Not just someone who asks how you’re feeling but also who gets you to look at the bigger picture. Talking to the right people can help broaden your perspective, Kross notes. Think about how what you’re dealing with compares with other experiences you managed effectively in the past zooms you out and renews confidence.

Keeping a log of your thoughts and feelings in the moment is another way to zoom out and enlarge your perspective.

When you think about how you will feel about the situation a week from now, a month from now, a year from now, that mental exercise makes it clear-as awful as this situation is-it will fade with time.” “If you have chatter about a presentation to colleagues,” Kross said, “think about how it’s going to feel in an hour after you’re done. When you’re immersed in a situation, it’s all-consuming, and you think it’s always going to be this way, forgetting everything’s impermanent. Thinking about how you’re going to feel about a problem down the road reminds you of the impermanence of the moment. It’s a piece of cake,” gives you the emotional distance to address the issue. Saying something like, “Bryan, you can do this. Think of what you’d say to a close friend, and use your name to give advice. When you refer to yourself with words typically used to talk to other people, it switches your perspective. But when they’re struggling, they suffer enormously. Many people find it easy to give friends and loved ones advice.

Kross has shown in experiments that when you use your name in the second person pronoun to coach yourself through a problem, it improves your performance.

Ethan chatter