Friend #18 - Steve
A psych prof from the University of Toronto
Steve, thanks for your support. 52 Friends is now on Instagram.
Steve’s introduction to psychology course covers anxiety—how it works, and critical strategies for managing it.
“‘Everybody needs to know this,’ I thought, so I reached out to UFT and Coursera and created a course on managing mental health during the pandemic. It was Niel Young style and has had almost 200,000 participants,” he says.
“Our limbic system is responsible for our emotions,” Steve points out. Because we can’t see the virus, that part of our brain wanted to spend time with people, but the rational mind, which is controlled by our prefrontal cortex, knew there is a danger.
Steve has been teaching at UFT since 1995. He finished his post-doc at McMaster and started teaching just before he turned 30—an enviable accomplishment.
“Did you always know what you wanted to do?” I ask.
He explains that his father, who is originally from Holland, is extremely extroverted. “In Holland, he would get dressed up and go out for Carnival, and when he immigrated to Fredericton, he led parades in town. I always thought I was nothing like my father until I started teaching and realized that I loved being in front of a class.”
He goes on to tell me that he’s not great at small talk like dinner conversation and that perhaps it all has to do with how comfortable we feel in an environment or our role and references the Stanford prison experiment.
That leads us to discuss teaching during the pandemic. Steve admits that there is a certain level of craftsmanship in his profession and that maintaining a sense of humanity is important even with 1800 students. He says, “I had a student from Hong Kong come to me and share that he was so excited for the campus experience, and he had all these expectations based on things he had seen on T.V., but he ended up going to class in his bedroom.”
“I think many young people struggle with defining themselves; what is your advice there?” I ask Steve.
“If we look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the highest level on the pyramid is self-actualization,” he says. “People who have found their purpose and place in life, whether that be as an Albert Einstein or Mother Theresa, come off incredibly attractive.”
He remembers a student named Rudy who was studying neuroscience but who was an incredible horn player. Rudy began playing around Toronto, and as he defined himself as a horn player, Steve saw a change in him. He walked around with a certain level of swagger.
“I guess at that point, you see who dislikes you, and you need to be okay with that,” I add. “Is it true that if we look at our five closest friends, we can see who we are?”
“People are like mirrors,” says Steve. He clarifies by illustrating that someone can be objectively reasonable but not bring out the best in us and that some people pick the wrong mirrors.
Steve’s closest friends are the guys from his band. He can say anything around them, and they are low-maintenance friends. “I’m hesitant to make this joke,” says Steve. “But there are friends, friends that help us move, and friends that help us move bodies. Leo and Jay fall into that last category.”
A good friend is an active listener. “You’re modeling it by the way you ask questions,” he tells me. Active listening is a way of conversing that improves mutual understanding by listening and reflecting on what the other person has just said.
“If someone does something bad or mean to us, do we assume that’s them or the circumstance?” I ask Steve.
“That’s an interesting question,” he says and then references a quote by American psychologist B.F. Skinner which goes as follows, “I have to tell people that they are not responsible for their behavior. They’re not creating it; they’re not initiating anything. It’s all found somewhere else. That’s an awful lot to relinquish.”
We end our conversation by talking about motorcycles. “I have my license,” I tell Steve.
He and his wife are riding their motorcycles across Canada this summer. They’re starting at the eastern tip of Newfoundland and ending at the western tip of British Colombia.
“We don’t know if we’ll be able to do it, but we’ll try,” he says.
“Tell me whom you haunt and I’ll tell you who you are.”
―André Breton