Everything You Know About Sleep Is Wrong with Dr. Matthew Walker

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Listen To The Episode

Show Notes

Video - 4 Scientifically Proven Paths To A Perfect Night Sleep

The Sleep Deprivation Epidemic - Why You Should Sleep More

Links and Additional Research

Episode Transcript

Are you tired? If your answer is yes, it would seem relatively straightforward to assume you're not getting enough sleep.

It’s one of the most important things you can possibly do for yourself.

Improve. Your. Sleep.

You’re going to spend a large portion of your like sleeping. And that’s a good thing! Getting more sleep not only allows you to wake up well rested each morning but also prevents disease and can lead to a longer (and happier) life overall.

Did you know that routinely sleeping less than 6 hours a night can increase your risk of cancer by 50%? After just one night of less than 5 hours of sleep Natural Killer Cells (which fight cancer cells) drop by 70%! After just one night!

Sleep isn't just about rest. It's about the body repairing itself, doing maintenance so to speak. Unfortunately, what has been discovered over time (and discussed in this book) is that, if you lose sleep, taking a nap, while it takes the edge off, it doesn't replace the sleep lost during the night.

Our ability to fight disease (including cancer) and obesity may be directly tied to not getting enough restful sleep. Pills don't help either. Yes, they knock you out and make it easier to fall asleep but they lack the restorative power of natural sleep and, in fact, some sleeping pills can increase your risk of cancer.

Knowing this, it must change the way you think about the old saying “I’ll sleep when I’m dead”… because ironically adopting that mindset will get you there quicker.

Do you find that you wake up feel groggy or angry? Do you reach for the snooze button 1, 2 or even 3 times each morning? Or, do you hop right out of bed ready to tackle the new day?

What about at night? Do you struggle to fall asleep? Tossing and turning seemingly unable to count enough sheep to get to bed. Or, are you out like a light when you pull the covers over yourself?

If you want to literally improve every single aspect of your life and wake up feeling refreshed and rested each and every night this interview is for you.

To get started NOW, download our free guide below and learn 5 super simple and easy ways to maximize your sleep starting tonight!

In this episode we discuss everything you ever wanted to know about sleep. We examine the findings from hundreds of studies across millions of people and pull out the major findings about how vitally important sleep is, the global sleep loss epidemic, the stunning data about sleep and productivity, the simplest and most effective evidence based strategies for getting better sleep and much more with Dr. Matthew Walker. 

Dr. Matthew Walker is Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Founder and Director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. He has published over 100 scientific studies and is the author of the book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. Which is currently the #1 Amazon Bestseller in Neuroscience . He has been featured on numerous television and radio outlets, including CBS 60 Minutes, National Geographic Channel, NOVA Science, NRP and the BBC.

Show Notes

• Global sleep loss epidemic - the average American sleeps only 6.5 hours per night

• Sleep has slowly been eroded by our society over the last 60 years

• Sleep is vital and essential from an evolutionary standpoint - you can’t just lop off 25% of the necessary sleep you need

• Studies across millions of people show one clear thing - the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life

• If you sleep less, you will be dead sooner, lack of sleep kills your more quickly

• Lack of sleep is a major predictor of “all cause mortality” including cancer, Alzheimers, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, depression, and suicide

• Hard science shows why a lack of sleep is tremendously bad for you

• Sleep has an image problem, we stigmatize sleep and think its lazy and slothful - people wear lack of sleep as a badge of honor to be celebrated

• Less sleep does not equal more productivity

• The 5 clear truths of sleep research and productivity

• Under-slept employees take on less challenging problems

  1. They produce fewer creative solutions

  2. They exert less effort when working in groups (slacking off, social loafing)

  3. They are more likely to lie, cheat, and engage in deviant behavior

  4. The more or less sleep that a CEO has had, the more or less charismatic they will be

• Chronic exhaustion cost most first world nation 2% of the GDP - 411 billion dollars lost each year to a lack of sleep

• The research is very clear that under-slept individuals are not as productive or successful

• The evidence is resoundingly clear - cutting on sleep makes you less productive and less creative and less effective

• After being awake for 21 hours, you’re as cognitively impaired as someone who is legally drunk

• The two principle types of sleep - REM sleep and non-REM sleep

• The different stages of sleep - the 4 stages of REM sleep

• Hard science shows that deep Sleep is critical to clearing toxins out of your brain

• Sleep is like a sewage system for your brain - it cleans all the toxins and debris out of your brain

• The less sleep you have, the higher your probability of getting Alzheimers

• Different cognitive systems in your brain also work during sleep - its like saving files to a hard drive, you have to sleep to get the save button

• The emotional circuits of the brain are changed and modified by sleep - the amygdala (which controls fight or flight) is regulated by the pre-frontal cortex

• Lack of sleep can have a serious negative impact on your emotional health

• Sleep reboots body systems as well - not just the brain

• Deep sleep is one of the best blood pressure medications you can imagine

• Deep sleep regulates insulin levels and blood glucose levels

• Sleep is also essential for the reproductive system

• Sleep boosts testosterone and lack of sleep makes you 10 years older from a testosterone standpoint

• Appetite, weight, food consumption are all regulated by sleep - lack of sleep makes you eat 300-550 more calories per day, and makes you eat more high sugar and high carb foods

• Sleep also has a profound impact on the immune system - one night of 4 hours of sleep will drop natural killer cells (body cancer fight cells) by 70%!

• The link between lack of sleep and cancer the WHO recently classified night shift work as a probable carcinogen

• Sleeping 5 hours per night makes you 200-300% more likely to catch a cold than someone sleeping 8 hours a night

• There is not a SYSTEM or PROCESS in the body/brain that is not impacted by sleep

• The most striking omission in the health literature today is that sleep is not at the center of the health conversation

• 3 key ways sleep improves your learning

• Is it wise to pull an all nighter? What does the research say?

• The “memory inbox of the brain” (hippocampus) and how sleep is vital to creating and storing memories

• Sleep is vital both BEFORE learning and AFTER learning to store and save new memories and solidify them into the architecture of the brain

• Sleep replays information and strengthens memories

• Sleep provides a 3x advantage to problem solving compared to an equivalent period being awake

• "The 6 Unpopular Tactics for Getting Enough Sleep"

• Carve out enough time and make sleep a priority - carve out an 8 hour window to sleep every night

  1. This is the #1 thing to do - regularity is KEY - go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time, no matter what

     1. Sleeping in late creates “social jetlag” which has serious negative consequences - regularity of sleep is key

  2. Keep the temperature cool - keep your bedroom 68 degrees - your body needs to drop its core temperature 2-3 degrees to fall asleep

  3. You can hack this by taking a hot bath before bed

  4. DARKNESS is key to producing melatonin. Phones, screens, blue light etc trick the brain into thinking its day time and shut off melatonin production

  5. Reading on a tablet 1 hour before bed shifts your melatonin production 3 hours later!

     1. Use blackout shades

     2. No screens 1 hour before bed

  6. Do NOT stay in bed if you’ve been in bed longer than 20 minutes. You brain is a very associative machine - being awake in bed trains the brain that it’s OK to be awake in bed. Get up, go to a different room, read a book in dim light, no screens, no eating. And only when you feel sleep return to bed, and you will re-learn the key association between making the bed about sleep

  7. Some people don’t like this idea.

     1. Meditation is a great way to get yourself to fall back asleep. The studies are very clear, very well done that meditation can help improve sleep.

  8. No caffeine after noon and avoid alcohol in the evenings.

  9. Caffein prevents deep sleep

     1. Alcohol fragments your sleep and makes your wake up much more, leaving with un-restorative sleep

     2. Alcohol blocks dreams and REM sleep

• Sedation is NOT sleep. Knocking out your cortex is not natural sleep.

• You could be A FAR BETTER VERSION OF YOURSELF mentally, cognitively, physiology if you just got more sleep

• Current sleeping pills are “sedative hypnotics” that do NOT productive naturalistic sleep, and do not get the benefits of sleep

• Sleeping pills have a far higher risk of death, cancer, infection

• CBTI - cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is just as effective as sleeping pills in the short term, but much more effective long term

• Melatonin can be a useful tool to time the onset of sleep

• Does napping work?

• There is no such thing as the sleep bank - you can’t accumulate a debt and then hope to cash in on the weekend - sleep doesn’t work like that

• Napping can prevent you from falling asleep and staying asleep! Be careful!

• How does GABA impact your sleep?

• Sleep is a remarkably complex neurochemical ballet

The Sleep Deprivation Epidemic: Why You Should Sleep More 

Do you ever pull an all-nighter to cram for a test, but still fail? Maybe you work 60-hour weeks but feel like you’re getting nowhere. Unfortunately, developed nations are suffering from a sleep deprivation epidemic, but science can help us see the reasons for getting a good eight hours every night.

 A common saying you hear is, “You can sleep when you’re dead!” But recent sleep studies have shown us that less sleep means our lifespans shorten and our quality of life will decrease too. Unfortunately, our society pushes us to sleep less and work more, so we need help shifting our social perspective.

It turns out, that our relatively recent attempt to shorten the amount of sleep we get runs into a lot of problems against the million-year-old necessity that mother nature has put in place. The 20-25% decrease we’ve imposed on ourselves has led to an increased likelihood of developing every major disease that kills us in the developed world.

Elucidating Sleep Science

“I think part of the problem, perhaps, is that the science of sleep is actually not being adequately communicated to the public and I think it’s people like myself who are to blame.” – Dr. Matthew Walker 

Dr. Matthew Walker is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley, founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science, and author of Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. His belief is that sleep science is not understood by the public, which was part of his motivation for writing Why We Sleep.

Many people appear to be proud of how little they sleep. However, the list of problems linked to a lack of sleep include Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, depression, bipolar disorder, and suicide, among other mental health conditions. With this information in hand, it’s necessary to remove the stigma on getting a sufficient amount of sleep (about eight hours).

Dr. Walker set out to write a book of reasons why you should sleep, rather than rules. He addresses the relationship between sleep and productivity, citing laboratory and workplace studies that have provided him with five clear truths.

Five Facts About Sleep-Deprived Workers

“It’s very clear that under-slept individuals are not going to be successful.” – Dr. Walker

1. They take on less-challenging problems.

2. They produce fewer creative solutions.

3. They exert less effort when working in groups.

4. They are more likely to lie, cheat, and engage in deviant behaviors.

5. Less sleep means less-charismatic leaders.

He also notes that a recent report demonstrated that chronic exhaustion and fatigue (due to a lack of sleep) caused most first-world nations to lose about 2% of their GDP (that’s $411 billion for the U.S.). “If we solve the sleep deprivation problem in the U.S., we could almost double the budget for education, and we could make huge in-roads into the problems we have with healthcare,” he adds.

Dr. Walker shares an analogy to represent the current nature of an office workplace by comparing it to a spin class: “Everyone in the office looks like they’re working hard, but the scenery never changes – there’s never any forward progression in terms of momentum with productivity and creativity.”

Finally, he ends his evaluation of workplace attitudes by observing how their attempt to optimize the efficiency of every system stops at the human level. Where the budget, taxes, hardware, and software are all effective, there’s no focus or understanding of a human’s cognitive or physiological capacities and their necessity to reboot and recharge.

Sleep: The Human Recycling Period

“There really isn’t any system within your body, or process within the brain, that isn’t wonderfully enhanced by sleep when you get it or demonstrably impaired when you don’t get enough.” – Dr. Walker 

Dr. Walker informs us that we need eight-hours of sleep after 16-hours of wakefulness; and after 20-21 hours of being awake, we are as cognitively impaired as someone who would be legally drunk behind the wheel. So what exactly is happening when we sleep?

Sleep is simply divided into rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, where we dream, and non-REM sleep; while non-REM sleep is further divided into four sub-stages. Each stage performs different yet necessary functions.

When we are awake, we are essentially in a form of low-level brain damage. Thus, one of the functions performed during the deepest stages of non-REM sleep is to clear out the metabolic toxins that have been built up in our brain. This is done through our brain’s glymphatic system (similar to our body’s lymphatic system). While asleep, this system’s performance increases by 200-300% relative to when we’re awake. (This process is known to remove a toxic protein called beta-amyloid, one of the leading candidate causes of Alzheimer’s disease.)

Sleeping also improves our learning in at least three ways.

1. Sleeping prepares our brain: A lack of sleep leads to a 40% deficit in our ability to make memories.

2. Sleeping ‘saves’ information: While asleep, we transfer information from our short-term to long-term memory. Like hitting the ‘Save’ button, it prevents us from forgetting memories.

3. Sleeping strengthens our memories: Sleep interconnects new memories together and interconnects it with pre-existing memories. This creates an updated associative network of memories.

Dr. Walker comments on the third point, “That’s the reason that you can come back the next day having extracted and divined creative novel solutions to previously impenetrable problems that you were facing.” While simple problems benefit from focused thought, complex problems benefit from non-conscious thought, such as that which occurs during sleep. It’s because of this function that nearly every language has a phrase similar to “sleep on a problem,” and not to “stay awake on a problem.” He ends with the analogy, “It’s essentially informational alchemy that occurs overnight.”

The emotional circuits of our brains are also modified during sleep. Our amygdala is reconnected to our prefrontal cortex when we get a good night’s sleep, which puts a brake on our emotional gas pedal. When we are deprived of sleep, the connection is severed, which essentially makes us all emotional gas pedal and no brake.

The benefits of sleep don’t end at the brain; there are many physiological systems that are rebooted during sleep as well. Deep, non-REM sleep is one of the best forms of blood pressure medicine, because it slows your heart rate. It also releases a variety of restorative chemicals and hormones, including a growth hormone that restores the cells in your body.

Sleep regulates your metabolic system, specifically insulin levels. In fact, studies have shown that one week of five-six hours of sleep a night will disrupt a person’s blood sugar enough to classify them as pre-diabetic. This illustrates the crucial role sleep plays in regulating the metabolic system.

A lack of sleep is known to age both men and women by a decade in terms of wellness and virility by disrupting the reproductive system.

Appetite regulation and food consumption are directly affected by sleep. Sleep deprivation causes in imbalance in leptin, which tells your brain when you’re satisfied with your food, and ghrelin, which tells your brain you’re not satisfied with your food. This causes you to eat 300-500 more calories a day. Not only do you eat more, but you’re also more likely to reach for starchy carbohydrates and high-sugar foods, while avoiding high-protein foods.

One night of four-hours of sleep will drop your cancer-fighting immune cells by 70%. The link between sleep-deprivation and cancer is so strong, that the World Health Organization recently classified night-time shift work as a probable carcinogen because it disrupts our sleep rate rhythms.

Five-hours of sleep per night the week before you get your flu shot will reduce your body’s antibody response to less than 50%, rendering it largely ineffective. Similarly, with five-hours you are 200-300% more likely to catch a cold than someone who gets eight-hours of sleep.

According to Dr. Walker, “All lack of sleep is, perhaps, a slow from of self-euthanasia.”

How to Fall Asleep Fast and Sleep Better

“I think what we know is that: Without sleep there is low energy and disease, with sleep there is vitality and health.” – Dr. Walker 

Dr. Walker begins to share five tips (and their explanations) for how to sleep better. These five tips all follow a primary, overarching requirement: Carve out an eight-hour, non-negotiable sleep window every night.

1. Go to bed and wake up at the same time.

Regardless if it’s a weekday, the weekend, or a holiday, always wake up at the same time. Even if you have a bad night of sleep, just make sure you fall asleep early the following evening. Sleeping in late causes “social jetlag” where you feel tired in the evening and drift forward in time; this has deleterious consequences to your health and sleep.

2. Keep it cool.

Keeping your bedroom around 68°F (18.5°C) is optimal for most people. This is because your body needs to drop its core temperate 2-3° to initiate sleep. If your feet get cold, then you can wear socks. Also, a hot bath before bed causes mass vasodilation (more so than a hot shower); this pulls your blood near your skin’s surface, plummeting your core temperature.

3. Keep it dark.

Darkness releases melatonin, a vital hormone for the onset of sleep. Too much light inside the house (or from LED screens) before bed will trick your brain into thinking it’s daytime, shut off the production of melatonin, and prevent sleep. Dim your lights by turning half of them off in the evening, avoid LED screens in the last hour before bed, and use black-out curtains.

4. Get up if you’ve been awake in bed for longer than 20-minutes.

Whether you’re trying to fall asleep or wake up, you must get out of bed if you’ve been lying awake for more than 20-minutes. If not, then your brain creates the association that your bed is about being awake, rather than asleep. If you’re trying to fall asleep but can’t, then go to another, dim room and maybe read a book (but avoid eating and screens). Only when you’re sleepy should you return to bed; that way you fall right asleep and recreate the association that beds are for sleeping. Dr. Walker, a hard scientist and skeptic, even suggests meditation, citing its support from clinical trial data and his recent conversion to the practice himself.

5. No caffeine after noon and no alcohol in the evenings.

Even people who claim that caffeine doesn’t affect them because they fall right asleep suffer from less-deep sleep. When they wake up, they don’t feel as refreshed, then reach for an extra cup in the morning, thus building a cycle of dependency and addiction. If you don’t stop at noon, then certainly after 2:00pm. Alcohol, on the other hand, sedates your cortex (effective knocking out your brain). This causes un-restorative sleep by waking you up multiple times throughout the night. It also blocks your REM sleep, which is critical for creativity and memory processing as well as emotional and mental health.

A common trap for people to fall into is thinking, “Well, this is how I am now at this age.” But this perception of yourself prevents you from realizing that you can be a far better version of yourself, mentally, cognitively, and physiologically, if you simply start getting enough sleep.

This trap can easily occur as a result of excessive or improper caffeine consumption. It isn’t until people come off caffeine that they start to feel the benefits that normally come from high-caffeine use. “It’s like wiping a fogged window, and you can start to see clearly through it,” Dr. Walker comments, attributing the improvement to a full, restorative night of sleep. 

How to Deal with Insomnia

            “There are no sleeping medications that we have currently that produce naturalistic sleep.” – Dr. Walker

Sleeping Pills

Dr. Walker goes on to address the question of sleeping pills. He explains that the current class of drugs one will be prescribed are called ‘sedative hypnotics.’ Just like alcohol, these sedate (or knock out) your brain. The sleep you get on sleeping pills is not the same as natural, healthy sleep.

Additionally, these pills are associated with a far higher risk of death, cancer, and infection. Though these links have not be confirmed as causal or merely associational. He goes on to inform us that that people don’t necessarily need them, and there is a safe, non-pharmacological alternative which is just as effective: cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBTI).

With CBTI, the benefits to your sleep are just as powerful in the short-term, but they also continue long-term as you maintain the practice. Sleeping pills, on the other hand, produce rebound insomnia, where your sleep is just as bad (or worse) once you stop taking them. (People should revisit these issues with their doctor if they’re interested in alternative treatment.) 

GABA

GABA is the principle, inhibitory neurotransmitter of the brain; it works like a red light for your neurons, telling them to stop firing. Most sleeping medications work by targeting the GABA system, though their blunt nature is incapable of properly mimicking the complex neuro-chemical and neuro-physiological ballet that occurs during sleep.

Melatonin Supplements

Next, Dr. Walker discusses the uses of melatonin supplements. While they don’t actually help a young, healthy person with a stable sleep schedule, they’re great for helping someone adjust to a new time zone. By taking it 30-60 minutes before you want to sleep, it can help reset your body’s internal clock and counteract jetlag. He also notes that if people take melatonin and they feel that it helps (even if it doesn’t), then they should continue to do so.

Napping

Many people think that, if they don’t get enough sleep, then they can just “catch up” on it later, either with a nap or by getting more sleep at night. Dr. Walker states, “Sleep is not like the bank. You can’t accumulate debt, then hope to pay it off at the weekend. There is no credit system.”

However, if you are sleep-deprived, then you can nap and overcome some of the basic sleepiness. Your reaction times improve a little, but you don’t overcome the higher-level cognitive issues, like decision-making, learning and memory, and focused attention. He goes on to discuss a futile tactic he sees in his students that he calls ‘sleep bulimia.’ This is where they get too little sleep during the week, then try to binge sleep during the weekend and make up the deficit.

He uses an analogy to describe a negative aspect of napping: Throughout the day we build up a chemical pressure in our brain, a sleepiness pressure, due to the build up of adenosine. The more you build up the sleepier you feel; and after 16-hours of wakefulness, you should fall right asleep and stay asleep for eight-hours, thus releasing the sleepiness pressure. However, when we nap, it’s like we open a valve and let a little of the pressure out. This makes it harder for us to sleep well at night, either by struggling to fall asleep or stay asleep.

Echoing the placebo affect associated with melatonin supplements, if you can nap regularly and sleep well at night, then keep napping. Otherwise, you should avoid napping and build up that sleepiness pressure until you fall asleep at night.

Action Steps for a Good Night’s Sleep

To finish off, Dr. Walker suggests a simple self-improvement test: Give yourself one week of eight-hours of sleep a night. Determine if you feel better when you get eight-hours of regularly scheduled sleep versus a random schedule of five-hours one night, then six-hours the next, and so on. Then ask yourself, “Did that experiment work? Is it in my favor? Do I feel any better? Do I notice that improvement?”

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

[Book] Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
[DVD] Memento
[Twitter] Matt Walker
[LinkedIn] Matthew Walker
[Website] Sleep Diplomat

Why We Sleep (14min)

• The incredible benefits of getting enough and the terrible side effects of not getting enough. 

• The Brain and The Functions of learnings and memory. 

  • Sleep after learning is essential and like hitting the “save” button after learning. We also now know that it’s important even before learning. 

  • Without sleep the memory circuits become blocked up.

• Examine The Hypothesis of the All Nighter

  • 40% deficit in the ability of the brain to make new memories without sleep.

  • Brain activity is shot almost entirely after sleep deprivation. 

    • He describes it as like Memento the movie. (Great movie BTW)

• What is it that causes people to get good sleep and how does it affect our brain?

• What in sleep causes these benefits?

  • As we get older our memory gets work but our sleep does as well and they are related.

• Sleep is critical for your emotional and mental health

  • On less sleep these areas of the brain become irrational. 

  • Video of a subject illustrates this point. - Subject goes from angry to laughing then back to base in about 20 seconds. 

  • Without sleep you can’t take your foot off the emotional gas pedal.

• Sleep deprivation is correlated with depression and almost every psychiatric disorder. 

• The body relies on sleep as well.

  • 75% reduction in NK cell activity even after one bad night of sleep. Immune system will be shot. 

  • Lack of sleep and cancer has been shown to have a strong relationship. 

Matthew on CBS This Morning (6min)

• ⅔ of Americans do not get their full recommended 8 hours of sleep. 

• Every disease in developed nations is made worse by lack of sleep.

• Short Sleep = Shorter Life

• Brain - builds up a toxic buildup in the brain.

• Body - No immune system and activities stress chemistry leading to heart disease and cancer. 

• ALL RESEARCH BASED

• Naps - A double edged sword. Sleep is not like the bank, you can’t accumulate debt then pay it off as you go about your day. 

• Sleeping Pills - These are bad!

Secrets of the Sleeping Brain (1hr 41min)

• Long video that goes deep into some of the topics covered above. 

• Love the concept that we’ve hit on before that sleep actually allows you to integrate in ideas and learnings into what you’ve been doing prior. 

The Sleep Deprivation Epidemic (6min)

• Sleep is one of the most important aspects of our life and yet it is increasingly neglected in twenty-first-century society, with devastating consequences. Award-winning professor of neuroscience Matthew Walker provides a fascinating insight into why it is vital we start taking sleep seriously.

Episode Transcript

[0:02:21.7] MB: Today, we have another fascinating guest on the show, Dr. Matthew Walker. He’s a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley and a founder and the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. He’s published over a 100 scientific studies and is the author of the book, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the power of Sleep and Dreams, which is currently the number one Amazon bestseller in the neuroscience category. He’s been featured on TV, radio, including CBS’s 60 Minutes, National Geographic and much more.

Matt, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:02:53.7] MW: It’s a pleasure to be on Matt. Thank you for having me. 

[0:02:56.2] MB: Well, we’re very excited to have you on here today. I’d love to begin the conversation and talk a little bit about – as I think you’ve called it the sleep deprivation epidemic, and what happens to us when we don’t get enough sleep.

[0:03:11.4] MW: You’re right. There is currently a global sleep-loss epidemic. This is sweeping developed nations. It’s been underway for probably about 60 or 70 years. We know from surveys back in the 1940s that the average American adult was sleeping 7.9 hours a night. Now we know that number is down to 6 hours and 31 minutes during the week for American adults.

Back in my home country, not much better. It’s 6 hours and 49 minutes on average people are sleeping. Japan seems to be the worse; 6 hours and 22 minutes. I just give you those numbers to reaffirm first this pernicious erosion of sleep that has happened over the past 70 or 80 years as truth. But also just to take a step back, I think we have to realize that it took mother nature 3.6 million years to put this necessity of 8 hours of sleep in place.

Then we have come along, and in the space of blink of an evolutionary eye; 60, 70 years we’ve locked off maybe 20%, 25% of that sleep amount. How could it not come with deleterious consequences? I think it’s been proudly confirmed that we are in a global sleep-loss state of deficiency, or an epidemic as the CDC and the World Health Organization have called it.

What are the consequences though? Because if it’s not doing us any harm, then why worry? If only that were true, there is demonstrable harm that is underway because of the sleep-loss epidemic. We can start at the big 30,000-foot level and make it a very simple statement based on epidemiological studies from millions of people. That is the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. Short sleep predicts all-cause mortality.

I think that classical maxim that you may have heard. You can sleep when you’re dead. It’s always struck me as ironic, because if you adopt that mindset, we know from the evidence that you will be both dead sooner, and the quality of that now shorter life will be significantly worse. 

If you dig down a little deeper you can say, “Well, if a lack of sleep kills you more quickly, then what is it that is killing you more quickly?” It seems to be just about everything. Every made disease that is killing us in the developed world has causal insignificant links to a lack of sleep. That list currently and tragically includes Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, as well as numerous mental health conditions; depression, bipolar disorder and most recently and sadly, suicide as well.

I think we’re really now starting to understand not just how deathly a lack of sleep is and the current weight of our sleep deprivation, and that elastic band of sleep deprivation can stretch only so far before it snaps. But with also understanding from hard science exactly why a lack of sleep produces such disease, sickness and ill-health within the brain and the body.

[0:06:31.1] MB: It’s amazing and it’s so important to think about why sleep is so vital. Yet, in today’s society it seems like there is more and more of a push to sleep less, work more, hustle more, do more. How do we combat that? 

[0:06:49.5] MW: There is. I think currently, sleep has an image problem in society, because more often than not, we seem to stigmatize sleep and we suggest that people who are getting sufficient sleep and I actually choose my words quite carefully there. As being lazy, as being slothful, those who get maybe 7 or 8 hours of sleep a night.

People I think are – or some people, I should say. Not all, but some people are perhaps quite proud of the fact of how little sleep that they’re getting and where it almost as though it’s a badge of honor to be celebrated. It’s sad, because for all of the reasons that we’ve just discussed, it’s an ill-advised mentality to expose.

It’s also strange, because if we don’t always have that opinion. I don’t think any of us would look at an infant sleeping during the day and say, “Gosh, what a lazy baby.” We don’t do that, because we know that sleep at that time of life is absolutely non-negotiable. It’s fundamentally necessary. But if you look at the evidence somewhere between infancy and now even childhood, not only do we abandon this notion that sleep is necessary and important, but we give it this terrible stigma.

I think that attitude has to change, and there are many ways in which it has to change. I think part of the problem perhaps is that the science of sleep is actually not being adequately communicated to the public. I think it’s people like myself who are to blame. I’m a sleep scientist, a professional sleep scientist for 20 years now.

I can’t go around wagging the finger at people if people have not been educated by the science that the taxpayer dollars have funded. That was part of the motivation to write the book that I didn’t feel as though there was a book after that gave people a blueprint manifesto of all of the real hard science of sleep.

There are lots of books out there that you can buy about the quick fix, these are the 10 rules to better sleep, or – I got nothing against those types of books, but for me I felt it was important because my sense is that people don’t respond to rules. They respond to reasons rather than rules, and I wanted to give and write a book of reasons for why you should sleep, rather than rules for how to sleep.

[0:09:27.7] MB: I want to dig a little bit more specifically into some of the negative implications or maybe the flipside of why sleep is so important for certain activities. For somebody who – let’s contextualize this maybe within a framework broadly thinking about, if I want to get more work done people often say, “All right, I’m going to sleep less,” or, “I’m going to pull a all-nighter,” or, “I’m going to cut down on my sleep so I can be more productive,” how does that usually pan out? What does the science say about doing that?

[0:09:59.5] MW: It doesn’t pan out very well. In fact, the opposite is true; we now know that less sleep does not equal more productivity. There have been lots of laboratory and workplace with these, and they give us five clear truths. Firstly, under-slept employees tend to take on less challenging work problems. In other words, they opt for the easy way out. Under-slept employees actually produce fewer creative solutions to work problems that they’re facing.

They also actually exert less effort when working in groups, and we’ve done some of these work. They essentially slack off. It’s what we call social-loafing. They write the tale of others and try to claim their hard work is their own.

We also know very interestingly that under-slept employees are more likely to lie, cheat and engage in deviant behaviors, such as falsifying a claims, receipts, etc., and it’s a scaling function; the less sleep that you have, the more likely you are to lie and be deviant. 

What’s also interesting is that it scales the business hierarchy all the way up to the top. We know that the more or less sleep that a business leader has had, the more or less charismatic their employees will rate that business leader.

Even though the employees themselves know nothing about how much sleep that business leader has had. They can actually see it in the expression of the behavior of their leader. You can then actually scale that up from those that have low-level studies, all the way up to the high-level studies. There was a recent round report, an independent report that demonstrated that chronic exhaustion and fatigue due to a lack of sleep caused most first-world nations about 2% of their GDP. For the United States, that’s 411 billion dollars that we lose each year due to a lack of sleep.

If you can just think about that, if we solve the sleep deprivation problem in the US, we could almost double the budget for education and we could make huge in-roads into the problems that we have with healthcare. Or we could just flat out give people remarkably high tax rebates, simply by solving the sleep-loss epidemic.

I think in response to your question, it’s very clear that under-slept individuals are not going to be successful. It’s a little bit like, if you think about your workforce and you’re forcing them to come into work every morning, early and leave very late, so no one is getting enough sleep, it strikes me a little bit like a spin class at a gym.

Everyone in the office looks like they’re working hard, but the scenery never changes, there’s never any forward progression in terms of momentum with productivity and creativity. I think we need to change our attitude in the workplace regarding sleep. The evidence is very clear there.

[0:13:04.3] MB: Especially around the creativity and the productivity aspect of that. It makes me think almost about the – an applied version of the 80-20 principle, where it’s not necessarily just more hours of work equals more output, but it’s really vital to have quality work, where you’re creative, where you’re bringing a fresh perspective and a well-rested mind. That’s when you really produce value. That’s the 20% that produces 80% of your results. All the busy work and the hustle and muscle, if you don’t get enough sleep you’re not going to be able to really be incredibly productive.

[0:13:44.3] MW: I think that that’s very true. Is there a way that we could actually break the classic [inaudible 0:13:50.0] 80-20 law that’s common throughout nature and it’s applied to human beings as well. By way of manipulating sleep could we actually force it to be that it’s 30% or 40% of your workforce that returns now 80% or 90% of the productivity by way of sufficient sleep. 

It’s just coming down to the very fact that what is the recycle rate of a human being? I think people have failed in the workplace to actually face this question and ask it. It’s surprising, because people in the workplace are wonderfully astute at trying to squeeze every ounce of effectiveness and efficiency out of all of their systems, be it the budget, be it the tax, be it the hardware, be it the software.

I think we forget about the biological organism at the heart of most companies, the human beings themselves. We have to ask, “How long can an individual be awake before they decline and decline significantly in the productivity, efficiency and effectiveness?” We now know that that evidence, you need 8 hours of sleep, 16 hours – after 16 hours of wakefulness, the cognitive capacities and the physiological capacities of the body starts to decline dramatically in after 20 or 21 hours of being awake. You are as cognitively impaired as someone who would be legally drunk in terms of driving behind the wheel.

There really is a recycle refresh rate of a human being, and we know that and it declines dramatically once you get past that 16. What I’m suggesting there is not 16 hours of work. I’m suggesting that this 8, 9-hour work span, then people need that downtime and they need to get that 8 hours of sleep to reboot and refresh.

[0:15:45.3] MB: What’s actually happening during that recycling period?

[0:15:49.7] MW: Well, we know firstly that there are multiple different stages of sleep that we ebb and flow in and out of, throughout a full 8-hour phase. Those different stages of sleeping, the two principle types of sleep, I should note that probably most people are aware of, or what are called non-rapid eye movement sleep, or non-REM sleep, and rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep, which is the stage principally from which we dream.

Non-REM sleep actually has several sub-stages to it, stages one through four, increasing in the depth of sleep. By the way, it always strikes me as funny that scientists are not a very creative bunch. We have these four stages of deep non-REM sleep, and all we could come up with was stages one through four. Let’s set that side for a second.

We know that all of those different stages of sleep perform different functions end up all necessary. To come back to your question though, exactly what is happening at night? Well, let’s take deep non-REM sleep for a start.  The deepest stages of non-REM sleep. That stage of sleep is actually critical for essentially clearing out all of the metabolic toxins that have been building up in your brain.

Now that may sound a little bit hand-waving, but is actually very hard to get science from animal studies. When we are awake, we are essentially in a form of low-level brain damage. That’s what wakefulness is. We produce a variety of metabolic byproducts as a result of all of that waking brain cell combustion that we’re doing.

It is during sleep at night when we clear that away. What is clearing that away? Well, it turns out that we made a discovery, which is a sewage system in your brain. Now you have a sewage system in your body that you’re probably familiar with called the lymphatic system. But your brain also has one, it’s called the glymphatic system after the cells that produce it or compose the system called glial cells. 

That sewage system within the brain, glymphatic system, is not always on, at least not in highest flow capacity. It’s only during sleep and particular deep sleep at night where that cleansing system of the sewage network actually kicks in to high gear. It increases by maybe 2 to 300% relative to when we’re awake.

Why is this important? Well, one of the metabolic toxins that the glymphatic system clears away as we sleep at night is a toxic protein called beta-amyloid. Beta-amyloid is one of the leading candidate causes of Alzheimer’s disease. This is why we know that people who are not getting sufficient sleep across their lifespan are at a far high risk probability of going on to develop Alzheimer’s disease. The less sleep that you have, the less clearing away of that toxic byproduct. That’s one way, general way that we know that the brain gets essentially a refresh.

We also know that different cognitive systems and networks within your brain undergo a restoration. For example, we know that learning in memory systems get overhauled. We take information that we recently learned and we transfer it from short to long-term memory during sleep, which is actually like hitting the save button on new memories, so it prevents you from forgetting by cementing and solidifying those memories into long-term story sites.

We also know that there is a clearing out of your short-term memory reservoir. It’s perhaps a little bit like shifting files from a USB stick, so that when you wake up the next day, you have this renewed capacities to start learning and acquiring new facts and information all over again. That’s a more specific way in which the brain actually gets an overhaul at night during sleep.

We also know that the emotional circuits of the brain are changed and modified by sleep. There are deep emotional brain sensors, very old evolutionary centers specifically a structure called the amygdala, which controls the vital flight response. That structure, the amygdala is normally regulated in us higher order primates, human beings specifically, by a part of the brain that sits just above  your eyes called the prefrontal cortex, which acts a little bit like the CEO of the brain. It makes very high-level executive top-down control decisions.

When you had a good night of sleep, that part of your frontal lobe has been reconnected to your deep Neanderthal amygdala fight or flight center of the brain. It just regulates it. It’s a little bit like a break to your emotional accelerator pedal. When you don’t get enough sleep, that connection is actually severed and there’s a consequence. You become almost all emotional gas pedal and too little frontal lobe regulatory control brake.

There are many different ways in which sleep generally and very specifically seems to regulate our brain. I could also speak about the different ways that sleep actually reboots multiple systems within the body. That’s certainly the ways in which it refreshes your brain.

[0:21:13.5] MB: I want to dig into learning productivity and the emotional aspects. But before we do, tell me briefly about the physiological and the body reset aspects of sleep as well.

[0:21:25.3] MW: Firstly, we know that deep non-REM sleep that we described is perhaps one of the best forms of blood pressure medication that you could ever imagine. It’s during that deep sleep that your heart rate actually drops, your blood pressure will lower. There are a variety of restorative chemicals and hormones that are released, a growth hormone in particular to actually restore the cells within the body. It’s fantastic for the cardiovascular system.

We also know that it regulates your metabolic system, specifically it regulates insulin levels. If you’re not getting sufficient sleep, your blood glucose actually starts to become disrupted. There are [inaudible 0:22:07.7] that is now taking healthy people with no signs of diabetes. After one week of five to six hours of sleep a night, their blood sugar is disrupted so profoundly that their doctor would subsequently classify them as being pre-diabetic. That’s how critical sleep is to maintaining the metabolic system.

We also know that sleep is essential for another one of the major systems, the reproductive system. Here I’ll speak frankly about testicles, because we know that men who are routinely getting just 5 to 6 hours a night have significantly smaller testicles than those who are sleeping 8 hours or more.

In addition, men who report getting just 5 or 6 hours of sleep each night have a level of testosterone, which is that of someone 10 years their senior. In other words, a lack of sleep will actually age you by a decade in terms of that aspect of wellness and virility. We see very similar impairment in equivalent reproductive hormones and health, of course by a lack of sleep. It’s not just males who are disrupted in that way.

There are a variety of systems within the body. It also regulates appetite and weight and your food consumption. We know for example that those individuals who are not getting enough sleep will have an imbalance in the two hormones that control your hunger and your food intake. Those two hormones are called leptin and ghrelin.

Now leptin sounds like a Hobbit, I know, but trust me they are actually real hormones. Leptin is the hormone that tells your brain you’re satisfied with your food. You’re no longer hungry. You should stop eating. Ghrelin is the antithesis of that. Ghrelin will actually signal to your brain that you are not satisfied by the food that you’ve just eaten, that you are still hungry and that you should eat more.

People who are put on a regiment of just 5 or 6 hours of sleep for one week will have a mocked reduction in leptin, the hormone that says, “You’re fine. You’ve eaten enough, you can stop eating. You’re not hungry.” A mocked increase in the hormone ghrelin, which tells you, “You’re not satisfied with your food. You’re hungry and it’s time to eat more.”

That’s why people will actually eat somewhere between 3 to 500 calories more each day when they’re not getting sufficient sleep. You should also know by the way, it’s not just that you eat more, but what you eat is non-optimal when you’re sleep-deprived. Without sufficient sleep, you actually reach for the heavy-hitting starchy carbohydrates, as well as high-sugar foods and you stay away from the protein-rich foods. In other words, you’ll find yourself reaching for another slice of pizza rather than leafy greens, kale and beans.

It’s not just that you eat more. It’s what you eat that is also detrimental too. I hope that gives people just a little bit of a few brush strokes in terms of the bodily consequences. The one that we probably haven’t mentioned though, which is perhaps most impacted is your immune system. We know that one night of 4 hours of sleep will drop critical anti-cancer fighting immune cells called natural killer cells by 70%, which is a truly remarkable state of immune-deficiency, which happens very quickly within just one night.

Secondly, we also know that the link between a lack of sleep and cancer has now become so strong that the World Health Organization recently classified any form of night-time shift work as a probable cause energy. In other words, jobs that may induce cancer, because of a disruption of your sleep rate rhythms.

We can look to more benign things too. We know that if you’re getting just 5 hours of sleep in the week before you go and get your flu shot, you will only produce 50%, or in fact, less than 50% of the normal antibody response, rendering that flu shot largely ineffective.

Finally, know that if you’re getting just 5 hours of sleep a night, you are 2 to 300% more likely to capture cold, than someone who is getting 8 hours of sleep a night. This was a remarkable study where they quarantined people in a hotel and they had tracked how much sleep that they were getting in the week before. Then they flushed up the nose of all of these individuals; the flu virus. Then in the next few days they looked to see how many of those individuals succumbed to the flu, how many got infected. Then they bucketed them on the basis of how much sleep that they had in the week before, and that’s how they were able to come to that conclusion.

There really isn’t any system within your body, or process within the brain that isn’t wonderfully enhanced by sleep when you get it, or demonstrably impaired when you don’t get enough.

[0:27:25.3] MB: What a powerful statement. I mean, just that sentence alone really succinctly summarizes the fundamental conclusion that the science is in across nearly every spectrum of the body, the brain, etc., that sleep is incredibly valuable. That 8 hours of sleep specifically is really critical.

[0:27:46.2] MW: I think it is. I think what we know is that without sleep, there is low energy and disease. With sleep, there is vitality and health. The sleepless epidemic is perhaps the greatest curable disease that no one is really talking about, or effectively trying to solve. I would simply say that the lack of sleep is both the most striking omission in the health conversation of today. All lack of sleep is perhaps a slow form of self-Euthanasia.

[0:28:16.6] MB: I want to dig back into the relationship. Let’s touch on learning and memory. Tell me a little bit more about the work you’ve done and some of the research around how sleep can improve learning and memory.

[0:28:29.8] MW: Sleep actually is beneficial for memory in at least three ways that we’ve now discovered and this is the work that we’ve been doing, or some of the work that we do at my sleep center.

First, we know that you need sleep before learning to essentially prepare your brain; perhaps a little bit like a dry sponge, ready to initially soak up new information the next day. We did a study where we tested a very simple hypothesis. Is it wise to pull the all-nighter? Is it a good thing, or a bad thing?

We took a group of individuals and we either gave them a full night of sleep, or we kept them awake throughout the night. Then the next day, we wedged them inside an MRI scanner and then we have them try and learn a whole list of new facts as we were taking snapshots of brain activity. Then we tested them to see how effectively that learning had been.

Firstly, what we found is that when we put those two groups head to head, there was a 40% deficit in the ability of the brain to make new memories without sleep, and just a frame that in context it would simply be the difference between acing an exam and failing it miserably. What we went on to discover from the brain scans however was why the brain was failing to lay down those new memories.

There is a structure in our brains, on the left and the right side called the hippocampus. You can think of the hippocampus a little bit like the memory inbox of the brain. That it’s actually very good at receiving new memory files and holding on to them initially.

When we looked at that structure in those people who’d had a full night of sleep, we saw lots of healthy learning-related activity. Yet, in those people who were sleep deprived, we actually couldn’t find any significant activity whatsoever.

It was almost as though sleep deprivation had shut down your memory inbox as it were and any new incoming files. They were just being bounced. You couldn’t effectively commit new experiences to memory. If people would like to just understand what that means in terms of the hippocampus, I’m sure many people listening have probably seen the movie Memento. In that movie, that gentleman has damage to the brain and specifically to the structure of the hippocampus. From that point forward, he can no longer make any new memories. It is what we call in neurology, densely amnesic.

That part of his brain was the hippocampus and it is the very same structure that your lack of sleep will actually attack and prevent your brain from actually laying down and placing those new memories into a fixed state within the brain. That’s the first way that sleep is good for learning a memory.

You also need sleep not just before learning, but also after learning, but for something different now. Sleep after learning will essentially hit the save button on those new memories. It will essentially solidify those memories into neural architecture of the brain. As we mentioned before, it actually will transfer those memories, almost like packets of information being transferred across the network, from a short-term vulnerable storage site to the more permanent long-term storage center within the brain, which is called the cortex; this wrinkled mass that sits on top of your brain.

That means that when you come back the next day, those memories are protected and safe and you will be able to remember, rather than those memories being vulnerable to being overwritten or lost, for example to the ravage of time. Which mean, that they are ultimately forgotten. 

We also know a little bit about how sleep not only transfers memories during sleep, but even strengthens those memories. It’s during sleep that the brain actually replays the information that you’ve recently learned. These are studies done in humans, but also in animals they were actually placing electrodes into the brains of rats and they were having them run around a maze.

As they were running around the maze and learning the maze, all of these different brain cells which fire in a specific signature pattern, which was essentially the imprinting of a memory and it adds different tones to them. It would sound a little bit like “babababam, babababam, babababam.” The brain is imprinting this memory as the rat is running around the maze.

Low and behold, what happens is that when you then let the rats sleep, but keep recording and keep eavesdropping on the brain, what do you think reemerges? It’s exactly the same pattern, “babababam, babababam.” The rat is replaying those memories. What’s incredible however, is that it’s actually replaying them at somewhere between 10 to 20 times faster. Rather than “babababam,” it’s actually, “brrm, brrm, brr, brrm, brrm.” It’s this high-speed fidelity replay. We think that that actually helps score the memory trace into the brain in a strengthened manner, almost like etching on the surface of glass. You’re really strengthening that neural circuit. That’s sleep after learning to strengthen individual memories, and I guess essentially future proof that information within the brain.

There is a final third way that sleep actually helps memory that we’ve discovered, which I think is perhaps most exciting. Sleep doesn’t just simply strengthen individual memories. It’s that strengthening of individual memories by the way that happens during deep, non-rapid eye movement sleep, or dreamless sleep.

Sleep also then actually interconnects those new memories together and interconnects new information with all of your pre-existing back-catalog of autobiographical stored information. Essentially, what sleep is doing and this is actually the work of rapid eye movement sleep of dream sleep, is that you’re starting to collide information together within the brain. This is a bit like group therapy for memories.

What you awake with the next morning is a revised mind-wide web of information within the brain. It’s a new associative network, or at least not a radically new associative network, but it’s an updated and it’s a modified associative network. That’s the reason that you can come back the next day having extracted and divine, creative novel solutions to previously impenetrable problems that you were facing.

It’s probably the reason – I mean, now know this, for example that sleep will actually provide almost a three-fold advantage in problem solving relative to an equivalent time period spent awake. That science is now very well, I think rendered and described.

There probably is a reason that you’re never told to stay awake on a problem and in every language that I’ve inquired about to date, that phrase sleeping on a problem seems to exist. It seems to transcend cultural boundaries. It’s a phenomenon that is common across the globe. I should also note by the way that we – the British, we say you sleep on a problem. I believe and please correct me if anyone knows this, but I believe the French translation is a little closer to you sleep with the problem, rather than you sleep on a problem. I think that says so much about the romantic difference between the British and the French. I’ll digress before I lose my British passport.

[0:36:22.5] MB: That’s great. Yeah, that’s a funny anecdote and probably true. I’ve seen the phrase creative incubation and some research around creativity, and some of the science behind what you’re describing. To me, it makes so much sense that the more you give the brain the ability to something, and when you come back to that problem, you’re going to be much more creative. You’re going to be much more effective at solving. 

[0:36:48.0] MW: That’s right. It’s not just sleep by the way. If it’s a complex problem, simple problems tend to benefit from deliberative focused thought. But complex problems, problems where there are maybe 10, 20, 80 different variables and you could think of this as something very crass to you. What type of knife or fork set do you buy? This may be just three or four different variables. Versus, what type of card do you buy, where there is maybe 16 different features of variants that you have to choose between.

Well, the more complex a problem is, the more benefit there is to actually stepping away and stopping consciously thinking about it. That’s where the non-conscious brain seems to go to work. It seems to be able to distill amounts of information that we just can’t consciously juggle all up in the air at the same time when we’re awake. It’s just too much for a working memory. 

If you’re to think of perhaps what the extreme version of that non-conscious processing would be, you would probably design a system that looks very similar to sleep. That’s exactly why sleep provides those creative benefits. It’s essentially informational alchemy that occurs overnight.

[0:39:22.9] MB: I want to segway now and get into strategies for sleeping more effectively. We’ve talked at length about how important sleep is both from avoiding a tremendous amount of negative consequences, but also in producing a myriad of positive benefits. Tell me about, for somebody who maybe has trouble sleeping, or just in general, what are some of the basic interventions that we can implement in our lives to sleep better?

[0:39:50.5] MW: These tips I suppose, and again, I’m not just going to tell you the rules. I won’t just try and explain the reasons for each of these rules. I do warn people that some of them are probably not necessarily desirable. It makes me very unpopular, but here they are.

The first overarching rule of course, is that you just have to carve out an 8-hour non-negotiable sleep opportunity every night. It sounds crass and it’s sounds hokie, but I do this in my life as well. I’m not just saying this because I’ve just written a book and I want to practice what I seem to be preaching. But it’s from a very selfish perspective, because I know the evidence so well. If you knew the evidences I do, which and I hope people will do after reading the book, you just wouldn’t do anything different. I don’t want to short a life, I don’t want a life filled disease and pain and sickness and suffering. That’s why I do give myself a non-negotiable 8-hour opportunity every night.

Once you’ve got that in place – I don’t think it’s insurmountable. People are doing wonderful things in terms of actually committing non-negotiable time to exercise, and people are trying to eat more healthily. I don’t think sleep is a lost cause in this regard. 

Once you’re getting that opportunity, then I think there are five things that you could do. If there is one thing that you do from all of these tips, it is these; regularity. Go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time, no matter what, no matter whether it’s the weekend, or the weekday. Even if you had a bad night of sleep, still wake up at the same time the next day. Accept that it’s going to be a bit of a tricky day. But then just get to bed early the following evening and then you will reset.

Because if you sleep in late for whatever reason, you’re not going to feel tired until later that following evening, and you start to drift forward in time and it’s called social jetlag. That has marked deleterious consequences to your health and to your sleep. Regularity is key.

The second is temperature. Keep it cool. Keep your bedroom around about 68 degrees is optimal for most people, which is probably colder than you think, or about 18 and a half degrees Celsius. The reason is this, that your body needs to drop its core temperature by about a 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit in order to initiate sleep. That’s the reason that you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that’s too cold, than too hot. Because at least the cold room is moving your brain and body in the right thermal direction, that it actually wants to go to for sound and healthy long sleep. 

Try to keep your temperature in the bedroom cool. Wear socks if you get cold feet. Some people complain about this, so it’s okay to wear those socks, but keep the bedroom cool. Another way that you can exploit this hack is actually to take a hot bath before bed, or a hot shower. The bath is better if you look at the evidence.

Most people think that when they have a hot bath, they get into bed, they’re nice and warm and that’s what lets them fall asleep more easily. It’s actually the opposite. When you get into a bath, all of the blood comes from the core of your body out to the surface, that’s why you get that rosy glow. It’s what’s called mass vasodilation.

Once you get out of the bath with all of that blood near the surface of your skin, you have this huge massive thermal dump. You get this evacuation of heat from the body, which plummets your core temperature, and that’s why you’ll fall asleep more quickly and more soundly.

The third tip is the light, and actually darkness more specifically. We are actually a dark-deprived society in all first-world nations. You need darkness to allow the release of a critical hormone called melatonin. Melatonin will time the normal healthy onset of sleep. If you’ve got lots of light inside of the house during the evening, and especially if you’re looking and staring at those LED screens from phones, tablets, laptops etc., that will actually fool your brain into thinking it is still daytime and it will shut off melatonin, so you won’t be releasing melatonin.

There were studies done where they had people reading on an iPad for one hour before bed. If I was doing that here in California, their data demonstrated that my release and peak of melatonin didn’t happen, or were shifted by three hours forward in time. I would essentially be close to Hawaii in terms of my internal clock timing to sleep, rather than California.

Keep it dim. You can turn down half the lights in the house in the evening. You don’t need all of them on the last hour before bed. Also stay away from screens in the last hour, and try and use black out curtains, that can actually be very helpful.

The fourth tip is not to stay in bed if you have been awake for longer than 20 minutes. This applies to whether you’re trying to fall asleep, or whether you’ve woken up and are trying to fall back asleep. The reason is this, your brain is a remarkably associative device. If you are lying in bed awake, it quickly learns that being in bed is about being awake rather than being asleep.

You need to break that association. After 20 minutes or so, if you haven’t fallen asleep, get up, don’t get too stressed, go to a different room and in dim light, perhaps just read a book, no screens, no eating. Only when you feel sleepy should you return to bed. In that way, you will actually relearn the association between your bed being about being asleep, rather than being awake.

I would note that some people actually don’t like the idea of getting out of bed. It’s dark. Maybe they’re warm and maybe it’s colder in the rest of the house. I understand that. Another way to try and help you get back to sleep that has good proven clinical trial data behind it is actually meditation. I’m actually quite hard know a scientist, and when I was looking into this evidence as I was writing the book, I was really quite skeptical.

The studies were very clear, very well done, some of them out of Stanford here just down the way from me. So much so that I actually started meditating myself and that was seven months ago, and I’m now a regular meditator. If I’m traveling going through jetlag, for example and struggling with sleep, I will actually use a meditation relaxation practice.

The final tip is the one that really makes me deeply – well, deeply unpopular, just generally as a person anyway, but this is the one that really makes me unpopular with people. No caffeine after noon and avoid alcohol in the evenings. Forego and I kept and I’ll explain both.

Everyone knows of course that caffeine activates you. It’s a class of drugs that we call a stimulants and it can keep people awake. What people may not know however is that for those people who say, “Well, I can drink an espresso after dinner and I force sleep fine and I stay asleep.” That may be true. However, the depth of the deep sleep that you have when caffeine is swirling around within your brain during sleep is nowhere near as deep as if you had not had that cup of coffee in the evening.

As a consequence, people wake up the next morning. They won’t fee refreshed or restored. They don’t remember having a problem falling asleep or staying asleep. They don’t equate it with the cup of coffee they had the night before. But now they find themselves reaching the two cups of coffee, or three cups of coffee in the morning, which essentially is building a dependency and addiction cycle. That’s the issue with caffeine and that’s why the suggestion is stop caffeine midday and certainly after 2 PM.

Alcohol is probably the most misunderstood drug when it comes to sleep. Alcohol is a class of drugs that we call the sedative hypnotics. Sedation is not sleep. Many people will say, “Well, I nightcap, I have a quick whiskey and it puts me to sleep. It’s great.” It’s actually not true. What you’re simply doing is you’re sedating your cortex, you’re knocking out your brain essentially. You’re not getting into natural sleep.

Then there are two more problems with alcohol. Firstly, it will fragment your sleep so you will wake up many more times throughout the night, which leaves you with what we call un-restorative sleep. The final thing is that alcohol is one of the best chemicals that we know blocking your dream sleep, your REM sleep, which is essential for not just creativity and that associative type of memory processing that we spoke about.

REM sleep is also critical for emotional and mental health. It is during REM sleep when we provide our brain a form of emotional first aid, and you won’t be getting that if you’re blocking REM sleep by way of alcohol. Those would be the five tips to better sleep and hopefully they help some folks. I’m also happy to speak a little bit about sleeping pills. They’re also misunderstood, but those would be for most people the five tips that I would offer.

[0:49:17.9] MB: Great advice. I try to implement as many of those as possible. One of the things, specifically caffeine is something that I used to drink at my peak. About a cup of – I mean, a pot of coffee a day. Now I basically don’t consume any caffeine. When I do, I limit myself, no caffeine afternoon. Maybe one cup of tea is the maximum. I’ve noticed a huge impact on that impact in my sleep. Sorry, were you going to say something? 

[0:49:44.6] MW: Yeah. I’m just going to say, I mean it’s immensely wise and it’s one of the problems with a lack of sleep is that you quickly reset your perception of your effectiveness and your health. You just think, “Well, this is how I am now at this age.” Not realizing that you could actually be a far better version of yourself, both mentally, cognitively and physiologically if you were just to start getting sufficient sleep.

I think many people fail to realize that with caffeine especially that it’s only when they come off caffeine do they really start to feel both the benefits of all of the side effects that normally come with high caffeine use, but especially the benefits on sleep. It’s like wiping a fogged window and you finally can start to see clearly through it.  That’s the benefit of a full restorative night of sleep.

[0:50:36.8] MB: I have a couple short questions all around specific sleep strategies or tactics. Let’s start with – you touched on sleeping pills. Tell me about sleeping pills. Do they work? If so, why or why not?

[0:50:50.2] MW: There are no sleeping medications that we have currently that produce naturalistic sleep. The current class of drugs that you will be prescribed are called sedative hypnotics. Again, as we mentioned with alcohol, sedation is not sleep. The sleep that you have when you’re on sleeping pills, if I were to show you the electrical signature of your sleep if you would come to my laboratory, it would  not be the same on sleeping pills as it would be if you’re just having naturalistic healthy sleep. That’s the first thing.

The second thing, and I go to great lengths and a whole chapter in the book to discuss this, is that people are probably not aware of the risks of sleeping pills. They have not been communicated to public adequately. Firstly, we know that sleeping pills are associated with a far higher risk of death. They’re also associated with a significantly high risk of cancer and infection.

Now, we don’t yet know if this is causal versus simply associational, but what I wanted to do is to try to get that information out to the public, so they at least could be armed with the knowledge and make an informed choice with that doctor when they go and see the surgery. That’s I think one of the biggest problems of sleeping pills is that the misunderstood nature about what they give you and the dangers.

People also don’t necessarily have to be taking sleeping pills, I should note. There is a safe and non-pharmacological alternative which is just as effective. It is called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBTI for short. You work with a therapist for a couple of weeks. As I mentioned, it’s just as powerful as sleeping in the short-term, but better still, once you finish that short therapy phase, you continue to maintain that better sleep. Unlike sleeping pills, when you come off those you tend to actually have what’s called rebound insomnia, where your sleep is as bad, if not worse than when you started. 

I think people can revisit their sleep issues with their doctor. I’m not trying to shame people who are on sleeping pills. I’m not trying to make you feel bad if you are. I’m very sensitive to the desire for better sleep and I’m so sensitive to the issue of insomnia, or the desperate, desperate state. You should be aware of what sleeping pills are, what they do and what the alternatives are.

[0:53:15.8] MB: What about taking a melatonin supplement?

[0:53:18.6] MW: Melatonin is useful in the circumstance of jetlag to try and reset your body clock in a new time zone. You should take it 30 to 60 minutes before you want to get to sleep in the new time zone. Melatonin works to essentially time the onset of your sleep. I guess, the analogy would be if you think about the 100-meter race in the Olympics. Well, melatonin is the starting official who has the starter gun.

It’s melatonin that brings all of the different ingredients off the sleep race to the starting line, then starts the race in its entirety. It begins the sleep race. Melatonin itself does not actually participate in the race of sleep, in the generation of that sleep race. That’s a whole different set of chemicals. As a consequence, that’s why actually melatonin when you are in a new time zone and you’re stable now in that new time zone, if you’re a young healthy individual, then melatonin actually isn’t effective as a sleeping aid. It doesn’t actually help if you look at the studies.

That said, I would note that for those people who are taking melatonin and they feel as though it helps their sleep, well then I usually tell people continue on. It’s because the placebo effect is one of the most reliable effects in all pharmacology. No harm, no foul if you think it’s working for you.

[0:54:48.1] MB: What about napping? Is napping something – if you’re sleep-deprived, can you catch up with a nap?

[0:54:53.7] MW: Unfortunately, you cannot catch up on sleep. Sleep is not like the bank. This is another myth that I try to deconstruct in the book. You can’t accumulate a debt, let’s say during the week and then hope to pay it off at the weekend. Sleep just doesn’t work like that. There is no credit system, or there is no credit sleep sell within the brain.

You can if you are sleep-deprived, take a nap and overcome some of the basic sleepiness. Your reaction times will improve a little bit after a nap, but you don’t actually overcome all of the higher level, cognitive issues such as decision-making, learning in memory, focused attention, all of those types of things that we know are would buckle and collapse by way of a lack of sleep. Naps just don’t seem to be able to overcome those.

You can’t overcome – you can’t bank sleep and you can’t sleep off a debt. I see this in my students. It’s what I would call sleep bulimia, which is where they’re binging on sleep at the weekend and they’re – try and taking too little sleep during the week. It’s this binge purge kind of cycle.

I would also say naps, just more generally are a double-edged sword. If during the day when we’re awake, we actually build up a chemical pressure in our brain. It’s a sleepiness pressure. Now, it’s a hydraulic pressure, don’t worry. As I said, it’s a chemical pressure.  The chemical that builds up is called adenosine. The more of that sleepiness chemical that you have, the more and more sleepy that you will feel. After about 16 hours of being awake, you’re nice and tired and then you should fall asleep and stay asleep for about 8 hours.

When we sleep, we remove that sleepiness pressure. It’s almost like a valve on a pressure cooker. We release that sleepiness steam as it were. This is where I come back to naps. If you nap too late in the day, you actually release some of that healthy sleepiness, which means that when it comes time to sleep normally at night, you may actually struggle to fall asleep, or at least stay asleep.

The advice would be this, if you are someone who can nap regularly and you don’t struggle with your sleep at night, then naps are just fine. But if you can’t nap regularly and/or you’re having difficulties with your sleep at night then the advice is you shouldn’t nap, you should stay awake, build up that healthy sleepiness, and then you will have a better night of sleep because of it.

[0:57:30.1] MB: What about someone who’s in a situation, let’s say like a new parent. Is there anything that they can go through obviously, very chronically sleep-deprived state? Is there any strategy for them to be able to implement, that would help them battle through that in some way? 

[0:57:45.0] MW: Some parents describe trying to work better shifts and what I mean by that is in two ways. Firstly, some parents will try to take early, the early shift and then the late shift, the first half of the night versus the second half of the night and switch between those two. Another way that you can do that on an informed choice is try to determine whether you are a night owl, or you’re a morning type, what we call a lock. That’s a genetically predisposed. It’s called your chrono type.

If you are someone who likes to go to bed late and wake up late, versus someone who likes to go to bed early and wake up early, that’s not a choice. That’s a genetic mandate that’s being given to you in your DNA code. You can try to ask in the couple, are you someone who would prefer to wake up early and go to bed early? In which case, could you take the morning shift, the late morning shift?

If I’m someone who likes to go to bed late and wake up late, well then it’s easier for me to actually take the first half of the night and then sleep for the second half of the morning and sleep late. You can think about split shifts like that. Some people will also flip-flop back and forth. Some people will say, “Well, I’ll take the next two nights and you get good sleep, then we switch over and you take two nights.” They try to mix and match it in that way too. It’s a desperately difficult situation.

In part, we would not actually design to be family units like this, if you look at [inaudible 0:59:17.8] tribes who have not been touched by the electrical influence, then they actually tend to sleep in groups. Restless legs dangling all over the place, arms intertwined. Whole families would sleep together and people would take turns in terms of caring for the young. It’s a lot to ask of parents, and those are some of the ways that you can try to overcome it.

[0:59:45.6] MB: One other question and this is out of left field a little bit. I’m curious, have you seen or studied around the neurotransmitter GABA and its relationship with sleep?

[0:59:56.5] MW: GABA is the principle inhibitory neurotransmitter of the brain. The way that most sleeping medications work right now and you can just name your favorite one and it will work in this way, is by essentially trying to activate the receptors in the brain for GABA. Those receptors essentially are like the red lights on your neurons. They stop them firing, they stop them from going. 

Drugs that try to target the GABA system within the brain are really quite blunt instruments and that’s why sleeping pills, which act exactly in this way are really not precise tools. Sleep is a remarkably complex neuro-physiological and neuro-chemical ballet if you look at it. All of these different stages of sleep, neurotransmitters going up and down and brain networks ebbing and flowing.

To think that you can essentially recreate something that is so complex and so bi-directional sleep by simply just knocking the brain out and switching it off using GABA receptors is really just – it’s an unfortunate outcome of how poor our pharmacology is in this day and age. We just don’t yet have the pharmacological precision and sophistication to mimic sleep at this stage.

[1:01:22.4] MB: What’s one piece of homework that you would give to a listener who wants to sleep better?

[1:01:28.5] MW: I would say try giving yourself one week of 8 hours of sleep and see if you feel any better. Just give it as self-improvement test. Try it as a hack, that if you are one of those people who are into the quantified self-movement and you’re into self-experimentation then just test out all of that what you’ve just heard in the past week and just determine if you feel any better when you’re sleeping 8 hours every night and you’ve regular each and every night. Versus a staccato sleep schedule where you’re sleeping 5 hours and 6 hours and 12 hours and then 5 hours again. Just ask yourself, “Did that experiment work? Is it in my favor? Do I feel any better and do I notice that improvement? 

[1:02:19.2] MB: For listeners who want to learn more and want to find you and your book online, what’s the best place to do that?

