Dr. Sam Alibrando on LA Talk Radio
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SH: Good morning everyone, welcome back to the show, today’s Thursday, January 5th, we’re back with you, Tory’s still out until next week and I’m joined once again by Leah Pelka, Hi Leah! (Hi Samski!) Good morning I always love when you come here because you’re so bright and happy all the time and that’s a good thing right?
LP: Thanks Samski! You know, I just thought about that this morning on the way in and I was like,
you know, getting up in the morning and driving here is probably like my favorite thing (Really?) It’s like my favorite way to wake up (so we’ll invite you a lot then) can’t even—no, it’s like my favorite way to wake up. I’m like I know Sam’s show’s gonna be amazing today. (Thank you Leah!)
SH: But no, it’s fun, that’s what I do—it’s like I get up in the morning and do radio, you know. (Follow your passion, just like we talked about yesterday). Exactly, you know, and that’s—we’re going to talk a lot about that too, about making our lives better today with our special guest Dr. Sam Alibrando, welcome to the show sir— (It’s great to be here.) Thank you for joining us. (You guys are having too much fun.) We’re having too much fun so we figured we’d bring you into the conversation, that would be really polite, right? He’s eager to talk, apparently a person who has a lot to say—thank you for joining us, (It’s great to be here.) Ah, you’re doctor of—what really? (Psychology.) Doctor of psychology, so this is something you—I guess this is something you—that’s what you do?
SA: Yes I’m one of those people, I do both clinical, so I see clients, right—but I also do organizational. So I also work with companies and organizations helping them with their leadership, emotional intelligence, team building—(So companies invest in that so their workers will be—) More and more they’re doing that because they’re starting to see that there’s a real true return on investment. Most of the problems that companies face often, are the “how are people getting along with each other and getting in the way of each other” and such, so getting people in the right place, hiring the right people, all those issues—the people stuff is what really makes organizations work. (Well, very cool and you work with individuals too.) Yes. (I see.) Right here in Pasadena.
SH: Really? We’ll talk about that and everything. How long have you been in psychology now?
SA: Oh gosh, I don’t want to date myself.
SH: Really, okay. So decades, right?
SA: I wrote my doctoral thesis on one of the first macs, let me just put it that way. (Wow.)
SH: So we’re talking early eighties is when you wrote it. (Yeah, yeah, well don’t say that. Now, you’re meddling . . . ) It’s okay, he looks like a young man to me. You look like you still have a lot of energy. (I’ve got energy.) A lot of life in you, so is there an area of psychology that you chose to focus on? (Well, my book is is in the area of emotional intelligence.) Ok. (And so that’s—I have a passion about that—which is how to relate to ourselves and relate to others better.) Right and I remember this term, wasn’t that coined like in the nineties when that book came out.
SA: In the mid-eighties. Originally it came out of academia, so the people at MIT. Originally intelligence was always seen as either being analytic skills—like math—and verbal skills. (Okay.) and in the eighties they began to see, no, we’re a little more complex than that and there’s one saying: It’s not how smart you are, it’s how you are smart.
SH: Okay. (I like it.)
SA: And so they came up with different areas of intelligence. (I see.) Spatial intelligence, common sense and one of the ones they came up with was what they called social intelligence and personal intelligence, and then they merged them into emotional intelligence. Which has been, how aware are you of yourself, how in control of yourself—how regulated you are—how well can you interact with other people and influence people, and then also how well do youunderstand other people. (Like empathy?) Empathy would be one of the key elements of emotional intelligence. (Wow and we’ll analyze that more, and everything, later.)
SH: You wrote the book The 3 Dimensions of Emotions: Finding the balance of power heart and mindfulness in all your relationships. When did you write the book? (About 30 years ago.) 30 years ago? And when was it published? (About three months ago.) Really, haha. You see, that’s why I don’t write books.
