Unveiling the Power of Everyday Bravery | Constance Scharff | 590

Peter Winick.

Let's talk about the intersection of thought leadership and primary research. In both cases, you're focused on questions that other people aren't asking, but they're questions that people should be asking and exploring. If academic training prepares you for the rigors of designing a research study, gathering data ethically, and then analyzing and reporting findings accurately, then the practice of thought leadership is very complementary. How will you get these questions and insights in front of your target audiences? What action do you want them to take? My guest today is Constance Scharff, the founder and principal investigator for Complementary and Indigenous Mental Health Research. And her research has literally taken her around the world framing questions, conducting research, and putting insights into the world. I'm Bill Sherman. This is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Let's begin. Welcome to the show, Constance.

Thank you for having me here.

So I want to begin with a level set question. You have a book that's coming out in the future around the topic of everyday bravery.

Yes.

I want to ask a very simple question to start. Can you define what everyday bravery is? And then as the journey, I want to talk about the research that's leading to the book and the work that you've done for a period of time. But first off, what is everyday bravery?

The definition has actually changed as the research has progressed. And so the last thing that will come out of the book is probably the very first chapter, which is the definition of everyday bravery. What I wanted to look at is the kind of courage, the kind of bravery that's not running into the burning building or,, you know, carrying a child out of a, you know, drowning situation or something like that. But what are the ways in which people act with courage as they are going through their lives? And it came from one of my mentors who said to me, he said, you're so brave. And I was like, well, I don't know what you're talking about. And it's because I've been sober for a long time. And he said to me, most people— in fact, in a week I'll celebrate 26 years. And so he said, people don't usually recover from addiction, which statistically is true. In my world, that's not true because that's who I work with. But statistically, that's true. And he said, and then people who do recover don't go on to become, you know, internationally renowned researchers and bestselling authors and award-winning authors and all the things that you do. And I was like, Oh, that's true. And so that got me thinking about courage because I saw— then I started to notice the people around me who maybe weren't able to get sober or who passed away or who were in very tragic situations but still had such dignity about how they approached that. So that's really where it, where it came from.

Okay. And so You have looked at this concept of everyday bravery from a research and intellectual curiosity perspective, but you're also trying to translate the findings and the research into something that's accessible to people, right?

Right. So I specifically have chosen to write public books, not as opposed to academic books. I don't write in academic jargon. I don't I will be on a paper, but I, I generally don't write academic papers as the first author. That's not my focus. My focus is writing books for the public because I want the public to have access to that information, particularly in the, in the United States where getting good mental health treatment is a challenge and it's a challenge to find good treatment where you are and that's affordable. So I write for, I write for the public. I also, I don't believe in the method of that the researcher can be completely divorced from the research, especially when you're doing research in social sciences or humanities. If I go out into the jungles of Ecuador where I was—

And we will get there metaphorically rather than on a plane right now. But yes.

Right, right. Yes, but, you know, it's disingenuous and frankly inappropriate for me to go and say, right, I'm going to take down my information and not interact with you. So I write very often from the perspective really of memoir of, okay, I went here and I went there and this is what happened and this is the— this is the interaction that I had. And then we back that up with the research, the real academic research that has been done and say, oh wait, what our experience was is actually backed up by these findings. I also find that it's really— it just frankly doesn't work to go into other cultures and try to do quantitative research. What percentage of people have a mental health disorder? That overlay of Western thought just gives you garbage results. So I go in the jungle and I'm like, okay, this is what it's like to be in the jungle, and this is the way these people see the world. And I'm fascinated by it, and I want you to be fascinated by it too.

So a couple observations. One, you're describing an intersection of what I would describe as the social sciences meets storytelling, right? Correct.

And correct, very much so.

Those stories elevated in a way that draws people in.

Absolutely.

And gets a taste of the experience.

Absolutely. Because I think some of the very early historical and anthropological research has been very damaging, not only to our academic perceptions of what anthropology is and what the human experience is, but also in terms of relationship building, building hierarchies. I don't find that very useful. And so I really want to say, hey, if you could go into the jungle and meet with these people, this is what we would learn together.

So let's talk about that. Let's talk about the journey in the research sense. Okay. And there's two sides of it. The journey that is both physical.

Sure.

And the travels, as well as the research question. I want to start with the research question before you pack your bags and we go off into the jungle.

Well, that is where the research starts, is with the research. Exactly.

Yeah, exactly. So let's start in the proper order before we get on, on the plane and off into the jungle. What's the origin of of the question. How did you come to what became a multi-year study for you? What flagged— what would— what prompted the question?

