[LISA LEWIS] The Am I Ok? Podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith Fringes, the Holistic Counseling Podcast, and Beta Male Revolution, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/network. Welcome to the Am I Ok? Podcast, where you will discover that being highly sensitive is something to embrace and it’s actually a gift you bring to the world. We will learn together how to take ownership of your high sensitivity, so you can make positive changes in your life, in the lives of others, and it’s totally okay to feel this way. I’m your host, Lisa Lewis. I’m so glad you’re here for the journey. Welcome to the Am I Ok? Podcast with me Lisa Lewis, a podcast for highly sensitive people. This is episode six. To find out more about highly sensitive people. Visit my website www.amiokpodcast.com. Today is my first guest interview for my podcast and I’m so excited about my guest who is joining us today. Dr. Tracy Cooper is a leading thinker and advocate for highly sensitive people. He is a high sensation seeking highly sensitive man, a professor at Baker University, a researcher and author of three books: Thrive: The Highly Sensitive Person and Career, Thrill: The High Sensation Seeking Highly Sensitive Person, and Empowering the Sensitive Male Soul. He has given interviews for numerous podcasts and articles, including one for the New York times. He appeared in the 2015 documentary film Sensitive – The Untold Story, and founded an ongoing series of seminars for highly sensitive persons. Dr. Cooper is also an international consultant on high sensitivity certified by Dr. Elaine Aron. He lives in the Springfield, Missouri area with his wife, Lisa and one doting female Siamese cat. Welcome to the podcast Dr. Cooper. [DR. TRACY COOPER] Thank you, Lisa for inviting me. Happy to be here. [LISA] I just want to say that I’m so excited to have you here, especially as my first guest interview. And I just heard about you recently through Dr. Elaine Aron. I received her mailing list and I was looking through it and I saw your information about highly sensitive men and the highly sensitive career and the high sensation seeking sensitive person and I thought, what is this? This is incredible. It just like opened my eyes to a new world and I’m like, I have to find out more information about this. And I’m so excited to have you here. Well, [DR. TRACY] Well, thank you. Yes, I’m working at a number of different areas all at one time. [LISA] Yes, and I wish we had like two hours to do this interview and I know we don’t. So what I’d like to get started on and what really stood out for me because I don’t, I’ve never heard anyone who is doing research about highly sensitive men. And I wanted to start with that. Can you tell me, what does it mean to be a highly sensitive man? [DR. TRACY] Sure. So to be a highly sensitive man means that you experience life in a more intense way that you have a deep richness to your inner world, that you have a deep mind, and you think about things more, you process things in a more elaborate way, insight in the brain. The brains of highly sensitive people work in a little bit different way that leads to more elaborate processing of all stimulation in the environment. It also means that you probably are susceptible to overstimulation before people who are less sensitive. It also means that you’re probably high in empathy and that you have a broad emotional responsiveness. And it also means lastly that you have a sensitivity to subtleties that others usually overlook. So those four things together, or what we call the DOUS, the four core aspects of sensory processing sensitivity, the underlying personality trait that highly sensitive people usually inherit. [LISA] And I’m curious, if this is not too personal, I was wondering how did you learn about being a highly sensitive man? And was it was easy to accept that or did it take time? [DR. TRACY] That’s an interesting one. Yes, as a result of going through my doctoral program, I was introduced to Dr. Elaine Aron’s book, The Highly Sensitive Person, her very first book and a fellow student said, “You need to read this one. I think you’d be interested in it.” So I looked at it and I read some of it and it was not easy to accept. No, it wasn’t. Actually, I put it away for a few months because I didn’t feel like on the surface that that was me and it took some time and reflection. I re-read and read more deeply and thought about it more deeply and then I started to recognize that when I understand the four aspects of sensory processing sensitivity that yes, and did that with me, but it’s still took me sometime to kind of allow that in my life to then to come to an acceptance of that and to find a way to embody that in a way that was productive and generative and that felt authentic to me. [LISA] And Dr. Cooper, can you tell me about the gifts and the wounds of being a highly sensitive man? [DR. TRACY] Sure, sure. So being a highly sensitive man is quite a complex thing to learn to allow to accept and then to embrace in your life because you really do have to adapt your life to fit your own needs as a sensitive man. And we often come into conflict with the culture, which kind of espouses a different view of what masculinity is. And a lot of us that are highly sensitive men may not identify with that so well. I mean, the culture itself presents many challenges and it kind of demands things of us that we don’t necessarily identify with or wish to participate