SA: I’ve been thinking about this model since my first graduate program, my first Masters and I’ve been working on it. I wrote a book in between called Follow the Yellow Brick Road: How to change for the better when life gives you it’s worst, and if we get to that I’ll tell you why—because the model I put in that book, I’ve been thinking about this model for three decades. (Wow.) And I’ve been working with it with clients, with businesses, and I wanted to write it down and get it down in a comprehensive way, in that’s what this book is. (So this is a result of all the years of work that you have done and things like that.) Yep.
SH: Okay so, wow, I’m really curious about this and everything
LP: I am too.
SH: So that’s why I want to build it up and everything.
SA: And it has great relevance to the first piece you did [on the show], the torture piece, which we’ll get to hopefully.
SH: Yes, yes, we’ll get to that. I mean, that was like—did you see the video? (No I didn’t.) Yeah it’s heartbreaking, because (Hearing about it is enough for me.) This is someone cowering in the corner and you know, in just, like, fear. (And that cruelty, right? How can human beings be so cruel?) Right? So maybe we’ll find out by reading your book and everything, and discussing it. So that’s that’s very interesting. Dr. Sam Alibrando sitting with us this morning. Where are you originally from, did you grow up here in LA?
SA: New Joisey. (New Joisey!) Philadelphia—New Jersey side of Philadelphia. (I see, what was your childhood like?) I grew up in an Italian-American family, and it was lower class and it was very colloquial. (Was it was a difficult being lower class?) It’s kind of—sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know, right? (Exactly, as a child.) But there’s always a feeling of “the other neighborhood,” right? Down the street—the richer neighborhood with the bigger houses, and you were in the little houses.
SH: Yeah, so you realized something’s going on, right?
LP: I agree with that, because, see, he told me he was Italian and my mom’s Italian and my mom grew up in that same kind of environment, really, and then we made a great deal of money through grocery stores like a lot Italians did, right? And my mom “moved us to Beverly,” you know what I mean, she “moved us on up.” But my mom was so ghetto, and I could tell between other people, because my momma was so ghetto she goes, “let me tell you sump’n!” and I could tell there was a big difference between my mother and other people and it wasn’t that I meant to be, but it’s so true, I think you’re right, my mom didn’t know, and doesn’t know she has those tendencies. But yeah it’s true.
SA: It gets burned into the limbic system. (Yeah, into the fabric.)
SH: Do you have any siblings? Did you grow up with brothers, sisters? (Yeah, we had a very small family. I only had three siblings, so there were four of us.) That’s a very small family for Italians.
SA: I had thirty first cousins on each side. so I had 60 first cousins. Oh my God. I could count mine on one or two hands, you know. I mean, my God. But this is good. I mean, did you like big families? I love it. To this day I like going to people’s houses and just sit down and the whole event happens in the kitchen. I love that, It just feels like home.
SH: It’s true, everything is around the food, right? And you know when I started noticing that?
When I was watching The Sopranos, you know, almost every scene is around food you know I’m thinking, it is true you know, and especially Mediterranean culture. You know, you’ll see that with Greeks and Turks, and everything else but it’s really interesting, you know, around the table that you mentioned that. And I think people communicate that way and stuff, so I think it’s a nice thing. I often think it’s not cool that families don’t eat together anymore, you know?
LP: Yeah, I feel like the reason I have a really good sense of self is because I spent a lot of time with my family, and I talk to them a lot. We’ve talked about a lot of vast things, I wasn’t afraid to speak in my home, and people weren’t afraid to tell me when I was wrong. And so it kind of makes you really prepared well for the world. So I think that that was a beautiful thing.