[1:02:25.9] MW: They can find the book, which is called Why We Sleep. They can find that online. Amazon holds it. You can find it from all of your major bookstores, both the major brands, as well as all of the independent. It’s on the list of most libraries too. If you don’t want to part with your money, my publisher would probably won’t like me saying that, but I read online, it’s about the knowledge of the book, not the sales.

If you want to learn more about the work that I do, you can follow me on social media. I am at sleepdiplomat, all one word. Sleepdiplomat. I’m on Twitter and also you can find me on LinkedIn. Also on the web I am at – it is www.sleepdiplomat.com 

[1:03:11.4] MB: Well, Matt. This has been a fascinating conversation. So much great information, practical strategies, tons and tons of science. Really appreciate it. Incredible insights. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of these wisdom.

[1:03:25.4] MW: Well, thank you and I have to say a real thanks to you too. It’s not just what people say at the end of these interviews, but I’m trying to fight this battle for sleep. I can only do so much by getting on shows or television, radio or writing a book for example. I need fantastic journalists and media and genius types to actually join and partner with me to get this message out. I too just want to thank you, Matt. Thank you for being part of the sleep mission.

I’m going to grant you now the title of being a sleep ambassador for having me on the show. Thank you very much. Sincerely, I really want to thank you. I desperately need to get this message out. This portal is a remarkable way to proclaim the virtues of sleep. Thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

Finding Joy In A World Full of Suffering - Lessons From a Former Buddhist Monk with Robert Thurman

This episode is a bit off the beaten path for us here at the Science of Success. Given this time of year, when many are thinking, reflecting, and being a bit more spiritual - we wanted to offer a different perspective. This episode is not as science based, but still provides a fascinating dialogue with a Buddhist monk, who was the first westerner ordained by the Dalai Lama, on life, meditation, mindfulness, and much more with our guest Robert Thurman.

Robert Thurman is a Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies in the Department of Religion at Columbia University, and President of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies. Time magazine has called Robert “the leading American expert on Tibetan Buddhism.” and named him one of Time Magazine most influential Americans in 1997. Robert was the first westerner ever to be ordained as a Tibetan Monk by the Dalai Lama and his work and books have been featured all over the globe.

• How Robert’s journey took him to becoming a Tibetan Monk under the Dalai Llama

• The human being is a learning machine

• The dogma of materialism - mind is the power that directs matter

• Inner science / buddhist science

• The basic misunderstandings of buddhism from a western perspective

• Life is suffering

  1. It’s just meditation

• Meditation without context isn’t useful

• The two kinds of meditation

• Clearing your mind of thinking / emptying the mind

  1. Analytic / critical meditation or “insight meditation”

  2. Thinking something directed towards the exploration of yourself, ideas, or things around you

• How an egotistical approach creates “guaranteed misery” - you could become the most powerful person on the planet and people still wont think you’re important

• Why enlightenment is not clearing your mind of thoughts

• The importance of focusing on and being open to other people

• You can learn if you examine yourself and your world

• The unexamined life will be frustrating

• “Dis-identifying from the thought flow” will not get you to enlightenment

• Look more objectively at your thought flow - see where thought flows arise, penetrate the thought flow, see the negative thoughts and the positive thoughts

• What thought is that?

  1. How accurate is it?

  2. Where does it come from?

  3. Whose voice is it? my mother’s voice? my fathers? my uncles? my teacher?

  4. Gain leverage on how the mind works, edit how the mind works reinforce the positive insights, de-enforce the negative insights

• Stripping away false identities and beliefs

• It’s helpful to have help of others - mobilize minds that are further along the path than you are - your the only one who can learn your reality in a viscerally transformative way - use their help and follow their methods

• How Eckart Tolle battled back from the verge of suicide - looking critically at negative thoughts

• Experiential understanding of the nature of reality - reality is beyond anyone’s idea of reality

• The experience of reality is beyond our ability to describe it

• How does the Dalai Llama keep up his joy, good humor, and happiness in a world full of so much suffering?

• The nature of life itself is blissful. Reality is good. The more you’re open to reality, the happier you are.

• Broaden your attitude and orientation, don’t deny the bad experiences

• When you’re miserable, you can’t help people. When you’re happy, you can.

• You have to put your own happiness oxygen mask on before you can help anyone else

• The habitual perception that we are our own isolated egos vs the universe

• Interconnectedness of all life

• Suffering and frustration are rooted in the false belief that you and your ego are the most important thing

• The universe is empty of any non-relational entity

• Buddhism is the opposite of ignorance is bliss, reality is bliss. You already have bliss, you have blocks of knowing and feeling and understand it. It’s YOU. You’re made of it.

• Wave particle paradox, Heinsberg uncertainty and the science of interconnectedness

• Quantum physics, buddhism and the observer paradox

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better?

Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

[Search List] Robert Thurman Amazon book list
[Wiki Article] The Thinker
[SoS Episode] Limiting Beliefs
[Book] The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle
[Wiki Article] Wave–particle duality
[Wiki Article] Observer effect (physics)
[TEDEd Video] What is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle? - Chad Orzel
[Video] The Real Meaning of E=mc² | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios
[Personal Site] Bob Thurman
[Book] Man of Peace: The Illustrated Life Story of the Dalai Lama of Tibet by William Meyers, Robert Thurman, and Michael G. Burbank

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

This episode is a bit off the beaten path for us here at the Science of Success. Given the time of year when many are thinking, reflecting, being a bit more spiritual, we wanted to offer a little bit different of a perspective. This episode is not a science-based, but it still provides a fascinating dialogue with a Buddhist monk, who is the first Westerner ever to be ordained by the Dalai Lama. We discussed life, meditation, mindfulness, and much more with our guest Robert Thurman.

I’m going to give you three really quick reasons why you should join our e-mail list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. There is some amazing stuff that’s available only to our e-mail subscribers, including a special guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything that we created based on listener demand, curated weekly e-mails that you’re going to get every single week, including our Mindset Monday e-mail, which listeners have been absolutely loving short, sweet articles and stories that we found fascinating within the last week, and a chance to shape the show. You can vote on guests, submit your own questions to our guests and much more.

Sign up today by going to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. There is some incredible stuff that you only get access to when you sign up and join the e-mail list. You can also, if you’re on the go right now, if you’re driving around, if you’re on your phone, just text the word “smarter”, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222. That’s “smarter” to 44222.

In our previous episode, we discussed one of the most important evidence-based psychology principles that makes people successful; self-awareness. We looked at the difference between people who succeed and those who plateau.

We talked about why self-awareness is the meta-skill of the 21st century, and a foundational skill required to succeed in nearly anything; including looking at conclusions from over 800 scientific studies about self-awareness with our guest Dr. Tasha Eurich. If you want to master the most vital skill in the 21st century, listen to that episode.

Now for the interview. But before we get into that, I wanted to make note, the audio quality in this interview is not the greatest. We had a little bit of trouble on Robert’s end with some of the sound quality issues. I just wanted to let you know ahead of time that Robert’s audio is not perfect, but there’s some really good insights in this conversation and I felt it was still worth sharing with you.

Now for the show.

[0:02:48.1] MB: Today, we have another fascinating guest on the show, Robert Thurman. Robert is a professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies in the Department of Religion at Columbia University, and the President of the American Institute of Buddhist studies. Time Magazine has called him the leading American expert on Tibetan Buddhism and named him one of Time Magazine’s most influential Americans in 1997.

He was also the first Westerner to ever be ordained a Tibetan monk by the Dalai Lama. His works and books have been featured across the globe. Bob, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:21.7] RT: Thanks, Matt. Nice to talk to you.

[0:03:23.9] MB: Well, we’ve very excited to have you on the show today. For listeners who may not be familiar with you and your background, I know you’ve had a fascinating story. I’d love to hear a little bit about your personal journey and how that led you to eventually becoming a monk and where you are today.

[0:03:39.0] RT: Well, okay. I was a Harvard undergraduate and I decided that western psychology and philosophy didn’t quite get it right. I decided to go to India to see some deeper psychology. I had a sense it would be there. When I got there, there were a lot of really nice Indians, but I got really turned on by the Tibetans and the knowledge they have of Indian Buddhism, of ancient Indian Buddhism.

I started studying with them, and that’s 54 years ago, 55 years ago and never turned back. I found the philosophical solutions I was looking for, the openness of mind to new questions I was looking for, the yogas, the meditations, everything. The people, they were just really great. I was speaking their language in about three months, and it was like coming home.

I’m still doing that. I must say I was a monk for about four to five years. But now I’m an ex-monk and I have a big family. Didn’t damage me forever. That’s pretty much my story. Joining academia is like coming back to another kind of monastery, where you – they were the American one, you know where you’re having family and you study what you want and you teach what you want after a while. It’s a privilege. It’s a wonderful thing. The human being is a learning machine and that’s what they should be doing with their life.

[0:05:01.3] MB: I’m really curious. As somebody who’s such an expert in something like Buddhism, where do you see some of the common western misunderstanding of the core principles of Buddhism?

[0:05:15.1] RT: Well, western and eastern people do misunderstand Buddhism. It isn’t really an east-west thing. Because misunderstand themselves and they misunderstand life. Buddhism as it is in a way never really interested me, I have to say. But Buddhist science and the knowledge of the mind and the knowledge of reality was what really interested me.

I think that has a lot to offer to west and east, and especially modern science is a little bit caught nowadays by the dogma of materialism. The idea that the mind doesn’t exist, that mind over matter doesn’t work. That’s a big error. Mind is actually really the power that directs matter, I would say, which Buddhist science has a very strong evidence and arguments about. That really is usual to people.

I consider I’m going ever deeper into that. I don’t claim to be enlightened or anything, but I’ve gotten in that direction and I’m sure there is that direction, put it that way. Everyone can do that. That’s what the human is built for. That’s what I like to do. I call it really a Buddhist science really, or inner science as it’s called in India.

Yoga and Hinduism has a lot of that too, because Buddhism totally influence every country it was ever in. It was in all the [0:06:27.2] countries have had a huge impact on them. Having discovered it, I think it’s going to have a huge impact here. It already has that some impact and it was gone with one. I think one thing that – the basic misunderstanding is that Buddhism teaches you and that all you can do is suffer and you can never get away from it and you’re better be resigned to it. That’s one of the big misunderstandings.

Before our Buddha discovered happiness, actually that’s what he discovered and how to get rid of suffering permanently. The second misunderstanding is that Buddhism is just meditating, and that’s also a mistake. Meditation is a powerful tool for transforming yourself on learning, but it must be preceded by scientific learning and lot of critical investigation, exploration and thinking and experiencing and analyzing your experience and seeing how your mind works.

Then when you get a bit of orientation about what you are, what reality is, then meditation enables you to really bring it down to your gut and really change your life more thoroughly. I mean, learning changes your life very much too, but to completely transform, you need to add meditation to learning.

You don’t just do meditation out of the bat. If you just meditate because somebody tells you that meditation is the solution to everything, you are basically deepening your ignorance actually. You’ll become more egotistical and you become more isolated and alienated more into yourself, which is not really a usual place to be stuck in. Not to send it wrong with including yourself, but being stuck in yourself is really not a good scene.

[0:07:58.5] MB: I want to dig into a couple different pieces of that. Let’s start with this idea that meditation without context isn’t useful. Tell me a little bit more about that.

[0:08:06.5] RT: Well, there is two kinds. One kind of meditation is just shutting your mind down and not thinking, which gives the person brought up in our school system a buzz, because we’ve been doing a lot of thinking. That we haven’t felt that thinking has done us a lot of good, because we still bit unhappy.

We get a buzz out of not thinking. But actually what that also does it dulls your ability to learn from experience, to teach reason from learning and from books. It gives you a palliative, it’s like getting hooked on a palliative, because you can just stop thinking and then now come down and then some people even think you’d be enlightened when you have nothing in your mind.

I was joking like to say, when Buddha entertained enlightenment, the first thing he didn’t say – he said, “That was not the answer.” What he said was, “I know everything. It’s really great. Reality really is fine and you can be – it is happiness. If you know reality, you’re going to be happy.” Unfortunately, of course just by me telling you, you can’t get there.  You have to go to work on it yourself, but you have amazing ability to learn and also to transform once you have learned. That’s the thing. That’s one type of meditation is just emptying the mind type.

Then the other type, which is more important is analytic meditation, or critical meditation, and what they call inside meditation. That’s where you’re actually are thinking something directed toward exploration of yourself, your experience and the reality around you. That’s a very good one and a very important one. If you don’t do that one, then you just do the mind empty one, then your original view of yourself and everyone has a slightly distorted view of the self, by conditioning, by instinct, by formalize and so on, which is that each one thinks, “I am the most important one.”

They don’t think that they’re being egotistical. They think that’s naturally, “Everybody thinks I’m the most important.” They think that’s just the natural way to be. But then that puts you at conflict with everybody else who doesn’t agree with you. That puts you in a guaranteed program for misery actually, since nobody else will agree that you’re the most important, and yet you will keep struggling to show that you are in some way, but still then out of it, you could become president of the United States and people will still will not think you’re the most important. You’ll get really freaked out.

The key is that if you then meditate however, without having examined your distorted self-image, your central CPU, your distorted inner wiring, then you will simply intensify your inner wiring and you will not transform yourself, you will not move to a more open-minded, open-hearted interrelated way of being where you start getting along better with others. You notice them more, because you’re less focused on yourself.

You get better feedback from them, because they notice that you’re noticing them and they like you, etc., etc., and you can be more successful. Success really comes in life not just from any big thing you do about yourself, but it comes from how open you are to other people and how you see what they need, what they want, you listen to their advice, you can see their perspective, then you can actually deal with them and others and everyone much better, and even yourself. You’ll feel much happier and you’ll feel much more capable. That’s the key thing.

[0:11:24.6] MB: There’s a bunch of different ways I want to dig into this. Let’ start with the idea of analytic meditation, or critical meditation, or inside meditation. What does that mean, and what does that look like practically?

[0:11:36.1] RT: Well, it looks like thinking something over and investigating it. It means that you don’t, when you sit, if you do sit or whatever posture, although better not to take the posture road as thinker, because it’s much too uncomfortable to maintain for a very long time, if you know what it looks like.

Anyway, when you sit down to think over something, you explore it and you’re fueled by the realization why taking a little bit confident in the great teachers of humanity saying that you as a human being are capable of understanding something more deeply. An analysis means you take things apart, you’re looking at its components, you see how it’s made, you look at its quotation, and you see its context, and you go deeper and deeper, then you look at the parts and you take that apart.

Anyway, ultimately, you can analyze everything to pieces and it will disappear. But then you know how it’s put together. You do that about yourself. Then when you do, you’ll get more aware of your moving parts inside, especially inside your mind, but your body also. Then the more you’re aware of that ,the  better you can make them function.

Of course, do really completely get at, then you do have to fit it with a one point of concentration ability. Otherwise, if you just keep scanning and you scatter yourself too much. But the scanning one is the most important one, and you can penetrate right to where you have an experiential understanding of the nature of reality.

Also, you go beyond your concepts. You use your common sense to take aim, so to speak, but once you get down it becomes very experiential and you go beyond – you realize that reality is beyond, and is but this idea of reality, which is why Buddha was so special and I think he says, “Well, I understand everything, but I can’t really explain it throughout well, because it’s beyond explanation. However, what I am confident is that if you put your own head into it, you can understand it yourself. You really can.”
Given, that’s what I love by the way when I first encountered the Buddhist teachers, was the fact that they for one, unlike the western religious people, theistic religious people they didn’t say, “You just have to believe something,” whether it makes sense to you or not, because you can’t understand it ultimately. Only God can. I did it like that particularly.

Being then the scientist tell you, “Well, you can’t really understand everything. You can understand a small piece, analyze it, write it down, make a formula. But then that will open up to you how much more you don’t know sort of routine.” Finally, also you can understand.

Both those western options and actually other cultures too are pretty much weakening of the human ability to use that marvelous super computer we have in the wetware in our brain. It’s amazing. Whereas, the Buddha said, “Yes, you can really understand. You just have to put your mind to it. You have to learn. You can use for help, find teachers. But even without a teacher you can learn if you really examine yourself and your world.”

Remember Socrates, the own examined life is not worth living. Buddha never said that. He just said, “The owned examined life will be frustrating and the fully examined life will be blissful.” He took it a little further than dear old Socrates.

[0:14:43.7] MB: Before we get into the experiential understanding of the nature reality, which I’m fascinated by, I wanted to touch on the – just to clarify my understanding of this. I understand the meditative practice of sitting there, bringing your thoughts back to breath or something like that. This analytical or this insight meditation, is this an actual meditative practice, or is this more like journaling, linking, setting aside contemplative time?

[0:15:08.7] RT: Well, it is a kind of analytic practice. You see, the mindfulness craze that has swept the country tends to be taken by people as a method by bringing back to their breath of this identifying from the thought flow, and just being there, just breathing.

In a way, it’s a version of the approached state, you could say of one point it as a mind empty. In a way, its foundational of course for inside meditation, as well as one pointed or quiescent meditation. But the way most people do it, it pretty much tapers off into quiescent meditation. Inside meditation, where it is, is when you go in and you look and see how your mind is – you come to the breath, just as a way of actually heightening your awareness of the distractions really, rather than just breathing.

That is to say you begin to see what it is that takes your mind away. You look more objectively at the thought flow. You see where the mechanisms of the thought, or how does this thought arise from the sense stimulants from that memory? You penetrate that thought though. You actually then see where there are negative thoughts and where there are positive thoughts that open you, or that is thoughts that open you, or thoughts that close you down, which are the negative ones.

Then we have the words, it’s more penetrative, where you just don’t just, “Oh, that’s a thought.” But you say, “Well, what thought is that? How is it benefitting me and how accurate it is and what does it come from? Actually, who’s voice is it in? Is it my mother’s voice, my uncle’s voice? My elder sibling who always told me I was a pipsqueak or whatever it was, some put-down voice, or some teacher’s voice, or some preacher’s voice.”

The words, you begin to really gain a leverage over how the mind works. Then you begin to edit how the mind works and you reinforce the positive insights, and you reinforce the negative ones, the habitual ones that just have you spinning.

Some of the popular mindfulness insight practitioners do that to some degree, but unfortunately, I think the most of the populous ones just do it for the mind quieting. However, I’m not against that. I think that’s fine too, because some people need mind quieting. But if they just only do that, sooner or later they will be disappointed. Just the palliative of the mind quieting has not actually made them happy. It has not actually given them a deeper genius about the nature of life, and therefore they have not found bliss and they’re still frustrated.

Then really unfortunately was all would be they say, “Well, meditating is useless and it’s all useless. I’ll just go and watch TV or something.” On the other hand, of course TV is meditating, reading a book is critical thinking. In other words, when you learn verbally, externally or having the debate or a dialogue with another person is also critical thinking.

Just when you bring it inside as a meditation into your own mind, you intensify it. Although, in the tradition, I don’t know if you know anything about zen, but they have a tradition they call Dharma Combat in zen, where you debate other practitioners or your teacher. They have this very much in the Tibetan monasteries, because they say that to honestly debate yourself, that is to have one voice inside yourself challenge another one.

Like one voice, you have one habitual voice a lot of us have is, “You can’t really do that. You’re just you. You can’t really change. You’re always the same way you are.” Then the critical voice is, “Well actually, you do change all the time.” Why do you say that? “Every time you think something, you change and pushing toward transformation and seeing yourself as a work in progress and able to really develop yourself.” 

These are two voices inside. They say, it’s difficult to be honestly truly critical with yourself, unless you are pumped up to it by being critical, emotionally debating. They have debating with others as an art forum, as a learning forum, as a pre-meditated launching forum that is very powerful actually. Particularly where they mobilize these emotions, like when you make – when you’re wronged and you fight to be right, but then actually rationally you finally realize you made a mistake, that’s how you change.

Then you can do that internally and you could strip away false images, false self-identities, false constricting self-labels and things and really develop yourself as a person. That’s really important.

[0:19:27.7] MB: How do we – going back to one of the ideas you talked about within this, how do you edit the mind to reinforce positive insights and as you said de-inforce negative insights?

[0:19:38.1] RT: It’s helpful to have help over others. You read the great enlightening teachings, or some other – that a lot of them are not in Buddhism. There is greater light in teachings in Hinduism and Christianity, especially mystical Christianity, the mystical Islam, mystical Judaism Kabbalah. You mobilize minds that are further than you along that path, and they left methods.

They couldn’t just transmit their experience unfortunately, or they would have of course, but unfortunately they can’t because you are the only one who can learn your reality in a visually transformative way. There are others who have done that in whatever tradition. You use their help and they give methods and patterns and templates of where you might want to go.

You go out into your own mind and you learn to see the note, that last time I lost my temper and had totally freaked out, the last time I got brooding vindictively about how I was going to get revenge over so and so for three weeks or a month, then they moved to another city and I just continued to brood, etc.

In other words, it’s like based on a combination of experience and learning and you start editing useless mind patterns that are completely useless to you and actually debilitating to you and they weaken you. You do that gradually by learning methods to do it, and also getting help of others to do it. There are qualified teachers, therapists and even noble friends who would really like you and therefore, dare to be critical of you.

All of that will – in the case us males, often those are females who have a very sharp intuition and can often give us pointers about where we need a little redo, a little improvement. They really can. We have to overcome our male tendency not to want to listen, because we got tired of listening to our moms at some point. We’re a bunch of chauvinists. Anyway, what can you say? That was you think, maybe not you, that I should speak for myself actually.

[0:21:43.4] MB: I mean, I think there’s a lot of different insights that come out of that. I want to come back to something, sort of a concrete, even a first step or one method or strategy someone listening can use. If they say, “Hey, I want to take a first step towards insight meditation, or more specifically reinforcing the positive insights of my mind.” What is sort of the first step?

[0:22:05.6] RT: Well, first step is a little bit to calm down and that’s what they do teach well about counting the breath for example, or you can say a mantra and bring your mind back to the mantra. It’s maybe even more effective than just counting the breath. Counting the breath is very time on earth hollowed one, so that’s good.

You begin to get a little calm, you feel better, your pulse decreases, your blood pressure calms down, your breathe will slow naturally actually. Then you’re more focused. Then don’t just drop out of thought flow that you observed in your mind, and don’t just say, don’t set out and then ignore it. But rather, start to look at the content of the thought flow.

Okay, there was a distracting thought, “What was I thinking about? Was I thinking about something that happened yesterday? Was I anticipating something I imagine might happen tomorrow? When I thought about it, how did I feel? Did I make me tense or uptight? Was I frustrated by something that happened yesterday? Am I frightened of something that will happen in the future, or do I anticipate with realization I get excited and palm-sweaty about something is going to happen?”

In other words, start to look at the distractions in fact. Then the trick as you get advanced is you keep the calm and you do it calmly. You don’t get excited by it and then get distracted from the distraction. You investigate that distraction and then you begin to apply your experience and you say, “Well, what I did that day was really not that good. How I lost my temper, how I got all jealous, how whatever it was.”

I say, “Well, I should see try not to do that.” Then another time, “What can I do? Well, instead of being jealous of that person, maybe I would a little bit take their point of view. What were they thinking during that incident? Due with, maybe they were very unhappy and dissatisfied, etc. Actually, why am I being jealous of someone who themselves is miserable?”

In other words, you begin to edit your interpretation of your experience, you edit the discursive thoughts. Don’t just drop out of them. Once you have a little bit and you drop out of them, so you have a little more common concentration then you start taking a look at them. You know the famous Eckhart Tolle. Great example was his how he saved himself from suicide.

He wasn’t doing Buddhist meditation or probably no any such thing at the time. He was just being himself. He was seeker, a philosopher, a little bit of a mistake, but he got in a really depressive cycle and he was swirling down, right down the drain and this voice was telling him – his voice which he couldn’t resist, because it was acting like it was his voice.

He should do himself in there while of course it weren’t worth living. He was really getting close to and he was suicidally depressed in other words. Then what it is, is some other voice in his – he heard another voice that was also him challenging the voice that was cycling him into depression. That voice said, “Well, why should I believe you? Telling me I’m useless and worthless and life sucks and whatever it was.” Then there started to be a little bit of a debate between them.

The more critical voice began to say to the other one, “Take a hike. Stop putting me down.” He was no longer identifying that it was his immovable voice. He had another more – intelligent, more critical voice that was free. Then sooner or later, he survived very well. He wrote The Power of Now. He became Oprah’s guru. He’s a happy guy.

It had to do in becoming critically looking at his distracting thought, which in that case wasn’t distracting. He was already nailed on that bad thought that was taking him down the drain into suicide. He found this another thought. Now he doesn’t elaborate in the anecdote when he tells that in his Power of Now book. That happened, he doesn’t elaborate whether he eventually analyzed the voice that was putting him down, did it connect to a parental voice, did he connect to where they were – was the stories of that self-image that he identified as himself disapproving of himself.

I don’t know. Or maybe he did in another book. I haven’t read into that. But the Buddhist psychology totally elaborates such things, because it codifies the experience of thousands of people over thousands of years exploring themselves in that kind of a way and improving themselves and getting rid of obstacles and so and so. That’s a very concrete example, I think is very good.

Also anyone can concretely just sit, count their breath, have a distracting thought. Mind would say, “Why am I doing this?” Sometimes it’s usually criticizing yourself for what you’re doing, or that I’ll never get anywhere to do this. Or I can’t get to 10. Or even cheating. Like okay, I lost track at four. Then I’ll jump in seven, because I’ll consider that I got those out of three. People, they even cheat themselves trying to get to 10.

There will be distracting thoughts like that, and then you calm those down. But then you say, “Well then, why am I having that distracting thought?” Then find the voice in yourself that always puts you down, that always expects you not to get the best, that always expects you to fail, expects you to always be stuck in that, and find out where does that come from and look at it.

Now the trick is doing the same thing when you go to a psychotherapist in the sense that you talk to them and the push you to keep probing into your memories and things and to locate different experiences and different forms of self and different self-narratives, and help you get that improved narrative, but just took long and laborious often with them. Sometimes not, but you can do this yourself, to yourself much cheaper and actually quite quickly and effectively.

I think really a good trick that I know and some of the really best ones, I would call them insight oriented shrinks, mindful shrinks. They have the patience to do that, because they have so many they can’t – they have any scarcity of people who are frustrated and happy. They urge them to do that to accelerate the process, and I think it works very, very well. Not every case and not everybody have lived it very, very well.

[0:28:06.4] MB: In many ways, that makes me think of something we’ve talked a lot about on the podcast in the past and we’ll include this in the show notes, but we call limiting beliefs and how to root out and remove these limiting beliefs that can be holding you back, or causing you suffering in your life.

[0:28:20.1] RT: Yeah, that’s right.

[0:28:20.8] MB: We’ll put that in the show notes for listeners who are looking for some of those concrete tools. I want to circle into another topic that you talked about, Bob, which is this idea that – the concept of the experiential understanding of the nature of reality. That reality is beyond anybody’s ability to describe it. Can you tell me more about what that is and what that mean?

[0:28:42.6] RT: That’s a really fabulous thing, which can also lead and has led a lot of people to misunderstanding. That is you and I and Austin and everybody listening, we are in contact with the nature of reality all the time. Our body is touching it, ourselves are aware of it, our peripheral awareness is aware of it and so forth.

We are not attending to our contact with reality, to our own Buddha nature, you could say, where we are merged with our environment, we’re merged with others, the boundary between us and them is not so rigid. Occasionally we have like an aesthetic breakthrough and we like either delicious apple, and for a moment we just lose our mind eating that apple. That’s being in touch with the nature of reality.
The problem we have is that our conceptual apparatus is what we pay attention to. Their conceptual apparatus, all it says is apple, delicious, nice. It just has some a fewer labels. It’s latched on. We don’t cover the whole thing. They just make it fit into our preconceived idea.

Then that removes us from being in touched with the nature of reality. Therefore, some people misunderstand by thinking that, “Oh, the mind emptying meditation is the really great one, because then I won’t recognize – I won’t use my concepts and I’ll concept-free. That means I’ll be enlightened.”

Unfortunately, it’s a little more complicated, because our concepts are rooted at a deep level in the brain, in our instinct, in our culture, in our acculturation. We can suppress their manifestation briefly just by not using them, but they’re still there. They still are carving up. They happen so fast, like when you see a blue painted wall, your mind immediately sees a blue – “blue painted wall.”

Actually, your perception when you look up and see this blue surface, you don’t have code blue, but you see something. You see a surface, and actually you’re of course not seeing something out there, because buttons are bouncing off things and hitting your neurons and your brain is desperately trying to organize it, and if you’re not color blind, it organizes it into blue.

The point is, it happens so fast though the conceptual overlay, and the conceptual overlaying structure which is huge in the brain is there even when you quiet it for a while. To really liberate yourself where you can have gut experience of the whole universe, you have to use the concepts to unravel the concepts. The thing is like, in the old time when you make fire with wood, like a boy scout, when you rub a bow back and forth over a stick, or spin it with your hands, with some little dust, or a little kindling there, then the stick itself will burn.

You use the concept like a fire to stir the concepts, to where then they consume themselves and then your experience, your perceptual experience, your intuitive, direct, unmediated experience will move out into feeling at one with the things that you’re seeing and experiencing as a Buddha does.

What’s needed by that, what I love about it is yes, it’s a far development to become fully enlightened, but actually we have that full enlightenment already in ourselves, right there hidden in our fingertips. But then we don’t pay attention, because we only think we have a “fingertip,” and we don’t get down to the cellular level of experience. We don’t want to let ourselves go into that.

We feel insecure when we don’t have a description and a narrative about what we’re doing that makes us feel it’s under our control. But the problem with keeping it under out control then is boring. It’s not fulfilling. It also it’s very, very partial.

You go to a concert, or you go to a museum, or you encounter an art object, or you have a personal experience, essential experience even and some of this says, “Well, how was that, or what happened to these things?” You say, “Well, I was really blown away,” you say. What means by blown away, of course in the gangster movie is that means killed. What gets killed or blown away is once fitting once experience into a set of preconceived concepts that actually don’t allow for that much ecstasy, or that much bliss, or that much self, losing yourself in something, where you feel – makes you feel really great and you really get it.

The goal is to be like that all the time. Not meaning that they’re like dead, then you’d be like a vegetable, you wouldn’t know what was going on and you would be just wondering around, lost in the universe without knowing who you were. No.

The good thing is where you completely are aware of the network, but you’re completely free of it at the same time. Although you can use it. That’s a great thing about this experiential thing being beyond our concept. It’s know this. Shelley said, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.” What he meant by that was that a poet sees something everybody else sees and fit into their preconceived idea. The poet sees something completely new and different, then articulates that in a poem, using some of the old concepts, but using them in a way that then the reader or the listener gets a hint of that new experience.

Then of course, that new experience then becomes a formula and a concept, which you then slap on the thing and it takes another part to come and break past that. What he meant by legislator, that they legislate the terms or more perception. The point is our habitually conceptually dominated perception is limited and it has value, of course, but it’s limited. The direct experience of things is where we go beyond that.
That’s where we – Buddha science really likes contemporary science, which is now just western of course, it’s worldwide. That they privilege the experience, which is the empirical experiment, like experience experiment and they privilege that over the theory. They say that theories are all just hypothetical accounting for previous experiences. If you have new data from new experiences and experiments, then you revise the theory.

Therefore, you don’t try to capture reality in some absolute dogma in theory. But of course, unfortunately do and they’re a particularly thing nowadays is the dogma of materialism that has no mind and no power of mind. That is self-defeating and self-limiting and unnecessary. I’m sure your audience in the topic just then shows that you’re aware of people who want to develop the mind, they want to know about mind over matter, they want to get their own minds in order and empower them and they should and they will and we have to, because it’s up to we individuals to straighten out this messed up society, planet, what have you. I won’t go into that.

One example though I like to give, because it’s my main topic nowadays is the Dalai Lama. People always wonder how he keeps up his joy, his good humor, his friendly presence and his own personal enjoyment of life, relish of life when he’s facing this empire that’s chasing him on the planet, that’s persecuting his people, that has for 60 years has been in exile and so forth, and they’ve been wrecking this country and harming his people?

He was fixing incident, he resisted. He hasn’t give into it, but he doesn’t let it destroy his daily existence and therefore, is more capable of resisting because he stays happy in spite of the adversity. How do you do that this is the direction we’re talking about? If you could do that, it seems like he can set an example for us to be able to do that like that, then we can certainly do it with whatever level of adversity we experience.

It makes you open. For example, say a bad thing happens to you in adversity and if you close on that with your concepts and your narrative about, “That’s a terrible adversity. That’s horrible, you know.” Then you’re just going to suffer. You will intensify the suffering that you already got from the adversary.

If you are more open, where what you experience will go ahead – the pay and dimension is more than whatever your identified pain is, and there is another side to it then you can find silver linings. You can make the best of it, then you can take advantage of it actually. You can use adversity to empower yourself for more success, but you can’t do that if you’re just wrapped one concept on it and get dogmatic about it and that’s it and close your mind around it.

All of the Buddha science, the masterful psychology they have for thousands of years is all about that the nature of life itself is blissful, is reality itself is something good. It’s nirvana actually. You don’t have to go off somewhere on icebox, or a vast empty space someplace for nirvana. This is nirvana. The more you’re open to reality, therefore the happier you are. The more closed you are and the more imposing of what your preconceived idea of reality is, whereas one that someone has brainwashed you into, the more miserable you will be. It’s generally the methodology, the art, the science of how to open the human mind and heart and have a happy loving life.

[0:37:53.5] MB: You’re probably listening to the show because you want to master new skills and abilities, so that you can live a rich and rewarding life. That’s why I’m excited to tell you once again about our amazing sponsor for this episode; Skillshare.

Skillshare is an online learning community with 16,000 courses in design, business and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. You get unlimited access to all of the courses on Skillshare for a low monthly price. You never have to pay per course again.

They have several awesome courses on there that I personally love; everything from mastering Evernote to Mind Mapping to learning to draw, if you want to get a leg up in graphic design, social media marketing, culinary knife skills, or anything else, check out Skillshare.

Right now, they’re offering an incredible value to our listeners. You can get three months of Skillshare for 99 cents. All you have to do is go to skillshare.com/success. That’s skillshare.com/success and you can redeem three months of classes for just 99 cents.

[0:39:09.1] MB: This is a topic that fascinates me and I want to dig deeper into this. How does somebody like the Dalai Lama, mind this happiness and joy in a world that’s so full of suffering?

[0:39:17.7] RT: Well, somebody comes up and insults you. That’s bad, and you’re not happy and sorry that they felt that way. Then you will take note your inventory and you realize a lot of other people didn’t. You throw some awful stuff. Gandhi had a nice way of putting it that the Dalai Lama I know agrees with. Where he said, when something terrible happens and it’s very sad and there’s so many things he said today’s goods that are really sad. Yet, you reflect on the broader pattern of life.

If somebody killed somebody, that’s – or somebody had OD’d and died, but you didn’t think about people who didn’t hurt anybody else. Somebody who helped that old lady across the street, somebody helps somebody carry their package, somebody who returned a – the other day I lost my laptop in a cab. Mohammad brought it back and he didn’t even want a reward. We had to contact him. We had to tell him how to contact us. I didn’t have to find my Mac, which I hadn’t turned that on, but we did locate him finally and they told him where to bring it, and he just rushed right back with it.

Like a 3.5 grand laptop and he didn’t want a reward. I’ve seen things like – then somebody else stole stuff. I lost this. I got ripped off on that. A lot of people who did rip me off. In other words, the Dalai Lama counts his blessings. He doesn’t deny his sufferings and he resists and he speaks out and he fights, non-violently fights to try to right the wrongs. He’s very honest and can be very blunt and so forth and can be unpopular when he has to take a stand sometimes, but he counts his blessings.

He looks at a flower on his way to a meeting where he’s going to be told, “You can’t get a Visa to go see your old friend on his 80th birthday.” He then sees the flower and he realizes his friend is looking on a flower. In other words, you brought your attitude and your orientation and you don’t fixate on the bad things, but you don’t – and you do that without just trying to live in denial of them.

In other words, you embrace that they’re there and you resist that, and you also you even are motivated not to be only focused on the bad things, because you know if you do that, you will get bad and you will be totally ineffective doing anything about it.

As you know, when you’re miserable, you’re very ineffective in dealing with people or anything. When you’re really happy, not in a hysterical way, but in a zingy way, then you’re really skilled. You can help someone overcome a tantrum, a kid who is so focused because they want that candy bar and out the window you get them thinking about Big Bird or something, or is looking out the horse out there distracting him. You’re really skillful and humorous about it, because you feel good. You share your good feelings automatically.

Therefore, it isn’t just a selfish thing. It’s a motivation to resist the bad is to be happy about the good. Then they’ll make you better able to resist the bad, because you have stronger motivation and more skill.

When someone loses their temper, then psychological studies they lose – I don’t know how they came with that exact figure, but they say they lose 85% of their judgment about how to mend, or how to deal with the situation that they’re so mad about. They had that bull in China shop that crash into stuff, they break things, they say things they didn’t mean, they overdo it, they got a big out reaction to tell the person they were trying to do something with. That’s how he does it.

[0:42:33.5] MB: I think I’ve heard a similar anecdote about the Dalai Lama, but it reminds almost when you’re on an airplane and they say you have to put your own oxygen mask on first before you can help somebody else.

[0:42:43.4] RT: That’s right. That’s right. You got that. That’s a good one. That’s really good. Love is like that. You have to be happy yourself already to have genuine, according to Buddhist psychology, define love. Meaning, not that just possessive wish, but the wish for the happiness of the beloved. Because how can you wish for someone’s happiness if you have no touch with happiness yourself? In other words, “I want you to be happy, I’m so miserable.” No, that won’t work. Then say, “Well, thanks a lot. But that doesn’t make me happy.”

[0:43:15.9] MB: Another topic that I’m fascinated with is the relationship between, or the idea of the illusion that we’re our own isolated egos oppose the universe and the reality of the interconnectedness of everything.

[0:43:27.4] RT: Right, right. Well, that’s what you’re talking about there is the second noble truth, or second noble fact taught by the Buddha, which is the fundamental miswiring of a human, come from probably many previous existences as a lesser intelligent animal that I’m the only absolute thing around here. Other lives are – I could be in the matrix and they could just be illusions and I’m the only real one.

Therefore, most important to me and that’s the one that puts you in this hopeless situation of suffering, of frustration. Because nobody else will agree, universe doesn’t agree, not just people, but germs, heavy objects that falls down over mountainside, the earthquakes, fires, they all don’t agree that you’re the most important.

When you’re up against death, there is all that. As long as that’s your thing, you’re going to be miserable. That’s a second noble fact. That’s a far for a noble person, noble being defined by a more altruistic, more well-connected, more relativized person. But nirvana, the third noble truth is the fact that the universe is empty of any non-relational entity. There is no such entity that is relevant to the universe that is not related to it. That’s all that empty just means. Empty does not mean it’s faced like a nothing, that’s like space. Nothing is not a space either. Nothing is actually nothing.

Point is that Buddha’s discovery 2,500 years ago anticipated Mr. Einstein, Dr. Einstein’s one of one a century ago or so. That is that relativity, because the great teaching of emptiness itself is this is a teaching of relativity. It teaches that you are totally interrelated, I am totally interrelated. We are a nexus of interrelationship of all that’s around us, space and time and we are a work in progress, and that does not disable us from being – making ourselves best work we can, making ourselves a work of art.

Which is there is apparently no limit, because the unlimited work of art is Buddha actually. Buddha’s manifestations are a work of art, and we’re having life itself becomes art. Because it’s all related and so there is infinite energy to be drawn on, there is infinite opportunities, there is also a lot of negativities, but all the negativities are weaker than the opportunities, because the negativities come from living beings thinking they got to just get out from number one, and then therefore each of them only has one small master, which is themselves, their ego, their little ego.

Whereas, the more altruistic ones, the more enlightened ones, they are serving everybody else. They draw energy from the need of infinite number of others, not just their own needs. They’re much stronger in the long run. Even in the short run, if one understands the short run. That’s what I was like to say, Buddha turned the old adage of ignorant people on its head. Their old adage being ignorance is bliss, implying they don’t want to really know reality, because it would be too unpleasant.

In the Buddha’s case he says, “No. Ignorance is the cause of suffering and reality is bliss.” Therefore, when you understand reality, you will know your own bliss, which you already have. The final really weird one that I’m loving more and more is that since I still I’m not that blissful, I’m busy, busy, busy, but although I love it, I love being busy with bliss, but it’s still not that blissful, because I’m still stupid.

The point is that the bliss that I will eventually find of nirvana, which would be Buddhahood is my own bliss that I already have. It’s just that I have blocks in me from really knowing it. It’s not some remote thing, exotic thing I have to go to Mt. Everest to find. It is me. We’re made of it, and you too, we all are.

That’s really encouraging, I think actually. Rather than all these big put-outs. Reality sucks, you suck. There’s some guy outside, like a God or something, or at least minimally nothing that will anesthetic for you, is like space out in. Instead of all those put-downs is like, reality is bliss, you’re made of bliss, you have the intelligence to get rid of the walls and blocks between you and knowledge of yourself, your habitual identity and knowledge of yourself. It’s very cool. Be happy. How about it?

Now, you go to go.

[0:47:41.3] MB: Yeah, we’re out of time, but that remind me of one of the fundamental conclusions of modern physics essentially is the same idea that every single thing in the universe exists interdependent of everything else, and that you would completely inseparable. You can’t ever really see one thing, except as a connected or relationship in some former fashion to everything else that’s ever existed in space and time.

[0:48:06.0] RT: Absolutely. The false thing was to doing to run away from the inquisition in the church, which I applaud them doing. But still, the idea that all those relative things, the one thing that’s excluded is the mind of the living being. That’s unnecessary. The mind is just super subtle awareness, and actually it is that with which we can go beyond the way of particle paradox into the area of Heisenberg on certain the principle, into the plenum of infinite energy of the vacuum, where everything is happening, but where we can’t reach conceptually.

We can work on the surface with probabilities and statistics and invent wonderful magnificent things. But our mind is this one that is – can reach that completely, seemingly inaccessible, non-objective, Copenhagen interpretation in forced real, which is the constitutive realm of reality of infinite energy, with no need for any scarcity or deprivation of anybody.

They should get over not having that be part of their world. I love this when Henry Stapp, a great senior and magnificent quantum physics guy, who explained to me for finally for the first time I finally figured out what was wrong, why the whole science wasn’t brought back  into a thing of being accepting the presence of mind and nature by the Copenhagen declaration of Bohr and Heisenberg, because Einstein rebelled against it.

That’s not an innocent, as a harmful statement that God does not play dice with the universe. He harmed himself because he said he wouldn’t accept that there was a non-objective reality that was a deep energy level, but it was you can’t grab in there with any kind of observation, mechanical observation, because the observing act disturbs what you’re observing. The mind that observes is engaged with the object served. There is no absolute objectivity and theory can’t reach them.

He then freaked out about that and said, “I’m going to come up with a grand unified theory.” Ran back to Princeton, got  himself a big grant and never did come up with such a theory, because there is no need for that theory, because we rather need the experience. It’s waiting there for all the scientists to get it.

Actually, Dalai Lama had been a big help in having these dialogues with them, and without being too pushy about any spiritualist or religious business with them, and just talking with them on a rational scientific level. A number of them have really gotten into it beautifully. Richie David and these kind of people, they’re really great. I’m sure you have them on your show, or I should think so.

[0:50:39.7] MB: Well, Bob. This has been a fascinating conversation and there’s so many other avenues and roads and things that I want to dig into, but I know we’re out of time. For listeners who want to do some research, find you and what you do online, what is the best ways for them to find you?

[0:50:53.6] RT: Bobthurman.com. That’s www.bobthurman.com. There is like a 100 some podcast on that, and there is a lot of stuff there. Access to my books and the one I’m promoting nowadays is the Man of Peace, which is a illustrated novel biography of its own, the Dalai Lama 80 years of life. It’s like a giant comic book. It’s lot of fun.

He’s a new mutant actually. He hasn’t beaten the bad guys yet, but he will, because he’s doing non-violence and that will win over this ridiculous, self-defeating violence that no one can really use.

[0:51:29.7] MB: Well, Bob thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing all these wisdom, so many interesting insights. It was great to have you on here.

[0:51:35.3] RT: Thank you, Matt. I enjoyed talking with you and another time I’d be happy to, and I’ll try to be on time. Take care.

[0:51:41.4] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should sign up for our e-mail list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. There’s some incredible stuff that’s only available to those on the e-mail list, so be sure to sign up. Including an exclusive curated weekly e-mail from us every single week called Mindset Monday, which is short, simple, filled with articles, stories, things that we found interesting and fascinating in the world of evidence-based growth in the last week.

Next, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, you can vote on guests, submitting your own personal questions that we’ll ask guests on air and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get a free guide we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free, along with another surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the e-mail list today.

Again, you can do that at successpodcast.com, sign up right at the homepage, or if you’re on the go, just text the word “smarter”, S-M-A-R-T-E-R  to the number 44222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes, because that helps boost the algorithm that helps us move up the item’s rankings and helps more people discover The Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in the show; links, transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get those at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of The Science of Success.

Evidence Reveals The Most Important Skill of the 21st Century with Dr. Tasha Eurich

In this episode we discuss one of the most important evidence based psychology principles that make people successful - self awareness. We look at the difference between people who succeed and those who plateau. We talk about why self awareness is the meta-skill of the 21st century and the foundational skill required to succeed in anything, and we examine conclusions form over 800 scientific studies about self awareness with our guest Dr. Tasha Eurich.  

Dr. Tasha Eurich is an organizational psychologist, researcher, and principal of The Eurich Group. She received her Ph.D in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from Colorado State University and a BA in Theatre and Psychology. She is the New York Times Bestselling author of Bankable Leadership and INSIGHT. Her TED talk has been viewed over one million times and her work has been featured in Business Insider, Forbes, The New York Times and many more!

• How Tasha uses evidence based psychology principles to make people more succesful

• The difference between people who plateau and people who meet and defeat challenge head on

• Self awareness “the meta skill of the 21st century"

• What does the data show is linked to high self awareness?

• Self awareness is foundational to all skills required to succeed

• What does the Science say about Self Awareness?

• Self aware people are:

• More fulfilled

  1. Better communications

  2. More confidence

  3. Have better relationships

  4. More effective leaders

  5. Run more profitable companies

• Self awareness sets the UPPER LIMIT for the skills you need to be successful in the world today

• "The secret weapon of the 21st century”

• 95% people of people think that they are self aware but only 10-15% actually are

• On a good day 80% of people are lying to themselves about lying to themselves

• Conclusions from reviewing over 800 scientific studies to figure out WHAT self awareness was

• The 2 broad categories of self awareness - the ability to see yourself cleary

• Internal Self Awareness (introspective people)

  1. External Self Awareness (pleasers)

• Those 2 types of self knowledge are completely unrelated

• Self knowledge underpins any other skill

• Self awareness is an “infinitely learnable skill”

• Research conclusions from people who began with a lack of self awareness, but then developed self awareness

• There are no demographic commonalities between self awareness

• The 3 categories of Self Awareness Unicorns

• Being in a new role / new set of rules

  1. Earthquake events - usually negative - that are so devastating that they either cause is to bury our heads in the sand, or they become a catalyst for self awareness

  2. The MOST LIKELY - everyday insights

• You have a tremendous amount of opportunities within your daily life to improve your self awareness

• The barriers to self awareness are myriad

• Internal wiring of human beings - change the way you introspect

  1. The power of substituting the word WHY for the word WHAT

  2. The world we live in today - social media, reality TV, the “cult of self”

• The cult of the self - and how our culture damages self awareness

• The challenges of excavating our subconscious / unconscious mind

• Moving forward with purpose, logic, and curiosity

• Too much Introspection can make you anxious and depressed

• To gain insight, focus on moving FORWARD

• Do your introspective practices serve you?

• Tasha’s training regimen to start to develop self awareness

• Tools for improving your internal and external self awareness

• The power of "The Daily Check-In”

• What went well today?

  1. What didn’t go well?

  2. What can I do to be smarter tomorrow?

• How you can use a “dinner of truth” to ask “What do I do that’s most annoying to you?”

• Dont’ defend, explain, disagree, just LISTEN

• The truth about feedback - you don't have to listen to or act on feedback from anyone

• How to become aware of your true strengths and gifts - ask your close friends

• WHY are you friends with me?

• Most self awareness unicorns rely on a handful of KEY people to provide them with feedback

• Someone has to truly have your back and want you to be truly successful

  1. They have to be willing to tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly

• The power of “loving critics”

• Our strenghts - seem obvious to us which makes it hard for us to see them

• You must be very strategic and very focused on WHO you get feedback from

• Self awareness unicorns don’t rely on other people to approach them with feedback. They never assumed that people would tell them ANYTHING - they took it on themselves to get regular feedback on their own terms

• You need feedback from multiple sources to get a clear picture

• The easiest, highest payoff activity to get initial self awareness

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better?

Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] Insight: Why We're Not as Self-Aware as We Think, and How Seeing Ourselves Clearly Helps Us Succeed at Work and in Life by Tasha Eurich

• [Book] Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious by Timothy D. Wilson

• [TEDxTalks] Learning to be awesome at anything you do, including being a leader by Tasha Eurich

• [Article] The Self-Reflection and Insight Scale: A New Measure of Private Self-Consciousness by Anthony M. Grant, John Franklin, and Peter Langford

• [Quiz] Insight Quiz

• [Book Site] Insight

• [Article] An Examination of the Deaf Effect Response to Bad News Reporting in Information Systems Projects by Michael John Cuellar

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.9] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over 100 countries. In this episode we discuss one of the most important evidence-based psychology principles that makes you successful; self-awareness. We look at the difference between people who succeed and those who plateau. We talk about why self-awareness is the meta-skill of the 21st-century and the foundational skill required to succeed in nearly anything, and we examine conclusions from over 800 scientific studies about self-awareness, with our guest, Dr. Tasha Eurich. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on the listener demand called How to Organize and Remember Everything. It’s our most popular guide. You can get it absolutely for free along with another surprise bonus guide when you sign up and join the email list today. 

Next, you’re going to get a curated weekly email from us every single Monday called Mindset Monday, which our listeners absolutely love. It’s short, simple, filled with links, articles and stories of things that we found interesting and exciting in the last week. 

Lastly, you're going to get a chance to shape the show. You could vote on guests, change our intro music, even submit your own questions to upcoming guests. There're some amazing stuff that’s only available to our email subscribers, so be sure to sign up, join the email list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage, or if you're on the go, if you’re driving around, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. That's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222. Join email list today. 

In our previous episode, we discussed how to master relationships. Went deep into cutting-edge networking strategies from one of the world’s top connectors. Examine how to unite people in collaboration and co-elevation. Look at the power of generosity in building real and authentic relationships. Discussed how to let go of individualism and much more with our guest, Keith Ferrazzi. If you want to build a world-class network, listen to that episode.

[0:02:36.4] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show, Dr. Tasha Eurich. Tasha is an organizational psychologist, researcher and principal of the Eurich group. She received her PhD in industrial organizational psychology from Colorado State University. She is the New York Times best-selling author of Bankable Leadership and Insight. Her TED Talk has been viewed over a million times and her work has been featured in Business Insider, Forbes, The New York Times, and much more. 

Tasha, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:04.5] TE: Thanks for having me. Great to be here. 

[0:03:06.4] MB: We’re super excited to have you on today. So I'd love to start out with — One of the biggest themes and biggest things we talk about all the time in the show is self-awareness, and I know you’ve kind of describe self-awareness as the meta-skill of the 21st-century, and I’d love to hear little bit about what does that mean to you and why self-awareness is so important. 

[0:03:27.4] TE: It’s such a great place to start, because I think it's really the Genesis of really all of my passion about the subject. So I'm an organizational psychologist, as you mentioned, and what I have done for the last 15 years is use evidence-based principles of psychology to help usually executives, but people in organizations be successful and make companies a better place to work and make leaders more effective and happier and be able to engage their people. 

What I started to see him, really, over the course of that time were two types of leaders. One type of leader was successful, successful enough to get promoted, but really didn't have an appreciation of who they were. Who were they authentically? What did they value? What was important to them? Nor did they have an appreciation of how other people saw them. They inadvertently got in their own way. A lot of times with those people, it's not a matter of if, but when they crash and burn. 

On the optimistic side, the other type of person I saw or leader were people who were able to sort of meet any challenge that came their way, and the reason they could was they knew very clearly who they were. They knew their values. They knew their strengths. They knew what they didn't know, and they also had an appreciation for the effects they were having on the people around them. This is sort of what we call self-awareness. 

About four years ago, I — This is really embarrassing, but it was Christmas break and I was kind of bored. I didn't have a lot of client work and I said, “I wonder ant what the research on self-awareness really is. What do we now?” 

I started to do a review of what the science on self-awareness really said and I discovered just how little we knew. We've been talking about it in the business world so much that it's kind of this buzzword, but from a scientific evidence-based perspective, there were so many things that we were assuming that may or may not have been true. 

I basically have spent the last four years of my life going through a very in-depth program to understand what self-awareness really is, where it comes from, why we needed and, really, how to get more of it. So that’s the preface of how I became so passionate about this. 

The reason that everybody who’s listening to this can be passionate about it too, if they’re not already, is I call it the meta-skill of the 21st-century. There’s so much evidence that people who are self-aware are more fulfilled. They have stronger relationships. They’re more creative. They’re better communicators. They’re more confident. They are more effective leaders. Actually, there is evidence that self-aware leaders actually lead more profitable companies. So there’s tremendous amount of benefit. 

The reason it’s the meta-skill is basically our self-awareness sets the upper limit for so many of the skills that we need to be successful in the world right now. Things like communication skills, influence, emotional intelligence, collaboration. We can only be as good at each of those things as we are self-aware. The other thing I call it sometimes is the secret weapon of the 21st-century. So many people think they're self-aware, but they actually aren't. So people that work on it are the ones that really I've seen reap the rewards time and time again. 

[0:06:52.1] MB: You brought up a great point, which is something that I've always found really sort of fascinating and maybe a little bit sad, but the idea that the less self-aware someone is, the less they realize it. 

[0:07:04.7] TS: It's pretty disconcerting, isn’t it? 

[0:07:06.5] MB: Yeah. I mean it's kind of a manifestation essentially of the Dunning-Kruger effect and the idea that the least competent people have the least awareness of how unaware and sort of incompetent they are. 

[0:07:20.2] TE: That's exactly it, and it does extend to self-awareness. My research has shown that — Get this, 95% of people think that they're self-aware, but only 10 to 15% actually are. The joke I always make is that means that on a good day, 80% of us are lying to ourselves about whether we’re lying to ourselves. 

[0:07:41.9] MB: That's pretty amazing. It’s very meta in a sense. I'm curious, going back slightly, because I want to make sure we have a clear definition of this. You touched on it a little bit, but how do you actually define what is self-awareness?

[0:07:57.1] TE: We thought early on in our research program that this would be a pretty quick cursory questions to answer, but we ended up taking almost a year and reviewing 800 scientific studies to figure out what the heck is this thing we call self-awareness. People were defining it differently. They were using sometimes like conflicting definitions. We did that review of all of the research and we came up with two broad categories. Self-awareness in general is the ability to see ourselves clearly, but it's made up of two specific types of self-knowledge. 

Number one, we call internal self-awareness, and that's kind of what we think about when we hear that term most of the time. It’s being clear on our values and our passions and our personality, our strengths and weaknesses, really seeing ourselves clearly from an internal perspective. 

The other type of self-awareness, external self-awareness, has to do with our understanding of how other people see us. So that’s a completely different skillset. It's a different mindset. Surprisingly in our research, we also found that those two types of self-knowledge were completely unrelated. So somebody could be low on both, in which case they have nowhere to go but up. They could be high on both, which again is very rare. But more often than not, people tend to be a little bit higher on one than the other. You get these archetypes. You’ve got somebody who is clear internally, but doesn't understand external perceptions. I call those introspectors. Self-examination might be a hobby for them, but if you go talk to their friends, their friends would say, “Oh boy! Sometimes that person can be a little annoying, or they’re cheap or whatever,” but the person doesn't even have an understanding of that because they haven't taken the time. 

The other side of the coin, I call pleasers, and I put myself in this category. These are people who spend so much time trying to understand how other people see them, that they might actually lose sight of what really matters to them. I think it's a really interesting framework because it helps us discover what are the areas of self-awareness that we can improve that will give us the biggest bang for our buck. 

[0:10:07.6] MB: Have you found any correlation kind of between either one of those two being more or less related with kind of some of the outcomes you talked about a moment ago? Whether it’s being more fulfilled or being happy or being better communicators, etc.?

[0:10:20.5] TE: There is some evidence there that there is a little bit different effects. You start to think about some of those internal outcomes, like happiness, confidence. Those seem to be a little bit more related to internal self-awareness, and then if you look at the outcomes of that external self-awareness, things like our relationship strength or even other people's ratings of our emotional intelligence. Those tend to be a little bit more related to those external perceptions. What's interesting is for most outcomes, both of them are related. If we work on one out of the two, we might get benefits in both areas of our lives, kind of the internal part of our life and the external part of our life. 

[0:11:03.0] MB: I want to dig in to kind of how we can cultivate both of those forms of self-awareness. But before we start with that, I want to circle back, one of the topics you touched on a second ago is this this idea that self-awareness is sort of a foundational skill. It's almost an underpinning of every other skill. I think that's a really critical point. 

[0:11:22.9] TE: Exactly. Take something like communication. I cannot name a single person that I know that is a good communicator that is not also highly self-aware. To think about that internal and external self-awareness again, to be a good communicator you’ve got to know what you do well, what you don't do well. You’ve got to know what's important to you so you can be able to sort of authentically represent that. Then you also have to know the effect you're having on the people around you. You need to be able to tailor your communication to their style and their needs and their passions. It's just such a great example of where both of those types of self-knowledge are underpinning pretty much any other skill, and we could substitute so many other skills for communication, but I think that's just a good example kind of to start with. 

[0:12:13.2] MB: We've seen that — I mean on the show we've interviewed all kinds of experts from a variety of fields and I’d say the single most current lessons that we've uncovered is that self-awareness is, as you said, sort of the meta-skill that’s necessary to be successful in, really, any area. 

[0:12:31.3] TE: What I love about that is that our research has shown that self-awareness is an infinitely learnable skill. So sometimes it feels overwhelming to say, “Oh my gosh! I was one of those 95% who thought I was self-aware. Maybe I'm not that self-aware.” That’s a good thing, and what I can tell people is after that somewhat rude awakening, there is nothing but confidence and success and fulfillment on the other side of it. 

In our research, one of the things we did, it was fascinating. We found people who didn't start out self-aware, but who became self-aware and made these really dramatic improvements in their lives, in their work, and we didn't find any demographic patterns. They weren’t more likely to be one gender than the other. Didn't matter what their industry was or their job. It didn't matter whether they worked or not. It didn't matter what age they were. The only thing these people had in common were really two things. Number one was a belief in the importance of self-awareness, and number two was a daily commitment to improving it. What I love about that is it sort of makes self-awareness available to all of us. We all are equally capable of building that self-awareness. 

[0:13:49.7] MB: I'm curious, how did you cultivate that sort of — Maybe not cultivate, but those people who had as you called it kind of a rude awakening where they started to realize their own kind of lack of self-awareness. What was that catalyst and some of the research you did or the work you've done? What is really kind of broken people through that kind of fog and taught them, “Wow! Maybe I'm not nearly as self-aware as I thought I was.” 

[0:14:15.5] TE: That’s such a good question. So just for terminology, we actually started to jokingly call these people that we’re talking about self-awareness unicorns, because we weren’t sure if we’d be able to actually find any, but thankfully we did. When we interviewed our unicorns about that exact question, we sort of found that those experiences fell into at least one of three categories. So the first category was being in some kind of a new role in their lives or having to play by a new set of rules. So that might be getting married, living with someone for the first time. It might be a new job in the same company. It might be a new job in a different company. Really, any situation where you have to fundamentally change your assumptions about your environment and sort of how you fit into that environment. 

The second was something I call earthquake events, and these are those events in our lives that they’re usually negative that are so devastating that we can either bury our heads in the sand or we can say, “I need to figure out what role I played in this.” Everything from unexpected divorces, people were telling us about getting fired and they had no idea. They were completely shocked. We also found some people talked about even illnesses, really serious illnesses that they got through on to the other side, but that really catalyzed their self-awareness journey. 

Here’s what interesting. Those two types of events to me seems like they would be the most common catalyst for self-awareness. We actually found a third type of event that was twice as likely to be a catalyst than the other two, and I call them every day insights. These are basically things that if we pay attention on a daily basis, we are getting so many opportunities to improve our self-awareness in just the normal course of our lives. This is a silly example, but I think it’s really — It says a lot about this area. One of our unicorns was talking about she was in her first apartment after college and she was moving in with her best friend. They were so excited. They were unpacking their kitchen and she barked to her friends, “Don't put the plastic cups in front of the glass cups. That's just ridiculous.” 

She remembered sort of hovering outside of her body in that moment and saying, “Oh my gosh! Wow! I must be really controlling if I just said that,” and that was a huge insight for her that she was able to sort of build on and continue to examine her behavior. 

Once again, I think it's great. We don’t have to wait for these events to come to us. We can decide that we’re going to get on top of it and really be in charge of our own journey. 

[0:16:54.7] MB: I think that's a great point. Every day, life is so filled with rich experiences to think about and observe and get feedback on your behavior, your own thought patterns, the way you kind of act and behave in the world, and there is such ample opportunity if you can kind of open your eyes and start to actually look for these things. 

[0:17:16.7] TE: That’s it. It’s all about paying attention, and sort of behind that is the mindset that in a positive self-accepting way, maybe I don't know myself as well as I think. What if I didn't? What kind of a newfound curiosity might that give me about my world?

[0:17:33.3] MB: So in the work you've done, what have you seen? What are some of the barriers that people have when they try to kind or begin this journey of self-awareness? What are some of the struggles or challenges that they encounter?

[0:17:44.9] TE: Oh my gosh! There are so many. We could do our own podcast just on this probably, but maybe I can attempt to sort of talk about the different categories that they fall in just so people can be aware of sometimes these really hidden factors that get in our way. The first type of barrier are the things internally just about how human beings are wired. What we've learned since the days of Freud is as much as we want to be able to excavate our own conscious thoughts and our feelings and our motives, “Why did I really do that?” or “Why am I really like this?” Most of that information is simply not available to us. It's trapped sort of in a locked basement where we can never find the key. 

So many people — I think it's the influence of Freud that we just feel like, “Well, if I go to enough therapy or if I journal enough, these things are going to come to me.” It's not that we shouldn't introspect. Part of it is just that we often make many mistakes without knowing we’re making those mistakes. 

One sort of easy way to get around that barrier is to accept it and to say, “Okay. I might not be able to know exactly why I picked a fight with my spouse this morning, but maybe instead of asking why, I should ask more action oriented logic-based questions.” Usually what I tell people is if you can substitute the word what for the word why, that’s going to give you a lot more insight. So instead of why did I get in the fight with my spouse, I can say, “Well, wait a minute. What contributions did my behavior have to the situation?” or “What are the common situations that I find myself behaving like this the most?” or “What do I need to work on in the future so that I can be more coolheaded?” Those are sort of those internal barriers that I think we just have to change the way we’re introspecting and we’ll get a lot more benefit. 

The second overall category of barriers to self-awareness is the world that we live in. You sort of think about the rise or social media and reality TV and all of these celebrities who are famous for doing absolutely nothing. That isn’t coming without a cost, and I call it the cult of self. It’s this idea that in our daily lives, both online and offline, we’re being tempted to become more and more self-absorbed and less and less self-aware. Unless we actively fight back, we might find ourselves belonging to the cult without even knowing it. 

One really easy way to get around that barrier, again, it’s not going to do everything, but it's a good start, is to really spend some time thinking about how you're showing up on and offline. Are you what researchers call a me former? Which is someone who constantly talks about themselves, is posting all their recent work accomplishments on their Facebook page or regaling all of their friends with stories about them all night, or are you in an informer who is really trying to focus on adding to other people's lives? Posting a beautiful photograph to Facebook or asking somebody about themselves and trying to learn more about them than talk about how smart or how right you are. 

