Feel Guilty Saying No? The Science Behind Why — And How to Break Free - with Psychologist Guy Winch, TED Speaker & Author

Cognitive reappraisal, we call it in colloquial terms, reframing. What it means is that you are reappraising something. You're rethinking something through. You're trying to reframe it. And reframe it means you're trying to get a different perspective on the same set of facts, to zoom out and see things from a different angle, to find a silver lining in a difficult situation, to find an opportunity in what would otherwise be a demoralizing situation. By finding. Finding those silver linings, those opportunities, by getting a different perspective, we are reevaluating that situation in terms that are more conducive and are more beneficial to us. Again, we are looking at the same thing. We're not looking at a different reality. We're just looking at the reality from a different vantage point that gives us more tools and more freedom. And so it's called cognitive reappraisal in the literature. That sounds complicated. We use reframing in day to day.

Hey, I'm Kwame Christian, and you are about to step into the world of Negotiate Anything, the number one one negotiation podcast in the world, where we teach you how to make difficult conversations easier while getting more of what you want in the process. Each episode is packed with practical tips and strategies from the experts. We delve into negotiation, conflict resolution, and leadership skills that are crucial in both business and in life. Whether you're closing a deal, managing a team, or navigating personal relationships, Negotiate Anything provides you with the tools you need need to succeed. Our conversations are real, relatable, and most importantly, rooted in practicality. So if you're ready to transform your conversations and elevate your negotiation skills, join me on Negotiate Anything. Subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you love to listen. Let's make every conversation a winning negotiation. Guy, thanks for joining us today.

Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure.

Yeah, it is our pleasure to have you, my friend. So how about you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

I'm a psychologist. I have a small private practice. I also am a speaker and an author. I have three TED talks. They have 40 million views. I think in aggregate, I have three books with the fourth on the way. They're in 30 different languages. And I like translating scientific findings into everyday, practical tools that people can use in their lives.

Incredible. And to the listener out there listening, make sure you read every book, check out every TED Talk. It's exceptional and a way I love the way that you frame that guy, because you really do a great job of taking what could be academic theory and making it practically actionable for people in a way that actually helps them to change their lives. And that's what we're going to talk about today, because I know a lot of folks out there are struggling with just even getting the confidence and overcoming the fear to have difficult conversations. And they might feel like, oh, there's something wrong with me. But I think when you understand what's happening psychologically, it normalizes it and then also gives you a path to a productive future. And so, Guy, how about we set the stage with a story, because I know the listeners love the stories. And then we'll get into how you can overcome these fears, have difficult conversations, and set boundaries effectively.

So just look off the top of my head. Here's a story of someone who was a C suite person in a company, and they were having a lot of problems with the founder. And they were supposed to be not obviously on equal footing, but on relatively equal footing. And they were very, very worried about bringing up any of their difficult differences that they had to talk about. Some difficult, maybe some not so difficult, but they were worried that their founder would be upset with them, fire them, it would sour the relationship in some way. And so they were very hesitant. And what I tried to explain to this person, that if you're trying to protect the relationship by not bringing things up when the relationship is already soured on your end because you have so many concerns or dissatisfactions or worries, then you're not doing the relationship service. You're just deepening your own resentment, your own feelings of frustrations, your own feelings of not being listened to. And you're not being listened to because you're not speaking up. So the moral of the story, and maybe not obvious in the story, but I will add this moral regardless, is that one of the main reasons we are so intimidated by doing this is that we tend to not do it well. We tend to not proceed well when we're having tricky conversations or potentially difficult conversations. And one of the reasons that happens is that we're so anxious about them, we're so worried about them, we're actually not taking the time to plan them. And I'm going to give one example. One of the first questions I ask people, and this befuddles too many people, but one of the first questions I ask is, okay, great, let's start working backwards. What is the result you want to accomplish from this conversation if you don't Know exactly what the result is that you're trying to accomplish. How can you possibly plan how to have a difficult conversation when you don't know where you're trying. Trying to go? So there are ways in which we can break down the steps of what we need to do. So they're much less intimidating because we've literally given thought to all these different things that worry us.

Oh, man, we're starting off hot. This is great. And I think what we're recognizing is that there is a distinction between thinking about something or overthinking or catastrophizing about something and actually preparing for that thing. Because essentially what you're suggesting is that you take the time that you would have spent worrying and translate it to a productive activity that actually moves you forward and helps you to accomplish your goal. Correct.

