Kirill Eremenko: This is episode number 357 with Behavioral Relationship Expert, Tracy Crossley.
Kirill Eremenko: Welcome to the SuperDataScience podcast. My name is Kirill Eremenko, Data Science Coach and Lifestyle Entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you inspiring people and ideas to help you build your successful career in data science. Thanks for being here today. And now, let’s make the complex simple.
Kirill Eremenko: Welcome back to the SuperDataScience Podcast, everybody. Super pumped to have you back here on the show. Today’s going to be a very different and a very exciting episode. In this particular session, I invited my personal life coach. So we’re definitely are not going to be talking about data science, we’re going to be talking about emotions, psychology, and lots of things to do with mental wellbeing. And why is that? Why did I decide to invite my personal life coach to the show? Well, this is because of the current situation in the whole world where approximately one billion people, it’s mind blowing, one billion people all over the population of the world are under lockdown due to the Coronavirus.
Kirill Eremenko: And that has its consequences, not just economical, financial, career consequences, but also emotional consequences, psychological consequences. People are in situations that they no normally deal with, we have to stay indoors, we might be surrounded by people we love, but we were not used to spending so much time with them all the time and that can cause conflicts, that can cause arguments. On the other hand, some people might be stuck alone and you’re used to seeing friends or used to having a social life, and you can’t right now and you’re feeling isolated, you’re feeling lonely, you’re feeling down.
Kirill Eremenko: Some people might be starting to feel depression setting on, some people might be starting to feel anxiety and all these negative feelings, negative experiences that some of us may be going through, many of us may be going through, and that’s why I invited Tracy to talk about this, how we all individually and collectively can get through this time better and come out better people on the other side. And that’s exactly what we focused on. So in today’s episode, you’ll hear Tracy’s professional opinion on the questions like, what to do if being stuck at home with your significant other is making you want to break up or driving you crazy.
Kirill Eremenko: How to change yourself in time of uncertainty while letting your partner be themselves. How to deal with anxiety of the unknown and make this time work for you. Being isolated from others when you’re single and how to make this time a game changer for you. How to maintain your social life during this time and build connections, and many, many other burning questions that everybody is facing right now. I highly recommend this episode to everybody. I enjoyed it a lot. And even if you’re not in the space of data science or you know somebody not in the space of data science who needs this help, after listening to this episode, please send it to them so that you can help them through this time as well, through this difficult time, difficult for all of us.
Kirill Eremenko: And on that note, let’s dive straight into it. I bring to you, behavioral relationship expert, Tracy Crossley. Welcome to the SuperDataScience podcast, everybody. Super pumped to have you back here on the show. Today, I have none other but my personal life mentor, Tracy Crossley. Tracy, welcome to the show. How are you?
Tracy Crossley: I am great. Thank you so much for having me, Kirill. I love being here.
Kirill Eremenko: It’s really a great pleasure of mine and an honor really because you have a podcast of your own, and I remember before we met, listening to your podcast and now I feel starstruck that you’re on this podcast. It’s really cool. It’s really cool to have you here. How long have we known each other?
Tracy Crossley: I want to say it’s been over a year now at least. Yeah.
Kirill Eremenko: Yeah, I would say so as well. I don’t know if I told you this story, but one of my friends in Brisbane, she, a long time ago, maybe two or three years ago… We weren’t really friends, she was a friend of my brothers and I met her, I thought she was a great person, but we didn’t really click, and I didn’t really understand her psychology or her behavioral aspects, that didn’t really mesh well with me and I knew we couldn’t be very good friends. But then a few years passed, maybe two years passed and I met her again and she was completely transformed, completely different person, no more victim, no more blaming, guilting other people, completely full of light and energy and all herself.
Kirill Eremenko: And I was so shocked and my brother was shocked as well. We asked her, “What happened, how’d you change?” And she said, “Well, I’ve been listening to this podcast by Tracy Crossley. You should check it out.” And that’s how I found out about your podcast, I listened to it for a few months and I couldn’t wait and reached out to you for a discovery session. That’s where it all started, I guess.
Tracy Crossley: Wow. I did not know that story. I love that story. That’s great.
Kirill Eremenko: Yeah, I’ll definitely pass on this episode to her. She’ll be excited. So for the past year or so, we’ve been catching up almost weekly, I would say maybe two, three times a month on average, and discussing my favorite topic, Kirill, and Kirill’s personal issues. How would you describe the work that you do so that people who aren’t familiar with your work know a bit better what to expect from this episode?
Tracy Crossley: There’s a couple of things. One is, I work with people to help them break negative beliefs that they have, which hinder whatever it is they’re trying to be successful at, whether you’re trying to be successful at being an authentic person, whether you’re trying to be successful in a relationship, whether you’re trying to be successful at work, whatever it happens to be, we get down deep and we really get into the belief system. So if you’re in a dysfunctional relationship or you’re single and you can’t seem to stop being single because you’re afraid or you don’t even know the reason, I basically help people to move on from that. And that is my specialty.
Kirill Eremenko: Got you. And for me personally, as I told you before the episode, I was a bit hesitant to… It’s a bit vulnerable to invite your personal coach onto your podcast, but in light of the situation in the world with the Coronavirus, there’s a lot of things I think that you can help our audience with overcoming that they might be struggling with right now. A lot of people are struggling right now sitting at home in isolation or in lockdowns, so I thought it’s definitely a necessary thing to do. And while we’re on this topic, I wanted to say that personally for me, my biggest experience with you has been working through my emotions, my feelings.
Kirill Eremenko: I’m a person who, I don’t feel feelings that well and don’t really deal very well with… Not that I don’t deal with my emotions, I don’t even experience emotions properly, experience feelings properly. A lot of the time I feel like numb to them or I overanalyze instead of feeling feelings. And so that’s a part you’ve guided me through, in my view, very successfully and I’ve learned a lot about myself and also relationships. Like when we started, I was seeing one person and that relationship… I learned through the coaching with you and understanding myself better and I understood what I want from a relationship. Now, I’m in a different relationship and I feel I’ve progressed and improved a lot.
