The Science Of Speaking Up For Yourself | Elaine Lin Hering

Hearing a voice can change everything. So AT and T wants everyone to gift their voice to loved ones this holiday season because that conversation is a chance to say something they'll hear forever. AT and T, connecting changes everything. This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey. Hey. How we doing? This will likely come as no surprise to anybody who's ever listened to this show. But one thing I really do not struggle with is using my voice. In fact, I've been told on more than one occasion that I use my voice way too much, that I should sometimes just shut the fuck up. However, I am well aware that this is not the case for many, many people, including for my wife, doctor Bianca Harris, who's gonna join me today as a co host for this interview. Our guest is Elaine Lynn Herring, who's a former lecturer at Harvard Law School and who now works with, both companies and individuals to build communication skills to help people handle both conflict and collaboration, which, brief aside, I have to say, is an incredibly important thing to teach. These basic communication skills are vastly undervalued in my opinion. Anyway, Elaine has written a book. It's called Unlearning Silence and it's about how and when to speak up as well as how to stop silencing other people, which had been a problem for me. Honestly, I'm not proud to admit that, but that is true. In this conversation, we talk about how and why many of us learn to self silence and self edit, often at a very early age. What the health consequences can be from self silencing. How we often miscalculate the costs and benefits of speaking up. In other words, it will often go better than you fear it might. We talk about Elaine's four steps for how you can learn to use your voice times when it actually makes sense to stay silent, and how we can unintentionally silence other people, even people we love. In fact, Bianca and I talk about our own experiences with this very dynamic in our own marriage. Before we dive in, I wanna do a quick plug here for the new 10% app. So cool to be able to say those words. The app has just gone live. We will be doing a free New Year's meditation challenge in early January, seven days, with Joseph Goldstein, the great meditation teacher. He has cooked up something incredibly cool for you. It's a kind of master class, an extraordinary and accessible on ramp to Buddhist meditation. This seven day course that he's crafted is good for beginners. It's also good for experienced meditators. I was in the room meditating right alongside him as he recorded these sessions, And I've been hanging out with him for years, and I still got a ton out of these meditations. In fact, I'm gonna be doing them again right alongside you from January …