And the worry is actually a useful signal. I mean, most of our feelings are very useful signals when we have them. The worry is telling us, I'm worried about specific outcomes. Excellent. Which ones? And now let's try and figure out how you can avoid them. So it's not that the worry is. I mean, if you're just looping the worry and ruminating about it, you're not getting anywhere. But if you're actually saying, oh, I don't want this to happen, how do I phrase things? Or make sure this doesn't happen, Or I don't want that to happen, that's actually useful. And you can start to construct accordingly what the plan is of the approach.

Oh, this is good.

Okay.

So when you think about an identity, like who you are, it's often a function of what you do. We are what we do regularly. And so sometimes we mistake an identity. We give ourselves a negative identity based on our negative habits. So the negative mental habit which is moving us in an unproductive direction is the overthinking, the worrying, the catastrophizing. And so we say, oh, I'm afraid of difficult conversations. I'm a people pleaser, whatever negative label we happen to have on it. Instead of saying, what is it? What are the activities, the actions that I need to take in order to become the person I want to be and accomplish the goals that I want to accomplish. And then when you start doing those activities with regularity now, you start to create a new positive identity that moves you in the direction of what it is that you want to do.

It's an interesting thing with identity, in fact, because, yes, we are what we do in certain ways. But I've worked with many people for example, who consider themselves people pleasers or who consider themselves a little timid in certain confrontational situations, yet they go forth and they speak up, yet they go forth and they actually engage in these conversations. And my thought to them is that you are mislabeling yourself. Because our identity, the construct, it's less about who we are, it's more about who we think we are. And there is room when it comes to your identity to edit. You can't edit out facts, and you have to edit with facts in mind. But if you were very intimidated to have a conversation and then you had it, are you someone who's afraid of having conversations, or are you someone who can overcome fear and have them? And those different definitions will have a big impact on your motivation and your feelings of confidence when you get to the next difficult conversation. So you have to think about how you're defining yourself and whether that's serving you and whether it's entirely accurate or not too negatively skewed.

This is incredibly empowering, Guy, because I think for a lot of folks listening, they might say, I never even thought about the fact that I could edit who I am or how I think of myself. And I don't want to blow past this because I think this could be really pivotal for a lot of people. What are some signals that you have a negative label that is potentially a mislabel, that you could actually edit and change?

Well, people often make lists about their skill sets, their weaknesses, their strengths, those kinds of things. You want to look at how you're feeling in certain situations because your identity is determining that if you're approaching a conflict conversation, feeling very, very intimidated or worried or insecure or unconfident, that's different than approaching it feeling nervous. The nervous is appropriate. It's going to be a difficult conversation. The unconfident means you haven't planned, and it's not necessarily accurate. It's your state of mind in that moment. If you address it and then you say, all right, if I prepare, I can come with more confidence. If I follow steps A, B, C, D, then I will have a better outcome, and I'm capable of doing that. And especially you think back to those times where you did that and they were successful, then you start to define yourself a little more as somebody who can overcome, who can. Doesn't love it, but can do it well. And I've met many people who tell me that they've kind of gone through this work, and they say, like, I hate the situation, but I can be a boss. In it because I know how to get myself into that headspace. But they don't enjoy it, they don't love it, they don't crave it. They started from the point of intimidation and insecurity, but the confidence they built and the experiences they built allowed them to define themselves in much more useful and motivational terms.

I love this. And it goes back to what you were talking about when it comes to the signals, too, because we often misread the signals, as you said, because I know for me, I do a lot of public speaking, I have a lot of negotiations and everything. I still feel the nerves that I would have felt before. The somatic experience remains the same, but the way that I think about it has changed. So it sounds like we're sprinkling in a little bit of cognitive reappraisal in this approach as well.

There's absolutely cognitive reappraisal there. The cognitive reappraisal is at each data point, because each data point has to be cognitively reappraised, has to be reframed in a positive way. And to emphasize, again, because this is very important, you have to stay within the bounds of reality, of what's reasonable. You can't tell yourself you're something that you're not. You can tell yourself you're trying to be something that you might not be, or you're on your way there, but. But your unconscious mind is a great detector of bs and it will buck and it will, you know, object, and it will make you feel worse when you're trying to sell yourself on something that you're not. So you have to stay within what's real. You have to define it in a way that, yes, this actually depicts what my capacities are or what I've been able to do in the past, even if I'm not feeling it in the moment.