Kirill Eremenko: So definitely I can attest that sessions with you have been… You definitely have the expertise to walk people through. How did you learn all this stuff? That’s one thing I don’t think I’ve ever asked you.
Tracy Crossley: Well, I can tell you. Basically, I not only have a degree in psychology, but my own personal experience really led me, and it’s kind of a long story, but I’ll try and shorten it. But I was reading a book, I had been recently laid off, and this was back in 2008 when the whole economy took a dump here in the United States. And I was reading this book and I thought, “Wow, this is really interesting.” And the book was called The Wishing Year. And it was fascinating because this professor at a college in Northern California had written it and she had not believed in wishing, she didn’t believe in the law of attraction or anything of that nature. And her book was really fascinating.
Tracy Crossley: It was a year in her life of her wishing and all these things started happening. Well, I wrote to her, I tend to write to authors that I like, so I had written to her. And in her book she’d also mentioned this other book. And I tend to, if I read a book, I tend to take down all the titles of books that these authors, other authors, mention. So one of them happened to be this book called Calling In The One. And I thought it was fascinating because my own love life was completely dysfunctional. And I had a habit of getting out of a relationship, but not ever being done emotionally where I’d be attached still and I could never figure out why.
Tracy Crossley: And then I had a habit of making it into something bigger and better like, “Maybe this is my soulmate,” or something like that. Anyways so I ended up contacting the author of the second book, who happened to be here in LA, and I scheduled an appointment with her. And at the time I was unemployed and no money, and I somehow scraped together $300 to go see her because I thought, “Okay, maybe if I go see this woman, she’s going to help me.” But what ended up happening instead was the session wasn’t really helpful to me at all. But I met her business partner and they asked me if I could do sales and marketing because that was my background, if I could do some sales and marketing for their programs.
Tracy Crossley: And I said, “Sure, no problem.” So then I started doing that, I want to say it was a couple months and they had a coach training program and they called me and they said, “We want you to be in our coach training program.” I said, “I don’t want to be a coach. How am I going to make money being a coach? That’s ridiculous. Who wants to do that?” So long story short, they kept pushing it and finally I took the coach training program, and when I took it they were saying, “Oh my gosh, you’re like a natural coach. You’re great at this.” And the funny part is, I was trained as a love coach, which at the time my love life was not doing anything.
Kirill Eremenko: So you needed to coach yourself?
Tracy Crossley: I needed to coach myself, but I was really good, I will say, this at compartmentalizing back then. So my whole life was falling apart at the time, but during the hours that I had to coach people, I could do that. I could separate out my feelings, which isn’t necessarily a good thing unless you’re in the middle of like say an earthquake or your house is on fire. But when it comes to living your life, you want to be connected to your emotions, otherwise that’s actually a great cause of anxiety, and I didn’t realize it at the time. I could have suffered so much less had I known the tools that I ended up gaining later on because I also hired other mentors to teach me how to do transformative coaching because it really is transformative coaching/ontological coaching.
Tracy Crossley: Ontological coaching actually was developed in Australia.
Kirill Eremenko: What is ontological?
Tracy Crossley: Ontological coaching is mind, body, spirit coaching. And so it was a mixture of that. And transformative coaching is basically along the same lines, it has a psychological basis to it. In fact, one of my mentors was a professor at a graduate psychology school here in California. So I started picking that up, I learned things in my own life and my own experiences because I had a lot of growing to do myself, and that’s pretty much how it began and how it went.
Kirill Eremenko: Wow. Fantastic. Fantastic. So you’ve been doing this for many years, like 10 years or so?
Tracy Crossley: I’ve been doing this since 2008, so 12 years.
Kirill Eremenko: 12 years. All right. Well, I guess let’s dig in to a couple of things. The main issue right now, how do you see this whole situation right now with Coronavirus, of course it’s very important to preserve life and healthcare systems, that’s why everybody’s staying at home to make sure that we flatten this curve. But at the same time, that has consequences. Of course, there’s economic consequences, we have a huge stock market crash and businesses are going out of business, people losing jobs.
Kirill Eremenko: But at the same time it has, what at the start may have seemed as hidden consequences, now I think is quite evident to many people that staying at home and isolation can be very traumatic for such a long period of time, whether you’re by yourself or you are with your family members. What are your thoughts on that, and why is it so traumatic?
Tracy Crossley: Well, a couple of reasons it’s so traumatic. First of all, you don’t have a choice. Most of us feel the freedom of choice usually, and when it’s taken away from you, it makes you feel almost like you’re a prisoner to the circumstances. And of course, if you’re watching the news, which makes it far worse because now you’re feeding into, “Okay, what’s happening and could this happen to me?” There’s all sorts of mixed emotions and then of course you have that going on. But the problem most people have if they’re stuck at home, let’s say with another person or their family members, they’re not used to spending this amount of time with them.
Tracy Crossley: And if you’re in the house, what ends up happening is all sorts of issues are going to crop up, the way you live, the way you do things. It starts to be where maybe your partner or family member or whoever it happens to be can be very nitpicky, so you may want to escape them because I know at least for me, like I have a lot of introverted qualities and I’m really good at entertaining myself, and I have a husband too who’s pretty much the same way. We’re great, we’re fine. But those people that are more, let’s say extroverted are going to struggle because you get in your head and you start thinking all sorts of things.
Tracy Crossley: You can get into the doom and gloom or you can feel like this is going to go on forever or you’re never going to be outside again with your friends or going out or doing travel or whatever it is that you enjoy doing, and so there’s a limitation again. And so people tend to react to limitation rather than being curious and understanding, “Hey, this is a great time.” In plagues in the past, you have Newton who discovered gravity, you have all sorts of people who have been able to, I don’t want to say pivot because I think that’s an overused word, but to put their energy into a positive place or a creative place or a curious place.
