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Welcome to The Empowered Relationship Podcast, helping you turn relationship challenges into opportunities and setting you up for relationship success. Your host, Dr. Jessica Higgins, is a licensed psychologist and relationship coach who shares valuable tips, tools and resources for you to dramatically improve your relationship.

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Hi, thank you for joining today’s podcast episode. Today’s episode is 230, “How to resolve conflicts that result from mental blind spots, an interview with Dr. Gleb Tsipursky.”

Before we get started in today’s conversation, I just wanna invite you to just take a moment and center into an intention for listening to today’s conversation.

Now, today’s conversation is a little bit more intellectual, academic, but I think  the concepts in the substance really do support the intention of the Empowered Relationship Podcast, and that is that the conversations that happen here are intended to support you in feeling better-equipped in navigating the terrain of long-lasting intimacy. Along the journey, as we talk about on this show, we often are confronted with challenges, or perhaps get a chance to see our tendencies, or perhaps ways that we show up that might relate to previous pain, or coping strategies, and that really everything that’s brought up is curriculum for our developing. And as we develop ourselves individually, we also grow the capacity to meet another. And as we grow our capacity in being able to meet another, we increase the intimacy, and we grow the relationship, co-creating.

As I am speaking to the intention of the Empowered Relationship Podcast, I also want to acknowledge you in this moment… Perhaps you just wanna take a moment and just touch in, perhaps noticing your heart, or where you are internally, what you feel in your body or your nervous system as it relates to relationship. If  you’re holding  a question or you’re just sitting with some discomfort, or just pondering possibility – I just wanna acknowledge that.

Thank you for tuning in, and if you would like access to the show notes for today’s episode, or perhaps other resources – book recommendations, getting support in the way of a course, if you’d like to self-study and want curriculum and guidance and exercises to really deepen in your practice, you can find these resources on DrJessicaHiggins.com. If you’re interested in today’s show notes, you can visit the podcast page, which you can find in the top navigation bar, and there you’ll find all of the episodes. again, today’s episode is 230, “How to resolve conflicts that result from mental blind spots, an interview with Dr. Gleb Tsipursky.”

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is an internationally-recognized thought leader known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, who is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases, which devastate bottom lines and bring down high-flying careers. His expertise and passion is developing the most effective and profitable decision-making strategies to empower leaders to avoid business disasters, maximize their bottom lines, and help their careers flourish. His proprietary methodology combines his pragmatic business experience with cutting-edge business economics and cognitive neuroscience research.

Today he’s gonna be talking about relationship and how these cognitive biases interfere with our ability to communicate and resolve conflict effectively.

I wanna comment that Gleb talks a lot about the gut, and you’ll hear in the interview he’s referring to the auto-pilot system versus the intentional system. And so when he speaks to the gut or the heart, he’s referring to this auto-pilot and these tendencies… So I just want you to hold loosely his terminology around the gut or the heart, because if you use those terms as a guiding principle for you to indicate authenticity or resonance, or your inner intelligence system, which I know a lot of people do, and I do in my own way, that he’s referring to this reactionary, this auto-pilot, that we don’t evaluate or we’re not understanding the ties to where that information comes from, and that we’re really seeking more of that conscious, intentional system that he’s referring to. So I just wanna highlight that.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Gleb, thank you so much for joining the show today.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Thank you so much for inviting me, Jessica. I appreciate it.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yes, and I think that you have so much to offer on the topic of cognitive blind spots and cognitive biases and our bias. How did you start getting involved in this topic?

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Well, actually it began in my childhood, because you know, there’s so many people who tell you to go with your gut, trust your heart, follow your intuitions… And that’s what the vast majority of us do; we don’t realize how many blind spots we have that cause our intuition to go in the wrong direction. Well, my parents were in that camp, as are the large majority of people out there… So they told me to go with my heart, trust my gut, and so on… But as I was seeing them behave toward each other, I saw that them trusting their gut actually led to some pretty bad decision-making in the relationship; they had a lot of conflicts, because unfortunately, their gut often disagreed with each other.