So when my mentor, you know, said to me, you're brave, I was like, well, that's nice. I mean, I— what I try to do with any, any compliment or criticism is I try it on for size. Does that feel like it fits? You know, because sometimes people are just mean.

But let's be clear, most people when they receive a compliment such as you're brave, don't immediately go, oh, and I need to be in the jungles of Ecuador next week, right? And not saying that you were, but there's a connective tissue between these two activities.

There is, because, you know, that's why I try things on. We don't see ourselves. This is just my life. Yeah, I, I, I lived in, in Kenya and India and I traveled in South America and the Middle East. That's just how I live. So that doesn't seem very exceptional to me in the same way that when my, you know, mentor said, well, being sober is brave, I'm like, it's not exceptional to me because that's just my life. Right. And so, but what triggered the research question was when someone I worked with actually died and, um, had not been able— did not die of addiction, but had not been able to get sober, and only for very brief periods. And when I spoke to her mother, her mother, right after her passing, her mother said to me, what did you love most about my daughter? And immediately my response was that she's brave. Because despite she had so many difficulties in life, and despite that, she kept trying and kept trying whatever her goals were, right? Not just with recovery, but all of her goals. She got knocked down, she got back up. And I thought, you know, there's so much stigma against mental illness. I work with a lot of veterans who have post-traumatic stress, with people, uh, with, uh, substance use problems. Behavioral health issues. And I thought, you know, so much stigma and we don't see the courage. We don't acknowledge it. Where else is there courage? And one of the things, because I travel so much, I've been— and I researched— my research began 15 years ago at the intersection of addiction and trauma. And as I was traveling to speak, I would do more research. I'd use that as an opportunity to go in the field. And I really started to see trauma related to climate change cropping up and to see what people were doing in relationship to that is really what got me— those two things are what got me interested in this research question because some people in some places have absolutely insurmountable problems and yet they show resilience. And I think going back to your original question, about what is bravery, I'm really coming to see that there's an essence of resiliency in there that I don't think is in standard definitions.

So let's stay here, for example, in resilience in terms of climate transformation and unmitigable adversity. So some of the Pacific atolls such as Tuvalu.

Yes.

For example, if you could perhaps explain that context as well as then where you've seen examples of this sort of bravery in your research.

Yeah. So I am fascinated by the Pacific Islands and the atolls and so forth and Kiribati and Tuvalu. You know, they're only a few feet above sea level at the highest points. And so they are going under. I mean, we are beyond a tipping point for those, for those places. Now, there are some organizations that are doing some tremendous work to try to protect what they can, particularly I've seen some work in the Marshall Islands. But what do you do if your island nation, your entire place where you live, your culture is going to literally be submerged? And with, uh, Tuvalu, New Zealand has said, we'll, we'll take you. But those Pacific Islands are in a tropical climate and the place where there's a lot of room in New Zealand is on the South Island where it is cold. It is like Scotland there. There's not, it's not a, you know, mystery why so many Scots moved there because it really is like Scotland. And so, you know, the Pacific Islanders like, well, how, how do we maintain our culture if you're going to move us to a place that has that kind of climate? And what was very interesting to me, to the second part of your question, is that the government of New Zealand expects them to become Kiwis. Well, but you'll just be one of us, right? That, that integration, that loss of cultural identity, which you see here in the United States, you see it in Canada. You will become us. We are the great melting pot. The Māori get it and they're like, let's have that conversation because The Māori understand in a very different way than the descendants of settlers what it's like to have your culture quashed by circumstance, by other people, and so forth. And so when I was in New Zealand at the beginning of this year, I got to see that and I got to have conversations with the Māori about what they're experiencing with their new government and then also you know, what they can do for other Pacific Islanders.

Thank you. So in short, could you summarize sort of the research journey and the travels? Yeah.

So I, I thought I was going to be a lot more academic than it ended up being. I thought I was going to go and do lots of interviews. And so I started off, funnily enough, in New York City because I thought that playwrights, writers in general, being a writer, but playwrights in particular are brave in that they create art that shows us the world in a particular way. They make statements. Hamilton would be a great example. Some things are just for fun. But what I ended up— what ended up happening is I went and I saw plays and talked to people and whatnot, but I went and I had lunch with some people that I lived with in India. And we talked about those experiences and how that has shaped us and changed us. I also, because plays generally happen at night, and I, so I had most of my days free, I went to the Stonewall Inn where Pride began. And I got to just sit there and see, because to be yourself, who the expression of who you are is incredible, especially understanding the adversity that the LGBTQ community had. Still has, but the very different adversity before Pride began. And I got to sit in that, in that bar, you know, and I got it. Like, if the police were poke, poke, poking you, that someone threw a brick and a riot started. And where that went— and that experience actually changed the whole research cycle for me, changed everywhere I went after that. And I realized that this was going to be about me meeting people and having experiences and having those observations. And so then I could know where to look for information.