I think, again, it’s something that we just need to be aware of. Even in writing this book, I’ve become aware of so many behaviors I didn't know I was demonstrating, and that was one of them. 

[0:21:03.8] MB: Those are kind of the two largest barriers, having sort of a flawed methodology of introspection and then also getting caught up in this kind of cult of the self. 

[0:21:13.7] TE: Yeah. I think overall, those are probably the two places we can look first, and I think it’s important to remember that first barrier. We cannot excavate our unconsciousness. For so many people, that’s how they spend their time trying to get self-awareness. This is a very complicated subject and I don't want to be glib, but there are a lot of therapeutic approaches that are solely focused on excavating the in unconsciousness. 

I think I’m not saying that therapy is bad. I'm not saying that introspection is bad. I just am encouraging people maybe to be a little bit more intelligent consumers both of help that they're getting from someone else, as well as the questions they’re asking themselves. 

[0:21:59.5] MB: We talk all the time on the show about the importance of mastering new skills and abilities, and that's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our amazing sponsor, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn anything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography, and the cool part about Skillshare is that they give you unlimited access for a monthly fee so you don't have to pay per class. 

They have some amazing courses on there that I personally really enjoy, everything from mastering Evernote, to mind mapping, to learning how to sketch and draw. If you want to get a leg up on everything from graphic design to your knife skills, if you're into cooking, and much, much more, Skillshare is giving every single Science of Success listener one month of unlimited access completely for free. That's pretty awesome. 

Go to skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month. 

[0:23:05.0] MB: Tel me more about that, that kind of notion that it's difficult to excavate our own conscience.

[0:23:10.8] TE: Really there, I think — I mentioned this earlier, but the influence of Freud has not left us. There has been so much research and evidence showing that a lot of his most fundamental assumptions about his work were wrong. He was right that we have sort of an unconscious set of thoughts, feelings, even behaviors that sometimes other people can see but we just don't have access to, and it's really interesting. There's so much work that's being done on this. 

For example, we often have implicit behaviors that we’re engaging in that we have no idea we’re doing that other people do see. There was one study that said the reason for that, the researchers thoughts was that it was just because we didn't see ourselves from a different perspective and that if, for example, the researchers showed participants videos of themselves doing these things, that participants would actually notice it. Shockingly, they found that that wasn't the case. 

There’s something about us that researchers, to be honest, don't fully understand that just gets in our way of seeing so many of our internal processes as well as our behavior. I think that’s alarming for some people, especially aficionados of self-awareness, but there's also something freeing about it to say, “I don't have to spend this time talking about my childhood. Maybe I need to make peace with my past and understand my past, but maybe it's about moving forward with purpose and sort of logic and curiosity.” That’s what I would encourage people to start to change in their mind.

The one other thing I'll say just about introspection in general is that in addition to the fact that it doesn't work the way most people are doing it, it's been shown over and over and over to be something that depresses us, that stresses us out, that makes us anxious. I remember the first time I discovered this in my data, it was really late at night and I was in my office and I just analyzed a set of data. We were looking at the relationship between people who introspect and things like happiness and stress and job satisfaction. I was absolutely convinced that the people who spent the time introspect would be better off. But our data found the exact opposite pattern. 

We found that people who introspected were more stressed, they were more depressed, they felt less in control of their lives, and that sort of gets to some of these mistakes that we’re making, but it also has to do with this idea that to gain insight, we don’t have to get into all of those dark horrible places about ourselves. We can really think about moving forward. 

I think if nothing else, if somebody is listening to this podcast and is passionate about self-awareness, I’d really encourage you to think about just kind of a self-awareness audit. What are the things I'm doing from an introspection perspective that are serving me, and what things might not be serving me as well as I think they are? 

[0:26:17.9] MB: Yeah. It seems very counterintuitive, the idea that introspection can sort of fuel anxiety or depression, etc., and yet if we want to pursue self-awareness, that's kind of a very tight rope to be walking it seems. 

[0:26:32.4] TE: It is. There's a reason so few of us are self-aware. I think even the most well-intentioned students of self-awareness, they're not aware of a lot of this research, and part of what my goal has been with all of these work with the work I'm doing and the work I am representing that other scientists are doing is to kind of get the word out and say, “We can make the world a more self-aware place. We can make ourselves more self-aware. To do it, we’re going to have to examine some of those fundamental assumptions that we've been making. 

[0:27:02.2] MB: Just making sure that I understand, the idea is that focusing primarily on kind of action oriented, sort of forward-thinking applications to solve some of your sort of current challenges or problems is more effective than the idea that you should dig deep into past traumas or something like that. 

[0:27:22.6] TE: That's what my research and a ton of other people's research has shown. Again, it’s sort of a hard fact to swallow. Back early in my research program when I first discovered this, I had this moment where I said, “Oh my God! Maybe self-awareness isn't actually a good thing to have, but I think we can distinguish the process of self-reflection from the outcome of self-reflection.” 

Most people just generally assume that if I think about myself I’ll know myself better. Again, it's about being intelligent about the way we’re approaching it. 

[0:27:55.7] MB: If you don't have this off the top of your head, it’s totally fine. But I’m curious. Do you know of who some of the other kind of researchers are as well? I’d love to dig in and do some homework on my own.

[0:28:04.3] TE: Oh, sure! Timothy Wilson has done a lot of really great work on that. He has a wonderful book called Strangers to Ourselves and it's very geeky and academic, which makes me love it. In there is basically every citation that has shown some of these effects. 

Another researcher that's done a lot of really great work on this in the last 10 years is a gentleman named Anthony Grant, and he was, as far as I can tell, one of the first people to disentangle this idea of nonproductive self-reflection from productive insight about ourselves and really sort of discover the facts that just because we self-reflect doesn't mean we’re necessarily going to be self-aware. 

[0:28:45.6] MB: We’ll make sure to include both of those sites in the show notes as well. I think that's a really interesting conclusion and very important distinction to make. 

[0:28:53.9] TE: It really is, and I hope everyone that’s listening to this can help us get the word out. Again, if we want to make the world a better place, and I think probably everybody wants to do that right now given where we are, we have to start by making it more self-aware. To do that, I think it's not even just educating ourselves and changing our own behavior. It's helping other people who are open to it and interested, really learn kind of the truth about it. 

[0:29:18.5] MB: So for someone who wants to embark on that journey of self-awareness, from the work you've done, how would you kind of put together a self-awareness training regimen for them to start or some other kind of first steps that would be really productive, things to do to begin that journey?

[0:29:35.0] TE: Sure. My glib response is they should totally buy a copy of my new book, Insight. The reason I say that actually in truth is there are tons and tons and tons of strategies, and it's not just a matter of saying do this, this and this and you will be self-aware. It's about really sort of starting with a mindset that says, “I am going to be braver enough to become wiser about myself,” and I call that braver, but wiser, to start to question some of those assumptions you’ve been making about yourself or about how others see you. 

From there, you’ve got to start doing some diagnostics about my internal and external self-awareness. Where am I actually at? Everyone who's listening to this is smart enough to know that we can’t evaluate our self-awareness on our own. We have to look at how other people see us and talk to them about those perceptions. 

There's actually a really cool quiz that we put together just as a resource to support this book that's totally free. If anybody wants to take a quick quiz on that, where basically you fill out 14 questions and then you send a survey to someone who knows you well. They fill out the 14 questions and then you get a report that says, “Here's your high-level internal and external self-awareness.” I think that's a really important part of the process, because maybe you're doing great at one and you should be focusing most of your time on the other. Maybe you have room to improve in both and you make an educated decision about what’s going to help you the most. I think that's critical and we shouldn't sort of overlook that step.

Then from there, it’s a matter of saying, “Okay. What do I want to improve?” If you want to improve your internal self-awareness, again, there are tons and tons and tons of tools, but one thing that our unicorns really universally reported doing that is so easy to incorporate into your life is something called the daily check-in. What they do basically is at the end of every day, whether it's driving home from the office, whether it’s sitting in bed before they go to sleep, they ask themselves essentially three questions. Number one, what went well today? Number two, what didn't go so well? Number three, what can I do to be smarter tomorrow? 

What I loved about that was it sort of allows us to reflect in a mindful and curious way without starting to overthink some of those things in a way that leads us away from the truth about ourselves. That's one thing people can do for internal. 

The suggestion I’d have if you think you need to improve your external self-awareness. The first thing you could you is have what I call a dinner of truth. This is actually an exercise that was developed by Austin communications professor, Dr. Josh Meisner, that he's been using this with his students for years and years and years. The way it works is you find someone who you want to improve your relationship with them and you believe that you have a solid relationship, but it could get even better. You invite them out to meal. I suggest dinner in case you want a nerve-defusing adult beverage, although it’s not required, and you sit down at dinner and you ask them, “What do I do that's most annoying to you?” Then you resist every temptation to defend or explain or disagree and you simply listen.

Just in general, in terms of our external self-awareness, I think we’re overly simplistic in the way we think about feedback. We assume that anybody gives us feedback, we should listen, and any feedback anyone gives us, we should act upon. Of course, it's not that simple. We don't always have to act on everything we hear, especially if the person who’s giving us that feedback might not have the best of intentions or they might not be comfortable telling us the real truth, the ugly truth as they see it, or maybe we get feedback about a skill that doesn't really matter to us, or we get feedback about a skill that we don't feel like we can improve no matter how hard we try. It's really a matter of having that self-awareness and the self-acceptance say, “What do I want to work on and what instead am I going to just be more open about?” 

I tell a story in the book about a leader, an executive entrepreneur who started a bunch of companies who learn that he wasn't the best communicator. In fact, he was a terrible communicator, and he did all these research and basically concluded that he wasn't wired that way. But instead of letting himself off the hook, he now is more open about that with his team and he says, “This doesn't mean I don't care about you. Here's how I’m going to show you that.” That's just another tip I would give people to intelligently consume feedback just like we are going to intelligently consume the introspective methods that we use. 

[0:34:20.8] MB: I want to dig deeper into feedback, but I also want to — I love the question; what do I do that's most annoying to you? I'm curious, are there other questions other than just focusing on annoyance? Is that too kind of narrowly focused in terms of getting a clear perspective?

[0:34:37.4] TE: Yes, and I think it’s not too narrowly focused. It’s one tool and one exercise that we can do. There a lot of people in my experience, just in my work and kind of getting the word out on this book who might not be fully aware of their strengths and what they bring to the table. A lot of us are overconfidence, but a lot of us by that same token don't fully appreciate our gifts. For them, if you feel like you’ve fallen that that category, I would probably say, “Instead of doing the dinner of truth, find friends that you really feel like you’ve got a strong relationship with and ask them a different question. Ask them, “Why are you friends with me?” 

For both of those exercises, I wouldn't put anything in my book that I haven't personally done multiple times. Just like I learned from degenerative truth, I learned very new strengths that other people see in me that I frankly never even thought about before. So I think we can look at it from both of those angles and it's really a matter of saying, “Where could I stand to have the most growth?” 

[0:35:47.6] MB: I think that the great question about cultivating or sort of understanding your strengths. One of the things that I've found is that often times when someone — I personally experienced this as well. When you’re really strong at something, it seems almost obvious to you it's almost hard to sort of get clear perspective that that's something you're good at as supposed to just something that people are good at in general and distinguishing between those two things. 

[0:36:12.1] TE: I think that's so true. Imagine somebody who’s accidentally great at presenting, let’s say.   They’re sort of built that way, that they’re an amazing public speaker. If they don’t know that that’s a defining strength of how they're showing up, it doesn't give them the ability to leverage that and utilize that help them be more successful. If I don't know that public speaking is a unique strength for me, I might not raise my hands when it comes time to volunteer for the board presentation. If I did, it would help me be even more successful. I think your point is a really excellent one. 

[0:36:48.7] MB: Let's circle back to the concept of feedback. Tell me a little bit about — One of the things that we talk about a lot of the show as well is the idea that to be self-aware you need to be constantly getting information about your behavior, about your own thoughts, about your actions, etc. I completely agree at the same time that you have to be very cognizant of what the source of that information is. 

[0:37:13.5] TE: That was another very surprising finding frankly from me in talking to our self-awareness unicorns. I expected that when we conducted these interviews with them, they would report, “Oh my gosh! I get feedback all the time. I get feedback from everyone I know at work and all of my family and the person behind me and the checkout line at the grocery store.” But we actually found the exact opposite. Most of our unicorns, almost all of our unicorns relied on just a handful of people that they actively got feedback from, and the two characteristics that almost all of those people had were as follows. 

The first was the person was confident that that source of feedback really wanted them to be successful. Remember I said earlier, not all feedback is well intended. You have to be sure that somebody really has your back and they're giving you any feedback they're giving you in the spirit of your success. That’s not enough, right? 

We also have to believe that they are going to tell us the good, the bad and the ugly. The first part is the person is loving, and the second person is they’re willing to be a critic if they need to. I call them loving critics. A lot of times people have one but not the other. Everybody has that coworker who just is negative about everything, who would be a great critic, but maybe who doesn't really want you to be that successful. You might have somebody in your life that just loves you and adores you but will never tell you that that haircut you got really doesn't do you any favors. And so the unicorns were very strategic and very discerning about who they got feedback from. In my opinion, that is at least 70% of the work in terms of getting feedback, is just being a laser-focused on who we listen to.

Another thing we learned was that they — Our unicorns didn't rely on other people to approach them with feedback, and this is supported by a lot of science. There was a really cool study from the 1960s, Dr. Rosen was one of the researchers, and basically they put people in a room and created a situation where a stranger, a participant in the study really should have given somebody else in the room some bad news. They sort of mocked it up. It was a crisis about their family, but the person who needed the bad news was a confederate of the researchers. They found that when the news was bad, almost no one told this person the truth, and they really needed to hear it in the situation they concocted. 

From that, they called this phenomenon the mum effect. Our unicorns smartly never assumed that people would tell them anything. They never assumed that people would tell them what they're doing well. They never assumed that people would tell them what they weren’t doing well. Instead, they took it on themselves to get regular feedback on their own terms. 

Kind of related to that, another thing I'd say is one person's feedback is not necessarily going to be something that's reflective of how all people see you. Especially if maybe you get feedback from that nasty coworker and you say, “Okay. I don't want to dismiss this outright, because maybe there's something valuable in it for me. I’m going to go talk to a couple of my loving critics and see if they see it too.” That way, if you can find a consistent pattern either in a strength or an area for development, that is going to give you more confidence that focusing on it will impact lots and lots of areas of your life.

[0:40:53.8] MB: How could we or how have you sort of found in your work to be — How can you open people up to feedback? Especially kind of bringing back the idea of the Dunning- Kruger effect, someone who doesn't understand their own lack of self-awareness, how kind of far off the mark they are and may be resists or doesn't want to hear feedback or criticism? How can you kind of open their ears so to speak? 

[0:41:19.7] TE: That’s a question I get all the time, and I’ve gone back and forth on this and landed at a place that I think is the most reasonable place, which is to say that other people’s self-awareness journeys are not ours to navigate. What I mean by that is, it doesn't necessarily mean that we can't help other people, but it also means that we can't give them the motivation to get there if they don't have it. 

I talked at the very beginning of this conversation about this people at work who just have absolutely no idea how they're coming across. You could, if you felt like it and you were willing to assume the risk, sit down with them and tell them all of these things, but because we have such well-honed defense mechanisms, if they are not feeling the pain or if they're not ready to do something differently, it's only going to make things worse in a lot of cases. They might resent you or they might think you're out to get them there. 

There are a couple of situations that I talk about in the book where we can approach somebody very tentatively with feedback. Sometimes unaware people know that something is wrong, but they don't know that they’re a large part of the problem. Sometimes in those situations they might be genuinely curious about what's going on. 

Maybe I interrupt people in the office all the time and I’m sort of noticing that I'm having prickly relationships with people. Maybe I turn to my coworker and I say, “Why is everybody so mean around here?” That might be an entry point to the conversation, but the other thing I’ll tell people is you have to be willing to assume the risk and you have to be willing to accept the worst case scenario and think about that. If this person is so unaware and if I truly want to take that risk, am I willing to accept what happens if things go really, really south? I think that's a judgment call. There are no hard and fast rules for that, but we should always, always,always, go into that with our eyes wide open. 

[0:43:22.4] MB: What is one piece of homework that you would give for somebody listing to this show that kind of wants to take the first step towards self-awareness? 

[0:43:30.8] TE: I think the easiest, highest payoff activity would actually be to take that insight quiz that I mentioned earlier. They can access it, it's at www.insight-quiz.com, and what I think is really valuable about it is it takes less than five minutes and it gives you a high-level picture of your internal and your external self-awareness. From there, that sort of opens up a whole new path and a whole new way to strategize about what you want to work on. 

[0:44:00.4] MB: Perfect. We will make sure to include that quiz in the show notes. So listeners who are checking that out can definitely access it. I think that's a great tool. One of the questions I actually was thinking about asking you was; are there any kind of tried-and-true self-assessments that you can have someone take that sort of gauges their self-awareness? So I think that's a great resource. 

[0:44:19.3] TE: That’s actually a subset, a 14 item subset of the larger, more comprehensive assessment that we've been researching and developing. So even though it's not your entirety of self-awareness, it's a very, very rigorously developed scientific tool. 

[0:44:33.3] MB: Excellent. Tasha, where can people find you and the book and your work online?

[0:44:39.9] TE: I am not difficult to find online. They can connect with me on pretty much any social media, Tasha Eurich. If they want to learn more about the book and/or take the insight quiz, the overall book website is insight–book.com. 

[0:44:54.8] MB: Awesome. Tasha, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of your wisdom. We’re huge proponents of self-awareness on the show and I think that the strategies and insights you’ve shared today were super valuable. 

[0:45:06.2] TE: Wonderful. Thank you so much for advancing that cause, it was really a pleasure. 

[0:45:10.0] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created the show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's matt@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every listener email. 

I’m going to give you three quick reasons why you should join our email list today by going the successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First, you’re going to get exclusive curated weekly emails from us, including our mindset Monday email, which listeners have been absolutely loving it. It’s short, simple, articles, stories, things we found fascinating and interesting in the last week. Next, you're going to get a chance to shape the show, vote on guests, submit your own personal questions to our guests and change aspects of the show, like our intro music and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide when you sign up and join the email list today. There are some incredible stuff on the email list that only people who’ve signed up get access to. So be sure to sign up. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage, or if you're on the go, if you’re driving around, if you’re out and about, just text the word “smarter”, that's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222.

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success.

Don't forget, if you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we talked about and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get those at successpodcast.com, just at the show notes button at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

Never Eat Alone - How Relationship Expert Keith Ferrazzi Built His World Class Network

In this episode we discuss how to master relationships, go deep into cutting edge networking strategies from one of the world’s top connectors, examine how to unite people in collaboration and co-elevation, the power of generosity in building real and authentic relationships, how to let go of individualism, and much more with Keith Ferrrazi.

Keith Ferrazzi is the CEO and founder of Ferrazzi Greenlight and the best selling author of Who’s Got Your Back and Never Eat Alone. Keith’s Greenlight Research Institute has proven the correlation between specific practices that improve relationships, with business success. His work has been featured in several high profile publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Harvard Business Review, Inc, Fast Company, and around the globe.

• Why you need to make the shift form networking to authentic relationship building

• The importance of leading with generosity to build real authentic relationships

• Are you still clinging to the rugged john wayne individualism and self focus?

• Keith wants to shift that to recognition that the greatest things in our lives only happen via co-creation

• Co-creation vs collaboration - it's one step beyond collaboration, going higher together

• How do we commit to growing together in the process?

• Co-elevation is an emotional commitment

• Traditional hierarchies and silos no longer serve us

• You have to put in the work to bring about co-elevation and co-creation

• Take full responsibility for all the relationships around you - take responsibility for making those people successful

• The victim mindset and how to defeat it

• For someone stuck in a victim mindset - how do they start making the shift towards responsibility?

• “What’s your blue flame?”

• What really matters to others?

  1. What drives success in their eyes?

  2. How do you serve that?

• Do you really know the blue flame of your boss? What does your boss truly care about?

• How do you become a conduit for other people to achieve their goals? (And why that’s so important)

• Focus on fully understanding what a person needs, wants and how you can serve them

• 2 Key shifts you have to make to get out of the victim mindset:

• Understanding that it’s all on you to take action

  1. Understand that it’s all about “them” (and the more broadly you define them, the more successful you will be)

• You can’t unite people, you can’t achieve greatness, unless you know how to create “us"

• Creating is the new competency of leadership

• How do you invite this community into becoming a movement?

• The 3 reason people don’t get on board with Co-creation

• Laziness

  1. Cowardice

  2. Sense of Entitlement / Ego / Vindictiveness / Indulgence

• You have no choice if you want to be successful other than to embrace relationship building

• Practice is the KEY to building successful relationships and enabling co-creation

• How success has impacted Keith’s networking tactics and strategies

• As you become successful - the question becomes more and more about filtering and where to focus time and energy

• The earlier you practice, the more often you do it, the more concrete and impactful those behaviors will be

• All around you are extraordinary people - hang out with them and build them for the long term

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better?

Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Personal Site] Keith Ferrazzi

• [LinkedIn] Keith Ferrazzi

• [Book] Never Eat Alone, Expanded and Updated by Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:12.2] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than a new downloads and listeners in over 100 countries. In this episode we discuss how to master relationships. We go deep into cutting edge networking strategies from one of the world’s top connectors. Examine how to unite people in collaboration and co-elevation. Talk about the power of generosity in building real and authentic relationships. Look at letting go of individualism and much more with our guest, Keith Ferrazzi. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. There's some amazing stuff that's available only to our email subscribers, so be sure you sign up. First, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand. This is our most popular guide called; How to Organize and Remember Everything, and you can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide when you sign up and join today. 

Next, you’re going to get a curated weekly email from us every single week called Mindset Monday. Listeners have been absolutely loving this email. It’s short, simple, filled with articles and stories, the things that we found interesting within the last week. Lastly, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, vote on guests, change our intro music, submit your own questions to guess and much more. So be sure to sign up and join email list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right there on the homepage, or if you're on the go, if you’re out and about, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, just text “smarter" to 44222. 

In our previous episode, we explored rejection in-depth. We talked about the incredible power of rejection. Went deep into rejection therapy. Looked at the incredible results created by seeking out rejection and living beyond your comfort zone. Talked about the magic of asking why, and heard a few incredible stories from the 100 day rejection challenge and much more with our guest, Jia Jang. If you want to become absolutely fearless, listen to that episode. 

[0:02:34.4] MB: Today, we have another incredible guest on the show, Keith Ferrazzi. He is the CEO and founder of Ferrazzi Greenlight and is the best-selling author of Who's Got Your Back? and Never Eat Alone. Keith’s Greenlight research Institute has proven the correlation between specific practices that improve relationships with business and success. His works have been featured in several high-profile publications including the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Inc., Fast Company, and much more around the globe. 

Keith, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:03:02.3] KF: Matt, awesome. Thanks a lot for having me. 

[0:03:04.4] MB: We’re super excited to have you on here today. Never Eat Alone is probably one of my — If not my all — One of my favorite books of all time and definitely the best book I've ever read about building relationships. I constantly reread it at least once a year to kind of get a refresher and recommend it to people all the time. So it's really great to have you on the show. 

To start out, I’d loved to begin with kind of one of the things you talk about in that book specifically which is this idea that when people sometimes hear the phrase networking, they think networking is kind of a dirty word and it's got a lot of negative connotations. How do you sort of think about repositioning or viewing sort of networking and what people traditionally think about it in a new and more productive way?

[0:03:43.2] KF: I would say the simplest thing I tried to do the very beginning running the book was to shift the word network into relationship building, and that's not even enough. I mean, the idea of building authentic relationships is crucial, but in this very self-serving and narcissistic world where everyone's scared about taking care of themselves, you better lead with generosity to get someone's attention. So the addition to the principle of building real relationships is leading with generosity. 

I’ll tell you that some of my work in the most recent years and transforming large organizations has awoken me to some problems in business today. One of them is that we still are clinging to that John Wayne rugged individualism mindset of, “I'm out to take care of myself. Based on taking care of myself, I will reach out to critical individuals and enlist them in helping me take care of me.” That's the way the world works. 

I want to start shifting that to the recognition that greatest things in our lives are only going to be happening through co-creation. Co-creation is an idea that is one step beyond how you think of collaboration today. You think of collaboration as; I got something to do. I need other people. I’m going to go get buy-in, or I got something to do. I need other people, and there are resistors not I’m pissed off and I’m going to figure out how to work around them, etc. 

Really leaning in and making a contract with critical individuals that are crucial to you achieving the mission you have in this world and co-creating and what we call going higher together, co-elevating not just collaborating. Co-elevating — Committing together to go to a different level while we’re both achieving our missions. That's the next generation of real networking. That to me is such a big shift in mindset, but when you embrace it, the world opens up to you and people open up two fundamentally differently.

[0:05:55.0] MB: I think that's so great, and to be — One of the quintessential lessons from Never Eat Alone, that it seems like this idea of co-creation is almost the next evolutionary step, is this notion that relationship building is not about sort of what's in it for me. It's much more about a shift to, “How can I add value to people in my network? How can I make everyone around me as successful as possible?” By doing that, that's how you really truly build authentic relationships. 

[0:06:23.6] KF: Yeah. Like I said, networking used to be; how do I collect as many business cards as possible to get opportunity from people? Then you move that from; how do I build real authentic relationships focused and born on generosity? Kind of taking that third piece now is; and how do we commit to growing together in the process? That's the added element. The co-elevation element is not just building authentic relationships, not just leading with generosity, all of that critical, but now how do we commit to helping each other go higher? That actually is an emotional commitment that you don't see very often. 

I’ll give you a quick example. Many of your leaders, many of the people listening to this are leaders who run teams of some sort. If you ask your team members, “How many of you think you could be 10% to 20% better at what you're doing right now?” They’d probably all raise their hands. Basic humility, of course we could be. 

Now the question is, “Look to the person you're right. Do you think it's your job to help them get there? That's co-elevation. Are we really committed to helping each other go higher or we’re just getting our shit done and working with each other as best we can? That's a different level, and I feel in a world where traditional hierarchies and silos are no longer serving us, we've got to create a new work contract of co-elevation. 

[0:07:48.7] MB: So how do we do that? Tell me about a bit more about building that emotional commitment to co-creation and co-elevation.

[0:07:56.4] KF: As I mentioned, it's going to be the title of my new book and it’s the subject of my new book. The first thing you have to recognize is that you’ve got to do all the work yourself. Meaning — I have a foster son who's 19 now. When he was 12 and came into our house, he was the biggest jackass you could possibly imagine. He’s been in multiple homes before us. Absolutely concerned about his — Whether he’d be sticking here in this home and screaming at us, “You will never be my father!” and that's sort of thing. 

What if I cross my arms and said I’m going to wait for him to meet me halfway. Do you think that would have gotten anywhere? Yet in the work environment we’re constantly doing that. We don't take full responsibility for the elevation of all of the relationships that we need to be successful, and that to me is the first act of co-elevation network that you have, which is your recognition that it's on you. It’s all on you. Does that make sense to you?

[0:08:59.9] MB: That makes total sense, and I love that shift. To me, it's funny when you look across the lessons of everybody, from ancient stoics, to Navy SEALs, it seems like that focus on taking responsibility for things that maybe they seem kind of outside of your sphere of influence is actually really almost the superpower that enables you to achieve incredible things.

[0:09:22.0] KF: The opposite of that is a victim mindset, where you just sit there wringing your hands and saying, “The boss won’t let me,” or “I didn't have the resources,” or “I don’t have the time.” That's a victim mindset and you will end up being mediocre or getting fired with that. 

The key is to take full responsibility for the relationships. Then the question is; what’s the blue flame? Like if you have an individual, if somebody wanted to go create a different relationship with me in order for them to be more successful, they would have to understand my blue flame. They would have an understand what really matters to me. What's going to drive success in my eyes? How will they serve that, right?

You just going out and being of service to somebody when you are may be of service to them in a way that they don't appreciate is useless, but do you have the mindset? I was just working with a head of HR for a big company the other day. I was suggesting to her, “Do really know the blue flame of your boss?” You keep trying to push on him programs and what he cares about is making his next quarter's earnings or he's going to be fired. How are you a conduit to him making his next quarter earnings? Until you show up that way, then you don't have a right to be considered his trusted advisor and his partner. 

You’ve got to come from the perspective of fully understanding what a person needs and wants and how you can serve them in that direction before you could open up the co-creation. So it's all on you and you have to position it from the perspective of, really, it's all about them. Those are two of the first core steps. 

Go ahead. 

[0:11:14.3] MB: No keep going. 

[0:11:15.8] KF: Well, I was going to say the next step of course is now put the questions and the dialogue on the table, because if you’re going to co-create and co-elevate, then what are the questions we have to chew through? 

I've been looking recently at how my brand is positioned at the marketplace. I’ve got this new book coming out a year from now, and I've got to figure out how to build a pre-audience for my book before it comes out in addition to those who just read Never Eat Alone. For somebody to have a squarely, an understanding of, “Okay. Ferrazzi’s brand is going to build, call it, 15, 25,000 presales for this book before the book comes out. What is Ferrazzi’s business? It’s coaching high-impact teams and Fortune 500 executive organizations.” Now, we take those two things, and somebody says, “Here are the five questions Ferrazzi, we’ve got to crack the code of in order to figure out how to get your outcomes.” 

Boy, now I am interested. Somebody has got my blue flame. They’ve identified that they want to be of service to achieve it and they've given me a set of questions that become imminently obvious for me that have to be cracked in order to get there, and I might tweak that there aren’t five, there are six and here’s three additional ones and we work together. 

Now, all of a sudden you have a business partnership. You have a real partnership, a co-elevation partnership. Now, along the way I’m going to want to know from that person how do I make them successful. They’ve spent enough time really breaking down what success looks like for me. Now, I begin to awaken to their success. Does that make sense to you?

[0:13:06.5] MB: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I think just the shift of — I think the two things that you pinpointed specifically, kind of the idea of if you're in a victim mindset today or you’re kind of someone who feels like you don't have a lot of agency or you're trying to get people on your team and you can't do it. The two shifts of; it's all on you, it's your responsibility to make something happen, and it's all about focusing on the other people and what they want. I think those two shifts are fundamental and it’s so crystal clear. I mean you see it across the board from a number of different spheres, but to me I think both of those are just really, really important.

[0:13:42.9] KF: Yeah. Again, this discussion I’m going to have on Friday with a news outlet, pretty big news outlet, is going to even talk about our current president and how a business president is leading the government today. The idea of an individual who got elected by micro- segmentation and understanding a very core distinct narrow audience in creating a lot of residents with that core audience is now tasked with leading a collective, but not focusing on leading the collective. 

My view is that you can't bring a country together. You can bring a company together across silos and divisions. You can’t achieve greatness in any mission unless you know how to create us. Creating us becomes a new competency of leadership, and that's what we’re talking about here. 

This co-elevation contract is the contract where an entrepreneur looks at the mission that they have and the ecosystem that they want to impact and invites that ecosystem in to a journey of co-creating something great together, going higher together. That's what entrepreneurship to me is all about, and that's internal and external with the organization. That's all on you and it's all about them. 

Then more broadly you define to them, the more successful you will be. It's not just a narrow audience of your own people. It’s not a sub-segment of your own people. It's your own people, your vendors, your customers your prospects. How do you invite this community into a movement in a sense, a movement? Your product’s got to be inviting people into a movement. Consuming your product is you being invited into being a participant of the movement of people that believe what you believe. Whether that's selling real estate or whether that's selling consulting services or a new consumer brand, you're trying to create a movement internally on your organization and externally to come together and believe something. Are you following me on this?

[0:16:06.3] MB: Yeah. I think it's a core lesson and something that — It's funny. I mean, obviously you're a master of relationship building and how to get people on your team, but you see these lessons echoed from everybody from spy recruiters, to hostage negotiators, a very similar kind of core thesis and lessons. 

[0:16:28.4] MB: We talk all the time on the show about the importance of mastering new skills and abilities, and that's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our amazing sponsor, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn anything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography, and the cool part about Skillshare is that they give you unlimited access for a monthly fee so you don't have to pay per class. 

They have some amazing courses on there that I personally really enjoy, everything from mastering Evernote, to mind mapping, to learning how to sketch and draw. If you want to get a leg up on everything from graphic design to your knife skills, if you're into cooking, and much, much more, Skillshare is giving every single Science of Success listener one month of unlimited access completely for free. That's pretty awesome. 

Go to skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month. 

[0:17:33.3] MB: I'm curious, in the work you've done championing these ideas, what have you seen kind of some of the biggest hurdles, or when people hear this, what are the reasons people don't get on board or what are some the reasons kind of people resists these ideas?

[0:17:49.4] KF: I joke that there're three reasons, and it’s not a joke. It’s true. Laziness, cowardice, or really a sense of — We can call it entitlement. It's more a sense of wellness kind of almost vindictiveness. I’ll explain what I mean. 

One of them is these relationships that, Keith, what you're talking about sounds like a hell of a lot of work. I've been very comfortable living in my silos, treating vendors like vendors, selling to customers, not co-creating with them. What you're suggesting requires a lot of work. Yes, it does, but the absence of it in this new radically interdependent marketplace will mean you're going to fail. 

If you don't open up your aperture and create a wholly different set of partnerships, you won’t succeed. So laziness, just laziness. Cowardice is if I open myself up this way, what if they reject me? What if they don't put up I'm not smart enough? What if they don't have time for me? All of those things, right? It’s these fear-based mindsets are always going to hold entrepreneurs back. 

The third is what I really — The word I think I was looking for a second ago was indulgence. I am used to not liking this person. I'm used to having a controversial relationship with this particular constituency or this customer base. Large automotive companies had an entire damaged set of relationships with dealerships for decades. That was just accepted. It's just accepted. Frankly, I considered it an indulgent to continue to think about one of your major channels as an adversary. That's like a teenager just getting comfortable with the clicks and the people that don’t get along inside of the high school. You see that operating in organizations all the time and people all the time. Whether it's your laziness or your cowardice or your indulgence, the answer is you have no choice and you want to be truly great in this world to find ways to co-create. 

[0:19:57.2] MB: What have you found has kind of worked for you in terms of getting people over those hurdles? 

[0:20:02.5] KF: Practice. I mean what we do is we don't teach this stuff. We coach it. Showing up over six months with an executive team, opening up different ways to behave with each other is crucial. So that's the key. The key is really trying to unleash a different set of experiences, and once you get people to taste a different way of being, they’ll be, “We want to try it again.” 

Small little bites, what I always say to people in Never Eat Alone is you’ve got 250 pages of tons of ideas. Try a couple of them on. If you like them, you’re going to want more. It's just very distinct experiences. 

[0:20:45.5] MB: Yeah. I think that's great advice. For me personally, I keep coming back to Never Eat Alone just because there's so much practical advice in there. I kind of implement three or four ideas from it and then I come back and I’m like, “All right. What else can I learn from this thing?” I mean that book is probably been out, what? 10 years, and I’ve read a lot of other books about relationship building and I keep coming back and I’m just like, “If I just execute what's in this book, I'm going to 10 X the effectiveness of my relationship building strategies.” 

I'm curious, for someone like you who's obviously become incredibly successful, how is that impacted either sort of positively or negatively or changed the way that you pursue kind of relationship building broadly, but specifically a lot of the tactics and strategies you talk about within that read alone. 

[0:21:34.2] KF:  Frame the question again a little differently. You’re saying how does these mindsets changed the way I've evolved in treating relationships?

[0:21:42.7] MB: Yes. Since you know since you've become more successful and grown so much since the launch of the book, how has that impacted, either in a positive or negative way, the way that you think about relationship building and the strategies you use?

[0:21:56.1] KF: Yeah. It’s interesting. In the old days, I had no currency. Nobody knew who I was. I was a poor kid from Pittsburgh, and I had to, of course, assume it's all on me. There was no assumption that anybody wanted to spend time with me, so I had to bust my ass to bring all the currency to the table. But the question is once I've had more success and there are more abundant set of individuals who would like to co-create with me. Now the question is filtering, and getting a better sense for where to put time and energy. 

I have the say that as long as I keep grounded what the core mission is and consistently put that out there to people and ask, “Is this something you share with me? Is this mission to change the way —”My view is I want to change the way the world relates through the workplace. I have found that by changing a way a leader shows up as an executive in the workplace and ends up makes that leader a better spouse and a better parent, that's where my livelihood is. If other people share that with me, then I'll find time for the co-creation. Knowing you audience better than I do, help me understand a few parting words that you think — Like what do think is on their mind having head all of these? 

[0:23:26.7] MB: I mean I think the two lessons you shared specifically regarding kind of co-creation make a ton of sense, and I think we’ve talked about a little bit some of the hurdles that involve that. One of the questions we submit to our audience when we have guests coming on board and we ask them to ask some questions. One of the questions that a listener had which may tie into this is from Maddie in Chicago, Illinois. She wanted to know for young professionals, when’s kind of the right time to start thinking about implementing a lot of these ideas? 

[0:23:56.9] KF: Well I started when I was in fifth grade. Does that count? The bottom line is this has to be a new set of behaviors that you try on and wear. We talked about earlier, how do you get this mindset to shift? Practice. The earlier you practice, the more likely that these behaviors are going to be yours for a lifetime, beginning to build that bridge network. 

I wish in retrospect — I just went to my college reunion and I was reasonable then, but I wish I'd known what I know now then, and I would’ve build much more deeper, longer-lasting relationships with a subset of the movers and shakers at the time that were at my university, because these people are running the world today and some of whom I know loosely and can certainly reach out to as a fellow classmate, but I didn't sustain those relationships. All around us are extraordinary people, hang out with extraordinary, build those relationships for the long-term, and that will be your growth trajectory and an area of opportunity for yourself. 

Matt and Austin, I appreciate your time, and thank you so much for exposing my ideas to your audience. I love what you guys are doing and I appreciate the affiliation of success. 

[0:25:10.7] MB: Absolutely. One just quick question, where can people find you and your work online for listeners that want to do some more homework? 

[0:25:17.5] KF: Yeah, please. I have a great newsletter which is free that goes out to those who really want to put these practices in place. You can reach me at keithferrazzie.com or just on LinkedIn. Sign up to follow us there. Those would be the best places. 

If you want to be a part of our newsletter, you can text my name. Just text Keith, K-E-I-T-H to 66866. So if you type in 66866 and type in my name, Keith, it will instantly sign you up for my newsletter, or go to my website.

[0:25:54.0] MB: Keith, thank you so much for coming on the show. I know we didn't have a lot of time today, but we really appreciate your wisdom, and you're one of the most insightful thinkers about relationship building and I think the advice you offered today is incredibly practical. 

[0:26:07.9] KF: Thanks, gentleman. I look forward to staying in touch and doing something again in the future.

[0:26:13.0] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based personal growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I love to hear from you and I read and respond to every listener email. 

I'm going to give you three reasons why should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First, you're going to get an exclusive weekly curated email from us every single week called Mindset Monday. This includes articles, stories, videos and things we found interesting in the last week. Next, you’re going to get a chance to shape the show, vote on guests, submit your own questions to our guests, change the intro music for the show and much more.

Lastly, you’re going to get awesome free content from us, like our free guide How to Organize and Remember Everything, which you get for signing up and joining along with another surprise bonus guide when you join the email list today. 

There some incredible stuff just for people who are on the email list that you don't get by listening to the show, so be sure you sign up, join the email list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage, or if you're on the go, if you're driving around, if you’re listening to this in your car or the subway or whatever else, just text the word “smarter” to the number four 4222 and sign up today. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. that helps more and more people discover the science of success.

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we talk about in this episode, and much more, Be sure to check out the show notes. You can get them at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

Your Secret Weapon to Becoming Fearless with Jia Jiang

In this episode we explore rejection in depth. We talk about the incredible power of rejection, go deep into rejection therapy, look at the incredible results created by seeking out rejection and living beyond your comfort zone, talk about the magic of asking why, hear a few incredible stories from 100 days of rejection, and much more with our guest Jia Jiang. 

Jia Jiang is the founder 100 Days of Rejection and the author of Rejection Proof. In an effort to overcome his fear of rejection Jia spent 100 Days forcing himself into situation after situation where rejection was almost guaranteedJia has been featured on the TED Stage, Forbes, Business Insider, and much more.

• Jia’s personal relationship with rejection

• The misalignment between wanting to achieve and being afraid of rejection

• The only way to overcome your fear is to embrace it and meet it head on

• How to become a badass and become fearless

• Saying no with grace - how to say no with grace

• Show people alternatives

  1. Give them something else / help them to get a yes in some way

  2. Have respect

• "Everything amazing and beautiful happens outside your comfort zone"

• The amazing power of forcing yourself to constantly challenge and operate outside your comfort zone

• The importance of understanding the vast majority will stay say no to you and why that doesn’t matter

• It doesn’t matter when you get rejected

  1. The few people that say yes make a huge impact - a real breakthrough

• "How many yesses have I missed in my life?”

• You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take

• It’s not about getting a yes - it’s about EXPLORING and CREATING SOMETHING

• The worst thing that can happen is you saying no to yourself

• It’s about having fun and challenging yourself

• Jia’s advice for someone who is afraid to take the first step

• How to take the first step and overcome the inertia of facing your first rejection

• Start small, just a little bit outside of your comfort zone, and grow

• How you can even blend rejection therapy into your work and your career as well

• If you ask enough, there is no request that will get rejected by everyone

• What to do if you feel like you’re bothering people when you ask them for something

• Be curious, don’t make your goal to get a yes - make your goal to ask 10 people

• Turning no into yes, and the magic of asking “why”

• Ask people why they said no to you - find out what the reason is

• What Jia learned from asking a stranger to plant a flower in his back yard

• The power of doubt and empathy

• Humor and positivity - don't take yourself too seriously

• Give a stranger a high five!

• We go through a bunch of rapid rejection techniques you can use right now

• You can do rejection therapy for FUN - or you can align it with you goals!

• Embrace rejection - rejection means something GOOD not something BAD

• Rejection doesn’t mean you’re wrong - the stronger the rejcetion, the stronger your connection with people on the other side

• The flip side of rejection is the power of people who are part fo your tribe

• Jia’s Life Mission to the movement of rejection therapy

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better?

Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [SoS Episode] How This Government Agency Spy Recruiter Hacked Psychology To Change Anyone’s Behavior with Robin Dreeke

• [Website] Rejection Therapy with Jia Jiang

• [Video] Rejection Therapy Day 3 - Ask for Olympic Symbol Doughnuts. Jackie at Krispy Kreme Delivers!

• [TEDTalk] What I learned from 100 days of rejection | Jia Jiang

• [SoS Episode] How To Demolish What’s Holding You Back & Leave Your Comfort Zone with Andy Molinsky

• [SoS Episode] Embracing Discomfort

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:10.6] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

In this episode we explore rejection in-depth. We talk about the incredible power of rejection. Go deep into rejection therapy. Look at the incredible results created by seeking out rejection and living beyond your comfort zone. Talk about the magic of asking why. Hear a few incredible stories from 100 days of rejection and much more with our guest, Jia Jiang. 

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First, you’re going to get awesome free guides that we create based on listener demand called; How To Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide just for signing up by joining the email list today. 

Next, you’re going to get a curated weekly email from us every single week called Mindset Monday, which listeners have been absolutely loving. This is just short, simple, articles and stories that we found interesting in the last week. 

Lastly, you’re going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show. You can vote on guests. You can impact the intro and outro music, things around the show, and you can submit your own questions to guests that we will ask them and sometimes even give you a callout on the show. So, if you want to ask questions to guest, if you want to be part of the list, there are some amazing stuff going on that’s only available to our email subscribers, so make sure you sign up and join the email list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage, or if you’re on the go right now, if you’re driving around or if you’re just listening on your phone or whatever, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, just text “smarter” to 44222 or go to successpodcast.com. Either way, sign up for that email list. 

In our previous episode we explored what it takes to succeed at the highest possible levels. We got into the science and the data from years in the trenches with the world’s top performers including NFL teams, Red Bull athletes and much more to uncover the strategies that really work for achieving results. We dug deep in the lifelong quest of discovering your own personal philosophy and much more with Dr. Michael Gervais.  

If you want to learn about the secrets of world-class performance and how you can use them in your own life, listen to that episode. 

Now, for the show.

[0:03:02.0] MB: Today, we have another amazing guest on the show, Jia Jiang. Jia is the founder of 100 Days of Rejection and the author of Rejection Proof. In an effort to overcome his fear of rejection, Jia spent 100 days forcing himself into situation after situation where rejection was almost guaranteed. He’s been features on the TED Stage, Forbes, Business Insider and much more. 

Jia, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:26.5] JJ: Hey Matt, thank you for having me here.

[0:03:28.5] MB: We’re super excited to have you on today. I know we’re talking about the preshow, me and Austin are both huge fans of rejection and rejection therapy and all these stuff you talk about. But before we get into the meat of that, I’d love for you to kind of share your personal story and kind of your personal experience with rejection and how that led that to the challenge to get rejected for 100 days in a row.

[0:03:50.2] JJ: Yeah. My relationship with rejection have been going back to when I was a kid. I just found out just throughout my life, I was really afraid of people’s opinions and specially their rejection. On the other side, I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I want to be this fearless guy who goes out and changes the world and makes new things. Those two conflicting emotions have always bothered me for a long times. It took me a long time before I started my own company and partly it was because of this reason. I was really afraid that people will see me and rejection from family and friends and the possible failure.

So I started my company when I was 30, and then even after I started, quit my job and became an entrepreneur, also I found I was still afraid of rejection. So much so that I was rejected, it was the investment. Then I just wanted to quit right there. That’s where it dawned on me and I was like, “Wow! I can’t be this afraid anymore. If I want to be a great entrepreneur, I want to be successful at anything, I can’t that fear dictate my life.” That’s where I said, “You know what? I’m done with this. I’m done. I’m going to take rejection head on,” and that’s how I’ve discovered this concept of rejection therapy, where basically it just challenges you to do rejection. That’s what I did.  

[0:05:19.3] MB: You set out to get rejected. Was it 100 days in a row or is just 100 times? 

[0:05:25.8] JJ: It’s 100 times, hopefully in a row, but at the end it became a little bit impossible just because of all the obligations I had. Yeah, that was the original idea, that I would do 100 rejections, 100 consecutive days of rejection where I would go and look for rejections. But it’s more or less maybe 130 days or something like that.

[0:05:47.2] MB: And so tell me a little bit about some of the experiences from that and why was your solution to fear of rejection to say, “You know what? I’m going to go and I’m going to get rejected 100 times, basically 100 days in a row.” 

[0:06:02.8] JJ: You mean what’s the motivation behind it? What kind of request that made?

[0:06:08.1] MB: Yeah. Start with kind of what was your motivation for doing that, and then tell me about one or two of the experiences you had when you started doing that. What was it like hopefully for you to go through that? 

[0:06:20.0] JJ: Basically, the idea of rejection therapy is you go out and look for rejection. Most people, actually everyone runs away from rejection, they’ll try to minimize rejection. But the idea is you’re never going to cure your fear if you run away from something. The only way to overcome your fear is to embrace it, to meet it head on, and that’s what rejection therapy was about. That’s what I did. So I’m like, “Okay. I want to do this for 100 days.” 

Rejection therapy asks you to do this for 30 days, but I’m like, “You know what? I’m doing this for 100 days. I’m just going to overdose on rejection. I want to see what kind of badass I can become, if I can desensitize my fear and just slowly become fearless.” That’s my incentive, and also I use my phone to film myself getting rejected, because I thought, “You know what? I’m going to make a video blog out of this thing, so maybe the world will hold me accountable.” 

That’s what I set out to do, and I started out terrified. The first rejection request is I went out and talked to a stranger and see if I can borrow $100 from them. I was so scared. I still remember that day like it happened to yesterday. I just felt something is going to happen. That guy will start fighting me and maybe like a verbal altercation will happen and you’ll call the police. As it turned out, nothing happened. I just went out and ask him, he said, “No,” and off I went. 

But I felt so scared throughout that encounter. That night I was looking at my video, the thing about video blog is you have to experience everything twice. Filmed myself, so I need to edit and upload that video and I saw how scared I was. I said, “Okay. Going forward, I’m not going to run at the first sign of rejection. When I get rejected, which for sure I will get rejected, I would stay engaged and make jokes, have fun and negotiate.” That’s how I started this whole thing. 

[0:08:37.4] MB: I do want to dig in. Tell me about — I’ve heard a number of stories and I’ve watched your TED Talk and etc., and heard some of the experiences. Tell me about one of the kind of most profound rejection experiences that you had and maybe one that you haven’t talked a lot about in your various kind of speeches and TED Talks.

[0:08:55.6] JJ: Yeah. I’ll tell you a couple. The one is the most famous one that I did and a lot of people know about which is the Krispy Kreme video, Krispy Kreme donuts. One day I went to this donut shop and I asked them to make me donuts that looks like Olympic rings. Basically, you name those five donuts. There’s no way they were going to do it. No way. Who’s going to do that? Guess what? The person did it. The donut maker could not let me walk away with the rejection. At the time I was looking for rejection. No matter what I tried, he was like, “I think I can do this. Maybe I can do that.” 

So 15 minutes later, he gave me a box of donuts that looked like Olympic rings, and I was floored. That’s really kind of — It put the whole rejection, 100 days of rejection experiment on the map, because that video went viral. There are over 5 million views for that video and it was really — It was something that I would never forget. 

I have a lot of these examples and some of them are pretty fun. For example, one day I said, I went to Costco and I said I want to speak over through the Intercom. I want to say hi to the customers. The manager said, “No. No way.” But I said that’s where I learned how to negotiate. This is like 10 days into this, I become so good at negotiating. I’m like, “Hey, I’m a member. I’m a Costco member. I’ve spent thousands of dollars here. Everything I say will be [inaudible 0:10:31.3]. I really love your store. I’m going to just say hi to your customers and tell them how wonderful your store is.” 

Then the manager said, “Actually, if you wanted to say nice things about Costco, why don’t you write an article for our membership magazine? I’m sure they’re going to love your article.” I’m like, “You know what? I just want to speak over your Intercom. That’s all I want.” He’s like, “Well, sorry. I can’t let you do this. But you know what? I’ll buy you dinner.” How about you go to the pizza and hotdog stand and get whatever you want? Make you and your family happy. I’m so happy that you are a good customer, but sorry we can’t say this to you.”

I mean, how can you not be a fan of Costco after that? I was a fan before already, but I’m a bigger fan afterward. I’ll probably spend thousands of dollars more in Costco. The thing is I also learned that people can say no to you, and you can say no to other people, but if you — There’s a right way and there’s a wrong way to say no, right? 

So I basically went to the other side table and looked from their lens. If you say no the wrong way, like if you’re sarcastic, if you’re trying to be rude that usually doesn’t make the other person feel good. But if you can be — Like say no the right way, like this Costco manager did, he was actually showing me alternatives. He actually cared about my request. In the end, he still couldn’t say yes, but he gave me something else. He made me a fan of this guy. That’s another example that I can talk about. That really left a profound impact to me. 

Now, when I say no to other people, I try to do that. I try to throw them or show them alternatives and try to help them to get a yes even though I cannot say yes to them myself. 

[0:12:22.3] MB: Yeah, I think that’s so important and saying with no with grace and being able to say no, but at the same time do it in a way that doesn’t necessarily leave the other person kind of feeling dejected or let down. As somebody who — I kind of call myself sort of a people pleaser, I never want to say no to anybody and I never want to let anybody down. To me, trying to figure out how to do that and how to say no people, especially the busier you get the harder it becomes, but the more necessary it becomes. I think that’s a really valuable skillset and a really interesting kind of takeaway that you learn from that experience.

[0:13:00.0] JJ: Yeah. I think most of us are people pleasers, right? Because our fear of rejection, the flip side of that is the fear of rejecting other people, right? Because if you fear you’re rejecting other people, you feel like a jerk, you feel they’re going to reject you because you’re rejecting them. If you know what I mean? That’s why the skill, having the skills of saying no to people is actually pretty important. But you can say it in the right way that you don’t have to feel bad. In fact, you can make them fans of you, just like this Costco manager did.
 
[0:13:33.1] MB: In fact, you ended up being probably a bigger fan of Costco as a result of that experience than if he had just said no and kind of moved on.

[0:13:42.3] JJ: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, even if the guy says no, I would not have any — I wouldn’t hold any grudge, because I’m looking for rejection, right? I wasn’t afraid of any rejection. I was expecting a rejection. But that rejection kind of made me a fan, just because how well it was given. How much respect the guy gave me. 

A lot of times when we say no to people, we just want to finish it, or we end up having to say yes, because we want to please them. If we say no, we’re like, “No.” Then we just leave, right? Think about this, help them. If we need to say no to them, help them to get a yes. Show them, “Maybe you can try this? Maybe we can try that? I’ll think different ways that you can get a yes. Maybe it’s not through me, but someone else might be able to help you.” It’s tough to be mad at you when you do that to others.

[0:14:36.2] MB: I think that that is a great example, the kind of lesson of how to say no gracefully. Coming back even to the story you told before about the Krispy Kreme donuts, the interesting thing is — And I know this personally because I am a very naturally sort of introverted person, and through essentially things like kind of rejection therapy and another kind of related learning toolkit called Social Skydiving, I really was able to get out of my shell and understand how to interact with people and realize that there’s really nothing to be afraid of once you kind of get in there. 

The amazing thing about this in the Krispy Kreme donut store, it really demonstrates it, is that people — When somebody thinks about a rejection challenge, they say, “Ooh! I would never want to do that. Oh! That sounds terrible.” Like, “Oh! I don’t want to get rejected.” In many, many instances through your 100 days of rejection and you’ve written about and spoken about, these amazing experiences come out of it and you end up building these relationships with people. You end up creating these really authentic bonds and relationships and it all starts from almost kind of a magic or an audacity of just putting yourself out there and not being afraid to look foolish and get rejected. 

[0:15:47.2] JJ: Absolutely. I think everything — I just have a theory that everything amazing and beautiful happens outside of your comfort zone. We all develop these routines, daily routines and comfort zones where we get up, go to work we go through certain emotions, hopefully get some joy and excitement out of it then go home and have our social life and whatnot, right? Doing that, we develop a comfort zone. We’re comfortable with that, but the thing is just like entrepreneurship, these type of social — You mentioned Social Skydiving or rejection therapy. These type of things where you are basically challenging yourself to go out of your comfort zone. A lot of times just amazing things happen. 

It’s just like you — Most people want to start — A lot of people want to start their own business. I live in Silicon Valley now. I’ve heard so many people telling me, “Hey, I want to be an entrepreneur.” Guess what? They this paycheck from the big company and they feel somehow they’re holding on to it, be it’s comfortable, because that’s their routine, because that’s something they want to hold on to. Real amazing things happen when you give it up, when you just walk out of that comfort zone and see what’s out there. 

A lot of times personal breakthroughs — A lot of times the breakthroughs happens in your personal life or in a business world because you get out of that comfort zone. I recommend everyone who wants to find something amazing, want to do something amazing, constantly challenge them self to go out of their comfort zone.

[0:17:23.2] MB: I think that’s why I think rejection therapy is such a beautiful tool, is because it’s such a concrete and practical way to blow apart your comfort zone and force yourself into a bunch of uncomfortable situations. As you experience and as I experience as well, like it doesn’t take very long for you to realize, “Hey, it’s not that scary out there.” On your third attempt, basically, you already had like an incredible experience where you built a bond with this women where you had like a life-changing memory basically just from going out and trying to get her to reject you. 

[0:18:00.4] JJ: Absolutely. This is not my story, I just heard stories almost every day from people all over the world try this. I know people who fell in love with their lives because they did this. I found people who started their new business. I found people who started new podcasts. Actually, I’ve known people who actually double their business, because they constantly try to do this now. They constantly force themselves to talk to customers who rejected them in the past or maybe talk to other, just cold emailing or cold talking to other people. 

This really works, because when you do that, what you’ll find is — I’m not saying everyone will say yes to you. In fact, I would say the vast majority of people, when you do this type of thing, will still say no to you, right? But what you find are, one, it’s not really bad. Our brain somehow tricks us into thinking it’s life and death. If we go out there and we’re going to be rejected and my life will be in ruins, right? Everyone in the world will laugh at me. I will just have no self-respect, self-esteem. None of that happens. When someone rejects you, you just move on and you’re like, “Wow! That’s actually not that bad.” 

But the fact that you didn’t die or nothing happened, you become more courageous. Then sometimes people say yes to you, and that’s where you get a real break through. You’ll start to find out, “Wow! If I can get a yes when I’m looking for no, what else — how many yeses have I missed in my life just because I think for sure I’d get a no?” Then you start becoming this guy at work, you’ll try everything. You start seeing everything is a possibility and that’s where a lot of amazing things will happen.

[0:19:51.4] MB: I love that quote, “How many yeses have I missed  in my life.” It’s a great way to kind of really think about it, because once you — I almost think that it’s like everybody is in this slumber, and as soon as you pull the wool off your eyes and realize that all of these kind of social rules and norms are — There’s no law of physics that makes those the case. You could go out, you can create all kind of unique and interesting experiences for yourself. You can push the boundaries of what’s possible. You can ask for things that are preposterous.

In many cases, yeah, you might get rejected, but the few instances that it happens to pan out, you end up creating these incredible and amazing experiences. I think you brought up a really, really important point, which is that it’s not about getting a yes every time, and you have to go into this understanding the vast majority of people will say no, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if they say no, because the few people that do say yes, the few yeses that you get are these incredible experiences, outcomes, etc. It’s something I think is really, really important. 

[0:21:00.2] JJ: Yes, absolutely. It’s like people talk about — There’s this saying in basketball, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, right? In basketball, there is opportunity cost for that, right? If you’re not taking a shot, maybe someone else is taking the shot or maybe someone takes a better shot. But in life that’s actually, that’s even true in life, that there are lot of times we’re just like, “Oh, I’m not going to ask. I’m just going to be lazy. Let me just watch TV or let me just do my thing and be with myself, right?” 

It’s not like you’re missing out by you asking, by you making these requests, by you going out and exploring, you’re missing out on something else that’s important. A lot of times we just miss out. It’s not about getting the yes. It’s about you, the fact that you are out there exploring, that you are trying to create something. 

People often say — There’s this saying, “The worst they can say is no.” We hear that all the time in sales and in career and whatnot, but I would tell people, the worst thing that had happened is not people say no to you. It’s actually you saying no to yourself. We do that constantly, on a daily basis, everything. So I tell people, “Don’t say no to yourself.” If there’s — if you’re going to be rejected, let other people. Let the world reject you. Don’t reject yourself. 

[0:22:25.2] MB: I think you made another great point, which is that it’s not about getting the yes. The yes is almost like an ancillary benefit. It’s about exploring. It’s about creating something. Being someone who’s kind of gone through similar — Probably not as intense as 100 days of rejection, but I’ve experimented with things like Social Skydiving and trying to get rejected, and it’s almost like once you — I started out being an introvert, being terrified of it, and once you start to get in there and do it, it almost becomes addictive. It’s so much fun. It’s so exciting. I was joking around with producer, Austin, before this interview. I was like, “Man! I kind of want to go out and just do 100 day rejection challenge just because I think it’d be so much fun to do it. 

[0:23:06.4] JJ: It is a lot of fun. It is a lot of fun. Also, it becomes an excuse for you to do and ask for everything that you thought was cool but you’re afraid of doing or maybe you want to put up doing later. One example I give in my TED Talk is I walk into a professor’s room, a professor’s office and just ask him, “Hey, can I be a teacher? Can I teach your class?” I’ve always wanted to be a teacher. I want to feel like someday I can be able to become famous or maybe accomplish enough so I can teach a college class. 

Then in that 100 days, I’m like, “You know what? I’m just going to do it. I’m just going to ask them straight up, “Can I teach your class now? Can you make me a guest lecturer or something?” I came in very prepared, put up a lot of stuff on my iPad and the professor was looking at me and he saw what I was doing. He’s like, “That actually looks pretty good. I can use you in my curriculum. Yeah, maybe you can come to teach my class for a lesson or something.” Then I did. 

It was really fun and I’m like, “Wow! I was a guest lecturer in college and I felt like a teacher at that moment.” I just felt like, “Wow! There’s 100 days, I could just ask.” By the end I’m like, “I can ask anything I want. I can ask anything I want. There’s a good chance I will get it. If I don’t get it, that’s fine. That’s totally fine.” 

I challenge everyone to do this, because by the end, it’s not about going out and getting rejected anymore. It’s just you having fun. You trying to see what’s possible and you challenging yourself to get out of your comfort zone. 

[0:24:54.7] MB: I think the hardest step to take is always that first step. I think back to people I know that are shy or even I’ve had listeners write in or reach out to me that struggle to make friends or kind of get into social situations, and I know you were terrified when you did your very first of the 100 rejection challenges. What would you say or what kind of advice would you offer to somebody offer to somebody who — “Here is all the stuff and says, “Yeah, that’s great, but I can’t do it, or I’m not ready to do it,” or “It’s just not right for me or it wouldn’t work for me.”  

[0:25:29.0] JJ: Yeah, that’s a very good point, because there are — Taking that initial step is the hardest thing. To me, it took me saying, “I’m going to do a video blog,” to actually get myself to do this. I have to make that hard commitment. Before doing this, I talked to my wife. I was like, “Do you think this is stupid and do you think I’ll get in trouble doing this?” There are all kind of those, “I’m going to stay in my lane. I’m going to be a good citizen. Does this look stupid?” 

Even for someone like me who’s set out so determined to do this, I still have to face that inertia. It’s basic law of physics. If the object is still, it takes a lot of energy to actually start moving it, but once you start moving it, the energy it takes to keep it moving is a lot lower. 

So how do you get that initial energy to get yourself moving? You do that by doing something pretty close to you or just a little bit outside of your comfort zone. Don’t go crazy. I asked someone to borrow $100. That was tough. That was actually pretty tough. To do this all over again, I would probably start with something easy, something you don’t normally do. For example, maybe pull out your phone and just message a long lost friends. Someone maybe in college, a high school friend. Just say, “Hi.” Just say, “Hey, I haven’t talked to you for a while. I haven’t seen you in a long time. How are you doing?” You can do that every day. 

You could feel there’s a little bit of awkwardness to reach out to someone who you used to know. But guess what? It’s really usually not that awkward. The awkwardness is in your head. Usually you get pretty good response. Or if you don’t get a response, so what? It’s not like — You don’t have this relationship with that person anyway anymore. It’s not like you’re ruining your relationship by doing something like this. 

So start small, or maybe write a quick email to your high school teacher or maybe your college professor telling them about your whereabouts. Just start something small and see what happens. Then once you do the first and second one, you can expand your comfort zone a little bit, go walk out, be on the street. When you see people, just say hi to them. Say hi to them. These are not that hard. These are pretty easy. 

Then you build it up and you’re like maybe you talk to someone, you shake their hand. Maybe ask to borrow $100, maybe ask to borrow a dollar. Maybe ask for a ride. You build it up. Eventually you’ll be like, “Hey, can I get a piggyback ride of you? Can untie your shoes?” You’ll get crazier and crazier, but you do it gradually. 

[0:28:19.4] MB: We talk all the time on the show about the importance of mastering new skills and abilities, and that's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our amazing sponsor, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn anything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography, and the cool part about Skillshare is that they give you unlimited access for a monthly fee so you don't have to pay per class. 

They have some amazing courses on there that I personally really enjoy, everything from mastering Evernote, to mind mapping, to learning how to sketch and draw. If you want to get a leg up on everything from graphic design to your knife skills, if you're into cooking, and much, much more, Skillshare is giving every single Science of Success listener one month of unlimited access completely for free. That's pretty awesome. 

Go to skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month. 

[0:29:24.3] MB: I love that. Even some of those examples are hilarious, right? Like asking a stranger for a piggyback ride. Until you start doing stuff like that, sometimes it works out and you end up having these like crazy, funny, ridiculous experiences that really kind of make life interesting. 

