111. Expert or Someone Selling Snake Oil?

A person selling "snake oil" is trying to get your money with a promise of a cure of a variety of problems (business, money, emotional care, mental health, etc.). These cure-alls for various ailments lack any real medicinal properties (Although they might give you a little information that makes it sound real). The person lacks business credentials or expert training in the topic. These fraudulent or ineffective products confuse the consumer who struggles to tell the difference between real help and the fake treatments. How do we tell the difference? 

And in this environment, how do we make sure people know we are not selling snake oil?

Transcript

111. Expert or Sake Oil?

How can we figure out what is the right information that's true and real on the internet and differentiate it from a snake oil salesperson? And how do you present yourself in your expertise without feeling like you're bragging or vain or overstepping others? We have a lot to unpack in this episode today all about how to become the Curator of Information. 

Welcome to the modern creative woman. I'm Doctor Amy Backos, your hostess here, and we are talking all about the art and science of creativity. I'm an author, a professor, a researcher, and I have 30 years of experience as an art therapist and a psychologist. The field of creativity, science, and art therapy is rich and abundant, and there is a preponderance of evidence about how you can use art to make your life the way you want it, to visualize, to explore problems, solve problems, and create an inner and outer experience that you've been craving. Let's get into this. Let's get this started. 

Have you ever struggled with talking about yourself and feeling uncomfortable that you might sound vain or ego driven? When you tell people about what you do or how you do it? If so, you are not alone. This is a problem that many women face and for a variety of reasons socially. Politically, we've been told to not brag, not speak up and behave in a humble way. I would like to counter that in a myriad of ways. There are ways that I definitely want to be humble. I want to be culturally humble. And I never want to assume that the way I was brought up and the way I live now is the right way. I also strive for scholarly humility. I recognize my scope of practice and expertise. And you don't hear me wandering into. Unrelated topics on the podcast. I'm sticking to the art and science of creativity in my work writing books or articles. I do research where you search and you search again, you research, you go revisit what you just looked at, and the idea is to make sure that I have explored many options, many possibilities, many authors, and many concepts. I feel it's very important to me to be well read in different cultures and belief systems, so that I don't suddenly have an idea and think it's mine and tell you it's mine, when in fact the idea has already been well researched. Scholarly humility shows up all the time when you hear experts make a comment like, well, the research shows, or to the best of our knowledge, there is a preponderance of evidence. Something else could be possible, but it's unlikely. Those are all statements that come from scholarly humility, and I find that the more education we have as we grow older, ideally we're getting more and more humble. We become aware of all of the things that we do not know about. We don't need to have an opinion on all of the things. When we don't know about all of the things, we can educate ourselves, we can think something, but we understand that there are things we will simply never know. I would like to know more about world history, but I'm not going to get a degree in that. I will not become an expert in world history now. Meanwhile, there are people without a degree in psychology or medicine or Somatics or some other related field saying with great powerful confidence that they can cure you of your anxiety and your past traumas. There are people who have taken workshops or got a certificate, which I think you get at the end of every workshop. You can have a certificate. They get a certificate in an art therapy class, and then they're claiming expertise that they are doing art therapy. Meanwhile, I'm working with art therapists who are into their 11th or 12th or more years of training of college and graduate school. And these are people who studied art and psychology in school. They are trained artists. They are experts on the interaction of psychology and art. Then they've gone on for a master's degree in art therapy. And then many some go on to get a doctorate in art therapy. I completed 13 years of college, plus two more years of supervision to be a psychologist and an art therapist. And still I really desperately strive to be scholarly, humble enough to understand that there are many ways that people can heal. Of course. Art sometimes talking movement like dance, spirituality, writing. If someone's struggling with anxiety and it manifests as an eating disorder, then food has to become healing. And so relating with that experience of sitting down for a meal requires a whole bunch of different ways of healing. I sent out an email for my Modern Creative Woman class for the month of June, and I got an email from a subscriber who gave me some really interesting feedback. And I love hearing from people. And I love when people email me and I always take the time to write a personal reply. And in their email they said that I really should cite the book called Your Brain on Art, since that was the title of my class that I needed to cite this book. So put a pin in that and let me work backwards a little bit. In the 1990s, I was first introduced to the brain scans of people and understanding what an MRI was and how people could observe brain functioning. So this