SA: So let me let me talk about this with the model, okay? So there’s three—I call it three dimensions of the relationship world, right? There’s three dimensions of the physical world—height and width and depth—and based on a lot of research I’ve done— if you want to learn about it you can read the book—but you have to trust me—but there’s— I call it the power dimension—this is the dimension that has to do with our own agency and how much we affect the world. Our competition, winning, getting things done, protecting ourselves— right?—that’s the power dimension. I call that Red. We have three primary colors right? Red, Yellow and Blue? Well, the three primary ways we relate to others. And then another is the heart dimension. And the heart dimension is the love dimension—it’s the togetherness, it’s the empathy, it’s the caring for other people and also need— our own needs for other people. And then the final is called the knowing dimension or the mindfulness dimension. This is a part of us that moves away and can observe things. It’s the scientific part. Now, we were just talking about family—that has a lot to do with—oh, the blue—the moving [toward others], the love— heart dimension I give blue, and the other one I give yellow—the mindfulness dimension or the moving away dimension, I call that yellow. I like colors because people remember colors and you can blend the colors.
LP: Primary, secondary, and tertiary.
SA: There you go, you got it, but when we’re talking about family, we’re talking about blue. Blue is converging you were saying earlier why can’t we all feel like we’re one. Well that’s the blue part of us that wants to be one. We’re pack animals, we group—we live together, we we can’t survive without each other, and we live in families, right? Right. And the more competitive part of us is the red dimension, and that’s the divergent. It’s us versus them it’s the me versus you, part of us. And each one of the dimensions can be positive. There’s something really important about our determination and wanting to get things done, and there’s something good about love and empathy, and there’s something good about stepping back and having self-control.
But when you were talking, back, about the torture—that was Red going bad. (Really!)
That’s Red without the other two—that’s the whole key here.
SH: That’s true, no balance there at all. There’s no balance.
SA: Right. So they had no compassion for this kid and they had no self-control. They had no Blue and they had no Yellow. They were all negative Red.
LP: I just have a hypothesis based on the things that you’ve said to me on what—your—with the dimensions of people. I often wonder, because I see my friends and I listen to their struggles for some reason my friends feel like they can talk to me about everything and they usually do and its really nice to hear, and I don’t mind it, but I’ve learned a lot of their pain stems from when they were a child. And it’s like they’re adults parading—they’re adults, but there just parading as one because they’re really inner children. And I feel like if they deal with those things that Redness tends to dull down some.
SA: Nice yes, very much so.
LP: And I feel like the empathy will increase some, but I feel like the more angry we see adults, it’s just things—they’ve been angry for so long, they’ve learned that. I feel like there’s almost even like a chemical response in their brain too, that would be—it’s like their first response because you know what I mean—I feel like we have control over those things if we really master ourselves starting first with us.
SA: Yes. I have a saying—a lot of the book has to do with managing difficult people, and my first three principles of managing a difficult person: the first principle in managing a difficult person is manage yourself first. (Right. Yeah.) The second principle is manage yourself first. Anybody want to guess what the third is?
SH: Well, let’s see! Manage yourself first!
LP: I just feel like self contrition and being honest with yourself about the terrible parts, or the difficult parts, or the painful parts are the things that people want to avoid, so they’ll do other things to mask it, aiding in those Red levels and then it causes, like the depression and problems that we see so often.
SA: That’s right, now you’re talking about my first book which is the Wizard of Oz book. The whole premise is that we don’t grow as adults in Kansas we only grow in Oz. And Oz is where we get tilted so anytime we have a feeling or something, that’s Oz. And most people, when they start to feel lonely, or scared, or empty, or angry—or whatever those emotions are—we often do something to get out of Oz. We try to get out of it. We’ll drink, we’ll smoke a joint, we’ll work too much, we’ll start a flight with our spouse. We’ll do something to get rid of those feelings, instead of mindfully—there’s the yellow—there’s scarecrow in this case, right, because the scarecrow represents the yellow, knowing. If we can go to that place where we can mindfully hold what we’re feeling—not act it out, but just observe it, feel it is not going to kill you—I tell people, I’ve never had anyone die from grief. Right. You know, you feel it and you heal it. But most of us don’t do that, most of us go into a reactive state and we’re going to react in one of three ways: we’re going to be in a fight mode, where we’re going to do this kind of crazy stuff, or we’re going to become doormats and acquiesce, which is the blue solution, or we’re going to detach which is unhealthy yellow, where you just kind of numb out you go offline.