Tracy Crossley: And what happens instead for people is they can get into a state of anxiety and worry and feeling like the world is going to collapse or their world’s going to collapse, and so that obviously has emotional outcomes with that. And if you’re living alone, you can feel even more alone and you can feel totally disconnected, and that can make you feel depressed, it can make you feel heavy, it can make you feel unmotivated. There’s things you can do, but the point is, it’s to even recognize what’s going on with yourself and not avoid it and not distract. It’s to go, “Okay, I’m feeling this way,” and to be with that.
Kirill Eremenko: Yeah. I had this thought a few days ago that this virus as much as it is terrible and destructive on many levels to societies, economies, people. At the same time, it’s like a reality check for all of us where we’ve been using our busy-ness, our occupations, our external social adventures and lives to distract ourselves from facing who we truly are internally, and now that we have to face who we are and there is no escape, that’s when a lot of issues come on. We’ve got a couple of questions that, thank you, you helped prepare and you actually came up with all of these great topics for discussion.
Kirill Eremenko: So I think let’s go through them one by one and see how people can help themselves in these times, what tools you can equip them with. Does that sound right?
Tracy Crossley: Yeah, that sounds great.
Kirill Eremenko: Okay. So question number one is, what to do if you’re being stuck at home with your significant other and this whole process of being stuck together at home is making you to want to break up or is driving you insane? I think we’re starting to hear stories of that on the news, we probably all have friends who are going through this experience or even ourselves. What do people do in these situations? You love the person in normal life, everything’s great, but being stuck together is causing a lot of conflict. What should people do?
Tracy Crossley: So, first of all, like I was saying a few minutes ago, it’s relatable because most people don’t recognize what triggers them until you’re in a situation where you’re sharing a home and you’re not leaving the home and so what it is that triggers you about that person, it’s on steroids, it’s multiplied. And so, one of the things you want to pay attention to is your own reactions. “Why am I having this reaction in the first place?” It’s a great time to try and grow yourself, actually, instead of going, “Should I break up with this person or let them drive me crazy?” It’s, “Why is this person driving me crazy? What is it about me that I am feeling completely triggered by them?”
Tracy Crossley: Because we are all doing the best we can, which sometimes isn’t that great. And so when you’re basically in lockdown with this person, you may tend to blame them for how you feel, and you have to recognize you’re responsible for your own feelings. And that’s why it’s a great opportunity to dig inside and go, “What’s happening inside of me emotionally that’s making me feel this way? Maybe I’m already scared or maybe I’m already on edge.” Or something is happening emotionally and you want to know what that is and then what’s being triggered on top of it so that you’re blaming your spouse or your significant other.
Tracy Crossley: And the thing is too, you married them or you’re with them for a reason and you don’t want to forget that. But at the same time, again, it’s about taking that responsibility for yourself and really looking at what you can do. The other thing to involve them is, you can have a conversation with them. If you’ve ever noticed, asking somebody to stop a certain behavior really doesn’t work because a lot of times people aren’t really aware of their behaviors all the time, especially something they’ve been doing their whole life, and so you can bring it up and say, “When you do A, I have the reaction of B. I know I can’t ask you to stop, but I’m sharing this with you so that you’re aware of it, so that if you see me reacting or I seem intense or anxious or on edge, you’re going to know that’s what’s happening for me.”
Tracy Crossley: You can share this, you can communicate, and it should go both ways.
Kirill Eremenko: Yeah. I love what you said, and that’s one of the biggest things that I’ve learned from you in our time together, that you are responsible for your own feelings. The whole phrase that, “You are making me feel like this and that because of your actions. I feel bad, I feel terrible because of you.” That phrase doesn’t have any sense to it because feelings… The way I see it is feelings come, they can come up in our bodies. You might feel fear or hatred or you might feel curiosity, you might feel joy, whatever else, in a split second because you’re just triggered by something or something happens around you, and that’s just the nature of things.
Kirill Eremenko: Do you wallow in it? Do you let it fester? If it’s fear, do you hold onto that fear? If it’s hatred, do you harbor that hatred? If it’s joy, do you prolong that joy? Or, do you let it go? Somebody once to gave me this example of, it’s like if you throw a pebble into water and you see the ripples, that’s what a feelings should be like, the ripples should appear and then they should go away, you should let go of them, whereas sometimes people choose to hold on to feelings. And I’ve been there, I’ve torn through feelings for a day, a week or like a few hours or longer, and like negative feelings because, there’s many reasons that maybe gives you significance, that brings attention to you, that makes you feel important, and other reasons like that.
Kirill Eremenko: So that’s probably a great first step, that if something… And I’m not a psychologist, I’m just trying to summarize what I’ve learned from you and what we’re discussing here, is that if somebody is triggering for instance for me, I’ll talk about myself, right now, I’m in lockdown with my girlfriend. And for us, it’s quite different, we’re different personalities. I’m an introvert, she’s an extrovert. So there are triggers between us occasionally. Maybe I will need some time alone, and that might trigger her to think that maybe I don’t want to be with her specifically, whereas I just need time alone.
Kirill Eremenko: Or maybe she’ll want a time together and that might trigger me as if she’s overstepping my boundaries. So whenever I’m triggered, I ask myself the question, “Why am I feeling this?” And then I make sure or I prompt myself to take responsibility for those feelings to definitely not put it on the other person. The other person has nothing to do with what I’m feeling inside my body, it’s my choice.
Kirill Eremenko: Hey everybody, hope you’re enjoying this amazing episode. This is a quick announcement and we’ll get right back to it. We are hiring at SuperDataScience. With the recent pandemic and the Coronavirus, we all know how a lot of people have lost their jobs and their source of income, so hopefully this will be a breath of fresh air for some people out there. We are 100 percent remote team, we all work online, we’re continuing to grow and I just literally just published 10 new positions at SuperDataScience, which might be suitable to you, and even if they’re not suitable to you, check them out.
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Kirill Eremenko: And those are just some of the initial positions that we have available right now, more will come soon. So keep an eye out at Superdatascience.com/careers. Maybe we’ll even post that data scientist position in the near future, but even if none of these are relevant to you specifically, if you know somebody who’s in marketing or in sales or who’s a great general manager, or who’s great at creating amazing products in education and learning experiences, or who’s great at running events or somebody who is amazing at creating animated videos. If you know any of these people, any people with the right talents and skills, please send them this link Superdatascience.com/careers. This could change their life or career, especially in these difficult times. Thank you very much for your help, and let’s get right back to it.