Guy, can you give us a quick definition of cognitive reappraisal?

Cognitive reappraisal, we call it, in colloquial terms, reframing. What it means is that you are revolution appraising something. You're rethinking something through. You're trying to reframe it. And reframe it means you're trying to get a different perspective on the same set of facts, to zoom out and see things from a different angle, to find a silver lining in a difficult situation, to find an opportunity in what would otherwise be a demoralizing situation. By finding those silver linings, those opportunities, by getting a different perspective, we are reevaluating that situation in terms that are More conducive and are more beneficial to us. Again, we are looking at the same thing, not looking at a different reality. We're just looking at the reality from a different vantage point that gives us more tools and more freedom. And so it's called cognitive reappraisal in the literature. That sounds complicated. We use reframing in day to day.

Perfect. So I want to take a quick shift to the fear of rejection, because this is the way that you've approached it in your literature and shared it in your books was actually very empowering to me because I think about my origin story. I was a people pleaser for the majority of my life until I discovered negotiation. And it was an incident on the playground where I wanted to be accessed. I was 6 years old and everybody on the playground said, no, I don't want to play with you. And so that's what put me on this journey, to be a people pleaser. So I was really popular. People looked and saw I was successful, but they didn't recognize those hidden compromises that I was making. And so negotiation kind of set me free. And I think that a lot of people don't fully understand, though, how legitimate the pain of rejection can be from a psychological sense. Can you help us to understand that from an evolutionary psychology sense so we can get an understanding of how it impacts us today?

Yeah, so I'm going to start actually with that. I'm going to start with the evolutionary sense. So we evolved as social animals, we evolved in small nomadic tribes over the millennia. And we're talking about millennia, right? So Homo sapiens sapiens, like our current brain and you know, has been around for about 100,000 years, maybe a little bit more and all of that. But we were in nomadic tribes. We could not survive without our tribe. That was a well known thing. And so if you got ostracized from the tribe, if you go rejected from the tribe, it's a death sentence, essentially. Now, rejection served as an early warning of that threat of being rejected from the tribe, because it starts with being rejected in small ways and then it accumulates to the whole tribe going, off you go. So it was an advantage for people who experience rejection as painful because they were more likely to pay attention and change their behavior. And over the millennia, the more you experience rejection as painful, the more likely you are to correct your behavior and literally survive to pass along your genes. Now, over thousands of years, that literally got wired into our brains, such as today in experiments, we find that if, when we do actual rejection experiments and People are actually rejected in those experiments. They will feel a lot of pain. Literally emotional pain that's very much mimicking physical pain. If you then say to the subjects, hey, you know what? That was just an experiment. The rejection wasn't real. Those were confederates of the experimenter, you would think the pain should go away. Oh, I got rejected, actually. No, I didn't. All is good. It doesn't go away. The pain remains. We are so hardwired to experience rejection that we will feel it even if it wasn't real. We will feel the sting of it. Even if the person who rejected us is somebody we have no interest in or no desire to be with, or somebody we actually despise. In some experiments, it still hurts. That is how hardwired we are to experience rejection as painful. However, if you don't know that, then you are going to interpret the pain you feel when you're rejected to mean all kinds of things. It does not. That is, I must be a loser. I must be very, very needy. Must be so amazing because look how painful it was when they rejected me. And those are all incorrect because there's a whole layer of that discomfort of that sting that's literally baked in and doesn't mean anything. Now, of course, some things do mean things, but that you start with a layer of sting and pain that is absolutely not related to you or to the person who rejected you, knowing that is really important because it allows you to then not give that too much attention.

Hello, my friends. Before we get back to today's episode, I want to ask you a question. Have you ever wondered how to elevate your team's negotiation game and how you can help the folks on your team have better, difficult conversations? At the American Negotiation Institute, we offer transformative keynotes and workshops tailored to empower professionals with top tier negotiation and conflict resolution skills. Whether it's a keynote for your next event or hands on training for your team, we've got you covered. Don't just negotiate. Master the arts with the American Negotiation Institute. Click the link in the description to find out more. Elevate, negotiate and succeed. Absolutely. And this is incredibly powerful because I don't want the listener out there listening to overlook this because it registers like a physical pain. And if I recall correctly, it's so tangible and real that if you give them an analgesic like Tylenol, it actually reduces the amount of pain that they experience. Is that right?

