John Blomster: Welcome to 红桃视频, a 红桃视频 podcast where we explore today's biggest legal topics with the law school鈥檚 distinguished guests and experts from around the world. I'm John Blomster. And today we welcome on a very special guest. We are joined by licensed clinical psychologist and writer Dr. Isaiah Pickens. Among his many professional and academic roles. Dr. Pickens is the founder of iOpening Enterprises. As part of his extensive training curriculum, Dr. Pickens uses science and entertainment to help people build lives full of meaning and promote their healthiest selves.
He recently joined 红桃视频 to conduct a student-focused training on staying resilient and brave during these unprecedented and challenging times. And we're fortunate to have him here today to share some of those key learnings, which I feel comfortable saying that we probably all need to hear these days. So, let's get into it. Dr. Pickens, thank you very much for joining us.
Isaiah Pickens: Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to talk today.
JB: So, one of the first things that you discussed in your training is just how significant stress is and the fundamental role it plays in how we see ourselves. And this was a really interesting point: how and why is stress linked so tightly to our most important personal and salient identities?
IP: Well, that's a great question. And I really enjoyed talking to law school, this past week around these issues of identity and stress. Because when we really are able to put together an understanding of what drives our most stressful life experiences, and tie it to what's most important to us, whether it's professionally or personally, it really gives us an expanded set of tools to be able to manage what's happening around us. One of the areas I love the most about our training that we did this past week is looking at Imposter Syndrome. So many of us can feel like frauds in our professional settings. And even in our personal life as we talk about physical issues as relates to race, as it relates to being an ally for the LGBTQ community, as it relates to being able to actually fight for the justice that we see needs to happen in different communities. And if we don't acknowledge that as being completely tied to the way that we manage our health and our well-being, then we sometimes lose focus of our ability to maximize our contribution to the world by first being able to take care of ourselves both physically, but also emotionally, mentally and spiritually.
So, part of what I really wanted to do is talk about from a science-based framework, how do we start to attune to what's happening in our body, and acknowledge that how stress is held in our body, but also take it a step further to see how that builds up when we don't think about the way the world around us is impacting the way we're seeing how we're dealing and managing with stressful life events ranging from if people are looking at issues related to the immigrant community, or they're thinking about issues related to their family and police brutality. All of these are connected to personal and workplace stressors. And so as we kind of build this framework, and we talked about this with law students, part of what we realized, is that we all can have moments where we feel like a fraud as we deal with these issues. And that builds our sense of stress and more. And so the best way to manage that is to, one, acknowledge that it's happening, and then two, to really be able to come together as a community and talk about some of these insecurities that we have. But do it in a way that's productive, and leads us towards having more insight into how we can use our identity, to actually move towards the types of contributions that we like to have, whether it be in the courtroom by supporting those that we feel has been aggrieved by injustices, or whether it be in our personal life and being able to deal with issues that may be relevant for how we are managing the stressors that come within our home, whether it be the pandemic, or other injustice issues that we're seeing. So, that was a big part of why and how I set that that framework. And I really enjoyed the way the law students, and some faculty who joined, how they really engaged their opportunity to be able to understand and deal with these issues that can be sometimes very difficult to talk about.
JB: Yeah, that's a really interesting point, because you talked about how, you know, we live in the United States in a very individualistic culture where we can be really hard on ourselves in the different aspects of our lives. It's hard to be compassionate to ourselves and give ourselves breaks in times of, you know, stress and suffering and law students, in particularly, can be incredibly hard on themselves. These are students who have worked so hard to get here, they're going through this difficult rigorous, very strange experience that is law school.
So, why do you feel like so many students face these feelings of imposterism? Can you explain why those different kinds of feelings kind of coalesce into to that feeling of not belonging?
JB: Yeah, that's another really great question. And I believe it's so much of it is tied to, one, culturally as an individualistic culture in the United States, we really believe in our ability to win and to achieve based off merit, which is very important, and very well founded. But we also have to understand that as much as we believe in this ability to kind of fight through and pull yourself up by your bootstraps, we're still interdependent in nature. And so what that means is, we don't achieve in a bubble, we don't just pull ourselves up, we really achieved by both working hard ourselves, taking responsibility ourselves, but also working with others and needing the support of others. And I think sometimes we lose sight of that, because of the way that we set up a lot of our most important professional tasks, whether it be in a law school, whether it be our journey to achieve within a university setting.
