Courage in You, Weakness in Me

Welcome to The Brighter Side of Everything.

This newsletter serves a simple purpose → To help you build optimism, resilience and a solution-focused perspective.

Each week, I’ll share actionable insights that not only brighten your day but position you to be a leader within your own life and seize life’s opportunities.

Read time: 20-30 minutes.

Hello, Brighter Side readers! ☀️

I'm glad you're here.

Welcome to our newest subscribers and, as always, a huge thanks to those of you who continue to read along.

Nobody has ever been harder on me than me.

And I doubt I'm alone in that fact.

This week we dig into why we hand everyone else a more generous version of events while keeping the harsher lens for ourselves.

We also farewell an icon in Dolly Parton, meet the psychologist who chose to give the good stuff away for free, and explore why advice is so much easier to give than take.

I hope there’s something you can implement in your own life that lighten’s your load in some way.

See you on the Brighter Side,

Chris

P.S. Please feel free to send me feedback on how I can improve. I respond to every email.

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There's probably something you've been meaning to say to someone you know.

Something you know is true.

Something you know would probably help.

And you still haven't said it.

Why?

Because you can picture their face when they hear it.

You can envision them deciding, right there in the moment, that you’re a little less than they thought.

That moment almost never comes though.

Not for you, not for anyone.

And the research is clear on it.

Yet, many of us brace ourselves expecting it to happen anyway.

In 2018, a psychologist named Anna Bruk published seven studies with her colleagues Sabine Scholl and Herbert Bless at the University of Mannheim, Germany.

They labelled their findings the beautiful mess effect.

The premise was simple.

Participants were asked to picture a moment that involved putting themselves out there a bit.

Something like confessing a new love to a best friend, or admitting a mistake to their leader.

Then they scored it.

How much courage did that take?

How much weakness did it show?

Half were basing their scoring on themselves.

While the other half were scoring somebody else in the same situation.

The difference was apparent every time.

When it's you, the words that surface were exposed, messy, a bit much.

When it's someone else, though, the very same act was read as brave.

As honest.

As something worth admiring.

Two completely different interpretations, depending solely on whether it was internal feedback or external feedback.

That said, imagined scenarios can only prove so much, so they followed up by running one with something real at stake.

This time, some were told they'd have to improvise a song in front of a jury.

While others were told they'd be sitting on that same jury, watching.

They never had to follow through on their performance, but they did once again score their experience.

Same result.

Think about yourself when placed in a similar moment.

The exact words you use.

The pause before you say them.

The wobble in your voice, the heat in your face and what on earth do I do with my hands.

Now, think about someone else doing the same thing and see what you notice.

Likely just a person with the courage to do something hard.

Psychologists call this construal level.

When you stand close to the action, you see detail.

When you stand further back, you see meaning, you see context, you gain perspective.

And detail?

Well detail is unflattering in ways that meaning will never be.

We're never standing far enough back from ourselves to see what everyone else is seeing.

The lazy explanation for this is low self-esteem, but I don't buy it.

Some of the most confident people I know get this wrong too.

Confidence has nothing to do with it.

You can easily march off very confidently in the wrong direction.

What's worth developing is more specific than overall confidence.

It’s knowing you're capable of meeting the moment in front of you.

It’s knowing that whatever you face, you can figure it out.

That only comes from reps and from putting yourself out there.

Follow through on something hard once and you might find you're still on your feet.

Follow through again and again, and it costs you a little less each time.

So the fear makes sense.

Because the fear of doing anything for the first time always does.

But never forget that every masterpiece began as a draft.

A couple of weeks back while at the Farmer’s Market, my daughter decided on the spot she was going to learn to cartwheel.

I’ve recently written about her efforts when learning to ride a bike for the first time, so many of you already know her approach to these things.

So, she had a go.

And she couldn't do it.

What she could do was a sort of half-jump, half-handstand thing that ended with her sideways on the grass.

So she did that instead.

Over and over, on the grass, in front of anyone who happened to be looking.

This continued in the backyard once we returned home, then in the hallway, the living room, anywhere she had the space to try again.

Through sheer determination she perfected her approach and even gave herself a sore wrist from her countless attempts.

Rather than stop, she decided to learn the whole thing again using only her left.

Back to the start she went, and this time it was much harder than the first time.

But she wasn’t really starting from scratch, she was starting from experience and she knew she would figure it out.

Now, she can do it both ways, at a speed that makes me dizzy.

Kinda like this:

Back on her bike the lesson was hers, about how children persist when learning something new.

This time, though, while I was watching her I was also watching myself watch her.

I saw it all and thought, look at her go!