For example, my mom liked to buy nice clothing, she liked to buy nice things, so she’d go out, she’d buy a $100 sweater. Well, my dad was kind of a cheapskate, so when she came home, he’d yell at her. “No sweater should cost over $20!” And then they’d go into a conflict. My mom would bring things up, my dad would bring things up, and they’d go at it… And as a kid, that was hurting me, that was painful for me, to see my parents have that sort of conflict… But it was just as bad to see that it wasn’t changing their behavior; it wasn’t changing my mom’s behavior, it wasn’t changing my dad’s behavior. They just kept having the same sorts of conflicts.

So that was one type of conflict… But the worst time was when my dad made a really bad decision. He was a real estate agent, so he worked based on commissions; he had a variable salary – more one year, less another year. There was about a six-month period where he got lucky. He made a lot of money, but he hid the money from my mom. Told her he made very little money; he probably didn’t want her to spend on clothing… And then he used that money to buy a small apartment and lease it up to some folks.

Well, in a couple of years my mom found out about the apartment and his kind of side-business, and she got very mad. She was so angry, she was pissed; there were broken dishes, it was really a huge, big blowout fight. And so she kicked him out, and he had to live in that apartment that he rented out to those folks for a while, until they reconciled eventually in a few months… But in that period, I saw my dad very rarely, and it was really painful for me to have that experience. It left an indelible impression on me that going with your gut, trusting your heart is just a route to relationship disasters. And of course, given that about 40% of all marriages end in divorces in this country, we can see that trusting your heart and following your gut on relationship decisions is a pretty bad idea that people have.

So that led me into an interest in exploring how we make our decisions, why do we make so many decision mistakes. And I began to talk about this topic, learn this topic, study this topic, and that’s when I became a trainer, consultant and coach. I’ve been doing training consulting and coaching for over 20 years for leaders and so on, on how to make good decisions in relationships and in communication and in other areas.

Unfortunately, there’s very little quality material out there on how to make good decision and address cognitive biases and mental blind spots in the popular literature, so I had to go into Academia. I became a cognitive neuroscientist, so studying how the brain works, the parts of our brain, how they work and how they influence our decision-making… And behavioral economics – how we behave specifically in economic situations. My interest originally sprang from economic bad decision-making by my parents, so I was really interested in economic questions.

So I spent 15 years in Academia, researching these topics, publishing… I spent seven years as a professor at Ohio State, I published in prominent peer-reviewed journals like Behavioral and Social Issues, The Journal of Social and Political Psychology… And I spent 15 years doing that before going full-time privately as the CEO of a boutique consulting, coaching and training firm Disaster Avoidance Experts, which focuses on these issues.

So that’s my background, and that’s what my new book is about, The Blind Spots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships in Both Personal and Professional Lives.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: I love how passionate you are about helping people perhaps start to examine their decision-making and what informs that. It sounds like you specify the gut, and go with your heart, and honestly, when I was reading your book, you’re talking about the fight, flight or freeze response, and on the show I think I talk a lot about too learned coping strategies, or even defense mechanisms, or impulses, or perhaps seeking pleasure or avoiding pain… And that these are all impacting and influencing our decision-making.

How did you identify — is that the language that people typically use, in your research around gut and heart, as far as information that they’re  making decisions off of?

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Yes, that’s pretty typical for decision-making research. When you look at decision-making research — I mean, there’s more formal terminology. The most formal terminology that’s used about this is System One and System Two, or as I prefer to call them, the auto-pilot system and the intentional system.

The auto-pilot system – what we know now about how the brain works is the old model of the Id, the ego, the superego – but that’s not really relevant; that’s not how the brain works. We have approximately two, roughly speaking, thinking systems, information processing systems in our brain. One is called the auto-pilot system, and that is the system that’s the lizard brain, that’s associated with the amygdala. That’s the older part of our brain. And that’s really what we’re wired for. We’re not wired for the modern environment. Our emotions, our intuitions, our gut reactions come from that part of the brain, and they’re wired for the savannah environment. We lived in small tribes of 15 to 150 people, so we’re wired to be very tribal, and that causes a lot of problems in our relationships, and we can talk about that.