in. So one of the biggest challenges is learning to find a way to get along in the world in a way that really feels authentic to you as a highly sensitive man. And I’ve seen this expressed through many of the men that attend my seminars, their struggles, and sometimes it takes quite a while to, in a sense deprogram yourself and learn to simply be who you are, learn to naturally embrace who you are authentically. So that process is one that takes some time and it takes some self-awareness and it takes some learning about the trait, because since you’re processing sensitivity as a complex trait, it really is a complex trait and it takes some time and association to get to know. And the more that you get to know it, and the more that you get to know other people who are highly sensitive men, the more you can come to identify with it and find a way, find a context within which you can situate yourself. But once you do, there really are some gifts that are embedded within it, chiefly among them, we tend to be creative people by definition, since processing sensitivity really provides a greater openness to the environment in general. It means more, we’re more sensitive to everything in the environment. So in that sense, we pick up on those subtle cues. We have that higher empathy, which allows us to enter the experiences of other people. We have that broader emotional range. We have that depth of processing so we think about things for a longer period of time and in a more elaborate way, something that’s a perfect creative combination. So the gift of that is that we can come up with fantastic ideas. We make excellent planners, we make great leaders, and that’s one of the things that I talk about a lot in my seminars, is quiet leadership. So the idea that rather than espousing this notion of leadership in a traditional role, what kind of quieter leaders that work on building social capital that we can then call when we need to get something done? We can call on people that we have built these careful relationships with. So our ability to navigate the interpersonal waters is superior in some ways to less sensitive people because we have that higher empathy and we have this sort of broader range of possibilities. So there definitely are challenges that go with being a sensitive man and one of the other challenges is that we don’t tend to be very good at self-care. And that’s one of the most significant things that I emphasize is the need to have a very serious self-care practice. And it goes beyond any kind of trendy buzzwords about self-care and to the idea that we need to examine our perceptions so that we’re accurately proceeding to things that happened to us and the things that we associate with so that we’re thinking in a way that is accurate and that we’re not subscribing to issues like low self-esteem, low self-efficacy, helplessness. And those can all be real problems that can lead us to greater anxiety, depression, things that are non productive. One of the most important things we can do with self-care really is to look at the kind of environment that we position ourselves within. We really do better in positive supportive environments and we do far worse in negative unsupportive environments. And that doesn’t mean that it has to be positive 100% of the time, just on the average. If you’re in an environment that’s positive on the average, and that works for you, then that’s fine, but so many people are not. They put up with far more than they should and highly sensitive men very often will stay in situations far longer than they should when it comes to career, when it comes to relationships, when it comes to how to set up their lives. So becoming empowered in that sense is the way that we come to embrace the giftedness of the trait. [LISA] Oh, that’s wonderful. So many of the things that you said, I couldn’t even identify with myself as a highly sensitive woman. I work with men in therapy and some of them are highly sensitive and they don’t want to accept that and it’s more of a denial, but as I work with him over time, that there is a level of acceptance of it. And I think that is so important too, the self-care. And I was wondering if you could share more about what that self-care would look like. [DR. TRACY] So the self-care aspect is a huge one. And in fact, it’s so important that I’m doing an entire seminar. My third min-seminar coming up on May, the 15th is actually focused on self-care because it is such a crucial topic. And I’m also doing a general co-ed workshop on August the 21st, I believe that’s also focused on self-care. So everybody just very interested in self-care will have an opportunity to learn more. But fundamentally what it consists of is finding way to take care of our bodies, our physical bodies because we do have more sensitive bodies. We do process stimulation to a greater degree than do less sensitive people. So we need more sleep. We need more rest at times. It’s not uncommon for us to sleep longer than the average because our bodies need to repair themselves. The right diet is also very important and that means different things to different people, but finding the diet that really works for you, the way of eating that really works for you and keeps your energy level constant and stable is really important to experiment with. There’s not one particular way of eating that I’ll advocate for, but one that really works for you along with that is hydration. So many of us are dehydrated to a certain