Dr. Becky Kennedy: evaluation

Transcript context

…Awesome. Okay. Okay. So let's get into the first topic lesson. Let's talk about the power of repair, one of your more important and impactful lessons that you teach parents. Explain the toddler, kids version of this and how this is useful in raising kids and then just how this might translate into a corporate environment. Yeah. I think repair is kind of the number one relationship strategy we have. And the thing that keeps us from repairing, which really is the idea of going back to a person after a moment we didn't feel proud of, taking responsibility for our part, maybe acknowledging the impact it had on them and talking about what you would do differently the next time, is actually this very false idea that there's a goal to be perfect. Right? And in our family, we say something, we actually now say it at work, "Perfect is creepy." I just think it encapsulates... You don't even want to be perfect. It's actually very creepy. Only non-humans can ever be perfect. And what defines kind of the human condition is that we want to do well and we mess up over and over again. And one of the things I remember learning in clinical psych grad school was that the thing that really differentiated secure attachment, which is the nature of a relationship you really want to have with your kid is the presence of repair. And I remember the professor continuing to talk and I was kind of stopped in my tracks thinking, "What? Oh, so secure attachment isn't defined by getting it right all the time? Secure attachment is just defined by, we're all going to mess up, but secure attachment has an adult who's willing to repair?" That felt very hopeful to me because it felt like something I could realistically get good at. And over and over, whether it's with your kid, when you say to them, "Hey, sorry I yelled." Some version of, "I had a stressful day at work. That wasn't your fault and I'm working on staying calmer even when I'm upset. " Or we say to someone, I don't know, on our team, "Hey, earlier in the meeting, I totally cut you off. I used a really harsh tone. Honestly, I did disagree with what you're saying, but it's no excuse for me to talk to you the way I did. Stuff was going on before the meeting. I'm sorry. I'm going to work on that." There's just nothing to reestablish trust and connection like repair. And when trust and connection are reestablished, then whether it's your kid or someone at work, they cooperate better, you don't get into conversations that are kind of run on conversations that are really an act of defensiveness and you can just get a lot more done. There's kind of an associated concept you talk about, which is around connecting before correcting, which reminds me of radical candor a little bit of just this idea of challenge directly but care deeply. Talk a bit about this concept of connecting before correcting.…

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