We’re also wired to have, as you mentioned, a strong fight, freeze or flight response, and that is also a big problem. Now, in the savannah environment that was great. You might have also heard of it as the saber tooth tiger response, when we have to jump and flee at 100 shadows in order to get away from that one saber tooth tiger. We’re all the descendants of those who were a little bit faster than the guy or girl next to us in getting away from the saber tooth tiger, right? So it’s a very strong response right now, and that determines  a lot of our decision-making in response to perceived threats.

Of course, in the modern environment we have many less saber tooth tigers. That’s not the major kind of threat that we face, but we still make decisions in our relationships and in other life areas based on the fight, flight or freeze response. That’s obviously a big problem. So that’s kind of system one, the auto-pilot system.

Now, the intentional system is the more logical, rational system. Unlike the super-ego, the old Freudian model, what we know is that the rational, logical, abstract reasoning system – that’s not the black and white thinking, that’s the auto-pilot system; the intentional system can actually interact with the auto-pilot system. It can influence it. We can influence our emotions, we can influence how we feel, if we train ourselves to do so. We can catch ourselves when we are falling into these cognitive biases. Cognitive biases are the specific dangerous judgments that — what I’m talking about when I talk about mental blind spots, the scholarly language for this is cognitive biases. These are the specific dangerous judgment errors we make because of how our brain is wired; due to a combination of our revolutionary heritage and just the structure of our brain, these are the specific dangerous judgment errors.

And the intentional system can be trained to notice when we’re falling into these dangerous judgment errors, and it can be trained to address them, if people put a modicum/little bit of effort into doing so. I talk about that in the book, and the kind of strategies that you need to do so.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Thank you for that context to help people understand some more of where you’re coming from. So for someone who’s listening and maybe isn’t really familiar with cognitive biases or blind spots, and they’re perhaps just kind of trying to connect with what you were referring to, can you give a little more example of what you mean by that?

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Of course, I’m happy to. Let’s talk about cognitive biases and what that means. A cognitive bias is a specific scholarly language, and it’s kind of dry, abstract; mental blind spots, dangerous judgment errors are more colloquial ways of expressing the same thing. So it’s not and. These are the same things – cognitive bias, mental blind spots, dangerous judgment errors… It’s just a more expressive way, colloquial way of saying this.

Cognitive biases – we have over 100 of these cognitive biases, and they’re pretty dangerous. They cause us to suffer a lot of relationship disasters, whether resulting in terms of communication – we have misconceptions, misunderstandings, mistakes that really result  in severed, broken relationships with romantic partners, friends, family, work colleagues… And they even undermine our society as a whole. So there are many of these problems.

I’ll talk about one example of a relationship issue, just to see the kind of examples that happen due to cognitive biases. This is called the illusion of transparency. One of the biggest problems with our effective communication is the illusion of transparency. Now, the illusion of transparency refers to the fact that when we communicate, we feel. And our feelings are not necessarily integral of the truth, just to be very clear. We feel that we are 100% effective in our communication. When I say something, I think I’m 100% conveying what I’m saying and what I’m meaning to the communicator. That’s how it feels; it feels right. That’s what you feel. We feel ourselves to be effective communicators, we feel that other people are getting our message. That’s the intuitive feeling. Unfortunately, that’s not the case at all. What we are saying, what we are communicating to others – they are only getting a twisted version of it; they’re not getting the 100% message, believe me.

First of all, the meanings of words that we employ, and the gestures, the body language, the tone – these all matter a lot. Some things that we think mean one thing to us may mean very different things to others. And that refers to words, that refers to tone of voice, that refers to body language… Some things don’t really translate well from one person to another, even in the same culture, even in the same family. So that is one element of the dynamic where there’s a disconnect.

Another element of the disconnect comes from the fact that other people — it’s not simply the meaning, the neutral abstract meaning of various terms, body languages, tone of voice, but also their perceptions, their filters, how they perceive the world. There’s so many ways that we misperceive what other people are communicating, misperceive information around us.

Let me share a story so that you can see how it works in a romantic relationship. The story is of two casual acquaintances of mine. They went on a date together… They’re named George and Mary. The actual names are different. So they went out on a date, and George thought it was a great date. He thought that Mary was very understanding, very interested, great listener… And he told Mary all about himself. He felt that Mary truly got him, she cared about him. And they  parted for the night, they agreed for another date soon, so that was really great for George.