extent, and we don’t even know it because we’re not drinking enough water. So it’s just that fundamental thing of consuming enough water, enough liquids; is important to how we are able to function. But also within the self-care realm it has to do with the emotional realm. So we have to look at the way that we are perceiving stimulation and the things that happen to us and the things that happened for us. Are we able to process those in an accurate way? Are we looking at what kind of lens are we looking at that through? Are we biased in some way? So we need to be able to examine our own thinking and take it apart and use critical thinking to have standards that will allow us to weigh how we’re thinking about something that’s happened and determine whether this is a fair and accurate assessment and then be able to move on. But the other big thing about self-care, that’s super, super important for highly sensitive man and highly sensitive people is that the notion that we need to set and enforce effective boundaries. So many of us don’t have effective boundaries and so we tend to run into overstimulation so easily because we’ll let people overstimulate us at a time when we should know where there’s a boundary. And unfortunately, so much of the time, it’s a matter of having people cross those boundaries and then we wind up over stimulator. We wind up in a negative environment. We have to extricate ourselves out of it with the greatest of effort. And it would have been far easier if we just knew our boundaries were. But boundaries are a complex issue because you not only have to know where to set a boundary, but then you have to monitor it and enforce it and periodically revisit it. Because what may have been a boundary when you were 25, may not necessarily need to be the same boundary when you’re 35 or 55. So boundaries have to be enforced. They have to be negotiated and they have to be something that you revisit from time to time to make sure that your, the strategy that you have actually works for you. [LISA] I so agree with that. And that is, I think like a lifelong process. As you age and your boundaries change, and that’s what I work on with all of my clients is setting boundaries and even asking like, what is a boundary? What does that even look like? And being highly sensitive, I was wondering, and I find this for myself and I find this with clients is that there’s like a merging of like energy and not even knowing where that boundary is. I hear this time and time again, being like highly sensitive, maybe the other part of it too, is the empathy and the intuition is that when you walk into a room, like you can kind of read the room, whether there’s been an argument or there’s a joke, or there’s something that feels a little bit unsettling and there’s that sensitivity to that. Have you experienced that? Have you heard that from other people that are highly sensitive? [DR. TRACY] Right Lisa, I have, yes. I’m highly intuitive and empathetic myself. So I noticed this when I’m doing interviews and I’m actually working on a new study on creativity at the moment. So when I’m interviewing people, I very often am using that deep intuition to know what they’re saying and where it will lead to next. So this is kind of deep listening, combined with this intuition that tells me, or that kind of informs me quietly where this conversation is heading and trusting that it will lead somewhere are really efficient and productive. But yes, definitely highly sensitive men can be highly intuitive and getting in touch with that can be difficult for them and allowing that in their lives can be difficult because intuition is not normally necessarily thought of as a masculine thing. So learning to embrace that and allow that in your life is something that we have to come to associate with over time and learned its value. When we see its value and application, then we can trust the fact that it actually has a purpose to it. And that’s something that many people don’t understand or don’t really seem to have the big picture on when it comes to personality traits, particular to sensitivity, but all personality traits really just have two purposes. They evolved in ancestral times to serve the purposes of survival and reproduction. You know, they’re there to keep you safe and then to help perpetuate the species. So being sensitive to everything in the environment for us entails having the strong intuition, this high empathy, this ability to sense when something seems off; this ability to know how to solve a problem innately without necessarily having gone through a logical rational process from A to Z, but intuitively knowing how to get there, how to get things done. And that could be an extremely valuable skill to have, but also combining that with the development of the rational and the creative minds. Those three together, intuition, creative thinking, rational thinking, are extremely a powerful combo and we need to develop all three of those. [LISA] Yes, I so agree with that. And it’s so wonderful that you’re doing this work and this research is so important and that more people know about it because I think more people just feel like there’s something wrong with them. and it’s not so easily accepted in our culture, I think here in the United States. [DR. TRACY] Exactly. And that leads me to something I’d love to announce here. I’m working with Will Harper, who is the India award-winning director of Sensitive – The Untold Story, Sensitive in