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Welcome to the Stress Nanny, the podcast where we take the overwhelm out of parenting and help kids and parents build calm, confidence, and connection.
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I'm your host, Lindsay Miller, kids' mindfulness coach and cheerleader for busy families everywhere.
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Each week we'll explore simple tools, uplifting stories, and practical strategies to help your child learn emotional regulation, resilience, and self-confidence, while giving you a little more peace of mind too.
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I'm so glad you're here.
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Douglas Garland, MD, practiced orthopedic surgery for 37 years in Southern California.
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Dr.
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Garland was a clinical professor of orthopedics at the University of Southern California, where he authored over 100 peer-reviewed scientific articles.
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With over 600 citations, the Tallpoppy Syndrome book that he wrote is the most comprehensive book on the subject.
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The Tallpoppy syndrome is a human condition that has been present in every society from the beginning of time.
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It explains why we seek fairness and justify our actions by cutting others down.
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Doug Garland has been studying the Tallpoppy phenomenon for over 10 years after he experienced it firsthand in his own career.
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His work brings awareness and clarity to an unknown and under-recognized, often misunderstood human condition.
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Doug, thank you so much for joining me today.
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I'm so excited for this conversation.
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It's my pleasure to be here.
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I'd love to talk about my favorite subject.
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So we're going to get right into it.
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We're going to talk about tall poppy syndrome today.
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But before we do, it's important to kind of determine the difference between some of these emotions that maybe are a little uncomfortable for us to sit with.
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So let's start out with envy and jealousy.
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Can you talk us through those emotions, the differences, kind of what distinct characteristics they have?
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So I think we need to do the definition first before we get into everything else.
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Yeah.
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So the de definition of the tall poppy syndrome is it's a metaphor looking at a poppy field and you see one poppy taller than the rest.
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And human nature is to want to cut that poppy down so that everybody's equal.
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It helps build your own self-esteem if you're not surrounded by a tall poppy in many, many instances.
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So that's the original metaphor, which was described in ancient Greece, and then it was modified in ancient Rome to include the poppy metaphor.
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The original description, the concept was with wheat, and then Rome, the Roman definition then became the tall poppy.
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And I would I look from that experience once I understood the concept, then I looked through all civilizations and through all time periods, and I was able to find it almost in every country and every time period.
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And they all have their own sayings.
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For example, in Holland, it is the tall tree captures all the wind.
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And Japan, it's the tall nail gets pounded down.
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So cultures are aware of it.
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They have a different meaning.
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Actually, the Nordic countries have a law of Jante, J-A-N-T-E, and it's 10 rules of how not to grow tall.
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So they're just the opposite of a lot of countries.
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They they try to prevent one to give habits not to stick out in society so that you won't get cut down.
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So it's prevalent.
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And the least prevalent area is America.
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And my original premises when I wrote the book was it must be our individualism that prevented America from having or knowing about the tall poppy syndrome.
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And by the time I had written the book, which took over five years, my conclusion was it's more prevalent in America because of our individualism and because of our meritocracy.
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So that we don't know about it, but I see it every day.
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So that's the concept.
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Now, the second, the next thing I had to do was understand it.
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And then I had to try and fit it into our particular culture.
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So the Australian culture, they were founded essentially as a colony from England, just like we were, but they were a penal colony, and in the penal system, everybody's equal.
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And that has continued throughout their history.
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So they're a very egalitarian society, meaning everybody are relatively equal.
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And they, if you do grow tall, which they don't have a lot of tall poppies compared to America, then there is a severe tendency to want to cut them down.
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And that particular problem is driven by envy.
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Envy is my favorite emotion, and I think an underrated emotion because envy is always on.
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So as soon as I looked at you when we opened up today, I looked to see your hair and what you're wearing and your facial expressions and things.
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So we're already making judgments through comparison.
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And of course, envy is coveting what someone else has, whether it's your looks, your money, whatever.
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And in the age of the internet, that's what I call the currency of the internet is as soon as you turn the screen on, envy's on.
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And so much of the internet is driven by selfies.
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So I'm out having a good time, and you're sitting at home reading or don't have money to go out.
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So whatever your problem is, you have low self-esteem.
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So the whole concept of the tall poppy syndrome in Australia and most of the other English-speaking countries is not prevalent, but Canada and England are both aware and use the term, but it's just not as prevalent.
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And as an Australia, then it's a means of cutting someone down and keeping everybody equal.