Very, you know, nice kind of studies that were done some time ago now, but where they wanted to show that the brain responds to emotional pain very similarly. Not exactly the same, but in a very similar way that it does to physical pain, because physical pain has an emotional distress layer attached to it that makes that physical pain worse. And so there's a lot of overlap. And they tried to show that by showing that they put people through rejection experiments, gave one half of them Tylenol. The other half was just told, it's a sugar pill. Well, they were all told sugar pills, but, you know, one of them was a sugar pill, the other was Tylenol. And the people who had Tylenol, unbeknownst to them, actually experience a little less sting in their rejection. This is not a suggestion to start downing Tylenol before negotiation by any means, because it was a cute little finding, but it wasn't meaningful enough. That's not the idea. Don't pack Tylenol on your dates is what I'm saying. But it's useful as a proof of concept.

Very good caveat. Very important. Yeah. And I think it just. It helps to validate how people have felt because we have the old adage, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never.

That's the wrong one.

Incorrect. Yeah, right. They certainly do. And so I think it's important to just normalize and accept the pain that we felt was real. It's not a signal of any type of undue fragility. It's just a sign of our humanity. Right. And that's an important thing to recognize. And then once we can feel that, then we can start to recognize what it really means. Because this ties together with what we were talking about before. Right. We can feel the fear. We can feel the nervousness. We can feel the pain of rejection. And now that we have this lens of psychology, we can accurately label what that is and then accept it, try to set it aside, and then think, okay, what does this actually mean? Because really, one of the most beautiful things about this revelation is that when we feel the pain of rejection, we take that personally. But now we can say, hey, listen, it is a number of other things that it could possibly be. Right. And this is really, really empowering.

Correct. And I think that people need to. I mean, part, again, of what makes people hold back is the fear of, oh, it might sting, and it might, but not because you did anything wrong. And so just come to acceptance that, you know, if you're going into a negotiation or if you're doing any kind of ask, then you might get rejected, and that will sting if it happens. But if you just Think of it as evolutionary sting and you don't take it too seriously. Then you know what I say to myself? Usually, by the way, depending on the rejection, like when I was writing for many years, I got plenty of rejections from writing. I would always assign myself how long I'm allowed to kind of feel the sting. You know, like, yeah, if it was a small thing, I'll give myself an hour to feel bad. If it was a big one, I'll give myself maybe a day. But after that, like, okay, move on.

Yeah. Oh, that's great. I am definitely going to use that. That's powerful. That is powerful. And now let's shift to setting boundaries. First of all, let's start off. When we talk about setting boundaries, what do we really mean? And then also, what is it that people often get wrong about it?

So setting boundaries is not about the other person. It's about you. It's about you protecting. I use this analogy, protecting your toes. Somebody is stepping on your toes and they're not realizing that they're stepping on your toes, but ouch, you keep doing it. So the boundary is. This is where my feet are. You may not step here. That's the general approach to what a boundary is. A boundary is letting the other person know when they are offending you, when they are in your space physically, mentally, socially, you know, and managerially in any kind of way that is actually inappropriate for you, painful for you, triggering for you in a reasonable way. Now, again, boundaries have to be reasonable. If you are oversensitive, you can still set a boundary, but you have to own that in setting the boundary. Look, I'm going to ask for this because I tend to be very oversensitive. I know I'm asking for a lot, but this is where my boundary is. So that's what boundary setting is. You are letting the other person know what to do or not to do. That is a violation of your personal space, physical space, you know, what have you. That's what setting boundaries is. What people get wrong is they think of it as a one step process. They think of it as you tell the other person, hey, when you do this, I find it really upsetting. Please don't do this. And then go, great. Boundaries set. So no, that is one step of many. The essence of boundaries is to teach the other person to respect where the boundary lies. They are not going to get that message immediately because most adults and certainly children will test a boundary. They're not sure. Are you serious? Are you just moody? Do you really mean that? So It'll be tested. The active ingredient in boundary setting is the maintaining of the boundary, not the setting of the boundary. The setting is not worth much if you're not maintaining it later on. Maintaining it means every time, and I'm using the word specifically every time. The boundary then gets violated. You have to point it out. You don't have to do it nasty, you don't have to do it angry. You don't have to do it, you know, with an attitude. You can just be like, oh, I'm so sorry. Just to remind you that that was the thing that I asked you not to do. Is that, okay, if we can move on from that? You do it nicely, but you do it consistently. Because we respond to, you know, reinforcement that's done consistently. If we're constantly getting the same message, we'll give it up. The same is true with kids. When they test boundaries, parents set the boundary, then the kid acts out, then they set the boundary again. But at some point, oh, they're tired. I'll let them do it this time. Or, you know, I already screamed at them earlier. I'm not going to do it again. Not. You have to scream at the child for that. You have to say it calmly. But the point is, like, when you don't set your boundary and maintain it consistently, the messaging you're giving to the other person is, keep trying. It's going to work once in a while, not the message you want to send, because that actually motivates them to keep trying to test where the boundary is and how solid it is. So the maintenance is the key ingredient. That's where all the effort actually goes in. And one last thing. I'll say, every conversation you have about boundaries, which is a difficult conversation, as in every other difficult conversation, requires planning and thought because you want to be respectful. You are telling something to someone that's difficult for them to hear. Nobody likes to hear, oh, you did something that violated a boundary, you immediately feel like, what? You get defensive, like, I didn't mean to do that. What do you mean talking about? You're saying something difficult. You have to say it kindly, respectfully, and clearly for them to be able to hear it rather than start getting defensive, which they might do kind of anyway. So that planning, that thought, and that respect are very much key ingredients, again, of any difficult conversation. But including boundary setting.

