don't go, "Oh, this is how my mom and dad are, but other moms and dad are different than other countries are different and other religions are different now. God forbid, maybe you don't even have a religion, hopefully."
I mean, we just go, "This is how the world is, this is what it is, and everybody else out there who doesn't believe it is really, really screwed up. [inaudible 00:35:32] a lot of therapy and join us over here and [inaudible 00:35:33]. It doesn't work that way. That's what we're coming up against. I mean, that's why when I say we're wired to live in a world we don't live in anymore, that's the truth. When people shame themselves for things like, "Oh my God, I'm so insecure. I care what everybody else thinks." We're wired to care what everybody else thinks, because we're wired to live in a world where if they didn't like us, they could hit us over the head and throw us off a cliff, which to some degree they still can do. There's so much where we should have empathy for ourselves in terms of how we make sense of things.

Carrie Fox:
Well, and I mean, they say knowledge is power and using the knowledge that you have helped to give so many people, I think we have the power to ask why? To be curious, to dig in and then to use those stories to keep asking. Tell me more. Just tell me more, because I think really being curious, practicing practical empathy, practicing radical listening, all those things, and maybe I'm an eternal optimist and I know I am, but I do think all those things put together can get us towards that best future that we, I think, all hope for.

Lisa Cron:
I think it's no matter what it's worth making the effort.

Carrie Fox:
It's worth making the effort.

Lisa Cron:
Totally. Yeah. I mean, because maybe it'll go the other way. Because when you think about Trump, it's like, okay, but he was just the ember that lit the fire, right? I mean, it wasn't just him, one person. But it took one person. Talk about right place, right time, or wrong place, wrong time, depending on how you look at it. I mean, maybe one person, maybe there is a lot of fodder, a lot of kindling out there to go the other way and maybe we can change things, but it's totally worth it to make the effort, because guess what, all we've got is right here, right now anyway.

Carrie Fox:
That's right. Well-

Lisa Cron:
[inaudible 00:37:27] right here right now, anyway.

Carrie Fox:
Lisa, speaking about right here, right now, I feel terrible we've been doing this because I could stay on the phone with you forever. It is very rare I think that someone gets to look in the eyes, even through a virtual setting of someone who has deeply inspired their work. For me, to you, Lisa, for 10 years, you have so deeply inspired my work. You have informed my work. You have helped me think more holistically about the power of my work. And so for that, I am so deeply grateful to you and so grateful for your time here today. Thank you so much.

Lisa Cron:
Well, thank you so much, and thank you for anything that I said you taking out into the world and making a difference, that difference that way. I can't thank you enough.

Carrie Fox:
Well, we look forward to staying in touch with you and sharing details of your book. For those listening, go practice practical empathy today.

Lisa Cron:
Oh, my utter pleasure.

Carrie Fox:
That brings us to the end of this episode of Mission Forward. Thanks for tuning in today. If you are stewing on what we discussed here today, or if you heard something that's going to stick with you, drop me a line at Carrie@missionpartners and let me know what's got you thinking. If you have thoughts for where we should go in future shows, I would love to hear that too. Mission Forward is produced with the support of Sadie Lockhart in association with the True Story Team. Engineering by Pete Wright. If your podcast app allows for ratings and reviews, I hope you'll consider doing just that for this show, but the best thing you can do to support Mission Forward is simply to share the show with a friend or colleague. Thanks to your support, and we'll see you next time.