Love, and so many other documentaries that he’s worked on over the years. And he and I are partnering up to produce a new documentary film on highly sensitive men. So there you go. You’re the first to know. [LISA] Well, thank you for sharing that here with us. That’s wonderful. And I can’t wait to see that. I’ve watched the other documentaries and I highly recommend them to everybody. It’s so needed. So I’d like to just switch gears a little bit to staying with highly sensitive men and like what is it like to be in relationship with a highly sensitive man? [DR. TRACY] Yes, that’s an interesting question. And I thought about that one, how I might answer that because one of the things that I talk about also with highly sensitive men and in fact, highly sensitive people is we need to resist the urge to homogenize, to assume that we’re all alike. Because if we’re 20 to 30% of the population, that’s over a billion people. And if the trait is equally split between male and female, that means you got 500 million men that we’re talking about from different cultures all around the world. So it’s difficult to generalize and say that all highly sensitive men are one particular way or will behave any particular way in a relationship. But you can look to the core aspects of the trait; the depth of processing of the mind, so they have deep minds, they have good hearts. When you think about empathy, when you think about the emotional range, you think about the sensitivity of the subtleties, potentially that makes a really good mate, a really good partner, but it depends on the person. If the per person is what I would call unevolved, in other words, if they’re brand new to the trait, or if they suffer trauma and chaos in their background, they may be a challenging person to be with in a relationship for anyone. And it’s not necessarily a fact that highly sensitive people should be together in a relationship. Maybe that would be great, maybe it wouldn’t. It depends on how evolved each person is, but if you’ve got an evolved highly sensitive man, that could be a fantastic thing, but it also depends on your expectations as a partner. It depends on where you’re at in life and what you need from a partner, but they could be the best, really the best partner you could have just depending on what your expectations are, what your needs are and whether you really mesh together. But highly sensitive man in a relationship can have that deeper empathy. You can have that sensitivity, the subtle cues that less sensitive people will lack. When it comes to other areas, romantic areas, highly sensitive men are more attentive. They could potentially be much more attentive in the bedroom, which is kind of a plus, kind of a bonus. Highly sensitive men, maybe they see the bigger picture better, maybe they understand life in a different way. They’re not so focused on the here and now, but they see the larger picture because they do have that more elaborate processing of the mind. And they’re good at building relationships. So potentially that can be a wonderful thing as well. They’re concerned about the relationships. They want to have deep, meaningful relationships. So they tend to not be people who want to have those superficial ones. So if you’re a superficial person or if you’re an exploited person, then you want to avoid the highly sensitive man, because he’s looking for those deep connections and you really should be on board for that. [LISA] Yes. So it’s like every person should know themselves really well, so they know what type of person they would like to be with in a relationship. [DR. TRACY] Sure, absolutely. And in too often, highly sensitive people, highly sensitive men wind up unfortunately in the wrong relationships, they have the wrong careers and they have the wrong lives. And it takes that fumbling around and that sort of failure, that out of failure can bloom success and self-realization and insights that can help you to pick a better partner the next time. So knowing what you know can then go into subsequent relationships with much more clarity about who you need to have as a partner, if you’re going to have a partner at all. [LISA] That’s wonderful. Well, thank you for that information. And I’d like to switch gears now and talk about the high sensation seeking highly sensitive person. And what does that mean to be a high sensation seeking highly sensitive person? And where did you come up with that name? [DR. TRACY] That’s a mouthful. So it’s is the intersection of two trades. I mean highly sensitive people have an inherited natural, normally occurring neutral trait called sensory processing sensitivity and we know that’s an approximately 20, maybe 30% of the population, depending on which studies you’re looking at, but also within the highly sensitive population are about 30% of people who are also higher in another personality trait called sensation seeking. So that’s how that came about. High sensation seeking was developed by a clinical psychologist named Marvin Zuckerman in the late 1960s. And Elaine Aron was working on sensory processing sensitivity in the mid nineties. So sensation seeking has been around a bit longer than sensitivity, but it’s been known from the very start. So they’re very different traits. In fact, they’re diametrically opposed, and they seem counter-intuitive in that whereas sensitivity is about the depth of mind, the kind of a high empathy, emotional responsiveness. The overwhelmed is the more easily