[0:29:43.6] JJ: Absolutely. Also, you can actually blend it with your work. I mean who says you have to do it on a street to strangers? What about if you’re in sales? Maybe ask for something — Maybe call your old customer. Maybe ask someone to buy — When they buy something, ask them to buy something else. Maybe get rejected, come back again the next day. Or if you’re a buyer, ask for a bigger discount. Start it with going — If you’re at a coffee shop, ask for, “Hey, can I get 10% off of this coffee?” They may ask you why. You’re like, “Hey, maybe you should offer a good guy a discount. I’m a good guy.” Something like that. 

It’s pretty harmless, but soon you’re going to start to learn, “I can negotiate off anything.” If you’re an author, if you want to be an author, if you want to be a writer, maybe just craft the email, quick email and, say, find a book agent and saying, “Hey, I’d just like to talk. What do you think about this idea?” These type of things can be related to your work as well. In that way when you do that not only you’re learning more to be fearless, but also you’re getting closer to your goals. You’re actually advancing in your careers. Try this everywhere. 

[0:31:10.1] MB: That’s great. Yeah. That makes a ton of sense. It doesn’t just have to be in your personal life. In fact, you might see huge rewards from kind of integrating it into your career as well.

[0:31:19.6] JJ: Yeah. I met this musician. He lives in Nashville. Every musician lives in Nashville, right? 

[0:31:25.7] MB: I live in Nashville.

[0:31:27.1] JJ: Oh, you do? Okay! 

[0:31:28.4] MB: That’s right.

[0:31:29.3] JJ: Yeah. It’s a great town, by the way. I’ve been there multiple times. It’s such a hip town now in Tennessee. Anyway, I have this guy, he’s an independent musician and he’s like he had this album he’s working on and he’s like, “I’m going to try this rejection therapy thing.” One of his rejection requests is to ask his music heroes to appear in his album. The guy said, “Yes.” 

So he has an album where one of the songs has a feature from his music hero. To him, I don’t know — He said, “I don’t know if this album become big or not,” but just doing that fulfilled one of the biggest dreams he ever had is to be in the same song with his music hero. It just happened. I’m sure it helps. The credibility will help his music career, or just fulfill his dream. So just for ask for it. Maybe you’ll probably get a no, but so what? 

Actually, what I found is if you ask enough, there’s no request that you’ll get rejected by everyone. It’s not going to happen. You will always get a no. No matter kind of crazy ideas, what kind of bad ideas you can think about. I challenge your listeners to do this. Think about one thing that will get rejected by everyone on earth, one request. Think about, if you use your imagination to find how crazy, how evil, how bad it is. Guess what? Someone will say yes to that. 

[0:33:10.5] MB: That’s great. I love it. We always like to challenge the audience on the show — And I think rejection therapy, one of the beauties of this whole concept  is that it takes a lot of these kind of platitudes that you hear all the time. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. The worst they can say is no. All these things that people have heard 100%, rejection therapy is the concrete strategy that you can implement literally today starting right now to move yourself down that path to start getting uncomfortable to make yourself face some of these fears and push through and realize that on the other side it’s not scary anymore. In fact, it’s actually really fun and exciting. 

[0:33:52.9] JJ: Absolutely. I just have a thinking that nothing is that new. The idea, the self-improvement ideas or any ideas, I don’t think any of them are new. It’s just you have to implement it. I definitely agree with you, rejection therapy is an easy and concrete way for you to experience all these things. You don’t have to be an inspiration speaker or like a sales guru or rara kind of guy, like a Tony Robbins to experience this. You don’t have to be like a hero to have accomplish a whole lot to experience this. Start small. Start with these little rejection requests and see what happens. 

One more thing I want to add is sometimes people tell me, “Hey, I’m just not comfortable asking people things. I feel like I’m bothering them.” Now, what if you can offer to help someone something, right? What if you just, “Hey, I mean you’re in a grocery store. Can I help you to push your cart for a bit and so you can rest and you can go do shopping. I’ll push your cart.” What about maybe you offer — You’re in a store saying, “Hey, can I buy you a coffee? There’s no string attached. I just want to buy you a coffee.” Something like that, right? 

In that way you’re offering to help people instead of just asking for things. You also get out of your comfort zone. I think just keeping your balance of giving and asking while getting out of your comfort zone, you can get a lot from it.

[0:35:25.0] MB: How does somebody who — Circling back to this idea of someone who is afraid to take that first step or has had some traumatic rejections in the past, rejections that they feel like are traumatic. How do you get past that kind of taking rejection personally and feeling like it’s about you when somebody says no?

[0:35:45.4] JJ: Yeah. First of all, when you’d start doing this, you will find out that a lot of times — The whole thing about rejection therapy is you do it with a stranger, right? Then you’ll find out it really is not about you, because these people don’t know you. They reject you just because they don’t think they should say yes. They don’t think they should say yes to a stranger like that or they don’t — Rejection is really not about you. It says more about the rejection than the rejected. 

Another thing you can do is make the same request 10 different times or five different times. What you’ll find is someone will say yes to you usually if you do it 5 or 10 times. The law of large number will say maybe there’s 20% of people will actually be open to that. Then what you’ll find is, “Okay. Some people will say yes to that. Some people will say no to that. I’m the same person. The fact that there are different answers, that shows those people are different. I’m the same. They are different. They are different in terms of the way they think, the way their risk powers, their preference, how they view this situation. Maybe they’re moved of the moment, right? It doesn’t say anything about. It says everything about them. 

Marketers have this for a long time. You cannot develop a product that everyone would have. The best product, you will get rejected by a lot of people, but you would develop rabid fans, a fan-based of maybe a small group of people who love your product. It’s the same thing. It says about that fan-base. It says about that those people will buy your product pretty much as much as about your product itself. 

Yeah, try different ones. Just be curious. Don’t set your goal to be like, “I’m going to get a yes. That’s my goal.” No. Just say, “My goal is to ask 10 people. I want to see how many will say yes to me or how many will say to me.  

[0:37:52.3] MB: I know one of the stories and experiences that you had was around kind of a lesson of how to turn a no into a yes. Can you talk about that and how that kind of learning came from all of the rejections that you’ve faced?

[0:38:06.9] JJ: Yeah. When we get rejected, our natural human tendency is to do one of two things, to fight or flight. You’ll fight, you start arguing with this other person and trying to turn their head. Their no into a  yes. They’re trying to say, “If I convince you, do I actually change your mind?” Your flight is you’re running away. You’re just like, “Oh! That’s okay. Thank you.” Just leave. 

None of those is actually a good option, because if you fight, if you try to argue, if you try to outsmart or whatever, usually it doesn’t work, because when you start arguing, you’re asking someone to change their mind. A lot of times emotions and egos get involved. People start to dig in. It’s really tough to actually turn no into a yes. 

Another way is if you run, it’s even worse, because you’re at the mercy of your own judgment. You lose confidence when you just run without actually doing anything. I tell people, “If you really want to turn no into a yes, okay, you can start by asking why.” When people say no to you, ask why. Basically, try to find out what’s the underlying reason for them to say no to you. Try to solve that problem for them. Help you, help me, right? 

Also, when you say why, you stay engaged. You’re buying yourself more time. You’re not arguing, you’re not running away, but you’re buying yourself time. You’re trying to find out if you can find different ways to get a yes. There are so many things you can do to turn no into a yes. If you fight or flight, you’re going to — Those are two of the worst options and those are two things we do normally.

[0:40:02.5] MB: Would you share really briefly, because I know you talked about in your TED Talk and other place, but would you share the story of the flower? How that kind of demonstrates this lesson really beautifully? 

[0:40:14.9] JJ: One day one of my rejection request was I’m going to have bought some flower from a store and I want to talk — Knock on a stranger’s house, door and say, “Can I plant this flower in your backyard?” They guy opened the door and he was like, “Oh, okay. That’s pretty interesting. I thought you were a sales guy. No. Sorry. I cannot do this for you.” I asked, “Why?” He’s like, “I have a dog that will dig up anything I put in the backyard. I don’t want you to waste your flowers. Actually my neighbor love flower, why don’t you go talk to her.” 

I was very happy, because, one, I just got some information. First thing I learned is not about me. If I just leave, probably I’ll thought, “Okay. Maybe I didn’t dress up well. Maybe the guy didn’t like me or for whatever reason.” It turned out to be none of those reasons. He told me about his neighbor. Two, I gained some very crucial information. I got my referral. If you come in and say, “Hey, your neighbor or your friend recommended me to talk to you.” The chance of you saying yes to me actually goes a lot higher. I did go and I go talk to his neighbor. She was very happy to see me and she let me plant the flower in her yard and she’s like, “Oh! Thank you. This is so nice. This is very interesting. Go ahead and maybe do it here.” As it turned out, he was right. She loves flowers. This is few years ago that happened, and I hope that flower is still there. 

[0:41:52.0] MB: It’s just another beautiful example of how all of these magic is on the other side of doing things like this, but you can’t uncover it and you can’t discover it until you’re willing to push through that fear and push through that little voice in your head that’s telling you, “You can’t do it.” That shouldn’t do it or that something terrible is going to happen when you do.

[0:42:12.2] JJ: Absolutely. 

[0:42:15.0] MB: So kind of a corollary of that, another strategy you’ve talked about uncovering was doubt and how doubt can be a really powerful tool for kind of helping people accept some of your request. Can you talk a little bit about that?  

[0:42:28.1] JJ: A better word for doubt is empathy. You want to empathize with the other person whether maybe — Anytime you make some big request, they probably have some sort of objection or some doubt that they have about you. If you can actually mention some doubts, especially if you have a good answer for, right? If you answer a doubt and you have no good answer for it, it’s not good. 

Talk about a doubt or objection that you actually do have a good answer for, mention that, and that becomes your advantage instead of a disadvantage. If you try to hide, if you are just like, “I hope none of that conversation about doubt doesn’t happen. I hope everything is smooth sailing.” 

A lot of times that won’t happen, because people always have doubt and they won’t necessarily mention it to you. They won’t be like — They’re like, “Okay. I’m going to say no to you, because all these reasons.” Sometimes it’s subconscious. Sometimes they have that reason. They can’t even articulate it. If you mention it and if you’re like, “Actually, you know what? I can solve this problem.” If you do it before they do, statistically speaking, the chance of you getting a yes actually goes up just because you demonstrate that you’re honest, you can solve people’s problems. If you can have your doubt or people — What they think about straight up, you actually increase how much they trust you. 

[0:44:01.1] MB: We talk a ton on the show about the power of empathy and we had a recent interview with a spy recruiter for the government who core kind of lessons and strategies was focusing on other people and understanding what they need and what they want, and it’s so simple. When you put yourself in someone’s else shoes, when you make it about them and not just about you, it’s amazing how effective it can be in terms of getting them on the same page. 

[0:44:30.2] JJ: Yeah, absolutely. Empathy is — I totally agree. I think you put it beautifully. Make people understand it’s really about them. If you’re empathizing with them even with their doubt, and then people want to be returning kind. That’s what we normally do. If you do something nice for me, my natural tendency is do something nice for you. Even the nice thing is you’re empathizing with me, knowing my pain, my doubt, and it’s like, “I understand that. I’m trying to solve that for you.” Then you’d be like, “You know what? This guy, this person is nice. I’m going to do something nice for this person as well.” 

[0:45:11.2] MB: I’m really curious. You seem like a very creative guy. How did you come up with all of these different challenges for yourself and all these different ways to get rejected?

[0:45:22.6] JJ: When I started, what’s funny is after the first one — The first is like me borrow $100 from a stranger. That’s my first request. I found that was like daunting and also pretty boring asking money from someone. Then I thought, “What are some of the funny things I can do?” I started trying to have fun. What are some of the things I’d get rejected but also just — I want to entertain myself in a way, because actually it’s such a — When you think about it from a normal lens, it’s such a dry, it’s such a painful experience. It’s such a subject that you are desperately trying to avoid. How can I have that in my mind which I can face it head on on a daily basis and be able to endure this? I’m like, “How about if I just try to be funny myself? I’m just going to have some fun. I’ll get rejected, I’ll just amuse myself.” 

That’s why you’ve got like all these pretty funny requests where I would ask for a burger refill after lunch. I would walk into like a pet store trying to get a haircut, like I were a dog. I would try to walk into a shipping store and try to send something to Santa Claus. I just want to have fun. 

What I found is somehow this turned into — The idea of I’m not taking myself too seriously and I’m having fun. Wow! That translates to how people kind of relate to you, not just my readers, but people I’m making request to. They thought it’s funny sometimes. When I think it’s funny, when I don’t take myself too seriously, when they reject me, the conversation never turns nasty. It doesn’t turn like — It’s always pretty pleasant, because people are going to feel the positive energy in you even they say no to you. 

I want to say that keep that type of humor and positivity in your daily work. It’s okay. It’s okay to have some fun when you make requests even at work, even try to make a sale, even entrepreneurship. I think that’s important.  

[0:47:30.9] MB: What would be as a starting point? Obviously you’ve got tons of examples, but for somebody who’s listening, we’ve challenges them to go out and get rejected. What’s a really simple maybe one to three kind of rejection challenges they can implement as soon as they finish listening to this episode? 

[0:47:50.4] JJ: Yeah. Like I mentioned this before. The number one thing, try to do something comfortable. Try something a little bit uncomfortable, but not outrageous. Text an old friend just to get back to them, just to get back and say, “Hi. How are you? I haven’t talked to you for a while. How are you doing? I’m doing this right now. Hopefully we can keep in touch.” Just do something like that. That’s the starting point. Then talk to a stranger. Say hi to someone. Give someone a high five. Be very happy. Smile at someone. Then buy something and ask for discount at a store. If you go to a store, say, “Hey, can I get a discount,” or maybe you’re like, “Hey, can I see your warehouse? Can I see what is out there? I’ve always wanted to — I’m always curious and I’m just wondering what’s out there. Can you let me take a peek?” 

These are the things that they’re not — They’re something you don’t normally do that’s not that 100% comfortable. Guess what? When you do that, it gets you out of the comfort zone and start getting you on the path of looking for rejection.

[0:49:02.6] MB: I think a kind of an important corollary of that is everyone has a different comfort level. So if texting an old friend is something that seems really kind of easy and seamless for you, don’t do that, and then say, “Oh! I did my rejection challenge for today.” You kind of have to tailor it to something that you feel a little twinge of fear. It has to be something where you say — You have to be at the edge of your comfort zone, and if you don’t feel that inside of yourself, then it’s too easy and you need to find a challenge that’s going to make you have a little bit that doubt, a little bit of that second thinking, “Oh, I don’t know if I should do this,” because when you’re there, that’s really where the magic happens.

[0:49:42.5] JJ: Absolutely. I think In the end, I will recommend people blend in these rejection requests that you can get rejection therapy, or something on your own. Invent your own thing. I just met this guy the other day and he just told me this amazing story that after hearing my talk, he did his own rejection challenge. He would go — He sat down in a coffee shop. He just write down, what are the 100 things that would take him out of his comfort zone, but also toward his goals? He wants to expand his business. He wants to find love. He wants to — He just want to get out of the rut. 

He wrote down his own challenges and he just did that once per day and a year later he’s like — He just doubled his business. He’s about to get married and he’s inviting me to his wedding. He was near depression. He was like in such a rut and he got this out of him, because he listed the things that will motivate him to keeping going. You don’t have to take suggestions from other people. Maybe you can list your own things. 

[0:50:55.5] MB: I think that’s great, and I love — We’ve talked about it already in this conversation, but you can do this as kind of a fun adventure, something crazy to kind of do in your free time, or you can align it with the goals that you have for your life, and that’s just as powerful and can end up creating some really amazing results. 

[0:51:15.1] JJ: Yeah, absolutely.

[0:51:17.3] MB: You shared another lesson, which is that if you look at some of the most impactful people in the history of last 100 years, people like Martin Luther King, people like Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, etc. All of these people achieve what they achieved because they had a powerful relationship with rejection and they were able to power through it and use it as fuel to accomplish their goals. 

[0:51:44.0] JJ: Yeah, absolutely. If you think this is where the ultimate level with rejection, whereas you embrace rejection. You know rejection actually means something good rather than doing something bad. We, in life, we’ll think rejection is something bad, something that we should avoid, and if you can just avoid rejection or minimize rejection you’re way into success, you’re are fooling yourself, because a real success that the people who really are not only successful in their own life, but also can change lives of other people, these folks didn’t do it by avoiding rejection, by trying to go through the easy route. The thing they are doing, the idea is they’re spreading they’re building. Some of the people hate them. Some of the people not only hate them, they violently hate them. 

In fact, the example of Nelson Mandela, he was put in jail for a long time. Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi, those people were assassinated. You cannot get any worst rejection than those, but that’s because they understand rejection doesn’t mean they’re wrong, because especially the stronger the rejection, that means the stronger the acceptance from the other side. If you can start up strong emotions from someone, that can mean you’ve got something. That means there’s the upset of those people, that people who strongly embrace you. 

Don’t be afraid of rejection. Don’t be like, “Oh, man. People hate this. I must be doing something wrong, or maybe I’m stupid. I shouldn’t do this.” Think about the people you are serving. Think that people will equally — Will embrace you with equal fervor. Think about those people. If they can find those people, if they can find your own tribe, you’re doing some amazing things for them.

[0:53:40.7] MB: For listeners who want to learn more, who want to dive in, who want to get some advice and start with things like rejection therapy, where they can find you and all of these resources?

[0:53:52.2] JJ: Yeah, you can go to rejectiontherapy.com. Since last year, I bought rejection therapy, I bought a domain, an intellectual property from the original owner, and now I own this. My goal and my life’s mission now is to make this — I want to make a lot more people use it. I want to turn this into a bigger movement so a lot of the people will share their stories with me, like this guy that I just met the other day. 

If you want to learn more, if you want to go experience this, go to rejectiontherapy.com, sign up with my blog. More important, I’m working on digitizing rejection therapy. I’m working on making this a mobile app, an interactive social mobile app where you could be challenged constantly with rejections, but also you will learn things from this app. 

I’m looking for testers. If you want to be a beta tester when I’m done with this app, you can test things out. You’d be one of the first users of this, go to my website and sign up. I think I have a popup where you can put in your name and email, then I will keep you updated with this new app I’m building.

[0:55:07.8] MB: Awesome. Jia, I’m a huge fan of rejection therapy. I love the work you’re doing. I really can’t emphasize enough how excited this kind of stuff makes me. I’ve done it in my own life. I know how powerful it can be. For anybody out there who’s scared, who is shy, introverted, has trouble making friends or being social, or who just wants to push their life to the next level, this is such an accessible, easy, simple way to get started with that, and I guarantee you, it changed Jia’s life, it changed my life. It’s something that you will find magic on the other side of it if you do it. 

Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of these wisdom.

[0:55:50.6] JJ: Yeah, thank you, Matt. Thank you for doing what you do. Thank you for inspiring people, I guess, to be more successful to do better and to be more courageous in their lives. This is very important. I really appreciate you having me on here. 

[0:56:05.9] MB:  Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say high, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email.

I’m going to give you three reasons right now why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. There are some amazing stuff that’s going on on the email list that only people who are signed up are getting access to including curated weekly emails from us every single week, our Mindset Monday email which listeners have been absolutely loving. Short, simple articles and stories that we’ve really enjoyed from the last week. 

Next, you’re going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, voting on guests, submitting your own questions to guests that we’ll ask on air, things like changing the intro and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get access to free guides including our most popular guide that we created based on listener demand called How To Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide when you join the email list today. 

You can join by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage, or if you’re driving around, if you’re on your phone, if you’re on the go, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we talk about and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get them at successpodcast.com, just at the show notes button at the top. 

Thanks again and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

The Psychology Secrets of Extreme Athletes, NFL Teams & The World’s Top Performers with Dr. Michael Gervais

In this episode we explore what it takes to succeed at the highest possible levels, we get science and data from years in the trenches with top performers to uncover the strategies that really work for achieving results, we dig deep into the life long quest of discovering your own personal philosophy and much more with Dr. Michael Gervais. 

Dr. Michael Gervais - Michael is a high performance psychologist who trains mindset skills and practices that are essential to revealing one’s potential. Michael has worked with some of the world’s top performers including sports teams such as the Seattle Seahawks, Felix Baumgartner (The Red Bull Sponsored Athlete Who Completed the Stratosphere Jump)Olympians, musicians, and more! His work has been featured on ESPN, CNN, The New York Times, and much more!

• Years in the trenches with top performers to get the best strategies

• The importance of rugged and hostile environments to cultivating presence and peak performance

• The value of working hard and getting right on the edge of capacity in order to grow

• Our ancient brain is the thing that gets us stuck, keeps us safe, and keeps us small

• The importance of stillness - the place where all of life happens

• Expressing your authentic self in harmony with other people

• There are only 3 things you can train as a human

• You can train your body

  1. You can train your craft - this varies by person - can be anything from writing to motorcross to partening

  2. You can train your mind

  3. Everything falls into those buckets when we talk about the development of the human experience

• A personal philosophy is one of the most significant anchors you can ground yourself with. Great achievers always have clarity of personal philosophy

• Line up your thoughts, words, and actions across any environment - there is a sense of power that comes from that - an inner knowing and being that is so rock solid that you can move eloquently in any environment when you have that mindset

• The life-long quest of discovering your own personal philosophy - and the 3 methodologies

• Mindfulness - being present with your inner experience

  1. Being around wise people - people who are switched on, people who are having deep convos, talking about their philosophies, having those conversations

  2. Writing - the art of writing, taking a thought and all the words in your native tongue and lock down these ideas and concepts

• Start with putting your philosophy to memory, and then most importantly begin putting your philosophy into practice

• There’s nothing new in the world of self help - the science is super clear - this is what we know to be true - you just have to do the work

• Optimism is a foundational pillar for mental toughness, optimism is about how you think about your future

• Optimism is a learned behavior - how to train it

• Relentless belief that you can focus your mind on what’s good

  1. First function - without awareness of inner dialogue you’re dead in the water - you must have meditation/mindfulness - train your inner experience to become more aware of thoughts and sensations

  2. Second - Martin Seligman - focus on 3 good things - gratitude journal

  3. Become a researcher of amazing / researcher of good in your own life

• Mindfulness is the backbone that runs through all of these strategies

• Going through difficult things doesn’t mean you will be traumatized - Post Traumatic Growth is also possible - How can you achieve post traumatic growth?

• “Small t trauma” vs “Big T Trauma"

• Resilience is at the center of growth - and the only way to become resilient is to go through difficult situations

• The difficult things you go through either get you stuck or push you to the edge of growth.

• In modern life for the average person - the most dangerous thing is what people think of us

• Getting uncomfortable is a requirement for you to be your best. This can be easily demonstrated with any world class performer from music to sports to any field.

• Knowledge won’t carry us through - it's not about more information - that learning has to turn into application and action. Learning has to turn into insights - and those insights need to change your behavior

• The 4 Pillars of Recovery

• Sleeping well - the science is pretty clear - the commitment to doing that requires incredible discipline

  1. Eating & Hydration are necessary pillars - colorful vegetables & clean protein

  2. Moving well - getting your body switched on, oxygenating your system - 6-7 hours of moderate to intense movement per week

  3. Think Well - your mind is an incredible tool, but it also needs to be harnessed

• Most people cannot even fathom the amount of vulnerability necessary to get to the truth - radical vulnerability - allowing the inner stuff to be revealed - is incredible, and so hard to do - most of us retreat to our normal patterns

• Doing difficult things expands your comfort zone

• How do you strike the balance between achievement and non-attachment?

• Winning is fun, winning pays bills - but the far deeper part of that is that the process of becoming - the process of knowing that you have what it takes, the process of being creative to solve problems on the fly and make decisions is much more fun.

• Winning is a requirement to keep going - but in order to cultivate non-attachment you have to be focused on the present moment

• Practice is more important than the conceptual idea itself

• What is your “craft" and why is it so important?

• For most people who are not on the world stage - begs the question - what is my craft? It’s not as complicated as it sounds - what are you most passionate about - what is the thing you care so much about you love doing it, you put work into it?

• Get back to seeing what we do from 9-5 as a primary craft - think about your work and your job as a craft

• Social media has made us lose our way, lose our true north, lose our focus on our craft

• Taking time to think about and articulate your personal philosophy - just starting WRITING “My personal philosophy is…” in 25 words or less - what do you stand for, what are you all about? What’s your true north, your compass?

• Write down the people who have inspired you in life - and next to their names right down the characteristics that they expemplify - those characertics might be part of your philosophy

• How you can engineer your inner experience

• Mindfulness is not a relaxation training - it's a focus training

• That moment of awareness (that your mind has wandered) is the work taking place

• Minimum effective dose is 6-8 minutes, optimal dose is 20 minutes

• Compete to become the best version of yourself

• Every day is an opportunity to create a living masterpiece

• And much more!

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better?

Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Wiki Page] Martin Seligman

• [TEDTalk] The New Era of Positive Psychology by Martin Seligman

• [SoS Episode] Embracing Discomfort

• [SoS Episode] How To Demolish What’s Holding You Back & Leave Your Comfort Zone with Andy Molinsky

• [Book] Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig

• [Website] Finding Mastery

• [Website] Compete to Create

• [Twitter] Michael Gervais

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:12.0] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

In this episode, we explore what it takes to succeed at the highest possible level. We get science and data from years in the trenches with top performers to uncover the strategies that really work for achieving results. We dig deep into the lifelong quest of discovering your own personal philosophy and much more, with Dr. Michael Gervais. 

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. One; you’re going to get awesome free guides that we create based on listener demand including our most popular guide; How To Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide, but you got to sign up to find out by joining our email list today. 

Next, you're going to get an curated weekly email from us every week, including our Mindset Monday email, which listeners have been absolutely loving, and you're going to get a an exclusive chance to shape the show, that means voting on guests, changing parts of the show like our intro and outro music and much more, and even submitting your own personal questions to our guests. 

There're some amazing stuff that's only available to our email subscribers, so be sure to sign up. You can sign up by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage, or if you're on the go right now, you’re out and about, just text the word “smarter”, that smarter” to the number 44222. 

In our previous episode we discussed the proven strategies for building effective relationships. Why it's vital to understand the results you get in the world come from working with other people. How you can see the world from other people's perspectives, tactics for building your credibility, how to get better feedback and much more with our previous guest, Todd Davis. If you want uncover the number one strategy for achieving results and getting what you want in life, listen to that episode. 

Now for the interview.

[0:02:22.3] MB: Today we have another awesome guest on the show, Dr. Michael Gervais. Michael is a high-performance psychologist who trains mindset skills and practices that are essential to revealing one’s potential. He’s worked with some of the world’s top performers, including sports teams such as the Seattle Seahawks, Felix Baumgartner, the Red Bull sponsored athlete who completed the stratosphere job, Olympians, musicians and much more. His work has been featured on ESPN, CNN, The New York Times and many other sites. 

Michael, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:02:51.7] MG: Thanks for having me on. 

[0:02:53.0] MB: We’re super excited to have you on here today. I’d love to start out, tell me a little bit about what is your mission? What is kind of the driving purpose behind what you do? 

[0:03:04.0] MG: Well, it’s changed, and I can work in reverse order, so I think it's probably a bit easier, but the beginnings is — Or where I am now, the mission now, is to see if we can make an impact in one in seven people across the globe. That sounds daunting and ridiculous, but we make it where it’s bite-size or snackable if you will and we’re trying to make a difference, one of five people in any organization that we work with. 

The reason one in five, the image in place is to help people be more clear about how they can train their mind to be more present. So that's the mission. If we can increase the frequency of people becoming their authentic self and by meeting the present moment when it happens and having command of their mind to do so in rugged and hostile environments, then the idea is that we’ll create a rising tide where that swell floats all boats. 

[0:03:56.6] MB: You touched on the idea of rugged and hostile environments. How does that play into the cultivation of presence? Another topic I know you’ve worked a lot on is mastery. 

[0:04:07.5] MG: Well, by trade and training, my skillset is high-performance psychology, or performance psychology. I think that it’s important to give some context to where I’m coming from, so it’s grounded in good science. Then I’ve spend years in the field and in the trenches with some of the top performance in the world learning how they, and we together, customize a mindset training or psychological skills training programs. 

The rugged and hostile environments is relative and in many of the environments I work in, they’re physically rugged and hostile. For the rest of folks, like it doesn’t have to be physically dangerous to be rugged. It can be emotionally dangerous and risky. What that means is any time that your heart starts to thump because of the interpretation that something is on the line, then by definition that becomes relatively hostile. It feels as though — No. A better way of saying that, it is the exact same feeling as if somebody were chasing you down with a knife in a dark alley when you’re required to walk across the dancehall in 7th grade and experience that vulnerability being the first person to dance or to walk across and ask somebody to dance.

All of the same ancient brain stuff from our ancestors that were passed on to us about fight, flight, freeze, mission or flow state, all of those are at play. In modern times, so many of us, we understand the value of working hard and getting right on the edge of capacity or getting right on the edge of this instability to grow and to become larger in our ability to manage moments. The truth is that our ancient brain is that thing that gets us stuck and keeps us safe and small in many regards.  

So that’s a long way of saying that the hostile and rugged environments is where we learn about who we really are. The way that we learn about who we are is only we really know our experience in those moments. Do we shut it down? Do we avoid them? Do we — Are so self-critical that it’s hard to be fluid in our craft, whether that’d be words or whether that’d be something more physical, like sport?

It’s the dangerous and hostile environments that teach us how well we prepared to be still in the present moment. Why is the stillness important, is because that’s where life happens. That’s where all things high-performance, that’s where all things that look like or feel like mastery take place. It’s where we’re connected to ourselves. It’s where we’re connected to nature. It’s where we’re connected to our craft. It’s where we’re connected to others. 

The essence is the whole inner engineering game is to figure out ways to become more present and to have that presence be aligned with your personal philosophy about who it is that you want to become and who it is that you’re working on being, and it’s the confluence of those variables that be more specific. Those variables are hostile or rugged environments. The personal philosophy about who it is that you’re working on becoming and the mental skills to have command of your inner experience so that you can do one thing, which is express your authentic self, and when you can do that in harmony with other people, really good stuff takes place. That’s the essence of how I spend most of my time conceptually. Thinking about those elements and how to leverage them and manipulate them in all the right ways and then to train our minds to be more calm and more confident, more resilient, more mentally tough, more nimble if you will to adjust to the unfolding and unpredictable unknown that only comes within the uncertainty of hostile and rugged environments. 

[0:08:06.3] MB: There’s a tremendous amount of stuff that I want to dig into just from that answer. I’d love to start out with the idea of really getting clear about who you are and how important it is to know who you are and how that intersects with performance.

[0:08:22.3] MG: Yeah. I think it seems like a simple question, but it’s a really big question. Let’s start with one concept above that, which is there’s only three things that as humans, there’s only three things that we can train. We can train our body, and science is pretty good there. We’ve got a pretty good handle on how to do that. You can train our craft, and our crafts vary across people. Some people, their craft is writing, and some people, their craft is motocross. There’re all different types of crafts people have. Parenting is a craft. You can train your body. You can train your craft and you can train your mind. 

Everything else in life falls in one of those three buckets when we’re talking about development of the human experience, and there’s an asterisk, and that asterisk is your spirit. There is some thought that I — I’m a scientist at heart and there’s no science that I can point to that says you can train spirit, but not put an asterisk next to it, because I think it’s possible.

Okay. There’s only those three things that you can train. Now, I spend most of my time on how to train the mind. When we talk about training the mind, it becomes almost fruitless to have mental skills, but there’s nothing to calibrate who you are and who you’re becoming, which is a personal philosophy. A personal philosophy becomes — Seriously, like one of the most significant anchors that we can ground ourselves with, and if you think about some of the most significant people in the world that have shaped the culture and the rhythm of the world, we’re very clear about their philosophy. 

Martin Luther King Jr., we know exactly what he stood for, because he talked about it, he thought about it, and his actions lined up, and that’s the essence of why a personal philosophy is really important, is to line up your thoughts, your words and your actions across any environment. When you can line up your thoughts, words and actions, there is a sense of power that comes from that. Now, I don’t mean power in a cheesy way, but there’s an inner-knowing and an inner-being that is so rock solid that you can — No. Not align. That you can move eloquently in any environment when you have that alignment. That’s Martin Luther King Jr. We knew that he stood for equality. 

Malcom X on the other side also stood for equality and they had very different tones to how they went about achieving that aim of equality. Malcolm X was widely known for by any means necessary, and Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. King, was very clear about having a non-violent approach. 

There’s dials that get embedded in one’s philosophy, but the philosophy itself becomes the compass for how to line up your thoughts, your words and your actions.

[0:11:14.8] MB: That’s so powerful, and I think it’s critically important point. I’m curious, for somebody who’s listening that kind of wants to ground that experience, how would you recommend starting out to uncover or discover what your own personal philosophy is or starting to get to the core of that?

[0:11:34.2] MG: It’s a lifelong quest, and it’s starts by getting clear, and there’s three methodologies to get clear that both science and ancient wisdoms would teach us. It starts with a basic principle, and the basic principle is that everything you need is already inside you. It’s not about going and asking other people for their philosophy, but it is helpful to have your eyes open to be curious about what other people’s philosophies are so that you can be more connected to what it is that they’re searching for and how they’ve organized their life. I’m talking about people of wisdom and passion and people that had great influence that you think is remarkable. Okay. That’s the first part. 

The second part is if everything you know — Everything you need to know is already inside you, how do you reveal that? There’s three methodologies, and the first is mindfulness. So that is the practice of being present with your inner experience. We can down as much of that conversation as you’d like. The second form is being around wise people, being around people that are switched on and having those conversations about deep stuff, about their philosophy, about how they have cultivated their philosophy, about how their philosophy has changed overtime and being able to bounce deeper type conversations across the people that have wisdom. If you’re not fortunate enough to know somebody that’s wise, that’s okay. There’re certainly people in your community that like are on the ball. Maybe they don’t have wisdom and they haven’t revealed it yet, but they’re certainly on the ball and they’re switched on. That’s the second; those types of conversations and building that community. 

Then the third is writing. The art of writing, of being able to take an esoteric thought and all the words in your native tongue to be able to lockdown as a forcing function to say, “This is the word or sentence or phrase that best describes this feeling or thought or concept that I’m trying to articulate.” It’s something incredibly powerful about that forcing function to take all the possible words that swirl on our head and pick one or two or a phrase of words to articulate ourselves. Those are the three ways, but it starts with a premise that everything you need is already inside you. Your work is to reveal that, and that happens by being, by listening, by having conversations and by writing.
 
[0:13:58.2] MB: What has your own journey been like to uncover your personal philosophy?

[0:14:04.8] MG: I’ve had wonderful experiences with this and I’ve been fortunate enough to have some mentors. I needed mentors when I was younger I should say, and so I was fortunate enough to have some really amazing people that helped guide me. One of those folks challenged me and said, “What is your philosophy?” and I had no idea what it was and I just couldn’t articulate it, and I tried. Just like most people that say, “Well, the things that are most important to me are —” But that’s not what it is. It’s like there’s something much deeper, and that deeper calling is to say, “I know it’s this.” The way to get to that clarity are the three approaches I just talked about, but also having somebody say, “Hey, listen. I really would love to know your philosophy.” There’s something really important about at the accountability that that person cares, they’re interested and I’m going to do this with them, or they’re calling me out on the carpet. That’s what happened to me. Somebody called me out and said, “I thought you had done this — You said that you’ve done this work and I thought you did, but it’s clear you haven’t.” I said, “Okay.” 

What ends up happening for me is I went based on that kind of — I wouldn’t say it was embarrassment, but I let myself down. I let my mentor down. I just went on a quest to really try to figure it out, but it took me two years and it was two years of searching and I was reading and I was talking and I was writing and I was listening. I was doing all the things that I shared with you earlier.

Then one day I was reading a chapter in a book and it just spilled out of me, and so I don’t think that what I’m describing is the absolute, most efficient way to do it, but that’s how it happened for me. Then when I realized, like this is me looking back with hindsight, that there’s some particular phases that we go through, there’s the searching phase of trying to understand it, and then there’s the phase of like shaping it, paring it and saying, “These are the words.” 

What I’d suggest to people is that you want to be able to so crisp with your philosophy is that you could get it out at knife point in a dark alley. That means that it’s got to be just a handful of words, or certainly less than 15, that maybe you start with a whole page and then you pare it down to half a page and then you pare it down to 25 words or less and then maybe you could get it done to just a handful of words that really get to the center of your compass in your life. 

Okay. Then the next is taking that work and putting it to memory. Little extra here is that when it happened for me, is that when it just spilled out of me, it was so right and so true, because I’ve been thinking and searching and really wrestling with it sometimes in the background, but sometimes in the foreground of my daily rhythms, that I only needed to edit two words in my statement. That leads me to this next phase, which is putting it to memory. For me, it was so crisp that I didn’t need to put it to memory. It was just there for me. 

Most people need to say, “Okay,” and they need to practice it, like, “Okay. What are those words? That’s right. Okay. It was these words. All right.” There’s just a memorization process. 

Then the fourth phase is to put it into practice, and so we’ve got to wake up in the morning in some kind of way and practice it. If you want to be good at it, especially in rugged and hostile environments to have that alignment, that true north that only a philosophy can offer us, is that we have to wake up and practice it. 

Then we want to practice mental skills to support us to be about it in hostile and rugged environments. That’s it. It’s not complicated. I think that there’s something very important about simplicity and it feels like I know I’m on to something when it’s really simple, but it’s hard to do and it just seems like that’s what I’ve learned from both being in the trenches with world’s best and variety of domains, that it’s not complicated to know how to shoot a basketball or do whatever the skill is in whatever sport we’re talking about when nobody is looking, but it’s extremely hard to do it when there are more people looking and there’s pressure involved. It’s even more difficult to do that in repeated fashion. That’s how I think about it.

[0:18:18.4] MB: Yeah, I feel like many of the most important things in life are simple but not easy. 

[0:18:24.2] MG: Yeah. A thousand percent. There’s something nauseating about the self-help world. It’s like, “Jesus! There’s nothing new.” It’s a fantastic field waiting for people to help them become their very best. The science is phenomenal saying, “Listen. This is what we know to be true. You just have to freaking do it. You got to put in the lonely work and roll up your sleeves, be really clear about your philosophy. Train your mind to know how to be confident in any environment.” That’s mechanical. That’s so mechanical, but the practice in the doing of it, it’s just not easy. How to become in any environment, completely possible to do, but we have to practice. How do we practice? If you want, we can go through those mechanics, but I’m sure that most of your listeners already know the answers on how to do that. 

[0:19:16.2] MB: Let’s briefly touch on that. Tell me kind of just in an overview sense what are those core mechanics and mental skills that are necessary to command your inner experience?

[0:19:27.0] MG: Yeah. Okay. Once we’ve locked in and we’ve got our compass for our philosophy and we’ve got a sense of, “Okay. I’m going to do the hard work,” and you make that commitment. It’s hard work to do. Then you can move into training the mental skills, which are the not complicated. It’s generating a sense of confidence, calm, the ability to lock in and focus in the present moment. The ability to trust yourself in difficult, rugged environments. Those are four, right? Calm, confidence, focus and trust. 

Then there’s some psychological framework stuff to work on as well, which is a fancy phrase for how you think about your future. Is it optimistic or pessimistic? We want to double down on optimism, because for us what we’ve learned, and science supports this as well, is that it’s part of a foundation, if not the center pillar for mental toughness. To create a life of high performance, let alone mastery or peace and meaning, we need — We require to be mentally tough. If the center of mental toughness is the belief that the future is going to work out and I have the capacity to figure it out, that’s a fancy phrase for self-efficacy. Then optimism is really important for us. That’s trainable. Optimism, pessimism are learned behaviors and if we want to be more mentally tough, we need to train optimism. 

Then the last two are being able to focus on what’s in our control, be very clear about that. Then the last is developing a sense of grit. Grit is a simple term, but it really means living with passion and a sense of resiliency to persevere for the long-term haul, for the long trek if you will towards your potential. 

If I make it more clear, it’s calm, confidence, focus and trust, optimism, control and grit. Those are the key mental skills that I spent a lot of time thinking about how to cultivate. If you’re going to do all of that, working to line up your thoughts, words and actions on a regular basis in safe environments all the way up to hostile events, and that’s what kind of natural training progression looks like. We start in a quiet, safe environment and then progressively get louder with more risk until it becomes more hostile. Then at some point, there’s the possibility to dissolve that hostility and dissolve that pressure if you will. That’s much more nuanced, but that’s left for people that are truly at the tip of the arrow to figure that out. 

If we’re going to do all of that work, then the last pillar, if you will, for a programmatic approach to progressive improvement would be getting your recovery program locked down. On the world stage, we do not talk about working hard. Everybody works hard. Everybody is freaking hard worker on the world stage and they’ve got this incredible talent to go with it. It’s exciting and it’s fun to work hard. 

We talk more about science and the art of recovery so that we can work hard on a regular basis and we down burn ourselves out in ways emotionally, physically or sometimes spiritually so to speak that we can’t go the distance. We got to push up against the edge, and if you’re going to push up against the edge of instability and doubt and physical limitations, then we’ve got to figure out the right way to recover our mind and our body.

[0:22:46.1] MB: I want to dig in recovery, but before we do, one of the things that I’ve thought about a lot is how do we balance optimism with the kind of acceptance of negative emotions and experiences? That’s something I think personally I’ve struggled with is, is kind of how do you balance spending time accepting and dealing with and thinking about past trauma or current negative emotional experiences with what you just talked about in terms of how powerful optimism is as a psychological framework and a key component of mental toughness and performance.

[0:23:20.9] MG: Okay. Yeah, it’s good. Everything that I just talked about, the wick that runs through it is mindfulness. Mindfulness is a particular well-being in the present moment without judgment. It’s a definition that was coined by Jo Kabat-Zinn. 

To answer your question, optimism is about how you think about your future. Now, if you’ve been burned, and I don’t mean physically burned, but that could be the case too. If you’ve been emotionally burned or let down or you’ve been through some really tough stuff you’ve seen or smelled or heard things that are traumatic or difficult for you to deal with, that that can and will likely impact a sense of optimism. Okay?

If you’re been through some really tough stuff, it makes sense to have mechanisms to protect yourself from experiencing those difficult emotions. Again, so how do we train optimism? The first thing we need to do is recognize that going through difficult things doesn’t mean that we’re going come out the other side of it traumatized. There’s a lesser known research about — What I’m talking about is post-traumatic stress disorder and trauma. Being traumatized is kind of a feature of that obviously. That there’s less research or less widely known research around post-traumatic growth, so that means it is possible to go through really heavy situations and come up the other side stronger, to come out the other side with the sense of growth. How? It’s really important. How?

It’s not as simple as I’m about to describe. I don’t want to pretend that this is not nuanced. It’s very nuanced when we’re dealing with emotional stuff that’s heavy, and I mean, shit a Ph.D., which is about 14 years of study doesn’t prepare us even enough to deal with what I’m about to say. It requires many more years in the field on top of that to deal with people that have been through traumatic experiences, but there’s trauma with a big T and there’s trauma with a small T. 

Let’s just say we’re dealing with trauma with a small T. It means maybe you’re publicly embarrassed. It doesn’t mean that you saw body parts or you almost died yourself. Trauma with a small T is more common. 

That means you maybe are publicly embarrassed or you let down some other people or there’s some sort of embarrassment or smaller traumatic experience that took place. If that was the case and that experience was fused with emotion and that fusion of emotion and physical experience becomes capsulated in such a way that we don’t want to experience it again because it was so hard, everything that you do looking forward would be to naturally protect yourself from that. 

We have to undo. We have to rewire that experience. How do we do that? That’s the complicated part. That’s where you want to get in touch with somebody that really has a deep understanding of how the mind works, a psychologist or a properly trained clinician, to understand how to unpack that, at the same time create the sense that resiliency is at the center of growth. 

We don’t become these amazing human beings without being resilient, and the only way to become resilient is to go through difficult shit. At some point, we have to have this meta-analysis, this observation that the difficult things that I go through are either going to keep me stuck or push me right to the edge of growth. That becomes very important. 

Now, from that point, the idea of optimism is a purposeful decision to think about what could be amazing in the future. We have to spend time to train that, because if our ancient brain and our traumatized brain with a small T, but big T for trauma, is working to protect us. It literally feels like we have to override our DNA, and this is why psychology is so freaking powerful and wonderful and complicated, because our software, our mind is driving our brain, our hardware. 

If the software is not strong enough, the hardware wins, the brain wins. The brain is designed for survival. So if we want to go back to any of our — Let’s say, glitchy experiences in us becoming our best version of ourselves, it’s either because our software has been traumatized or it’s glitchy or the hardware is doing its job, and it’s doing its job to protect you from all the things that could potentially be dangerous. In a modern life, the things that are most dangerous are what people think of us. 

Certainly, that there are physically dangerous elements that take place. There are dangerous and bad people that lurk in dark places. That is true. For most of us, the worst thing that we experience is what other people might be thinking about us. We have to face down our glitchy software to upgrade it or know that our hardware is working to keep us safe and small and stuck and just okay, and we have to override that hardware by purposely training our mind to find what could be good as supposed to what our brain wants us to do is scan the world and find what could go wrong. It’s the combination of the balance of those two, because it’s ridiculous to think that nothing could go wrong. We do need to entertain those thoughts, but it’s that purposeful balance and double down or tripling down on what could be amazing and saying, “Okay. If that’s an outcome that could be amazing, what do I have to do to position myself right now in this moment or over the next week or month or years to see if that thing is actually possible.” That’s where all of the mental and physical and technical craft-base work goes into play.

[0:29:08.5] MB: If optimism is a learned skill, how can we cultivate and train it?

[0:29:14.9] MG: Okay. It starts with a decision, like I’m going to focus my mind on what could be good and what could be amazing. It’s a relentless belief that that’s possible. Then once that’s in place, then we back into how to train it, and there’re two functions of it. The first function is, without awareness of our inner dialogue, we’re literally dead in the water. 

It begins with an awareness of your inner experience. How do you train awareness? Mindfulness. Mindfulness is a way to train your inner experience to become more aware of your thoughts, your emotions, your body sensations and the stuff outside, the external environment. 

It starts with awareness. If you don’t know your thoughts, you can’t change them. The second is there’s some really great research out of UPenn that Martin Seligman designed, and that study reflects — They put people through — I can’t remember. Thousands of people. I think it was 4,000 people that put them through a study. I could be mixing up my research right now. He put thousands of people through a study and they asked them for seven days to just focus on three good things and at the end of the day just write those three good things down. 

What they’ve found is people came into that study that were depressed. It stabilized their depression. What they’ve found is people that were not depressed, overall life satisfaction and wellness increased after just 7 days. That’s on a bunch of research around optimism training and gratitude training. That would be the most mechanical, the easiest way, evidence-based practice to start is wake up in the morning, become a researcher of good. Just do that. Become a researcher of amazing and a researcher or good. Then at the end of the day, write those things down. At the end of the day you’d have a sentence and a parenthesis right next to the end of the sentence. 

Literally, I’ve got so many athletes and folks out and artists and folks I work with that they’ll send me a text as an accountability measure at the end of the day and it will say something like, “A woman held the door open for me.” Period. Then a parenthesis, it would say connection. Like they felt connected. The parenthesis is the emotion or the piece that made it special, and then the sentence is the thing that actually took place. It’s got to be real. It’s got to be something that happened and it’s, by the definition, has to be good or amazing if we’re so bold to be able to make that list. 

It forces our brain to scan the world and find what’s good as supposed to all the things that could go wrong. It’s simple. It’s mechanical and it’s evidence-based. 

[0:31:53.2] MB: We talk all the time on the show about the importance of mastering new skills and abilities, and that's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our amazing sponsor, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn anything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography, and the cool part about Skillshare is that they give you unlimited access for a monthly fee so you don't have to pay per class. 

They have some amazing courses on there that I personally really enjoy, everything from mastering Evernote, to mind mapping, to learning how to sketch and draw. If you want to get a leg up on everything from graphic design to your knife skills, if you're into cooking, and much, much more, Skillshare is giving every single Science of Success listener one month of unlimited access completely for free. That's pretty awesome. 

Go to skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month. 

[0:32:58.1] MB: Let’s transition back to talking about recovery. You mentioned how important recovery is and talked about a little bit of the art and science of that. Tell me more.

[0:33:07.3] MG: Okay. If you’re going to get on the edge, if you nudge your head and say, “Yes. I understand that getting uncomfortable, I’ve heard it over and over again, that getting uncomfortable is a requirement for me to be my best.” 

Then what that means is that you’re physically taxing your body on a regular basis. If we’re doing that, then we’ve got to put in the right recovery mechanisms so that we can replenish. There’re four pillars of recovery. The first is sleeping well. The science around that is pretty clear. We all know it. We all know that most human beings, 68% of human beings need to between 7 and 8 hours of sleep pm a regular basis. That’s not new. Grandma told us that. 

However, making the commitment to do that does require an incredible discipline and it requires organizing our lives in such a way that we value recovery, because we’re working at our capacity on a regular basis. 

Knowledge is not going to carry us through. It’s not more information, and it sounds counterintuitive for me to say this, but the idea of listening to — And I have a podcast and I love it and I’m clip just like you to learn. At some point, the learning has to turn into application and then that application has to turn into insight. Then we have that insight, we can reveal our potential easier. 

It moves from not knowing and hearing again that, “Oh, I should be getting 8 hours of sleep.” It’s having a fundamental pivot and orientation in your life to say that, “I’m freaking getting after it, and because of that I need to be disciplined and organize myself to ensure that I have at least 8 hours in bed on a regular basis.” That’s one. Sleep is the first pillar. 

Eating and hydration is the second pillar, and that’s mechanical as well. I’m not going to tell you more information that is going to be helpful other than you know that having colorful foods on your plate and having clean protein is essential. Colorful foods, I don’t mean like Skittles. I mean like all the different colors that mother nature offers us, and having handfuls of clean protein on a regular basis are really important. We can dig down in the weeds and to go deeper in that, but that’s a basic frame. If you’re not doing that on a regular basis and eating on a regular basis every three to four hours, then you’re kind of blowing it. The hydration piece is essential as well. When we are dehydrated, one of the first things that happens is we dehydrate our brain. I actually say the first thing, but we know that dehydrated people also had a shrinkage in volume in their brain, because so much of our cellular structure happens up in that three pounds of tissue in our skull. Eating right and hydration, that’s the second pillar. 

Then the third pillar is moving well, and that’s just a function of getting your body switched on and oxygenating your system. Basic guidelines are like 6 to 7 hours of movement, moderate to intense movement a week. It’s probably not quite enough if you’re really trying to get on the edge. 

The reason we want to get our bodies moving in that way is because it oxygenates our system, it gets our blood flowing, it gets all of the joints and the muscular and the skeletal tissue, all of that stuff is working and it helps enhance our brain for lots of different reasons. Also, it’s one of the ways that helps promote before lifting heavy things, and I say this with an asterisk, if you’re going to lift heavy thing, make sure that you’re skilled and qualified to do that with a coach, a sports performance coach or your local exercise guru, whoever that might be, and lift heavy stuff. It helps promote growth hormone. It helps promote the testosterone, and both men and women need those especially as we get into our 20s and 30s and 40s. We need to make sure that we’re taking care of those two hormones. That is all part of it. 

Then the fourth pillar is the think well. If you did all those three pillars, if you kicked ass all day, got right up into the edge of your capacity by doing difficult things, whether it’s emotional or physical and you’re in the amphitheater so to speak on a regular basis and you recover for the first three pillars, but you wake up in the morning and you pull your sheets off and the first thing it happens is that you drop into a state of anxiousness or worry or frustration that somebody drank the last — I don’t know. Say, milk or orange juice or whatever. The image in my mind is that you to the refrigerator and somebody drank all of the juices that you wanted. I’m not a fan of juices, that’s why I’m kind of stammering in this part of it. That if you wake up with a mind that’s anxious or frustrated, you just undo all of the recovery that you put in place. 

Our mind is an incredible tool. It’s also a weapon that can be used against us if we don’t put the right harnesses on it, and those harnesses begin with great awareness. Again, awareness can be cultivated, it can be trained, and mindfulness is one of the center pillars for increasing that awareness. 

[0:38:09.8] MB: You actually kind of tossed out a phrase that I think is a phenomenal insight, which is the idea that getting uncomfortable is a requirement to be your best. I think so many people get trapped in their comfort zone and it ends up really kind of stifling much of their growth potential. 

[0:38:25.4] MG: Yeah, for sure. I mean that’s one of the things that we can easily learn from world-class in anything, whether it’s music. The amount of artist, world-class artists — I’m spending some time right now with an artist who — I don’t want to say who it is for confidentiality, but has over 200 hits, and I mean hits. He’s a writer/producer and artist himself. When he goes on stage, he sells out in 15 minutes. He books at about $1.8 a night and works about 50 nights a year. I mean mega influencer of the world.

The amount of vulnerability, the intensity of vulnerability to get to the truth, I don’t think most people can even fathom what it takes to get to the truth. That level of radical vulnerability to allow the inner stuff to be revealed is incredible and it’s so hard to do. That what most of us do is we retreat to our normal patterns. We drive almost the same way every day to work. We eat from the same restaurants. We think the same patterns. We talk about the same silly shit with our friends on a regular basis, really getting on the edge, whether that’s physical. 

Great athletes have taught us this for years and coaches, world-class coaches have this insight; practice has got to be real. It’s got to be on. We’ve got to get switched on and get the most out of ourselves so that we can learn, so that we can figure out and push our capacity. I’m holding my hands, like I’ve got my hands around a balloon. If I breathe air into the balloon, which is doing difficult things, the balloon stretches and there’s a new capacity. There’s more room to play when the capacity gets bigger, when the balloon gets bigger and there’s ways to do it emotionally and there’s ways to do it physically. There’s no such thing as mental uncomfortableness. Thoughts are thoughts. 

Thoughts become challenging as soon as we have an emotional experience to them. There’s emotional uncomfortableness, which is really vulnerability. Then the physical stuff is much more mechanical and much easier to do. It’s about getting your heart rate up and your lactic acid and the [inaudible 0:40:53.3], or the chemicals in our body that are difficult to deal with. It’s about getting our wind up and breathing heavy, because we’re out of capacity from an oxygen standpoint, and from my lactic acid [inaudible 0:41:06.1] standpoint, when our muscles feel like they’re shutting down. You can do that by long distance stuff or intense burst of stuff. That’s how you do it physically. The whole purpose of that is to be able to have better command of your mind in those difficult situations and command of your craft, whatever that craft is, physical or mental. 

[0:41:26.4] MB: I want to come back and dig into craft as well, but there’s another topic that I’m curious to hear your insights on. One of the other psychological frameworks you talked about was focusing on what’s within your control, and kind of the corollary to that is something that I think that I think a lot about is striking the balance between pushing and really trying to achieve a lot and also kind of the concept of non-attachment, non-attachment to the outcomes. How do these high-performance you work with and how do you think about sort of striking that balance between not being attached to outcomes and at the same time still striving to achieve great things? 

[0:42:01.8] MG: Yeah. The concept of non-attachment is very much — The origins of that are very much in a Buddhist practice. I think that it’s hard. What you just described sounds wonderful and is really, really difficult to do. However — Before I get to the however, almost everyone I know wants to win. They know, they understand the invisible handshake that winning is really fun. If you don’t win enough, you don’t get to keep going. That visible handshake is for me or for an athlete or a coach in world-class organizations is that if we don’t win in the first — Let’s say in the NFL. If coaches don’t win the first four games, the owners can just fire you. That’s kind of the tolerance. 

Imagine if you’ve got four weeks to get it right and it doesn’t work right. You’re gone. You have to win. It’s a requirement. Winning pays bills. Winning is certainly fun, but it’s far deeper than that. The far deeper part of it is that the process of becoming, the process of knowing that you have what it takes. The process of being creative to solve problems and make decisions on the fly is much more fun. It’s just like when we match up against our competitors and we get to see how well we prepared, that’s the real reward. The winning part of it is a requirement to keep going to get another shot at it. 

Okay. How do you get into the non-attachment piece? By thrusting yourself completely into the present experience. Our minds are wired in such a way that we cannot process two new things at the same thing. It’s called serial processing, and that’s how we think at least we’re wired.  

If you can’t process two new things at the same time and you make a conscious decision and you have the ability — Anytime you have an ability, that means you can get better at it. You make a decision and develop the ability to put your mind in the present moment to focus on the most relevant task-at-hand, then that’s where we experience non-attachment. Non-attachment is a byproduct of full absorption in the present moment.

[0:44:27.2] MB: That’s a great insight, and I think that makes a ton of sense. That balance is something that I spend a lot of time kind of thinking about how do you strike a balance between those two things. Thank you for sharing that insight.

[0:44:38.4] MG: Yeah, good. I’d say it’s not going to probably do you much good thinking about it. The next phase is if once you have some clarity around it, is practicing it. How do you practice being fully connected to the present moment just this next thing is you might actually be practicing it on a regular basis through these conversations and in your podcast is by listening deeply. 

If you’re just listening deeply to this conversation right now, you’re practicing single pointed presence, like just this word, just this word again and you’re here now again in the present moment and again in the present moment and doing that for 15 seconds, 20 seconds and locking in for another 30 seconds once your mind wanders, maybe even doing it for one second at a time. That’s how it works. I’d say practicing it is far more important than thinking about just the conceptualize piece of it.

[0:45:31.7] MB: Another really good insight and very true — I’m a very cerebral person, so I naturally gravitate towards the ideas, but I think the practice is integral and critical.

[0:45:42.4] MG: Yeah. These are all abilities. That means wherever we are with them, we can get better. What I love about the space of psychology and the space of mindset conditioning and training is that it’s wide open right now and our potential as humans is untapped and we’re moving into a digital world where our ancient brains are not primed properly for it. So we have to train our minds to pursue our potential. We have to train our minds to override our DNA and that DNA function is to survive. If we can train our minds and we’ve got a clear purpose of our philosophy and connection to our philosophy, the world becomes so much more playful and wonderful. It doesn’t mean it’s not easy. It’s like hard, and there is real danger in the world. It’s a fantastic time right now for the science of psychology and the application of it. It’s phenomenal.

[0:46:36.2] MB: I want to circle back to craft, which we talked a little bit about earlier. Tell me — When you say craft, kind of what does that mean and how does thinking about that factor into the work you do with top performers?

[0:46:49.5] MG: Craft is — It’s so easy to look at an athlete and say, “Oh, I understand their craft. Their craft is dribbling a basketball or throwing a football or throwing a javelin or whatever. That’s super simple.” You look at an artist, you’re like, “Oh, okay. His craft or her craft is playing the guitar or singing.” 

For most people that are not on the world stage or are not professional at what they do, it begs the question what is my craft, and it’s not as complicated as it sounds. The way to think about your craft is what are you most passionate about? What is the thing that you care so much about that you love doing it? You put work into it? It could be a hobby, but that can be your craft. 

I’d also suggest that it’s really important for us to get back to seeing what we do from 9 to 5 or whatever that rhythm is for work for people to seeing that as a primary craft even if it doesn’t have the same type of passion around what it feels like to spin some pottery or to play music on a guitar as a hobby, but to see what we do and how we spend most of our time as a workforce, as that being our primary craft, that’s a really important distinction between being a laborer and being a craftsman. Even if it’s a factory worker, even if whatever — It does not matter. What we’ve found form research is that people that have a deep connection to purpose and meaning in life, they see that the simple bolt that they’re attaching on the factory line to the nut that is eventually one day going to turn into an automobile where people can have some freedom to move around or it’s going to turn into whatever piece of technology that provides creativity for people, that connecting to the deeper part of what they’re doing is significantly important to overall well-being, to happiness, to joy and to purpose in life. 

That science has been around a long time, but what’s happening right now is that the modern pace of instant access and the need for comparing our Instagram highlight reel to other people’s Instagram highlight reel is that we’ve lost our way and we’ve lost our way about what is our true north, what is the craft that we’re working on refining and why are we here. What is the purpose for us to be here, and it’s a difficult conversation that only you can answer for yourself. I would encourage us to take a good look at how we spend our time and to think about the things that we do through the lens of being craftsman.  

[0:49:38.4] MB: The idea of seeing your job as a craft makes me think of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and especially the notion of quality from that book.

[0:49:46.2] MG: Yeah. It’s a classic book. It’s really good. Yeah, certainly, he has pulled on that thread quite a bit. If you haven’t read that book, I highly encourage to take a look at it for sure. 

[0:49:58.2] MB: What is one piece of homework that you would give somebody listening to this episode so that they could concretely implement some of the ideas we’ve talked about today?

[0:50:06.6] MG: Okay. Certainly, taking time to think about and articulate your philosophy, your personal philosophy. How do you do that? Just start writing and just start feeling the words that start thumping when you say, “My personal philosophy is,” and just kind of sense and feel your way through that. That would be a phenomenal and significant investment in yourself to see if you can articulate in 25 words or less what you stand for, what you’re all about, what it is that is your true north, your compass for what you’re doing here in life. That would be a phenomenal thing to do. Maybe even go research other people’s philosophies just to get your juices rolling. 

Then let me add one more thing, and I want to give your listeners two things. That would be one, and if I could add to that, it would be you could even write down the people that have inspired you in life, whether you know them or not, write down their names. Then write next to the names, write down the characteristics that they embody, that they exemplify. Those characteristics will also be part maybe of the words that you choose for your philosophy. That’s a significant contribution to your overall inner engineering, right? We do get to engineer our inner experience. 

The second would be an investment in mindfulness. Mindfulness has been around for 2,600 years. I feel like we’ve moved past the conversation with folks about what it is and why it’s important. I feel like that pop culture has done a great job there. Mindfulness, the actual practice of mindfulness is so powerful and so wonderful to increase our awareness of our inner experience, our thoughts, our emotions, our body sensations as well the awareness of the unfolding world around us so that we can pivot and adjust, that investing in a mindfulness practice will be a second very significant investment in one’s potency in life or efficacy in life. 

How do you it? Mechanically, there’re thousands of mindfulness practices, there are thousands of ways to meditate. Mechanically, if we start it off with some training wheels, it would be as simple as mastering your inhale. Breath in and take a nice deep breath in and maybe that breath lasts for about four to five seconds, somewhere in that range, and master it. How do you master the inhale, is when your mind wanders away from it? Just bring it back. Bring it back to the inhale, and when your mind wanders away again, bring it back. If you ask yourself, “Am I doing it right?” That’s the wandering mind. Just bring it back. 

Then notice the tension at the top of the inhale and master that tension, that pause at the top. It’s not radical, but it’s just enough to say that I’ve got a full breath. Then master the exhale. If the exhale is longer than the inhale, overtime, you’re going to get the benefit of a bit of relaxation. But mindfulness is not a relaxation training. Mindfulness is a focus training. 

As soon as your mind defocuses, moves away from the present moment, which in this case is the breath, your breath, that the moment that you’re aware that you’re away from the most important task at hand that you set up for yourself, the breathing, that moment of awareness is the moment of the work taking place, and so you gently bring it back. It’s like that, “Yes! I’ve realized I’m away. Okay. Come back.” That’s the mechanical part of refocusing back to the present moment. 

If you set a timer and if you follow good science, somewhere between six and eight minutes is a minimal effective dose, and my teacher from, I guess it’s about 20 years ago, is rolling his eyes right now if he’s listening saying, “Mike, are you still thinking about timing yourself? That’s not what it’s about.” 

An optimal dose according to science is somewhere around 20 minutes. It’s not like it’s completely hard science. We’re still trying to figure it out and there are some great researchers that are doing that right now, but somewhere between six and eight minutes is a minimal effective dose and the upper limits are somewhere around 20 minutes. That is what a mental mindfulness practice would look like.

[0:54:19.0] MB: Where can listeners find you and your work online?

[0:54:22.6] MG: Brilliant. The head coach of the Seattle Seahawks, Coach Pete Carroll, who I think is going to go down as one of the great coaches of our era is — That’s an NFL team for people that are not familiar with the National Football League, that he and I about four years ago we created a joint venture where we’ve taken his insights and best practices on how to switch on a culture and my insights and practices on how to train the minds of people that want to become their very best. It’s essentially what we’ve been doing together up at Seattle Seahawks, how to cultivate culture and how to train the minds of people inside of it, and we’ve created a business out of it. 