LP: And see, I know of myself as a person, that I do all three of those just depending on what the stimulus is, (exactly) is how I react to it but I call mine the porcupine reflex, where it’s like I just feel like I’m protecting myself, so sometimes those harsh things come out because it’s my reflex to step away. So, it’s like I can even imagine that I mix the two of pushing someone away while hurting them so that I know that I can, because you know it’s one of those things where you’re trying to heal yourself and lick your own wounds, and sometimes they’re making it worse. (Yep.) So you know, I can totally—I love it.
SA: And I want to just make a note of couple of things you said. One is, because I I keep telling people this is not a personality theory. This is a behavioral description. It describes how we behaviorally move. Right. And I’m different with my wife than I am with an alpha male. I have a couple of good friends who are actors and they are very powerful, and I kind of get almost acquiescing around them. I go into the negative blue place—and with my wife I’ll go into another space. We will be different with our kids then we will be with our boss. If people are interested, on my website for the book they can take a free assessment. I don’t know if that’s okay to say this?
SH: Why not? Give the website.
SA: Here’s the website: power-heart-mindfulness.com
LP: That’s perfect. We’ll have to get that and post it with the picture as well, that we put on our social media so they can get to it easier.
SH: Yeah, that’s cool, but so you get to take an assessment test sort of thing?
SA: And when you take the assessment you have to specify, it’s regarding who? Because we’re going to be different in different situations.
SH: True, absolutely. Now when you talk about difficult people, what do you mean by difficult?
SA: That’s a great question. (I mean, it’s a perspective thing, right? I mean, if he’s not agreeable to me, he’s difficult.) Yeah, well, we’re on the same page here, When I work with new workshops and stuff, I’ll ask people, is 50 degrees hot or cold? You tell me, is 50 degrees hot or cold? (It depends.) It depends! If you’re in Chicago in February, it’s a heat wave. And if you’re in LA in July it’s freezing, right? What’s a difficult person? A difficult person is anyone who makes me into a difficult person. (Exactly, right?)
SH: Yeah and you were talking about anger, anger when you break it down is, when you’re not happy that things are not going your way, right? That’s what anger is. It’s like, you know, this is happening a certain way, I don’t believe it should happen this way, I believe it should happen another way—and I think that’s what leads to anger.
SA: I work in a clinical setting, I work with people who have a really hard time with anger—they don’t do the Red very well. And because they don’t do Red very well, they’re going to be detached Yellow, or they’re going to be, you know, kind of codependent Blue, or Green, if you may, right? And one of the things i do, as said, Look, I go, let’s go back to the first time you ever were angry and that was when you screamed after you were delivered. And that’s because we didn’t like it, so your statement is brilliant, that that our anger comes from things we don’t like, and so for people who don’t have a hard time with anger, I help them say what do you like about that and what don’t you like about that? And that begins to help them get in touch with what is really a necessary emotion. We need anger.
LP: No, it’s so true, you have to have the yin and yang of life. Happiness and anger have to coexist because you wouldn’t appreciate one without the other. But my thing is that I am somebody who doesn’t do well with the Red, and I know that about myself. Like I’ve dealt with that, and the reason is because I get angry immediately and I grew up with an Italian mother, like I said.
SA: And what was the other part?
LP: Native American. (And?) So it’s like—and Greek. (Well, you’re doomed.) I was! I know that. So I’m the type person, that I found the best technique for me—the only thing that works is me walking away, moving past the anger, accepting what’s happened, and then figuring out why it hurts me and then going and communicating why it hurts me.
SA: Okay, can I now use my model to just describe what you just said? (Sure!) So you’ll react in red. (Yes.) That’s your knee-jerk, that’s your limbic—you know limbic—the emotional brain reaction, ok? Red. So the beauty of the model is that it’s not what you’re doing that’s negative, it’s what you’re not doing that’s positive. I mean, what you just said, the coping mechanism you learned—and it’s a good one—is that you learned how to go to scarecrow. You learned how to go into the Yellow. You learned to go into the mindfulness. You step back, you think—I just stepped back from the mic—You step back, you think about it, you feel it and then when you connect with it you can go back in a regulated way and talk to them.