For myself, just to give a little bit of background, I was former clinical faculty at NYU School of Medicine, as well as Assistant Director of the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress at UCLA. And during my time there, and even during my own professional grad school experience, there were times where we were really pressing hard to be able to achieve certain goals, whether it is creating a trauma-informed practice for a justice agency or a school system, whether it was understanding how do we support professionals who might be experiencing what we call secondary traumatic stress, which is having been exposed to stories of people who have experienced trauma. And because we care so much about doing the job well and supporting those people in those roles, we sometimes prioritize our job to help them over our own personal well-being, which over time undercut our ability to actually be most effective in that role.
And so to answer your question, I think sometimes, we put the purpose of what we're doing ahead of our own well-being, because we think it's going to help fulfill that purpose more effectively. And in an accelerated fashion, when in fact, what it does is it may achieve some short-term goals, but in the long run, it really doesn't give us the sustainable tools to be able to manage both what we hope to do in terms of our professional goals and our purpose here, whatever we like to call our reason for being here and contributing to the world, but also in terms of our ability to recharge those other areas of our life, that give us insight into our professional life. And just to kind of bring this full circle, we are people who are part of families, who are a part of communities, are a part of school communities, spiritual communities, the gaming community, all these different pieces. And these inform how we see the world and they inform how we think about keeping ourselves what we call psychologically safe. And this is the belief that I can manage the stress is happening within me, or reach out to someone who can help me manage that stress. And I think sometimes not by our own fault, but because of blind spots in our life, we don't realize what actually sustains our sense of psychological safety. It鈥檚 not just pushing forward, pushing forward, pushing forward. Part of what sustains our ability to feel psychologically safe, is recharging when we feel depleted, and not just recharging in any kind of way, but recharging in a targeted way that refills our most important identity so that when we feel like we're not a good enough student, or when we feel like we're not a good enough mother, or when we feel an imposter fighting for injustice, we're reaching out to people who say, 鈥淟ook, this is a long journey, and you might not be doing everything that you want right now. But you're doing enough to be able to grow yourself and to build yourself into where you need to go.鈥 And that alone and that process and those tools that align with that allow us to recharge to the point where we push forward, and we grow into that thing that we believe we can be even if we're not that right now.
JB: This of psychological safety, right, we're familiar with the fight or flight response that our bodies activate when our physical safety is threatened, but you talk about how that same phenomenon occurs when our psychological safety is threatened as well. What are some ways that we can work to kind of strengthen that muscle in order to become more resilient in this particular space?
IP: Yeah, I think that's something we're actually doing right now. The first thing we have to do is we have to have these open conversations about what is it that's making us feel like we are, one, imposters or we're not, you know, a fraud in someway in what we're doing. But also being able to have honest conversations about when we feel pain. Another aspect of our culture that I think sometimes can be in our benefit, but also in our detriment in moments is pushing through no matter how you feel, no matter how much it hurts. And sometimes the way that you actually develop a sense of psychological safety is by admitting it hurt. That it鈥檚 painful when you're in class and you feel like your perspective is not being fully heard by the professor because they've had a long career, a long career in the court, long career in the work that they do. And you're bringing up issues around how people are understanding race and you're bringing up issues around gender equity, and it feels like you're not really being heard. And it could be one thing to say, 鈥淲ell, that's just how it is and move on.鈥 It鈥檚 another thing to say that 鈥淭hat hurts,鈥 like I want to be seen, I want to be heard.
Now, the question is, what do you do with that? How do you continue to build that? Well, when we talk about creating this sense of psychological safety, part of what we're talking about, is developing our coping skills. And there's two ways that we can think about coping, if we put them into their most simple form. There's problem-focused coping, and there's emotion-focused coping. Problem-focused coping is a coping style that focuses on how do I fix the problem in front of me, and then emotion-focused coping focused on how can I stick inside of myself, so I can manage the problem that's in front of me. And the reason why these two are different is because we have different levels of control over the things that are stressing us out. The things that we have control over is best to use the problem-focused coping approach because you can actually fix the problem in some way.
