[00:00:00] Christine Ko: Welcome back to SEE HEAR FEEL. Today, I have the great pleasure of speaking with Dr. Susan Ko. Susan Ko earned her Doctor of Philosophy and Master of Arts degrees in Clinical Psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Boston, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from Brown University. Over the past 20 years, a constant has been her direct work with patients in her role as a clinical psychologist. While that was always ongoing, she has worn many hats: VP of people, executive coach, managing director, subject matter expert in areas including organizational development and culture, leadership development, performance management, training and education, recruitment and onboarding, assessment, product development, marketing, implementation, and dissemination. That's a lot of words, right? The consistent thread that ties all this together is her desire to hear people's stories and find a way to help them address their questions, challenges, and pain by listening, hearing, and identifying tools and resources. So with all that, most importantly, Dr. Susan Ko is my sister.
[00:01:03] Welcome to Susan.
[00:01:04] Susan Ko: Thank you. Very happy to be here with you today.
[00:01:06] Christine Ko: My sister has had a huge influence on me my entire life, but as I just read off in her biography, she majored in Psychology in college and also has an upper level degree in Psychology as well. She has always been someone that I could talk to about various concepts like emotional intelligence or the growth mindset. She's actually the first person who introduced me to the growth mindset by sending me Dr. Carol Dweck's book. So I thought my first question could be, what do some of these concepts like emotional intelligence or the growth mindset mean to you?
[00:01:44] Susan Ko: So as you said, I've been practicing psychology for quite a long time and seen lots of patients and clients over the course of my career. A consistent theme that comes up in relationships is emotional intelligence, so the extent to which you can understand your own emotions, your impact on other people's emotions. Being able to read the room, read other people's emotions, is critical in how you act, what you perceive, what you think you perceive. So much of communication is misperception, unfortunately.
[00:02:16] Christine Ko: Emotional intelligence has become something that is really important to me now, maybe for the last six to eight years, but I have to admit that I had no idea what emotional intelligence was, and I really think that growing up I had like a zero in emotional intelligence.
[00:02:35] Susan Ko: We grew up in a culture not heavily focused on emotional intelligence, stereotypically. A lot of Asian cultures, including Korean culture, there are a lot of behavioral norms and expectations in terms of how you act in a relationship. You even see it in the language, right? There's an honorific. There's a way in which you're supposed to speak to your elders. So there's a lot of dictates for how you're supposed to be that's based on behavior as opposed to reading someone's expressions, understanding their emotions. We didn't grow up with emotional intelligence. If you happen to be in a culture or a family that appreciates emotional intelligence and teaches you intentionally, then maybe you're one of the lucky ones. But I see couples, people in relationships, across workplaces, across different social settings: they still do not know necessarily how to interact with one another because they're misperceiving cues. They're misperceiving what people are saying, how they read behavior, how they understand emotions. It happens all the time.
[00:03:38] Christine Ko: What I realized talking to you right now, that most of my life, I guess I would say, I have tried to hide what I feel, and it's really liberating in a sense, to really put emotional intelligence into action, I think, and be authentic with how I feel. Not all the time, every single moment, but be able to really express, say at the end of the day, with someone that I trust, how I felt or how I feel about a certain event or something that happened. And it's been really, I think, something that, has changed the way that I'm able to react and process things.
[00:04:17] Susan Ko: It's another way, I would say, that you can have some reflection. This idea of emotional intelligence is relatively new because still, I think there's a bias against emotions, right? Against feeling: it's fluffy, it makes you weaker. You know, that whole adage of boys aren't supposed to cry, kids aren't supposed to cry, adults aren't supposed to cry. These are all things that I think are still a very deeply rooted part of our society. And until we can really accept that there is a range of emotions, and there's value to that range of emotions, we're going to continue to struggle with how to share that, how to have that emotional intelligence because we're all so busy trying to hide what we actually feel.
[00:05:02] Christine Ko: Yes. Can you talk a little bit about the growth mindset?
[00:05:05] Susan Ko: Carol Dweck's concept of the growth mindset is revolutionary. It's incredible. It was revolutionary, this idea that you could change, right? That you can intentionally be thoughtful about how you want to do something differently. I work with a lot of young professionals. Everyone thinks they're an imposter in their workplace because they feel like they are not good enough. All of this is related to not having a growth mindset.
[00:05:33] Christine Ko: I realized, when I read that book, that really I grew up with what the contrast, the antonym, kind of what Dr. Dweck calls the fixed mindset. I guess I was lucky in the sense that people told me I was smart, smart being usually seen as a positive trait. I was viewed positively, but the problem with that: being always told I was smart is I was definitely afraid to fail. And anytime a certain concept in school didn't come easily to me or if I felt challenged, I didn't want to admit it. I think I felt a certain amount of shame, really, and embarrassment at not being able to get it right away and then I would think, Oh my gosh, I don't want to be challenged by this because I don't want people to realize that I'm not smart. So that's the fixed mindset, where you don't want to be challenged because then it goes against that core identity. I definitely had a fixed mindset, and it's been also quite liberating, just like with emotional intelligence, it's been quite liberating to have a growth mindset and be like, Oh, okay, I don't know this, or I have no idea what this means, or This, I find very challenging, but that doesn't mean that I'm not smart. And actually the smarter thing to do is to admit that either I need help or Okay, I'll fail however many times at this before I finally get it.