LP: Because I just don’t want to—the person I love, I don’t want to yell at them and hurt them, and I know I’m capable of that—and I know I’m really, like, Linda Blair good at it and I don’t want to be that kind of person to a person I love. Because you can’t take those things back, and you don’t need to make a person worse too, if you’re struggling. And the thing is, is like, you know, for me if I walk away and I can and I can logically look at and take the emotion out of it, and then give that communications that person—that’s the best thing I can give to them, but I find that if I don’t get that time and a person follows me and pushes me, I stay in the Red, and then I begin to—once I do calm down and they think, “Oh she’s calmed down, it’s great it’s wonderful”—but no, then I begin to detach because I learned—I learned that behavior, that’s a pattern with them that they won’t address it with me, they’re going to make me feel bad about it, and I start to detach. So, when Red doesn’t work anymore you go into Yellow reaction, which is detaching. Well, if I don’t get a chance to get to Blue, then eventually that Red stays there so long and there’s so much built-up that I have to just detach because it’s not healthy for me. (Yes, yes, yes—exactly.) And I have to continue to grow as a person because I’m still not done yet. And I don’t want to go—I don’t want to regress with someone I want to progress with someone.
SA: Unlike Sam and I, we’re both done.
SH: Let me ask you this, though, how does it help usunderstand ourselves better when you put things into these dimensions—into these colors?
SA: We, as in—what happens with your daughter, right, when there’s—let’s say she’s—how old is your daughter?
LP: I have two, I have a five-year-old and a six-year-old.
SA: So your five or six-year-old gets snubbed by one of the neighbor girls, and they call her a poopy-head or something. What do we do, as a parent—a good parent? A good parent will say, “Oh, that’s awful, I hate that when people say things like that.”
LP: Oh, I can’t say that to her, because I’m afraid that if I say that I hate that—I leaned down with her and I ask her how it makes her feel. I want to know what her feelings are.
SA: Okay, but my whole point is that, early on, we give our kids words for feelings. It’s very interesting, at the age of three or four we learn how to control our bowels and we learn how to control our emotions at the same time. That’s when the brain is starting to get into a place where it can start to regulate itself. And one of the key ways we do that is by giving words. When I can use a word, I can contain my emotions better. Oh, I’m sad—oh ok i’m mad. Oh, ok. And what this model does is it gives us words to describe what we’re doing and then it becomes a roadmap. So you go, “Oh, I’m negative Red, I’m reacting Red.” Well then, using the way—what I call working the triangle—you go, I either need to do some healthy Yellow right now or some healthy Blue, or some combination of both—and when I do that, I will then bring myself into balance, like you said. And that’s what you described, you go into the Yellow, you think about what you’re feeling, you calm down, and then you can go back in a more balanced, integrated way.
LP: And at that age right now with having children that are at that age, and what you’re describing, I totally agree because what I do—is my mom—what I didn’t like was I felt like she told me how I felt a lot of times growing up, so what I do now is I ask them, because I know they know the words hate, sad, happy—I say, how does that make you feel because they’re at the five- and six-year-old age. I want them to express their feelings, so that’s—
SA: I know, and—the tricky thing is they need us sometimes to label the word at least initially. But we can do that awful thing that parents can do, we project—we think what we think, we project onto them and I like the idea of sometimes giving them a choice. “Is that making you feel sad or mad? (Oh nice.)
SH: Yeah, helping them understand the words and the meaning, and so forth.
SH: That’s pretty cool. Because I feel like the hardest part of parenting is teaching your child how to navigate this whole system you’re talking about, because you want them to be emotionally intelligent when they get older.
SA: And emotional intelligence—the research is very clear emotionally intelligent people are the most successful people.