So you can go to competetocreate.net and those two words are the center of our personal philosophy. His personal philosophy is always compete, to become the best version of yourself, the best dad, the best wife, the best coach, the best friend. Then mine is philosophy is the word create is important, which is every day is an opportunity to create a living masterpiece. 

We took our two set of philosophies and spun it into a business, and that’s competetocreate.net. You can also find me at findingmastery.net, which is a podcast we spun up to have conversations about mastery and with world’s best and a variety of different domains. Them more mechanically on social media to @michaelgervais, it’s G-E-R-V-A-I-S, and on Instagram is @findingmastery.

[0:55:52.7] MB: Michael, this has been a tremendously insightful conversation. There are so much that we got into and so many fascinating insights. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of these knowledge and all these practical insights with the listeners.

[0:56:05.5] MG: Matt, thanks for having me on. Like what you’re doing is a fantastic expression of people being able to share what they’ve spent their life figuring out and I felt honored to be in the conversation with you and I hope that some folks have found this fast conversation to have maybe one little gem in there that they can practice and apply, and so thank you for the opportunity.

[0:56:27.7] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say high, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email.

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. One; you’re going to get exclusive curated weekly emailed content from us every single week including our Mindset Monday email, which is short, simple tidbits, articles and stories that we've been loving for the last week. Next, you’re going to get an exclusive listener-only chance to shape the show, that includes voting on guests, changing parts of the show, like our intro and outro music and even submitting your own personal questions that we will ask in interviews with our guests. 

Lastly, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand called How To Organize and Remember Everything. You can get that completely for free along with a surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the email list today. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage, or if you're driving, if you're on the go, if you’re on your phone right now, just text the word “smarter”, that's asked “smarter” to the number 44222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we talk about and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get them at successpodcast.com, just at the show notes button at the top. 

Thanks again and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

Proven Practices For Building The Ultimate Competitive Advantage with Todd Davis

In this episode we discuss the proven strategies building effective relationships, why it’s vital to understand that the results you get in the world are a result of working with other people, how you can see the world from other people’s perspectives, tactics for building your credibility, how to get better feedback and much more with Todd Davis. 

Todd Davis is the Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer at Franklin Covey and author of the new book Get Better: 15 Proven Practices to Build Effective Relationships at Work. Todd is responsible for Franklin Covey’s global talent development in over 40 offices in 160 countries and previously served as director of innovations, developing many of the company’s core offerings.

• The culture of an organization can make all the difference

• The nature of relationships between people becomes a companies ultimate competitive advantage

• Todd’s lessons from working with and coaching hundreds of companies and executives

• What did Sarte mean when he said that “Hell is other people?”

• The ultimate way you are measured is by the results you get

• You get your results WITH and THROUGH and other people

• What we see determines everything we do, and what we do determines the results we get

• Consider stepping back and understanding that their may be a different way to view things - that can powerfully impact your relationships

• Ask yourself “have you considered the other person’s perspective?”

• An exercise can you use right now to start to see the world from other people’s perspectives

• The power of examining your real motives

• How to avoid the pitfall of self deception

• Journaling exercise you can use to understand your real motives

• “The Five Whys” - keep asking why until you get to the root cause

• The most effective, successful, and influential people start with themselves first

• Be the change you seek in others

• Your circle of influence vs your circle of concern

• Why you should focus your time, energy, effort, and resources on things that you can impact and control

• The power of asking “Can you help me understand something?”

• Start with humility - the power of having humility in dealing with tough conversations

• Proactive, effective people don’t wait for feedback, they actively go and seek it out

• The 4 common reasons why we don’t seek feedback (and what you can do about them)

• A great opening line for dealing with tough conversations and situations

• Seeking validation vs actually seeking feedback

• How to “behave your way to credibility”

• The 2 key components for credibility - character and competence

• The importance of taking the long view when building credibility

• An exercise you can use to build your credibility over the long term

• The single biggest mistake of influencing other people - not “walking your talk”

• Make sure someone deeply understands your intent

• How to communicate effectively with someone who is in an emotional state

• When emotions are high - that’s not the moment to start addressing the problem

• With people - "fast is slow and slow is fast"

• Take the time to let someone share, just try to understand them

• The socratic method of influencing people - if you ask the right questions, seek understanding, and uncover the real issues - you can solve serious problems

• Todd shares a personal story that deeply impacts the lessons we discuss in the show

• In the end, relationships are the most important thing.

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better?

Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] The SPEED of TRUST: The One Thing That Changes Everything by Stephen M .R. Covey,‎ Stephen R. Covey, and‎ Rebecca R. Merrill

• [Book] The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Personal Workbook by Stephen R. Covey

• [Book Site] Get Better: 15 Proven Practices To Build Effective Relationships at Work by Todd Davis

Episode Transcript

[TRANSCRIPT BODY HERE][00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. In this episode, we discuss the proven strategies for building effective relationships, why it’s vital to understand that the results you get in the world come from working with other people, wow you can see the world from another person’s perspective, the tactics for building your credibility, how to get better feedback and much, much more with our guest, Todd Davis.

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our e-mail list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the  homepage. First, you’re going to get awesome free guides that we create based on listener demand, including our most popular guide how to organize and remember everything. What you can get completely for free, along with another sweet bonus guide. But you got to sign up to discover what it is by join the e-mail list today. Next, you’re going to get a curated weekly e-mail from us every single week called Mindset Monday. Listeners have been absolutely loving this e-mail; it’s short, simple, a few articles and stories that we found interesting in the last week.

Lastly, you’re going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show. You can vote on guests, you can change our intro music, which we voted on a couple weeks ago in e-mail list. You can even submit questions to upcoming guests. Be sure to sign up, check out the e-mail list. There’s amazing stuff that’s only available to subscribers who are on our e-mail list and you can sign up just by going to successpodcast.com, putting your e-mail in right there on the homepage, or if you’re on the go right now just text the word “smarter”, that’s “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, just text the word ‘smarter’ to the number 44222.

In our previous episode, we discussed how our guest went from a childhood head injury to becoming an accelerated learning expert. We covered memory, speed reading, improving your focus, taking notes like an expert and went deep into the tactics of accelerated learning. We talked about the importance of mastering the fundamentals and got into tons of highly specific and actionable advice that you can use starting right now with our guest, Jim Quick. If you want to master your mind and your ability to learn, be sure to listen to that episode.

[0:02:42.0] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show, Todd Davis. Todd is the Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer at FranklinCovey and the author of the new book, Get Better: 15 Proven Practices to Build Effective Relationships at Work. He’s responsible for FranklinCovey’s global talent development in over 40 offices in a 160 countries and previously served as director of innovation, developing many of the company’s core offerings. 

Todd, welcome to The Science of Success.

[0:03:10.3] TD: Thanks, Matt. Pleased to be here.

[0:03:12.1] MB: Well, we’re super excited to have you on. I’d love to start out, when – there’s so much knowledge in the book. When you talk about the idea of effective relationships, what does that mean?

[0:03:25.6] TD: Well, I think it’s a widely held belief and a true on that culture matters. The culture of a team, of an organization, of a company can make all the difference. It’s how we define culture. We say all the time that people are our greatest assets. That’s true. It’s actually the nature of the relationships between those people that I’ve seen become an organization or a team or a company’s ultimate competitive advantage, if you will.

It’s important to have the right people on the bus, as Jim Colin says. Then it takes it to a whole different level when you focus on and have really effective relationships between that talent.

[0:04:09.1] MB: I think that’s a great point. It really underscores, it’s not just about finding and sourcing great people, but the way that they work together is really essential to achieving any kind of results.

[0:04:20.4] TD: Exactly. The speed with which you can work, and the trust levels are high when the interactions, when there is no hidden agenda, all of those things play into really the bottom line of the company or organization when you can have effective relationships.

In my role, in my career really for the last 30 years, I’ve observed and coached leaders at all levels in organizations. From the literally hundreds of principles and tools and paradigms contained in FranklinCovey’s world-class solutions, I’ve seen because of the role I’m in, I’ve seen time and time again those specific behaviors or practices that really accelerate relationships. Therefore, people’s influenced, or you’ll trip them up, including myself. A lot of these came from my own mistakes and trial and error. That’s what I’ve honed down into this book you mentioned 15 Proven Practices to Build Effective Relationships at Work.

[0:05:22.4] MB: I want to dig into a number of the practices, but before we start, I want to zoom out and talk more about this notion that you talk about the idea that you get most of your results with and through other people.

[0:05:39.4] TD: Right. In fact, I was just doing a keynote in Florida yesterday talking about a play that some people have heard of, is written by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called No Exit. The play begins with these three people in the afterlife. They find themselves, these three souls I guess we’ll call them, find themselves in this room with no door and where the windows are completely bricked up, thus the title No Exit.

Does it surprise us to learn that the structure really irritate each other. Because they irritate each other, they try to change or fix each other and that doesn’t go so well and it only serves to escalate their frustration.

While it’s only a play, think about it, how often do we find ourselves with other people who irritate or who annoy us? We try and change, or fix them in some sentimental way. Well in the play, these three characters start to realize that hell isn’t fire and brimstone, or the torture chamber they had imagined. But in fact, hell is other people, and people who won’t do what we want them to do.

Why is this important into your question? Well, while we’re all measured in a lot of different ways and we have different responsibilities, and so lots of different ways to measure us, the ultimate measure for every one of us regardless of your role, your job, is by the results we get.

How do you get your results? Unless you are a pro golfer, or maybe you run a company where you’re the only employee, the rest of us, you and I, all of us, we get our results with and through other people.

Relationships are critical to all the very important goals that we need to achieve. That’s the point is that we get our results not by ourselves, but within through others. It behooves us to really focus on how to make those relationships more effective.

[0:07:30.2] MB: Such a critical thing to understand. Unless you’re essentially a chess player, or pro poker player maybe, something where you’re solely competing just on individual ability, the vast majority of everything that you do in life, really one of the core competencies necessary to do that is to deeply understand and be able to interact with an influence to other people.

In many ways, that’s what we focus on in the show and why the show really – our podcast even began initially was the fascination of mine of like, how can I build a really robust toolkit for influencing and interacting with others?

[0:08:11.5] TD: Such great point. Every day and my role as chief people officer, I’m working with people. I just had an experience this morning incidentally with an e-mail that was sent to me by an irate account executive that works for us. This person is furious with this other person. Not that we shouldn’t be upset, not that we shouldn’t voice our concerns and try to help each other improve, but if we could just embrace the principle that you just shared, we get things done through others.

If we can embrace that and work with that and not fight against it, and not have this – it’s not intentional, but think, “Oh, I’m on my own in this. I got to drive this whole thing. I am the super starter, whatever.” But no, we embrace the fact that we all work together. Those people that do that are much happier, much healthier and most importantly are more effective, not just in their professional live, but in their entire life and their personal lives as well.

[0:09:06.2] MB: What is that conclusion that we get our results within through others. How does that impact our behavior?

[0:09:14.9] TD: Well, it’s a mindset really. It all starts out with a mindset. Of the 15 practices, you could – if you pick up the book, you can go to any one of the practices that resonate with you and hopefully be all will, except for start with practice one. Because practice one, which I call wear glasses that work, is all about the way we see the world. What we see determines everything we do.

Of course, we all know what we do gives us the results we get. But it all starts with the glasses that we’re wearing. In fact, I remember as a young child receiving my first actual pair of glasses, real glasses, I was in the 2nd grade. This might sound silly, but I put those on and for the first time, I could see the leaves, the detail of the leaves upon the trees.

I thought honestly before that situation with the real glasses, I thought that that green blurry mass is what you and everybody else saw when they looked up on the trees. That’s the challenge is that we see things and believe that the way we’re seeing them is accurate. Sometimes it is. I’m not saying straw out all of your strongly held opinions, but consider stepping back and understanding that there might be a different way to do things.

It starts with relationships, realizing that we’re part of a much bigger piece of the picture here. When we can have that mindset and that paradigm, if you will, then we’re in a position to look at everything that we do differently, our behaviors. In fact, this person I was just referring to this morning with this e-mail, stepping back – I’m not saying don’t be frustrated and saying, “Hmm. I  wonder why this person gets frustrated. But I wonder why her response was that way. I wonder why she’s choosing to do things this way.”

Well, we can start to ask ourselves those questions working in what we call our circle of influence would become much more effective and get to a solution much quicker than those people who just want to stew and rant and rave.

[0:11:09.2] MB: How do we start to put ourselves in other’s shoes, or see the world from other people’s perspectives?

[0:11:17.5] TD: Yeah, great question. I was doing an interview a week or so ago and I was asked the question. This person said, “If people were waiting to talk to you –” it’s not like I have a doctor’s office or anything, and nor am I a psychiatrist. But they said, “If people were waiting to talk to you and you had a sign out in your waiting area, what would that sign read?” That really got me thinking.

I came to the conclusion that the sign I would put there would read, “Have you considered the other person’s perspective? Have you considered the other person’s perspective?” So that’s the — [inaudible 0:11:49.5], but that’s the point is that taking time to consider a different way to look at things. So the practical application of that, when I coach people and I’ve used this for myself many times, coach people to do is look at a situation or a relationship that’s not going as well as you like to, a circumstance or a person.

Let’s say I’m really odd with this person. I’m frustrated for how many reasons. I have them go ahead and list the reasons. Write it down. You don’t need to be with somebody to do this, but write down all of the reasons that make this situation frustrating, or this person frustrated to you.

Then what I ask them to do is go through that list of reasons, those words or descriptors, encircle those that are facts. They say, “Well, how do I know if they’re facts?” Well, for my activity here I say if they’re facts, you could share this with five other people, know the situation, know the people and they would agree with you that those things you circled are facts.

Now we’d have to back up a little bit. “Okay, well maybe I circled 10 of them. But maybe seven of them would fall into that.” Okay, great. Even if nine out of 10 fall into that, look at the one, or those that aren’t circled. Those are your opinions. Now they’re strongly held opinions and they may be accurate, but nevertheless, they’re opinions.

Take the time now to consider, “What if I were to look at this opinion in a different way?” It sounds really basic and elementary. I tell you, it’s magic when you do this. You all of a sudden realize, “Boy, I’ve been saying all along and believing that Marietta is really lazy.” I made that name up. Marietta is really lazy.

We’re never going to give her anything that we got to have that on timer, because she’s really lazy. If I go to the activity I just shared with you and I think, “Well, I don’t know that everybody else would agree with that.” Then I start to ask myself, “Why am I so convinced Marietta is lazy? Maybe she’s not lazy. I think there’s something else going on that I haven’t taken time to consider. Maybe she’s not engaged in this project for a different – or maybe there is –

You see all the considerations that I can start to give that now. Again, sounds really elementary. It works wonders to help us start to see maybe a different set of lenses we might want to put on regarding a person or a situation.

[0:14:00.6] MB: I think that exercise really underscores the importance more broadly of self-reflection in this whole process and the idea of taking responsibility for your own results and outcomes. Putting the burden on yourself to be the person who pushes yourself, who takes that banner and tries to create the change you want to see.

[0:14:25.5] TD: Yeah. You’re exactly right, Matt. In fact, practice number nine – By the way, in the book each of the chapters and practices, they end with an application, a practical application like the one I just shared with you. But practice number nine to your point is called examine your real motives.

You just hit on it. It’s stepping back, only you know what your real motives are. No one can tell you what they are. You are the only one that knows what your real motives are. If I’m in a meeting and I feel like I need to talk or share an opinion is because I believe that that thought that I want to share is really going to contribute to the subject, or the problem we’re addressing.

Or am I feeling a need to talk, because everybody else is talking. Gosh, I want my boss to know that I’m a smart person too, because I’m trying to get up with something intelligent to say. That’s again a reflection point of saying, “What is my real motive here?”

Well, to the earlier point with lazy Marietta, and if your name is Marietta and you’re listening, I’m not talking about you. What is my real motive? Examine your real motive. Is my motive to help if I’m a leader, to help grow and develop people, including Marietta has on my team? Or is my motive to be the superstar that brings this on time. I don’t care what I think of others, if my motive to maybe label people, because like wasn’t doing that intentionally, I realize that’s making me feel better about myself.” All of those things are absolutely what you say just a reflection, stepping back and deciding what are my real motives here?

[0:16:00.2] MB: I think that’s critical. One of the things that we talk about on the show and I think probably one of the core lessons that really if you listen to a lot of episodes will show itself again and again is this idea that self-awareness is really one of the cornerstones of improvement and achieving the results that you want to achieve.

To me, a lot of times when especially someone who doesn’t have a lot of experience examining their own motives and ideas, I think they can easily fall into the trap of self-deception. How do you avoid that pitfall when you’re trying to understand what your motives are?

[0:16:38.1] TD: Well, the application for that on examining your own motives is just that – so look at a high-stake situation and write out – I really caution people and coach people too to write these things out. At least type them out and I find it to be more effective to write it out. It’s the change, or the magic really happens when you actually write the words out, not just think about them.

Write out a high-stake situation and then write out the outcome that you want. Then ask yourself why you want that outcome. When I say at least five times, you may have heard of the five Whys that came to light in the Toyota production era, where they were trying to get the root cause on the assembly of a different problem back in the 80s.

It’s called the five whys. There’s no magic about the number five, but it might be three, it might be 10. But you keep drilling down into and why am I feeling that? Why is that? You get down to a root cause. Once you know your real motives then you can say, “Which motives serve only me and which motives serve the whole? Me and others. What happens if I act on just self-serving motives?”

We had a situation several years ago where we were going through a restructure and we met as a leadership team. One of the leaders over a particular part of the business is going to be impacted and several of his people were going to be displaced.

We all agreed this was the right thing to do, this restructure. I talked, and we’ll call him Steven. I said, “Okay. So Steve, so you’re going to get with your, say 10 people and talk about what’s going on.” He said, “Yup.” He had eight weeks about go for this change when it happened.” About two weeks later, I called him and say, “Hey Steve. How’s it going?” He’s, “You know, Todd. I want to revisit this.” I said, “Well, what are the people saying?” “Well, I haven’t talked to them yet.”

I was shocked. I said, “Steve. We’ve eaten into two of the eight weeks for these people to be able to network and start looking for other activities. Help me understand why.” He said, “Well, I’m not sure if I agree with it.” “Well, you agreed with it two weeks ago.” Anyway, long story short, we started drilling down and I said, “Well, Steve why do you discreet?” “Well, I don’t discreet it, but these are hard conversations.” “Why are they hard conversations, Steve?” “Well, because it’s going to disrupt people’s lives.”

What do you and it sounds obvious, what are you concerned about disrupting people’s lives? Well, we drilled down to Steve saying, “It’s the right decision. I’ve always had a difficult time with hard conversations. I’ve always avoided them.” At that point it’s, “Steve, would you like me to join you in these calls? I’d be happy to do that.” He just breathed a sigh of relief. That’s a quick example of try to help someone or we can use the same process just helping ourselves. Get to what is the real thing that’s driving why I’m feeling a certain way, or why I’m acting a certain way. You got to be honest with yourself and drill down in what I call, in what we call the five whys.

[0:19:30.9] MB: I think that’s awesome. I’m a huge proponent of just continually asking why, peeling back the layers until you really get to that core understanding. Because in almost every case, the initial reason that maybe you’re telling yourself you’re doing something, or you think you’re doing something is almost always underpinned by a number of deeper and deeper layers of things and what’s really going on.

[0:19:54.4] TD: Exactly.

[0:19:55.1] MB: I want to circle back and talk a little bit more about this idea of taking responsibility for your own results in the world, and the sense that – I think you’ve talked about this and write about this in the book, but the idea that it’s not just enough to hope that other people embrace these philosophies, but you have to be the one to say, “I’m going to make these changes in the way I interact with people and be the first person to take that step forward.”

[0:20:27.1] TD: Yeah. Back to the play that I begin the book with, and these folks that are so busy in this – in hell, so to speak, this room that’s all bricked up. They’re so busy trying to change each other, and that only is making things worse.

One other important element in this play, for those of you who have seen it, there are no mirrors in this room. The others doors are bricked up, or the windows are bricked up, no doors, and  there are no mirrors. The point that’s being made is you don’t take the time to look at in the mirror and start with ourselves.

Honestly, the most effective and successful and how you define success and influential people in the world start with themselves. Gandhi said it best, “Be the change we seek in others.” It doesn’t meant that others don’t need coaching. It doesn’t mean that others don’t need to be put on a performance plan, or need help in certain areas, but we start with ourselves. We start modeling that very behavior that we’re looking for in others.

I’ve seen it in my many years of life. It happens every time if I could start to model, or make sure I’m modeling the behavior that I want in others. It makes the difficulty of the dive much easier. That’s the premise there in starting with ourselves.

I talk in the book about what we’ve used a lot for a long time at FranklinCovey, being within your circle of influence versus your circle of concern. You picture these two circles, the influence circle is inside the circle of concern. The circle of concern is much broader, because as human beings we’re concerned about a lot of things.

What can we actually do something about? Where do we have influence? Now we often have more influence than we think, but – sometimes we throw on the talent, “Why can’t we just change that?” That’s not good. On the other hand, most of us, many of us spend our time, our efforts, our energy, our resources on things that we can’t influence or control.

Those people who start with themselves, even again referring back to this e-mail I saw and swearing from this irate account executive. I’ll be talking to him later today and we’ll have a great pleasant conversation about what can you influence? I understand the frustration. I can appreciate why you’d be frustrated. Let’s think about what she, the person who is upset with, what might be her reasoning for that. Let’s start to analyze that. What are some things you could influence?

I can appreciate you’re mad. What could you actually influence here and what would be the best way to influence that? Instead of going over and yelling at her or sending her an e-mail, what if the conversation started with, and I’ll call her Sarah. “Sarah, could you help me understand something?” That’s a great way to begin any conversation when you’re odd with someone.

Instead of saying, “I want you to know I’m really upset. Or I want you to know I see this really differently and I’m bugged, or whatever.” One of the best phrases to use is, “I wonder if you can help me understand why we’re seeing this so differently or why you’re choosing [inaudible 0:23:24.7]. I’m sure there are pieces of information I’m missing.” This is language that I use naturally and I coach others to use all the time.

I’m sure, and this is practice 15. I’m jumping around here, but practice 15 just start with humility. Boy, you got to have a big dose of humility if you’re really going to step back and try to understand the situation. I begin conversations like this with, “I wonder if you can help me understand why you chose to handle this situation this certain way. I’m sure I’m missing something here. We worked together a long time. You’re a really talented person. I’ve heard a lot from you, so I’m not – this isn’t making sense. I’m wondering if you could help me understand that.” Boy, you just lowered everybody’s defense mechanism and you can now start to get to a root cause.

[0:24:07.2] MB: What a fantastic question. It’s funny, I was dealing with a situation yesterday that I think that would’ve been the perfect question to just create a really open dialogue about what is the issue, why is this not happening and can we all collectively without people getting defensive, etc., get down to the root cause of the issue. I think it’s a fantastic and really simple tool that immediately takes down the defensive barriers and opens up just a much more meaningful dialogue.

[0:24:38.2]TD: Thank you. I’d love to tell you it’s because I was just born a genius, but it’s really, you know, you’re excellent at it to doing podcast and everything else you do. I just have years of repetition in this. Again, I want to make sure that the listeners don’t think, “Oh, this guy thinks he’s so smart.” I don’t, other than this has been my world for the last 20, 30 years of helping shape conversations so that we can actually move things forward. I’ve just learned from trial and error and lots of experience. It’s my one claim to expertise, if you will.

[0:25:16.7] MB: We talk all the time on the show about the importance of mastering new skills and abilities. That’s why I’m excited to tell you once again about our amazing sponsor, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn anything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography.

The cool part about Skillshare is that they give you unlimited access for a monthly fee so you don’t have to pay per class. They have some amazing courses on there that I personally really enjoy, everything from mastering Evernote, to Mind Mapping, to learning how to sketch and draw.

If you want to get a leg up on everything from graphic design to your knife skills if you’re into cooking and much, much more, Skillshare is giving every single science of success listener one month of unlimited access completely for free. That’s pretty awesome.

Go to skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month.

[0:26:21.5] MB: I want to dig into another practice that I find really interesting is talking about and focusing on the truth and making it safe to tell the truth. Can you tell me a little bit about that practice?

[0:26:32.4] TD: Yeah. Practice 13 is make it safe to tell the truth. The whole premise of the book is getting better, for us to get better. Somebody asked you today, is this a book I buy for people that I have got challenges? Well, you could do that. But again, only if you’ll look in the mirror first.

The whole premise is for us to – where can I get better? Where can I improve? How we do that if we don’t know in which areas we do need to improve. Practice 13, make it safe to tell the truth. The meaning behind this is make it easy for other to tell you the truth. Matt in fact, let me ask you, when was the last time you received some feedback? More importantly, when was the last time you asked someone for feedback?

[0:27:14.5] MB: I mean, this is – I’m a huge fan of seeking the truth and always looking for the truth and trying constantly to get feedback. I’m constantly asking people for a candid feedback and trying to develop relationships with the people that I work with to really have very clear lines of communication.

I was just going to say, it’s something for me that I’m really obsessed with, because I think that feedback can only help you. I don’t get defensive about negative feedback. All I want is all the information that I can gather, so that I can make the most effective decisions and choices possible.

[0:27:51.0] TD: I need to take you out on the road with me on all of these keynote speeches I’m giving, because you are the poster child for someone who sounds like makes it safe to tell the truth. That is not the norm, and it’s great. I really admire and respect you why you do so well in what you do.

We tend in general to be hesitant to ask for feedback, and it’s because we’re vulnerable. We don’t want to hear what we’re not doing so well. In general, we’re vulnerable. We don’t like to give ourselves feedback. I stood on the bathroom scale this morning. That was some feedback that I didn’t want to give myself. Raises it more when we seek it from others.

I will have people share with me all the time, my leader neighbor tells me, “Give me any feedback.” Well, that’s a challenge. Proactive effective people don’t wait for someone to give them feedback. They do what you’re doing. They actively go out and seek it and their intent, their real motive is to get better.

What I found is that there are four – probably many more, but four common reasons why we don’t seek feedback more often and why we don’t make it safe to sell the truth; to tell the truth. The first is we assume bad intent when we should be doing just the opposite. You don’t assume bad intent if we’re at lunch and I say, “Hey, Matt. You got a spinach in your teeth.” You’re not thinking, “Why are you trying to be so critical of me?” That’s just feedback, because I care about you and don’t want you to be embarrassed with spinach in your teeth.

Yet, if I say to you, “Hey, I noticed that in meetings, you tend to dominate discussions and doesn’t give people a chance to share.” Well then, we start to feel defensive on this subjective feedback. Don’t assume bad intent. Assume good intent. 99% of the time, people just want to help. That’s one of the first things I see.

The second thing is what you’ve already talked about; ask for feedback. You need to ask for feedback, not wait for it. That sounds like an obvious, but it’s the way we ask for feedback. For example, if I’m giving a presentation and I noticed my friend Matt in the audience and I walk up to you right after the presentation, a thousand people are there and they say, “Hey, Matt. Good to see you. What did you think of my presentation?” What are you most likely going to say?

[0:30:04.3] MB: It was great.

[0:30:06.4] TD: Yeah. You better. Okay. That’s what most of us would do. But think about this, what if I – the day before the presentation I call my friend Matt and I say, “Hey, Matt. I know that you’re going to be in this presentation tomorrow. Could I ask you a favor? Would you mind taking down some notes of what you see that I could do better?”

I mean, sure I’d love to hear what you liked about it. But I’m really drilling down on where I could even improve better my presentation and delivery style. Would you mind doing that, and then maybe we could together later in the week and you would mind sharing those things with me.

Both scenarios I’m asking for feedback, but very different intent. You can see that one, I’m just seeking validation, what is so good about it. The other one, sounds  like you do on a regular basis, I’m truly interested in getting better.

A third area or step that I find is critical is evaluating the feedback. One reason I found that people don’t ask for feedback is they think they have to implement all of it. That’s not true. Only you are the one that decides what you will and will implement.

Evaluating a feedback. Certainly listen respectfully. My gosh, you ask the person for the feedback, write it all down. Then you evaluate the side what resonates with you and the role that you’re in and what you’re trying to accomplish. Then the fourth step is just to act on it. Acting on it doesn’t mean implementing  it, acting on it means you digest it, you consider it, you thank the person, you follow-up with them. It’s really the key in making it safe for them to continue to be telling you the truth by the way you follow-up.

I like to remind people it’s important to remember that as nervous as we might be, some of us in asking for feedback, they’re just as nervous in giving the feedback. Take that into consideration, if you’re truly interested in getting better and you want to have a huge group of people, like it sounds like you do, Matt; that will willingly give you honest, sincere feedback in an effort to help you get better at what you do.

[0:31:58.2] MB: I think that’s so critical. You touched on a really key point, which is this idea of knowing the source of the feedback and evaluating it, because I think it is important to understand that I think all feedback is relevant information, but it’s not necessarily true in all cases. Or maybe the source giving you the feedback isn’t qualified to be giving you certain types of feedback or information.

I think it’s really important to also understand truly what are the intentions of the person giving you feedback, what are their qualifications and their credibility to be able to give you meaningful input on whatever particular thing you’re sort of looking for feedback on.

[0:32:37.8] TD: That’s a really good point. Certainly, when people volunteer feedback, that’s really critical. It’s also critical when you ask people for feedback, but you need to be really careful here too. If you ask someone for feedback, you want to evaluate who you’re asking for this feedback. Do they know anything about creating podcast? Do they know anything about giving keynotes? You want to choose carefully.

Stephen M.R. Covey, he is the son of the late Dr. Stephen R. Covey of course is the bestselling author of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. His son, he wanted to certainly emulate and follow in his father’s footsteps, in his character and in his business sense and all that, but not in his public speaking.

Stephen M.R. Covey, the son, had no interest in that. He wasn’t very good at it. Well, many years ago, he came out with his own bestselling book, The Speed of Trust. He therefore found himself having to do keynotes. Sometimes alongside his world-renowned father.

He said by his own emission, he wasn’t good at it. He called in a couple of his trusted colleagues and asked them to go to his next speech and give him feedback. Well, he tells me the story. They gave him, it was like 42 pieces of feedback. 42 things he needed to do differently. His next keynote was like three days later.

Well, he tried to implement them all and he said it was a disaster. He said it was the worst speech of his life. He stepped back, and just to your point, he carefully evaluated what of those 42 things really resonated with what he was doing and trying to accomplish and what didn’t? While he heard it all and appreciated it all, he picked three or four things and really honed in, worked on those and picked a few more things, never attempting to do all 42 things.

He has become one of the really most sought-after speakers in the world particularly on this topic of trust. That is the importance as you mentioned, of really evaluating and analyzing the feedback that you’re given.

[0:34:22.2] MB: Yeah. I mean again, I think that one of the things – I do want to say, by no means am I a perfect receiver of feedback in all cases, and we all have our own cognitive biases and  blind spots and everything else. But I think the quest to find and gather information that can help you improve, and the flipping the switch from trying to hide your mistakes and weaknesses to bringing them into the light and understanding that information about them is going to help you get better, or gap fill, or be able to overcome and improve on those weaknesses is a fundamental shift that I think really makes a huge difference between who gets stuck in the patters of self-sabotage and people who actually go out and achieve tremendous results.

[0:35:08.6] TD: Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more.

[0:35:11.3] MB: I’m curious – I mean, what are the other practices – that jumped out of me that I thought was really interesting was this idea of behaving your way to credibility. Can you tell me a little bit about what that means and how we can create credibility for ourselves?

[0:35:26.9] TD: You bet. In fact, all I ask you is think of someone in your life who just they jump to the top of the list when you think of someone who is really credible. Without sharing with me who – their name. It doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t know it anyway. But what are the reasons? Give me this three or four reasons why you’re thinking of someone right now who is really credible in your life.

[0:35:45.6] MB: They do what they say, they achieve a lot of results, they get stuff done, they don’t make a lot of excuses.

[0:35:54.7] TD: Yeah. Great reasons. Great reasons. Credibility, those are absolutely reasons that someone is credible. These reasons and more fall into two buckets, and you got to have both to be credible. It’s character and it’s competence. They do what they say they’re going to do, character; they get great results as you said, competence.

Plenty of one, or an overabundance of one does not make up for a lack of the other. You’ve got to have both for it. An example I like to use is we might be best friends and I remember your birthday every year and I know your – all of your favorite places to eat and you let me watch your dog when you’re out of town, but yet when I offered to pack your parachute for your first skydiving lesson, you might at least want to know how much parachute packing experience I have, would just done by the way Matt.

On the other hand, it would be interesting for you to learn the person who did pack your parachute had recently been acquitted of a manslaughter charge, because of a technicality. They might have all the parachute packing certifications in the world, but if something’s off about their character, it gives you cause for pause.

It’s a combination of character and of competence. Like I say, one doesn’t make up for the other. You got to have the character, the integrity and then the skillset. Then something that I really emphasize in this particular practice and chapter, because I’ve seen it time and time again, in fact I saw it with myself. I learned this lesson the hard way is you take the long view.

So often, I see people who want credibility overnight, or they want the credibility because, “I know I can do it, so gosh, you should know I can do it. You should just know that. You should trust me.” While there is another practice called extend trust, we don’t extend trust naively. Taking a long view means being comfortable with the fact that establishing or increasing our credibility with someone takes time, and it’s through a track record of both character and competence showing up time and time again. That’s the essence of behaving your way to credibility versus trying to talk yourself into or out of the situation you behave your way into.

[0:38:07.8] MB: I really like the tandem approach of you have to have both character and competence. I think that really clearly encapsulates what creates credibility as a great insight.

[0:38:20.7] TD: Thank you. For the practical application on this, which I like to use a lot with people is – in fact, I’m just working with someone last week on this and they’re – hadn’t lost credibility, but they really need you to increase their credibility in the role they’re in with some key stakeholders.

What I coach them to do, and this is in the book as well is look, identify at least three character qualities and competency qualities in this particular role that you believe are important to that person with whom you’re trying to increase credibility. Then write those down, then rate yourself on 1 to 10, 10 being high, how you would rate yourself in each of those.

Now take that list to the person with whom you’re trying to increase your credibility and just be openly transparent with them and say, “Hey, I know you like me and you trust me, but I really want to increase my credibility with you in this particular area or this particular project, whatever it is.”

Here are the things I have identified that I believe would be important to you. I may have missed some. Would you do me a favor? Would you look at these enemy that I’ve missed, looked how I’ve rated myself and would you please go ahead and rate me? Again, I’m trying to get better, so I don’t – don’t need to rank me 10 in all of them, especially if you don’t believe that.

On anything that she or he rate you lower than a nine, now you know where to start and you can say to the person, “Okay, I saw that you gave me a nine in timeliness, Debbie. Can you tell me what would you need to see – Do you mean, am I late to work? Tell me what you see there.” It opens up the dialogue. You actually have a roadmap now on where you need to focus to get better and increase your credibility in this case.

[0:39:52.9] MB: I like to dig into the other side of the coin now and talk a little bit about what do you see the biggest mistakes or pitfalls you see people making when they try to influence others, or even when they try to implement some of the practices that you’ve written about.

[0:40:08.7] TD: Well, the biggest and most obvious and this won’t be – shouldn’t be new news to anyone, it’s when I’m trying to influence you to do something differently than I am doing. In other words, I’m not walking my talk. Pretty tough to – it’s the do as I say and not as I do problem.

I’ve got to be modeling, and not perfect. Nobody is perfect in any of these every, but I’ve got to be seriously attempting to model the various things that I’m trying to influence you. I think that’s the first thing. The second thing is to make sure the person understands your intent. I’ll tell you because of the role I’m in, I began a lot of conversations when there is a performance issue, or when there is a worry about someone, I begin a lot of conversations with, “I want you to know my only intent is to help resolve this situation, or to help you be successful in your role.”

I begin any performance conversation, we have a formal performance process here, if we get to that point, we’re still and really struggling in your particular role; good people. Always good people, but maybe a mismatch for the role, or maybe just haven’t had direct feedback that they need to have.

I will begin the conversation with, and it’s very sincere from the heart, “You know, Matt. I want you to know that my only intent in this conversation we’re having with you and your leader is to help you improve and be wildly successful in your role.” Now if you can say that it comes from the heart, boy does that start the conversation in the right place.

I think making sure that the other person understands your intent is to just help them, not to be critical, not to try and show them the door, not to make yourself look smarter than they are, but just to help. You just want to help.

[0:41:56.2] MB: This is something I think that I’ve dealt with personally in some instances. If someone’s in a defensive or emotional state, how can we try to effectively communicate our intent to them in a way that takes down those defensive barriers?

[0:42:13.4] TD: Well, I think when emotions are high, I don’t think I know, when emotions are high, that’s not the moment to start addressing the problem. The late Dr. Covey used to say, and I just love this because I’m reminded of it every day; with people, fast is slow and slow is fast.

When emotions are high, the first step is to take time to understand them. Practice 10 is talk less, listen more. That’s particularly relevant when emotions are high. Like this person I’ve been referring to, this accounting executive that’s upset. I’m going to spend probably the first 15 minutes of our conversations saying nothing other than, “Hey, help me understand the situation.”

We as human beings, we need what I like to call psychological error. We just need to feel understood. If we can feel understood, then we can get to a place where we can start to resolve a problem or address a situation. But we jump past that first part Matt, because we’re fixers. We want to help. We’re busy. We want to just get to the solution.

In the end, it ends up taking a ton more time when we jump to the solution, versus taking whatever time is necessary upfront to really just understand. Years ago, one of my teenage daughters was wanting to move out of our house. We’re good parents, so she had no reason to do that. I was concerned about her moving out. She’s just out of high school, but who she was moving in within the situation.

We would discuss it. Not really argue at that point. Then I was on a international business trip for 10 days, and I came home to find out she had moved out. Well, mom was gone. I was pretty upset. She come over for Sunday dinner with the rest of the family. We’d have dinner and then we’d start a discussion and we’d go back five minutes and then the argument starts, that why did she do this and can’t believe it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

We just argued. End in tears. Week after week this is what happened. I’m embarrassed to tell you, I worked here at FranklinCovey at that time. I’m out teaching this stuff and pretending that time to live this stuff, I guess I have to say. Well, I still remember the Sunday afternoon when we were falling into the same pattern. After dinner, I just thought, “Todd, you got to do something different here. This is not working.”

Well, I admit it comes natural to me now, it didn’t at the time. It was forced. I remember it, my daughter her name is Sydney, we went out on the backswing. She said, “Okay, let’s have it.” I said, “What’s that?” She said, “Why I made this big mistake.” I said, “You know what, Sydney. You make your own decisions. I just love you and you seem really stressed.” “Well, I’m not stressed.” I said, “Okay, well that’s okay.”

Then we sat there and talked. She talked. I just bit my tongue. She started to share with me one of her roommates was irritating her. All I said was – Well, I wanted to say, “Well, I told you this would happen.” All I said was, “Boy, that must be really frustrating.”

It was like a light switch went on. Then she started to share more, and I had to keep biting my tongue and just say, “Wow, I bet that’s hard. Or I be that’s difficult.” This volume of information opened up. Believe it or not, it’s like out of a movie. At the end of her time sharing she said, “I don’t know what to do, dad.”

Well, those had been the words I’ve been longing to hear for I don’t know how long. But even then, I bit my tongue, and instead of jumping in and saying, “Well, here is what you do. You move out of that situation.” I said, “You know what, Sydney you’re a smart girl. I know you’re going to figure it out.” Then she started pushing, “How do you think I should do this?”

Again, sorry for the personal example. But boy, I’ve just seen it time and time again in my life, it will take the time to let someone share and really just try to understand and not agree, or disagree, not to suggest or fix, just to share. Then we open up a pathway to start resolving the situation.

[0:46:06.0] MB: It’s a really powerful example and thank you for sharing it. I think it really grounds a lot of these lessons for the listeners. You know, it’s funny. I sometimes call it the Socratic method of influencing people, which is one of the things I’ll do if I can’t – if I’m trying to influence someone subtly is just keep asking them questions, “Well, tell me why you’re doing it this way, and tell me why that’s the case, and tell me –” Eventually, you can – you start to pull out all the reasoning and the logic and all the thought process behind it.

Many will see for themselves, “Oh, maybe that doesn’t really make a lot of sense the way that I’m doing it.” If they have the realization themselves, it’s infinitely more powerful than you trying to force it into their heads.

[0:46:48.5] TD: Someone said to me, and I wrote about this in the book. Someone said to me – they’re leaving my office once, they said, “Man, you just know – you come up with the answers for everything.” I just laughed. I said to this person, “I didn’t come up with anything. You came up with the answer. It’s just what you said. If you ask the right questions and not in a manipulative way, not because you’re trying to stir them, you’re just trying to help them, what you just said, uncover what the real issues are.

90% of the time, they’ll solve or at least get on the pathway to start solving the situation, or solving the problem. If they feel hurt, if they feel understood, if they feel like there was someone who really just wants to understand and not fix or change them.

[0:47:29.4] MB: I’m curious, what’s the most effective relationship that you’ve ever had and why?

[0:47:34.3] TD: Wow. I have not been asked that question before. If my wife listened, I better say with her. Yeah, the most effective relationship is a good friend of mine. We’ve known each other for 21 years now. Why is it most effective? It’s most effective, because through our friendship, we’ve really – we have very different personalities and that we’ve taken the time to understand each other.

Communication is very quick, because we know what each other is thinking. I want to be careful here to say, well does that just happen? I think so. I think it’s been developed over time, because of what we just finished talking about. Taking the time to really understand someone, what drives them, what motivates them, what are their hopes, what are their fears, what are their aspirations in life.

I think when we take time, I don’t want to make this to a referring, but in the end really, we’re all about relationships, I think, or we should be. I don’t know that much else matters when all set and done. I mean, yup results matter and work matters and all of those things. But in the end – in fact, someone asked me today what was one final thought I could give?

I was reminded of a bumper sticker I saw – quite a while ago I was following a motor home towing a boat, and I think I’m exaggerating this but I swear they have some ATVs up on top, all these toys piled on all these trailers, or all these trailer. The bumper sticker, and it’s a popular one, people have seen it. It said, he and I’ll political correct here and say, or she, but he or she who dies with the most toys wins.

Well, I would love to have every one of those toys that I was following. I honestly Matt, thought to myself, for me anyway, he or she who dies with the most meaningful relationships wins. That’s just my philosophy and it’s what makes me happy and it’s what makes me effective in my various roles that I play.

[0:49:35.9] MB: I think that’s a really important lesson. I mean, if you look at and study people who are in the last moments of their lives or talking about their regrets, etc., it seems like relationships are really recurrent again and again and again, kind of come back to end of life, people think that the most important things in their lives were there relationships.

[0:49:57.0] TD: I have yet to meet anybody who doesn’t feel that way.

[0:50:00.2] MB: That’s a pretty deep note, but I want to transition on a much more surface-level question, which is something we ask as we’re wrapping up many of our interviews. What’s one piece of actionable advice or homework you would give to the listeners as a starting point for implementing some of the practices we’ve talked about today?

[0:50:19.9] TD: Well, practice 15, the last practice in the book is ironically titled Start with Humility. I had an idea many years ago of writing a book on leadership about humility, because I had worked with or for so many great leaders, and some that weren’t so great. But the common thread among the great ones were many things that went in to their great leadership, but it was this foundation of humility.

I was putting together some material for this, just the beginnings of it. One day it came to me. I thought, “I know what the title is. The title is going to be Lead with Humility.” I Googled it to make sure there wasn’t a book already written on that. Well in fact, there was.

Not only was there a book titled Lead with Humility, but it was written by Pope Francis himself. It’s actually written by another author, but he uses Pope Francis as his example through all of the great leadership qualities, start with humility. I didn’t write that book. I decided not to go toe-to-toe with the pope.

It is the last chapter in the book, because we can look at all of these areas we think we need to improve, or we do need to improve. We can focus our energy and our efforts on all of these things. But if we’re lacking in humility – humility is not a weakness. Humility is a strength. It’s the greatest strength we can have. Humility is the thing that helps us forgive, it’s the thing that tells us no matter how successful we are, we didn’t do it on our own, it gives us the courage to be honest with co-workers, it reminds us to be patient with ourselves, to know that all of us are in this process of getting better.

That’s my parting thought on this is that we need to really ask ourselves, understand what our real intent is, what our real motives are and make sure that it’s based or grounded in humility that we don’t think of ourselves as all that and more, but that we’re all here to help each other continually be getting better.

[0:52:18.3] MB: Where can listeners can find you and the book and your work online?

[0:52:23.1] TD: If they will go to getbetterbook.com, that’s www.getbetterbook.com, they’ll have links to an information on everything that we’ve talked about and a lot more.

[0:52:34.6] MB: Well, Todd thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing not only some really impactful stories, but also some great and actionable advice. Really appreciate having you on here and you sharing all these wisdom.

[0:52:47.1] TD: Well, I appreciate being invited. It’s been great to get to know you better. Thank you so much.

[0:52:52.2] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our e-mail list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First, you’re going to get exclusive curated weekly e-mail from us every single week called Mindset Monday. This is articles, stories, links, things that we found interesting in the last week.

Next, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, you can vote on guests, submit your own personal questions to guests that we’re going to have on the show that we may ask on the podcast, vote on things like new intro music and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get free guides that we create based on listener demand, including our most popular guide How to Organize and Remember Everything, which you can get completely for free along with another sweet bonus guide to surprise, so you go to sign up to get it by joining our e-mail list today.

Again, you can just go to successpodcast.com, sign up right on the homepage, or if you’re on the go right now, if you’re driving around, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. That’s “smarter” to the number 44222.

The greatest compliment you can give us is referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover The Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in this episode; links, transcripts, everything and much more, be sure to check out our show notes as well. You can get those at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button right at the top. 
Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of The Science of Success.

How To Learn More In Record Time - Speed Reading, Concentration, & Memory with Jim Kwik

How to Learn More in Record Time: Speed Reading, Concentration, and Memory

November 16, 2017

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Listen to the Episode

Why You Need to Hear This

Watch the Episode

The Science of Becoming a Super Learner

Show Notes, Links, and Additional Research

7 Brain Hacks

Reviews of Jim’s Work

Get Help

Episode Transcript

The Science of Becoming a Super Learner 

Do you ever read a page of a book, then stop and realize you don’t remember a single word you just read? Or maybe long sentences take you so long to read that you forget how it started before you even get to the end. Fortunately, we can greatly improve our reading and learning abilities with just a little bit of knowledge.

  A lot of people believe that our abilities, potential, intelligence, and memory are all set in stone. However, in the past 20 years, we’ve learned more about our brains than we ever have. The things we are taught in school are essentially a lie, but by rethinking and altering a few false, core beliefs, we can smooth the path towards mastery.

The good news is that we’re underestimating what we’re actually capable of. That means we can only get better. A few, simple brain hacks will improve our minds and capabilities for the rest of our lives.

From Head Injury to Brain Coach

“My goal is: I want to be a personal trainer—a brain coach if you will—to help people to tap into more of that potential so they could be more productive, have higher performance, and have greater peace of mind in a world where we’re driven to distraction.” – Jim Kwik

 Jim Kwik is a brain coach and the founder of Kwik Learning and SuperheroYou. He has worked with high-profile companies, like Nike, and individuals, like Oprah. His work helps improve people’s reading and learning speed, memory, and brain performance. However, he hasn’t always had a high-octane mind.

His abilities are actually preceded by an early-childhood head injury which made him slow to understand, ruined his focus, and left him with no memory. Though it took him three extra years to learn to read and he struggled through school, it didn’t stop him from becoming the super learner he is today.

When he was about 18, a heavy workload and lack of self-care led him to the hospital again. There, a fall down the stairs left him with another head injury—but this time, it woke him up. He started studying meta-learning (or learning how to learn).

 A deep dive into adult learning theory and multiple intelligence caused a light switch to flip on in him. This gave him a laser-focus, effortless retention, and improved reading abilities. By reading two or three books a week, his grades improved—with his grades, his life improved as well. He thought, “I can’t believe this is not taught back in school,” so he started tutoring.

 One of his first students read 30 books in 30 days. She did it because her mother was given 60-days to live. In the books she read, she was looking for answers to help her mother. Six months later, her mother was alive and getting better, which she attributed to the information her daughter shared from the books she read.         

Learning: Mankind’s Superpower

Jim believes: If knowledge is power, then learning is our superpower. He comments about how modern workers are paid less for brute strength and more for brain strength. In our knowledge economy, knowledge is profit; so the faster you learn the faster you earn.

He laments about how people suffer from digital overload and dementia. The amount of information available on our smart devices easily distract us and decreases our use of memory. Thus, the issue is: How do we churn through so much information, retain it, and apply it usefully? The answer and goal are at the heart of Jim’s work.

How to Learn Faster

“I think people first have to start with what’s important to them, meaning that motivation is really a key drive towards learning.” – J.K.

 Jim doesn’t simply focus on speed-reading, though he believes everyone can double or triple their reading skill with a few brain hacks. Due to his childhood struggle with reading, he spends a lot of time on smart reading, or how to comprehend and retain more information when reading.

He challenges the audience to read one book a week, then brings up that the average person only reads one or two books a year. A book written by an expert contains decades of experience, and that wealth of knowledge could be learned in just a few days.

Jim recalls when Warren Buffet shared with Bill Gates that he had probably wasted 10-years of his life by reading slowly. Between processing information and reading emails, blogs, websites, books, newspapers, and magazines, we stand to save a lot of time by improving our reading speed.

He breaks down some simple math. If you currently read four-hours a day but double your reading speed and save two-hours a day, then you would save 730-hours a year. Even if you only save one-hour a day, that’s 365-hours a year—or nine 40-hour workweeks.

When Jim was discussing the future of education with Bill Gates, he brought up meta-learning and Bill Gates brought up technology, but a third person asked, “Is there anything missing?” And Jim believes the key ingredient is motivation. Because many people know what they should do, but they still don’t do it.

H-Cubed: A Success Formula

“I would say when it comes to reading, which is one of the focuses here, if you want to boost your comprehension, first of all, have a purpose for why you read.” – J.K.

Jim talks about the Three Hs: Head, heart, and hands. You can visualize, affirm, set goals, and have a vision in your head, but if you aren’t acting with your hands, then nothing will change. So he usually looks at the “heart” of this formula, or your “why” for learning.

 “Where your focus goes, energy flows,” he says. As the symbol of emotions, Jim views the heart in this formula as a representation of the fuel for your car, because your emotions and purpose will compel you to do anything, such as speed reading.

 He sees many people wasting time studying something that isn’t relevant to them and not filtering it out appropriately; so first, you should be clear on your outcome. He says, “If you have the greatest interest and higher levels of motivation, then automatically, your retention and focus are going to be boosted and enhanced.”

He believes we grossly underestimate our own capabilities, and half of success is just mindset. Instead of a fixed mindset, we should adopt a growth mindset. If you say you can’t do something, then you need to tack on a simple, three-letter word at the end of the statement: “Yet.” Otherwise, you limit yourself and prevent any growth from ever happening.

GPA: Another Success Formula

“The average CEO reads about four or five books a month—about a book a week.” – J.K.

 Jim shares another formula for success: GPA (or Goal, Purpose, and Action). He parallels this with the previous formula: Goal is in the head, Purpose is in the heart, and Action is in the hands. To take this out of the abstract, he applies this to reading by setting a goal of reading a book a week.

He comments how the median word-count for books is 64,000 words. For the average reader reading at 200-words per minute, that’s 320-minutes to finish the book. Across seven-days, that’s about 45-minutes a day. Not only does this show you the power of reading every day, it also demonstrates the power of breaking down big goals into smaller, more attainable goals.

To compound the benefits of reading daily, he also comments on the power of winning the first hour or two of your day. Instead of playing on your phone, which distracts you and wires you to be distracted all day, you can build momentum by doing something productive that wires you to be reactive.

Mental Fitness

“There’s two things I do every day: I like to run, and I like to read.” – Will Smith

When he coached Will Smith, Jim noticed that he did two things daily: One physical, and the other mental. If you’re trying to improve your mental intelligence, then improving your mental fitness might even be more important. Like a personal trainer at the gym, Jim wants your mental muscles to be focused and have energy, agility, flexibility, and lots of power.   

Visual Pacers

“Using a visual pacer will boost your reading speed 25% to 50%.” – J.K.

Whether you are tying to improve your reading speed, focus, or comprehension, a visual pacer will help all three. It’s as simple as using your finger, a pen, or a computer mouse to underline the words as you read. This works because your senses of sight and touch are closely linked, just like smell and taste, so your eyes are attracted to motion (in this case, the motion of your finger or other pacer).

Jim suggests you test it for yourself. Just read anything for 60-seconds without your finger, then count the lines you read. When you’ve done that, reset the timer, and do it again, but underline the words this time. When you count the number of lines you read this time, it will be about 25-50% more. Also, when you ask someone to count the number of lines they just read, they’ll use their finger to count the lines! That’s because it improves your focus.

 However, it’s really about reading for maximum understanding and comprehension. Simply reading fast or slow and trying to retain every bit of information isn’t always the answer, it’s dependent on your desired outcome from reading. Most people don’t retain anything when they read slowly; that’s because their minds get distracted and tired. When you read fast, your mind focuses on the reading material more and boosts comprehension.

Sub-Vocalization

“If you have to say all the words to understand what you’re reading, you can only read as fast as you could talk—not as fast as you could think.” – J.K.

While visual pacers help you read faster, sub-vocalization makes you read slower. “We don’t have to say words in our mind to understand them,” Jim explains. Ninety-five percent of the words we read every day are called “sight words.” That means we don’t have to pronounce them to understand them, because we’ve seen them so often.

Rituals, Routines, and Habits

“Excellence really comes down to a set of rituals and routines and habits.” – J.K.

Have you ever noticed that Mark Zuckerberg always wears the same t-shirt? According to scientific research, that’s because we can only make a certain amount of good decisions a day before we develop “decision fatigue.” Jim found this out when he was doing research on surgeons, as the number of mistakes they make increases as their starting times begin later in the day. Why would you waste one of your good decisions on what you’re going to wear?

Jim believes discipline gives you freedom, contrary to the idea that it takes it away. If you’re doing the hard things, then life gets easy; but if you do the easy things, then life gets hard. He then brings up Dr. BJ Fogg, a researcher at Stanford University, and a specific model to undo bad habits: BEMAT (Behavior Equals Motivation, Ability, and Trigger).

If your desired behavior is to read every day, then you need a proper incentive (or motivation), the ability to read, and a trigger. The trigger is what many people ignore. The trigger is a reminder for your desired behavior. Jim explains that he does squats every time he’s on an elevator—the trigger is getting on an elevator, and the behavior is doing squats.

 To help start the habit of reading every day, just say to yourself, “I’ll pick up a book and read one word.” This is a tiny, easily manageable task. And since the book is already in your hand, you’re most likely going to read a few more words, then a paragraph, and finally a few pages. That one word is just the first domino that builds momentum for bigger, better habits.

The Pomodoro Technique

“Reasons reap rewards.” – J.K.

 After 30-45 minutes of an activity, such as reading, there are huge dips of focus due to primacy and recency. Primacy is a memory principle that says you tend to remember things from the beginning, such as the first few people you meet at a party. Recency says you tend to remember things from the end, such as the last few people you meet at a party. What happens in the middle though?

 While everyone knows there’s a learning curve, they don’t realize there’s also a forgetting curve. This curve also causes us to forget up to 80% of what we learn within two days. An answer to mitigating how much information you lose in the middle is the Pomodoro Technique. With it, you take a five-minute break every 30-45 minutes.

 By splitting up a 5-hour party or work session into 45-minute chunks, you have more beginnings and ends with fewer lost, middle chunks. Ideally, during your five-minute breaks, you’ll choose to do the things that are good for your brain, such as movement, deep breathing, and hydration.

The Power of Teaching

“We learn best by co-creating it with other people.” – J.K.

Jim shares another simple brain hack to boost your comprehension: Read something, then talk about it with someone else. “That’s why book clubs are so powerful, because learning is not always solo,” he adds. When you teach someone something, it’s no longer random information from a third-party, now you’re making it personal for yourself in an effort to make them understand.

He also suggests learning something with the intention of teaching it to someone else, because, “You get to learn it twice.” This will help you accelerate your learning since it makes you more active, ask more questions, and take better notes because you have a stake in it.

Reticular Activating System

Jim recalls a time when his sister kept sending him photos of pugs. He finally asked her why she kept sending him these dog pictures, and he realized her birthday was coming up and she wanted one. After that realization, he started seeing pugs everywhere he went. That’s because of our reticular activating system.

It turns out, if you have a question, then you start seeing answers everywhere because it acts like a magnet that pulls all the relevant information to you. It’s not that the people around Jim suddenly got pugs, it’s that they were always there; but he only just started noticing them. Once she made it important to him, he started seeing them everywhere.

Mind Maps and Taking and Making Notes

“Is it because they’re geniuses that they journal all the time or is it because they’re taking notes and journaling all the time that makes them a genius?” – J.K.

Jim explains the concept behind mind mapping, which is essentially a bubble map with a main idea in the middle, all the associated ideas branching out from it, and even more associated ideas branching out from those. It takes 20-pages worth of notes and puts it into one-page view, so you can see all the associations and relationships between the information.

Next, he explains the difference between taking and making notes—two useful tactics for learning. Taking notes is where you capture information, strategies, or ideas. This is a factual copy of what you’ve learned. Making notes is writing your own impressions of what you’re capturing, what questions you have, and how it relates to what you already know. This is a creative attempt of combining the new information with your preexisting knowledge.

Jim suggests taking a piece of paper, splitting it in two with a line down the middle, then putting “Taking Notes” on one side and “Making Notes” on the other. The thoughts you have when your mind wanders while listening to a podcast or any speaker are excellent for making notes.

Learn Faster with FAST

· Forget – Forget what you know (or think you know) and have an open mind, forget what is unimportant, and forget your limitations.

·  Active – Be active when you learn by asking questions and taking notes.

·  State – Change your state by adding emotion to your learning process, and you will learn faster.

·  Teach –Teach what you learn, so it will benefits others as well as yourself.

 Jim shares this acronym as another strategy to learn faster. He explains that multi-tasking is a completely debunked myth. When you switch between tasks, you get a dopamine reward each time for the novelty, which only tricks you into feeling like you’re being productive. In reality, it takes you 5-20 minutes just to regain your focus and flow.             

He also explains that all learning is state dependent. A state is a snapshot of the mood of your mind and body—your emotional state of how you feel. This is important because it’s key to quick recall. “Information combined with emotions becomes a long-term memory,” he says. He compares this to how a song or smell can take us back to a distant memory.

Lastly, he says we should be a thermostat, not a thermometer. While a thermometer simply reacts or reflects the environment, a thermostat sets a standard or goal and the environment raises to meet that standard. The standard you set is how you feel about things, and that change in how you feel will help you learn faster.

Action Steps

“Every 30-days, take on a new challenge—because when we’re green, we’re growing; and when we’re brown, we’re rotting.” – J.K.

As a starting place for the audience, Jim invites everyone to listen to his podcast. They are 10-minute long podcasts and provide brain hacks for free. Next, he encourages everyone to “schedule it.” Whatever it is that you talk about doing it, you have to write and down and make it real. It takes the invisible and makes it visible on the calendar.

He adds that he has a very large “Not to Do” list, such as not using his phone for the first hour of his day, as well as a “To Learn” list. He encourages us to dedicate our lives to learning by picking subjects and skills that we’re interested in. Finally, if you want to grow to your fullest potential, then you have to schedule time for yourself.

In this episode we discuss how our guest went from a childhood head injury to becoming an accelerated learning expert. We cover memory, speed reading, improving your focus, taking notes like an expert and go deep into tactics for accelerated learning. We talk about the importance of mastering the fundamentals, and get into tons of highly specific and actionable advice you can use today with our guest Jim Kwik. 

Jim Kwik is the founder of Kwik Learning and Superhero You. Jim is a brain coach in speed reading, memory improvement, brain performance, and accelerated learning. Jim’s methods and work have been utilized by with several high profile companies including Nike, SpaceX, and GE, as well as individuals such as the Clintons, Oprah, Richard Branson and more.

• We’ve discovered more in the last 20 years about the human brain than we learned in the 2000 years before that

• How Jim went from growing up with learning challenges from an early childhood head injury to become an expert in accelerated learning and speed reading

• How to read 30 books in 30 days

• How we can actually retain what we read

• Knowledge is not power, its only potential power

• The one super power you want to master in the 21st century (learn faster)

• Traditional speed reeding, skimming, skipping words, getting the gist of something is not enough - its about fully capturing and retaining the information

• The average person reads 1-2 books per year, but the average CEO reads 4-5 books per month

• What Bill Gates said the #1 super power he would pick would be

• Warren buffet said he wasted 10 years of his life reading too slowly

• How you can gain 2 months of productive time per year

• Why motivation is such a critical component of accelerated learning - have a purpose for why you read

• "H-Cubed” - 3 things you need for motivation to have accelerated learning

• The fastest way to read something is not to read it at all - figured out what your end goal is

• How you can remember names more effectively & become a great connector

• If you forget someone’s name, you show that they’re not important to you

• Self Awareness is a super power

• “Smart reading” - what’s your goal for reading these books?

• How to give a speech without notes

• Half of success is just mindset, then get the mechanics right

• Brain Hacks for Speed Reading

• “Leaders are readers” and why Jim thinks you should read 30 minutes per day

• 12 things Jim does every morning to jumpstart his brain

• Mental fitness is as important, if not more important, than mental intelligence

• If you read 45 minutes a day, on average, you should be able to read a book a week

• Using a “visual pacer” and how that brain hack can help you instantly double your reading speed

• The adventure of lifelong learning

• One of the biggest traps in the personal development field is the “next new thing”

• People who are truly on the path to Mastery focus on the fundamentals and get REALLY REALLY GOOD at the BASICS

• How to get a 20-50% boost in your reading speed right now

• Excellence comes down to a set of routines, rituals, and habits

• If we always do the easy thing in life, life becomes hard, if we do the hard things, life becomes easy

• BEMAT = behavior equals motivation ability and trigger

• The primacy principle and the recency principle - and why you should chunk and take breaks to create more “beginnings and ends”

• Start as simply as possible - pick up a book and read one word

• "Upleveling your ability to process information” not just skimming - reading so that you understand

• Another brain hack - talk to someone else about what you just learned - we learn best by co-creating and sharing information

• If you make everything important than nothing is important

• It's not about reading slowly or quickly - its about reading for understanding - reading faster creates flow and focus

• Read for maximum comprehension and understanding for the goal you have for your reading

• You can learn things faster by overcoming the forgetting curve - you forget 80% of what you’ve learned within 2 days

• There is a difference between taking notes vs making notes - note taking is capturing ideas, note making is writing your impressions of what you’re capturing - you’re CREATING, questions you have, how it relates to what you already know, how you would teach it to someone else

• Ultimately all learning comes down to associations - that’s why metaphors are so powerful

• Mindmapping is an incredibly powerful strategy for you to remember concepts and ideas

• Most successful people in any industry journal on a regular basis - journalling helps us retain information and make new associations to things

• Brain hack - learn something with the intention of teaching someone else very specific - or think you were coaching someone or teaching them or giving a presentation on these topics. When you teach something you get to learn it twice.

• The FAST method - 4 strategies for learning anything more quickly

• Forget what you already know about a subject (set it aside)

  1. Active - be active about learning (doing problems, engaging your mind, etc). Learning is not a spectator sport.

  2. State - all learning is state dependent. Information + emotion becomes a long term memory.

  3. Teach - learn to benefit yourself and learn to teach others

• Forget about your limitations - if you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them - add the word “yet” to negative self talk - be very careful to the words you put behind the words “I am”

• Be a thermostat not a thermometer

• To turn knowledge into real power - you have to schedule it into an activity and execute that

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better?

Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Personal Site] Jim Kwik

• [Website] Kwik Brain

• [Article] The Zeigarnik Effect and Open Loops by Stephanie Booth

• [Wiki page] Mind Map

• [TEDTalk] How Great Leaders Inspire Action by Simon Sinek

Reviews of Jim’s Work

“Get his course. It will change your life in ways you cannot imagine. Jim’s training is incredible. I read faster because of Jim. I have a better memory because of him. LOVE his stuff. Get his course. It will change your life in ways you cannot imagine.”
-Brendon Burchard, New York Times Bestselling Author, Personal Development & Marketing Trainer

“Real thanks to Jim Kwik and the whole team for the minds that they are creating, how they are empowering people to change the world and commit to making this a better planet.”
-Peter Diamandis, CEO of XPRIZE & Chairman Of Singularity University

“Jim is one of the foremost authorities in the world on this subject. Jim makes it easy, fast, and efficient. So then you can say to yourself, I can learn anything that I need to learn.”
-Brian Tracy, Chairman & CEO of Brian Tracy International & Top Selling Author of Over 70 Books

“Unleash Your Superbrain! Never forget a name again and read faster and smarter with memory expert Jim Kwik.”
-Success Magazine

“There is no one that I trust more than Jim Kwik and his programs to optimize brain functioning.”
-Dr. Daniel Amen, New York Times Bestselling Author Change Your Brain, Change Your Life

“Jim’s superpower is learning. The ability to learn quickly is a distinct and powerful competitive advantage in business. It enables all success in a fast paced, fast changing world.”
-Forbes Magazine

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:12.0] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet, with more than a million downloads in over a hundred countries. 

In this episode we discuss how our guest went from a childhood head injury to becoming an accelerated learning expert. We covered memory, speed reading, improving your focus, taking notes like an expert. We go deep into the tactics of accelerated learning. We talk about the importance of mastering the fundamentals and get into tons of highly specific and actionable advice that you can use with our guest, Jim Kwik. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide, which is called How To Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide when you sign up and join the email list today. 

Next, you’re going to get a curated weekly email from us every single Monday called Mindset Monday. Listeners have been absolutely loving this. It’s simple, short, sweet, a few articles, stories, videos that we find really fascinating that we’ve enjoyed in the last week. 

Lastly, you’re going to get a listener exclusive chance to shape the show. You get to vote on guests, submit your own personal questions that we will ask the guest in interviews and vote on changes to the show, like new intro music and much more. 

Sign up and join the email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage, or just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222 if you’re on the go or if that’s easier. Again, that’s “smarter” to 44222. 

In our previous episode, we discussed how our guest went from a hard-nosed skeptic who thought most self-help was BS, to someone who uncovered that evidence-based growth strategies that actually work. We talked about guest journey from meeting self-help gurus, to spiritual leaders and even neuroscientists to discover the biggest lessons about improving your mind and body and the simple, scientifically validated tools that evidence demonstrates are the best ways to be happier, with Dan Harris. If you want to know the science about being happy, listen to that episode. 

[0:02:32.0] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show, Jim Kwik. Jim is the founder of Kwik Learning and SuperheroYou. He’s a brain coach in speed reading, memory improvement, brain performance and accelerated learning. His methods and work have been utilized with several high-profile companies including Nike, SpaceX and GE as well as individuals such as the Clintons, Oprah and Richard Branson. 

Jim, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:02:57.5] JK: Matt, thank you so much for having me. I’ve been looking forward to this, and thank everyone who’s joining us.  

[0:03:02.2] MB: We’re super excited to have you on here today. For listeners who might not be familiar with you and your background, tell us a little bit about your story and how you got so interested in accelerated learning. 

[0:03:13.8] JK: You could say when people see on my stage, they see me do these demos where I’ll memorize a hundred people’s names forward and backwards or these hundred words or hundred numbers and I always tell people, “I don’t do this to impress you. I really do this to express to you what’s really possible,” because the truth is each of us, everyone who’s listening could also do that and a lot more. The only reason why we can’t is just because we are taught, if anything, a lie. A lie that’s somehow that our intelligence, our potential, our memory, abilities is somehow fixed, like our shoe size. We have discovered more about the human brain more in the past 20 years than the previous 2,000 years, and what we fund is we’re grossly underestimating its potential. 

That’s what I’m really excited about, and I know this from personal experience, because as you’re asking, my origin story started — I wasn’t born with these abilities. If anything, I grew up with learning challenges and some people are surprised when they hear me say that, but it came from an early childhood injury. I had a head injury when I was a kid and I was very slow to understand things. Teachers would have to repeat themselves numerous times. I had no memory to speak of. I have very, very poor focus. It actually took me an extra three years to learn how to read. That was really debilitating for me and really affected me when I was a child. 

I struggled all through school. When I was about 18 years old, it got so bad. I was looking at everybody. I’m looking for a fresh start sometimes and I want to show the world and show my family and my friends and myself that I did, that I was smart enough, that I was good enough in these areas. I started taking on a lot of workload and I actually was ended up being hospitalized again because I wasn’t eating, I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t working out. I wasn’t doing anything remotely, looking like self-care, and I ended up passing out in the hospital one night because that’s where I was living practically. I fell down a flight of stairs, I hit my head again. I was in the hospital and I just — A part of me woke me at the same time thinking there has to be a better way. 

I started studying, doing a deep dive instead of on subjects in schools. School teaches you what to learn; math, history, science, Spanish, all the important classes, but there was zero classes on how to learn. Just like what we’re talking about in the beginning, this idea of meta-learning, learning how to learn, adult learning theory. I wanted to solve this riddle that, basically, how does my brain work so I could work my brain better? I did a deep dive into adult learning theory and multiple intelligence. It is the early, like old school, the art of memory training and speed reading. 

About 60 days into it, a light switch flipped on and I just started. A whole new world opened up to me. I started to understand things. I started to have this laser-focus. I started to retain information almost without trying. I started to be able to adopt my reading abilities to the point where I never finished a book cover to cover, and I was reading like a good book or two or three a week, and my grades improve, and with my grades improving, my life improved. 

Really, Matt, the reason why I’m still doing it to this day, a couple of decades later, is because one of the first students I started tutoring this, because I was like, “I can’t believe this is not taught back in school.” One of my very first students, she read 30 books in 30 days. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine going on Amazon and picking up 30 business marketing entrepreneur or leadership, in health, in relationship, whatever, topic you’re interested in, picking up 30 of those books and then finishing it within a month’s time. It blew my mind. I wanted to find out not how she did it, but why she did it, and I found out that through asking that her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Was given 60 days to live, two months only to live, and the book she was reading were books to help save her mother’s life. I was blown away because I found out six months later that not only does her mother alive. She’s really started to get better. Doctors don’t know how or why. They were calling it a miracle. But her mother attributed 100% to the great advice she got from her daughter that learned them from all these books. That’s where I realized at that moment, I realized that if knowledge is power — We’ve all heard that, right? If knowledge is power, then learning is your super power. Learning is our super power. 

I think, now, in today’s millennium of the mind, we live in an age where our greatest wealth is found between our ears. Like no longer are we paid like an industrial age for our brute strength. It’s our brain strength. Like nobody listening here is paid for their muscle power. They’re compensated, rewarded for find-tuning their mind power, because we live in this knowledge economy, and knowledge is not only power, knowledge is profit. I don’t just mean financial profit, that’s obvious. The faster you could learn, the faster you could earn. Just all the advantages in life; in your health, in your relationships, in your career and so on. 

A lot of it, as you know with your show, the Science of Success, there’s a science in art to being smart, and that’ what I’ve devoted my life to. I never want people to struggle the way I struggled with. I think nowadays people are suffering from all these digital overload and digital dementia, where we’re losing our memories, because we’re relying on our smart devices, or digital distraction. Who doesn’t feel like their brain is not wired differently, because they can’t focus in any area, because their mind is going place to place to place, to phone notification, and texts, and WhatsApp, and social media, and emails and so much to keep up with. It feels like it’s taking a sip of water out of the fire hose. 

My goal is I want to be a personal trainer, a brain coach if you will to help people to tap in to more of that potential so they could be more productive, higher performance, have greater peace of mind in a world where we’re driven to distraction. 

[0:08:50.6] MB: There’s so much I want to unpack from that. Just starting out, one of the thing that sticks out to me, I want to understand the tension or kind of the connection between doing something, like reading 30 books in a month and how you can actually retain all that information. There’s so much, as you talked about, overload and digital dementia, and there’s just a deluge of knowledge that I feel like it goes in ear and out the other. How can we simultaneously churn through so much and actually retain it and turn it into sort of applied knowledge that becomes useful and relevant?

[0:09:28.2] JK: That’s really the goal; applied knowledge, because knowledge in itself if not power. We know it’s cliché, but we’ve heard it so much, but just all clichés, there’s truth to it, that knowledge is not power. It’s only potential power. It only becomes power when we apply it, when we take action upon it.

This is one that I think if there’s one super power to master in the 21st century, I think it’s the ability to learn faster. We do that with our podcast show and our online programs and we focus in areas of memory improvement, of speed reading, focus on concentration, in note taking and listening skills. These are the things I wish we would have learned back in school. There was never a class on memory. 

I think once you’re talking about when your people are reading, are they really retaining what they read? For example, a lot of people, like traditional speed reading programs taught years ago, and in some areas it’s evolved, some areas it hasn’t. Traditional speed reading is more associated with skimming or skipping words or getting the gist of what you’re reading, which is fine, because I think, for some people, maybe that’s all they need. They’re looking for a very specific information, and once they get it, that’s all that they need and they could take an exam and then they could just forget it and that’s all. 

For me, that was not the case. I grew up not being able to read very well, and so that was always something I’ve always wanted to conquer and a challenge that led to a greater change. The methods that I teach are really focused around not just speed reading. I think everybody has the potential, double or triple their reading speed and with the same level of retention and comprehension, and we could go over some of those brain hacks. 

For me, also, it made sense not just speed reading, but smart reading. I like to spend a significant amount of time teaching people how to comprehend information, even if they’re not reading it faster. How to actually understand more of it and retain more of it also as well. I like to get people who are listening here, if they’re up for the challenge. I just did our own podcast episode on how to read one book a week. 

You know how many books the average person reads? Obviously, you read a lot more than the average person, but it’s about one or two books a year, which I find really scary, because I think there’s so much great information out there that if somebody wrote took decades of experience and they put it into a book, maybe they are experts in marketing, or leadership, or optimal performance, health, relationships, whatever it is, and they put it into a book, and you could download decades into days. 

I think people first have to start with what’s important to them, meaning that motivation is really a key drive towards learning. I remember I was skimming a talk recently in Silicon Valley, and afterwards Bill Gates came up to me. He was in the audience. We started talking about the future of education, and he’s an avid reader. In fact, I asked him, talking about speed reading, I asked him if he got any one super power, what would it be. He looked at me and says, “Jim, the ability to read faster.” I was like, “Wow! I could totally help with you that.” 

Warren Buffett has said to Bill that he’s probably wasted 10 years of his life reading slowly, because think about how much reading we have to do. Probably about four hours a day, half on our workday is spent just processing information, reading emails and blogs and websites and books, newspapers, magazines, you name it. If you could just double your reading speed and save two hours a day, two hours a day over the course of a year is how many hours, right? We’re talking about 730 hours — Let’s just say if you save one hour a day. One hour a day over the course of a year is 365 hours. If you divide that 40-hour work weeks, that’s more than nine weeks of productivity, two months of productivity you get back saving one hour a day. 

I think starting point with reading, I think you want to tap into this motivation, because when I was talking to Bill Gates about this, we’re talking about the future of education. I was taking in a meta-learning approach, adult learning theory, and he was talking about it from a technology standpoint where those two things collide, and somebody who was listening was saying, “Is there anything missing?” We’re talking about it. Is there a thing we came up with for that legs of a stool, if you will, is motivation, like human motivation, like what drives people to do what they do, because a lot of people know what they should be doing, but why aren’t they executing and why aren’t they inconsistent, why aren’t they not completing it? 

I would say when it comes to reading, which is one of the focuses here, if you want to boost your comprehension, first of all, have a purpose why you read. If we’re talking about motivation, I always talk about the success formula. I call it H-cubed. H, the letter H. Three H’s; head, heart, hands. Head, heart, hands. Meaning that you could visualize things in your head. You could affirm things in your head. You could set goals in your head and have this vision for what you want things to be and imagine it, but if you’re not acting with your hands, nothing change. You’re not taking action. 

Usually what I would look at as the second H, which is the heart, which is the symbol of emotions. Where your focus goes, energy flows. What’s the fuel for the car? Everyone, most of your listeners probably read a great book called Start With Why, by Simon Sinek, I assume. Tapping into you why for learning is very important. 

Where I would start with when it comes to speed running, even before reading faster, I would tap into your purpose, because the fastest way to read something is just not to read it at all. I see so many people wasting time going through and studying something that might not be relevant and they’re not filtering out for it. Be clear on what your outcome is, going back to motivation. What’s it going to give for you? 

For the same reason, like one of the big focuses of our company and our podcast is focusing on helping people to remember names, because I think that’s some of the most successful people out there are really great networks, they’re really great connectors, they have great charisma and they have this unique ability to show that they care to other people. I think that starts with the very first words out of your mouth which is like introducing yourself. 

The problem is when people forget other people’s names, they communicate that that person is not important to them and it’s really hard to show someone you really care for their future, their family, their business, whatever it is, if you don’t care enough just to remember them. 

That’s just really starting with human motivation, and I think the self-awareness — I do believe self-awareness is a super power to understand intrinsically, extrinsically what motivates you to learn. When it comes to speed reading, I would start with smart reading, understand what your goal is for reading the books that you’re reading, because if you have greatest interest and higher levels of motivation, automatically, your retention, your focus, is going to be boosted and enhanced. 

Then when it comes to tactical things, I am not really big on getting soft information. I remember years ago, I’ve learned these skills, and I was speaking on it. I started to build a good reputation for speaking and making entertaining with these mental feats, kind of like a magician who does their tricks, if you will, but then I show, I pull the curtain behind and take people behind the curtain and show them exactly how to do it so they could be the incredible mentalists as well. 

We were getting home one night and the person, I didn’t know who it was, so I answered it and he says, “You got to help me, Jim. I have a conference tomorrow and my main speaker, they cancelled.” I was like, “Who’s this? How did you get my number?” “It came through a referral.” Basically, this person couldn’t get out for inclement weather or whatever, to do a keynote, and they needed somebody to speak on stage. 

I was like, “Well, what’s the topic? I’m not really prepared for this.” He tells me the topic. I was like, “Why are you calling me? I know absolutely nothing about that topic.” He was like, “Yeah, but this guy, he wrote a book.” I’m like, “So?” He’s like, “I heard you’re a speed reader.” I’m like, “Okay.” He’s like, “Well, can you show up a little bit early and read the book?” I was like, “Well, this is really going to cost you.” 

I ended up going there. The talk was around the 12:00. I ended up getting there around 9:30, 10:00. I read the book and then I present on it, and humbly it was the highest rated talk of the whole conference. I don’t think it’s because of my ability to present. I’ve never taken one minute of public speaking, but I was able to read it and also retain it, and also I do this whole thing on how to give a speech without notes and go through it, and I taught it. I think everybody has that ability, and I know it. Just after teaching this for 25 years and having students online, students in over 150 countries, that we grossly are underestimating our own capabilities and we’re faster and we’re smarter than we think. 

I’m just putting this out there. Just to start with, I think that half of success is just mindset, and I do believe — That’s why I think it’s great with your show, having people like Carol Dweck and all these amazing icons and experts talking about the power of mindset and growth mindset and such. I really think that’s a starting point. But the other half is really what we teach, which are all the mechanics. Not the person that fixes your car, but like the tools, the strategies, the step-by-step recipes, if you will, to learn another language, to read a book a day, to be able to walk into a room and meet 30 strangers and leave saying, “Bye,” remembering every single one of their names, because I think these are critical skills. 

Especially, I know a lot of your listeners are thinking about starting their own business, or they are entrepreneurs, or anybody has a relationship with a human being. These are super powers that’s attainable for anybody.

[0:19:00.2] MB: There’s so many things I want to dig into from that. Let’s start with share a couple of the strategies that you have for speed reading. What are some of these brain hacks? 

[0:19:10.3] JK: Okay. What I would start with if you want to — People, their goal is to read more. Let’s say they want to read — I would start with a goal. Let’s say with college students and high schools, I talk about their GPA, but I don’t talk about like their grade point averages. I do it as more of like a success formula which G stands for goal, P stands for purpose and A stands for the action that’s going to reach that goal. Kind of like H-cubed. 

The goal is inside the head. The purpose is inside the heart. The action lies inside the hands. Having a book, let’s say, starting with the G in terms of goal. I would have a goal for reading. I think one of the most important — I challenge everyone to do this also, is leaders are readers, and I challenge everybody who’s not already doing this consistently to read 30 minutes a day. I do this whole morning routine where I have 12 things I do every single morning to jumpstart my brain and I try to hit most of those 12 things. 

I think, as you’ve heard many times, and I’m not the person to talk about this. If you win the first hour or two of your day, then you could win the day. I think people have really bad habits in the morning, like playing with their phone and stuff like that distracts them and wires them to be distracted, wires them to be reactive. 

Going back to how I started my day, I start more like — My goal, things I want to be able to accomplish. You always start with a goal. If we’re talking about speed reading, I would have a goal on your reading. Let’s say maybe it is to read one book a week. If you break that down, when it comes to hacking reading — I was looking on Amazon and said that about the middle amount of words per book is about 64,000 words. That’s a really large number, but if you break it down, say the average person reads about 200 words per minute, we’re talking about 320 minutes approximately to read a book. If you break that down into, let’s say, seven days, we’re talking about approximately 45 minutes of reading a day, which makes it much more doable. It’s not like this unattainable goal for people who just never start with reading. I would chart, really hit, see if you could do 30 minutes and start with 30 minutes a day.  

One of my favorite actors is Will Smith, and I had the privilege to be able to coach him, and he has this phrase where he says, “There’s two things I do every day. I like to run. I like to read.” I like to run; meaning something to do with something physical. I like to read; do something mental. 

When it comes to your brain — What I do is I help people to improve their mental intelligence, and I think it’s great to be able to recall facts and figures and [inaudible 0:21:37.8] all this stuff. As important, if not, more important than mental intelligence, is mental fitness. Really, when I talk about being a brain coach, just like how a physical trainer, a personal trainer at the gym will make your muscles faster and make it stronger, give it energy and give it focus, agility. That’s what I want for your mental muscles. I want your mental muscles to be focused. I want it to have energy, agility, flexibility, lots of power there. A lot of it is underused. 

Going back to reading, breaking it down to really set goals, I challenge people to read 30 minutes a day, maybe up to 45 minutes. Finish a book a week, and that would change your life. They say that the — I was looking online and I saw these reports are people reading — The average person reads one or two books a years. The average CEO reads about four or five books a month, about a book a week. I would commit to seeing if you can do 30 minutes a day and watch your life transform completely, because you feed your brain, it’s good things in, good things out. 

When it comes to the mechanics of reading, there’s whole programs on this. Fundamentally, people want to improve usually their reading speed, their focus or comprehension. One of the things that will help all three of these things is using what they call a visual pacer. This is such an easy brain hack, and I really have to emphasize and pull out for a minute before I go into this. As you’re listening to this, I doubt this is the first show you’ve ever listened to, right? If you’re listening to this show, you listen to other shows, you’ve read other books and going to conferences, because you’re on this path, this adventure of lifelong learning, because you know in order for your life to grow, you need to grow. Your income to grow, you need to grow. 

I would say that one of the dangers and the traps in the personal development field is this idea where people always want the next best thing, and I totally get it, because our minds thrive on novelty. But there is a difference between a dabbler and somebody on the path of mastery. I find that the people that are really on the path of mastery, that the people that I get to coach on a regular basis and spend time with that are icons in technology or entertainment or in politics or what have you, they really focus on the fundamentals and they get really, really good at the basics. It’s that idea with that quote with Bruce Lee saying, “I’m not scared of anything. The only thing I’m scared of is I’m not scared about — I’m not scared of the man who practiced 10,000 kicks once. What I’m scared of is the person who practiced one kick 10,000 times.” Metaphorically, the 10,000 hours and there’s some misunderstandings around that. The idea here is getting really good at the basics. What I’m going to give you is very basic and fundamental, and yet that’s going to give you — Those are the things that are going to give you the highest returns. 

For example, my talk about a visual pacer when you read. A visual pacer is like underlining the words as you read with a pen, a highlighter, a pencil, your finger, mouse on a computer, whatever it is, will boost your reading speed, your focus and your comprehension. Simple. Again, it’s common sense, and I’m going to explain why it works. The common sense is not — As we know, it’s not often a common practice. 

The reason why it works is when you’re underlining the words with your finger, as you’re underlying, not skipping not anything. Fancy finger motions I don’t think are necessary where you’re taking your finger and running it down the page and making it look like an S. You’re skipping over big pieces of information. My clients, some of the top financial advisers, doctors, attorneys in the world. You don’t want your doctor just get the gist of what he’s reading or she’s reading, right? That wouldn’t be the [inaudible 0:25:15.3]. You’d be very scared to go to that kind of doctor. 

Using a visual pacer will boost your reading speed 25% to 50%. Now, I don’t know if that sounds remarkable or not. I was blown away when I first saw this, and I’m not expecting people to believe what I’m saying. I’m saying you are the expert. Test it for yourself . Read something. Take a book. Pick up any book in your home or your office, read for 60 seconds, count the number of lines that you just read, and then reset the timer and then this time underline the words as you read the next 60 seconds and you’ll find that second number will be about 25% to 50% boost instantly with very, very little practice. Maybe people have to practice for a few minutes, they get a feel for whatever it is. 

Some people actually improve 100% their reading speed just using a visual pacer. That’s pretty remarkable, right? A 25%, 50% jump doesn’t sound like a lot. How many people would have loved to get in the 25%, 50% return on their investments this past year? It’s incredible, right? That reading takes time, and time is money. 

Let’s unpack this. The reason why using the visual pacer while you reads works. Number one is it’s interesting children do it. Every single child, when they’re learning to read will use their finger to help them maintain focus until we teach them not to do it. Second of all, you do it. People who are listening saying, “When I read, I don’t use my finger.” Yes, I understand that, because we’re taught that, but when I ask you to count the number of lines you just read, a hundred out of a hundred people will use their finger to count the number of lines, because they’re using a visual pacer, their finger, to help maintain their focus so they could count. We do it naturally until we’re told to not do it. 

The third reason why you use your finger while you read is because your eyes are attracted to motion. As you’re underlying the words, instead of your attention being pulled apart, which often it is. People report to me all the time, “Have you ever read a page in a book, got to the end and just forgot what you just read?” It just happens, right? You go back and reread it and you still forget what you just read. By using your finger while you read, it maintains your focus. Your attention is not being spread apart. It’s being pulled through the information. 

The fourth, and I’ll give you one more. This is one I find most interesting, is that certain senses in your nervous system works very closely together. For example, have you ever tasted, Matt, like a great tasting piece of fruit? Like something like right off the vine or like right from the farmer’s market? It’s not like it’s been sprayed for six months and sitting in wax and sitting in a supermarket and stuff. Have you ever tasted like a great tasting peach before?

[0:27:49.8] MB: Yeah, for sure. 

[0:27:51.2] JK: It’s amazing, right? There’s nothing like it. In actuality, you’re not actually tasting a peach. Your tongue is not really capable of tasting everything that’s in a peach. What you’re actually doing more, so as you’re smelling the peach and you’re like, “Are you sure?” “Yeah.” Because your mind doesn’t know the difference between what you’re tasting and what you’re smelling, because your sense of smell and your sense of taste are so closely linked in your nervous system. You don’t know the difference. You know it when you’re sick though. When your nose is congested and you can’t breathe out of your nose, what does food taste like?  

[0:28:25.9] MB: It’s bland.

[0:28:27.0] JK: It’s bland, right? It loses its flavor, if you will. It’s because that’s how much you rely on your sense of smell, and we confuse sometimes our sense of smell and taste, just like our sense of smell and taste are so closely linked, so as our sense of sight and our sense of touch. That actually people who use their finger while they read is what they will report. They say they feel more in touch, touch with their reading. There’s a kinesthetic connections. Kind of like with a little child. Let’s say there’s a toddler there and you’re kind of waving your keys and they look at my keys, “Look. Look with your eyes. Look at my keys,” and the toddler will reach out and grab the keys, because in order for the toddler to feel like they are looking at it, they have to touch it. In fact, when you lose your sense of sight, how do you read? You use your sense of touch with brail and such. 

Just one really quick brain hack — And I spend more time to explaining why to do it, because, again, going through the H-cube, you can have in your head, “I want to read 25%, 50%, 100% faster,” but if you’re not practicing the technique with your hand, get into the motivation of it. That’s why I explained why, and I go into leaders are readers, and Bill Gates is an avid reader, and just the more you could learn the more you could earn. 

Then tap into your focal point in terms of things like the reasons why, because I do believe — I always tell people, and I get retweeted on this every day, is just reasons reap results. Reasons reap results. You always need to — If you’re not taking action — Like I just did a whole episode on procrastination, because I think so many people are overloaded, overwhelmed. They can’t get themselves to start and do the things that they need to do. Part of it is they’re just not tapping into their motivation in terms of why they need to do it. 

Other reasons why — Interesting enough, when it comes to reading — I’ll give you another brain hack, is changing habits. Habits are so hard, but I do believe first do make your habits, and then your habits make you back. It really becomes — Excellence really comes down to a set of rituals and routines and habits. 

The reason why you want to habitualize things, routine things, the reason why my whole first hour of the day is set up is because I have decision fatigue. You’re hearing this world all over the place. It’s the idea and science, the research is saying that you could only make a certain amount of good decisions a day. It’s a finite amount. After you hit that limit, you can’t decide what to order at a restaurant at night, because you’re so fatigued. I found this doing research with surgeons and how the increase of mistakes that they’re making later in the day from what their start time was. It’s interesting. That’s the reason why Mark Zuckerberg and Tony Hsieh of Zappos, that they wear the same t-shirt, they wear the same sweatshirt, because they don’t want to waste one of their good decisions on, “What am I going to wear today?” 

Going back to what we’re talking about in terms of reading and hacking a brain, is starting new habits. Sometimes it takes a little bit more will power to start it, a new habit and to develop that habit. Once you’re done with it, I find that if we’re always doing the easy things in life, that life is really hard. If we’re doing the difficult, the hard things in life, life becomes really easy. Reading and discipline is one of those things. 

As we’ve heard many times, discipline is not something that takes away freedom. Discipline is what gives you freedom, because if you can’t get yourself to do the things you need to do, meditate each day, journal each day. I do this whole thing where I do brain tease and then make brain power smoothies and all these other stuff. You can’t get yourself to do that. Really, that’s a prison that’s taken away from your freedom. 

When I’m looking to do this when it comes to habit formation, and I’m going to close this loop in a second, is besides starting with your why and reasons reaping results, is also breaking things down. A lot of people don’t take on something brand new, because it’s this big monster. If you break things down into tiny habits — I get to interview this gentleman. He’s a researcher at Stanford University. His name is Dr. BJ Fogg, and we did a two-parter on how to create habits and how to undo bad habits, break bad habits. 

He was talking about this very specific model, it’s called BEMAT; behavior equals motivation, ability and trigger. Whatever behavior you want to, let’s say it’s to read each day, and you did — Your behavior is equal to the motivation. You need a motive, some kind of reward or incentive for what that reading is going to give you. You need the ability to be able to read, and then you need a trigger. That’s the area that a lot of things get ignored. Often, when it comes down to memory training, it comes down to anchors and triggers, reminders, for example. 

One of the triggers that I have like, like it’s silly, but every time I get into an elevator, especially when I’m alone, I’ll just do squats, and it’s so silly, but it’s just I feel like — You’ve heard that sitting is the new smoking. That living a very sedentary lifestyle, sitting at your computer all day for eight hours a day is really bad for you. You need to get up. I recommend this Pomodoro Technique, it’s a time management technique that says that they find there’s huge dips of focus after about 30 to 45 minutes. Setting my phone alarm every 30 minutes to 45 minutes to just remind me to get up and take a five minute break is very important. 

Going back to memory training and reading training, the reason why I don’t read for more than 30 or 45 minutes, the reason why I don’t study anything for 35, more than 35, for 35, 45 minutes or so on average, is because there’s something called primacy and recency. Primacy says — It’s a memory principle. It says you tend to remember things in the beginning. If I give you, Matt, a list of 30 words to memorize, you probably remember the first few words, because that’s prime. It’s first. 

Recency says you tend to remember things more recent, or at the end. You probably remember a few of those last words, because they’re most recent. Similar to if you went to a party and you meet 20 strangers there. You probably remember primacy, the people in the beginning at the party; and recency, the people at the end. Now, how to use this when it comes to reading and studying and stuff like that? A lot of people, they realize there’s a learning curve. What they don’t realize is there’s a forgetting curve. You learn something, it’d be gone. If you want to insulate that and mitigate the loss, sitting for five hours is not the process to do it. 

That’s why we take breaks, because if primacy says you remember stuff in the beginning of that five hours, and then stuff at the end of that five hours, but in the middle there’s a huge dip [inaudible 0:34:57.4] of regression where you lose that information. By taking a break every 45 minutes and breaking up that five hours into 45 minute chunks with five minute breaks, all of a sudden you created more beginning and more ends. Do you see that? All of a sudden you could have like eight beginning and eight ends which creates more primacy and more recency, which is more opportunities to retain information. 

It also coincides with our focus, that we can maintain really peak focus for more than 30 or so minutes. So since you’re getting diminishing returns, you should take a middle brain break, if you will, for five minutes and do the things that are good for your brain. Movement; which is very important. Deep breathing; which is very important. Most people get tired because they’re not getting enough oxygen. Then hydration, because your brain is mostly water and it needs to be hydrated. 

Going back to habit formation, where I’d like to start with people is just breaking it down. I don’t even tell people to read for 20, 30 minutes. I’ll just say, “Hey, just pick up a book and read one word.” That’s where what I’ve mentioned tiny habits. That’s out of Dr. BJ Fogg’s work at Stanford. That’s where Instagram came out of and everything out of his one of his students, is just starting somewhere small, and then just like flossing your teeth. We know flossing your teeth actually is good for your health. It actually helps you live longer. It’s crazy, right? That brain hack. But most people don’t floss their teeth, and what I would say for them is just, “Hey, practice flossing one tooth.” Who’s going to just floss one tooth? Nobody. So you’re going to do the second tooth and the third and fourth and so on. 

That’s one of the ways of overcoming procrastination, is starting with your why. Having a real reason. Motivation; a motive for action. Number two; breaking things into tiny little habits where it’s attainable. Instead of thinking about, “Oh, I got to go all the way to the gym and do this 60-90 minute work,” whatever. Tiny habits is putting on your sneakers. It’s something everybody could do, and then you start building momentum. Then there’s a memory principle actually called the Zeigarnik Effect. Zeigarnik effect is a psychologist, Dr. Zerganik in Europe that was noticing — She would notice when she’s at this café that the wait staff, the waiter and the waitress would remember everybody’s order. 

Have you ever had like going out to dinner and had somebody like memorize your order and you’re like a table, a sizeable table and they’re not writing any of it down? The reason why they could do it, it’s something called the Zeigarnik Effect. Unless they’ve been — Unless we do a lot of training at a lot of the hospitality hotels and restaurants and such. 

The Zeigarnik Effect basically says that the mind isn’t like open loops. It needs closure. Even when I’m talking right now, I’m opening up a lot of loops and that I’m going through and my cycling through and I’m closing them with reading and habits and everything else like that. The Zeigarnik Effect basically says that if a waiter opens up the loop in terms of what your order is, they will remember it until they deliver the order. Once the order is delivered and the customer has their food, they forget it. 

Similar to procrastination and getting yourself to take action, once you at least somewhere, the mind is more likely to want to finish it and conclude it, because it doesn’t like keeping that door open and it wants to be able to finish. 

When it comes to speed reading, I would start with using a visual pacer. It would boost productivity 25%-50%. Some of you will double your reading speed. Remember, saving one hour a day saves you 9 weeks of productivity every single year. That’s two months of productivity. I would say if you can’t get yourself to do that, break it down and just say, “Okay. Yeah, I want to build up some reading 20 or 30 minutes a day, because I like what Jim is saying and that makes sense, reading a book a week, 50 books a year and really retaining it. It’s going to be huge for my career and my personal life.” Just saying, “Hey, I’m going to break this down. I’m just going to read one sentence. Start with that.” Once you read the first sentence, I’ll guarantee you’ll read the second sentence and so on. Practice — It’s a misnomer. Everyone says practice makes, how do you say? Makes perfect. I would say that practice makes progress. Practice makes permanent, and that’s really the goal. 

[0:39:00.6] MB: I’m sure if you're listening to this show, you’re passionate about mastering new skills and abilities, and that's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our sponsor this week, Skillshare. Skillsshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn everything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography, and you can get unlimited access to the entire catalog for a low monthly price so you don't have to pay per class like many other sites. 

They have some really cool courses on there. They have a course on Evernote mastery. You know how much I love Evernote. Evernote runs basically my entire life and I highly recommend using it as a tool, but also checking out their course on how to do it. They have a really cool course on productivity planning and they have a course on mind maps. Mind maps are awesome. I have a mind map sitting on my desk that I'm looking at right now for the Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin. I love my mind maps. It’s an incredible strategy that speaks directly to your brain and your subconscious and it's a really cool tool to remember things. 

There's so many fascinating courses on Skillshare, and the cool thing is they’ve been so kind to the show, they've been an incredible sponsor, and they're giving all of our listeners a free month of access, so get in there. You can get free classes for up to a month completely for free. You can check out all of these courses, just go to skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month. 

[0:40:28.3] MB: I’d like to come back to the concept of sort of applied knowledge and the idea that — You mentioned, people on the path to mastery focus on the fundamentals. One of the things that I recently realized and I’ve really sort of shifted my focus on a little bit is I feel like there’s so much information out there. There’s so many new self-help books, information, all these stuff, and I’ve actually kind of dialed back and said, “I’m going to read less. I’m going to focus on really high quality stuff. Reading it very deeply and deliberately, and then actually applying and using the information that I read about.” 

[0:41:05.8] JK: Yeah. I completely support that. I’m an advocate for people. Whatever it take to actually use the information, because I think there is this imposter effect, meaning that a lot of people getting personal development and they’re trying to live up to some kind of standard that they’re seeing in the industry or social media. I think people waste a lot of energy there trying to maintain this image of who they pretend that they are, and then they’re putting energy into an area where they feel like this is who they fear they are, and then the energy into that they really are. A lot of people are depleted that way. 

I would say that you’re 100% right, that I learn something, if you’re not going to apply it for something. There are certain areas that it’s okay. Certain areas that you could learn out of the surface, and that you feel well read on it and it serves you. There are certain areas based on your filtering or qualification, how you’re qualifying information, of good information that you want to deep dive into something. I think a lot of a cycle through both areas, from one thinking to another, where sometimes we want to — Just like with people. Some people want to go out and meet a lot of quantity people, and other people want to go deeper with the handful of people that they’re interested in. There’s no unnecessarily right or wrong. I think that’s great, because that comes down to, again, starting with a goal in mind and having a purpose. 

I like mastery, because I feel like the future belongs to those experts who are really to demonstrate a level of outstanding ability and competence. I’m completely good with focusing on one subject, focusing on one book. When I speed reading, again, it’s misnomer. I’m not talking about skimming or scanning. You never read faster than you understand. I’m about up-leveling people’s ability to process information through a series of questions that they’re asking, through series of note taking, through a series of teaching other people and relating to other people so they could deeper in the level of knowledge. It’s not just some information that’s from some third-party, but when they’re teaching it to other people, they get to make it personal for themselves. 

Even in a nice brain hack to help people boost their comprehension is reading something. Then after you’re reading it, talking about it to somebody else. That’s why book clubs are so powerful, because learning is not always solo. It’s social. We don’t learn just by consuming information. We learn best by co-creating it with other people. Really, the other thing is there’s — It’s valid. Meaning that — Like I’m all about saying no in our life. I think people should say no more often and make things more clear. I think people, one of the reasons why people feel overloaded, overwhelmed, that they feel depleted, they feel like it’s too much mental fatigue, is because they’re overcommitting to things all the time.
They’re out there saying yes to everything. 

When you say yes to everything, it’s equivalent of highlighting everything. Which actually those people that just are reading and they are just like highlighting every other sentence, but if you make everything important, then nothing becomes important. It’s similar to like that book, it’s similar to your life. If you overcommit to everything and everything becomes important, then nothing becomes important. I don’t think you could necessarily manage your time, because time is very abstract. I do believe we can manage our behavior and our priorities. 

It’s even hard for me to say the word priorities, because as you know, from your reading, that the word priorities was never plural. It was never multiple priorities. It was always this one thing. More recently, over the past few decades, people have all of these priorities. If everything becomes important, nothing becomes important. 

I would scale back to if it’s a goal for people to reach a level of mastery in a specific subject, then I would not dabble. There’s nothing wrong with reading slowly. I just want to make sure people know that reading slowly doesn’t necessarily equate to understanding, because some people read so painfully slow, they don’t retain anything. It’s like riding a bicycle really slow. If I ride a bicycle really, really slow, I’m going to end up falling over. 

One of the reason — I’ll debunk this myth a little bit as best as I can in this like very short period of time. A lot of people think that if they read faster, their comprehension would go down. Maybe I work with a lot of people from all kinds of countries and backgrounds and levels of education, I find that it’s a misnomer and it’s actually not actually correct, because I find that some of the best readers, in terms of their comprehension, are actually some of the fastest readers, because they have the best focus. 

Meaning that the human brain has an incredible capacity to process information. Yet when we read, we feed it one word at a time. Metaphorically, we’re starving our mind. If you don’t give your brain the stimulus and needs, it will seek entertainment elsewhere in the form of distraction. 

There’s a myth out there that people that read faster don’t understand as much, but in actually they have some of the best understanding, they have the best focus. It’s equivalent of — Like notice when I was talking slowly. It’s like reading slowly. It’s like — You start thinking about other things. Like if I’m talking slow, your mind would wander. You would get tired. You would go off and do something else. You would fall asleep or whatever it is. Aren’t those the same exact symptoms have when they read? Their mind wanders. They get tired. They use reading as a sedative. It’s such a boring chore, because you’re dulling your brain. 

It’s like driving a car. If you’re driving in your neighborhood, you’re going 15-20 miles slow. You could do a lot of different things, because you’re going so slow. You could be drinking your bulletproof coffee, be texting, which you shouldn’t. You could be having a conversation, thinking about the dry cleaning, five different things, because you’re only going 20 miles an hour. If your racing car is going 200 miles an hour down a raceway, do you have more or less focus? 100% focused, right? You’re not trying to text. You’re not trying to fix your makeup. You’re not trying to think about the clients or dry cleaning or anything. You’re 100% focused on what’s in front of you, and that focus gives you the comprehension that you want. 

What I would say if you want to go deep in your information, then definitely go deep, especially if it serves you for a topic that’s important to you. Then do a bunch of — Use your finger while you read. Don’t read any faster than you understand, it also as well. But I think that the speed will give you the focus and the focus will give you the comprehension that you’re looking for.  

[0:47:21.1] MB: I think that’s a great distinction. Essentially, the idea that it’s not about whether you’re reading slowly or quickly. It’s really about reading for maximum understanding and maximum comprehension. 

[0:47:33.4] JK: Right. To your goal, because some people could skim or “speed read” the newspaper and they get full — They get fully satisfied. You know what I mean? Because not everything that we read do we need to 100% focus on or retain every single bit in chunk. It really depends on what your outcome is. That’s why having questions is so important for comprehension. Whether it’s listening to a podcast or reading a book or going to a seminar or reading someone’s blog. Questions are the answer. 

What questions do is they activate that part of your brain called the reticular activating system, RAS for short. Basically, it determines right now there’s two billion stimuli in your environment that you could pay attention to, but you can’t, because mainly your brain has a deletion device, because you would be, you’d go crazy if you had to pay attention to too much. Mostly, it’s trying to block stuff out. 

You have this reticular activating system that determines where your focus goes. Years ago, years ago, my sister was sending me postcards and emails, photos of these pug dogs. You know, these little like smooching face, little fun or whatever dogs. I was like, “Why are you sending these to me?” I realized that her birthday was coming up and that’s what she wanted. 

I noticed everywhere I was going, I go to the supermarket, I see a lady holding a pug dog. I’d be running and doing my jog around my neighborhood, I saw this guy walking six pug dogs. I was like, “Where were these pug dogs before?” The truth is they were always there. It’s just my mind, it fell into that two billion of things that I just didn’t pay attention to. Once she made it important to me, like me asking why is she sending these to me. What’s so important about pug dogs? I started seeing pug dogs everywhere. 

Just when it comes to those, if you imagine, pug dogs are the answer you’re looking for, they’re the knowledge or the wisdom, comprehension, if you will, that you want, then you’ll start seeing them everywhere. If you have questions about sales or marketing or whatever it is, and when you’re listening to a podcast, you’re reading that book, all of a sudden you’re like, “There’s an answer. There’s an answer.” Because it acts like a magnet and you’re pulling the information inside as supposed to somebody, a lecturer trying to push it inside of you, because the brain doesn’t work that way. It works better by wanting to answer these questions themselves and satisfy that open loop. 

I would focus mostly on what your outcome is for reading, and then that should determine your level of speed and comprehension. I don’t speed read everything. One of the challenges to overcome, the reasons why our programs are so successful and we’re getting 300% increase of reading speed in our online is because the biggest challenge when it comes to reading actually is not focus. It’s something called sub-vocalization. Sub-vocalization is that inner talk that we have. 

You notice, Matt, when you’re reading something to yourself, you heard that inner voice inside your head reading along with you? 

[0:50:29.9] MB: Yeah. 

[0:50:30.7] JK: That voice and stuff. Yeah. Hopefully it’s your own voice. It’s not like somebody else’s voice. You don’t hear like two or three voices in there. The reason why it’s a challenge is because if you have to say all the words to understand what you’re reading, you can only read as fast as you could talk. Not as fast as you could think. 

That’s why when I listen to podcast and many people listen to podcast or listen to books on — Like audible and stuff like that, books, audiobooks, is they put it on 1.5 or 2.0 or whatever, because you could understand all that information. It’s just you can’t possibly talk that fast. You don’t have to say words in your mind to understand what words mean, and it’s just a bad habit we picked up when we’re kids based on the way we’re taught in school. The fastest readers I find don’t pronounce a lot of the words, because you don’t have to pronounce a word like New York City, take all that time to say it, because you know what it means on sight. 95% of the words you read every single day are what they call sight words. You don’t have to pronounce and to understand it, because you’ve seen them tens of thousands of times. 

This is just going in to just reading methodology and stepping to this commonsense corner of your mind saying, “Does what I learn back then still make sense to me?” I think being a quick learner or having what I call a quick brain is not about just memorizing facts, because you get a lot of facts on Google. The ability to be able to focus, be able to absorb, to learn, to teach, to apply this information. 

That being said, a good memory now is more important than ever, because at any given time you can — Our live is a reflection of our decisions that we make day to day, like the decisions of where to live and what to do and who to be with and what to eat and everything. You could only make good decisions based on the information you know and remember. 

That’s why Socrates said, learning is remembering. That without remembering, you can’t make good decisions and you lose your power in the areas that you would normally be able to really be unstoppable.  

[0:52:28.7] MB: Another strategy, and I think that’s the really key point. In today’s world, there’s so much out there. How can we focus on really capturing and remembering, as much as possible sort of align with our goals in terms of what we’ve determined we want to learn about. One of the strategies that I’ve heard you talk in the past is using things like mind maps. Will you talk a little bit about that?  

[0:52:53.0] JK: What happens is when we’re learning something, people want to learn any subject or skill faster, whether it’s Mandarin or martial arts, or it’s marketing, music, whatever it is. Obviously, everyone like to do it faster. What helps you to be able to do it faster is to overcome what they call the forgetting curve. That within 48 hours, just two days, up to 80% of what you learn can be gone within two days. That’s a lot of loss that’s there. 

One of the ways to keep that from happening is by taking good notes. I like to talk about different ways of taking notes. Different than making notes, and that’s my distinction, is that when I take notes very simply. Mind mapping is one way of taking notes. It was created by a gentleman by the name of Tony Buzan, and some of your listeners may be very familiar with it, where you put the main idea in the middle of the page and branching out, just like the branches of the tree. You have those sub-ideas. 

Imagine the middle is health and then branching out of health is, “Oh, it’s exercise,” and then another branch out of the trunk is called nutrition and so on. Off of nutrition could be a branch that says food, because that’s one place you get your nutrition. Then another part of the nutrition branch could be supplements, so on. Then you can have a branch come off of supplements, different kinds of nutritional supplements and so on, or different kinds of food. You could break down the food groups. You could have this rare kind of sardine that leads to this, say, under the fish, to lead to protein, to lead to food, to lead to nutrition and that leads to overall health. 

It’s kind of a neat way on one page view instead of seeing notes on like 20 pages linear notes, and something on page 17 could be important than what’s on page one but it’s varied on page 17. Mind mapping is one way of seeing all the notes on one page view and seeing the relationships and the associations, because ultimately all learning is going to come down to associations, one thing linked to another. 

When  you’re learning something, you’re taking something unknown, something outside of you and you’re connecting it to something that you know already. That’s why metaphors are such a powerful way of learning when you’re comparing things to what you already understand. 

Another way — If to like the mind map with all the colors and the icons and images, these two right brain or imaginary creative for somebody. What I recommend, and I did a whole show on this, is just take a piece of paper and put a line down the middle page, and on the left side, take notes, and on the right side, make notes. 

There’s a clear distinction. What I’m talking about is — Because it’s only like a letter off. Note taking is where you’re capturing information. You’re capturing the strategies or the ideas. This is how to read faster. Okay, use your visual pace or a great rate. Do one thing at a time. That would be where you’re taking notes on the left side, you’re capturing notes. On the right side, you’re writing your impressions of what you’re capturing. On the right side, instead of taking notes, you’re making notes. Instead of capturing it, you’re actually creating. 

On the right side, you’re writing down questions that you have. How it relates to what you already know. How you’re going to teach it so somebody else, and I think that’s very important, because when you look at geniuses, and I don’t just mean IQ geniuses. People who are excelling in any area and at any industry, the majority of them journal. They take lots of notes. When you’re there — It’s interesting, because I just had a dinner recently with this very well-known multibillionaire. During this gala, if you will, he was just taking lots of notes of every single, what every speaker was saying and everything. I think that’s one of the ways not only do we retain information, but it also helps us to make new associations to something. 

Think about the journals of Einstein and Edison and Da Vinci and how priceless those things are.  There are studies that want to know, like, “Is it because they’re geniuses that they journal all the time or is it because they’re taking notes and journaling all the time that makes them a genius?” 

I’m a big believer in note taking, whether it’s mind mapping or this idea of capturing on the left side and creating on the other side. That’s the other reason, is it also is a great focus tool, because if your attention is going to somewhere else, like it often does when you’re listening to a podcast or sitting in a conference or a summit or whatever, then it might as well go on the right side of the page. Your creative expression of things might as well go to like, “Oh! How is this relate to what I already know? What about this and how am I going to share this with this person and everything?” 

By the way, you notice that I’m talking a lot about teaching other people, because another brain hack, if you will, is learn something with intention of teaching it somebody else. Again, it’s common sense, but it’s not common practice, that I challenge everybody who’s listening to this to re-listen to this episode and listen with the intention of teaching it to someone very specific, because if you had to give a talk on this in a couple of days, 48 hours from now on stage or coach somebody on how to speed read or whatever, you would listen at a higher level. You would be more active. You would ask more questions. You would take better notes, because you would have a stake in it. 

The reason why I like that is — What gets twitted all the time is this thing they say, I say that, “When you teach something, you get to learn it twice.” Is intention matter. If you learn with the intention of teaching and sharing it with somebody else, when you teach it, you get to learn it twice. 

If you want to accelerate your learning, learn any subject or any skill faster, learn it with the idea, the motive to teach it to someone else. Again, going back to this mastery path about fundamentals and the basics, this is very basic. It’s not very sexy, but it’s going to get you’re the result that you’re looking for.

[0:58:45.4] MB: Tell me a little bit about the FAST method and the strategies you have from learning faster. 

[0:58:50.3] JK: Perfect. I love talking about this, because — This is a framework that I use, just a guide system for learning anything more quickly, because I think that’s what we want to do. Our ability to acquire new skills. Our ability to acquire new subjects. Really simple four steps. The F in FAST stands for forget. If you want to learn something faster, I would say forget what you already know about a subject. Not permanently, but just set aside what you already know. I find that when I’m coaching somebody, as long as they have a motivation to learn something and then they have an open mind to learn something, a beginner’s mind, that’s really the phrase here, then they can learn faster. 

A lot of people won’t learn something faster, because they feel like they know everything and they’re not going to learn faster. I would say if you want to learn something new, temporary forget about what you think you know about it. 

The other thing I would say really fast when it comes to forgetting, I would forget about what’s going on that’s not urgent and important. It’s a myth that you can multitask. It is completely been debunk. Yes, you could walk and chew gum and have a conversation on the phone. You can’t do two cognitive intensive activities at once. It’s not possible. 

It’s a myth, and when people are multitasking, what they really are doing is what they call task switching, they’re switching from one task to another and every single time you switch to another task, because you’re getting these dopamine fixes and everything, because you’re getting rewarded for the novelty, you’re feeling like you’re getting stuff done, but it actually takes you another 5 to 10 to 20 minutes just to regain your focus and your flow. 

You lose time and, actually, that person also has more errors, so they make more mistakes. I would say focus on one thing. The F when it comes to forgetting, I would forget about anything else that’s not going — That’s going on that’s not urgent and important, because if 25% of your attention is being spent trying to do this and thinking about this and this, that only leaves you like 25% to really learn. 

The last F I would say for forgetting is forget about what you know about a subject. Forget about situational things, but also forget about your limitations, because most people are out there and they have a focus on what they can’t do. They have a fixed mindset where they are saying, “Oh, I’m just too old,” or “Oh, I’m just not smart enough,” or “I didn’t go to that school,” or “I don’t have that background,” or “This runs in my family,” or whatever it is. They’ll fight for their limitations. If you argue for your limits, you get to keep them. If you argue for your limits, you get to keep them. 

I would stop fighting for them. Instead, just set the possibility that something else is possible. Just a quick hack; if you find yourself saying, “I’m not successful.” Just add the word yet. Three letters at the end of that limitation, so at least your mind opens up the possibility that it’s going to happen, because imagination is very powerful. But be very careful whenever you put behind the words I am. Those are very — The two smallest words, but they’re the most powerful words on the planet, because whatever you put after I am, it’s going to determine your life, an identity level. Forget about subjects, what you know. Forget about situations. Forget about limitations.

The A is active. If you want to learn any subject or skill faster, you need to be active about it. While I was saying that one of the challenges is most people grow up with this very passive education where they were just sitting quietly by themselves, not talking to their neighbors. They had to regurgitate information or [inaudible 1:02:07.6] passive, and learning is not a spectator sport. Learning is not a spectator sport. You have to get off the bench, roll up your sleeves and get involved. Ask questions. Be active. Take notes, like we’re talking about. 

The S in FAST stands for state, and this is really a key one. I want to really emphasize this. If you walk out with anything from this conversation know this, all learning is state dependent. All learning is state dependent. 

What is your state? A state is a simple word for snapshot of the mood of your mind and your body. How you feel, your motional state. The reason why it’s important is one of the keys when it comes to quick recall, if you want a better memory that I teach, is information combined with emotion becomes a long term memory. Information combined with emotions becomes a long term memory, and you know this because there’s probably a song, a fragrance, or a food, or something that could you take you back when to when you’re a kid, right? We all have it. 

There’s a food, a scent, a perfume, some fragrance, some kind of music, whatever. It takes us back decades. That’s because information combined with emotion became a long term memory. You didn’t have to repeat it over and over again. You did it once and it’ll be there forever. That’s really accurate when it comes to learning, that you have to add emotion into your learning process. Otherwise we don’t remember the boring. We don’t remember the mundane, because if your emotional state is zero, zero times anything is anything. You want to up your state. 

We have control of our state and how we feel, because what I challenge everybody here is to be a thermostat, not a thermometer. What’s the difference? A thermometer is something — Functionally, it reacts to the environment. It reflects the environment, what the environment is giving it. That’s not a thermostat though. A thermostat is different. Thermostat sets the standard. It sets a goal. It sets a vision, and all of a sudden what happens to the environment, the environment raises to meet that standard, because that’s the power of the thermostat, and I’m here to say that just remember who you are, that you’re more of a thermostat than a thermometer, and that whatever you set that too, you’re more likely to be able to achieve. The thing that you really want to set, the standard for most, is how you feel about things. You could control how you feel based on just your mind and your body. You change your thoughts, right? Thoughts are things. There’s a biology to belief as we’ve learned. Also, by moving your physiology, it affects your psychology. That changing your posture, doing deep breathing, doing the things that I do in my morning jumpstart your brain kind of thing, it changes your physiology, and all of a sudden it changes the way you feel. When you change the way you feel, you’re going to learn faster. 

Finally, the T in fast is what we covered already. It’s Teach. Because I think there’re two reasons to learn anything. You learn it. Number one, how it could benefit you. The other reason you learn anything is because how it could benefit somebody else. I would always learn — One of the reasons why I feel like I learn fast, is everything I learn, I learn to be able to share with somebody else. That’s who I am. I think everyone else should do that and should give and pay it forward that way. Don’t give to get, give because it’s who you are. 

They say those who can’t do teach, I never thought that was negative. I thought, “Wow! Those who can’t do, teach. When you teach it, then you could do it.” I would encourage people. That’s FAST; forget, be active, manage your state and learn with the intention of teaching somebody else. 

[1:05:32.6] MB: Really quickly, for somebody who wants to be — We covered so many topics today. For someone who wants to really simply and easily start implementing some of these ideas today, what would kind of one piece of homework be that you would give them as a starting point to begin? 

[1:05:48.6] JK: Yeah. I’ll give people two. Number one, I would invite people to listen to our podcast. It’s only 10 minutes long. It’s not guest-driven. It’s just one brain hack for busy people who want to learn fast or achieve more, on how to learn a language or how to get rid of negative habits, how to read a book a week and so on. It’s not a big time investment. There’s zero cost. 

Number two, I would say schedule it. That’s the big thing I would encourage people to do. I think people don’t — They talk about things all the time. If you want to turn knowledge into real power, you have to schedule it down to a task or an activity and you have to schedule it and treat it as time that you would never cancel it with somebody. You would never cancel on a family member. You never cancel this doctor’s appointment. You never cancel this meeting with an investor or your number one client, because if we talk about stuff, it’s a dream. When we write it down and you put it into your calendar, then it’s real. 

I would say that the most important thing to take something invisible and make it visible is make it visible on your calendar. I would say like even with your show, I would say, “Hey, this many times a week I’m going to listen to this show at this time.” Then once it’s in there, that’s your learning time, and it’s time you never compromise. 

I would encourage everybody to listen to this episode again. Maybe try — Actually, listen to this episode again and do the note taking with the intention of teaching, that capture and create. The big thing is, schedule your learnings. Everybody has a to-do-list. For me, two more important lists that I have is a not to do list. I never touch my phone the first hour of the day. I think it’s somewhat the most destructive things to your productivity or performance. I have a very large not to do list. 

I also have a to learn list, and I think that’s very important, that if you want to be a leader, that you always are learning. Dedicate a lifelong learning, and pick subjects and skills that you want to — Every 30 days, take on a new challenge, because when we’re growing, when we’re green we’re growing, when we’re brown we’re rotting. I think all of us, everyone who’s listening to this wants to grow to their fullest potential. I would say it starts with scheduling time for yourself and it’s time well-invested. 

[1:07:56.2] MB: Jim, where could people find you and your show online? 

[1:08:00.3] JK: The best place for people to go is kwikbrain.com. You have to spell Kwik — Kwik really is my last name. I didn’t change it to do what I do. It’s K-W-I-K, kwikbrain.com. That’s how people can see our podcast. You can see it on Sticher and iTunes and so on. 

Then I would love to continue the conversation on social media. I’ve very, very active on Facebook, Instgram and Twitter, just @jimkwik, J-I-M K-W-I-K. I would love people to actually tag both of us on this episode, so if you’re sharing this episode, that’s a way of you teaching somebody else, like we talked about. I think that’s important. I would love to know everybody’s big takeaway. If there’s one aha after this conversation that we had together, I would love for you to post that big aha, because that’s a way of you demonstrating, you’re taking the invisible and making it visible and you’re teaching it, and so you’re owning it and making it your own, and tag us un it, and I would love to read that and respond it and re-share it also as well. 

Yeah, Kwik Brain is the podcast, kwikbrain.com, K-W-I-K, and @jimkwik, K-W-I-K.

[1:09:02.7] MB: I think that’s great. I’ll second that. I respond to every listener tweet, and so definitely do that. We’ll both chime in and give you some feedback. Jim, thank you so much for coming on the show. You shared a tremendous amount of wisdom today. I really appreciate all of the awesome insights that you shared with our listeners. 

[1:09:19.9] JK: Matt, this was tremendous. I really appreciate you and everyone who’s listening. Remember, you’re faster and smarter than you think. I wish your days be filled with lots of life and lots of love, lots of laughter and always lots of learning. Thank you. 

[1:09:31.5] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s matt@successpodcast.com. 

I’d love to hear from you and I personally read and respond to every single listener email. I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. 

First, you’re going to get our exclusive weekly Mindset Monday email which listeners have been loving. It’s simple, short, sweet, articles and stories that we’ve enjoyed from the last week. Next, you’re going to get a chance to shape the show, vote on guests, submit your own personal questions, vote on things like changing our intro and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we create based on listener demand, including our most popular guide; How To Organize and Remember Everything, which you can get completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide when you sign up and join the email list today. You can join by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage, or if you’re on the go, just text the word “smarter”, that’s “smarter” to the number 4222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes, that helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. 

Don’t forget, if you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we’ve talked about and much more, be sure to check out our show notes, which you can get at successpodcast.com. Just go there and hit the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

The Skeptics Guide To Meditation With Dan Harris

In this episode we discuss how our guest went from a hard-nosed skeptic who thought most self help was BS, to someone who uncovered the evidence based growth strategies that actually work. We talk about our guest’s journey from meeting self help gurus, to spiritual teachers, and neuroscientists to discover the biggest lessons about improving your mind and body, and the simple, scientifically validated tool that evidence demonstrates is the best way to be happier with Dan Harris. 

Dan Harris is a correspondent for ABC News and the co-anchor for the weekend edition of Good Morning America. Dan regularly contributes to Nightline, 20/20, and World News and has covered stories from all over the world including war reporting in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as investigative reports in Haiti, Cambodia, the Congo and more. Dan is the author of the book 10% Happier and his work has been featured in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Dr. OZ, Good Morning America, and much more.

• How Dan went from being a skeptical hard-nosed reporter who thought meditation and self was was largely “bullshit”

• What happened when Dan had a panic attack in front of 5 million people on Live TV

• What it’s like to have your mind get hijacked by the most boring person alive

• Dan’s journey of visiting self help gurus, religious leaders, neuroscientists and more led him to one major conclusion about how to improve your brain and your body

• How many self help gurus are correct, but often not useful in a practical sense

• Simple and scientifically validated tool to deal with the voice in your head

• The secrets of "contemplative neuroscientists"

• How to train up the ability to focus, deal with emotions, be nice to other people, be nice to yourself, have patience, and be grateful

• The radical notion, supported by research, that you can literally train and transform your brain to prime it for happiness

• Happiness is skill, according to the science, and it can be trained

• There are thousands of kinds of meditation and it’s not useful to get overly dogmatic about the superiority of one method over the other

• Dan gravitates towards mindfulness meditation because it has valuable and strong research supporting it

• The basic and simple strategy you can use to start meditating RIGHT NOW

• You don’t need to clear your mind - clearing your mind is impossible

• Think about meditation like going to the gym - if you’re not sweating and panting youre not doing it right, meditation is like bicep curls for the brain

• The whole game of meditation is have the collision with the voice in your head and return to breath

• How to defeat anxiety, depression, and panic attacks using meditation

• What to do if you don’t have enough time to meditate

• The false belief that meditation is self indulgent and a waste of time

• The myth that you will lose your edge if you start meditating

• The different between responding wisely and reacting blindly

• How do we strike a balance between acceptance/mindfulness and achievement?

• Non-attachment to results - you are not fully in control of the universe - everything is interconnected and multifactorial - the wise stance for an ambitious person is to recognize that you shouldn’t be attached to results

• How do we battle back from nihilism if we go to deep down the path of buddhism?

• We do have some agency to impact the universe, but we aren’t the master of the universe

• The importance of seeing things as they are instead of as you want them to be

• It’s not about perfection its about marginal improvement, a 10% improvement compounds

• Meditation is simple but not easy

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better?

Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Website] Sam Harris

• [Website & App Download] 10% Happier

• [Book] Hoist on My Own Petard: Or: How Writing 10% Happier Threw My Own Advice Right Back in My Face by Dan Harris

• [Book] 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works by Dan Harris

• [Book] Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program by Sharon Salzberg

• [Website] MNDFL Meditation

• [Article] Mindfulness-based stress reduction and health benefits: A meta-analysis by Paul Grossman, Ludger Niemann, Stefan Schmidt, and Harald Walach

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

Today’s very special episode on the Science of Success, this is episode 100. I couldn’t imagine more than two years ago when we set out to start doing this show that we would do over a hundred episodes and we would interview so many amazing, incredible experts, but I’m super excited today. In this episode we’re going to discuss how our guest went from a hard-nosed skeptic who thought self-help was BS to someone who uncovered the evidence-based growth strategies that actually work. 

We talk about our guest’s journey from meeting self-help gurus, to spiritual leaders, and neuroscientists to discover the biggest lessons about improving your mind and body and the simple scientifically validated tools that evidence demonstrates are the best way to be happier, with our guest; Dan Harris. 

I’m going to give you four reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. Yeah, there’s an extra fourth reason today. Why is that? Well, the fourth reason, I guess, really we’re going to start with the first reason. I have something special that we’re going to do in honor of our 100th episode of the Science of Success, but you have to be on the email list to be part of it. So if you’re not on the email list, you’re not going to be eligible. In fact, you’re not even going to hear anything else about the surprise, but it’s going to be awesome. We’re doing something really special for the 100th episode only for the people on the email list. So you should definitely sign up. 

Next, if you sign up on the email list, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide, it’s called; How To Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide that you have to sign up to get by joining the email list today. You’re also going to get a curated weekly email from us every single week called Mindset Monday, which listeners have been absolutely loving. It’s a short, simple list of articles, stories and things that we found exciting in the last week. 

Lastly, you’re going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, vote on guests, submit your own personal questions for our guests, vote on changes intro music and much more. So make sure you go to successpodcast.com and sign up for the email list right on the homepage, or if you’re on the go right now, if you’re moving around, if you’re listening in your car, just text the word smarter, that’s “smarter" to the number 44222. Text “smarter” to 44222 to get all of these awesome benefits. 

In our previous episode, we discussed the groundbreaking research behind the ancient molecule that fuels peak performance, look at the foundations of neuro-economics, talked about how our brains react during social interactions. We examined how our brained are designed to connect and built to work cooperatively, and we dug into the power of oxytocin and how you can increase it in your life, with Dr. Paul Zak. If you want to know the science behind what makes your brain happy, listen to that episode.

[0:03:13.2] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show, Dan Harris. Dan is a correspondent for ABC News and the co-anchor for the weekend edition of Good Morning America. He regularly contributes to Nightline  2020 and World News and has covered stories from all over the world, including war reporting in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as investigative reports in Haiti, Cambodia, the Congo and much more. 

Dan is the author of the book 10% Happier and his work has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Dr. Oz, Good Morning America and much more. 

Dan, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:03:45.0] DH: Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it. 

[0:03:46.7] MB: We’re very excited to have you on here today. I’d love to start out, you have a fascinating background and story around what kind of lead you down this path of studying self-help and meditation more deeply. Could you share that story? 

[0:04:00.8] DH: Sure. First, let me apologize for any background noise you may hear. I’m actually at my hose and there’s possibility for noise in the background. If that happens, I apologize in advance. I am a reporter, a pretty skeptical guy. I didn’t have a lot of preexisting interest in things like self-help and meditation. I think it’d be safe to say that I was, for most of my life, I thought that stuff was bullshit would be probably the technical word. 

