I've known Dr. Shapiro for more than 15 years. Join our conversation to hear about how he thinks about emotional intelligence and who thinks they have a D vs an F (not that it is a competition!)! We touch on two tennis greats, John Newcombe and Roger Federer, as well as what a ditch has to do with emotional intelligence. Dr. Philip E. Shapiro is a dermatopathologist and dermatologist in Meriden, Connecticut who founded Dermatopathology Laboratory of New England. He previously worked at Yale University and is affiliated with multiple hospitals in the area, including St. Francis Hospital and Yale New Haven Hospital. He received his medical degree from Albany Medical College and has been in practice for 34 years. He was formerly Director of Dermatopathology at Yale. He has numerous publications and has been a leading voice in dermatopathology throughout his career; his contributions include describing interstitial mycosis fungoides and pseudomelanocytic nests.
I've known Dr. Shapiro for more than 15 years. Join our conversation to hear about how he thinks about emotional intelligence and who thinks they have a D vs an F (not that it is a competition!)! We touch on two tennis greats, John Newcombe and Roger Federer, as well as what a ditch has to do with emotional intelligence. Dr. Philip E. Shapiro is a dermatopathologist and dermatologist in Meriden, Connecticut who founded Dermatopathology Laboratory of New England. He previously worked at Yale University and is affiliated with multiple hospitals in the area, including St. Francis Hospital and Yale New Haven Hospital. He received his medical degree from Albany Medical College and has been in practice for 34 years. He was formerly Director of Dermatopathology at Yale. He has numerous publications and has been a leading voice in dermatopathology throughout his career; his contributions include describing interstitial mycosis fungoides and pseudomelanocytic nests.
[00:00:00] Christine Ko: Welcome back to SEE HEAR FEEL. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Phillip E Shapiro. Dr. Shapiro is a dermatopathologist and dermatologist in Meriden, Connecticut, who founded Dermatopathology Laboratory of New England. He previously worked at Yale University, and he's affiliated with multiple hospitals in the area, including St. Francis Hospital and Yale New Haven Hospital. He received his medical degree from Albany Medical College and has been in practice for 34 years. He was formerly Director of Dermatopathology at Yale, where I am now, and he has numerous publications and has been a leading voice in dermatopathology throughout his career. His contributions include describing interstitial mycosis fungoides as well as those pseudomelanocytic nests that can be very pesky, irritating, and, in worst case scenarios, lead to misdiagnosis.
[00:00:53] Welcome to Phil. I am really excited to be talking to you.
[00:00:56] Philip Shapiro: Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here.
[00:00:59] Christine Ko: I've known Phil for, I don't know, I guess more than 15 years.
[00:01:04] Philip Shapiro: Yeah, it's been a while since we worked on that chapter in Lever together a long time ago.
[00:01:10] Christine Ko: Yeah. So Phil is very thoughtful and very detail-oriented. It'll be great to hear some of his answers. Can you share a small personal anecdote about yourself before we start?
[00:01:26] Philip Shapiro: One of the highlights of my life was playing tennis on John Newcombe's team at Fantasy Camp.
[00:01:34] Christine Ko: Oh, wow.
[00:01:34] Philip Shapiro: I was playing terribly in a very important match. And he used to be the Australian Davis Cup captain. He coached me in the middle of a match because they were allowed to do that. And basically he changed my emotional intelligence around; I know we might be talking about that a little bit. He changed my framework of thinking, and I came back and won the match, and it helped his team win for the first time in 18 years. And it was one of the highlights, not only of my sports life, but of my life because it made him so happy, and I respect him so much. This event took place 11 years ago, but I just saw him a couple months ago, and I told him how this was one of the highlights of my life. And he gave me a big hug. And here's a guy who was such an icon in tennis and in Australia, but we just had this human connection where he knew what it meant to me. It made him really happy to know that he made such a big difference in something that happened in my life.
[00:02:34] Christine Ko: That's really cool. Thanks for sharing that. You mentioned emotional intelligence in your story, so can you talk about what emotional intelligence means to you?
[00:02:46] Philip Shapiro: Sure. I'm hesitant to give answers on things where I don't consider myself really an expert, and I'm not an expert in emotional intelligence. But I tried to think about this a little bit beforehand, and so I went to the literature, and I found one definition of emotional intelligence that basically said there are five key elements: 1. Self-awareness, 2. Self-regulation, 3. Motivation, 4. Empathy, and 5. Social skills. And I've gotta say, I think in my early life, I think I was doing pretty well on what people consider academic intelligence and pretty poorly in what we now call emotional intelligence. I think a lot of that has to do with our upbringing. We're all influenced by our parents. And my parents taught me a number of wonderful qualities. I think they focused on education and honesty, and they taught me about music and other things. But they weren't great in teaching me about emotional intelligence issues. And it's something I've had to work on for a lot of my life. And I'd say back when I was younger, I'd probably get a D in emotional intelligence. And I think maybe I'd give myself a B at this point; just becoming aware of it, keeping your eyes open. I think people don't start to think about these things until they reach a certain age. One example of something that had an influence on me, I'm digressing a little bit, how people will do things that might have a big influence on someone else, and they're totally unaware of it. So I remember watching Tom Lawley. I don't know if that name rings a bell, but he was a researcher at the NIH, and he did some seminal work with serum sickness. And I remember watching him ask questions of colleagues at medical conferences. And he was very respectful. Even if he found some glaring error in what somebody did, he would say something like, did you have the opportunity to do such and such? Instead of, why didn't you do that? And watching people like that helped me grow. And I still try to do it to this day. It's obviously a work in progress, but I think keeping the eyes open and being aware of that [Yeah.] helps.