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But in doing so, you elevate your own your own self-esteem.
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So the first thing to realize about an emotion is it's really a functional state.
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It's what your mind, your mind controls your emotion.
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And Aristotle defined good and bad envy.
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Good envy is emulation.
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So I see you, I think you're attractive, I want to dress like you, you're smart, I want to learn your habits.
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I want to emulate you.
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That's good envy.
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And bad envy is the syndrome and what I consider the dark emotions.
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And the dark emotions for me are the seven deadly sins, which is how I remember the dark emotions.
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So in studying Australia, it's very simple to understand their culture.
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And they cut somebody down, but in their madness about doing it, they feel justified in cutting somebody down because that somebody lacks deservingness to be a tall poppy.
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They probably did something that the cutter didn't agree with.
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So in America, I had to change all that because we have so many tall poppies.
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The movie industry, the business industry, the sports industry, the Hollywood industry.
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So we have way more tall poppies than any country in the world that I looked at.
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And why do we cut tall poppies down?
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Well, we have the Australian concept of bad envy, but we also have more anger in America.
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And we have more anger than most countries.
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And anger is also a good and a bad emotion.
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Good anger would make you focus.
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Say you're a ball player and somebody dribbled by you.
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Instead of tripping them, which would be bad anger, you would do more work, your more footwork, get in better shape, try to improve yourself so that they can't do that.
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But we're such an immediate society right now at this time that we want a good fast result.
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And a fast result is always cutting somebody down.
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And the third dark emotion that I see in America is sloth, which is laziness.
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I'm 79, so I grew up in the early 60s, and the STEM in high school and even in junior high was what's great.
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And the emphasis was very different in America from what it is today.
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And so we had less bad envy, I think, when I grew up.
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It's definitely there, and bullying is definitely there, but not to the degree that I see it now.
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I blame a lot of it on the internet and our society.
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But anyway, that's three dark emotions that we talk about that's found in the cutter.
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And what about the tall poppy?
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Well, the tall poppy usually is going to do what egregious is one of my favorite terms.
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So egregious actions, egregious, the most common egregious action is pride or hubris.
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The tall poppy gets too big for their britches.
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And the public feels justified in cutting them down.
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And usually if there's a difference in income or societal level and stuff, you can't cut a tall poppy down.
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It has to be a mass.
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So if you see Brad Pitt, I can't cut Brad Pitt down.
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So it's going to take some public reaction to do it.
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So it's usually pride is number one, greed is number two, and lust is number three.
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Those are six of the seven so-called deadly sins in Christianity.
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The only one we leave out is gluttony, and that's not part of the tall poppy syndrome, but the mnemonic or is something to help you remember, it's the seven deadly sins.
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And of course, everybody's going to want to know how do we cure the tall poppy syndrome?
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Well, it's to identify the bad emotion and to look for the corresponding virtue.
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So envy is the virtue, the counter to envy is kindness.
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And of course, the virtue for pride or hubris is humility.
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So that eventually becomes a treatment.
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So we need to discuss the other emotion, which people use interchangeably, but it's not an interchangeable emotion, is jealousy.
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Coveting is wanting something that somebody has that you don't.
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That's going on daily.
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Jealousy is something that you have and you're losing.
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And it usually involves three people.
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So jealousy is relatively uncommon, where envy is as common as a common cold.
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And jealousy is a dark emotion, but as far as a big cause of the tall poppy syndrome, it's in the little league.
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And so it's nice to well, it's nice to differentiate between that because most people that are doing the cut cutting are coveting.
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And it's three, and it usually involves three people.
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So that's how you remember what jealousy is.
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And cutting down somebody is usually because they have something you don't.
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So the whole drug world is really about money and habiting.
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They're in a lower escalon of society, and they feel they can't have what everybody else has.
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So what do they do?
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They do the shortcut and do drugs.
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So it's pervasive in every level of our society, depending on what cultural aspect you're in.
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The other thing that I need to help, and I'll then let you ask me questions that would be of your interest to you and your listeners.
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Most of the cutting doesn't involve tall poppies.
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Since I feel envy is so prevalent in our society, I had to reconcile that the cutting wasn't happening to tall poppies, that it was happening in our peer groups.
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So it happens in your family, it happens immediately in your family, what I call familial envy.
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So in my family, we had seven kids.
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My mother had her black book.