SH: Absolutely. So our guest is Dr. Sam Alibrando, the book is The 3 Dimensions of Emotions, and you have a website. Give the website again.
SA: www—(It’s not necessary to put the www anymore)—I guess not, (I’ll make life simpler for you~) Very good: power-heart-mindfulness.com
SH: And you’re gonna get all kinds of—you have an assessment there and get all kinds of information and stuff which sounds really cool. I want to go back a little bit though to you and what made you leave New Jersey? What got you out of there?
SA: Grad school. I went to grad school. It was near Chicago. So I got to live in Chicago for five or six years.
SH: Oh, I see, did you like that?
SA: It’s a great city. It’s a great city, and it’s colder than you know what. A witch’s you know what, for my J.D. Salinger fans out there.
SH: So we’re complaining about nothing here, right? It reaches 52, I’m like freezing.
SA: And then I came out here for my doctorate. And I ended up going to—living in Pasadena, because I did my internship—Fuller is a very, very world—internationally-renowned seminary, but they also have a school of psychology and I ran their outpatient clinics for a while. And that’s how I got interested in organizational consulting.
SH: And how did you get into psychology in the first place, what attracted you to it?
SA: It was inevitable.
SH: Really? (Yep.) So you were just like, into the mind, into behavior from the beginning?
SA: Well, I initially wanted to be a priest. Until puberty. And that was the end of that. (That makes sense.) I said, “What am I going to do, I can’t be a priest?”
SH: Discovered girls, there you go. Wow, so . . . Chicago, and then you moved here to do your master’s or your doctorate?
SA: My doctorate here, and then to Pasadena.
SH: But why did you choose LA, of all places?
SA: Well, you know what’s interesting is that when I was in Chicago I got accepted at Temple, which would have brought me back home, I got accepted at Northwestern which would have kept me right where I was, right—and I got accepted as place called Rosemead, and it was “Go west, young man.” Yeah, there’s an explorer in me, I think I have part gypsy in me.
LP: That’s okay, I think that everyone here does, which is what we all appreciate about one another. And that really, I think, forms, in some ways, the culture here. (Yeah, that’s really cool.) And I love that people come from all over the place, you know. Every corner of the world people come here. I’ve met so many ethnicities.
SA: My daughter just moved from Portland back to LA, and Portland’s, like, cool— right? Isn’t that the place you want to be when you’re young? And she says, I love LA because I see people who aren’t white here. Everyone’s white in Portland. And she says, i love the diversity here.
SH: No, it’s true—and people bring different cultures and different ideas, and different creativity. I think it’s great, you know, and when people wonder where’s the best place to live, I always say, well look where everybody’s moving to, you know—and this is where everybody’s coming.
LP: And what I like about LA is that it has such diverse communities, niche communities, because I love art, so it’s like, not only do I get to learn about new different people, but I get to learn about their art and their culture as well, so it’s so beautiful because it’s like you get an understanding and you get to taste the food and meet the people. It’s almost like living in little different portions of Europe sometimes, because it’s so cool.
SH: Yeah, you travel you know, almost.
LP: Yeah, because it’s a high population of Irish and Catholics and Italians back home, and I mean, can you think of any others?
SA: Well, you mentioned art, I have a friend who’s daughter is an artist—and she went to some of the best schools in Europe for art. And the vibe—the word is, LA is the place now. LA is the place for art.
LP: I mean, really and truly it is, like those are the best events to go to, like those are the only times I show up.
SH: Yeah and why wouldn’t it be, because it’s a city of creative people. Right? (Absolutely.) Yeah, so tell people how they can, if they want to, so how can a company benefit from your services? What would you do if you came in and you had a big company, and they had—what is it—why do they usually call you?