Not once did it cross my mind that she looked ridiculous flopping about on the grass.

And yet if you asked me to go and learn a cartwheel in that same place, I'd probably have a quick look around to see who’s watching before I did.

She’s learned to take a wide view of herself when attempting something hard.

The generous view.

The one most of us save for other people.

Which is exactly why she can be visibly bad at something in public.

Until she isn't.

I worked in the travel industry for over twenty years.

If you want a quick education in how it feels to deliver a difficult message?

Try standing in front of a room and telling them you don't have the answer yet.

Or telling an excited family their flight has been cancelled.

I’ve done plenty of that.

And every time, it felt like handing over evidence.

Proof I wasn't the person they'd hired.

Nobody in those rooms was reading it that way.

They were watching someone tell them the truth when saying nothing would have been easier.

Somebody has to go first.

The moment one person says the honest, uncomfortable thing, the temperature in the room changes.

Others then follow.

Quickly, and with obvious relief.

The cost of going first is all ours.

But the benefit belongs to everyone, including us, because now we're in a real conversation instead of a surface level one.

Going first might feel exposed.

But it’s received as leadership.

Four years later, the same research team added further insights to their initial findings.

In 2022, they published a follow-up looking more specifically at self-compassion.

Those who scored high on this one were far less harsh about their own vulnerability.

How they saw themselves moved much closer to how they saw everyone else.

But what’s interesting is which side actually shifted.

The observers didn't change their position, they'd been generous through every study and every scenario.

What changed was the way people scored themselves.

The crowd was never the problem.

Many assumed we simply need to build thicker skin, so we can survive the judgement when it comes.

But the judgement we're bracing for generally isn't coming.

Of course, there will sometimes be the inevitable jerks, but their opinion matters about as much as a speck of dust in a hurricane.

Instead, the harshest critic often resides within ourselves.

Constantly evaluating and questioning our every move.

The important work all sits on our side of the equation.

By learning to give yourself the same benefit of the doubt you hand everybody else.

Without trying, every day of the week.

Send the message you're embarrassed to send: The version in your head is being scored on a scale that nobody else is using.

Run the friend test: When you catch yourself replaying something you said, ask what you'd think if a friend told you they'd said it. That answer comes fast, and it's generally much kinder. It's also more accurate.

Go first: When one person admits something hard, everybody else receives permission to stop performing. They'll think better of you for it, not worse.

Be as fair to yourself as you are to everyone else: Nothing changes by trying to convince the world to be kinder. It changes when you lower a standard you'd never dream of holding anyone else to.

On the other side of fear, lies opportunity.

This is as true for me, as it is for you, as it is for my daughter.

What gets me about both the research above and my observations over the years is that everyone is doing this at once.

Each person in the room is writing off their own honesty as weakness while subtly admiring yours as courage.

And because we're all doing it?

Nobody says so, and the thing holds.

We need to celebrate each other more and judge each other less.

Cartwheels are fun, even more so when everyone is doing them.

Lose the need to be perfect, to look put together every minute of every day.

Give yourself the grace to learn something new, and suck at it through your initial attempts.

I've written over 100 editions of this newsletter so far.

The ones that landed best, have never been the most polished ones.

They were the honest ones.

The ones where I shared a story or said something I wasn't at all sure I should have.

Every time, I braced for it.

Each time, replies came back with some version of thank you or me too.

I'd love to tell you I've stopped bracing.

I haven't.

The feeling still arrives right on schedule.

What's changed is that I don't treat that as information anymore.

The flinch is real but its reading of the situation isn’t.

And on the days I don’t feel confident in that?

I now have a shortcut.

Asking what I'd think if I watched someone else do the same thing.

I already know the answer.

And so do you.

Jia Jiang spent a hundred days asking strangers for ridiculous things on purpose, to find out what really happens when you brace for a no. Fifteen minutes, and it’s much funnier than it sounds:

🔭 NASA’s Roman Space Telescope Has Launched - Named for Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer, the observatory lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on a three-month journey to a point 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, where a field of view at least a hundred times wider than Hubble’s will send back roughly 1.4 terabytes a day—and as senior project scientist Julie McEnery put it, there’s no telling what more we’ll know and have seen by this time next year. Read more → (Sci.News)

🐟 One of the World’s ‘Most Wanted’ Lost Fish Has Been Rediscovered - A team spent two weeks travelling 700 miles of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea by boat and canoe, showing photographs to fishers and village elders and finding nothing, until in the expedition’s final days a prawn fisher named Helen Asu pulled two spinach pipefish out of the water in her handheld net—the first record of the little seahorse relative in more than forty years. Read more → (Yale Environment 360)