What started to change that for me was that back in 2004, I had a panic attack on live television. I was anchoring the news updates on Good Morning America, so that’s kind of a term of art for the person who comes on at the top of each hour and reads the headlines. Just gives you a basic rundown of here are the headlines of the day. I had been — At that state in my career, it wasn’t my full-time job. I was kind of filling in that morning on that beat, but I had done it many times before. So there was no specific reason that I was aware of for what was about to happen, which was that I basically just freaked out. It was like 7:04 in the morning and that the main hosts of the show tossed it over to me and said, “Okay. Here is Dan. He’s going to give us the headlines in the morning,” and just a few seconds into — All I had to do was read six voice overs, just basically quick stories off of the teleprompter and then I’d be done. 

Again, I was in my early 30s. I had been doing this work for, at that point, 10 years. Again, this was a pretty basic assignment for me and a few seconds into it I just was overcome with fear. My heart started raising, my lungs seized up, I couldn’t breathe, my mind was raising, my palms were sweating, my mouth dried up. It was just classic fight or flight response, and I had to do something radical to get myself out of the situation, which was I just basically quit. I somehow squeaked out, “Back to you,” to the main hosts of the show, and they looked a little surprised and just took over from there. 

As embarrassing as that was, actually what was more embarrassing was what caused it. I was and still am, really, a very ambitious news reporter and that point in my life I had spent a lot of time overseas covering the aftermath of 9/11, so the war in Afghanistan. I’ve spent a lot of time in Pakistan as well. I covered The Second Intifada in Israel. I spent a lot of time in the West Bank in Gaza. I made something like six trips to Iraq covering the war there, and that had produced for me an undiagnosed depression. I was having trouble getting out of bed. I felt like I had a little grade fever all the time, and the coping mechanism, which was extraordinarily stupid, was I started to self-medicate with recreational drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy. Just to be clear, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that movie, The Wolf of Wall Street, where there’s pounding Quaaludes every five minutes. My drug use was not like that. It was pretty intermittent and it was never when I was working, and I was never high in the air or anything like that. 

After I had the panic attack I went to a shrink who is an expert in panic and he’s asking me a bunch of questions trying to figure out what went wrong. One of the questions he asked was, “Do you do drugs?” I officially said, “Yeah, I do a little bit.” He gave me a look, one of those classic shrinky looks that communicated the following sentiment, “Okay, asshole. Mystery solved.” He pointed out that even though I hadn’t been doing drugs that long or that frequently, it was enough to artificially raise the level of adrenalin in my brain and primed me to have a panic attack. 

That was a huge aha moment for me, and I realized very quickly that I’ve been very stupid and that set me off on a long, winding, weird journey that ultimately led me to meditation. I’ll stop talking there, but that’s the basic fact story.

[0:08:12.9] MB: One of the most interesting things that I really connected with about your story was how the panic attack itself was really a manifestation of years of buildup and things all kind of culminating in that single moment. It wasn’t just something at that particular time that triggered it, but it was all of these kind of underlying factors that slowly accumulated. 

[0:08:35.0] DH: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Sorry, you’re hearing a little noise. It’s what I would call a sort of a cascade of mindlessness. It was the opposite of mindfulness, which is what you learn in meditation. Where I just wasn’t in touch with my own — I wasn’t in touch with a thunderously obvious fact that most of us are not in touch with, which is that we have a voice in our heads by which I’m not referring to schizophrenia or hearing voices or anything like that. I’m talking about your inner narrator, the voice that chases you out of bed in the morning and is yammering at you all day long and asks you constantly, like wanting stuff or not wanting stuff, judging people, comparing yourself to other people, judging yourself, thinking about the past or thinking about the future to the detriment of whatever is happening right now. 

I have a friend, a guy named Sam Harris, who’s maybe familiar to some of your listeners. It’s a good friend of mind and he’s also really into meditation. He has this wisecrack that he makes occasionally, which is that when he thinks about the voice in his head, he feels like he’s been hijacked by the most boring person alive who just says the same shit over and over, most of it negative, all of it self-referential. 

What I realized, what I came to realize in my journeys after the panic attack was that when you’re unaware of this nonstop conversation that you are having with yourself, it yanks you around. It’s why eat when we’re not hungry or we check our email in the middle of a conversation with our child or we lose our temper when it’s really not strategically wise. For me, the voice in the head is why I had gone off to warzone without really thinking about the psychological consequences. I was really sort of wrapped up in idealism and curiosity and ambition, and then I came home, got depressed and was insufficiently self-aware to even know it, and then I blindly self-medicated and it all blew up in my face. 

[0:10:27.7] MB: I think that’s so powerful, and you see — One of the things that you talk about in the book and in the stories that you’ve shared is that often times all of these kind of self-help literature strikes many chords in the sense that it can kind of identify some of these problems and in many instances does a great job of pointing out that there’s negative voice in our heads, but sometimes can kind of go too far or doesn’t really offer practical strategies and solutions for resolving that. 

[0:10:55.4] DH: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Just to fill in some of the blanks there. Many years after the panic attack, I ended up reading on the recommendation of one of my colleagues actually, a book by Eckhart Tolle, who may be familiar to your listeners, huge self-help guru. I had never heard of the dude. My producer recommend that I read him, because at the time, one of my areas of interest as a reporter was faith and spirituality, which was an interesting, I say areas of interest. I was forced to be interested in it, because I was raised basically by atheist parents. I did have a Bar Mitzvah, but only for the money. 

Mind boss, Peter Jennings, who’s now no longer with us, but he had the kind of strong-armed me into taking over the faith and spirituality feat. As a consequence to that, one of my producers recommend that I read this Eckhart Tolle book, and Tolle was the first person who pointed out to me via his book that I have a voice in my head, again, not schizophrenia, but this inner narrator that we’ve discussed, and it was just a massive, massive headline for me. I just was unaware. I knew that I had thoughts, etc., etc., but nobody had really articulated this idea of our ego, this inner yammering that we have all the time and how negative and destructive it can be when you’re unaware of it. 

The problem with Eckhart Tolle in my view, and I’m going to paraphrase a friend of mine who says, “Tolle is correct, but not useful.” In my view, Eckhart Tolle beautifully articulates this phenomenon of the voice in the head, but there are several problems. One is like he’s really weird about it at times and gauges his pseudoscientific dabbling and also like a lot of grandiose promises about spiritual awakenings and blah-blah-blah. That’s one problem for me. The other problem for me is that I had a hard time finding any actionable or practical advice about dealing with the voice in the head in his material. Ultimately, that’s what got me to — I’m very grateful to Eckhart Tolle. I make fun of him a lot. But if I hadn’t read his stuff, I never would have ultimately found meditation, which is a really simple secular scientifically validated tool for dealing with this fundamental fact about the human situation, which is that we have this stream of consciousness often driving us to do phenomenally stupid things. 

[0:13:36.6] MB: In your journey, you met with self-help gurus, spiritual leaders, scientists, people across the board. What was kind of the resounding conclusion from all of these different spheres of influence? 

[0:13:49.0] DH: Yeah. The self-help, my peregrinations in the self-help world, which I write about in the book, I mostly put in there for entertainment of value, because I think we really get much useful information out of it, but it was pretty weird, so it makes good copy, so I write about it. 

Once I started talking to scientists, specifically, neuroscientists who are looking at what meditation does to your brain and to your body, that’s really what — That for me was the signal moment. Just seeing that there’s this little community of what’s called contemplative neuroscientists, and now not so little, but smaller at the time when I was looking into it many years ago. When I started to look into it, they were doing this path, this groundbreaking research. For years, the dogma, the received wisdom in the world of neuroscience was that the brain doesn’t change after like your mid-20s. 

In fact, what the research on meditation has shown us is that you can train your brain very specific ways. In fact, we’re all training our brains all the time, mostly in negative ways, mindless ways, we’re training it to eat crappy food or to watch crappy television or to be totally distracted by our devices, but actually the act of meditation, and we can talk about what that actually is. The act of meditation is training up the qualities that I think most of us would agree we want, like the ability to focus, the ability not to be yanked around by your emotions, the ability to be nice to other people, the ability to be nice to yourself, the ability to have patience, the ability to be grateful for stuff. All of these qualities that we want are trainable, and that is a radical nation, because most of us think that happiness is dependent upon the quality of our childhood, the quality of our marriage, the quality of our work life, all of which are super important. I’m not down playing that at any way. I’m focused on all of those things. 

In fact, what the science is telling us is that happiness is a skill, that you take your responsibility for it and train and your own just the way you can work on your body in the gym. If you think about it, most of us spend so much time working on our bodies, working on our stock portfolio, our interior design, our cars, but no time working on and maintaining the one filter through which we experience everything, and that is our mind. To me, the resounding headline out of my time with this theory of scientist was that. 

[0:16:19.5] MB: When you talk about meditation and people throw around different strategies and types of meditation, everything from mantra-based meditation, mindfulness meditation, etc., what do you think kind of the — How would you define it and what do you think the most effective forms of meditation are?

[0:16:35.5] DH: I’ve read some of your writing about meditation as well, and I think it’s important to honor the fact that there are thousands of kinds of meditation and I don’t think it’s useful for me or anybody to get orally dogmatic about the superiority of one over another. The word meditation, as one of my scientist friends like to say, the word meditation is a bit like the word sports. It describes a whole range of activities. Water polo and badminton don’t have a lot in common. There are tons of kinds of meditation. 

I have gravitated towards something called mindfulness meditation, because that is the kind of meditation that has been on the receiving end of most of the scientific research. Not all. Lots of other kinds of meditation have been studied too, but most of the research that I’m aware of and the strongest research appears to really be centric around mindfulness meditation. 

I also like it because it’s a validly secular. Mindfulness meditation is derived from Buddhist meditation, and you can make an argument, as I often do, that Buddhism itself isn’t even really a religion. It can be practiced as one, but in my view, it’s an interesting religion, because the more fundamentalist you get, the less metaphysical you become in my view within Buddhism. Some people disagree with me on that, so I want to be clear that that’s my view. 

Anyway, mindfulness meditation is derived from Buddhism, but it’s stripped of all of the metaphysical claims and religious lingos and it’s delivered as a secular exercise for the brain and the mind, and some might say the heart, although I try to avoid that kind of language, because it can be off-putting to people like me. 

Basic mindfulness meditation is really simple. The beginning instructions are to sit comfortably with your spine straight so that you’re not falling asleep, although if you fall asleep, worst things could happen. It just probably means you need more sleep. Sit comfortably with your spine straight. A lot of people close their eyes, although you don’t have to. You can kind of soften your gaze and stare at a neutral point on the floor or whatever. That’s the first step. There are only three. 

The second step is just to kind of focus on the feeling of your breath coming in and going out. Usually you pick a spot where it’s most prominent, like your nose or your chest or your belly, and this is an important step, because you’re not actually thinking about your breath. You’re doing this interesting thing of just feeling it. You’re just feeling the raw data of the physical sensation of the breath coming in and going out. 

Then the third step is the key to mindfulness meditation, and this is the money move here, which is as soon as you try to do this seemingly simple thing of just feeling your breath coming in and going out, your mind is going to mutiny, your mind is going to go crazy. You’re going to start thinking about all sorts of stupid shit, like what’s for lunch? Do I need a haircut? Why Dances with Wolves beat Goodfellas for best picture in 1991? Blah-blah-blah. The whole game is just to notice when you become distracted and to start again and again and again and again. This is like a golf game with a million mulligans. 

In fact, a lot of people feel like they can — I hear this all the time. In fact, I’m writing a book that’s coming out at New Year’s that’s about all of the reasons why people don’t meditate. I would say the number two reason why people don’t meditate is because there’s this feeling of, “I can’t clear my mind.” The good news is you don’t need to clear your mind. In fact, clearing your mind is impossible unless you’re enlightened or dead. 

The way to think about meditation is similar to going to the gym. If you go to the gym and you’re not panting or sweating, you’re cheating. If you sit to meditate and all thoughts have disappeared, like you might want to go to the hospital, or you should go to the mountain top, because you are enlightened. 

Really, the whole game of meditation is just to over and over have this collision with the voice in your head, and the reason that’s valuable is that the more you become familiar with the insanity of your inner narrator, your ego, the less owned you are by the insanity. The goal of meditation is not to clear your mind. The goal is to focus your mind for just nanoseconds at a time on the feeling of your breath coming in and going out, coming in and going out. Then when you get lost, start again, and start again. 

The three benefits that really emerge from this are; one, just a greater sense of calm; two, a greater focus, because you’re engaged in this daily, this exercise of trying to feel your breath coming in and going out and then when you get lost, just start again. That’s like a bicep growth of your brain on your ability to focus. Third is this word mindfulness. Mindfulness is just the ability — This is the most important benefits. It’s the ability to see what’s going on in your head at any given moment without getting carried away by it. That benefit is derived from just over and over and over seeing how fucking crazy you are but not reacting to it. Just trying to see it nonjudgmentally, “Oh, yeah. That’s right. I just gotten distracted by a big blast of anger or I’m planning something or I’m thinking about something random or whatever. I don’t have to deal with it right now. I see what it is. I’m going back to my breath.” 

Then the value of that is in your — The rest of your life, when you’re ambushed by a big blast of anger or you’re tempted to eat the 18th cookie or you’re tempted to say the thing that’s going to ruin the next 48 hours of your marriage. You can catch it before you actually do it. It’s like having an internal meteorologist that’s pointing out the hurricane before it makes landfall. That, to me, is the game changer. 

[0:22:19.0] MB: I think that’s a great description, and I’ve heard one of the simplest kind of explanations to that is that meditation is the return to breath. It’s not this kind of state of having no thoughts, but it’s really the act of returning to that state whenever your mind wanders. 

[0:22:34.4] DH: Yes. It took me  years to internalize this, because all the basic meditation instructions — For years, I was a phenomenal — And I’ve been meditating for eight years. I’ve been publicly evangelizing for meditation for the last three and a half since my book came out and since I started this app also called 10% Happier, and a podcast also called 10% Happier. I’m not a pretty public evangelist for this thing. 

For much of that time, I have been a massive hypocrite, because when I first heard the beginning instructions of meditation as a type A driver, I basically ignored the third step, which is when you get distracted, start again, because I told myself, the cocky asshole that I am, I told myself, “I don’t need that step, because I’m going to win at this thing. I’m going to get so good that I’m not going to get distracted,” which is that it’s just impossible and so phenomenally stupid. It ignores that what you just said, which is that the act of meditating is noticing you’ll become distracted and starting again. That is the magic moment. If you can be cool to yourself in that moment instead of doing what I’ve done, which is engaging in endless and useless rounds of self-flagellation around my inability to focus, then the whole thing starts to flow with much more ease. 

[0:23:54.5] MB: I’m sure if you're listening to this show, you’re passionate about mastering new skills and abilities, and that's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our sponsor this week, Skillshare. Skillsshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn everything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography, and you can get unlimited access to the entire catalog for a low monthly price so you don't have to pay per class like many other sites. 

They have some really cool courses on there. They have a course on Evernote mastery. You know how much I love Evernote. Evernote runs basically my entire life and I highly recommend using it as a tool, but also checking out their course on how to do it. They have a really cool course on productivity planning and they have a course on mind maps. Mind maps are awesome. I have a mind map sitting on my desk that I'm looking at right now for the Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin. I love my mind maps. It’s an incredible strategy that speaks directly to your brain and your subconscious and it's a really cool tool to remember things. 

There's so many fascinating courses on Skillshare, and the cool thing is they’ve been so kind to the show, they've been an incredible sponsor, and they're giving all of our listeners a free month of access, so get in there. You can get free classes for up to a month completely for free. You can check out all of these courses, just go to skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month. 

[0:25:22.2] MB: Tell me the story of how you kind of fell off the wagon and maybe fell out of the rhythm of meditating. 

[0:25:29.3] DH: That has never happened actually for me interestingly. It is a real issue for many, many people. I don’t want to pretend that I’m especially disciplined. Just by way of an example to prove this to you, not long ago I have a huge problem around food. I’m a slim guy, but I have a huge sugar addiction, because I am an addictive personality. True story, not long ago I ate so many Oreos one night while watching TV with my wife that I woke up in the middle of the night and puked. 

I tell you that, because I don’t want you to think that I’m somehow some militaristic, inhuman, disciplined dude. I’m not. I have never fallen off the meditation wagon largely because I’m now like so publicly associated with meditation that I’m not willing to live with that level of hypocrisy, A. B, more importantly, because I have a lifelong struggle with depression and anxiety and it’s so clear to me that when I do less meditation, like if I’m like on a big breaking news story and I’m only getting a few minutes a day, that I can see how much more noxious my inner weather becomes. 

I do many things in my life to stay off what Winston Churchill has called the black dog of depression and like daily exercise. It’s not because I’m super disciplined, it’s because it sucks so badly when I get depressed that I’m willing to be quite regimented about a few things in order to make sure it doesn’t happen. 

[0:27:08.4] MB: That’s something that I’ve dealt with as well, and I totally agree. It’s really funny, because the simplest things are often the most effective, right? Meditation, getting enough sleep, exercising on a regular basis, if you just do those, you’re 80% of the way there into battling back the anxiety and depression. 

[0:27:26.7] DH: Yes. I would add to that. I know you weren’t trying to make a comprehensive list, but I would just amplify your excellent point by adding in proper diet and having good relationships and meaningful work, whether it’d be volunteer work or your actual career, like a sense of meaning in your life and also a sense of social connection either to family members or friends. These are the things you need to do in order to maintain mental fitness in my view. 

There’s a funny story of my shrink, who’s a really great guy and a sort of no nonsense dude, also quite ambitious and very, very willing to point out when I’m being an asshole. Early on, when he was helping me avoid panic attacks, quit doing drugs, etc., etc., he used an animal analogy to explain to me that I really need to take care of myself, because of how prone I am to anxiety, depression and panic, the wonderful trifecta there. 

Years later, I went back to him and I said, “Remember that animal analogy you told me that I needed to treat myself like a stallion?” He’s like, “No. No. No. No. I said thoroughbred.” Of course, I, being the, as I mentioned before, cocky bastard that I am, heard stallion. In other words, if you are prone to these conditions, you do need to treat yourself like a finicky thoroughbred, a hothouse flower, you need to take care of yourself, because this is what will lower the odds or recurrence. There’s no silver bullet. Let’s just be clear about this. I certainly don’t think meditation is that silver bullet. There’s a reason why all of my endeavors are branded under 10% Happier, the book, the app, podcast, because I don’t want to do what I think — I don’t want to be guilty of what I think is rampant in the $11 billion howling sea of bullshit that is our self-help industry where they pedal these sort of reckless panaceas. I just think meditation is another arrow for your quiver. 

[0:29:30.7] MB: Tell me a little bit about the new project that you’re working on and kind of diving into why people don’t meditate. 

[0:29:37.4] DH: Yeah. It grows out of the — About two years ago, I started to work on a meditation app with my meditation teacher; Joseph Goldstein, who’s this kind of legendary teacher. We launched a sort of minimum viable product about two years ago and then we actually put up a much more fulsome 10% Happier app about a year ago, but we’re still very much in the early stages. Although growing fast, faster than I would have expected, because there seems to be a real appetite for this kind of instruction. 

I’ve learned so much in the course of becoming, in essence, a small businessman, an entrepreneur. What I’ve really learned is that I made some mistakes in my first book, because I kind of cavalierly assumed that if I demystified meditation and made it seemed fun and useful and told a funny story about it, that everybody would go and do it, but the human behavior changes so complex. 

I think we now — The culture has really changed on meditation. When I first started getting in it back in like 2008, 2009, there was a huge stigma around it. I think there still is in many quarters, but that has really — That stigma has declined in many ways. Where I think we are now as a culture, is that we have millions of people who know they ought to be meditating, but aren’t, can’t get over the hump to do it. 

In the course of doing, building this app, we did a lot of market and consumer research and started to identify the main, we call them secret fears, but basically another way you describe them is just main obstacles or myths, misconceptions and self-deceptions that could stand in the way of people meditating. That led to a book idea, like let’s taxonomize these myths and misconceptions, like make a full list of them and then really help people get over the hump. We did this ridiculous things where we rented an orange rock to our bus, and me and one of my favorite meditation teacher, a guy named, Jeff Warren, he’s a Canadian, hilarious meditation teacher. Me and him and a whole crew of people, we got in this bus and we drove across county over the course of 11 days and we met people who sort of embodied these various obstacles and we help them get over the hump and actually start a habit. 

Actually, the book isn’t out until January, but a lot of the material from the road trip is available on the 10% Happier app, so you can see the videos and get access to some of what we learned and also learn how to meditate there for free. 

Just a taste of some of the obstacles we encountered. The most obvious ones are — The biggest one, first of all, is time. People feel like I don’t have time to do this. I have good news on that score and then I also have better news. The good news is I think what you should be shooting for is 5 to 10 minutes a day-ish, daily-ish, trying to get 5 to 10 minutes in most days. That’s, I think, a really good goal to have. 

Here’s the better news; if you don’t feel like you’re ready to do that or if you, on one day, you’re just too busy to sneak that in, I believe firmly that one minute counts. We are on the app building a lot of — We have them up there now and we’re actually going to be doing even more, one minute meditation. As a way to help people get over what is the biggest obstacle, which is finding time for meditation. Too often, people think they need to do a really dedicated ton of time to it, and then it becomes another thing on there to do list, which is stressing them out, which is defeating the whole purpose of meditation, which should help you reduce stress. 

The second fear which we discussed, which is the idea that you’re supposed to clear your mind, which I think we’ve thoroughly debunked that in the course of this conversation. Others include, and this is particularly prevalent among women I found, the idea that meditation is self-indulgent. That sitting with your eyes closed and doing nothing. It’s just like a complete waste of time and you ought to be out doing much more useful things. 

My wife labored under that illusion for a long time. The answer to that of course is that if you are not taking care of yourself, you’re not equipped to help other people. It’s like that cliché from the airline safety instructions; put your own oxygen mask on first before assisting others. 

Let me think of one other obstacle. Yes, I think will, I think, resonate with your audience. Another main misconception that stands in the way of a lot of people meditating is the idea that you’ll lose your edge if you do it. We spent some time in our road trip with police officers in Tempe, Arizona, and some of them were really worried that in their dangerous, fast-moving, stressful job, that if they started to meditate, that they would be ineffective. In fact, that it could be downward dangerous. 

Again, I think this is a misconception. I think there’s a reason why we’re seeing some of the most — People who are engaged in the most high-octane works; athletes, executives, scientists, lawyers are now using meditation, because it sharpens your edge. It puts you in the zone. It allows you to be less yanked around by random emotions so you can stay on task and be maximally effective. That’s why we’re now seeing a lot of police departments and Marines and soldiers embracing meditation. That’s kind of a sampling of some of the obstacles we found. If you want a full dissection, you’ll get it soon.  

[0:35:19.5] MB: There’s a couple of those that I’d love to break down. The idea that you’re losing your edge, I’ve definitely heard that, and it’s so funny, because when you really start practicing it, you can see how much more clear the edge has become. You’re so much more centered and focused. My reaction to stressful situations now, and it reminds me of, I think, a quote from — I think it’s Marine Corps snipers, which is slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. In the midst of crisis, my reaction is often to slow down, because if you’re slow and methodical, you can see all the pieces moving around and you can figure out, “What do I really need to do right now?” If you’re reacting really rapidly, you’re getting whipped around by kind of the winds of fate and running around like a chicken with your head cutoff. Often times you’re not only not being effective in trying to actually achieve what you want, but you’re being counterproductive. 

[0:36:10.7] DH: Yes, I think that was beautifully said and I think it’s fully accurate. I write about this a lot in my book, this lose your edge myth was a massive factor for me, and it is possible to misinterpret the message of mindfulness and to be passive in the face of life’s challenges. I’ve actually fallen into that rut, and I actually go into embarrassing detail about how I’ve done so in the book. 

Really, that is the opposite of what meditation should teach you to do. It doesn’t mean that you should be lifelessly and non-judgmentally observing everything and passively resigned in the face of challenges and emergencies, etc., etc. The goal is that you should learn how to responds wisely to things instead of reacting blindly. 

Most of time, there’s no buffer between the stimuli in our life and our blind reaction to it, but with meditation you’re able to get enough self-awareness so that maybe 10% of the time, when something infuriates you or scares you, you are able to respond, take a breath and respond with some wisdom rather than just getting yanked around by it. That is massively valuable in stressful situations, in strategic situations, in interpersonal relations, from your marriage, to your colleagues, to your bosses. This is a huge game changer. 

Again, it’s why we’re seeing some of the people we admire the most, the Chicago Cubs, the U.S. Marines, 50 Cent. That dude got shot nine times. I’m glad he’s using meditation to get some peace of mind. Some of the most aspirational figures in our culture are embracing this precisely because it enhances rather than erodes your edge. 

I think it speaks to a deep misconception in our culture, which is that if you get to happy, you’ll get complaisant. I think that is to misunderstand what happiness is, that people think that happiness is this like sort of passively resting on your laurels, but that to me isn’t what happiness is. 

[0:38:27.7] MB: I think you’ve kind of hinted at something that I think about a lot, which is how do we strike a balance between sort of acceptance and mindfulness, versus achievement. How do you think about that balance? 

[0:38:41.2] DH: Yeah. There’s something I’ve learned from my teachers, which has been really useful to me, which is the idea of non-attachment to results, which is going to sound counterintuitive at the beginning. If you’re achievement-oriented, it’s very natural to feel attached to the outcome of whatever project you’re working on. I have a startup company that is teaching people how to meditate through an app. I’m attached to whether we succeed. I have been writing a book that comes out in January. I’m attached to whether that succeeds, or that’s my inclination is to get overly attached. 

However, that is to willfully overlook some rather obvious things, which is that you’re not fully in control of the universe and everything is interacted multifactorial and the wise stands for an ambitious person, is to recognize that it makes sense to work really hard and stress and plot and plan on whatever you’re working on, but then to recognize that at some point you lose control. If you’re not overly attached to the outcome of whatever you’re working on, then you have more resilience to bounce back. 

I have so many projects that I’m working on my life; my journalism career at ABC News, where I’m constantly launching investigative projects, to the app that I’ve mentioned, the books that I’m writing, I have a podcast, and I’m always pitching new ideas. Sometimes things don’t work or they don’t go as well as I’ve planned. If I’m so knocked out and paralyzed by any setback, because I’ve become so overly attached to the success of a thing, it hinders my ability to be resilient and, really, to analyze with dry ice what went wrong so that I don’t do it again. 

Yeah, that to me has been just incredibly valuable lesson. Don’t get me wrong, I still — I’ve had a couple of setbacks lately that really threw me for a loop and I mourn the loss of things when they don’t go my way, and I can probably be pretty unpleasant if my wife just walked into the house and I gave her the phone, she would probably tell you how unpleasant I can be in the days or weeks after something doesn’t go my way. I think my bounce back time has gotten much better. 

[0:41:07.4] MB: If we falloff kind of on the opposite end of this spectrum in terms of going down the rabbit hole of thinking really fundamentally that everything is so interconnected, so multifactorial, that it’s really beyond our control, how do we — If we’re in kind of that deep end of the pool, how do we pull back and still strive to build or achieve things in the world? 

[0:41:29.3] DH: Yeah, it’s a great question among many great questions. That’s to misunderstand, and that’s like one of the classic pitfalls of this path is to fall into a kind of nihilism that like, “Oh, yeah. Everything is so deeply interconnected, so fleetingly impermanent, that there’s no way I can have agency.” That’s not true. It’s somewhere in the middle there that you certainly have some agency and some ability to affect the universe, the world around you. You’re just not the master of the universe. Sort of figuring out that titration is key, and figuring out what leverage you actually can impact and which you cannot is really key. I don’t have some secret sauce, some magic, some silver bullet that will allow you to navigate this. It’s I’m constantly trying to figure out in my own life. The best way to proceed is from a position of clearly seeing what reality is and that, like it or not, is reality. 

[0:42:30.7] MB: I think that’s a great point, and something that meditation I think really helps crystalize is the ability to both see and accept things as they are as supposed to as you want them to be. 

[0:42:42.5] DH: It’s exactly right. Again, it’s not like I don’t struggle with this. I do. Maybe there are meditation masters out there who have some beautiful equipoise that allows them to move to the world like a ninja without getting upset when things don’t go their way. That’s not me. Again, it goes back to my whole 10% happier thesis. This is not about perfection. This is just about marginal improvement. I would add, since I’m now stuck with this stupid 10% joke, that I kind of pulled that on my butt. The 10% compounds annually. The more you practice, the better you get at this stuff. 

[0:43:20.0] MB: That’s another great point as well and something that I think about a lot kind of on this journey. In many ways, the journey of the podcast as a whole is about this compounded improvement and the idea that if we can make incremental improvements in our ability to manage our emotions, to think more clearly about reality, to understand, as we talk a lot about in this show, the mental models that kind of govern the world. Those improvements compound overtime to produce a really drastically different kind of understanding of the world, of yourself, and really your ability to create and achieve things in that world. 

[0:43:54.0] DH: I think that’s exactly right. I think it’s a really positive useful message to be spreading, so good on you. 

[0:44:00.4] MB: For somebody wants to get started with meditation, what would either be maybe kind of the simple piece of homework you would give them as a starting point, or just something that you would say to them as like, “Here’s the dead simple way you could start literally today and just try it out.” 

[0:44:19.3] DH: Yeah. One overarching thing is that it should be cheap or free. I’d be a little weary of somebody asking you for a ton of money to learn how to meditate. There are lots of options. The three that come to mind are; one, the way I learned how to meditate, which his by reading a few good books. As I articulated earlier, the basic instructions are pretty simple. It’s very easy to lose your way though, because usually people start to have a lot of questions. I just read a few basic meditation books and just went from there. 

One that I like in particular is called Real Happiness by my friend, Sharon Salzberg, who’s just a master teacher. Pick that book up and it will explain the basics to you and you’re up and running. Come January, the book that I’m working on about the obstacles to meditation will be the book that I will recommend the most, because that book will also include a ton of, “Here’s how to meditate.” Anyway, one option is just pick up a good book. 

The other option is an app. Obviously, on partial, our app, 10% Happier, but there are a lot of good apps out there and all of them, to my knowledge, teach you the basics for free. For example, if you download our app, there’s a whole course teaches you how to do it. You don’t have to pay us anything and you can use that material as long as you want. Frankly, you never have to pay us anything. If you want to subscribe, great, we love that, but it’s not mandatory. If you don’t like our app, there are plenty of options out there. That’s another tip I would recommend, so book, apps. 

Then third is if you live in a city where you can go to an in-person class, I highly recommend that. I think it’s really useful to be in a room with other people who want to do it. I think that has kind of an HOV lane effect, and to be in a room with a teacher who you might want to taste test a little bit, go to different places. I live in New York City. There are tons of options. There are a bunch of — There are meditation studios all over the city. Some of them are Buddhist, some of them are Hindu, some of them are secular. Like this one chain that I particularly like called Mndfl, M-N-D-F-L, which is run by a friend of mine. 

L.A. has a bunch of both secular and Buddhist meditation centers. We’re seeing secular meditation centers popping up in Miami, Austin, Chicago, Washington D.C. and elsewhere. Also, if you live in a smaller place, you may not have a meditation studio per se available, but there are often teachers who will teach some MBSR; mindfulness-based stress reduction, which is, again, the secular meditation secular, which is an eight-week course and it’s offered all over the country. Just do a little Googling. You might be able to find somebody in your area. If you live in an area where there are no meditation teachers and you really want a teacher, there are teachers who are willing to teach via Skype. 

[0:47:10.9] MB: What has been the hardest thing for you about becoming a consistent meditator?

[0:47:15.7] DH: Like I said before, for me, consistency hasn’t been that hard and I feel a little sheepish saying that, because I think it really is hard for a lot of people. Working on this book, the thing I learned about human behavior change is perhaps the most important attitude with which to approach it is one of experimentation and exploration. You should know, we are not wired as — We did not evolve for long-term planning about our health and well-being. We evolved to escape from saber-toothed tigers and get the meal today. We evolved for pretty immediate gratification and also to get our genes into future generations. 

Changing your behavior to improve your health and wellness is a really hard thing, and I think just being aware of that and giving yourself a break and going into any formation of a new habit with a spirit of like, “I’m going to experiment. I know I’m going to fail, and that’s cool.” Rather than trying to rely on the extremely ephemeral and unreliable internal reservoir of willpower, which is a huge — I think often sort of destructive myth. In the behavior change world, people think, “Oh, well. I don’t have willpower.” No. You need to experiment and see what works for you. What works with your schedule? What provides you with the benefits you need to be pulled along by the benefits, by the positive outcomes of the practice rather than trying to whip yourself over the back and force yourself to do the thing, because that’s not a recipe for a sustainable habit. 

Boiling it down; just experiment. Try different  times a day, try different apps, try different books and just know that you will fail and that you just need to have the resilience to get up and start again once you fall off the wagon. It’s totally fine.

[0:49:17.2] MB: For listeners who want to learn more about you, want to dig in and read the books, check out the app, where can people find you and these resources online? 

[0:49:25.7] DH: Thanks for that. The book is available on Amazon. The app is available — If you have an Apple device, you can download, it’s in the App Store. If you don’t have an Apple, we’re working on an android version, which should be available in the pretty near future, I hope. If you don’t have an Apple device, you can get a web-based version at 10percenthappier.com. The podcast; 10% Happier Podcast, is available wherever you get your podcasts. 

I think the pitch for the podcast is that basic meditation is pretty basic. The cliché is that it’s simple but not easy. It can start to feel a little stupid after a while just sitting there and watching your breath. One thing that I found to be incredibly useful is to have sources of ongoing inspiration, and that’s why I started the podcast, because you’ll hear from great meditation teachers, you’ll hear from celebrities. We’ve had the lead singer of Weezer on. We’ve had athletes on. We’ve had Marine Corps, folks from the U.S. Military. Josh Groban, the singer. Blah-blah-blah. We have lots of people on and we talk about meditation. How it plays out in an individual mind and life. Talked to cops. We talked to all sorts of people. I find that, for me, as the host, and hopefully for the listener, that this is just a way — It’s just like a support for your [inaudible 0:50:39.6].

[0:50:40.3] MB: Dan, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your amazing story and all of these wisdom about meditation. 

[0:50:47.9] DH: Thanks for having me. Great questions. Really appreciate it. 

[0:50:51.0] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's matt@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and personally read and respond to every single listener email.

I want to give you a couple of reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First, we’re doing something special in honor of our 100th episode, but you have to be on the email list to find out what it is and to be eligible to participate. 

Next, you’re going to get an exclusive weekly email from us every single Monday called Mindset Monday. It’s short, simple, awesome articles, TED Talks and stories, things that we found exciting in the last week. You’re also going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, vote on guests, submit your own questions to our guests, vote on major changes in the show. If you want to be part of what we’re creating here, make sure to get on the email list. 

Lastly, you’re going to get our awesome free guide that we create based on listener demand including our most popular guide; How to Organize and Remember Everything. Listeners have been absolutely loving that guide. It’s super helpful and it’s exactly the system I use to keep track of all the information I get from interviewing amazing guests, reading a ton of books and much more. Be sure to sign up and join the email list today. You can do that simply by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage, or if you’re on the go, if you’re driving around, just text the word “smarter”, that’s “smarter” to the number 44222.

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get everything we talked about in the show, all the information, links, transcripts and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can find them at our website, successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

The Ancient Molecule You Can Use To Unlock Peak Performance with Dr. Paul Zak

In this episode we discuss the groundbreaking research behind the ancient molecule that fuels peak performance, the foundations of neuroeconomics, how our brains react during social interactions, we examine how our brains are designed to connect and built to work cooperatively, we dig into the power of oxytocin and how you can increase it in your life, and much more with Dr. Paul Zak.

Dr. Paul Zak is founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies and Professor of Economics, Psychology, and Management at Claremont Graduate University. He was also among the team of scientists who were the first to use brain imaging to identify the role of oxytocin as a key driver of trust, love, and morality that distinguish our humanity. Paul is the author of the new book Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance Companies and has appeared on ABC World News, CNN, Fox Business, and more.

• Paul founded the field of Neuroeconomics - what is that?

• How are humans able to interact with total strangers when that is impossible in the animal kingdom?

• How do our brains balance the risks of meeting a stranger vs the benefits of increased social influence?

• Our brains live in this soup of chemicals, none of which we are aware of consciously

• How Paul’s groundbreaking research transformed what scientists thought about the production of oxytocin and how humans build trust

• Testosterone inhibits oxytocin synthesis

• People are complicated, its important to have alot of acceptance

• Oxytocin is an on/off switch

• Paul challenges the listeners to a fight!

• Our brains naturally help us adapt to the environment we are in

• How do we get people in groups to perform at their highest level

• How you can train your brain to release more oxytocin

• Learn how to read the emotional state of the people around you

• “All research is me-search”

• How “listening with your eyes” can help boost your oxytocin and help you become more in sync with people

• The “evil trick” you can use to get tons of information when you meet someone (it’s NOT what you expect!)

• Our brains are designed to connect, we want to be connected. We are naturally open to touch. Our brains are built to work cooperatively.

• Strategies you can use in your daily life to increase your oxytocin

• How companies can measure and manage their culture for high trust and high performance

• The 8 key building blocks leaders can use to build trust and improve high performance

• Paul focuses on measuring brain activity and use that to solve real problems that humans have.

• Its all about empowering humans to be their best selves

• The neuroscience firmly demonstrates the power and vital importance of sleep

• How you can implement concrete changes to get the biggest bang for your buck in building a culture of high performance

• We trust people more who are their real, vulnerable, natural selves

• Why you should replace “how was your weekend” with “hey you look really <insert emotion on their face>” to build deeper relationships

• Almost no human can survive on their own - we only survive in groups - we must understand how to engage the groups that we are constantly around

• Science predicts, and data strongly supports, that people want to be and enjoy being part of high performance groups

• Relationships are super important

• Why isn’t work an adventure? How can we make a work an adventure

• Connecting, touching, giving a gift - give the gift of connection, empowerment, love, to someone around you

• Effective social behaviors are rooted in SERVICE and serving others

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better?

Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance Companies by Paul J. Zak

• [Book] The Moral Molecule: How Trust Works by Paul J. Zak

• [Website] Ofactor

• [Personal Site] Paul J. Zak

• [Video] Paul Zak: Trust, morality - and oxytocin

• [Video] TEDxAmsterdam 2012: Paul J Zak - The Biology of Good and Evil

• [HBR Article] The Research Is Clear: Long Hours Backfire for People and for Companies by Sarah Green Carmichael

• [Wiki Page] Peter Drucker

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

In this episode we discuss the groundbreaking research behind the ancient molecule that fuels peak performance, the foundations of the neuro-economics, how our brains react during social interactions. We examine how our brains are designed to connect and build to work cooperatively. We dig into the power of oxytocin and how you can increase it in your life, and much more with Dr. Paul Zak. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First; you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we create based on listener demand. This is our most popular guide, it’s called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another sweet surprise bonus guide when you sign up today by joining the email list. 

Next, you’re going to get a curated weekly email from us every single Monday called Mindset Monday. Listeners have been absolutely loving this email. It’s simple, it’s short, it’s a few things every single week that we find interesting and exciting. 

Lastly, you’re going to get a listener exclusive chance to shape the show; vote on guests, vote on and submit questions to our guests. In fact, we’ve got an interview coming up this week where we had listeners submit questions, and we’re going to be asking those questions and calling specific listeners out that gave us those questions. You get to vote on new intro music, changing all kinds of pieces of the show. It’s an awesome chance to shape the podcast. So be sure to sign up for the email list. All three of those reasons are great reasons to join the emails today. Just go to successpodcast.com and signup right on the homepage, or just text the word “smarter" to the number 44222. That’s “smarter” to the number 44222.

In our previous episode, we discussed how to use mind control techniques to create any habit you want. Why we’re driven much more by pain than pleasure. We looked at the Hook Model for describing human behavior, talked about how to hack your reward to change your behavior, and the power of tiny amounts of friction and much more with our guest, Nir Eyal. If you want to hack your behavior to make or break any habit, listen to that episode. 

[0:02:30.8] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show; Dr. Paul Zak. Paul is the founding director of the Center for Neuroecoomics Studies and a professor of economics, psychology and management at Claremont Graduate University. He was also among the team of scientists who are the first to use brain imaging to identify the role of oxytocin as they key driver of trust, love and morality that distinguishes our humanity. Paul is the author of the new book Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High Performance Companies and has appeared on ABC World News, CNN, Fox Business and more. 

Paul, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:03:04.4] PZ: Matt Bodnar, great to be on with you. 

[0:03:06.5] MB: We’re super excited to have you on today. For listeners who may not be familiar with you and your background, I’d love to go back and start with kind of your story and some of the early experiments that you did that really uncovered the power and the role of oxytocin. 

[0:03:22.5] PZ: Sure. I’m a very confused person. I have spent both the economics and neuroscience in both my training and my research help start this field called neuro-economics that we could talk about a bit. 

Anyway, one of the kind of deep questions that I’ve been studying for almost 20 years now is the role of interpersonal trust in explaining why countries perform better, why companies perform better, why individuals have more friends, are happier. As part of this quest, I was looking for a signal on the brain that would tell us essentially why we can live around strangers all the time. If we think of our closest genetic relatives; chimpanzees, they don’t like other members of their species they don’t know. 

I just came back to Atlanta a couple of days and I spent six hours on a metal tube with 150 other humans being dowsed around. You put chimpanzees on a metal tube, don’t even bounce them, put them in a metal tube and you see fur and blood to be all over the floor. How do we do that? How do we get a sense that you met wonderful human being, fun to hang out with you and your producer are often clearly a sketchy dude, don’t want to be around him. We have to have something in our heads that say, “Matt is safe. Austin, not so much.” Otherwise we can’t live in New York City or any big place we don’t know people all the time. 

Basically, the punch line is the secret to my success has been to read research and animals and figure out a way to apply that to human. We began running experiments in which we could have people share money with each other, and that money would grow if they shared it, but then they would lose control over it. Animals have been shown that when an animal encounters another member of a specie that it recognizes, usually by smell, think of this in a burrow. I ran into Matt in a burrow and I sniff and I can say, “Oh, that’s Matt. I know him. He’s awesome.” And so my brain makes this chemical oxytocin and it motivates me to affiliate with you so we can — I’d love to stay warm, we can protect each other, we can hangout, we can dig in the burrow, whatever we’re doing. Then if I smell an Austin coming in, then I’m like, “Oh, no! Fear response, aggression. I’ve got to battle this guy.”

It turns out that the same signal works in humans. In fact, it works in overdrive in humans that when someone intentionally trusts us or more generally shows us a kindness, our brain make this chemical, oxytocin, and it motivates us to invest effort into helping that person. 

If you think about this from an evolutionary perspective, the cost and benefit of being around strangers are not always clear. The cost of being around a stranger is that person might hurt me, might steal from me, could be dangerous, but the benefit is that I might find a project to do with him or her or I might be romantically attracted to that person or I might have that person join my circle of friends. 

Our brains are constantly balancing the benefits that come with building more social relationships with a cost of having the wrong person or people in those relationships. Oxytocin seems to be a key part of that signaling mechanism in the brain.  

[0:06:43.4] MB: I love the focus on looking at the animal kingdom and trying to understand how do these parallels play out in human behavior. One of the things that we talk about all the time on the show is how evolution has shaped the human brain, and it’s done a lot of good but it’s also baked in these cognitive biases and traps that we fall into. Tell me a little bit more about how that drove your research. 

[0:07:11.0] PZ: Yeah, I guess the major focus of my research in the last 20 years has been — I’ll just tell you that in a second, but I just had this socialization for talent development big HR meeting in Atlanta and I gave a keynote there and I started out by saying, “None of us will be ever out of a job, because the humans are complicated.” 

My talk was about how to understand some of that complication. By complicated I mean that if we run an experiment and we have people do a particular task and you put 20 people doing that task, you’ll get 15 different brain responses, not just behaviors, but brain response. 

As you sort of suggested, Matt, the selection pressure for higher cognitive abilities evolutionary has been very weak and so we see high variation in how people respond to different environments, and those manifest as cognitive biases, the use of heuristics. Our brains live in this super chemicals none of which we’re aware of consciously. 

A lot of the work we’ve done changes that chemical soup and then we can map out how that changes responses to a particular choice, and I do think choice is an interesting place to focus on because eventually all the information you take in — Not all of it, but a lot of it, boils down to doing something with it, which ends up being a choice. Much of my work has focused on where that variation in decisions comes from, and there are sort of trivial variations, male, female, young, old. There are also super interesting weird variations like I test you, Matt, today, and then I test you a week later to do the same thing and your brain and your behavior are totally different. I want to know why that’s the case. 

[0:09:05.3] MB: I think that’s another really important point, which is that this chemical soup as you called it or super chemicals is something that’s taking place in our brains that we are not consciously aware of. 

[0:09:16.4] PZ: Yet because our brains produce language, there’s this expectation that we have kind of insight into the brains inter-workings. In fact, what [inaudible 0:09:27.7] we always ask people, “Why do you do this? Do you think this was an interesting choice?” The whole reason we started measuring brain activity, honestly, was because people’s modal response to most experiment stimuli was, “Oh, I don’t know why I did this.” 

It’s pretty hard to build a theory of human behavior on I don’t know. Other than that it’s like having you eat a hamburger and saying — Asking your liver how it’s processing that beef. Your liver can’t tell you. Honestly, your brain can’t really tell you. I can force you to say something to me, because I know you can create some language. It doesn’t mean it has any insight into what is going on. 

Most of what your brain does, perhaps 99%, is in fact unconscious, and there’s a good reason for that that we could talk about. We’re not just aware of what we’re doing, and that’s okay. It just means that people are complicated. 

[0:10:21.0] MB: Let’s bring this back. Tell me about — You mentioned some of the early experiments that you did with trust and with money, what were the results of that and what did that teach you about Oxytocin? 

[0:10:33.1] PZ: Right. In humans prior to the experiments we started running around 2002, the brain was only known to make oxytocin when humans gave birth, breastfed or had sex. All three of those activities are way too messy for me to run in my lab. I don’t want to get involved. 

Based on the animal literature, we thought that if someone intentionally trusts you, your brain would produce oxytocin, maybe, and maybe that oxytocin would impact your behavior. In fact, that’s we found. We found that the more someone intentionally trusts you with money, but with other stuff we show subsequently, the more your brain produce oxytocin, which is a very rapid signal in the brain. It has about a three-minute half life, so it’s like a quick on and off switch. It says, “Oh, this guy is cool. He wants to play nice. I’ll make this chemical.” And oxytocin predicted how much money people would reciprocate to someone who trusted them. 

It’s not only that we respond to positive overtures from strangers. It’s that this chemical motivates us to engage with them in a cooperative way. I think of oxytocin as the biological basis for the golden rule. If you play nice with me, most of the time I’m going to play nice with you. Of course, most of the time is where the rubber hits the road. We spent about 10 years classifying the factors that inhibit or promote oxytocin release, and we really, really know this, because we also developed a way to shoot synthetic oxytocin into living human brains safely, and in that case we can erratically increase the amount of trust, generosity, cooperation that people have.  

[0:12:09.0] MB: Tell me about some of these factors that inhibit or promote oxytocin release. 

[0:12:13.4] PZ: Let’s talk about your producer, Austin. Why is he a sketchy guy? Because he’s a young alpha male. I’m looking at his picture right now. Look at that guy. He’s a specimen. He’s got a very high testosterone, and testosterone has been shown to inhibit oxytocin synthesis. Indeed, when we run experiments, when we give men synthetic oxytocin, we create a bunch of Austins, and sure enough they are more self-focused. They are more entitled. They demand more from others. They offer less to others. It’s all about them. 

I can tell you a nice evolutionary story on why between 15 to 25, young male should be aggressive and think only about themselves, but nonetheless that’s the factor. You have pretty reliable markers for testosterone levels, hairiness, deep voice, long chin, but we don’t know second to second how much testosterone is in our system, because like every other neuro-chemical system in the body, it’s adapting second by second to help us survive or reproduce. 

Other factors we find in women, estrogen levels which vary twice over the course of a month over a women’s menstrual cycle. Estrogen increases the uptake of oxytocin. For listeners who are female or who have girlfriends or wives, when you go to the movies with them and every once in a while for seemingly no reason they cry at the Bambi movie, they could be that they’re just more sensitive to oxytocin, which increases our sense of empathy and caring, and that may be driven by changes in estrogen levels. Progesterone, which increases when women are ovulating or pregnant, inhibits the action of oxytocin. High stress inhibits oxytocin release. 

Again, normally, I maybe want to affiliate and meet with Matt and hangout, but if I’m under high stress, then I’m in survival mode and I’m less interested in hanging out with new people and more interested in getting to the next 10 minutes. Anyway, whole variety of factors that we’ve been able to characterize, affect the way we are. Again, I may run into you down the street, Matt, and not know that you’re super stressed out and you treat me like a jerk and I say, “Oh! Matt’s a real jerk,” and what I didn’t know was that your dog just died or you just got in a car accident or something stressful really happened to you and you’re just having a bad day. 

I think for listeners, the punch line I’ve learned for doing this for 20 years is that not only are people are complicated, but it’s important to have a lot of acceptance for the degree of complication that the people around also aren’t even aware they’re giving off. We’re complicated and we’re unaware that we’re complicated. I think the only way to go through life is just to be accepting and just to say, “Hey, it’s not that Matt is a bad guy. He might have just had a bad day or a bad week, and that’s okay. I don’t want to rule him out from ever interacting with him. There’re maybe a lot of good things that I could do with Matt.” So I become much more accepting and tolerant of people around me. How about that? 

[0:15:23.5] MB: If I’m somebody that cries all the time at a movie, does that mean that I have a higher sensitivity to oxytocin or that I have higher sort of natural oxytocin levels? 

[0:15:33.1] PZ: Yeah. Oxytocin, it’s a really on-off switch, so it’s not a level of response. It’s a change from baseline. I’ll tell you something embarrassing about myself. I’m going to answer that question with a story. We’ve done a lot of work on persuasion and storytelling, and I know you’ve worked a lot in marketing, Matt, so we could talk about that. 

We started doing this work because I was on an airplane coming home from Washington, D.C., and my kids were little — I have two little girls, and I was tired and I couldn’t work, because it was turbulent. So I was watching The Million Dollar Baby, this Clint Eastwood movie, which I had never seen, and it’s a father-daughter story, has a very sad ending. The next thing I know, the guy next to me on the plane is poking me saying, “Sir, do you need some help. Is something wrong with you?” Not only was I crying, like every orifice in my face was shooting out goo. It was really embarrassing. 

When I got back to my lab, I mentioned that to some of the people I worked with, and I said, “You know, I was cognitively attacked. Maybe I was a little tired or lonely, but I knew I where I was. I knew this is a fictional story and yet I was so absorbed in that story that I couldn’t help but cry at the movies.” It turns out, since I had children, I become much more of a movie crier, and there’s a reason for that. As you age, your testosterone goes down, so the relative effect of oxytocin goes up. When you commit a relationship, your testosterone falls. When you have children, your testosterone falls. I don’t have data for this, but in my personal experience, if you have girl children, you pick out little dresses everyday of your life, your testosterone goes to zero. You become a big girly man. 

Again, there’s probably a good adaptive story evolutionary and why that’s the case. For the guys listening, if you’re in a relationship or have children or have girl children, don’t worry, all of us men have this high octane version of testosterone, which has the initials DHT. It has a long name behind it. DHT, you can turn on in a second. I’m making a joke, because I’m 6”4’, 205 , I’m not a girly man, but I am very sensitive now because I have kids. I wasn’t before I had kids. If you want to mix it up with me, I’m happy to do that. I can turn on the DHT like nobody’s business. Anyway, I’m kind of making jokes here. 

It does mean that our brains are helping us adapt to the environment we’re in, and the part of that is the social environment. Again, if you’re around children, if you’re around women and you need to be more sensitive, a lot more oxytocin and less sort of testosterone-driven, your brain will adapt to that. These systems are very adaptive even in adults, and so the more able you are to connect to people, the more you release oxytocin, the more you are in tune with the emotional state of people around you, which is also a very effective tool to have. 

I don’t know about you guys who are young, Matt and Austin, but when I was — Under 30, I couldn’t tell you the emotion of anybody around me. I didn’t really care. I was just like driving a thousand miles an hour in everything that I did. Now, I’m much more socially aware and I think that I’m a better social creature to people around me. Anyway, it’s a kill you can develop. If a big stupid jock like me can do it, then you guys can certainly can do it. 
 
[0:18:46.7] MB: I think you’re maybe the first guest to challenge the listeners to a fight, which I think is pretty funny. 

[0:18:52.7] PZ: I’m ready, man. Come on! I like, Matt, that you talk in your blog about performance. I think one of the most interesting things — I’m cutting you off. I’m sorry. I love high performance. I think that’s — The current work I’m doing is really focusing on how do we get people in groups to perform at their highest levels? I think it’s a really interesting and hard problem. I don’t know if you want to go there, but maybe that’s the pitch for why I’m still a — Like all of us who are men. We’re still kind of like 18-year-old doofusses, because we just want to do super cool stuff all the time, right? Let’s be honest. 

Women too, and a lot of women are really high performers. Sorry, I didn’t mean to be sexist there, but I don’t know. I can’t think of anything more interesting than knocking a baseball out of a park or jumping out of an airplane. I don’t know. I just love that stuff.  

[0:19:42.8] MB: I definitely want to dig into that. Before we do, I want to dig out a little bit more about oxytocin. Tell me what are some things — You mentioned kind of dosing people with oxytocin in your lab. What are some ways we can naturally increase our oxytocin levels. Is that something you would recommend, or would you even recommend potentially trying to take oxytocin?

[0:20:03.5] PZ: On the later, it’s a no. Oxytocin is a prescription drug. You cannot get it without a prescription from a physician. There are homeopathic versions sold on the internet, which are of course are just bogus. Don’t waste your money buying Liquid Trust or some other company that claims that there’s one part per bazillion of oxytocin. There’s nothing in there that have an effect. 

In fact, when we do experiments, we’d put about two teaspoons of oxytocin up your nose to get into your brain. It turns out the nose is a good portal to the brain for physiologic reasons. Two teaspoons of fluid up your nose is not really pleasant. Yeah. Really for research only. There have been a number of clinical trials that have looked at Oxytocin infusion for things like autism, schizophrenia and basically the effects are really, really mild, because the larger brain system that oxytocin activates is just regulated or damaged in these patients. 

Taking oxytocin, not a good idea, but training yourself, training your brain to release more of it, probably a good idea, because it will make you a better social creature, it will make you more empathic to people around you, which means you can read the key source of information, which is their emotional state. 

Again, when I was 18 or 30 or something, I wasn’t really good at reading people’s emotional states and I ran over people a lot. As you can tell, I talk fast, I have high energy, I move fast, and a lot of people, that’s not an effective to interact with them. Now that I’m a little older, and this saying in psychology that all research is me search, so maybe I had issues and that’s why I studied this chemical that makes us better social creatures. 

Now, I’m much more in tune with people around me — How they’re responding to me, how they are responding to the environment. I’ve trained myself to release more oxytocin, and I know that because I do a lot of experiments on myself, because I have a lab. 

Some things you can do are — Gosh! There’s so many that we’ve shown experimentally. One of my favorites is called listening with your eyes. I’m actually looking at your picture, Matt, even though we’re only on audio. When I’m talking, I’m actually making eye contact with you. Next time you’re with some friends or with your romantic partner, if you put down your phone, there are no screens in front of you and you gave that person in front of you your full attention. If you listen with your eyes, you’re giving this person the gift of being fully present in that conversation, and we’ve shown that when you do this, release oxytocin, that person becomes more in tune with you. 

Dogs actually do this to us. Dogs make eye gaze and cause our brains to make oxytocin. Other things you can do include things like touch. If people have ever seen my TED Talk, at the end of that I gave a person, the audience a hug. I got outed as a hugger, and now I just hug everybody. I go into a business meeting and if people want to shake hands, I say, “Hey, I hug everybody. I’m a connection guy.” 

Boy! People’s faces light up and all of the sudden I’ve got a ton of information from you. It’s almost an evil trick for listeners. If you hug somebody, you get smell information, you get touch information, you’ve invaded their space for 10 seconds or whatever, 5 seconds. It’s a great way to accelerate the connection that you’re trying to build somebody. What I do is I pre-announce. I just say I hug everybody. 

Maybe 1% of humans I’ve interacted with in the last seven years were refused a hug, because they’re socially anxious or they’re super old or whatever, but everybody else is happy to get a hug. Yeah, touch, really important. 

Sharing a meal, actually eating with another person will release oxytocin. There are tons of things. I will go through more, but I certainly have a top 20 list I can go through. 

[0:23:51.7] MB: No, I think those are some great resources. I love the evil trick of hugging people. I’ve even heard something sort of similar on a scaled on version, which is that you should never fist bump, you should always do a hand shake, because a handshake releases more oxytocin for both people and kind of forms a deeper connection. 

[0:24:08.3] PZ: I don’t think that’s even proved, but presumably. If you’re shaking my hand, I’m going to do a two hand and I’m going to pull you in anyways. Here’s the thing. It seems weird in a way like, “Oh, that’s just a funky, weird dude in California.” In fact, our brains are designed to connect. We want to be connected. We’re really open to touch. 

Like when you play sports when you’re younger, I think the only place you can hit a guy in the butt and not get punched in the face is on a sports field, right? There’s a sense of teamwork that goes into — Or team building that goes into touch. I want to just accelerate that process because, again, I’m interested in high performance and anything I can do, any hack I can use to get the people’s brains around me to connect better to me, it means we’re going to form a more effective team.  

[0:25:00.4] MB: Let’s dig into that now. Tell me what has your research uncovered around how we can build more high performance teams. 

[0:25:07.7] PZ: Yeah, the short back story on that, Matt, was that, as you know, we got kind of fair amount of media attention around this work on trust and oxytocin because it was brand new. No one had shown this before. We’ve got protocols to measure oxytocin in humans and, as I said, infuse into the brains. 

Eventually, companies started coming to my lab saying, “Hey, we think trust is important in our organization. Could you tell us how to build trust?” My first response, because I’m a nerd, was, “Yeah, we have this protocol. I can draw blood from your employees and I’ll measure their oxytocin,” and these executive’s faces turned white, they’re like, “There’s no way you can take blood from our employees.” Then I started thinking, “Gosh! If I’m such an expert on trust, how come I can’t advice companies on what they can do to build trust?” 

We started running experiments in my lab on teams. We eventually got permission to actually go in and take blood from companies like Zapos and Herman Miller and measure brain activity and measure productivity, innovation. We really got objective data on the conditions within organizations that allowed them to build trust, and we showed that high trust organization perform better using multiple measures. Then we went back and developed a tool and actually spun out a company called Ofactor so that companies can measure and manage their culture for high trust and high performance. Now we have a survey that identifies or both measures organizational trust and identifies these eight key building blocks that leaders can influence that create higher trust. 

The sort of punch line of that work is once I can measure trust within your organization, then you can manage it for high performance. If you can’t measure, you can’t manage. Because humans create culture whenever you put them in groups, if leaders on organizations don’t manage their cultures, those cultures are going to manage them. 

The humans are going to work out norms of behavior, and either you can let them go and just figure whatever it is it is, or you can manage that culture for high performance in a consistent way using the way our brains respond to each other. 

I think thinking about people that work as brains at work, embodied brains, in which our brains are built to work cooperatively, I want to use neuroscience again to optimize how I’m deploying resources and getting the most out of these individuals. It turns out that people want to perform in high levels, almost everybody, and if you put them in situation in which they can’t perform which they have the freedom to execute as they see fit when they get a lot of coaching so they can hit performance goals and then are recognized when they achieve those goals, people dig it and they perform better, they stay at their jobs longer, they’re happier, they’re healthier. That’s the work I’ve done in the last 8 years or so, and it’s fun for me because I get to work at scale now. 

The clinical work we’ve done is really exciting. It’s great to help patients, and it’s very rewarding, but if we go into a company and we change the work life for the better for 10,000 people or 20,000 people, that’s super exciting to me.  

[0:28:20.0] MB: I’m sure if you're listening to this show, you’re passionate about mastering new skills and abilities, and that's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our sponsor this week, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn everything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography, and you can get unlimited access to the entire catalog for a low monthly price so you don't have to pay per class like many other sites. 

They have some really cool courses on there. They have a course on Evernote mastery. You know how much I love Evernote. Evernote runs basically my entire life and I highly recommend using it as a tool, but also checking out their course on how to do it. They have a really cool course on productivity planning and they have a course on mind maps. Mind maps are awesome. I have a mind map sitting on my desk that I'm looking at right now for the Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin. I love my mind maps. It’s an incredible strategy that speaks directly to your brain and your subconscious and it's a really cool tool to remember things. 

There's so many fascinating courses on Skillshare, and the cool thing is they’ve been so kind to the show, they've been an incredible sponsor, and they're giving all of our listeners a free month of access, so get in there. You can get free classes for up to a month completely for free. You can check out all of these courses, just go to skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month. 

[0:29:48.0] MB: I love that point that our brains are designed to connect with each other and they’re built naturally to work cooperatively. 

[0:29:55.6] PZ: Yeah, and if we don’t inhibit that, it will happen. The question is it doesn’t happen in a way that is sustaining. It think if you remember like econ 101, we were sold this bill of goods from — I don’t know, like the 19th century or something that work provides this utility. The reason you have to pay for them at work, is because work sucks so much. But I know, Matt, that you dig what you do. I can tell, because I read your bio and we chatted beforehand. 

We’re recoding to Memorial Day. I’m all about doing cool stuff. I don’t care if it’s Memorial Day. I want to talk to you. I think it’s awesome. Why am I “working” on a holiday? Because it’s not work for me. It’s the coolest thing on the planet to measure brain activity, for me, to measure brain activity and use that to solve real problems that humans have. 

Yeah, if you understand that we’re set up to work in teams or we’ve done this for eons, don’t screw it up. Try to create an environment where people can really deploy that passion, that energy in an effective way. 

By the way, in my new book Trust Factor, as you mentioned, there’s a ton of ton of Peter Drucker in there. I was on a faculty with Peter Drucker at Claremont Graduate University for 10 years before he passed away, and Peter really influenced me, and Peter was all over this stuff, like in the 50s and 60s. It’s really about empowering the humans within an organization to be their best selves in groups, to get them stretch goals, to challenge them, go give them a chance to grow. 

There’s a ton of Drucker in the book as well and it’s just super practical. Every chapter ends with — In homage to Peter Drucker who famously said, “Don’t tell me what a great meeting you had. Tell me what you’re going to do differently on Monday.” 

I have a Monday morning list after every chapter. There’s a list of five things to do on Monday, and I say these are all experiments. No one knows for sure if these principles, even though they’ve been worked out in lots of different companies. They worked on my laboratory. If they work in any particular organization, because every organization had its own little weird quirks. They’re just experiments, and if you pitch it to people you work with and say, “You know what? I read this book.” We think it’s going to be awesome if we move to a four 10 hours a day instead of five eight-hour days. We’re going to try it for six months and see what you guys think and you give us feedback. If that helps marshal your energy so that you can do your other crap you need to do on a Friday or whenever and not take up a work, I want you to be all in. 

For example, I talk about this in the book, the importance of sleep is just really been shown clearly from a neurologic perspective. In a bunch of companies, you use something called firm 40. That is office opens at 8. At 5:05 the parking lot should be empty. I want you to be full bore for eight hours and then get the hell out and take a rest, see your family, go recreate, whatever you want to do, versus places I’ve worked, for example, where the boss is late for 8 p.m. Yeah, you screw around during the day, because you know you’re working a 12-hour day and you got to — Whatever, get your laundry or go on Facebook or whatever people do at work. 

I want people to be in 100% or as close to 100% as like Dan, and culture is a way to do that, to set up these normal norms where people are challenged and can respond with their best selves. 

[0:33:17.6] MB: There was a recent HBR article that talked about — I think it was something about how people who worked more than 40 hours a week actually started at some point to become less productive than people who just worked 40 hours, which I thought was really interesting. 