Kirill Eremenko: So I think that’s a very good first step. What else can people do in situations like that?
Tracy Crossley: Well, they want to recognize that if they are blaming their partner, that they are a victim and they have no power, because if you’re ever waiting for somebody else to change or to accommodate your feelings, you are going to feel bad. But, you also may be used to being a victim and it may be something that you use as, I don’t want to say a power tool, but a lot of times when people are feeling sorry for themselves or feeling bad, or in this instance where you have been, I don’t want to say trapped against your will, but in a sense you’re trapped against your will, you tend to go to the patterns of behavior. There’s something called the drama triangle that means you have the victim, you have the rescuer, and you have the persecutor.
Tracy Crossley: And it really does go through our whole society and we don’t realize it’s a relationship dynamic. And so people in a relationship, and this only takes two people, doesn’t mean three just because it’s a triangle, but we tend to switch positions and it’s another point of recognition of, “How do I victimize myself in this relationship and make the other person the persecutor?” And then I expect them to rescue me from my victim position. So we can feel there’s some sense of power in it, but it’s really powerless because it means other people have to do something.
Tracy Crossley: So you never want it, your emotional state, you never want it to be where you’re expecting anybody to do anything for you because that expectation means that you’re always going to have a focus on what the other person isn’t doing for you or doing right or is doing wrong. They’re impacting you in some way where you’ve set yourself up to fail in that way.
Kirill Eremenko: Wow, fantastic. And that’s a great segue to a topic number two, changing yourself in a time of uncertainty while letting your partner be themselves. I find it quite a difficult thing to work on yourself while at the same time not pushing other person to work on themselves while just leaving them alone and focusing on yourself. What are your comments on that? How do you accomplish this growth while letting the other person be themselves?
Tracy Crossley: I think that it’s such a great time because I can use my own life as an example. So how I decided when this went down, when first of all we heard about the COVID-19 and I decided, “Okay, I am not going to handle this in a way that I would have handled it years ago where it would have been heavy and I would have felt victimized myself by it.” I don’t feel victimized really by anything at this point, but I noticed that I made a conscious decision that I was going to use this time to be curious and to grow myself, meaning, how can I do that? Well, here’s a great example of that. When let’s say I see the news and I don’t watch the news, I stopped watching the news many years ago, I don’t like my emotions manipulated by outside sources and so I tend to get my information from let’s say non news places usually.
Tracy Crossley: So if I have a reaction to that. Okay. Any reaction I have to something is an opportunity for growth because if it’s, let’s say a negative reaction and I feel myself, let’s say getting angry or I feel myself getting sad or I feel something that feels like a negative consequence, I can jump into that feeling and be with it and go, “Where does this originate from? Why am I being triggered again in this way? Why is it that this piece of information is doing that?” And then I can look at, “Well, maybe I feel a loss of control. I don’t feel safe. I feel bad because maybe I’m a person who’s doing something wrong or I think I’m doing something wrong.” I look for whatever my reaction is and then I go through that fear because it’s a fear-based reaction, and I go through the fear, the feelings of the fear, and I make a different choice.
Tracy Crossley: And it’s hard to do right off the cuff, but the more you get connected to your own feelings and understand your own reactions, you can actually start changing your reactions, and it allows you to grow as a person. You can have more compassion for yourself, you can have more compassion for the person living with you because now you’re not in a state of reaction. A lot of times we don’t realize it, but let’s say you listen to the news and then you go talk to your significant other and you don’t realize your feelings are all amped up and you’re in a reactionary state, and now you’re bringing something from another place into your relationship and you’re both reacting to it because now you’re probably coming across to your partner in a way, maybe you’re being aggressive or maybe you’re upset or whatever you happen to be, and your partner is going to have a reaction to that.
Tracy Crossley: So it’s really about paying attention to that and understanding that each of you in this situation, both have choices and you want to be able to honor your own choices. And I’m talking about inside of the relationship and your partner to honor their choices. And it’s to be curious, of course, when things happen. So as things happen outside of us, we hear the news, “Oh it’s spreading,” or, “Oh it hasn’t peaked,” or whatever about the virus, we can tend to ride that roller coaster as another example. And so you again want to have the self-awareness and you want to look at, another thing you can look at besides your reaction is your resistance.
Tracy Crossley: So we tend to get into a state of struggle when we don’t like something, every time something happens, “We need to go fight this.” Well, you don’t have to fight yourself, but we tend to fight ourselves by resisting what is happening in reality. So it is a place of accepting what is happening rather than struggling with what’s happening. The more you can accept it, the easier you’re going to be to live with. But acceptance isn’t something you can snap your fingers and go, “Wow, I can accept that this is happening.” It’s a feeling exercise. Again, it’s a state of, “I’m resisting the fact that I’m stuck like this.” And you may struggle with this all day long and it comes out in how you treat your partner. It comes out in how you treat your life.
Tracy Crossley: And instead of doing that, it’s to recognize it, be with the feelings of resistance, and then accept, “This is what’s happening, this right here. I have no control over it and I have to accept it.” And this is all, again, a feeling exercise.
Kirill Eremenko: I was talking to our company coach, the person who coaches our team, and he actually mentioned a very beautiful thing. He said that the word surrender, surrender to an experience, to a situation, the circumstances, that’s I guess as a form of accepting them actually has beautiful meaning when you think about it. It’s just accepting what it is and accepting whatever comes out of it without struggling and resisting it. And yeah, I think that’s a good… it’s on par with what we’re talking about here, so it’s great to hear this from two different sources.