overwhelmed because we have a lower threshold for over arousal and the sensitivity to subtleties. Sensation-seeking is about thrill and adventure seeking like physical thrill and adventure seeking, but also three other aspects. And they are novelty and new experience seeking, so seeking new varied, novel, interesting experiences for the sake of having the experience such as travel for instance, to unusual places or interesting things. There’s also a boredom susceptibility. We tend to be bored more easily, more frequently and disinhibition. So sensitivity works through inhibition, in other words, pausing to think before we take an action. Sensation seeking works the opposite with disinhibition. In other words, rushing ahead, without thinking related to impulsivity, but not quite the same thing. So when the two intersect, and you have someone who is both high in sensation seeking and high in sensitivity, it’s quite a duality that really takes a lot of effort. In as much as it takes a lot of effort to be highly sensitive it takes almost twice as much effort to understand two different personality traits that you have and then how to mitigate those, or how to navigate those in a way that balances the both of them out without one dominating the other. And what usually happens with high sensation seeking sensitive is just sensation seeking tends to win out because it’s a very strong trait. They’re both strong traits, but sensation seeking tends to overrule the sensitive part and that tends to lead to easy burnout. It tends to lead to a lack of self-care, extreme lack of self-care in seeking that new novel and varied sensation. [LISA] Yes. And I was, as you were explaining this, I was thinking about that high sensation seeking and what was coming to my mind was like the person that really likes it to, needs that thrill like skydiving or likes roller coasters, or some kind of really like adrenaline flowing for that high sensation seeking. [DR. TRACY] Exactly. [LISA] So yes, is that right? Is that part of the trait too? [DR. TRACY] It’s how it works. Yes, sensation seeking works through the pleasure pathway in the brain. In other words, it’s a little hits of dopamine and adrenaline that you get when you do something that’s novel, new, or exciting. That could be physical thrills, it could be interpersonal thrills, seeking thrills through meeting people or going strange places, trying different foods. What have you, that’s novel for you? You get that little hit that’s like, “Oh, I feel good.” You get the hormone that makes you feel good, and then you want more of it. And that’s the kind of addictive quality to it, is that you seek new experiences that are better and better each time. And that can have a dark side to it as well, because it can lead you to addictions. It can lead you to legal, financial, personal consequences for exercising too much disinhibition and not thinking. So when you balance the two traits out the sensitivity there is as the cautionary instinct and then the sensations you can conserve as the less cautionary instinct. But it can work together really well and when you put the two together balanced out, you can have someone that’s really intensely creative and that also has that richness of the deep mind and the high empathy. So you can be a fantastic combination. [LISA] Yes. When those two are working succinctly, that’s beautiful. And how does the high sensation seeking highly sensitive person thrive? [DR. TRACY] So how do they thrive? It’s a long process of learning to understand both traits. And the more you understand about both traits, the more you understand how they express themselves and then you can understand how to allow those in your lives. And it explains so much in your life. So someone who is a high sensation seeking, higher sensitivity, so many of us tend to move from thing to thing. We’re not people who do really well on long-term projects. We tend to prefer short-term projects because of that board of susceptibility again. So that has to be a problem, but when you can balance it out, we move through these projects, very creative projects, and we gain so much experience from doing that, that we tend to be these broad generalists that have so much incredible breadth of experience and depth of experience. But we do have to learn how to actually complete projects that we start, because there are so many fascinating things going on that we could do that, you know everything is new and shiny to a certain extent, but we want to go do that because that seems like fun or that seems like a really interesting thing to do. But we have to learn to mitigate that to a certain extent, so we can actually set goals and achieve those goals. So that’s one of the challenges that we face to thriving. And of course, thriving as a sensitive person means that you understand your boundaries that you need to have, that you are able to take care of your physical body, you’re able to take care of your emotional health and that you’re able to keep up the movement so your body stays healthy and that you’re able to understand how both traits work and the potentiality is inherent in both. When you can do that, then you can really start to do things that will put you on a really incredible path. [LISA] Yes. Oh, wow. And this, and coming back to those boundaries again, how important they are to have boundaries, just your personal boundaries and personal like this, the personal boundary and professional boundaries, yes, I need to