✨ Couples Who Share Moments of Awe Report Deeper, Steadier Relationships - Across two studies of more than 500 people, researchers at Radboud University found that awe experienced together predicted satisfaction, willingness to sacrifice and a sense of shared meaning far better than awe experienced alone, and lead author Matteo Perini is careful to say this isn’t an argument for chasing spectacular experiences—just for making room for wonder side by side, whether that’s music, nature, or something familiar seen a different way. Read more → (PsyPost)

🐒 Monkeys Make Friends With Other Animals, and It Looks Surprisingly Familiar - An Oxford team led by Cyril Grueter gathered 427 encounters between 88 primate species and 127 other kinds of animal—macaques grooming a temple dog in Thailand, a langur stroking a giant squirrel in Sri Lanka, a Japanese macaque climbing aboard a sika deer—and found play and grooming topped the list, with the monkey almost always making the first move and getting nothing obvious in return. Read more → (Earth.com)

🎨 A Teenager Who Lost His Mum at Six Now Paints Free Portraits for Grieving Families - Hugh Saetia was fourteen when he painted a portrait for the woman who had helped raise him after she lost her son, and her reaction turned into a mission: he began approaching mourners at the cemetery where his mother is buried, paid for canvases with money earned sharpening knives at a farmers’ market, and now runs a registered foundation with around 400 active requests. Read more → (Nice News)

Hand me a karaoke microphone and my friends know what's coming.

"I Will Always Love You."

It’s certainly not the obvious pick for an Aussie bloke raised on 90s rock and grunge.

Which is half the fun of it.

Nobody sees it coming.

The room generally laughs for the first four seconds, before all joining me in song.

I sing it as Whitney's, because it’s the version I grew up with.

But I've never thought of it as Whitney's song.

Mum told me who wrote it when I was a kid, a fact she was very proud to know and share.

Layer on that at least once a week throughout my childhood (and beyond) I’d hear Jolene, Jolene, Jolene … JOLENE!

Joyously echoing from whatever room she happened to be in, and it was clear that Dolly had a special place in her heart.

Dolly Parton died on the 25th August, at 80.

This song might be how I was introduced to her, but it turns out it could be the least interesting thing about her.

And that’s saying something.

Dolly Parton was the fourth of twelve children living in a cabin in the Smoky Mountains, Tennessee.

When she was born, the doctor who delivered her was paid in cornmeal.

Why? Because cornmeal was all the family had.

Her father had never learned to read after finding himself working the fields too young to ever get the chance.

Dolly finished high school in 1964 and was on her way to Nashville the very next day.

Everything she achieved after that point, she built herself.

And she built it while being underestimated, at every turn.

The hair, the nails, the outfits, the strong accent that many mistakenly believed was a reflection of her intelligence.

She allowed all of this to work in her favour.

Because she always arrived at the joke before anyone else could get there.

After reading countless Dolly stories over the last week or so, the story that told me the most about her?

Is the one where she said no.

In 1974, Elvis Presley wanted to record the track "I Will Always Love You."

His manager, Colonel Tom Parker, had a standing rule and he wasn’t willing to budge.

“Elvis doesn't record anything unless we take half the publishing.”

She said no.

Then she headed home and cried all night.

She’d grown up in a house with little in it, and knew what a song she owned outright would be worth to the people coming after her.

She was sweetness on the surface, and became steel underneath.

Eighteen years later Whitney Houston recorded the song.

And that one decision to deny Elvis Presley?

Made Dolly a fortune.

Then, she gave it away.

For fifty years, mostly directed back toward the mountains she came from.

In 1995 she started the Imagination Library.

Where each month, she would post a book to every child in her home county, from birth through to school age.

She even did it for her dad, given he’d never learned to read.

The children started calling her the Book Lady and he got a kick out of that, telling her it felt like he'd helped do something special.

What began as a one-county experiment, has now sent more than 300 million books to children around the world.

When wildfires tore through the Smokies in 2016, her foundation sent $1,000 a month to every family who lost a home, for six months running.

And they even rounded the final payment up to $5,000.

Over 900 families received financial support along with other local non profits totalling $12.5 million when all said and done.

Remarkable.

When a doctor friend of hers shared some early coronavirus research in 2020, Dolly wrote Vanderbilt a cheque for a million dollars and the scientist running that particular lab said her money funded the critical early stage.

Which then fed into the Moderna vaccine.

The thing I find most impressive has nothing to do with her talent.

Or her money, or fame.

I've been around the world a few times and have lived on three continents.