Kirill Eremenko: Now, when you were talking, you mentioned a couple of times that to work with your partner or work with your significant other, about not reacting to the news or to these other things, somebody listening to this podcast might make the conscious decision to follow the advice you’re giving and to actually work on themselves and use this time to understand their emotions, understand what’s triggering them, understand how they can be a better person. How would you recommend for somebody to talk to their partner, to get them on board as well, to convince them or to even bring up the idea to, “Hey, let’s use this time to grow together”? Of course, that person can grow on their own and just leave their significant other to be themselves, but I think it could be great to grow together. How would you suggest bringing up this idea of growing together?
Tracy Crossley: Okay. If you’re coming out of, I don’t want to say left field with this, where you don’t communicate in a manner that let’s say, is positive in your relationship, so you have to back it up a bit and you would need to look at how do I communicate to my partner? Do I communicate in a loving manner? And this is for anybody who really doesn’t communicate or if you’re already communicating from a loving place, then it’s much easier, but it’s really to come from the feeling of love for that person rather than the feeling of they’re going to be the loser in the argument, you’re going to be the winner or there has to be two different sides.
Tracy Crossley: And a lot of times people tend to, in relationships, not really be on the same team. So it’s really establishing that first like, “Hey, I really would love for us to be on the same team as we go through this, be partners in this. What do you think?” It’s always to ask, it’s not to tell. When you tell someone what to do, nobody likes that. I don’t know any person who wants to be told, “This is what we’re going to do.” The other thing you can say besides I’d love to be in partnership doing this and so let’s establish what that looks like. What do you think that should look like? It’s again, asking questions, being curious, being able to listen.
Tracy Crossley: You cannot convince someone again, by telling them and you can’t convince them even if you do ask these questions, what if they don’t handle it that way? What if they really are a ball of worry or they really can’t seem to focus on doing anything productive in terms of connection with you, in terms of growing the relationship or having a common bond. They may be so isolating with their emotions that they’re shut down. And so you still can’t force them, but you can be compassionate. And so these are steps by the way that really do grow you as a person because the more compassionate you can be for yourself and for them, it just makes you feel better. And that’s really all you have control of is making you feel better, but if you feel better, you’re going to treat other people better.
Tracy Crossley: So that’s really all you can do because again, you don’t want to tell the person that you’re with what they’re doing wrong. You don’t want to tell them what you think they need to do to improve or how they should change or what they should be. All you can do is say how you feel and what you would love to see happen between the two of you, but you have to say it also from that place of not forcing that outcome.
Kirill Eremenko: And if they don’t accept it, that’s okay as well, you can always work on yourself.
Tracy Crossley: Exactly. You can never force somebody to change, you can never force them to get on board with you, it doesn’t work.
Kirill Eremenko: Speaking of being on the same team, my girlfriend and I started this interesting practice where every time now, or almost every time we have a meal, we aim not to sit opposite each other because somebody told me about this study that sitting opposite each other at a table, like for instance in negotiations, is the most adversarial type of positioning of two people that you’re going to come up with. It’s better to sit on the corner, so one person sits on one side of the corner, the other person sits another side of corner, but the ultimate best is if you’re sitting both on the same side of the table and you’re looking in the same direction.
Kirill Eremenko: So like before the lock downs, we would go to restaurants, we would specifically look at tables where we could sit near each other, maybe on a couch or just on a bench. And now when we’re having dinner at home because we’re cooking most of the time, we make sure to put the place on the same side of the table, so we’re sitting on the same side. And that promotes the idea that we’re not opposite each other, but that we’re on the same side, we’re on the same team.
Tracy Crossley: I like that. I tend to sit next to my husband. It’s funny you say that because it made me think about when we go out and we’re always sitting next to each other, unless there’s no choice, unless there’s only one chair on one side or one on the other, we usually choose a booth so we can sit next to each other.
Kirill Eremenko: Yeah. And after you do that for a while, it even starts feeling weird to sit opposite each other.
Tracy Crossley: It does. Yeah, I agree with you. That’s an interesting… I’ve never heard of that before, so that’s pretty interesting to me. Makes sense.
Kirill Eremenko: Yeah. All right. Let’s move on to somebody who is single, somebody who is by themselves and they’re isolated. And being an introvert, for instance, in December, I was working on a big project, I was recording a video course like this past December, and I spent the whole month by myself out of choice just because I needed to focus a lot. And I caught up with my brother occasionally, but predominantly, like 95% of the time I was all by myself, and I found it absolutely fine except for by the end of 30 days, I was starting to go a little bit insane. I was starting to talk to myself out loud and even as an introvert, I could feel this is taking a toll.
Kirill Eremenko: I can only imagine how difficult, I probably can’t even imagine how difficult it would be for an extrovert right now, somebody who’s not used to being by themselves to be in isolation for so many days without any social experiences. So how can people who are single and isolated make this time a game changer for them as well?
Tracy Crossley: There’s a few different ways that they can do that, one is to evaluate if they’re happy to begin with. A lot of times because we can get into the program of life where we’re just doing the same thing every day, and then now we’ve had a disruption to that program. And so it’s to really evaluate, “What do I want for myself? This is such a great opportunity, what do I really want for myself?” Maybe you really want a relationship or maybe you are thinking, “Okay, I want to start dating because I haven’t dated in years or months or what have you.” So it’s a great time to go, “Okay, I want to start dating or I want a relationship.” So it’s an opportunity to go, “How can I grow myself today?”
Tracy Crossley: Well, it goes back to what I was saying earlier, you want to look at what resistance do you have to it? What is your fear if you’re single of connecting to someone else right now? Because you can do it virtually. You can also do things from a place of social distancing. I guess it depends on where you live. You could meet, but you could be six feet away, like I saw a guy, actually, I thought this is so cute and some people might think it’s creepy, but he saw this woman on the rooftop, I think it was in New York. and he saw her on the rooftop and he had his drone deliver his phone number to her. And it was creative, but what he did was, they started talking.
Tracy Crossley: And then, I don’t know if it was her first date, I think it was her first date, he sat on his patio and she was on the rooftop and they had their roommates help them by being the waiter or waitress, I guess to their dinner. And then they were on the phone, FaceTiming each other. They could see each other. So it was quite a distance, obviously, but that was being creative, and that was a desire to step out. And this guy had not dated in a long time and he had just seen her and something about what she was doing on the rooftop, she was dancing on the rooftop, I think that’s what it was. Anyways, you want to look for inspiration at the same time.