finish this project before I move on to something else and not getting distracted by that, like that new thing over there that, “Oh yes, I think I want to just let this go and go work on over there.” So really practicing those boundaries within yourself so that you have a sense of completion and accomplishment. [DR. TRACY] Exactly. Yes and developing a confidence in your abilities as a high sensation seeking HSP so that the sensitive part can take those deep dives into something really interesting because that’s what it’s really good at, those deep dives into research or into a project where it has time and space to think, and to reflect. Sensitivity is a trait that really requires time and space. And that’s an expensive thing to have because in our world, it’s all about fast solutions, efficiency. And our trade is an extensive caloric one, too, like extensive for the body, because we tire more easily. We intake more stimulation. The brain spends more time processing, so energetically it’s more taxing. Sensation-seeking is exhausting in and of itself, as you can imagine. But when you put the two together, it’s like being two people at once. So you really have to learn to mitigate that out and develop a very strong self-care practice so that you can keep yourself in balance because you can easily crash and burn many, many times. [LISA] Yes. And just with the convenience of everything at our fingertips we can have just about anything that we need so instantly whether it’s food or buying something online. We can just to have it delivered to our home. So I could see how that could play into both sides of this highly sensitive person and sensation seeking person. [DR. TRACY] Exactly. There’s so many more materials and resources available now that can help with mentoring to learn those skills, not only for things like boundary setting and self-care, but learning how to really tap into your creativity. Even if you don’t think you’re a creative person, learning what that means in a bigger sense that it doesn’t just mean artistic end product, but it means creating your life, being able to harness creativity in that way, that you’re able to reinvent yourself over and over and over and really being okay with that. There’s so many more resources that you’ve got people like me out there that are doing these wonderful seminars, where we bring people together in community where they’re able to share with each other sometimes for the very first time. A lot of these men have never met another highly sensitive man. So it’s a transformative experience for them to meet somebody that is like them more or less. And we have an international community of men that come from all over the world to meet. And it’s really quite an incredible experience for these men to share and to learn not only that they’re not alone, but that their experiences could be fairly similar in dealing with overwhelmed, dealing with the high empathy, dealing with the cultural stigmas around a hegemonic masculinity, and how to overcome that, how to mitigate that to a certain extent, how they’re able to navigate those waters. So mentoring, finding appropriate mentors can be really key throughout your life throughout the life course perspective. [LISA] Well, that is incredible, the work that you’re doing and it’s so much needed, and I’m so happy that you are providing this work for everyone in the world to learn more about this and really so they can learn more about themselves and help themselves so they can live the life that they want to live. [DR. TRACY] Exactly. Thank you so much. I took up this mantle of educator and it’s been an interesting one because all at once I’m a professor at a university, but I also do a lot of teaching with highly sensitive people. I mean, I work as a mentor and I guide people. So it seems to be education. That’s the path that I’m on and has organically formed for me, but it’s really been there my whole life and has been slowly building to that point. So I’ve definitely following, I think the propensities that I have in fulfilling the potential that I always felt I had. [LISA] Hmm. Yes. And that leads me to our next question about the highly sensitive person in career. Can you say more about that? [DR. TRACY] Sure, sure. There’s so much to say. It’s definitely a hard area that many people that are highly sensitive face tremendous difficulties with. And you can imagine when you have a lower threshold for over arousal, that the modern workplace can be extremely over arousing. It can be extremely overstimulating. So many people, as we said, don’t have effective self-care practices. They don’t have effective boundaries that they maintain, they enforce, or they negotiate over time. So the modern workplace can be extremely overstimulated. It can be hectic. And frankly is not necessarily populated by the nicest people. You don’t necessarily work for the nicest bosses or nicest leaders that are mentally healthy. Many of are pathological and torture people. So learning to navigate that world of career is a difficult one. You know, some people say that self-employment is really a good avenue for sensitive people. I tend to agree with that particularly nowadays, if we’re looking at this pandemic kind of waning to a certain extent. So many people have now had a chance to work from home and see how well that works for them. And I think it’s estimated, I heard recently that up to 40% of employers that allowed people to work from home or really were forced