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We got to have a birthday party only when we were 10, and we only got to spend$50.
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If we wanted five kids, we got$50.
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If we want 10 kids, we got$50.
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But she tried to keep everybody the same in our family so that everybody was equal.
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And many, many families do the same thing.
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And then you get into school and then the competition starts, and you get into high school, and there's more competition and more bad envy.
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And then, of course, college, worse, and then in the workplace and climbing so-called climbing the ladder of success, more competition, more cutting.
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So I felt that the what I now label the private or peer-to-peer, the tribal tall poppy syndrome is more prominent than the so-called public, what I now call the public tallpoppy syndrome.
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It's what the original description of the metaphor was.
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So once again, you only can cut in your own tribe.
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You know, you don't have power to cut somebody outside of your tribe.
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I can't cut Brad Pritt down, but if he does something really, really dumb, then through society, you can cut him down to his size.
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So that's kind of how I work through things, the etiology of the tall poppy syndrome, and that it's and the whole book is a self-help book.
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Because if you understand the syndrome and the emotions that are involved either in you in the cutter or the cutie, then you understand yourself better because you have your own bias and your own issues.
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So as you understand what's happening in the world and your relationship to it, then you understand yourself better and how you're actually involved in the family.
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I mean, once I tell people about it, they go, Oh, yeah, I remember growing up and they relate some family episodes.
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So it makes you become more aware of yourself.
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And so in the end, it's kind of a self-help book, but it's not how I intended it to be.
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I wanted to, first of all, introduce the syndrome to America.
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And you can't, you know, it's like going to a meeting and you get cut down and you don't know it was a tall poppy syndrome, and you walk out and you go, What just happened?
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And so if you don't understand what just happened, you can't figure out if it was your fault or if the other people were off base.
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So it's really a method to help not only understand what's going on about you in the world, in your tribe, but also in your own head.
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Yeah.
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And I can tell you, I was cut down.
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So what happened, I just briefly, because I've already dominated the thing.
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I was an academic orthopaedic surgeon in LA.
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I ran a large spinal cord injury unit, one of the largest in the country and the world, 100 beds.
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Wow.
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And I had gone to a meeting, I was to go to Australia.
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They have six units in Australia.
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I was to go to Australia as president of the American Spinal Injury Association at that time.
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And I was to go to Australia and visit each center for a week.
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And I had gone to a national, international medic spinal cord meeting and met with the person who I was setting it up with.
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When I got back to my office in LA, I had a note on my office that I had been moved down from the great grand suite with the corner window and the big room and down to a little cubby hole.
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And I went home and told my wife, and she said, they've moved your cheese, which was a popular book about that time, which is to a certain extent a little bit like the tall poppy syndrome.
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And she said, you know that they're telling you that your time has ended and it's time to move on.
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And fortunately, I didn't have her emotional intelligence because I would have gone back the next day and immediately become angry and sought revenge to see who was behind moving my office and got in a pissing contest with somebody to see who would win.
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And my wife was smart enough to figure all that out.
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So the next day I went in after 30 years and I was a full professor of orthopedic surgery.
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I threw all my accolades off the wall into a big green garbage, plastic garbage can, all my lectures, everything, put my key on the desk and walked out.
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And I called Australia and told them I wasn't coming.
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And they said, Why aren't you coming?
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And I told them what happened.
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And they said, Well, you've been tall poppied.
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So that was my introduction.
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But fortunately for my wife and then for Australia, it took them about five minutes to finally get it.
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Let me wrap my arms around what actually happened, that I understood what was going on, and then confirmed what my wife had told me.
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And I mean, I was pretty prominent.
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I probably could have won every every battle, but what was the point?
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My wife was right.
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They they had moved on, and it was a good time for me to move on.
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Turned out to be the best thing that ever happened.
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I had a big private practice I concentrated on.
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I became head of the joint service at that hospital.
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We computerized everything and made it a very important center in LA.
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And I wrote the book.
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So when you have an obstacle, it's best for you to find some positive way to work yourself around it.
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Yeah, and I have a chapter in the book of my tall poppies, what I consider it takes to be a tall poppy.
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And all of the tall poppies had been tall poppy.
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Most of them were cut down and they all grew from it.
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Probably figure it took some soul searching and and then they come back a better person.
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So just be if you do get caught tall poppy, frequently it's not your fault.
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And you should if it is your fault, that's why if I mean you don't get the promotion, you shouldn't trut the person down who got the promotion.