So George texted Mary the next day to arrange their date, but Mary didn’t text back. George waited for a bit, then sent Mary a Facebook message, I think on the next day. Then George noticed that Mary saw the message, but she didn’t reply. You can see that on Facebook. He sent her an email, but Mary really didn’t respond again… So he got really frustrated and he eventually gave  up trying to contact her. He thought that “What a disappointment.” Just like so many other women that he dated, he couldn’t believe that he was so wrong about  her.

Well, why didn’t Mary write back? She had apparently a different experience than George on that date. She’s polite and shy and introverted, and she really felt overwhelmed from the start with George. He’s pretty extroverted, he’s pretty energetic. As she listened to him talk about his parents, his job, his friends, she realized he didn’t ask her anything about himself, and she thought “Why would I date someone who overwhelms me like that? Who doesn’t ask about me, who’s just all about himself…” So she was polite, she listened to George, didn’t want to hurt his feelings; they had a number of mutual acquaintances, including myself… And then she told George she’d go out with him, but actually had no intention of doing so.

So I learned about these really different viewpoints of Mary and George. Like I said, I knew both of them as casual acquaintances… And George, what I knew from George – he started babbling around about how Mary was so mean to him, and how she was bad; how he was genuinely sharing, Mary did wonderful listening, but somewhat happened.

So I decided to talk to Mary about what happened from her perspective, and she told me that she kept sending non-verbal signals of her lack of interest, but George failed to catch the signals. She was kind of turning away, casting her eyes down, playing with her phone a bit… Mary perceived him as over-sharing, and herself as behaving politely, until she could leave. She didn’t want to be overtly more overt than that

Now, you might say that’s problematic from both sides – for Mary to avoid responding to George’s messages… And I’m not saying I condone Mary, but there’s definitely many people out there like Mary, who are shy, polite, introverted, who don’t want to offend, and they have the flight response from these sorts of situations – freeze, flight. Whereas George – there are so many Georges out there who are tone-deaf, who are not noticing the signals that people are sending, who are missing out very important cues that determine the success of their relationships. So of course, this date fiasco – it cost both George and Mary.

George had a very unpleasant experience, and then he lost some social capital among his friends by babbling around [unintelligible 00:20:55.15] and Mary of course lost out, because George was bad-mouthing her, and of course, she had a  bad experience in the restaurant. Both of them should have behaved differently, and we can talk about how they should have behaved differently.

But the illusion of transparency was a big problem with both of them. They were not understanding. George wasn’t getting the signals, and he wasn’t understanding that Mary was not engaging with him, and Mary was not understanding that the signals that she was conveying weren’t getting across to George. She thought that he was being rude and obnoxious, whereas he just was being a little bit thoughtless and not as attentive as he really should have been.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: And one way that I’m even imagining this for couples that have been together, or perhaps are married – I think a few weeks ago I released a podcast on stonewalling, with John Gottman’s research… 85% of the people who stonewall are men, and often the case is that they’re flooded. They are in that kind of over-aroused, reactive state, and they’re trying to contain and regulate, or perhaps having a hard time doing that. So I wonder if that would be another example of this illusion of transparency, in that there’s that mis-attunement, where if we’re talking about a heterosexual relationship, and the wife in this case would be pursuing her husband, and he’s shutting down and not responding, she’s interpreting that as “He doesn’t care” or “He’s not interested, and rejecting her”, when in fact he’s like “I don’t wanna make this worse. I don’t know what to do”, and that type of thing. Would that be another example?

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Yes, and this is a great example. Thank you for bringing it  up. The problem here with the situation is the misunderstanding of communication. The wife is pursuing the husband, trying to get him to talk about the situation. The husband is not wanting to talk… And the thing is, it’s both emotional — what they’re not understanding is that there… Emotions, by the way, just to step back a little bit, to be clear – they drive about 80%-90% of our decision-making. It’s very important to understand that. They drive us overwhelmingly. The autopilot system is much stronger than the intentional system. Much, much stronger.