Tracy Crossley: Use the internet, use your family, use your friends to communicate and be authentic and honest, don’t hide your feelings. Part of what we try to do is we try to sound like we’re feeling better than we are or we can sound like we’re completely out of control, but for most introverts, we’re usually trying to sound better than we are because we usually tend to tamp down our emotions and not connect to them and really stay in our heads and do things, read a book or do whatever. But it’s really about connecting to your emotions and sharing that with another human being because that’s how you establish a bond with people is being vulnerable and being open and honest in that way. And even if you go on a dating app or I guess it would be a dating app at this point, so you go on a dating app, it’s really about connecting in a very vulnerable, authentic way.
Tracy Crossley: And if somebody rejects you, it isn’t any worse than if they reject you and you’re not being vulnerable, when you’re being vulnerable, you can actually recover quicker. A lot of us have that Impostor syndrome, going on where we tend to try and portray ourselves as someone different other than who we are because we think who we really are is going to be rejected, but it’s actually easier to be rejected for being who you are than being a caricature of who you are. So it’s really an opportunity to take down those walls and just be you and understand that, let’s say you do start doing online dating, and it’s like the courtship evolve where you’re just communicating with somebody online and yet you’re establishing some communication and maybe you’re being honest and open, and it feels good. Well, that’s connection.
Kirill Eremenko: That was a beautiful story about how they met through supplying a number through a drone. There’s lots of places where people can connect online, for instance, like virtual events are becoming more and more popular because many events had to cancel their physical events and they had to start virtual events. So that could be one way of meeting people, and they have this like networking component in some cases. And more creative ideas, people are going to start coming up with more creative ideas, things we haven’t seen before because we hadn’t experienced this situation before. And I’m sure even at the time this podcast goes out, which is in a few weeks from now, there’s going to be even more opportunities for people to socialize online.
Kirill Eremenko: So while right now off the top of my head I can’t come up with, apart from virtual events and flying around with drones, if it’s legal of course, I can’t come up with other ideas, I’m sure there’s going to be more. So have a look out on the internet, it’s definitely not the end of the world in the sense of that you can still meet people. Tracy, do you know any other ways people can maintain social life during this time of isolation?
Tracy Crossley: Well, there is. You can definitely get in your car and you could go and be, I don’t want to say six feet apart, but you can go, and I’ve seen people gathering in groups like that where they’re in a neighborhood as an example and everybody’s on their driveway, they’re not near each other. So you could do something like that. I believe hiking as long as you could be, again six feet apart, but I don’t want to, again, depending on where people live, there is different experiences of lock down right now. So that was one way. Getting on the phone and talking on the phone is another way. I would also recommend, again, taking the time though, and this is something that I did a long time ago and that was when I decided that I really wanted to have a real relationship with someone because I was single on and off for a long time, and I decided, “Okay, I want to have a relationship.”
Tracy Crossley: I realized that I had things standing in the way of that, mainly fear. And so I really started to work on my fear and I would challenge myself every day, “What can I do to get out of my comfort zone?” And that’s really what you have to do because a lot of us are in a comfort zone and we don’t realize it, we’re doing the same patterns of behavior and it’s really stepping outside of that that’s uncomfortable. So if you shy away, let’s say from internet dating or you shy away from joining things online, it’s really to step up and do it. There’s a lot of opportunities, like you were saying, and people are having virtual cocktail parties and if you get invited to one, maybe you’ll meet somebody on there or at least you’re going to have some kind of interaction with other people.
Tracy Crossley: And it’s really to keep stepping out of your own comfort zone and get uncomfortable, that’s the key. If you get uncomfortable, you know you’re changing something. If it’s just easy for you to do, you’re not really changing anything. So I look at it that way, that’s what I do. Right now, I’ve made choices not necessarily to do with, because I’m not single, I’m married, but more to do with my work rather than my personal relationship because my personal relationship already have this kind of foundation that I’ve been talking about anyways. And so I’m not having issues with my husband, but when it comes to being a single person and feeling isolated, you have to take the steps to get out of your own way.
Kirill Eremenko: Absolutely. Your mention of cocktail parties reminded me I’ve been meaning to invite… My girlfriend and I would discuss that we want to, invite our friends, actually Vitaly, he’s been on this podcast, Vitale and his wife to a dinner. The only challenge there is that they’re in Australia, we’re in the England right now and the time difference is about like I think nine hours or so or 10 hours. So if we are going to be having dinner, they’re going to be having breakfast, if they’re going to be having breakfast, we’re going to be having dinner. So it’ll be funny. It’ll be funny. Okay, great. Now, moving back to relationships, I think based on your topics, and I would agree with this, is your belief that taking responsibility for yourself can change almost in your relationship. Would you care to elaborate a bit on that? How does taking responsibility for yourself change in your relationship?
Tracy Crossley: That goes back to what I was saying earlier about the Drama Triangle and being a victim, a lot of people go into a relationship expecting the other person take care of their feelings. And the problem with that is nobody at all can take any care of your feelings if you’re not taking care of them to begin with. So it’s almost like going in and saying, “I don’t care about my feelings, but you need to care about my feelings.” And that’s how a lot of people go in and it doesn’t work, it really creates a divide between you and the other person because you have an expectation that’s going to be unfulfilled. Even if, let’s say, in the beginning it seemed like, “Oh my gosh, I was getting all this attention and this person was acting in ways that made me happy.”
Tracy Crossley: That was still a choice back then to look to the other person for your happiness or look to the other person to fulfill the need of your feelings, whatever your feelings were, instead of looking to yourself because again, somebody is going to disappoint you that way. Nobody’s going to be able to keep up the level of attention, and I’m all about when you start dating people to just be your authentic self and don’t go over the top and don’t try to prove or don’t try to chase or don’t try to do these things that are really over and above. It’s really to be yourself so that when you’re in a relationship with someone, there’s never an expectation for you to be someone else.