SA: Right now i’m using it one of two ways. I have a workshop on emotional intelligence for businesses Okay. So they take the assessment for work, in the context of work, and then I have them go through a whole day workshop on finding out where they need to work, what they need to work on—what dimension do they need to work on to bring themselves to the next level of emotional intelligence. So, I have an off-the-shelf workshop. And then I also use it for executive coaching. Along with other things it’s not the only model I use right now, but I’ll use it to help them see, okay, when your employee showed up late again you just checked out, you moved away, you dissociated—what do you need to do instead? What Red thing you may have to do or maybe some Blue thing may have to do—you may have to be empathizing with their kid is sick, or whatever. But helping them engage, in that case. So, I use it that way as well for executive coaching.
SH; Sounds very good. I mean, the thing is that I can really see where company would need to educate its people, because not everybody’s into self-help, and all that—but bottom line is, if the people function okay, then the company does well.
SA: And study after study shows that
LP: Oh, absolutely, and I think the way that you speak is not very, like, Dr. Phil and ominous. You’re very understanding, it’s very easy to understand your model, I think people can relate to it, and I think that most people want to learn about themselves, but don’t know where to start. So it’s like you’re not a threatening person, so it feels very nice and easy to talk to you and speak with you, so I know that that that really helps with the success rate of what you’re doing.
SA: You’re very empathic.
LP: You’re also a Gemini. No, I’m just kidding.
SH: So you have a consulting firm, tell us a little bit about your company.
SA: Well I work with anything that—I’m working with one company I think has five employees, and I work with another company that I think is—the division—the company itself is about eight billion dollars, and the division I’m in is about a billion so, the whole range—because people are people, and industries—you need to learn about their industry, but the people are still people. And so we we do work a lot with teams—executive teams, because most companies now are driven by teams it’s no longer the John Wayne follow me, one leader, the Lee Iacocca. It’s more being run and so the chief person is very often the facilitator of the team. And teams are made up of people and therefore you can run into problems if you don’t understand each other and don’t appreciate each other. It’s the model if you don’t do the Blue where you understand and empathize and accept other people, and you don’t do the Red where you can speak up for yourself, and you don’t do the Yellow, where you’re measured and you’re thoughtful. So we work with teams and helping them be more efficient, and we’ll go and do assessments, cultural assessments or other types of assessments, because most people won’t tell anybody else the troubles they’re having, except at the water cooler, with their peers. But they don’t usually talk about up-lines, so we go in and we do extensive interviews with everyone. And they’ll talk to us.
SH: So they sit in teams and they talk about the problem?
SA: Yeah, and they’ll talk to us in a way that they won’t talk to up line. They’re not going to tell their boss that, “you don’t treat me very well,” but they’ll tell me that the boss doesn’t treat me—and if five other people say the same thing, i can give that boss feedback. I go, “you’re going to be a lot more effective if you treat people better.”
SH: That’s true, yeah. So you come in as, like, the third-party and you’re able to objectively look and see what’s going on.
SA: And if they hired me as an employee, that would end.
LP: If they hired you as an employee, they can just kill human resources entirely. You know what I mean? Like, think about that budget cut, guys.
SA: I don’t feel like doing payroll, but yeah.
LP: No, they can just cut it because then then they’ll learn how to coexist as people and they won’t need them anymore, you know what I mean?
SH: Wow, so and what’s the name of your company?
SA: I call it APC. I actually work for myself, and I also work for another company in Beverly Hills, and that’s called the Impact Group. And mine is APC—Alibrando Psychological Consulting.
SH: Okay, and people can find more about that on your website as well, right? They can contact you and stuff there. Are you on social media, do you find a need to be on there?
SA: Yeah, you know what, I am now a crazy Twitter guy. (Really? Nice!) I’m up to 3,000-plus followers, which is—
LP: I will follow you today so you can have 3001-plus followers.
SH: Dr. Sam Alibrando, final words—is there anything else we didn’t cover that you want to let us know about the three-dimensions? The book, by the way, is The 3 Dimensions of Emotions, and you can get it—can they get it only on the website? Do you have it elsewhere?
SA: It’s at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and there are some retail stores that have it as well.