This is a paradigm shift, guy. And I'm realizing that perhaps one of the things that needs to happen is changing the way that we describe it. Because when you say setting boundaries, I think back to those cheesy infomercials. Set it and forget it. You know, you and the job is done. Right. It sounds like it should be something a little bit more active like planting boundaries. Because if something's planted, you realize, okay, I might need to maintain it. Or I'm not sure, but I think semantically people get lost because they say, okay, I should set the boundary. I did my job, I had the hard conversation one time, and then it's the other person's responsibility to then respect the boundary. And if they encroach on my boundaries again, it's a reflection of them being bad, not a reflection of me not asserting myself in teaching where my boundaries are.

Right, exactly right. In other words, I wish we could call it how to maintain boundaries, but that skips the setting part. And when you say how to set and maintain boundaries, it's a mouthful. And we like short things, so, you know, like short phrases. That's where it's at. So yes, you're absolutely right. I wish we found another way to describe it, to frame it, to title it so that people would get that the setting boundaries is only the first step and the more important one is the maintenance.

Yes, this is great. And I think one of the most powerful things about this is that it helps you to have a bit of a more stoic approach to it where you're controlling the things that are within your control. What can I do? When somebody encroaches on a boundary, I'm going to let them know, respectfully, empathetically, and I'm going to think through how I'm going to do that in an intentional type of way. And if they do it again, I will have to do it again. And as I hear the pitter patter of adorable footsteps and they're adorable because they're not my responsibility right now. I just think about my 3 year old. It's like we have to tell him every day, every day, every day. And parenting isn't just a one time thing. You have to keep on coming back. And I think we have to take that same mentality, hey, listen, we have to teach you how to respect me in these conversations in order for us to have a healthy relationship.

He said three year old, right? So hey, what a great practice ground for setting boundaries when you have a three year old because they do need them and they certainly need the maintenance. But you know, 30 year olds are not that much different than the 3 year olds, unfortunately. They too needed to be crisp, clear and maintained.

Amazing. And guy with the time that we have left. I want you to set the stage for the next book because this is really exciting. Every, every book that you, you write is well researched, well intentioned and incredibly practical and actionable. So let the listeners know what's coming down the hill.