Tracy Crossley: But, going back to the responsibility part, it’s really about a sense of freedom you get from that because when you realize that you’re responsible for how you feel, you’re responsible for what you do, what you think and what you say, those four things. If you’re responsible for those things, then you get to be in control of yourself, you get to control your own emotional state rather than looking at someone else to control it for you, because that’s what we do a lot of the time, we’re looking at our partner and saying, “Oh, you need to do this for me. You need to do that for me.” We’re setting ourselves up to basically put them in control of us. And that’s really, again, a victim position.
Tracy Crossley: So you want to make sure, what can I take responsibility for? Well, let me stop complaining to my partner that they don’t pay attention to me. Why don’t I pay attention to me? What can I do to give myself attention? What is it I need? And sometimes for a lot of us, especially in a busy world, sometimes it’s just to sit for a few minutes and be still with yourself. Meditation’s great and I’m a big proponent of it, but at the same time, it’s really about what you’re doing to connect to yourself. So the more connected you are to yourself, the better you’re going to feel and the less you’re going to make someone else responsible for your feelings. And then it goes back to also what you communicate, and if you’re truthful and you’re honest about your feelings, it’s all of that.
Tracy Crossley: It’s if you say something to your partner and you take full responsibility for what you say or you do something, you take full responsibility. You don’t go, “Well, you did this, so I did that.” It doesn’t work, because that just creates a dynamic of being on the battlefield with somebody, then you’re not being in partnership. It’s about being that person because what starts to happen is, the other person will feel less pressure, they’re going to feel something’s changed, they’re going to notice they have more freedom. They’re not walking on the egg shells waiting to be criticized, because that’s what we do and we are putting all the responsibility on someone else for how we feel or what we think they should do or what we think they should say.
Tracy Crossley: It’s really about taking it back yourself and you start to feel better, so you’re feeling better because now you’re paying attention to yourself, you’re giving to yourself, whether it’s attention or you’re doing things in a self-care manner or maybe you stop people pleasing, you stop trying to be perfect. We do all these things in relationships because we’re trying to hold onto somebody rather than just being ourselves and letting go of the things that we do that aren’t really us. And then the expectation of course, that you have of someone else, when you let go of your own expectations of yourself, the expectations you have of someone else, they also change. And so the other person can feel that there’s less pressure, that other person can feel better.
Tracy Crossley: And even if you guys still don’t get along in a great way, you’re both still going to feel better because now there’s not that pressure or that hook that you’ve got to do something, you need to make me feel better. It’s not there.
Kirill Eremenko: I really liked what you said about that the other person, if you do your part, if you improve yourself, the other person will definitely feel what’s going on and, well, they feel something’s going on there. And they might even become curious, they might ask you like, “What is going on? How are you working on yourself?” And they might also start working on themselves. So that’s very cool thing. I wanted to ask you your opinion on something. At the start we were talking about the situations where you’re like, things get really tense where people start maybe feeling, “This might not be the right person for me, I want to break up,” and so on. And a lot of it is to do, of course with the current situation that we’re in, but in these emotionally heated situations, it can be very difficult to think rationally and people might say things that they will later regret or that will cause consequences that they actually don’t want, including breaking up and divorce and so on.
Kirill Eremenko: Some idea that we had with my girlfriend is, and I wanted to get your opinion on this, we haven’t discussed this before, so a bit of coaching on the podcast. So the idea we had was, we sat down and we talked, maybe we had a bit of some debate about something, nothing serious to the extent that like, “Oh, we want to break up.” Or, “You’re not the right person for me.” Thank God, but we realized that in these circumstances, things are going to be different. We are going to be exposed to each other more and we’re going to be exposed to each other’s feelings and our own feelings, we are going to work on this, we are committed to work on this, but there’ll be times when we will have arguments and we will have misunderstandings.
Kirill Eremenko: And so when we sat down a few days ago and we agreed that we’re not going to threaten each other to leave the relationship, we’re going to commit to this relationship for the next 60 days, no questions asked, fully and entirely, and work on it as much as we’re going to work on ourselves, discuss things and be brutally honest with each other, but knowing that we’re secure that everything is going to be… We are committed to work, we’re not going to just throw around these phrases that, “Oh, maybe this is not the right thing.” No, we’re going to be committed. And then after 60 days, we’re going to sit down, maybe together, maybe individually and evaluate for ourselves, “How do we feel? Is this something that we truly want? Is this something we want to continue doing?”
Kirill Eremenko: And if indeed the answer is yes for both of us, then we’ll do it again and maybe commit to a longer period of time, depending on the situation in the world, depending on what’s going on, what circumstances we’re in. So we found this safeguard quite useful for us because that way, it removes out additional stress, you’re the fear, that you can’t say absolute brutal honesty because other person might misunderstand you and just explode and leave or whatever else. And yeah, I just wanted to get your opinion, do you think that’s a good practice or you would suggest something else?
Tracy Crossley: Well, it depends on if your brutal honesty is an opinion. So opinions, everybody has them and it comes from your perception. So if you have an opinion about something, that’s your perception. Does it mean it’s right? No. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong? No. It’s your perception. So I think when you are being brutally honest that it’s not about, “You know, you should do this or you should do that.” We tend to tell other people what to do, again, going back to telling people things like that, and that’s not really to me helpful in the long run. It’s better, again, to say what’s going on for you, and maybe that’s how you guys are speaking, I don’t know, but it’s better to say what’s actually happening for you, “I feel this way.” A lot of I statements, “I feel this way. I don’t know why, I’m trying to figure it out.”
Tracy Crossley: And I say things, like if my husband triggers me, I will say, “Okay. I am triggered.” I have the wherewithal to know that. Does it mean that sometimes we won’t have a spat? No, it doesn’t necessarily stop the spat from happening, it can still happen because when you have a lot of intense emotions from let’s say, the current situation we’re under, you can go and be snappy, but is that really truly authentic? Is that really truly being brutally honest? No, that’s expressing, you’re feeling intense, but you’re not really saying, “I feel intense and this is what’s happening.” And a lot of times when we’re in a spat, we’re arguing. And so we don’t really argue very much because we catch ourselves and we go, “Okay. What is going on with me?”