research has been going on long before I was introduced to it. In graduate school, I studied neuropsychology in my doctoral program. That I took lots of classes, including dissection of brains. I studied psychological testing, both personality testing and cognitive testing. And when I graduated, I was hired to teach those classes. I was chair of graduate art therapy psychology departments at universities for master's and doctoral students. I already have three books under my belt. I have lots of articles. I serve as a dissertation member or dissertation chair for many students getting their doctorate. I serve as a peer reviewer on two professional journals. All of that to bring me to the conclusion that I hope you can also reach, is that I know how to cite the research. I've worked on NIH funded studies, I've conducted my own research, and I served as a researcher at the VA hospital. Here's what I'm not doing. I'm not teaching my membership from pop psychology books. This book, Your Brain on Art, is a very popular book. It sold a lot of copies. Here's another thing I'm not doing. I'm not writing my brain or yours. By presenting material that I find on ChatGPT. Rather, I use a global database of research, and I'm looking at original articles, and I review and present the findings, and they structure what I teach. I can tell you why a certain breathing technique will give you more relaxation than another, because I've read some of the evidence based, randomized controlled studies about the best way to breathe. I can tell you with great confidence about art therapy and PTSD, because I wrote a book of that title. Which leads me to this question. How can I convey that? I know the research. I know the art and the science in a way that is both humble and assertive. And perhaps you've had similar questions yourself about how you can speak up about what you know, where your area of expertise is. So my dear listeners, you are an expert and whatever it is that you are an expert in, and I am sure that you have had experiences where you find yourself face to face with a non-expert who's claiming that they are, or they want to give you advice. We saw in the news many doctors facing extreme hatred from people who watched YouTube videos about vaccines or about the pandemic. So people comparing their Google search with an expert. There are some of you listening who are business or financial experts, and you may find yourself getting business advice at a party from someone who's not certified, or maybe not even in that business. People have been confusing their Google search with your knowledge over and over again. Your knowledge, your degree, your license, your experience. Knitters are often told that their handmade object is too expensive by someone who does not know how to knit. They say, well, target sells sweaters at a fraction of the price that you're charging, and target does sell sweaters at about the cost of less than the yarn it takes to make a handmade sweater. You may be now subject to laws about biology and medical care from someone created by someone, not of your gender. You may find yourself getting parenting advice from people who don't have children, or whose kids are now adults, and they've long since forgotten the struggles of the first five years of raising your child. This episode, I hope, does not come off as a critique of people who hadn't experience and then decided to create and sell a program on social media to teach others. I understand that all kinds of ways of knowing are welcome in the world, and here's where it can get a little bit troublesome that there is such an ongoing stigma about mental health. And so many people are looking for these low stigma solutions to their distress. They might drink at night to avoid feeling bad, develop further problems doing that. They might want to just read a book by a chiropractor who's talking about trauma, or take a class from their neighbor instead of seeking out evidence based, tried and tested solutions to their problems. The shame that many people feel in lots of different cultures about going to see a therapist is huge. And so these quickly crafted classes available can be quite damaging if they're not healing, if they're not trauma focused, if they are asking someone to open up about their traumas without a good secure map, without understanding the factors that come into play around dissociation and retraumatizing people, it can lead to a lot of problems that person might feel it's. Not worth it to keep trying anymore because all of these classes aren't helping. I really do strive to be psychologically flexible, and that's the goal in acceptance and commitment therapy. I focus how I think and how I live my life. On this approach, to be flexible, to allow my mind to see all of the possible ideas available. All of the possible ways that I might respond and then choose one. I really work hard to not choose a repetitive, habitual poor response, and I see pretty clearly that our suffering internally comes from the way we're relating to our thoughts and our memories. And I see people who speak as though they have a cure and all the solutions. I also see people who are experts in one area, and then start expanding into advising us on our entire life. We all have a place where we can share our information. Where I get stuck and maybe you feel the same way, is that there is just no librarian to help us. For all of these programs and approaches, how can you possibly know? Here's another example. Psychology today is an online platform where therapists can list their services. And what's cool about it is. Psychology today will do the research to confirm that you have your. License. Your mental health license. You can't post there if you don't have a mental health license, like a marriage and family therapist, a psychologist