From Australian pubs to the Canadian Rockies and everywhere in between, I’ve had people tell me exactly what they think about anything and everything.

I have never once heard a single person say a bad word about Dolly Parton.

Not one.

Not ever.

Think about how odd that is.

We can't agree on anything.

We argue about politics, football, even how to load a dishwasher.

Somewhere out there, is a person with a strong negative opinion of puppies.

And yet a rhinestoned country singer from a hollow in the Tennessee mountains was loved by people who can't stand country music, by church congregations and drag queens, by folks who agree on nothing else whatsoever.

Sixty years in public, and if she did make enemies along the way?

I’m yet to hear of one.

So, it seems we all know what good looks like, what kindness looks like and what empathy looks like.

Within Dolly, they all pointed to the same person.

Which leaves the question I haven't been able to shake.

Why aren't there more like her?

Given her universal appreciation, it’s alarming that there aren't more individuals who embody her qualities and values.

It can't be that nobody knows what she was doing.

We all watched her do it, in public, for sixty years.

I believe (and this is just my opinion) it's because every piece cost her something.

Costs that appear invisible but surface within her integrity.

Saying no to Elvis cost her the biggest moment of her young career.

Forgiving Porter Wagoner cost her the right to stay angry.

Porter gave her the break that started everything but when she left his show in 1974, he thanked her by suing her for $3 million.

Implying she was the sort of person he'd never trust with anything of his.

But when the taxman came knocking for him in the eighties?

She bought the rights to his songs so he could stay afloat, then handed them back and refused his money.

The library, the vaccine donation and the wildfire cheques cost her millions of dollars.

Showing up for fifty years in a wig and rhinestones, while an entire industry sniggered, cost her being taken seriously for most of her career.

The respect showed up eventually.

About thirty years after she'd earned it.

When we look at Dolly we see warmth, but what we're looking at is a long run of expensive decisions.

Expensive financially, but liberating mentally, as she was someone who fully understood the word forgiveness and its impact on both the giver and receiver.

Mum was right to make sure I knew whose song I was singing.

Because the world could use a few more Dollys.

If you want a front row seat to her kindness, business savvy, wit and authenticity, check out this video of her delivering the commencement speech at the University of Tennessee:

Now and then, I receive a reply to this newsletter from someone asking me where they should start.

Having read something here about negativity bias, or optimism or any of the countless psychological theories that explain human behaviour.

They simply want to know which book to open first.

It's a harder question than it sounds.

Point them one way, and I've essentially given them a dense, four-hundred-page textbook on neurobiology that’s crafted for folks fluent in the terminology.

Point them the other way and they’re reading back to back slogans.

If you’re new to understanding (and interpreting) psychology, there's one book I keep referring back to:

Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?

by Dr Julie Smith.

Dr Julie Smith is a clinical psychologist who worked in the NHS and in private practice before doing something unusual to her profession.

She started filming 60-second videos of things she'd normally utter in a therapy room.

The actual useful tools themselves.

The things she'd pass along to a person sitting in front of her.

Which is a generous approach, given what it can often take to reach that information.

Her videos found ten million people.

This was followed by a book in 2022, which went straight in at number one and held a top ten spot on the Sunday Times list for more than 140 weeks.

What’s remarkable is how little of it is about actually being unwell.

The majority focuses on the everyday weather of a typical life, such as feeling flat during the week or the conversation you keep re-running long after the other person forgot it happened.

This isn’t a book you need to read front to back.

It's built more like a field guide.

Eight sections, running from experiencing low moods and motivation through grief, self-doubt, fear and stress.

Each broken into chapters of two or three pages that answer one question and then get out of your way.

You can go to the part you need, on the day you need it.

There are diagrams, flowcharts, a summary at the end of each chapter, so a loop you've been stuck in for years has a shape you can point at.

Underneath it all, sits one idea.

That your thoughts, emotions, physical sensations and behaviour form a single connected system.

Each one tugging on the other three.

Move any one of them and the rest will shift with it.

That right there is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in a sentence.

And Dr. Smith gets you there without the endless jargon.

This is also where her powerful point about motivation surfaces.

That it follows action rather than leading it.

That twenty-minute walk you're hesitant to take?

It's often the very thing that’ll boost your mood and provide the escape you need.

Thoughts are not facts: They're a mix of opinion, memory and old story, arriving as front page news. Smith's approach is to put some distance into the language you use. Not I'm going to make a mess of this but I'm having thoughts that I'm going to make a mess of this. That way you stand next to the thought, rather than inside it.

Name the feeling properly: Most of us run on three settings. Fine, stressed, tired. Smith asks for something more defined, because feeling off gives you nothing to work with, while disappointed, or overlooked, or angry or apprehensive all point somewhere.