Tracy Crossley: And so again, the brutal honesty can be like, “Okay, I’m going to share something,” because I’m one of those people that I can’t stand to listen to people chew, I can’t handle it, my brain just loses it. So I married a man who’s like the loudest chewer ever, and so I tend to use humor. And he knows, I’ve shared it with him. And I can’t say, “Stop chewing your food.” It’s not like he’s chewing his food and his mouth is open and food is falling out or anything like that, it’s literally, he just chews loudly. So I really can’t ask him to do anything different and nor would I?
Kirill Eremenko: Stop eating food, only liquids.
Tracy Crossley: Those are loud too by the way. And so what I do is, sometimes I’ll make funny faces or whatever because he knows and then he’ll do something funny and we make it funny. And we use a lot of humor in our relationship because it’s not so much that you want to always be digging deep, it’s that you want to be also human. So I think that what you guys are doing, it can be great as long as it’s not critical and as long as the other person isn’t taking it personally and trying to walk on eggshells to accommodate your feelings.
Kirill Eremenko: Great advice. Thank you. Thank you, Tracy. I think we should wrap up here. We are getting to the end and I wanted to, of course, ask you just some questions about like, first of all, do you have any final thoughts, final recommendations for people in this time, maybe something we haven’t covered. What’s something that you could wish to our audience in this difficult time?
Tracy Crossley: I would say the number one thing is to be kind, to be kind to yourself, and if you are around other people, to be kind to them. Everybody may feel like their emotions are hair trigger right now, and so the best thing you can do when you get up in the morning, before you even get out of bed is to check in first of all with your feelings, “How am I feeling?” If you feel fear, just let yourself feel it in your body, get in your physical body, feel the fear, let it run its course, which usually only takes seconds. I rarely have had it last more than a minute because usually you’ll find that once you start connecting to your feelings, you’re able to let go of them and move on to other things.
Tracy Crossley: And the next thing I do, it’s about, what can I do to be kinder myself today? What would be a kind act for me today? And you feel better when you’re doing uplifting activities for yourself even if you’re stuck in the house, you feel better. You feel connected to yourself, you feel good. And I say that that’s the basis of self-care, it is not to do things against yourself. If you get up and let’s say that you’ve been hanging out in your refrigerator this whole time, like, “Okay, I’m going to go and eat the worst foods in the world for me.” And then you’re going to feel even worse. So it’s really be mindful, it’s not to say, you can’t have something that tastes good, but there’s this dealing with your emotions, but not eating your way through your emotions, is an example of being kind to yourself.
Tracy Crossley: It’s to really try to be aware of what you’re doing and what you’re saying and how you’re acting. And you can’t be obviously self-aware 24/7, but the more awareness you can have of your own actions, because you might automatically be sitting on the couch and go, “I’m going to go get something to eat,” and find yourself in the refrigerator. And before you know it, you’re gobbling down, I don’t know, a cold pizza or something. And the point is that, you really want to become aware, “Why am I going to the kitchen? Am I feeling a sense of emptiness? Maybe I can just sit here with myself for a few minutes. Maybe I’m trying to fill up the space and eat my emotions,” instead of be with your emotions. So those are just some things that I would say, but it’s at the basis of being kind or being compassionate with yourself.
Kirill Eremenko: Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you very much for that lovely message. Tracy, where can our listeners find you and interact with your work in case they want to further learn more about themselves and grow further?
Tracy Crossley: They can go to tracycrossley, all one word, .com, and they can go to, there’s Work With Me page. And so there’s different levels of working with me and you can send me a message through there. An easier way to do it, once you’ve been to my website and maybe you’re not sure what you want to do, just send me an email at happiness@tracycrossley.com, and we can set up a short time to have a chat and see how I can best help you.
Kirill Eremenko: Fantastic. So Tracy’s spelled, T-R-A-C-Y, and Crossley has double S, C-R-O-S-S-L-E-Y. And of course, the Tracy Crossley Podcast also have wonderful resource, I love your podcast. How long have you been doing that for?
Tracy Crossley: Five years.
Kirill Eremenko: Five years. Five years of awesome episodes. I just recently went on there, I checked out one of the ones on Feeling Your Feelings, definitely a great resource as well. On that note, Tracy, thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing all these lovely insights, please continue your work. Of course, I’m looking forward to our sessions every weekend, but I mean, continue work on the podcast, is helping thousands of people. Very, very glad that you exist in this world.
Tracy Crossley: Thank you. Thank you so much, Kirill. And thank you for having me on your show. This has really been enjoyable for me.
Kirill Eremenko: So there you have it everybody, thank you so much for being on this episode today, for listening in. And if you did enjoy, if you got some valuable takeaways, please forward this episode to somebody you know. They don’t have to be a data scientist, they don’t have to be in the field of an analytics or machine learning or Python, please send this episode to help them through this difficult time. I’m very grateful to Tracy for coming on this show and sharing her insights and giving us tips on how to cope, not just cope but thrive and become better or stronger, people who are much more in touch with ourselves, how to use this time to our advantage. So I’m very grateful for that, and if you know someone who might be struggling or feeling lonely or maybe not getting along with the people that they’re in isolation with, send them this episode.
Kirill Eremenko: Very easy to share, send them the link, www.superdatascience.com/357. That’s www.superdatascience.com/357. There you will also find all the materials mentioned on this podcast, things like the Drama Triangle, there’s a great article by Lynne Forrest, and a short YouTube video explaining the Karpman’s Drama Triangle, very powerful tool in the world of psychology. Also of course, you’ll find a link to Tracy’s Podcast. You can also just look it up on your podcast app, it’s called The Tracy Crossley Podcast, with double S. And also a link to Tracy’s website where you can sign up for a discovery session if you’d like to take things up further with Tracy. So there we go, that was our podcast for today, make sure to share it with somebody you know who might be needing the support at this time. And I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Untill then, happy analyzing.