social worker. And when you fill out your profile there, then people can search for therapy all around the United States and find a therapist who specializes in whatever kind of care they're looking for and in the state or area where they live. However, Psychology Today asks you questions about your area of expertise. And so I would check. I work with trauma, work with substance abuse. I focus my work on women, and there's a box for art therapy, which of course I checked. And then I realized anybody could check art therapy as one of their areas of focus. Psychology today is not researching that credential. So there's these systematic ways that expertise is not especially valued. We see it, of course, in social media. The person. Maybe claiming to have the biggest impact on your life. And we see it in Psychology Today where people are getting a little misinformation. If you're looking for art therapy and the credentials, don't say art therapist registered and board certified or art therapist associate, then they're not an art therapist. That lack of library filtering skills is a problem. But this email was so helpful to me because it made me think I need to do a better job telling people what I have to offer. This email that said, I better cite this popular psychology book. So I started looking at the book and it's not new information. It's kind of branching into a variation of neuro aesthetics. It's not new information, and it's not scientifically rigorous. It's a nice explanation of things. I bought the book and I bought the audiobook, and I'm having trouble getting past the beginning because I'm supposed to take a quiz to see how creative I am. I'm not disparaging the book, but I am needing to figure out a way to differentiate what I'm doing. I told you all the ways that I've learned psychology in art therapy, but I need to do a better job telling people what I offer so that my work is not confused with a pop psychology book. And I don't want people thinking what I'm teaching is just trendy. I imagine many of you have this same question about yourself how to differentiate yourself at your work, in your community, in business, online. How to speak in a way that demonstrates your expertise in a particular area. Our ability to do this impacts how much money you might be earning. Our ability to speak about what we do determines if you're in an office. A lot about promotion. I'm sharing all this because I think it's a problem women face, not only for ourselves to be a contributing member of the team, but also highlight what's special about the approach we bring. We all know that diverse teams make companies more money. We all know the research says having women on your teams, having people of color on your teams generates a more robust problem solving skill set. The team does better, the company makes more money. So when we're quiet about what we're bringing or our perspective, it costs not just you and your self-esteem. It costs the team and even the company. If you have a different idea than others on your team, you can be sometimes made to be quiet about it, or what I've seen happen many times and I've heard from many of you about is someone will hear your idea, bring it up later as their own. Maybe a boss will take your idea, or a little bit of time will pass and someone brings up the same concept and gets credit. The second part of this is who do we trust? I'm sure we've all worked with someone who spends half their time self-promoting while other people are doing the work, so we don't want to be that person either. I get dozens of ads in my LinkedIn messages, and they are offering me things that maybe I would be interested in a virtual assistant, someone to do something for me on social media. How would I know who to trust? I would have to do that research. I even started getting direct messages from people saying they could help me write my first book. So, you know, they're just emailing everyone they can think of. They they clearly didn't read my bio or my books. That's not someone I want to trust and hire. I did find someone that I was very curious about, and I've been looking at their website off and on for about three years, thinking maybe this is someone I want to hire. And for three years they've had in their website that they are the author of these two books and they both say pending coming soon, get on the email list and we'll let you know when it becomes available. I've gotten on the email list several times and these books have not appeared. Now it takes a couple of years to get a book from contract to publication, but most people write one book and then they write a second book. They don't partially write two books for years and years. So seeing this over time felt really disingenuous. And it made me not want to hire that person, even though what they offer looks pretty cool. It is disingenuous. I think we're also lacking trust because of so many social media, fake or bot accounts. They deliver propaganda disguised as coming from a friend or a follower. They get into conversations by throwing out the opposite opinion of things. The democracy of the internet is both incredible and helpful and extremely dangerous. Lately, I've been really appreciating what's available on social media because I can see live in person the millions of people across the United States who have been protesting and protests from around the world were able to see firsthand some of the atrocities that are happening. The downside of this democratization of putting information up is that we don't really know who is selling us cures or remedies or solutions to our problems, and who is trying to sell us a quote unquote class written by ChatGPT. It's the same old story of trying to figure out who is selling us snake oil. I've spoken here before about the paradox of intolerance. The