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You should figure out why they got their promotion and grow from it yourself.
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Maybe maybe they are a better person than you are.
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So you need to self-reflect and evaluate the situation.
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I think it is an invitation, is what I'm hearing you say.
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Yes.
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Yeah.
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Well, thanks for sharing that story.
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That was a poignant way for you to come across the concept.
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And then I appreciated the way you described it in terms of both the person who is growing and is the tall poppy, and then the person who has or feels the inclination to chop that tall poppy down.
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This is especially resonant to me when it comes to kids.
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And you mentioned a little bit about the difference between tall poppy syndrome and bullying.
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But I'm wondering if you could take us through like a simple scenario where, say, a child is, you know, the kids in its school, perhaps not bullying, but trying to keep that child kind of small or quiet, or, you know, not letting that child flourish in the way that they could.
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Maybe they're, like you're saying, their peer group is can see and feel maybe intimidated and envious of the child, and so is trying to keep them from growing to their potential.
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What kind of things would could a parent do to help a child understand tallpoppy syndrome and then work with that scenario?
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Well, that's the reason I emphasize the dark emotions and and what's happening and the importance of envy.
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I'm just telling you, it is so prevalent and it's prevalent in your families, and it's important for the parents to know.
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And so if they they understand the tallpoppy syndrome, they can tell it to your kid.
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If if they just have, if they if you are if if you are smart and the other kids are envious of you, and you're right, you people always think of the two, both bowling and tall poppy, frequently as being an individual thing, but frequently it is a group.
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So a tall poppy's tall because he's taller than the group.
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So that tells you that concept right there, and they are going to be hit from all sides.
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And it's important to identify the behavior of the other people.
00:21:15.119 --> 00:21:19.119
One, it's important to understand the status of the other people.
00:21:19.440 --> 00:21:28.400
In the grade school system in America, it's changing dramatically now from when I grew up because we were all we were all equal at that time.
00:21:28.640 --> 00:21:31.519
You know, the society now is layered.
00:21:31.599 --> 00:21:35.200
There's so many layers, economic layers and social layers.
00:21:35.359 --> 00:21:48.960
I mean, when when I grew up, the banker's kid was in the school, the farmer's kid was in the school, you know, every layer of our little society was all in the same place.
00:21:49.200 --> 00:21:53.680
And frequently the bullying is always a power difference.
00:21:53.839 --> 00:22:00.000
There's always a difference, and you have to under the first thing you have to do is understand that.
00:22:00.160 --> 00:22:05.119
And you have to understand the various layers of bullying, and frequently it is a problem.
00:22:05.359 --> 00:22:15.279
And you have to help your child because your child most likely does have low self-esteem, and that's the reason they're pick picking on them.
00:22:15.440 --> 00:22:27.039
Kids understand low self-esteem, and they understand some child that has lower self-esteem, and that gives them the power over that child.
00:22:27.519 --> 00:22:39.039
So the first thing the parents have to do is understand their children, and especially if they have lower self self-esteem, and they have to help the child build that self-esteem up.
00:22:39.279 --> 00:22:43.359
That's more on the bullying side, but also the the cutter.
00:22:43.759 --> 00:22:51.359
We're talking about the somebody being cut down, but that also works if the child has low self-esteem.
00:22:51.440 --> 00:22:57.200
They need to build that up so that the child itself is not the bully or something trying to cut somebody down.
00:22:57.359 --> 00:22:59.519
Both involve low self-esteem.
00:22:59.759 --> 00:23:03.839
The kid that's being bullied and the kid that's cutting down people.
00:23:04.000 --> 00:23:11.599
So the parents need to identify that and they need to do what we call in medicine a social history.
00:23:12.079 --> 00:23:33.839
They need to question the child about the situation and try and understand the situation itself so that if it is intellectual, they can tell their child that not to give them pride or hubris, but that they are smarter and the other kids are envious of them and that they just want to be like them.
00:23:34.160 --> 00:23:46.160
And just the identification, the parent to the child is so important because when you're not in the battle, you understand the field, just like that's why General Stand on the Hill.
00:23:46.319 --> 00:23:48.960
And that's why my wife understood it.
00:23:49.279 --> 00:23:53.279
And I didn't, because she didn't have any dogs in the fight.
00:23:53.440 --> 00:23:56.400
She was completely neutral to what was happening.