And where did those travels take you?

So I ended up in England, Turkey, Romania, Ecuador, Australia, New Zealand, and of course, several locations in the United States.

So literally around the world.

Literally around the world. Yeah. Yeah. And I only— I only stopped because I have some real interesting research that I want to do in Africa. Probably in South Africa, potentially in Rwanda, possibly back to Kenya. I'm unsure of the stops. Definitely in South Africa. But I had to stop because it's a year of living bravely. At some point, you have to put a pause. And then this becomes part of the next research. But I'm absolutely fascinated by the Truth and Reconciliation work that happened both in South Africa post-apartheid and in Rwanda after the genocide there. How does that reconcile with definitions of bravery? But that'll be the next research tour.

And I hear in that sort of this peeling back the onion, because even like when you talk about the Reconciliation Committee in South Africa or after the genocide in Rwanda, those are exceptional events in some ways, certainly the genocide, right?

I mean, yes and no. I mean, they're exceptional as in thank goodness they don't happen every day. And that, that is what I mean, is yeah, but I don't think they are exceptional in the sense of they happen continually. There's the Armenian Genocide and there, and there is the Holocaust and there is this the, you know, so we, if we can dehumanize the other, then killing them is nothing, then they're chickens, right, for slaughter. And so what is, I do, I think it is a tragic flaw in the human condition that, you know, we have to overcome. So I don't, I unfortunately don't see it as really exceptional. I also don't see it as exceptional because it covers huge population. That thousands of people can get caught up in doing harm to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of others, either through actual action or just, I'm staying out of it.

If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. So it seems like with the research that you're talking about in Rwanda and South Africa, you're moving from an individual moment of everyday bravery to something that's larger. Am I understanding that correctly?

That's true, because there are so many examples of people who have ex— through those, through those, you know, metahexperiences, right? Experienced and showed individual bravery. Because what I wanna do is, is have us learn from each other what it is that we can do in our own lives to act bravely. How can we overcome the things that stop us? What are those fears or prejudices that cause our inaction? Or that cause us to succumb to victimization.

And it sounds like there's everyday bravery at the individual level, at the community level, and sometimes even at the national or international level, where depending on context and stressor, depending on sense of nation and identity, whether you're living in Tuvalu and looking and going, I have to pick up and move, literally, not just me, but my entire community, my entire country. What does that mean? There are layers to this.

There are huge layers, but it all comes from the individual's action. So as I look at—

because it's so individually experiential.

Exactly. So as I look at these meta layers, right, then we can distill that down. That's where the research comes in. Is we can distill that down and say, okay, well, what were individuals doing to make this happen? You're seeing this in many ways in Israel right now. When October 7th happened and people were killed and hostages were taken, if you look at the news coming out of Israel every day, the vast majority, overwhelming majority of Israelis are like, hostages, hostages, where are our hostages? That is a community. Whatever you think of everybody's motives aside, the factual information is that there is a cultural movement that says our hostages are important. We are a no man left behind society. So you see this happening all over the world, that Zelensky on the individual level did not leave Ukraine when he could have done so and just let the country go and let Russia have it. And that appeasement, he said, no, I am the president of this country and I am leading this, I am leading this nation. Those, whether it's on that cultural level or on the individual level, there is a lot to distill there, and it is multi-layered.

So we've talked about your desire to research and then translate to a popular audience. There's a lot of complexity here.

As— that's why I write books, not articles.

Totally understood. Right. But as the researcher, what do you hope someone comes away with at the end? What are you— what are you trying to achieve? What impact are you hoping to create through the research and the writing of the books?