core idea of the paradox of tolerance is that in a tolerant society, we have to be willing to not tolerate intolerance. And it really matters when someone's intolerance poses a threat to the foundations of our tolerance. And this is an idea that was originally attributed to Karl Popper. And Popper wrote that an unlimited tolerance of people being intolerant can lead to the destruction of our own tolerance. Politically, a society that is unconditionally tolerant can be essentially undermined by people who are intolerant. And it can lead to the suppression of the people who are more tolerant. And this isn't about censorship. And Popper didn't say that we should censor all these intolerant ideas. But he said that intolerant ideas need to be countered with rational arguments. But so many times, intolerance can resort to violence or seek to undermine the foundations of what's happening. It's a paradox because if we were completely open and accepting to all views, including those that are untrue or those that promote hatred, it creates this environment where these intolerant groups gain power and eliminate the ideas that are accepting and loving. In signing my book contract with my publisher, Jessica Kingsley. I signed an agreement about human creativity and authorship, and they have a very clear stance that their industry relies on. The creative talent, and AI generated content does not meet the requirements for authorship, given the need for human creativity and accountability. They're very clear that they're opposed to machine creativity. I'll talk about this more in future episodes. There is finally some research out about what happens to our brain when we begin using AI, and our ability to maintain the work of memory of it is very poor. So it does not give us creativity. It's a useful tool, but it is not human creativity. With research, we search again and again. We search again what we've studied. Someone that I trust recommended a book to me, and I read it cover to cover because I trusted their suggestion, and the book was so awkward and superficial, and I felt like it was a bit robotic. There was so little poetic nuance or phraseology in this book, which was about creativity, and there was almost no reference from the author. There was so little personal direction in the book. So I looked it up. And the publisher is actually a team of people who will make a book out of your ideas. Uh, that felt really frustrating to me when I think about the songs we love the best they're written by usually the band or a person said, or the person in the writing partner that there's a singular vision. The movies that we love are often written by one. They're made from a book, perhaps, or they're written and directed by one person. They have a singular vision that points us in the direction of a story of beauty. There are also teams of professional writers, and they will write pop songs as a team. The committee writes a song, and they'll even give the exact beat that makes people want to continue listening to it. There are movies written by committee, these big blockbuster movies that have a formula. They keep us coming back over and over. They are like junk food. We listen, we watch. But we are not satisfied. We are not moved. My goal is really to give you nourishing information and not give you junk food. I'm giving you my singular vision. But the foundation of my vision is 30 years as a therapist, as a psychologist, an art therapist. I have the credentials and the registration. I was reading a book recently that said, well, it's really better to seek help from someone who just went through an experience or a problem, because doctors don't really keep up on things and they don't really know. They don't have that personal experience. This felt like rationalizing a lack of experience. First, it assumes that doctors did not go through something that they're talking about were human beings. And it also forgets that to keep our license, we have to update our knowledge constantly. Let's go back to the paradox of tolerance, and let's go back to the idea that we need to speak up when these kinds of things happen. And I have a few ideas I would really love to hear from you. You can message me in the show notes. There's a button you can click. You can hit reply to my emails if you're on the email list. I really do want to hear a little bit more from all of you about your experiences. There are times when we may not want to speak up. We're at a family party and maybe we don't want to rock the boat. We just say, oh yeah, okay. While we're getting advice about something from a non-expert. That's an option. And I would never judge anyone who's unable or unwilling or uninterested in speaking up. I get how families go. But there are ways that we can speak up. I have a great example from my college roommate after college when Kathleen was pregnant. She was still going to the gym every day. She's a very healthy woman. It's one of her priorities. And she was on one of the machines and someone came over and said, should you be running while you're pregnant? And he talked to her for several minutes about how she should not be running while she was pregnant. And her response was, oh, are you a doctor? My doctor said it was okay, but I would love to have a second opinion from you. I thought that was a brilliant way to interrupt someone. Who? He admitted he's not a doctor. You just thought that it would be bad for her to do what she was doing, and he felt the need to come over and give her his advice. So I have a few ideas. We can complement someone's enthusiasm. There's ways that we can engage with someone. Say, oh, thank you for noticing I am having a baby. Yes, that's true, but then we can redirect people to the facts. In a business meeting, when someone takes over your idea, we can redirect. We