For all of us trying to stay calm in aisle seven.

I’m endlessly intrigued by the moments when people and systems collide in everyday life.

Like the three seconds in a grocery store when a stranger notices a caregiver and child having a hard time. Or the moment a kid throws his truck on the playground for the third time. Or when someone in a meeting finally says what everyone else has been thinking.

These moments are ordinary, messy, and remarkably hard to capture. They’re also where I think some of the most consequential questions about human behavior live.

I got here by way of mathematics, biostatistics, and an oh-crap-I-need-a-hobby run at improvisational theater. Improv turns out to be surprisingly good preparation for studying human beings, who have an annoying habit of refusing to behave the way our models say they will.

My PhD is in behavioral science, and I’ve spent more than twenty years studying how context shapes what people do. More recently, I’ve found myself questioning some things I’d taught for years, including things I did raising my own kids. Charts. Consequences. Counting to three. I know.

There’s something humbling about realizing you’ve changed your mind about things you once held so tightly. And something incredibly invigorating about asking better questions because of it.

Here’s where that’s landed me.

The hardest moments — with our kids and with each other — have more in common with improv than theater. We can prepare. We can practice. We can even have a pretty good idea of what we want to say. But then another human being enters the scene.

And now we have to pay attention.

Turning toward means staying curious enough to notice what is actually happening, not just what we thought would happen. And that’s a skill, which means we can learn it.

Teams start saying the true thing. Parents repair instead of retreat. Kids learn to move through hard moments without pretending they aren’t hard. And the person in aisle seven is known instead of watched.

Sometimes I study these moments with data. Sometimes I share stories from the front of the room. Sometimes I toss out a challenge and let a team discover in ninety seconds what I could have spent forty PowerPoint slides trying to explain.

I take the science seriously and myself considerably less so.

Connection isn’t extra. It’s the part that does the work.

And I would love to tell you all about it.