[00:04:52] Christine Ko: You've said so many good things. First off, if you had a D when you were younger, you were still ahead of me. Because looking back, I feel like I had an F, and I had no idea what emotional intelligence was. It wasn't even on my radar. Anyway, I love the answer you gave because I think if we all could go up, me from an F to maybe like a D.
[00:05:17] Philip Shapiro: It's funny when you said the F because I think of you as someone with high emotional intelligence. So it's interesting to hear you say this.
[00:05:23] Christine Ko: I'm a quiet, shy person, so I won't say what's in my head. If I said right away what's in my head? Like immediately in a social situation, it would not be good.
[00:05:39] Philip Shapiro: I think it's good to speak up. That's one thing that bothers me when people don't say what's on their mind. There's a difference between speaking up confrontationally and just speaking up to get better understanding. And I think that you need more of the latter.
[00:05:52] A couple other thoughts about emotional intelligence that I learned when I was older. One was this phrase, you don't need to elevate yourself by putting other people in a ditch. And that phrase I learned decades ago. It really stuck with me because I think I was one of those kinds of people that would put other people in a ditch a little bit more to elevate myself. And it's not only not necessary, it's bad. It makes you look worse, it makes the other person worse. So I've been trying to strive for the other, for much of my life, that's one thing I learned growing emotionally intelligent.
[00:06:30] And another thing I just heard recently, this gets back to my tennis reference. I'm a big Roger Federer fan. And Federer, by the way, a lot of people may not know this. When he was a teenager, he was a monster on the tennis court. He had very bad behavior, and he realized as he was getting more famous, that a lot of people, especially kids, were looking up to him, and he said, he's gotta change his attitude. And now, you may know how he's turned out. He's really a model for a public figure. He has a foundation that, so far, I think has raised about $70 million to help underprivileged kids in Africa and in his home country of Switzerland. And I think the motto of the foundation is, it's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice. And I love that. The older I get, the more that sticks with me. And personally, I respect someone who's an ordinary person, who's nice and is a positive force around them, than a physician who might have had great academic accomplishments and contributed to medicine, but if they're not a nice person, that's not as good as the ordinary person who's nice.
[00:07:38] Christine Ko: I'm so with you.
[00:07:40] Philip Shapiro: I've come to that philosophy that, be kind, is really number one. It's easier to say when you're older, and you're looking back on life, than when you're struggling with a lot more pressures and things when you're younger. It's so easy to adopt at a certain stage in life, but something I think is good to strive for. That's something else I learned, one small act of kindness sometimes goes a very long way, has a much bigger effect than people even realize when they're doing it.
[00:08:06] Christine Ko: Do you have any final thoughts?
[00:08:09] Philip Shapiro: I have a couple of final thoughts. One has to do with communication. There's a lot of miscommunication that happens all the time between family members and coworkers and nations. If we could pay a little bit more attention to how we are communicating and how people are perceiving what we're saying, it would help. And that even translates into dermatopathology. I would urge dermatopathologists to look exactly what they're saying and think what the clinician is perceiving because sometimes the clinician isn't getting the message that the dermatopathologist thinks that he or she is giving in that report. So be aware of that communication.
[00:08:49] I know one of the things you wanted me to think about beforehand was work-life balance. Again, I am not an expert at this, but I was thinking about that a little bit, and I think it depends on one's situation in life, how much you have control over that. So I'm better at it now cuz I'm older. I'm in my sixties. It was a lot different for me when I started out academically at Yale, and you have pressure to publish, et cetera. And then when I set up my private practice, that was a lot of work. It took a huge amount of work. Now that I'm more settled, it's easier to focus on that non-work aspect of life a little bit more. So some of it's a little bit outta your control. So I don't really have great advice there. But I have always at least tried to do something. When I was at Yale, full-time, and working really hard, I said, I'm gonna go play tennis once a week no matter what. I need this. I'm still doing that now. Now for me it's a walk with the dogs in the woods every morning. That for me has made a huge difference in my life. Just something I love to do. I have the luxury now. But my last comment about this: I really dislike the term work life balance. I think it should be work, non-work balance because to me, work is a part of life. The real question, I think, is how do you balance the work part with the non-work part? And again, it's different for different people. Some people work all the time. Sometimes I've asked myself how happy they really are. I don't know. I haven't talked to them about it a lot. But I think different people need different things. I think people just have to figure out what they need.
[00:10:15] Christine Ko: Yeah, I don't like the term either: work-life balance. Phil, from the outside at least, to me, it has always seemed like you had a joie de vivre in your work and in your non-work. We are going to continue talking in another episode. Thank you for spending the time.
[00:10:33] Philip Shapiro: Christine, it was great chatting with you.