to allow people to work from home are going to do that long-term. So that’s a paradigm shift that we’re seeing in our society and our culture that there’s going to be more people working from home. And for me, that’s the perfect opportunity for a sensitive person that has ever wanted out of their horrible open office environment to work from home and have that quiet space to think, and to process and to work on things in the way that they need to in a way that really works for them. But also with regard to career, I want to say that highly sensitive people are not limited in any way. Your sensitivity can be employed in just about any career field. And in fact, we are in every career field. We can largely be lumped together in the helping professions. Many of us are educators, many of us are in healthcare, many of us are in counseling and guiding people and helping to heal people in different ways but also many of us are leaders. Many of us are thinkers and creatives. And there are many of us also that are, believe it or not engineers, military members, people who work in professions that you wouldn’t believe necessarily highly sensitive person would do. I was in the military myself. You would think, “Why would you go in the military?” But I was very young for one. I didn’t know myself very well. But it’s also a place where you can find a niche, where you can find autonomy, where you can find a way to navigate the working world. So there’s many opportunities for you as a sensitive person and the more yourself, the more self-aware you are, the more you understand what your needs are and then you can begin to adapt your life to those needs. Too many people do it the other way. They adapt their life to the needs of the working world and it really should be the other way around. You should really take the position that you’re going to build a life, you’re intentionally going to craft and create a life that works for you from the very start. If you do that, and that’s one of the things about having so many more people working in the field providing resources, is that if you can do that from a younger age, if you can start out with that in mind, you’re going to be far better off. If you’re not just chasing the dollar and position and prestige, you’re going to be far better off. You still may do fine if you’re self-employed or if you’re working from home. You may still make a fantastic quiet leader or you may be an extrovert. You know, 30% of highly sensitive people are also extroverted. And we can come across the same as any other extrovert, except that we may tire more easily than do other people and need to withdraw. Some people won’t understand that. They think you’re neurotic. But we can learn to navigate the world. And there are some fantastic opportunities. If we can come to this high degree of self-awareness, we can find and develop a career that will really work for us over time. But it is a lifelong process. And it’s something that you’re not going to find an easy answer to. And that’s something I always emphasize to highly sensitive people’s, “I don’t have an easy answer for you with regard to your career. It’s a journey you’re going to go on and if you’re a high sensation seeking, it’s going to be a harder journey, in fact, because you’re going to change more often than will just an HSP.” [LISA] Yes. I agree with that. And it is like a lifelong journey. What else I like about this trait is that you don’t have to feel like you’re stuck in like one job or one situation. There’s so much flexibility and adaptability. And also when other people see that and they have that realization too, like, “Oh, well, if I can’t change careers, yes, it maybe hard or it may take some time, but I can do it. I see other people do it.” I think this is one of the wonderful traits about being highly sensitive. [DR. TRACY] Yes. So many sensitive people don’t understand that their trait is really a positive and a strength. Too many of them only see the negative aspects, which are the overstimulation. Some people will never make it past that point of the overstimulation. So they never get access to the point of understanding about the deep processing. They never understand the high empathy. They never understand the emotional range or the sensitivity, the subtleties. They only focus on the overstimulation, but that could be largely mitigated and dealt with so that you could move on with life and you could manage that well enough that you can be extremely functional, even at the top end. I mean, some of the best creatives in the world are highly sensitive people. Some of the best performers are highly sensitive people. Some great historical figures are thought to be highly sensitive, like Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, for instance, highly sensitive people, most likely. And people today alive, there’s plenty of highly sensitive men, highly sensitive women. It’s ubiquitous in the culture. [LISA] It sure is. And the more people that talk about it, the more that it just normalizes it, and people are more accepting of it within themselves and within like even their family members. And when they recognize, or they understand like, “Oh, now I see what’s going on. Now I know why this family members like that.” It just makes it so much easier for everybody and then that, there’s that family discourse or friction going on that can slowly go away over time. [DR. TRACY] Sure. Yes, when you’re able to show the value of the trait, what