[00:06:49] Susan Ko: First of all, you're the poster child for someone with a growth mindset, the ability to keep learning, and be excited by that, challenging yourself. Certainly, that's a lot of pressure, when you tell someone they're good at something. Yes, it's seemingly a compliment. That's what I did my whole master's thesis on: the whole idea of the model minority myth and the challenge that it creates for kids. Because if you think that you are supposed to be smart or you're supposed to be an athlete, or you're supposed to be fill in the blank, and then your whole identity is wrapped up in that or people are telling you that's what you are. And then you're not quite measuring up, that's not who you are.... That's quite damaging, too. Unfortunately, we don't often think about the damage of that because it seems, Oh, it's a positive stereotype, right? Asian people face this all the time. You're smart, you're this, you're that. It's, You're all good, right? But then what happens when you don't? you're not that? Where do you fit in? Developmentally, kids are just trying to fit in for a long period of time or figure out who they are. Adults are trying to figure out who they are.
[00:07:50] Christine Ko: Yeah. I recently spoke to Will Bynum as well as Luna Dolezal who do research and a lot of work in shame in medical learners and talk about how, when a lot of medical learners, who have been told probably much of their lives that they're smart, can react to not knowing things with shame. And in talking to both Luna and Will, that's when I realized that there has been a lot of shame in my life. And when I mentioned that briefly to my sister earlier this morning, she had some really interesting things to say about shame.
[00:08:25] Susan Ko: Think about when you have this feeling of shame. What do you want to do? You want to hide. I have this visualization of someone who's trying to crawl into themselves, right? It's so uncomfortable, it's so awful, that of course you want to get away from that feeling.
[00:08:39] In theory, many adults have more experience and tools to be able to address some of these things. They don't feel this sense of Oh, I have to hide that, or I shouldn't feel like this, or, That's wrong. This feeling of shame, that makes me a bad person. That's internalized. And then what happens is, maybe that doesn't get expressed or you don't know what to do with that. And it just sits inside and a lot of people do a lot to try to avoid uncomfortable feelings. If we don't have the skills for how to express that or do something with it, then maybe you sit with it inside and avoid that, and that certainly can impact your ability to want to work through it, using growth mindset or develop or do something about it because you're so busy using all your resources to run away from that.
[00:09:25] Christine Ko: The Korean culture that we both grew up in was filled with shame. Meaning, you're bad if you can't speak Korean or you can't follow the cultural norms in this instance. Everything's, Oh, other people, Korean society, other adults are watching and observing, and if you're falling short, that's embarrassing. That's shameful. So that's definitely how we grew up and I didn't fully realize that until really quite recently when I spoke to both Luna and Will and just reflected on how much of my life I was always thinking about the norm and comparing myself to the norm and, Am I there? Am I falling short? Where am I compared to a norm? So it's just been something that I only realized recently. And also David Caruso has also influenced me on that. Shame, he said, is a complex emotion. It's a social emotion. So that's also where it ties into the growth mindset because he recommends using shame, just like any other emotion, as a data point. And Will Bynum said this as well, use shame as a sign post for, really, Why are you feeling shame? And what is it that's generating that? And what can you then do about it? And we can move on from it. It doesn't have to be this horrible thing that I turn away from and don't want to face.
[00:10:45] Susan Ko: Yeah, I think that's really true. It's how do you turn towards the emotions, especially challenging emotions, rather than run away from them. I think that's a key part of emotional intelligence. Rather than wanting to hide, that you're wanting to express that, to figure it out, even if you don't have the answers. That's another thing, maybe, that you and I grew up with a lot, is trying to have the answers before you express something or the solution. And sometimes you don't know. Maybe you might not even know how to articulate how you feel, and then maybe that turns into shame because it feels shameful not to know or not to have an answer, but I like that idea that there's a social aspect to it and maybe that social aspect is also trying to learn together. And of course as a therapist, I think being able to process emotions and talk about things together, there's a great learning that can come from that, and a utility.
[00:11:41] Christine Ko: Do you have any final thoughts?
[00:11:43] Susan Ko: There's a lot of value in how you come out of a difficult emotion, how you come out of a difficult communication. Having hard conversations is worth it. I've learned a lot in my own relationships, but also from the couples that I work with. It's not just about how you end up in a conflict or the pattern even that the conflict takes you on. It's how do you get out of it? Can you work through it with someone? Again, you don't have to have all the answers yourself, but if you're willing to use that courage to talk about these hard things, then you might surprise yourself in being able to handle more than you think you can. Rather than hiding, it's about expressing it.
[00:12:25] Christine Ko: I love that. Thank you so much for spending the time with me to do this today.
[00:12:30] Susan Ko: You're welcome. So fun.