We can notice and steer our auto-pilot system, but it’s hard to don, and you need to learn how to do it; you need to know the techniques of steering your emotions in the right direction; you need to have strong emotional intelligence, and that’s what emotional intelligence is about – emotional awareness of yourself, and being able to manage yourself. So self-awareness and self-management. And there’s the separate social intelligence, which is awareness of others and being able to influence them, which is clearly – in the stonewalling case, neither the husband, nor the wife have strong emotional intelligence or social intelligence. So they’re probably not aware of how they’re being driven by their emotions, and they’re not aware of how to influence the other person effectively. Politicians may have low emotional intelligence, but they have pretty strong social intelligence, and we can talk about that.

So what happens with the husband and wife is that the wife is really driven by her anxiety. She’s anxious about the relationship, she’s worried about what’s happening. She’s not sure what’s going on, so she’s trying to connect, she’s trying to get the husband to talk, to connect, to build up that relationship and engage with her. But the husband is scared, and also anxious – and this is really important to understand – driven  by anxiety. And the husband’s response is the fleeing response, fleeing from a situation with which he’s uncomfortable. Men overwhelmingly want to control a situation, and if they can’t control a situation, there’s  a drive to withdraw, to step back, to not deal with a situation that they can’t control, that overwhelms them… And that is something that happens with a lot of men – they fall into this illusion of transparency. The other thinks that they fall into is called the omission bias where they feel that by not acting — they feel that acting is worse than not acting, and they don’t realize that sometimes not acting, omitting an action is worse than acting. That the lack of engagement, the signals that they’re sending – they’re shutting out the wife, and it’s really damaging and harmful for their relationship. And the wife is not understanding that pursuing the husband is really damaging and harmful to their relationship as well, because the husband is feeling increasingly overwhelmed, and increasingly withdrawing.

This is a bad situation for both of them. This is definitely a situation where both need to step back. Ideally, they’d get some relationship counseling, but in both cases what is especially important for the wife, who is the more active participant here, is to create a context of safety for the husband. And the husband is not feeling safe, so the wife, who has the energy to take the initiative, needs to create that context of safety for the husband in order for the husband to feel less anxious, and be more ready to engage.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yes, and I love what you’re saying. I think it really reinforces some of the other research around attachment, and that sense of safety… But since you’re such an expert in the cognitive biases, I wanna get from your perspective what are some of the things that you recommend when perhaps people aren’t even aware that they’re operating in this automatic pilot system, or they perhaps  have these cognitive biases operating?

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: The first thing to do is to definitely learn about cognitive biases in the first place. If you don’t know about them, of course you can’t do anything about them. So if yo want to address cognitive biases within you — and by the way, to be clear, all of us have cognitive biases. I have cognitive biases, everyone has cognitive biases, just due to who we are as human beings. So if you don’t think you have cognitive biases, you’re suffering from what’s called the bias blind spot, which is one of the cognitive biases. It’s where we think we’re perfect and we think we don’t have cognitive biases, and we have nothing to worry about. That is the formal term of this cognitive bias. A lot of people fall into it who are really a  little bit too confident about their abilities.

I’ve been studying this for over 20 years and I can tell you that I still suffer from these problems and I still need to deal with them, and I still need to employ techniques to deal with these issues… So just being very clear.

Now, what you want to do if you want to address these cognitive biases is learn which of these are the most powerful for you, because you definitely have some of them. You need to know which of them are the most powerful for you.

For me, one of the most powerful is called the optimism bias. Now, the optimism bias is something that a lot of people in leadership positions and in influence positions – I do a lot of consulting, coaching and training, but people who are those sorts of folks, they often feel too optimistic about life. They feel that their life is full of opportunities, they ignore threats, they are risk-blind… I’m risk-blind. I tend to wake up in the morning and have 20 ideas before breakfast, and I think they’re all brilliant. [laughs]

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Right. Well, and when I was reading your book too, I resonated with the over-estimating one’s resources. I was like “Oh, I do do that…” [laughs]