you can do with the trait, and not simply explaining the trait itself, because so many people will subscribe to misunderstandings or they’ll just pass it off as something that’s not true. You know, even if you show them all the scientific studies enough, well over a peer review studies in the best scientific journals on the planet that have all more or less backed up the initial model from 1997 they’ll still sweep it aside and say all that doesn’t sound right. You know, let’s just sit with a wave of the hand. So I’m not necessarily a believer that you should tell everybody you’re highly sensitive. You should show them what that means. Put it into practice. Now, show them the function of the trait and how that is an advantage. And it doesn’t need to be an advantage in every situation. A lot of times we’re simply observing and gathering information, but there are those key times when we kick in and we show what this really allows us to do. For instance, maybe we have a fully formed plan that no one else has thought about, but we did because we process more deeply. We spend more time in reflection and we’re more creative people. So maybe we had a fully formed plan that we can drop out all of a sudden that nobody has even thought of. But it’s because we have that ability to think in a divergent way that really provides an advantage. And it’s an advantage on the whole, not in every situation. [LISA] Yes. And that’s such a beautiful way of just expressing the traits and how to apply it to your own life and just showing it to other people, not necessarily having to explain it. Because people may not even want to listen to how you want to explain it. Like showing actions has such a great effect on other people. [DR. TRACY] Absolutely. So many people are closed-minded and they’re just not going to listen. So when you reveal that you’re highly sensitive, you put yourself on the defensive automatically. And why would you put yourself in that situation? Because now you put yourself in a negative situation where you’re in conflict with other people who aren’t going to listen to you anyway, for the most part. So I advise people, you have no obligation to tell anyone you’re highly sensitive. You are far better off to show the function of the trait and how it applies to life and particularly in the positive and generative ways. They understand that. They’re not going to understand the science. They’re not going to understand you explaining it, or the various people that are, they don’t care about any of that. They want to know what does it allow you to do this any different. [LISA] Well, thank you for that. I feel so empowered now by what you shared with all of us today. I have one last question Dr. Cooper. What would you want a highly sensitive person to know? What’s like one thing you would want a highly sensitive person to know? [DR. TRACY] I want them to know that there’s nothing wrong with them. I want them to know that they’re not alone, that there’s a billion, other highly sensitive people on this planet and that we are gaining greater recognition in the society and the culture and that over time, I think that’s going to increase and we’re doing a good job on understanding how to mentor and educate highlight sensitive children and that we are going to improve the situation over time. It’s going to take a lot of effort, but there’s a lot of people working in this field and stay tuned because there’s a lot of interesting and very useful materials coming out and resources. And if you can join some of them so you can meet other highly sensitive people, it’s such an imperative thing to do, to get to know at least one other highly sensitive person, because you’re not alone. You’re totally not alone and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with you. You have a natural, normally occurring personality trait that was evolved to help you survive even in a modern world. So you’re in a marginally rare personality trait, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with you at all. You just need to come to know yourself better and you need to learn how to harness that and how to put that to work in the world. [LISA] Yes. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Cooper. I appreciate your time. I appreciate your knowledge and all of that you share today and I hope everyone out there who’s listening, whether you’re a highly sensitive or you know someone is please share this with them and have them join some kind of group or mentor so that they don’t feel that there’s something wrong with them and they feel that they are a part of, I think I really special trait that we need in this world. [DR. TRACY] Right. Absolutely. [LISA] Okay. Thank you again, Dr. Cooper, thank you for your time. [DR. TRACY] You’re welcome. [LISA] Thank you for listening today at Am I Okay? Podcast. If you are loving the show, please rate, review and subscribe to it on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you’d like to learn how to manage situations as a highly sensitive person, discover your unique gift as a highly sensitive person, and learn how to be comfortable in your own skin, I offer a free eight-week email course called Highly Sensitive People. Just go to amiokpodcast.com to sign up. In addition, I love hearing from my listeners, drop me an email to let me know what is on your mind. You can reach me at lisa@amiokpodcast.com. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want to professional, you should find one.