I want your life to be better because against all odds, my life is better. And what I've learned in mental health research is that one of the greatest obstacles to improving your life, I don't even really like to call it recovery because a lot of the things that people go through and call mental health disorders are overly pathologized. They are human experiences. But here in this country, in the United States, we have come to think that anything that's not just blissed out all the time is a diagnosable disorder for which we need to take medication so that we're all in the zombie land of everything is good and everything is great. You know what? If your beloved parent dies, you are going to be devastated. That's called grief and it's normal. And if it doesn't go away in 3 days, you know, or a week or a month, that's also normal. Now, there is a point where it becomes problematic But, you know, a friend of an elderly friend of mine died a few months ago, and it was her birthday a few days ago. I texted her daughter and I said, I get it. Today's hard, right? That's normal. So I want people, first of all, to know that fluctuations in your emotional state and in your mental health are normal. But then I also want you to know that when there are really, you know, severe, you know, things that have happened, addiction, trauma, so on and so forth, that there is recovery. And most people don't believe that's true. You know, you hear in 12-step pro— programs, well, it's for the people who want it, not for the people who need it. BS. It's for everyone that can create a new story and live their life in a different way. And it's not as impossible as people think. And that's what I want us to know. The other thing I, I think is so important that I want people to know is that we are more similar than we are different. And going to these very remote populations, the window dressings of what they do is different, right? The rituals and, and so forth look very different. But the underlying ways that people address their mental health are very uniform, except in the West with the, with the push for pharmaceuticals. When you don't have pharmaceuticals, there's a very strong, very strong correlations between cultures.

Got it. And so You've spent a career now researching, translating, continuing with further questions. I want to give you a magic wand and let's look 10, 15 years in the future. Are you still writing and researching? And if so, What fuels you?

So I self-funded this research tour, and, uh, my financial planner is like, you're gonna run out of money, you can't do this. He said— and I said, no, no, you don't understand. People like me, we work until either we are literally die, or until there's some sort of, uh, dementia or, or physical disability that keeps us I have retirement. I was like, I'm not, I'm not working for retirement. That's, that's just not of interest to me. And fortunately, writing, as long as, you know, I can— and now even with, you know, voice to text, I, as long as my mouth works, I don't even need my fingers to work. I could have arthritis. So as long as my brain works, I can, I can keep doing this. My passion really is for the people who don't have a voice, who are ostracized in whatever way, for whatever reason. There's lots of that. I also— I'd love to work myself out of a job. I don't think that would happen, um, not in my lifetime. But I really want to continue to advocate that Western-style psychotherapy and mental health treatment is not the be-all end-all, and it is not appropriate for a lot of cultural groups.

I—

first of all, the DSM used to be a pamphlet. Now it's like, you know, a phone book. I mean, it's tremendously thick.

And to me, those of us who remember phone books, right?

Right. But for that, to me, that's over-pathologizing, right? All those things are not disorders. These are not all— I mean, a lot of it's just for coding. Right? Because in the United States, healthcare is a business. It is not, it is not a nonprofit, you know, everybody gets what they need. But I embarrassed myself once in South Africa. I was invited to speak at a hospital out in a township hospital, like outside of the, uh, outside of Cape Town. And, uh, they brought in everybody. I think that, I think the janitor was in the room. I mean, everybody came and they asked me to speak on best practices in addiction and trauma treatment. And I was like, great. And, you know, I got up there and I spoke and everybody applauded. And I left, you know, 15 minutes for questions. And the only other white person in the room, a psychiatrist, raised his hand. And I think this was a leftover— this is some time ago. I think this was a leftover from apartheid that, you know, the doctor from the United States came in to speak. And so they weren't going to question me. And he said, we don't have those resources. He said, we have 4 psychotherapists for this area, essentially a state. He said, we have 4 psychotherapists for this area and the area to the north that we also treat, none. And I thought, I just wasted everybody's time. Of course they don't have all this stuff. But I remembered living in Kenya and I said, y'all ever work with shamans? And then that opened everything up because then we could talk about the translation of these, the ideas behind these best practices, because what is talk therapy? It's a kind of storytelling. There's a whole lot of storytelling that goes on in mental health— mental health care. I'm using that term very, very broadly, not a clinical term that we would use in the United States. Very broad. There's a whole lot of that. And I had seen that as an undergraduate in Kenya that opened us up to resources that for that community. But it changed the entire focus of my research because I was like, I shoulda, coulda, you know, known going in this was not the information they needed. I worked at one of the most exclusive, most expensive addiction treatment facilities as their director of research in the world. That's not gonna translate to Township, South Africa. I was a fool. I was a fool. But I can acknowledge that I had a misstep. And say, okay, these are the resources I really can bring to you. And that's actually what I was doing in Ecuador is I'm talking to the shamans. They ask me, they're like, you know, do you want to talk to the shamans? I was like, of course I do. And he was like, you want to learn how to make ayahuasca? And the answer is yes. Not that I would use it in anything here in the United States. That's not appropriate. But the fact that he wanted to teach me Mm-hmm. It's about that interaction and that connection, and that's what I thrive on. So why would I ever want to give that up? You know, I mean, there might come a day that I'm not physically fit enough to go into the wilds of wherever, but I absolutely love these relationships and I want to keep doing it because it brings— it puts value on non-Western ways of viewing the world. And I think that's incredibly important.