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Yes, exactly. Exactly. So you overestimate one’s resources; in personal life, when you’re planning a vacation, you think everything will go great, and you can visit five cities in one day, and you’ll be ready to go the next day to five more cities, right? [laughs] That’s the kind of experience you have. Or when you’re doing home renovations. And that of course is pretty bad and dangerous and harmful, as I’ve learned to my bitter experience to have that excessive optimism about myself, about others, about life… And that is something that has harmed me in my relationships, of course, in a number of ways, because I have too high expectations of other people – that’s one – as well as myself, and that’s harmful. It led me personally in my own life to burn out on a couple of occasions when I overworked… But with other people I have too high expectations, that they did not meet my expectations, which were too high… So I shouldn’t have had those expectations in the first place. I was to blame… So that was not great. But the really important thing I discovered was with my wife.

So my wife – she suffers from the opposite bias, which is called the pessimism bias. She looks at life, I look at life, and I think the grass is greener on the other side of the hill, even though it’s too often yellow. And she looks at life, and she thinks the grass is yellow on the other side of the hill, where it’s sometimes green. So she’s very risk-avoidant, and she sees the world as more of a frightening place than a place of opportunities. So I had to learn how to collaborate with her effectively.

Now, if I have 20 ideas before breakfast and the intuitive thing is for me to share about these ideas, and the intuitive thing for her is to shoot them all down. That’s not great for  a relationship, right? So that’s something we really had to work on. And what I’ve found is a much better way of addressing relationship problems, and actually broadened my consulting and coaching work, is that I don’t share these as brilliant ideas. I just share these and say “Hey, honey, here are some ideas I had. What do you think of them? Let’s talk about them, and see how they can be improved.”

So from this perspective, it’s kind of the framing of the issue. I’m not saying “Here are my brilliant ideas”, because when I say that, what she feels is a lot of anxiety. That’s what she feels. She feels threatened, she feels anxious. She feels worried about these ideas, because she sees that all of them are flawed, in some way or another. But if I say that “Hey, here are some ideas I had. Can we talk about improving them?”, then the framing is not like “Oh, these are dangerous ideas.” The framing is “Well, okay, these are all half-baked ideas”, she tells me, “…but let’s work on them and see how we can improve them. Maybe these three are worth retaining and working on. She’s like “Okay, these are the three least worst ideas.”

That’s a really interesting framing, because I see them as the best ideas, and that shows you the difference of perspective and the powerful cognitive biases that they [unintelligible 00:31:12.08] It’s not a terrible thing to be a pessimist or an optimist. People have too bad opinions of optimists and pessimists. Pessimists have really value to add when they improve ideas. She’s great at improving, but she’s terrible at generating new ideas, because she sees the exaggerated flaws of each idea. But she’s great at improving ideas; taking an idea and improving it and addressing a lot of problems that have to do with that idea. That’s a big strength of hers.

So we ended up collaborating really well. She actually works with me now on the company that I run, Disaster Avoidance Experts, and the only way we could learn to collaborate together is that we have this effective relationship where I give her my supposedly brilliant ideas, and she discards most of them. She says “These few are worth implementing”, and then works on implementing them. That’s her strength.

So you need to discover. These are just two examples of cognitive biases, and you need to discover which of them are the most powerful for you. I of course have others as well, which I can talk about, but we have limited time.

So you need to discover which of them are powerful for you, and then there are a number of techniques in the book that I describe, that you can use to address each cognitive bias. I just gave an example of how with my wife I use the technique of getting an external perspective. An external perspective is one of 12 techniques that has been shown by extensive research to be effective at debiasing. Debiasing is the practice, the science of addressing cognitive biases, and there are a number of techniques to do that. Again, getting an external perspective – very effective technique when you know where to apply it, to which cognitive bias. For some cognitive biases it’s less relevant, but for most of them  it would have at least some effectiveness, and you need to know how to do it effectively.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: I love that. And you do give a lot of examples in your book around how to identify maybe your more prominent tendencies, and then how to work with that. Is that correct?