So my next book, it will only be out in 2026, so that's next year. It's called mind over grind, how to break free when work hijacks your life. And this book is about the emotional science, you know, the science of emotional health that takes place in and around how we relate to work. The workplace right now has the highest levels of, of stress and of burnout symptoms than we've ever seen in the workplace. Literally peaking, as are things like bullying and harassment and bias and incivility. So the workplace is a very difficult place for many people right now. And it's a difficult place by the way, whether you are suffering in your job or whether you are enamored of your job. Because the level of engagement work requires is extremely, extremely high. That's why people are getting stressed out. Not just because they have a toxic, toxic work environment, but because they are just so overworking and because work invades your life in all kinds of different ways. Now the workplace isn't changing anytime soon. So the only thing we can control is ourselves and how we manage ourselves and our psychology and when we are under stress. And even if the stress is self induced, I'm in that category all the time and I'm self employed. I have no one to blame for the stress I put on myself for work. I say yes to too many things, whatever it is, I. But you know, it happens to all. And because the workplace isn't changing, there's one thing you need to know that when you're under significant stress and pressure, when the demands of your work are high, what happens is we tend to go on autopilot and then we tend to mismanage ourselves. Because when we are on autopilot, we are deferring to automatic coping mechanisms. Our attention span is limited. We can pay attention to the task we're doing. When we're doing that, our unconscious mind will take care of all the rest. And our unconscious mind does not have access to, to the prefrontal cortex in the sense of planning and consequences and a long term view. It is in charge just of the right now, providing you immediate relief, providing you with a quick solution for right now. And that turns out to be very self undermining in the workplace and it to be very self damaging in all kinds of ways. So this book is about how you need to know what's going on in your mind that's screwing you up and how to be more intentional to recharge, to be able to get back your autonomy and lower the stress. You can lower the grind because a big chunk of it is self induced. When we're under stress and work also takes over our relationships, there's studies that show that when you are burnt out, your non working spouse will start to develop symptoms of burnout. Because things transfer in that way. It takes over your identity. You don't have time to do the things that used to define you and make you feel like you and that were meaningful to you.

You.

It takes over your coping mechanisms. There's so many things that get hijacked when our work is so central to our lives which anyone who's interested in their career and it's true of everyone. So we need to know how to manage ourselves and how to manage our psychology when we are, you know, in a stressful work situation. And that's what this book is going to help you do. It's going to help you lower the grind and lower the stress by managing yourself more effectively.

Incredible. I think I feel like that is a book that we all need. I'm excited to read it myself. Guy. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it.

Very welcome. It was a pleasure to talk to you.

Amazing. Cool. Congratulations. You've just joined an elite club by listening to a full episode. You're now officially on the Negotiate Anything team. So welcome aboard. What most team members do is they subscribe to the podcast because that allows them to automatically get the latest episodes of the show. The best things in life lie on the other side of difficult conversations. Keep learning, keep practicing and keep getting better. Your relationships will improve, your career will soar and you'll have the confidence you need to get the most out of these crucial conversations. Again, thank you for joining the team. We're excited to have you and I will see you in the next episode. I'll catch you later.

I have a question. Please. I'm going to mix the two topics.

That you to want were talking about.

One of them was setting boundaries and.

The other one is about your new book. And I would like to know how.

To set boundaries at work because the fear that I feel or people might feel is okay. If I set a boundary, I might lose my job. So how can I set a boundary and feeling safe that I'm not losing my job. So when you're setting boundaries at work, you have to be very, very informed of the culture of where you work. There are some workplaces in which setting boundaries in certain ways is accepted, is normalized. And there are some workplaces in which any kind of pushback will get you in trouble. And you need to know your workplace and you need to know whether you have that freedom to indeed set certain boundaries. Where most people do actually have the freedom to set boundaries with work is outside of work, in the invasion of your privacy of your evenings and weekends, which is something I think the statistics are, that most people work eight extra hours outside of work, almost a full day of work per week, because of the emails they have to go through and the calls they have to take and they have to respond to this. And you know, all of the. And this is not the self induced rumination about work that you can add in lots of hours about. This is what the workplace is requiring of you. And people will often, you know, check their phone every 15 minutes to see if they have to respond to something. At work you can set certain boundaries in terms of I am going to check my emails but once in a year and for 15 minutes when it suits me so it doesn't ruin every other thing that I'm doing. And I don't have to explain why I couldn't answer an hour ago, because if I was getting a massage or being intimate with my spouse, it's none of your business what I was doing. You can just say I was unable to respond earlier. Here's the response now. So there are ways you can set boundaries, especially when it comes to outside of work hours and within the workplace. There are ways you can do it as well. And I talk about that in the book. But you have to be highly informed of culture because it's a high risk activity in certain places.

Oh, that's good. And now, Simone, you should feel empowered to set those boundaries with.

No, no, I usually don't need to, but this is something that I've been listening because I have listeners in my.

Podcast in Spanish and this is a frequent question.

I'm sorry.