I also want to underscore something that you said and implied, is an idea is not necessarily for every audience. Yes. And the application of ideas may be translated differently. And sometimes that's a humble lesson to learn in thought leadership, and it can sneak up on you again and again in all sorts of ways. And the example that you provided so generously of your experience in South Africa is one that I think crystallizes it in many ways, but is one that any time we're advocating and evangelizing an idea we have to remain grounded to our audience and say, this needs to be serving them, not me.

Yes, because human beings really are all equal. When I, when I go out into some places, I always say, please don't introduce me as the doctor who's writing a book. And invariably they introduce me as the doctor who's writing a book. And the power differential You know, it's night and day. It's wrong. I'm a human being. And where I get so much of my juice, so to speak, where people I find respect me, it is— I am very clear that I know a lot about this. So if you want to ask me about complementary and Indigenous ways of addressing mental health, particularly related to trauma, especially on a— with a global perspective and not of a particular, you know, ethnic group. I have something to share there. But if you say that I have a light switch that started sticking, I don't know. And then I bought the wrong light switch because I looked at it and it had— I got the one on, on, uh, uh, homedepot.com that, that looks like the light switch, but on the inside, evidently it has very different guts and there's all sorts of different kinds of guts. I don't know shit about that. I don't know what it means to be a Samburu and live in northern Kenya except from having lived beside them for the time that I was there. I don't know what it means to be a Māori, but when I got adopted into a Māori family and they're like, you're iwi now, and I'm like, because I, I want to engage in that human experience. And I have found that because I don't want anything from you, I want to be of service to you if I can be, and maybe I can't, or maybe it's not in the way that I think I can. You know, so when I was in the, when I was in Ecuador, in the Amazon, where I was really of service is I was speaking to the principal of the local school about how to, the community that I was staying with owns a lodge and a lot of people come to see birds. Parrots and all sorts of birds that I wasn't getting up at 5 o'clock in the morning to see a bird. That's just, that's not my jam. You know, if you like it, do it. And I was like, well, why don't you just ask the people who come to the lodge in their information that you send them out before they come? Why don't you say we need books from all, for all reading levels in English and Spanish? I was like, every single one of us. Is going to throw our favorite children's book into our bag and bring it for the children of the Amazon, right? I was like, this isn't— to me, this is a no-brainer. But that's what they needed. It doesn't matter what I need. Maybe, maybe I get useful research. Maybe I don't. Sometimes I go places and it's kind of a bust. I was supposed to— when I went to Romania, I was supposed to go on this big Jewish tour and see all these things. And I was leaving from Turkey to Romania, and at the airport in Istanbul, the guide that I had hired was like, yeah, can't do it. Everything's booked, prepaid. I'm there a certain amount of time. We ain't coming back, right? I pivoted to, it turned it out, it turned out to be so much more interesting what I ended up doing. But the point is sometimes things just go in the, in the toilet. When I, I was in Bali getting ready to, I had gone a few days early and I traveled around and it was fun and Bali's amazing. And, uh, then I was supposed to get down to, to work and I had a conference I was speaking at that they built the whole conference around my research and then I was gonna go into the bush and do some other stuff. COVID hit. I got a text, get out. I threw my things in a bag. Thank goodness I kind of stay packed. You know, things don't explode around my room. Threw my things in a bag. We got the last flight outta Bali before they closed the airport. I was in Tibet and it rained so hard. A landslide washed away a Chinese general. Chinese generals don't get washed away. Like, that's not a thing. So it doesn't— I don't know what my results are going to be. My question is, how can I be of service?

And I think that's a fantastic point to underscore here at the end of the conversation. Come from a mindset of service and thought leadership. And impact flows from it. Constance, I want to thank you for joining us today in this conversation. This has been fantastic.

I love to talk about this stuff. You know, I'm so— I just want— I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to go the places I've been and meet the people. People have been so generous with me, and I just love to share it with anyone I can. Thank you for having me.

Thank you. Okay, you've made it to the end of the episode. And that means you're probably someone deeply interested in thought leadership. Want to learn even more? Here are 3 recommendations. First, check out the back catalog of our podcast episodes. There are a lot of great conversations with people at the top of their game in thought leadership, as well as just starting out. Second, subscribe to our newsletter that talks about the business of thought leadership. And finally, feel free to reach out to me. My day job is helping people with big insights take them to scale through the practice of thought leadership. Maybe you're looking for strategy, or maybe you want to polish up your ideas or even create new products and offerings. I'd love to chat with you. Thanks for listening.