can help each other out. I was at an incredible meeting where a woman shared a possible solution. And we were brainstorming. And then a man said the same thing and people said, oh, yeah, that's a good idea. And another woman spoke up and said, hey, that was that was her idea. First she just said that two minutes ago. Speaking up and looking out for one another is incredible. We can advocate for one another. If you are at work and someone speaks up for you, they're an ally or an advocate for you in your work. You can do that for other people. You don't have to have some kind of formal agreement. You can compliment someone's ideas, either in a meeting where they're present or when they're not present. It doesn't take away from your expertise to acknowledge the contributions of others. I've interviewed on this podcast, Mary Bridget. She had a huge influence on my work, and her fingerprint is all over what I do, and I want to give her credit for that. You can go back and listen to that interview. You can listen to an interview with my psychologist and doctor. Amy came on the podcast to talk about happiness. And my hope was that we destigmatize a little bit around mental health. You got to hear me have a chat with my therapist. It's not so scary. Having humility when it's necessary is important. We don't know everything. Being curious, asking questions, and getting clear on what's happening before we make any kind of assumptions or start brainstorming for solutions, is a great way to not only demonstrate the expertise of your team and yourself, it's a way to avoid pitfalls. If you're struggling with speaking up for yourself, there are things you can do about it. You can read some books about it. You can practice telling people about your work. You can ask a friend to listen to your elevator pitch. You can make a video recording of yourself talking about what you do and really practice. You might need a coach to help you with speaking. You might need a therapist to help you work on those emotions that come up when it's time to advocate for yourself. There are solutions to this. Let me tell you what I'm doing in an effort to make sure that I'm clear about what I'm offering. And not just presenting a pop psychology book. I recorded this podcast because if I'm experiencing this, I can imagine many, many other women are a lifetime of a career, having examples of not speaking up, of feeling insecure about it. I really wanted to do something. So I'm here sharing this idea, really hoping you will message me about your experience. And I'm going to do some video journaling about it. I already did pages and pages in my journal. I want to do a little video recording of myself not to share, but as a cathartic experience. And I saw this idea from the show Frankie and Grace, where Lily Tomlin sets up her phone and makes a little recording of herself talking through a problem when she's upset. And I thought that was genius. You have the pleasure of seeing yourself go through the process. You can look at it later and really listen to your ideas. So I'm going to do that. Maybe you will join me in these activities Next, I want you to really focus on being your own librarian and curator. Of course, looking to others for support and direction is really helpful when you're curating what kind of information you want. You can take book recommendations from friends. You can take a referral from a friend about their therapist. There's many ways you can gather information, but you are the curator of your experience. You get to decide, is this right for me or not? And you want to give yourself the proper, correct knowledge, not the easy, self satisfying knowledge, but something that will really nourish you. This concept makes sense with our health. We go see the doctor, we go to the gym, go to the grocery store. We spend time in nature. We make art. We do all the things that are good for our health. But we're the curator of this. There's nobody who can do it for us. There's nobody who can tell us exactly what to do. We consult. We don't just make stuff up. We question what we learned as kids about nutrition and mental health and family dynamics, and we choose how we do it. So really, being your own curator, of your creative experience, of your art, your health, your family is the best way for you to grow and change and develop who you are. When you're gathering new information. This brings this episode to a close, and I'm very curious what you think about this. I would love so much if you would share this episode with a woman who you think would relate to this idea, and I would definitely love it if you would shoot me an email and let me know what you think about all the ways of knowing, and how you can learn to curate, how you express your ways of knowing, and how you can curate what you're consuming. 

So now that you know, what will you create? You can find me on Instagram @DrAmyBackos and this podcast drops every Wednesday. I'm also live on Instagram every Friday at noon Pacific time with just a little bit of inspiration for you. If you want to take your learning and your creative growth to the next level, I would love for you to join us inside the modern creative woman. Each class packs a real punch. Over the course of every month, we focus on establishing your presence, your mindset, and your purpose so that you can let go of old strategies to solve problems and embrace new creative ones that are modern and fresh and really focused on women and this specific special needs and desires that we have. I think this program is so unique and special. It's evidence based and it's creative. It's fun. We make art, we do meditation. And I am teaching you the latest of what's happening in psychology. Join me over there. You can find the link in the show notes and I will see you in the next episode.