SH: Except there’s no retail stores left out there, right, as we were talking about.
SA: We just talked about that didn’t we?
SH: It’s terrible, and the thing is that you just go out there, you want to go to a bookstore, there’s no bookstore, there’s only one or two left.
LP: But they have the Kindle for that, so it’s like—
SH: I know, but, you know what? It’s not the same.
LP: It’s not, I love turning pages and, like, dog-earing them, and having them for reference.
SH: Yeah, and being able to put them on the shelf when you’re done.
LP: Right! For reference.
SH: My book shelves are full of books, what am I going to do with a Kindle, right? And that’s one thing—
SA: On the other side, though, in my little thing over here you can carry a lot of books. (Exactly.) I can carry my whole library in there.
SH: I have one, but . . . (So each has its uses, you know?) There you go but if you want a book to sit back and enjoy, i think a real book is still there, you know~ (Like a fireplace kind of situation.) So, that’s why, when I go to retail bookstore, I still try to buy something there so they’ll stay alive.
LP: Well I have a rule, i read it first on my—even though, mostly, I get from Amazon~ I read on my Nook first, if I love the book, like The Count of Monte Christo, one of my favorites, I keep the classics, but like, I’ll buy it THEN. Then, I’ll re-buy it, saying I co-sign to this and I really believe in this and I want to put in my shelf, it’s so amazing, that I want to visually have it. If have a friend who’s struggling, I can pass it on, that’s just that Native American in me—
SH: You can do both, who cares, right? Yeah, there’s a use for everything. Yeah, there you go. So, and also you do personal stuff? I mean, if people want to come to learn the model one-on-one, do you do that as well?
SA: Yeah, I do coaching. It depends on the context. There may be more clinical or maybe more life coaching, and certainly business coaching.
SH: Sounds very good.
SA: And another thing in terms of having things in people’s hands, if they go to the same website, there’s a graphic I call the the relationship circle and it’s a really nice graphic showing the the positives of all three and the negatives of all three dimensions. And they can kind of use it to say ah, yeah I’m really being Red right now and then you look at the positive: should I be doing this.
SH: Right, see, that would be good if you have like a visual representation of it.
SA: Exactly, it helps. To see all the different representations of it. To see the different extremes. That’s why I call it a roadmap, it like that kind of tells you where you can go.
SH: That’s true, yeah, like to see the extremes on each dimension.
SA: Do we have a second ? Yeah. So, my wife is upset about something. (What is that?) I can’t tell you that. (He’s sorry, he’s sorry, I promise.) And my first reaction is to be defensive—(right)—as a male I’m gonna go into my Red and my—I call it Orange. (Right) And what’s missing when I go into Orange, what’s missing? Blue—empathy, listening—and I’m starting to learn to listen to what she’s feeling, reflect her feelings back, she feels understood and the whole thing changes. But my reaction is always to be defensive I’m a male.
SH: So I think—I learned a lot today. So thank you for coming in Dr. Sam, and everybody go get the book. The website, one more time?
SA: Power—no www—power-heart-mindfulness.com
SH: There you go, and you guys can’t go wrong with that—Leah, thank you so much. (Thanks for having me Samski—) And Sam, all the best to you—(Thank you.) We wish you a lot of success. Any more books in you, do you think?
SA: Ah, not if I want to stay married.
LP: Are you sitting on any that—since you were sitting on that one for 30 years, are you sitting on any that could possibly—
SA: I’m actually sitting on a couple.
SH: Okay, so it’s fair, so maybe so, then?
SA: I’d like to write The 3 Dimensions for Parenting, The 3 Dimensions for Leadership—I would love to do that—
LP: It’s like Chicken Soup for the Soul, but like, three dimensionally.
SA: Exactly.
SH: Yeah. Nice, sounds good if you can find the time, go ahead and do it. Alright everybody, thank you all for listening, and we’ll see you tomorrow.
You’re listening to Sam in the Morning with Tory, only on LA Talk Radio.