The basics aren't housekeeping: Sleep, food, movement, daylight, other people. These aren't what you get to once the real work is done. In her clinical experience, they are essential, and some of the more intriguing techniques rely heavily on their foundation.

Nothing in this book is a secret.

It's standard clinical practice, that’s taught in universities and used every day in therapy rooms.

The problem is, most people don't meet these terms until something has gone wrong and they’re looking for answers.

That gap is one of many reasons I started this newsletter.

I'm no guru, but I have studied psychology and behavioural science for much of my adult life and experienced their effective use, time and time again.

What I can do is share my experiences, along with what I’ve found useful and hope some of it lands for you.

The ideas that have changed the way I think have generally surfaced that way.

Because there is no substitute for experience, none whatsoever.

No matter how good you think you are at shortcuts.

Last October I wrote about how self-help has become overwhelming these days (Self-Help Is Everywhere), and acknowledged that acquiring knowledge has never been the hard part.

It’s what you do with newly acquired knowledge that makes a difference.

One word of caution, though, this book isn't an overview of psychology.

It won’t provide the history on the topic and explain neurobiology.

If you've already read this topic widely, much of it will feel too familiar so I’d point you elsewhere.

It was written for those who’ve never read any of it.

So if that's you, and you've been meaning to make sense of your own head?

Start here.

Please share; I'm always keen for great suggestions.

Isn’t it interesting how we always seem to know what our friends should do?

As an outside observer, we can see it as we sit across from them.

Whether it be a conversation we know they need to have, a job they should walk away from or a relationship that no longer serves them.

The signs are often clear to us.

For the person involved, though?

They are decisions clouded by emotion, fear and uncertainty.

When something heavy lands in our own lives, all of that clarity seems to go missing as the clouds roll in.

It's easy to offer advice from a distance, but much harder when you’re subbed into the game yourself.

The advice we offer others is often well intentioned, we just need to be sure it also applies to the person giving it.

Psychologists have a name for this, one they borrowed from a king.

Solomon was sought out from across the kingdom for his judgement, and he made a wreck of his own life.

Igor Grossmann at the University of Waterloo and Ethan Kross at Michigan wondered whether that same split runs through the rest of us.

They called it Solomon's paradox, and they tested the theory on 693 people.

It's real.

Asked to think through a friend's crisis, people reasoned relatively well.

They admitted what they didn't know, looked for compromise, considered the other side and even imagined more than one way it might end.

Handed the identical crisis as their own?

All four of those shrank away.

So the researchers altered one simple thing.

Some of the group were asked to think about their own problem in the third person, using their own name instead of "I".

That was the only adjustment made, and guess what?

It closed the gap.

What stayed with me is the part that didn't help.

The older adults in the study, sixty to eighty years old, were no better at this than the twenty-somethings.

Experience doesn't fix it.

Distance does.

Write it down as somebody else's problem: Use your own name and "he" or "she". It feels ridiculous at first and then potential next steps begin to surface almost immediately.

Ask what we'd say to someone we love in the same position: Then treat that answer as an instruction, not just an interesting thought we had.

Notice the moment we stop examining and start defending: The defensive voice is the voice that reasons worst, yet it always sounds the most certain.

I've approached this a little differently over the last 5-6 years.

Through keeping the small promises I make to myself.

What and when I eat, scheduled workouts, the tasks I told myself I'd finish this week and doing things I love with people I love.

None of these are dramatic.

But each promise we break with ourselves, hangs around like a shadow.

Subtly influencing both our mood and self-perception.

Each unfulfilled commitment chips away at our confidence, reminding us of our unmet goals and intentions.

They stay open in the back of our minds and charge us interest for parking there.

Collect enough of them and we're dragging around a set of loose ends nobody else can see.

Keep our promises though, and something beautiful happens.

We stop having to talk ourselves into things.

We build trust in ourselves but also lay the foundation for growth and happiness.

We begin trusting our own word again.

In my experience, the most evident impact of keeping these promises was how much lighter life becomes as a result.

And once we've stopped lying to ourselves?

Being straight with everyone else requires almost no effort at all.

Wisdom was never the issue, as we've been handing it out to others for years.

The key is trusting the person you see in the mirror.

Transform your daily routine with my specially crafted gratitude journal.

Start (or end) each day with a moment of reflection and positivity.

As you develop daily your gratitude, you're also helping grant wishes to children facing critical illnesses.

It's a powerful cycle of hope and optimism.

🌟 What's Inside:

Ready to embrace the power of gratitude?

Click here to order a copy now!

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