So, the things that you don't have control over is often important for you to think about an emotion-focused approach, because you can't necessarily fix the problem that's outside of you, you have to adjust yourself inside. So, for an example, right, you have a professor in class that has really been challenging to deal with, maybe because they are a very smart professor, but at the same time, they're not seeming like they're being aware or hearing your perspective. And so you've been in this class for some time, and you've tried to adjust maybe how you have dealt with them kind of rebuffing what you've had to say, or what you've brought to the table. And so maybe there's a situation, you feel like you don't have a lot of control over. And so you think about an emotion-focused coping strategy, just one in terms of regulating your body when you're in the class. Because when we get stressed, particularly by people who make us feel like we're small, our body actually starts to activate in that fight, flight or freeze response. And so being able to like practice some deep breathing before you go in the class, and know that your responses may not be heard the way you want, because you're adjusting yourself in some way. So, when you do have control, though, maybe in a certain class, you see that they're forming some kind of committee to give feedback on how professors teach in the classroom and engage students. Well, you choose to be a part of this group. Well, that's a problem-focused approach, because you're doing something that can potentially address that problem. So, really being able, as a very practical tip for how to do this, identify the things that are stressing you out, identify when you're triggered with those things. So, how do you know you're starting to get set off by stress? And then identify what are the areas you have control over? What are the areas you don't have control over? Well, the things you have control over think about problem-focused coping strategies that you can employ and the things you don't have control over think about the emotion-focus coping strategies that you can employ. And overall, what that will do is that will build your sense of psychological safety, and ultimately, build a sense of psychological bravery, which is your ability to show up authentically as your full self.
JB: And finally, you talked about the discussion that you facilitated in the training, you know, with the students and, you know, the students were in a really great safe space and shared personal feelings on imposterism and other ways that they feel about themselves, especially now. What did you hear from our students in those moments? And what did you kind of take away from the discussion that was had in the kind of dialogue that you had with them?
IP: Yeah, the first thing I heard, which is I always hear, no matter how smart you are, at some point, you feel like an imposter. And it鈥檚 such a funny, funny, kind of counterintuitive way of being in the world. Because, honestly, I feel like the more people achieve, the more they feel sometimes that they aren't, you know, the ones who should be in these positions of success or power. And what I heard from your students were students who not only felt that sense of imposterism generally, which is very normal being in law school, but I think they heard it and they felt silly, in particular, during the time during the pandemic.
One of the comments that really stood out to me was when you're in this virtual environment, it's really easy for the course of that hour and a half class, virtual class, or that meeting that you have for everyone that they met they have it together, but you're not able to do a lot of those micro interactions that you have when you're in person with people to look at someone's faces, and look at them and say, 鈥淒id that professor just say that?鈥 or 鈥淎m I getting this right?鈥 Everyone looks kind of the same in terms of looking at the camera. So, it's harder to really be able to have an accurate comparison around how other people are absorbing the information. And so, you know, part of what I really hope that the 红桃视频 students, University of Washington law students, and the school as a whole can continue to do is lean into how people might feel like imposters when it comes to both law school but also when it comes to having these difficult conversations around racial justice, around you know, phobia, homophobia, all these different issues that can come up. And that really you are on the front lines of creating just faces because that's the work that you do. And your students really seem to be on board with that.
What we ended with, with our session, which I hope to pick up with the next time is a concept called Radical Healing. And this is really taking all the things I just talked about in terms of the connection between our identities, our most important identity, whether it be race or gender, or being a parent or student, whatever it may be, and how do you understand the wounds, the pain that comes when those areas, there's injustice that happened in those areas. Not just for you personally, but for the people you consider a part of your community, a part of who you are, and then how do you start to heal from that.
So, radical healing says, let's acknowledge exactly what those wounds are and lets again to be targeted in the way that we heal from those wounds by refueling those important parts and it begins with these brave, these safe and brave conversations that I've been sharing with you, some of the insights for how to do it individually. But there's ways to scale that up so that you can do that throughout a community. That's what I'm hoping to do as we continue to talk through some of these issues with the law students and the energy you all have. I just want to throw that out there. I really loved it. It was a really great session. These topics are tough, but they don鈥檛 have to feel heavy, you know, we can talk about them in ways that are real, that are honest, that we feel connected to and we can feel hopeful after we finish it and that's how I left with the training for the UW students
JB: Dr. Isaiah Pickens is a licensed clinicologist, writer and founder of iOpening Enterprises. He joined the law school for a student-focused training on bravery and resilience in the face of challenges and you can learn more about his work over on our podcast page at law.uw.edu. We will have show notes and links for more information on everything that we've discussed today.
Dr. Pickens, it's really been a pleasure. Thank you very much for joining us.
IP: Thank you so much for having me. Again, I wish you all much success as you continue this important work.