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Absolutely. The book talks about a lot of examples of these cognitive biases, just like the stories I shared of George, and Mary, and my wife and myself, and many other people, where you want to know and learn about what are cognitive biases and how do you actually address them effectively. Now, one of the most powerful stories is of my friend Jeff. Jeff is actually a close, dear friend, so this is his full name. I actually wrote about this publicly, so I’m happy to share this story…  He talked about how there was a cognitive bias that he discovered which caused him to actually decide to marry his long-time girlfriend. He discovered that he was suffering from what’s called reactance. Reactance is one of the pretty common cognitive biases among people, where they are pushing back against external forces that they perceive as trying to impose on their autonomy. And sometimes, pushing back against these forces is good, and sometimes it’s bad, but they always push back; they don’t realize that sometimes it’s bad to push back.

So he was always reactant to social pressure that he felt to marry his long-time girlfriend. And his long-time girlfriend would have welcomed the wedding, welcomed marriage, but she knew that he was pretty reactant to this, and he had a negative response to suggestions that they get married. But once a number of social dynamic upheavals took place in our society in 2016, with the presidential election and the dynamics that’s happened afterward, he really took a hard look at his life, and he realized that he needed to make some changes in order to align himself with having the kind of life that he envisioned for himself, and the kind of community that he envisioned for himself, and he realized that he needed to get rid of what he saw as this really – in some ways – teenage phase of his life. You know, “Hey mom, I won’t do what you tell me to do. Hey, dad…”

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Right…

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: So that was his attitude, and that well describes the reactant attitude. And I’m in no way making light of it, but it’s his authentic story, which he really talks about in the book. And this reactance, he realized, was inhibiting him from a number of important areas in his life and his relationships, the most important one being his marriage. And that was actually a result of a number of conversations he and I had about this topic, heart to heart, and he eventually invited me to be the best man for his wedding. So that was very special, and that was really something that I feel very good about; addressing that cognitive bias for  him resulted in him eventually getting married, and that was great.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: I love that you have so many stories around what examining perhaps the influences or the reactivity or the cognitive biases and how that limits us or keeps us in this limited space, and we’re on that automatic pilot, and what can happen if we are examining our beliefs and examining our processes and how we make decisions, and really being that much more intentional and aware and conscious.

So I love what you’re up to, and I feel like there’s so much more we could talk about, but I wanna also give space for how people can get in touch with what you’re doing. It sounds like the book — I’ll make sure to have the link on today’s show notes, and… Yeah, can you speak more about how you want people to get in touch with you?

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Of course. So the book, The Blind Spots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships is  a great way to get to know about my work. It’s available in bookstores everywhere, if they’re open around you… But don’t go there if they are not the safest place right now. You can always go online – Amazon, Barnes & Noble… It’s published by New Harbinger, which is the biggest publisher of psychology books out there. So it’s available in pretty much all bookstores. They’ll get you a copy if you go on their website as well.

Now, my own work is on DisasterAvoidanceExperts.com So if you want to avoid disasters in your relationship, make sure to go to DisasterAvoidanceExperts.com. There is blogs, videos, podcasts, decision aids, guides, manuals, virtual coaching, consulting, training classes of various sorts. You’ll want to especially check out DisasterAvoidanceExperts.com/subscribe for a free eight-video based modules on how to make the wisest decisions in relationships and in other areas. Again, DisasterAvoidanceExperts.com/subscribe for that free class, eight video-based modules, and there’s an assessment on dangerous judgment errors there, which you can take to assess their influence on you. That’s part of the class.

And finally, I’m really available on LinkedIn, so that’s my favorite platform. If you have any questions about anything you’ve heard in this podcast, connect with me there – Dr. Gleb Tsipursky on LinkedIn.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Wonderful. I’ll make sure to have those links on today’s show notes. Gleb, thank you so much for what you’re doing in the world, and also sharing your wisdom and time with us today on the show.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Thank you so much for inviting me, Jessica.

I hope you have enjoyed today’s interview. Again, “How to resolve conflicts that result from mental blind spots, an interview with Dr. Gleb Tsipursky.” If you would like access to today’s show notes, with the links mentioned, you can visit DrJessicaHiggins.com, click on Podcast in the top navigation bar, and there you’ll find all the episodes. Again, today’s episode is 230.

Thank you for listening, and until next time, I hope you take great care.

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