Amanda: Hello guys. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Amanda.
Laura: I'm Laura
Kendra: and I'm Kendra.
Amanda: And this time, I wanna give a special shout out to our sound engineer, William. It's actually Laura's son. And he helps us out by making this reasonably put together and splices in the intro and outro. And I am so thankful because if I tried to do it, it would take me two hours. That being said, thank you, William.
We are finishing up the series of 10 Signs of Emotional Maturity from the article we found in americanbehavioralclinics.com. And starting us out this episode is Kendra.
Kendra: Yeah. So we are going to talk about how emotionally mature people believe in themselves. So this, kind of, if you heard our podcast on self-confidence, this almost alludes to this very character trait. It is not an egocentric or deluded sense of self. It is actually an optimism or a hope for the future, as far as the gifts, talents, intelligence that you are already equipped with. You know your potential, and you're able to look hopeful into the future and know that you can accomplish hard things or new things or challenging things. You believe in yourself to the point where, “Hey, you know, I can look at this as I will begin this process, use my time and talents, and everything I have, to make it very successful. And when I need to lean in for help, I'll lean in for help.”
They know their limitations. They establish a belief that they are equipped to deal with any of the roadblocks, opportunities, or obstacles that come their way, but they also know when to ask for help. So it is a very mature, self-confident, and emotionally mature characteristic to believe in yourself and your abilities and not look at it as an inflated or egocentric type of ability. Because we all know that as soon as we operate outside of our limitations, it could lead to a bad outcome, especially when we're talking about patient care. Because if we don't know our own limitations, or we don't know when to ask for help, that's actually doing a disservice to our patients and not really providing in the best patient care that we can.
So this is definitely one of the characteristics that I strive for: to believe in myself and stay within my capabilities and also know when to ask for help.
Amanda: Laura, you wanna take us into the next characteristic?
Laura: Yeah. Next one's approachability. And they say emotionally mature people are able to, and prefer to talk with people, not at them. They have genuine empathy for others, an open mind, and work towards not being judgemental of others, knowing that judgements are often based on preconceived notions that can impede their ability to know someone and their truth.
I love this cuz I 100% love people who want to know what I think and don't wanna just tell me everything that's on their mind. I think if you think about a really good lecturer, a great teacher in college, it's gonna be someone who's interested in engaging with the students and not just standing up there and telling them a bunch of stuff. If we have medical students or residents that are following us around the emergency department, They're going to have a better experience if we are ones who are able to ask them questions and not just spew a bunch of information at them.
Also, I love how they talked about not being judgemental of others. So sometimes a person might look at the way another person looks. And this has been me in the emergency department early in my career, I judged my patients a lot just based on either their complaint or the way they looked. And those interactions always were less than they should have been because of the way I was bringing judgment into the situation. If I go into a situation where, specifically like drug addicts, and I come in and I see, you know, a guy who's got abscesses all over his body because of injecting with dirty needles, I can come there and judge him and say, you know, “This guy's a horrible person,” or I can go in and say, “Hey, what happened to this person? Like what, what has this person been through that has created this in his life?” And when I can come in with curiosity, I'm so much better equipped to help. I'm so much better equipped to provide empathy and really, what that guy needs is acknowledgement that he is a human person. He's a human being with value and worthy of love. And I can extend a little bit of that to him just while he's there in the department with me. So we want to be, as we move into emotional adulthood, we want to be approachable. We want people to know that they can come to us and we are not going to judge them. We'll extend curiosity and love to them. And we won't base our opinions on preconceived notions.
And back again to what we talked about in previous podcast about politics. This is a big one. We really need to be able to approach each other with open minds and, and curiosity, and trying and understand rather than issuing judgements against other people.
Amanda: I think that that is one of the most serious consequences of social media is that you can just come at somebody, and it doesn't feel like they're really human. So you can just say the nastiest things you want to say, not realizing that the person on the receiving end, is a human. I feel like that gets lost a lot when we're not having in-person interactions, but I'm going off on a, on the deep end there.
Laura: Oh, like I see that so much. I work mostly in the pediatric emergency department, so I see a lot of pediatric psych stuff right now. And that is exactly what's happening. It’s horrific because not only are they saying these horrible things, and of course they hurt, but the kids internalize them. They believe them.
Amanda: Right. Because they're children and they're not emotionally mature. And so they can't know that. I mean, we can do our best to teach them, but that's kind of how we all grew up with this fallacy of not becoming emotionally mature is because nobody's teaching us that, and it's so easy, and it's not reasonable to expect from, from a child who doesn't have a fully formed prefrontal cortex yet.
Anyway, so rounding it out with #10 sign of operating in emotional maturity is: a good sense of humor. And an emotionally mature person knows life cannot be taken too seriously. It's going to be messy. It just always has from the beginning of time. And I actually have a good example. Kendra, I’m gonna drag you into this. But Kendra is our medical director. She does a phenomenal job, and she has been advocating forever to get us a raise. And the other day she was like, “Well, I heard back, and we're gonna get a raise.” And I was like, “oh!” I was like, “oh, I'm excited!” Cuz in my mind, we are majorly undervalued. And the number she told me was so minuscule that at first…
Kendra: It was definitely what I was NOT advocating for, from the get go.
Amanda: At first, I was like, for about a split second, I was like, “dude, that is a throat punch,” but it was so absurd that, like, I immediately started cracking up. It was so wildly small of a raise.
Kendra: It actually helped me cope with it because I took it as a throat punch, basically.
Amanda: Yeah. And I'm sure she's imagining everybody being furious whenever she has to tell them. But. It just. I don't know. And in most, most things, I mean, if we're being honest, there's some element of absurdity to almost everything that's going on, especially lately. It's just absurd! I could think of like 8 billion things on my list of: this is crazy-absurd list right now. But that's so much better than feeling like you've got a constant throat punch happening to you, right? The truth is, about a sense of humor, is that it releases endorphins. It releases serotonin. That's your feel good hormone. And there's even some suggestion that there's anti-inflammatory effects, but being in emotional maturity means that you have control over that. If you want to think it's absurd, that's definitely an option because it's definitely absurd. Or you can choose to be angry, and do something about things, but that's all your choice.
It's not the circumstance that makes you feel something. It's your thoughts about it. And that's when you get to choose. So that rounds out our list of 10 things: 10 Signs of Emotional Maturity from americanbehavioralclinics.com. And let Kendra take us home.
Kendra: Yeah. So it definitely does take an emotionally mature person to think of the light side of things, especially when you either have been working on something for so long, or you've been persistent in trying to obtain a goal. You really can get down in the details or, kind of go in that vortex. And, when you actually have some sort of resolution to whatever you're trying to obtain, and it's not exactly what you plan for, and your colleagues start laughing. It is actually funny. It's actually pretty absurd. And the fact that it was so off target that that's all you can do sometimes is laugh because it really beats crying or cussing in the middle of the emergency department. So…
Amanda: We're talking like 1% to 10% of what was expected.nIt was just wildly funny.
Kendra: Yes. And so. It's all fun and games. We do experience many shenanigans in the emergency department, so it kind of goes with our line of work. But being approachable, believing in yourself, having that level of self confidence that you know what you know, and you know what you can do.
So thank you for listening today. We hope you've enjoyed this series on becoming emotionally mature, and until next time: you are whole, you are a gift to medicine and the work you do matters.