I also love your perspective as viewing everything as an experiment and just trying it out. I think that’s a great framework for implementing any change in your life and especially it changes in business, but I think that’s a really insightful way to view all of these potential strategies. 

[0:33:48.7] PZ: I think so, and I think if you’re honest with people that you work with — By the way, I don’t like the word worker or employee, I never that use that — Colleague or teammate. If you talk to your colleagues and say, “Hey, you know, we did this survey and we found that the culture isn’t as good as we like it to be, and we’re going to try a couple of new things for six months or 12 months as an experiment, but I think it’s going to be awesome for you guys. If it’s not, look, we’ll try something else. We just want to make your time here as engaging and as valuable to you as possible. If it’s valuable to you, it’s going to improve the performance of the company.” 

I have to suppress the name of this company, but we did a kickoff of a — Once you have the data, you can intervene. We’ve created culture interventions for companies to use and I did a kickoff at a company recently, and I was talking to the employees and I said, “Look, you may not think this is going to make your work-life better, but please give it a try. You’re going to get some little animated videos, we’re going to ask you some questions, we’re going to do this for 60 days, which is what about it takes to change a habit. 

It’s basically a habit change. It changes the way you interact with people at work. Guess what? If you actually try to change your behavior, it will improve your home life as well, because all these behaviors are good for all the humans around you. If you want to be happier at home, if you want your relationship, romantic relationship to be better, if you want your kids to be performing better and your workmates to be a more effective teammates to you, here are some behaviors you can do to make that happen. 

It’s got to be like a win-win space, right? If it’s like so many times at work, right? You know there’s some issue, they have to change something and employees get it right away. You want to pay me the same and get me to work harder. Doesn’t sound like a good win for anybody, but if we’re in this world in which labor does not provide this utility and which I have an integration with my work and life. I’m working from home, I’m working remotely, I’m doing stuff I think is super cool, I get choice over the kind of assignments I take. Then you can — If I’m a good leader, I can help to focus your energy and passion on stuff that you really enjoy doing. If you do that with a group of people that you rely on, that you could trust — Boom! Then you’re in high gear and it’s super exciting. 

[0:36:09.0] MB: Let’s dig in a little bit. I want to hear some of these building blocks. Tell me about the various different building blocks that you specifically recommend to kind of integrate trust into and help develop high performance. 

[0:36:21.9] PZ: Right. I’d be happy to. Somehow, Matt, as you know, magically they spell out the acronym OXYTOCIN. I don’t know how that happened, but I’ll list them and then I‘ll just discuss one or two briefly. The OXYTOCIN acronym stands for ovation, expectation, yield, transfer, openness, caring, invest and natural. 

Really quickly, ovation is recognizing the higher performance. Yield is crowd sourcing processes by delegating responsibility. I left out the E, sorry. The X is for expectation, which is designing challenges for people at work. The T is for transfer, which is enabling self-management. O is for openness, which is reducing stress by being clear about what the company is doing and why. C is for caring, which is intentionally building relationships with people at work. The I is for invest, which is helping colleagues grow personally and professionally, and the last letter, N, is for natural, which is being your authentic self at work and including being vulnerable.

Some of these things, people have happen to cross, because we’ve tried everything at work for the last 500 years, but what I like is that the neuroscience, my lab has done and other labs have done, show you how to implement these culture changes to get the biggest impact on branded behavior. Let’s take the first one, ovation. Recognizing high performance. Hey, that’s not new. Yeah. But what’s the science say about this? 

Recognition comes from peers when it’s close to when the goal is met, when it’s unexpected, when it’s tangible, when it’s public. All those things are reinforced the importance of achieving high performance within this community that we call work. When my community members go, “Matt! You killed it. You worked on this project for three months. Your team was just killing it. You thrilled the client. You hit these milestones, under budget, on time. Everybody is thrilled. We as a community want to recognize you, so we’re going to give your whole team a trip to Disney World. You guys are going to take three days off. We’re going to send you down to Orlando. Knock yourselves out. You just killed it an we’re thrilled to have you be part of our team.” 

Because the number of high performance in the world is in fact limited, I want the best people not only at my work, but performing at their best. Doing things like recognizing tangibly people who are just knocking it out of the park is the way to say, “It’s not about money. You got to pay people fairly for sure. It’s about doing stuff that’s super cool in a community that values that.” That’s just one example, and the book has many, many more examples for all these components on how to create really high engagement by essentially tapping in to intrinsic motivation.  


[0:39:14.1] MB: I’d love to dig into the power of vulnerability as well and hear some strategies you’d recommend for how to bring that into the workplace, or maybe how listeners could potentially bring that to a workplace even if they’re not necessarily a manager. 

[0:39:28.8] PZ: Yeah. All these applies to people at any level of the organization, from the lowest level, and in the book I spent a lot of time talking about how even entry level people at work can do amazing things with their work team and for the organization. 

The last component I call natural, which is just being yourself at work. If you have to put on some kind of mask that your work persona, that’s just extra wasted energy that doesn’t go into performing at the highest levels. It turns out, many experiments have shown, that people who come off as too perfect, too beautiful, we kind of hate those people. Yeah, I’m talking about Austin, again. 

If you show that you don’t know everything, if you ask for help from people around you, if you let your imperfections show, it turns out that induces oxytocin release, and people want to help you. 

If I said, “Look, Matt. We got this big project. Our client wants to do machine learning on this dataset we’re collecting for them. I read about machine learning. I don’t know how to do it, but I know you do. Can you help me out? I really need two weeks of your work life to do this machine learning thing and teach me about it. I want to learn from you. Even though I’m the boss, I don’t know how to do everything, for sure, that’s why we have an organization. That’s why people specialize.” 

Just being who you are, letting your work show, it’s okay. We actually trust people more who let their imperfection show. It’s okay to be imperfect and then ask for help. 

[0:41:02.0] MB: What’s another one of these that you think could be really relevant for our listeners and maybe something that — As a concrete, one of these strategies that they could really benefit from understanding?  

[0:41:12.5] PZ: I forgot one more. The caring component is straight down the trust building oxytocin runway. Sometimes, at least when I was in business school, they sort of had this implicit or explicit statement that fraternize with the people you work with, they will respect you. You don’t want to be friends with people at work. Again, our brains are built to form connections. 

If you’re at work and you’re forming connections, again, you’re inhibiting your national responses and you’re not going to be able to have strong relationships and count on people, trust people to do what you need them to do, particularly in crunch times. 

One way you can intentionally build relationships is to articulate the emotions you see in others. Normally, when you walk in at work you’ll say, “Hey, Matt. How are you?” “Good. How are you?” “Good.” I might go as far as to say, “How is your weekend?” “Oh, it was great. Fine. Whatever.” 

If you replace that hey what’s going on with the emotion you see in that person’s face, then you have a much different conversation. Matt walks from the office and I say, “Hey, Matt. You look tired, happy, sad, joyful, worried,” then we have all different conversations. “Why do you look so worried today?” “You know what? My wife has been really sick. We went to the doctor last week and it looks like it’s something really bad.” “Okay, let’s talk about that. How do we now modulate your work-life relationship? Do you need to be at work today? Should you take some time off? Is your team working effectively?” 

Once you actually can recognize the emotions in others and if you just articulate them, it’s like a booster to build relationships with them, and other things. Like in my lab I have a lot of graduate students, so I buy beer out of my own pocket every month. I think the beer budget is the best money I spend, because we have a nice patio behind our lab. You’re done with work and you want to have some bees and hangout with the people you work with, awesome. Build that relationship. 

[0:43:12.6] MB: I think it’s so vital and it underpins all of the research that you’ve worked on over the last — However long, 20 years or however long. I think that, just fundamentally, it’s about building relationships, and oxytocin underpins much of that, but at the end of the day if you care about people, if you invest in them and you really genuinely want to develop relationships with them, it yields tremendous benefits for yourself sort of at a biological neuro-chemical level, but also in the results in your life and in the results you see in your workplace as well. 

[0:43:50.3] PZ: Yeah, and I think Peter Drucker said that every knowledge worker, which to me is everybody now, needs to be their own CEO. If you’re your own CEO and I’m in an organization that treats me like crap, “Dude! I got skills. I can go elsewhere.” I’d rather have you have a lot of say over your career, to give you opportunities to grow, to have you be in a place that recognizes the amazing things that people do every day at work. Yeah, I want those people with me. 

I should say. I always keep my scientist head on, Matt. I’m always skeptical of anything I do, so that’s why I spent eight years doing this work before writing the book. We looked at all the business outcome measures we could capture, like energy at work and chronic stress and productivity and retention, all those things — Trust, substantially improves. 

Even objective measures like sick days or life satisfaction, the people who work in high trust organizations take fewer sick days and they’re more satisfied with their lives outside of work, because when you come home, instead of being beaten down by some — Sorry, bad word, asshole boss, you’ve been working with people who respect you, who value you, and if you’re something cool for the world at the same time, you’re energized when you come home. Yeah, you’re a nicer person to be around. That’s the world that we can create at work, which improves employees lives, improves organizational performance and really strengthens societies by focusing on relationships. 

[0:45:28.8] MB: We’ve touched on it, but we haven’t even really hammed home at this point, which the fundamental thing that underpins all of these high performance is trust itself. We’ve talked a little bit about and talked about a lot about oxytocin and how that helps build trust, but it’s really all about trust fundamentally. Once you’re able to cultivate that using these various strategies that you’ve recommended, that’s how you yield these incredible dividends.

[0:45:56.5] PZ: Yes and now. I want to push out a little further. I think it’s really about relationships. There’s almost all humans that can survive on their own. There must be some permit living in some mountain somewhere, but it’s extraordinarily rare. We only survive in groups. If we survive in groups, then we’ve got to understand how to engage the groups of people that we’re always around. We’re in many different groups over the course of our day or week or life. 

Again, I’m just a really super boring person and I just want to make the groups I’m in and my own performance better, because for some reason I’m obsessed with performance. The nice thing is the science predicts and our data strongly support that when you’re in a high performance group, you enjoy what you’re doing a hell of a lot more. A lot of focus on happiness at work and giving employees, I don’t, Taco Tuesdays or something, and that’s not what the science shows. It shows if you’re doing something important for the planet, we’re talking about purpose, if you know your organization’s purpose and you’re doing it with people that you trust and you can rely on that treat you well and you treat well, now you’re in high gear and now you are making a dent in the universe. It’s really that joy, that satisfaction of doing something important with people that you trust. It’s really about relationships. 

I think for guys in particular, we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about building relationships who are younger, partially because of testosterone, partially because we’re more aggressive than older guys are and then women are in general. I think this is a bit of a call to say that relationships matter a ton. I want the 3 a.m. friend. This is a guy that you can call up at 3 a.m. and say, “Don’t ask questions. Just bring a couple of shovels and supply. Something bad went down.” I want a couple of guys like that in my life who just they don’t ask, they just show up at 3 in the morning and help you fix some nasty problem. 

In the best case, I’m like a 3 a.m. employee. I’d like to have an employee not that I can call at my house at 3 a.m., but occasionally emails me at 3 a.m. going, “Hey, Paul. You know this problem we worked on for a month? It just came to me. I couldn’t sleep tonight. I fixed this damn thing that’s been bugging us that’s been holding down our performance.” 

You can’t pay people to do that. You have to love what you’re doing. You have to care about the people you do it with. Anyway, that’s my claim at least. Relationships matter. 

[0:48:33.9] MB: I love the phrase that you used. I forgot if it’s on the cover of the book or not, but why isn’t work an adventure. 

[0:48:40.7] PZ: Yeah. You know, we always adventures. Certainly, if you look at the way the world is evolving in terms of business, which is people will pay for experiences. I pay a lot of money for experiences. Why is that experience only for the customer? Why are the employees not having that experience? 

I think work should be an adventure. Not every second of the day maybe. There’s still some stuff. Still got to clean up the floors or whatever you got to do, but — I don’t know. What about you? Isn’t your work an adventure most of the time? 

[0:49:09.9] MB: Most definitely. Yeah, as you said, even adventures have boring parts potentially. Yeah, I try to make every single day an adventure. Absolutely. 

[0:49:19.0] PZ: And you can’t do that by yourself, because you got to work with a team. I think empowering the people around you to have cool ass adventures is — I don’t know, man. That’s a true leader, I think. When I’m helping the people around me be successful and allowing them to create adventures for themselves, what could be better than that?  

[0:49:42.4] MB: What would be kind of one piece of homework or actionable advice that you would give to somebody listening to this podcast that they could use to either implement some of the strategies that we’ve talked about to make their lives more of an adventure or to build trust relationships and develop kind of more oxytocin, I guess, in their lives? 

[0:50:05.0] PZ: It’s a broad question. I could do that. I work quite at home. Let’s do it at home. It holds over. Again, I don’t think there’s any — For most of us, there’s no hard line between work and home anyway. Oxytocin is a really, really interesting and ancient molecule and it’s very difficult or perhaps impossible to have make your brain make it yourself, but you can give that gift of oxytocin release to others by connecting to them, touching them, giving them a gift. Almost always when their brains make oxytocin, they want to reciprocate and give you the same thing. 

If we think about the best social behaviors, it’s really about giving the gift of connection, of empowerment, or love or whatever that person around you really needs. Think of this as effective social behaviors are surface behaviors. I want to serve the people around me. 

I try to end every conversation with the word service and I’ll do that with you, Matt. Matt, I want to be of service to you. It’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you, and I hope that we find a way to do something in the future, so I want to put myself out there and say when you’ve got an idea, when you’ve got a crazy neuroscience question, when something you’re doing, I want to continue to be of service to you. I think if I end every conversation with service that I want to engage with the people around me, and it turns out that if you serve other people, that comes back to you many fold. If it doesn’t, that’s okay, because I still feel good helping other people. 

Think about being of service to the people around you as supposed to what’s in it for me? Think about what I can do to make you happier, perform better. I don’t know. I think that’s a pretty good way to go through life.  

[0:51:53.2] MB: What a great idea and what a great framework, and I’m pretty sure I felt a little boost of oxytocin when you said that. 

[0:51:59.9] PZ: Bingo! We’re in good shape now. 

[0:52:01.5] MB: Exactly. It reminds me of the old — It’s probably before him, but Zig Ziglar, “You can have anything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.” 

[0:52:11.5] PZ: Man, it’s so true, isn’t it?

[0:52:13.0] MB: I’ll do a small act of service for you. For listeners who want to dig in more, where can they find you and find the book online?

[0:52:20.9] PZ: All your online sellers; Amazon, Kindle, Audible Habits, Trust Factor, the science of creating high performance companies, the company we’ve spun off to do that work is ofactor.com, O-F-A-C-T-O-R.com. Lots of free tools and assessments there that you can use, and you can find out more about me at pauljzac.com.

Reach out listeners. Let me know what I can do to help you. 

[0:52:47.7] MB: Paul, thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing all these incredible wisdom. Your work and research and fascinating and there are so many relevant conclusions for everybody, so thank you again. 

[0:52:59.6] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's matt@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. In fact I responded into a number of listener emails this morning from across the globe. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First, you’re going to get exclusive curated weekly emails from us every single week, our Mindset Monday email, which listeners have been loving.

Next, you're getting a listener exclusive chance to shape the show, vote on guests, submit your own personal questions to our guests, vote on new intro music and all kinds of ways to interact with the show. Lastly, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide which is equally as awesome by joining the email list. You can go to successpodcast.com, sign up right on the homepage, or if you’re on the go, if you’re on the move right now, just text the word “smarter" to the number 44222.

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in this episode; links, transcripts, everything we talked about on the show and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get them at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

How You Can Use Behavioral Design To Create Any Habit You Want with Nir Eyal

In this episode we discuss How To Use “Mind Control” Techniques to Create Any Habit You Want, why we are driven much more by pain than pleasure, the “hook” model for describing human behavior, how to hack your rewards to change your behavior, the power of tiny amounts of friction, and much more with Nir Eyal. 

Nir Eyal is an expert in “behavioral design” having worked in both advertising and video gaming helping companies build and create more engaging products. Nir is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of the book Hooked: How To Build Habit Forming Products and has been featured in Forbes, Psychology Today, and more. Nir is an active angel investor and currently writes to help companies create good habit and behaviors in their users on his blog NirandFar.com.

We discuss:

• Persuasion, mind control, and behavioral design

• What is a habit and how do you define it?

• How we can leverage technology to build healthier habits

• How 50% of your actions take place with little or no unconscious thought

• Internal vs External triggers

• There is only one reason you use a product or service - to modulate your mood - that’s it

• Our behaviors are driven NOT by seeking of pleasure, but rather the quelling of a unconformable emotion

• Figure out what your frequently occurring internal triggers are

• We are driven more by PAIN than by PLEASURE

• There’s no end to what we can accomplish if we can understand that pain is our primary motivator

• Even seeking pleasure = satisfying the PAIN of WANTING

• The power of the unknown to draw us in

• The 4 stages of the “Hook” Model on how Habits are formed and sustained

• Rewards are actually wanting to quell the “stress of desire”

• Discomfort drives us to action

• How the same mental hardwiring behind addiction also underpins love and desire

• The easier you can make a behavior the more likely people are to do it

• The biggest thing that drives people to adopt technology is making life EASIER

• Reward itself doesn’t have much impact on your brain, its the anticipation of the reward that drives us

• 3 Kinds of Variable Rewards

• Rewards of the Tribe

  1. Rewards of the Hunt

  2. Rewards of the Self

• The power of adaptability

• Belief is as much of a factor in addiction as physical dependency itself

• How making a behavior just a little bit easier can have dramatic results

• How to put the hook model in reverse and destroy bad habits

• How putting space between steps in your habit loop can create massive changes

• Even small amounts of friction can change the marginal decision and make a habit much harder

• How can you make bad habits more difficult, take longer, or be harder to do?

• How you can use “temptation bundling” to break the hold of variable rewards in your habit loop

• Never do something when you don’t have the end in sight - do things that have a finite END so that you don’t get hooked

• Key question you must ask yourself: Is this technology serving ME, or am I serving IT?

• One simple piece of advice to implement the ideas discussed in this interview right away

• How to leverage technology to combat technology that is distracting you

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better?

Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Article] Skinner - Operant Conditioning by Saul McLeod

• [Wiki Article] B. F. Skinner

• [Personal Site] Nir & Far

• [Calendar] Nir’s Meeting Scheduler

• [App] 7 Cups: Anxiety & Stress Chat

• [App] Pocket

• [App] Byte Foods

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

In this episode we discuss how to use mind control techniques to create any habit you want. Why we’re driven much more by pain than pleasure. We look at the hook model for describing human behavior, talk about how to hack your rewards to change your behavior, look at the power of tiny amounts of friction, and much more with Nir Eyal.

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First; you’re going to get awesome free guide that we create based on listener demand, like our popular guide; How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get that for free along with another awesome surprise bonus guide that you go to sign up to find out by joining the email list today. 

Next, you’re going to get a curated weekly email from us every week called Mindset Monday. Listeners absolutely love this email. It’s short, sweet, simple. It's basically topics, ideas, things that we've come across that have us excited that we're talking about, that we've come across that we find interesting. 

Lastly, you’re going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show; vote on guests, give your input for guest questions. In fact, in our Mindset Monday in the last two weeks, we've sent out emails asking for specific questions for an upcoming guest. You got to be on the email chain to find out who that guest is and to submit your questions, but this is a great opportunity to get involved, shape the content, figure out what we’re going to be asking the guests, vote on things like the new into we rolled out last month. All kinds of chances to shape the show and become part of what we’re doing. You get all of these if you join and sign up for the email list, which you can go to successpodcast.com and sign up right of the homepage, or if you're on the go right now, if you don't have a chance to go to the website, just text the word “smarter”, that's “smarter" to the number 4222 on your cell phone. That’s “smarter” to 44222 and you can get signed up that way. 

In our previous episode we discussed what happened when our guest; the astronaut, Chris Hadfield, went blind during a spacewalk and how he made it out alive. We talked about the mental toughness necessary to survive extremely dangerous situations. We discussed in depth how astronauts deal with fear, looked at the vital importance of having training to deal with powerful risks, and much more with Chris Hadfield. If you want to learn how to crush through any fears standing in your way, listen to that episode. 

[0:02:52.2] MB: Today we have another awesome guest on the show, Nir Eyal. Nir is an expert in behavioral design, having worked in both advertising and vi9deo gaming helping companies build and create more engaging products. He is the Wall Street Journal best-selling author of the book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, and has been featured in Forbes, Psychology Today and more. He’s an active angel investor and currently writes and helps companies create good habits and behaviors in their users on his blog nirandfar.com. 

Nir, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:03:25.9] NE: Thanks so much, Matt. Great to be here. 

[0:03:27.2] MB: We’re very excited to have you on here today. For listeners who may not be familiar with you and some of your background, tell us your story and how you got started down the path of behavioral design. I'm curious, especially, I’m a huge gamer myself, so I'd love to hear especially kind of about the video gaming side of your world. 

[0:03:45.7] NE: Sure. The last company that you mentioned they was at the intersection of gaming and advertising, and that company gave me a lot of insights into persuasion, mind control, behavioral design, whatever you want to call it, that those lessons I found were very powerful and very effective. I saw my clients using them time and time again and I became fascinated with these techniques, but what I found was that there wasn't a book out there. There wasn't like a resource into how to use these techniques, and in fact many of the gaming companies that I worked with and the clients, the advertising clients I worked with, they just use these techniques because they worked. They didn't know what they were called. Certainly, they didn’t know the psychology behind these principles. They just kept using them again and again and again because they produced better results. 

I really became fascinated say with how these technologies persuade us, and I came to a hypothesis that technologies of the future will be the ones that are able to persuade us to form these long-term habits. Originally I wanted to learn these techniques for my next company. My company was acquired and I wanted to figure out what to do next. 

When I started doing research into, “Okay. I'm going to figure out how to compile all these into a resource that I would use into my next company,” I started blogging about what I was learning. I spent a lot of time in the Stanford Library. I started to spent a lot of time talking to people who are building these technologies, folks at Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and WhatsApp and I just learned so much from them and the more I blogged about it the more interest there was in people reading my blog and learning more. One thing kind of led to another. The blog became a class at Stanford that I taught for many years, and then that class turned into the book that you see today, which is called Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. 

[0:05:30.7] MB: Let's start with something really simple. How do you define habits? What are habits? 

[0:05:38.2] NE: Right. Habits are defined as the impulse to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought. It’s about half of what you do every single day is done purely out of habits, and these habits are by and large very good for us. It’s just another form of learning that human beings have evolved. Many animals have evolved habits, where our brain is able to put these tasks into automatic mode if you will, so that we don’t have to think about it while we’re doing these behaviors. 

These repetitive tasks that you do day-in and day-out without really thinking about why you're doing them, those are our habits, and my contention is that we can actually use the psychology of habits to help us live better lives. In fact, technology can facilitate those healthy habits. Now, of course, technology can also facilitate a bunch of unhealthy habits as well. Many of us feel that we are overly dependent on our devices that many times these habits can be bad habits as well, but I think it's imperative to understand the psychology of habits so that we can hopefully, as business people, design products and services that create healthy habits in our lives, helping people stay connected and helping people save money and helping people exercise more and eat better. We can do all these things through these miracles of today's technology, but then also understanding how these technologies hook us. We can also make sure that we put technology in its place to make sure that we control the technology and that the technology doesn't control us. 

[0:07:05.8] MB: I think one of the most important things that you said is this notion that the habits are unconscious, right? I forgot the exact percentage, but like 50% of everything we do takes place unconsciously. We’re not consciously thinking about it. Some sort of random queue or trigger from our environment sends us into this habit loop, which I find fascinating. 

[0:07:28.3] NE: Right. By and large, these things are great for us. We benefit from having all these habits. You can see from an evolutionary basis, if every time there was danger, you had to think as a caveman a hundred thousand years ago, “What should I do when this sabertooth tiger is charging after me?” If you deliberated, you’d be dead. That branch of the human evolutionary tree died off. Whereas the people who had these instincts, who had these quick response behaviors, who had these learned responses that they didn't have to deliberate, these were the people who had survived and became us. 

[0:08:04.3] MB: Let’s dig into how do habits get formed, and what are some of the components that go into creating habits.

[0:08:13.1] NE: Sure. The basic habit loop that a lot of people know about is a trigger, something that queues us to action habits are environmentally dependent. These are things that occur with little or no conscious thought based on our environment, so there's always some kind of trigger, some kind of queue. Then there is the action, and then there's the pay off, some kind of reward. 

Now, what I’ve changed in that model, looking into the research that I did, is not so much how do habits form in our day-to-day lives. I think that’s pretty well understood stuff. I think what I wanted to push the field forward in a direction of how do we build products and services, or how do products and services build habits within us. What I added to that model is a few things. One is this idea of internal and external triggers, that when it comes to the products and services we use, there is only one reason that you use any product or service, one reason, and that reason is to modulate our mood. I don't care what the product is. You use that product to feel something different. 

The internal trigger, meaning external triggers you know all about. External triggers are things in our environment that tell us what to do next; your phone dings, or you get an email, or friend tells you to do something. These are all external triggers, they tell you what to do next. 

What we also have are what’s called these internal triggers that when we are in a certain situation or routine around certain people or places or when we feel certain things, before we even understand what's going on, we already have the itch. We already have this unconscious trigger to get us to do something. 

For example, when you're feeling lonely, you check Facebook or Tinder. When you're feeling uncertain about something, before you scan your brain to see if you know the answer, you're already Googling it. When you're feeling bored, before you even ask yourself what you're feeling, your brain is already telling your fingers to type in New York Times, or Reddit, or YouTube, or something else to ease that boredom. 

This is a very important thing to understand, that our behaviors are driven not by the seeking of pleasure per se, but the quelling of an uncomfortable emotion. What I call this internal trigger. That’s one very important thing to understand both when we’re designing products and services. When I advise Silicon Valley companies on how to build more habit-forming technology, part of my advice is you’ve got to figure out what that frequently occurring internal trigger is. 

Then from a personal development standpoint, we have to understand that we are driven by pain, right? That it’s not the pleasure principle that Freud espoused that everything we do is for the pursuit of pleasure and the denial and quelling of pain. It's just pain all the way down. Everything we do is just to avoid pain in as much as even when we think we are driven by pleasure, we’re not actually driven by pleasure. We’re driven by the urge to satisfy the pain of wanting the pleasure, and this is a really important point, because, really, the superpower that we all have within us is to understand that we are driven by pain and find ways to deal with that pain. There is no end to what we can accomplish when we can deal with our dissatisfaction, with our pain. 

Anyway, that’s one important addition. Another important addition has to do with the next what I call the action phase of the hook. In my book I talk about the hook model. the action phase; we see this manifested in all sorts of products we use, that what’s happened today, the reason so many of our technologies are so habit-forming is that they have become so much easier to use. Meaning they’ve made the action way easier to do. 

The fact that I can open an app with one tap, that I can scroll a feed, that I can watch a video anywhere at any time with very little effort makes that behavior more likely to occur. The more friction is removed the easier the behavior is to do. Then the third part of the hook model is what I call the reward phase, which is not just the reward, it's a variable reward. This comes straight from Skinner. We know that variable rewards, when it comes to Skinner's famous experiments with his pigeons, when he gave them a food pellet as a reward. When it was on a predictable schedule of reinforcement, they clicked X-number of times when it was on a variable schedule of reinforcement, meaning sometimes when the food pellet came out, sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t. When there was variability, when there was an intermittent schedule of reinforcement, Skinner observed the pigeon clicked on the little food pellet dispenser many, many more times. 


Variable rewards are everywhere. We’ve thought traditionally in psychology as variable rewards being something that is only about food pellets, but it turns out it's everywhere. It's what makes slot machines  so enticing. It what makes the news, right? Why are we all glued to the news these days, because we all want to know what the next stupid thing that's going to come out of the president's mouth, is that we want to know what's going to happen next. The first three letters of news is new. We watch a movie, we want to know what's going to happened at the end of the movie. It’s all about the unknown. 

When you think about online, scrolling the newsfeed and scrolling and scrolling and searching and searching, is it uses the exact same psychology as pulling on a slot machine. They’re both variable schedules reinforcement.

Finally, the last part of the hook, which has never been articulated before, but I've kind of added to the conversation when it comes to habit-forming design is the investment phase. If you think about all these technologies, what’s really special about technology today and why it's particularly habit-forming, is that we are co-creating the technology with the manufacturers. Now, that's never been possible before. If you're Henry Ford in the production line, you decide how to make the model T. You design it on paper that you tool it, then you create the machines to build the machines. This takes years, or at least it used to take years. Now, that’s gone. 

Now, that’s gone. Today we are co-creating products with the manufacturers. When you think about Facebook, every time you like something, you add a photo, you friend someone, you comment on something. You are giving them data to modify your feed in the future. You are making the product better and better with use, so that if you were to log into my Facebook account, it would be super boring for you. It would make no sense, because it's been tailored to my needs based on my data. Now, that’s super special. 

When we think about habit-forming technology today, the four key steps are trigger, an action, a reward, and finally an investment, and it’s through successive cycles through these hooks, this is how consumer preferences are shaped and how our product habits are formed. 

[0:15:15.2] MB: There’s a lot I want to unpack out of that. Before we start, I want to explore more deeply this idea that we only seek to avoid pain. Tell me more about that. 

[0:15:24.2] NE: Yeah. When you look at the biology of what's actually going on in our brains, a lot of people think that we do things because we want to feel good, but that's not actually biologically true. When you think about the reward system, when you think about what's happening inside the nucleus accumbens, it’s not the pursuit of pleasure per se. It's the need to quell the wanting, what we call the stress of desire. That’s the way the reward system operates, is it creates this itch, this psychological state of hetero stasis where there is an imbalance, where there's some discomfort that drives us to action. This is when we are most focused. This is when we are most engaged, and this is when we pursue something, is to quell that feeling of wanting. 

Wanting doesn't feel good. If you think about some of the things that we think are driven by pleasure. Let’s think about love and sex. It’s not actually the orgasm itself. It's not the love affair itself. It’s the pursuit, right? That’s what makes us lovesick, and if you think about, in fact the language of love, it’s very similar to the language of addiction, that when you think about someone that — I could spout off song ballad after song ballad of how love hurts, and many people will describe this longing that they have for another person in very similar terminology. In fact, there are scientists out there who believe that the same mechanism that drives addiction today comes from the hardwiring that drives love, that drives sexual desire, is basically the same hardware that is hijacked by someone looking for a sensation, looking to quell some kind of negative sensation, but through other means. That a very important understanding. When it comes to driving our own behavior and how we shape what we do in life, is understanding that it's really all about the dealing with pain. 

By the way, this is fancy psychology terminology dropped on something that has been a knowledge that people have had for thousands of years. Every major religion, Buddhism comes to mind first and foremost, has ways to deal with the pain of this world through different means. 

[0:17:48.5] MB: Let's get into — I think this is a really interesting discussion of how triggers function. I want to kind of move into the next phase of the hooked model. Tell me more about the action phase. 

[0:18:02.4] NE: Sure. The action phase is really about making the behavior as easy as possible. This is really been the innovation that we’ve seen from personal technology over the past several years, is making it as easy as possible to do the intended behavior. The easier you can make the behavior, the more likely people are to do it. What seems trivial to people outside the industry has a huge impact on how people will do something. 

Just the positioning of a button, or which button comes before a different button, or the color of the body, or the contrast of the button. All of these things make a profound impact on how likely you are to do a particular behavior, and I know because we test these things all the time. There are armies of people behind the apps you use every day who are there to do nothing but make that behavior easier to do. Now, that’s nothing new. Technology has always been defined as the process by which a behavior becomes easier to do, and I don’t care if it’s the cotton gin to the iPhone. Every technology we use is adopted because of the work it saves us. 

Now what we’re seeing with this manifestation through personal technologies is that companies are investing all sorts of ways, some of them seem trivial, but fact turn out to be quite persuasive to make the job easier to do. When you think about how we went from desktop. to laptop, to mobile phones, now to wearable, and now to voice interfaces, like the Amazon Alexa or the Microsoft Cortana, what we’re seeing is the technology is helping us make the day-to-day tasks of our life even easier. 

Again, it seems trivial when you first interact with some of these technologies, but what happens is that people adopt them because of these small bits of effort that they save us. I can ask my Amazon Echo what the weather is, and that will save me a couple taps over going to my iPhone, that will successfully change my habit over time. 

[0:20:09.2] MB: That's a great example, because my wife and I have actually two Amazon Echoes in their house because. 

[0:20:14.8] NE: Oh, they got you. 

[0:20:15.9] MB: Recording everything that we say and do. It’s so funny, because that's probably the biggest use that I have for it, is just asking it, “What's the weather today?” It's great, because if you’re in your closet getting ready, you can kind of shout at the Alexa and it will tell me as supposed to having to dig out my phone and fidget around and figure out and look at the weather app. 

[0:20:35.6] NE: Right, and you think to yourself, “What’s the big deal?” If you compare that to the way we use to get weather a generation or so ago, the iPhone is way easier, right? It used to be, if you want to know whether, you had to wait for the weatherman on television to tell you what the weather was going to be like. There was no magic tablet that we could just touch and instantly know all these information or our fingertips. 

If you take the perspective of a few decades, certainly, a generation, these things are magical. We couldn’t have imagine these things are real today when we were children. Yet even they aren’t easy enough. Even now there are opportunities to make that behavior even easier to do with these new technologies that are just becoming widely adopted. 

[0:21:21.8] MB: This may be kind of leading into the next phase of the hook model, but tell me about the idea that — And this is something you've written about and spoken about, this notion that when we complete the action is not actually when we get the reward, but it’s more in the anticipation itself. 

[0:21:41.0] NE: Right. This whole idea of pain versus pleasure, what these products often stimulate is not the reward itself. What keeps us coming back is the anticipation of the reward. When we think about how the reward system is structured in the brain, it’s back to that stress of wanting, that pain of desire. That's what keeps us coming back. 

The reason you are waiting for Alexa to tell you the weather, is that there’s unknown there. There’s uncertainty. There’s variability. In that period of time, you’re not going to do anything else in that second. It’s the same reason why when you pull the handle of a slot machine, you're going to want the results, because there’s uncertainty about what you might get. 

In a softer form, this is what keeps us engaged to all sorts of things, is this variability, this uncertainty, this mystery around what you might find next. 

[0:22:37.2] MB: Tell me more about the different kinds of rewards that can impact us and how — Let’s dig into, and I’d love actually to talk even maybe as a starting point a little bit more about Skinner's work with pigeons and the power of variable rewards, and then kind of dig in to the different types of rewards you’ve seen be really effective at driving human behavior. 

[0:22:59.5] NE: Sure. The type of verbal rewards that I identify in my book, they come in three forms. There are rewards of the tribe, rewards of the hunt, and rewards of the self, and you’ll see these in all sorts of products and services that you use every day both online and off-line. 

My book is mostly around technology products, but the same exact rules by the way apply to all sorts of things. If you think about spectator sports, if you think about what makes books and movies interesting, why we watch the nightly news, why we subscribe to a particular religion. They all have hooks embedded in them. They all have these elements of variability. 

Rewards of the tribe are things that feel good, that come from other people and have this element of variability. When you think about — We talked about what makes Facebook so habit-forming. You’ve got this endless stream of information in your newsfeed and it’s all about your friends, what are your friends doing. Are they going on vacation? Did they post pictures of their kids or their puppy or an interesting news article? There's uncertainty around what you might find when you keep scrolling that newsfeed. Of course, all about your friends, all about information about people you really know. 

In a workplace, when you think about Slack, or email for that matter, it's all about information from other people. That's rewards of the tribe. This is also the base of what makes romance romantic, right? That romances is romantic in the beginning of a relationship when it's uncertain. Now, I’ve been married for over 15 years now, I know that other things become what keeps a couple together. To be honest with you, very few couples who been married for any lengthy period of time still feel the butterflies that they felt the first time they held hands or the first time the kissed. That uncertainty, that variability, that mystery is extremely exciting and extremely engaging. It's almost a high that you don't get later in life when you know everything about your partner. 

Of course, it doesn't mean that you can't stay in love certainly, but it’s a different type of engagement. It’s a more intellectual type of engagement. You have to remind yourself, “This is why I'm here,” as opposed to this love sickness that is a mindless kind of attraction. That's rewards of the tribe. Competition is another form of rewards of the tribe, cooperation. These are all forms of things that feel good, that have an element of variability and come from other people. 

Then you have rewards of the hunt. Rewards of the hunt stem from our primal search for food and other material possessions. In modern society we get these things in the form of money. When you think about a retention bonus, a year-end bonus, why does a year-end bonus key people retain? Why do they keep coming to work for a year-end bonus, also known as a retention bonus? Because there's uncertainty there, “How big is my bonus going to be? How well did I do?” That’s all about this uncertainty, and that's why it works to keep employees engaged. 

If you think about the stock market, people play the stock market as day traders, although anybody who specializes in the science of how to make money in the stock market will tell you that day trading is a fantastic way to lose money. That playing the markets, you might as well be playing on a slot machine. Of course, that metaphor is very apt, because it's the same exact psychology the keeps people playing. The ups and downs of the stock market, it's a variable reward. There’s uncertainty there, so that's why day traders do what they do not because it makes money, but because it's as habit-forming and sucks us in as engaging as a slot machine.

If you think about sports, for example, why are we obsessed with a little bouncing ball going back and forth on the field? It might as well be a pachinko machine. It's the same exact thing. It’s uncertainty, it’s variability, it's these things keep us engaged. If you were to go into a sports bar during the World Cup or during March Madness, there’s a reason they call it March Madness, because it is madness. It doesn't make any logical sense why we do this, but it's fun, it's engaging. It has this element of mystery around who is going to win. In the moment, it’s incredibly important to us. Of course, if I told even the most diehard March Madness fan who won five years ago, who won three years ago, it’s going to take them a minute to remember. In the moment, it was everything to them. 

All of these comes from terrible rewards of the hunt. That's variable reward of the hunt. Of course, we see the same exact phenomenon online and we talked about the slot machine, effect of scrolling on a newsfeed, whether it's Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn. So many products these days have this newsfeed element, because scrolling on this newsfeed, hunting for information, is this reward of the hunt. Searching and searching and never down searching for that next interesting bit of content. 

Finally, we have rewards of the self. Rewards of the self are things that feel good that have this element of variability, but don't come from other people and aren’t about these information or material rewards. These are things that feel good in and of themselves. The search for mastery, consistency, competency, control all examples of variable rewards of the self. 

When you think about gameplay, for example, online games, you may not win anything in terms of material possessions when you play Angry Birds or Candy Crush or one of these online games. You don’t really win anything. Most of these you don't even play with other people, but there's something fun and exciting about getting to the next level, the next accomplishment, the next achievement. Those are all rewards of the self. 

We also see this online when it comes to email, for example. Checking those unread messages, finishing the to-dos in your to-do-list, or tapping on an icon on your home screen that has a little message that says something is waiting for you, all examples of variable rewards of the self. The search for competency, consistency and control. 

[0:26:57.9] MB: I’m sure if you're listening to this show, you’re passionate about mastering new skills and abilities, and that's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our sponsor this week, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn everything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography, and you can get unlimited access to the entire catalog for a low monthly price, so you don't have to pay per class like many other sites. 

They have some really cool courses on there. They have a course on Evernote mastery. You know how much I love Evernote. Evernote runs basically my entire life and I highly recommend using it as a tool, but also checking out their course on how to do it. They have a really cool course on productivity planning and they have a course on mind maps. Mind maps are awesome. I have a mind map sitting on my desk that I'm looking at right now for the Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin. I love my mind maps. It’s an incredible strategy that speaks directly to your brain and your subconscious and it's a really cool tool to remember things. 

There're so many fascinating courses on Skillshare, and the cool thing is they’ve been so kind to the show, they've been an incredible sponsor, and they're giving all of our listeners a free month of access, so get in there. You can get free classes for up to a month completely for free. You can check out all of these courses, just go to skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month. 

[0:30:25.7] MB: This is something we talk about a lot on the show, but I think it bears repeating, and I love the verbiage you’ve used on here, the rewards of the tribe, the rewards of the hunt. These psychological tendencies are baked into the human brain by evolution. One of the most powerful things about the hooks model and something the more broadly we talk about on the show all the time is that the more you align yourself with the inmate sort of way that evolution has shaped our brains. The more you align yourself with those forces, powerful things can happen, but the more you try and fight them, the more you try to challenge and refuse to accept natural biases and the way that our brains are structured, you're fighting a serious uphill battle. 

[0:31:09.7] NE: Right. I think understanding this is incredibly important. Now, I think the worst thing we can do — One of the worst cognitive biases that we have is when we learn helplessness. A lot of critics of technology — If you listen to what I've just said or you read my book, one interpretation is that these companies are out to get us. They are using our psychological tendencies to get us to buy more junk and to get us to use their apps. That is all true. They are doing that. They have always done that. Persuasion has always been about changing behavior. If you dress a certain way to impress a mate, that is persuasion, and that has happened for 200,000 years of human evolution. 

Now, what's beautiful about the human species, what makes us so special, one of things that makes us so special is that we are adaptable. If I took a Siberian tiger and I put them with their cousin, the Indian Tiger, in the middle of the Indian forest, that Siberian tiger would die because it can't adapt to its environment. Human beings who can adapt to every single continent on the planet and they can even adapt to life outside the planet, in outer space. We are the only species that can do that. 

The lesson here is that we need to use that adaptability. The reason I wrote this book is twofold. One; I want people to build technologies that help change our habit, because I really do believe that we can use this new generation of technology to help people live better lives. The second reason I wrote the book is because I want us to understand how these technologies change our behaviors so we can do something about it. 

I don't want people to think that these technologies are somehow taking away your agency, that you're powerless to resist them, because that is in fact the worst thing that you can believe. There’s been some great studies that have shown that — There was a study back in 2015 that found that alcoholics who believe they were powerless to resist the temptation of alcohol were much more likely to relapse after treatment. In fact, there are beliefs about powerlessness, were as much of a factor as the physical dependency itself. That should stop everybody in their tracks. Think about that. Their beliefs about the addiction and their powerlessness relative to temptation was as much of a factor as the physical dependency itself. 

The lesson here is that as an adaptable species, I have never found any technology to date that makes us powerless. There is nothing I can show you on a screen. There’s even nothing I can inject into your body that turns you into a zombie. What that means is that we need to be aware of how these technology work, how these products and services can potentially hook us and sometimes addict us, so that we can do something about it. So that we can put these products in their place. 

Now, most of the time, these products and services serve us, we love them. They help improve our lives. Of course, sometimes we can go overboard with all sorts of different bad habits, and so this is an instruction manual just as much to help people build healthy habits as it is to help us break unhealthy habit that don't serve us. 

[0:34:35.6] MB: Let's unpack each of those, maybe starting with building healthier habits. What are some specific recommendations or habits that you talk about that maybe somebody listening could use the hooked model to create healthier habits for themselves. 

[0:34:51.3] NE: Sure. The book is really about products. I will give you a few examples of a few different products. Now, I have to state for full disclosure, I've invested in some these examples that I’m going ot share with you, so I just want to get that out of the way, because I want to invest in companies that are using my techniques for good. One product that I'm particularly proud of is a product called Bite. Bite is this — It tackles this problem of food deserts. food deserts happen when there are people located in areas where they cannot get access to healthy food. 

This particular company tackles the problem of folks who work in office buildings, and many times the only options for accessible food are vending machines. Think about nurses that are working late, or people in office buildings maybe in more rural settings where they can just walk downstairs to a cafeteria that’s serving fresh food. Literally, millions of people are stuck in these effective food deserts where the only food they can get if they didn’t bring something from home are Cheetos in the vending machine and soda. 

The current thinking around the obesity epidemic is that people don't eat healthy, because they don't understand. I see this over and over and over again, that many people the first knee-jerk reaction as to why people don't change their behavior is because, well, they just must not know. It turns out that’s almost never true. That people know more than you think. That people generally know what is healthy and what is unhealthy. That a bag of Cheetos and a Coca-Cola are not as healthy as a fresh salad.Tthere's very few people who don't know that, so why don't people eat better? 

It turns out it's really about availability. It's about access to these food items. In fact, making that behavior just a little bit easier can have dramatic results. We talked about the action phase of a hook. We have seen that there are — We can dramatically change people's behavior just from moving the access to food a little bit closer, and sometimes I'm talking about just a few floors closer can have dramatic effects. 

In fact, there was a study done at Google that have found that just moving unhealthy food in the snack room a couple of shelves up so that people had to reach for the cookie dramatically reduce the amount of cookies eaten and increase the number of healthy snacks chosen instead that were placed at reach level. 

This company that I started to tell you about, Bite Foods, they basically took these refrigerators, the size of vending machines. They slapped an iPad on top of each one of these vending machines so that all you have to do is swipe your credit card, the machine unlocks, and you take out of this vending machine farm fresh foods; salads and fresh made food that was made that day that's delivered from local restaurants, and this has dramatically increased the number of people who are eating healthier and losing weight and getting their bodies in better shape just because they made it easier to access these foods. That's one example of a company that I've invested in that’s using the hook model. They’re also, of course, using variable rewards, because the food changes regularly. Also using investments, because the products — They will bring you more of products that you are consuming, so they you’re your preferences. If you like yogurt and you rated it as something you like, they’re going to bring you more of that Greek yogurt next time or the salad or whatever it is that your preferences are. They are using the hook model in that way. 

Another company that's building healthy habit that I've invested in is called 7 Cups. 7even Cups was started by a psychotherapist by the name of Glenn Moriarty, and Glenn called me a couple of years ago. On my website, many people read my book and they'll ask for time with me. They want to figure how to build a habit-forming product or they have a question about the book. I actually give out time for free. Anyone can call me just by going to my website. 

Glenn booked time with me a couple of years ago and he said, “Look. I’m a therapists, and I know that there are far more people who could benefit from therapy that don't get it, because that’s too hard. There's social stigma. There is expense. There’s time involved. All these things that make getting therapy something that people don't do because it's too darn hard.” 

Glenn built this beautiful app called 7 Cups, that is essentially something that whenever someone's feeling down, let’s say it’s a parent of a child with a disability or a soldier suffering from PTSD or just someone who’s feeling down and need someone to talk to. With the click of one button, that’s the action phase, a click of a button. The internal trigger by the way is loneliness, that negative emotion. The action is clicking with one of the button. The variable reward is that you are instantly connected to another human being, and the investment is that the more you participate with this product, the more you use it, you are actually offered the opportunity to invest in the platform by learning how to become a trained listener yourself. 

It turns out that people who do this find the service to be as effective as traditional psychotherapy, which is really amazing, because it’s a free service that I think right now is in a 140 countries and they’re doing 180,000 sessions a week. These are two great examples of companies that are using the hook model to build healthy habits in people's lives. 

[0:40:14.3] MB: We’ll make sure to include those in the show notes so that listeners can check them out. On the flipside of the coin, what are some strategies we can use to break negative habit loops that we get stuck in? For example, looking at Reddit or constantly checking Twitter, something like that. 

[0:40:30.9] NE: Yeah. Basically what we do is we put the hook model in reverse. The idea is that we want to break the hook. Habit-forming products of all sorts — By the way, we talked a lot about technology. Again, there's just as many habit-forming technologies off-line as there are online. What we want to do is put space between the steps of the hook. 

For example, the simplest thing you can do is to remove the triggers. Let's say you got a bad habit of checking Facebook too much. The simplest thing you can do is to remove the Facebook app from your cell phone. How about this? Take 15 minutes and adjust your notification settings. About two thirds of people with smartphones never adjust their notification settings. That’s madness. Take a few minutes and just make sure that the app makers are not interrupting you, are not triggering you on their schedule. Make sure that only the apps that are important to you can notify you, can send you those triggers. Remove unwanted triggers. 

The best thing you can do if you're on a diet and you find yourself eating unhealthy food, is to remove those foods from your house, for God sakes. If you're trying to cut down on sugar, don't have cookie and ice cream all over the house, because it's too powerful of a trigger. You have to remove them. 

In my house, for example, we’ve dramatically cut down on our sugar consumption. There’s doctor in America that's going to tell you sugar is good for you and you should eat more of it. The science there is pretty darn ironclad, that we don't need more sugar. We still eat dessert from time to time, but we don't eat it in the house. What a simple rule. If we really want something sweet, we have to go outside, go to a restaurant and go but it. 

Just that added friction has dramatically reduced how much of that thing that we don't want to consume we actually consume in our lives. Just removing the trigger, the next step is of course making the action more difficult. We talked a little bit about how now that added effort of having to go get a dessert outside the home, that's increased friction. 

When it comes to technology, for example, how could we make the action more difficult? Here's what I do in my house. I was finding that every night I was spending more and more time online as supposed to being with my wife, someone I love very much. Our relationship was suffering. Our sex life was suffering because we were spending more time fondling our iPhones than actually being together. We did something very simple. I went to the hardware store and I bought myself a $10 outlet timer, and that outlet timer every night at 10 p.m. turns off my Internet router. 

Now, I could go over and take out the Internet router and unplug it from the timer and re-plug it in. I could do that, but of course now that requires more effort. I just inserted a bit of friction to make the action a little bit more difficult to do. Why? Because now it gives me this moment of mindfulness to say to myself, “Wait a minute is this really important right now? Do I really need to be online, or do I need to get to sleep, or do I need to spend some quality time with my wife?” That bit of mindfulness, that’s what we’re looking for, just a moment of reflection to stop a mindless habit. 

When it comes to the variable reward phase, I use a technique called temptation bundling. What you want to do here is to make sure that these variable rewards are not something that keep pulling you in. What I do is use a technique, and it’s been well studied now, called temptation bundling, which is when you take something you want and you couple it with something that you don't really want to do. 

Here’s what I do. Here's a bad habit I tried to break, where particularly with new administration, with the elections, I was reading the news all the time and that was not healthy for me. I just kept wasting time. I’d read one article and then I’d see a link for another article and another article and I’d be pulled in and 45 minutes later I was scrolling the web and I didn’t get anything done. 

Instead I have a rule that whenever I see an article that looks interesting I save that article to an app called Pocket, and there're other apps like it. I think previously there is another app that does this. Basically, you can save that article into an app. Then there're variable rewards there. What's in the article is the variable reward, the content itself. I want to know what the story is about. Instead of reading it right then and there where it's going to be a big waste time, I have this rule that I don't read on my desktop. Instead, I only can read that content when I'm on the treadmill, or I use this other app called VoiceStream that will literally read what's in my pocket queue to me. I can go on a walk. I can ilft weights. I can do something that I want to do, but it’s a little bit more difficult to do, I need some extra motivation, so I’ve put it in my headphones. I can listen to these articles, and I’ve removed the reward from that immediate circumstance and then coupled it with something that I want to get done, namely; workout in the gym. 

Finally, when it comes to the investment phase, the fourth step of the hook, you want to make sure not to invest. Here's the rule; never do something that you don't have the end in sight. I like video games. I like movies, but I don't play social games and I don't watch series. I had this terrible experience. Do you remember the Series 24? Did you ever watch 24? 

[0:45:38.1] MB: Oh, yeah. I remember 24. 

[0:45:40.0] NE: All right. With Kiefer Sutherland. He got me bad. Kiefer Sutherland got be real bad. I went with some friends to a ski retreat and somebody brought 24, and we sat there the entire weekend and we watched every episode of this stupid show and we didn’t do any skiing, it was horrible, because of this stupid show. 

From that day forward I decided I will never watch one of those serialized shows. I'm sorry. Maybe I'm a dork that I don't know what happens in Games of Thrones. I don’t know what happened with the House of Cards. That's okay to me. You know why? Because I like movies, I like things that have an end. I like things that have two hours, and then I know that’s how much time I’m putting into it, but I don't start things that go on and on and on and on. Why? Because they are designed. There are thousands of people at that studio trying to figure out how to keep you coming back. Every episode ends with a cliffhanger, and that emotional investment of your of wanting to know what happens next is what keeps you watching the next episode and the next episode and the next episode. Do not invest in things that you don't have the end in sight. 

[0:46:47.1] MB: Very good recommendations, and especially Pocket. Pocket is something that I personally love using and recommend to people all the time as a great way to stop a random article from disrupting the middle of your workload. Just save it to Pocket and then have that time set aside to actually look into it. That's when you go and you sort of batch that time to read articles or you use dead time, like time when you're waiting in line or somewhere. 

What would be kind of one simple piece of homework that you would give a listener as a starting point to implement some of the ideas that we’ve talked about today? 

[0:47:23.8] NE: Sure. If you're trying to build a healthy habit, maybe if you're trying to build a habit-forming product, that you want to make sure that you have a hook built into that product. If you're working at a company and you need to form a customer habit, you want to make sure that you have trigger action reward and investment built into the product design. It’s not that every product has to have a habit. It’s that every product that needs a habit has to have a hook. That’s if you're trying to build a habit. 

Now, if you're trying to break a habit, the first thing to ask yourself — I think this is something that we’re going out to become more and more familiar with, is this simple question of; is this technology serving me, or am I serving it? 

We all need distractions. Distractions are something that human beings have had forever. Socrates and Aristotle debated the nature of a crazy, this tendency to do things against our better interest. In fact, distractions can be very useful in life. They help us cope with uncomfortable situations. However, when we rely on distraction to escape an uncomfortable reality and we never learn how to deal with that pain, well then the person who can alleviate that pain can take advantage of us. Whether it’s drugs, whether it's television, whether it's watching too many sports, frankly, whether it’s listening to this podcast. If we’re using a distraction to escape something that we don't want to deal with, and that goes on for an extended period of time, that can harm us. 

The real question here is when does a distraction serve us and when are we serving it? By asking us that critical question, that’s the homework, is to ask ourselves that critical question. Then we can start to categorize, “You know what? This technology actually does serve me. I enjoy it. I like this distraction. I'm not serving it.” A way you can test that is to disconnect for a little while. What would happen if you didn’t use Facebook for a week or two? What would happen if you stop watching sports for a week or two? How would you deal with that? If the answer is, “It’s no big deal,” then that’s probably not addiction. It's not something that causes you any kind of long-term harm. If you find that, “Wow! This is really difficult for me to cope with, or I'm unable to cope with,” then you might need to bring out the heavy artillery and understand with the deeper needs are, what the deeper reason. What kind of pain are you really escaping from?

For the most part, what you'll probably find if you're not actually addicted, there is a portion of the population that is actually addicted, but it's a very small proportion. If you're like most of us, you're not struggling with addiction. You're struggling with distractions. The key question here is to understand when is the distraction serving you, when are you serving it, and then to put technology in these distractions in its place by adapting your behaviors around these technologies and distractions and adopting new technologies.

We talked about how you can use these other technologies. Like I told you the story about that router that shuts off the Internet — The outlet timer that shuts off my Internet router. There are literally thousands of apps and technologies that you can use to shut off technology during certain times of the day so that you can focus, so that you can get the kind of work done that you want to get done. 
We talked about Pocket, all these new technologies that help put technology in its place. Lots of solutions out there if you ask yourself this critical question of; is this serving me or am I serving it? 

[0:50:42.2] MB: For listeners who want to dig in more, where can people find you and your book and your blog online? 

[0:50:48.0] NE: Sure. My website is called nirandfar.com. Nir is spelled like my first name, N-I-R, so nirandfar.com, and my book is called Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and it’s available wherever books are sold. 

[0:51:00.7] MB: Nir, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all these wisdom. I know listeners are going to get a lot out of this and to have some really concrete strategies to both implement using technology to build better habits, but also how to combat negative habits and distractions. 

[0:51:13.7] NE: Awesome, it is a real pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. 

[0:51:16.7] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We’ve created this show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based personal growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's matt@successpodcast.com. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First, you’re going to get an exclusive weekly email from us called Mindset Monday. This is packed full of interesting links and articles in short, sweet, easily digestible. Things that are interesting to us, things we’ve been talking about, reading, discussing internally here that we wanted to share with the listeners. 

Next, you’re going to get a chance to shape the show, vote on guests, guests’ questions. We actually have a guest coming up that’s a guest we’re super excited about and we’ve been asking the email list for the last couple of weeks to give us feedback and questions for this particular guest. 

Lastly, you're going to get an awesome for a guide. It’s a free guide we created based on listener demand. It's our most popular guide, it’s called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with a sweet bonus guide, that's a surprise. All you have to do is sign up and join the email list. You can do that right at our website, successpodcast.com, sign up on the home page, or if you're on the go right now, just text the word “smarter”, that's “smarter” to the number 44222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in this episode; links, transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out the show notes. If you go to the website, successpodcast.com, you can find the show notes, just hit the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

How This Astronaut Survived Going Blind In Space & Tools for Crushing Fear with Chris Hadfield

In this episode we discuss what happened when our guest astronaut Chris Hadfield went blind during a space walk - and how he made it out alive. We talk about the mental toughness necessary to survive extremely dangerous situations like that, discuss in depth how astronauts deal with fear, look at the vital importance of powerful training to deal with huge risks, and much more with  Chris Hadfield.

Chris Hadfield, who the BBC called “the most famous astronaut since Neil Armstrong" has been a part of several space missions with the Canadian Space Agency and NASA. He served as Chief of Robotics and Chief of International Space Station Operations. Chris was the first Canadian to command the International Space Station and was awarded the NASA Exceptional Service Medal and inducted to the Canadian Aviation Hall Of Fame. In addition to his work as an engineer and astronaut Chris is an author, musician, and speaker.

We discuss:

• The 3 key things that enabled chris to make it all the way through the astronaut selection process

• How Chris survived going BLIND during a space walk in outer space!!

• How astronauts rescue incapacitated crew in outer space

• How to cultivate the mental toughness to survive the most dangerous situations imaginable

• The learned and trained ability to deal with extremely complex circumstances

• Why Chris was an astronaut for 21 years and only spent 6 months in space, thats how important training is

• In outer space, you can’t count on luck, you count on your own learned ability to deal with the probable things that could go wrong

• How NASA develops training programs to do everything possible to be successful

• The vital importance of visualizing failure and understanding what could go wrong

• The importance of practicing the 10,000 things that could go wrong

• Astronauts don’t visualize success, they practice for failure, all the time

• Visualize failure, incrementally improve, don't count on luck

• NASA’s Recipe for Success

• The relationship between DANGER and FEAR

• Things aren't’ scary, but people get scared

• Things don’t change whether or not you are afraid of them - the ONLY question is whether or not you are prepared

• Preparation is the antidote to fear, if you’re ready, you won’t be afraid

• Your body’s physiology reacts to being unprepared to a dangers situation with a reaction we simply call “fear”

• FEAR = LACK OF PREPARATION

• Perpetual fear = STRESS (and overwhelm)

• Ask yourself “what thing am I not prepared for that is causing me stress?"

• Listen to fear, but don’t keep fear from allowing you to dictate your life

• How do you change your own threshold of fear?

• How to overcome your fear of spiders!

• Recognize real threats through the noise of the non threats

• if you dont know what to be afraid fo, then your afraid of everything

• the difference between belief and knowledge

• If you're afraid of a jaguar, should you be afraid of a kitten?

• One of the ways to increase your own significance is to exaggerate your problems

• Why the perception that the world is more dangerous now than ever is fundamentally flawed

• "The Sky is Not The Limit"

• Life is TOUGH and the earth is TOUGH - it’s been here for 4.5 billion years

• The perspective of an astronaut viewing the entire world from above

• The shared nature of human existence

• Why Chris recommends that you should “aim to be a zero”

• Take the time to get informed, understand what is happening, and then take action

• The building is very seldom on fire, yet we always treat it like it is

• In space, ”there is no problem so bad, that you can’t make it worse”

• Don’t just accept your fear, understand WHY, dig in, and treat it clinically - whats the REAL danger, whats the REAL problem I’m trying to solve, how can I change who I am to solve that problem / challenge better, what skill am I lacking? Why am I allowing myself to be terrified?

• How can I change myself to move beyond fear

• Fear is a destructive long term solution to anything

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better? 
Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Personal Site] Chris Hadfield

• [Twitter] @Cmdr_Hadfield

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

In this episode we what happened when our guest, astronaut Chris Hadfield, went blind during a spacewalk and how he made it out alive. We talk about the mental toughness necessary to survive extremely dangerous situations just like that. We discuss in depth how astronauts deal with fear. We look at the vital importance of powerful training to deal with huge risks and much more with Chris Hatfield. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First; you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand. It’s our popular guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything, and you can get it completely for free along with another awesome bonus guide. That’s a surprise. You’re going to sign up to find out, by joining our email list. 

Second, you’re going to get curated weekly emails from us every week including our mindset Monday email, which listeners have been loving. It’s a short email that shares articles, stories and links of things that we found interesting in the last week. 

Lastly, you’re going to get listener exclusive content and a chance to shape the show, vote on guests, change our intro music, like when we rolled out our new intro a couple of weeks ago, and weigh in on many important things that are going on with the show. 

Again, join the email list today by going to successpodcast.com signing up right on the homepage, or if you’re on the go right now, you can just text the word “smarter”, that’s “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, that’s “smarter” to 44222.

In our previous episode we discussed how a neurologist’s perspective on your brain fundamentally ignores the health of the entire system. We talked about your gut biome’s role in depression, mood regulation and how the micro-biome controls your behavior and emotions. We ask why it is so hard for people to break negative eating habits, looked at the biochemistry of addiction, discuss the incredible importance of understanding your micro-biome and gut health and much more with Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary. If you want to get the neuroscience behind your gut in your micro-biome, listen to that episode. 

Now, for the interview. 

I want to make a quick note before we dive in. Chris had to dial in via phone, so the audio quality on this episode is a little bit rougher than some of our typical interviews. Remember, we are interviewing experts across the world, people in many different industries and in many cases, you know, astronauts like Chris are not professional podcasters. They don't have a professional recording set up. We do the best we can to try and deliver the highest quality audio possible, but I just wanted to give you heads up that the audio quality on this interview is not the best that we've done, but the conversation is amazing. I know you’re going to get a ton out of it, so let's dive right in. 

[0:03:15.7] MB: Today we have another incredible guest on the show, astronaut Chris Hatfield. Chris, who the BBC called the most famous astronaut since Neil Armstrong, has been part of several space missions with the Canadian Space Agency and NASA. He served as the Chief of Robotics and the Chief of International Space Station Operations. Chris was the first Canadian to command the International Space Station and was awarded the NASA Exceptional Service medal and inducted to the Canadian Aviation Hall of Fame. In addition, his work as an engineer and astronaut, Chris is an author, musician and speaker. 

Chris, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:03:50.4] CH: Thanks, Matt. It’s really nice to be joining you. That’s almost embarrassing to listen to all of that introduction, but thanks for mentioning everything. 

[0:03:57.0] MB: You had quite a storied career and some really, really fascinating experiences. I’d love to start out, for listeners who may not be familiar with you and some of your background, tell us how did you become an astronaut and what were you doing before that? 

[0:04:12.3] CH: The simple question, or I guess how to answer to your question is, I decided to be an astronaut when I was a kid and I started trying to turn myself into one starting at like 10 years old. I really had no idea, but I thought astronauts fly in space, so I’m going to learn to fly. Astronauts have to know how to operate complex machinery, so I’m going to become an engineer. I noticed that a lot of astronauts traditionally at the beginning were test pilots, so I thought I’m going to try and become a military test pilot and see if all that works or not, and if it doesn’t, that’s all still a bunch of interesting things to be a pilot and a test pilot and an engineer. That's the path I followed. 

I served 25 years in the Air Force and became a test pilot, actually even serving with the NAVY, U.S. NAVY as a test pilot. At the end of all of that, I even got a university degree in Tennessee, in fact. After all of that, I got selected as an astronaut and then served 21 years as an astronaut. 

[0:05:09.9] MB: That’s fascinating. Both of those things, how do you — I know it’s such a competitive and challenging field even just becoming a test pilot, let alone becoming an astronaut. What do you think enabled you to make your way through that incredibly difficult selection process? 

[0:05:28.4] CH: Three different things, Matt. I think let me get through all that. Number one was an unquenchable burning desire. You really, really have to want to do this just because there're so many dead ends and obstacles and unlikely opportunities. The second is a huge amount of work. I love work. I grew up on a farm work. I think work is interesting and productive and it gives me satisfaction. I think in addition to an unquenchable desire is also a big appetite for hard work. Then the third is luck. If I’ve been born 10 years prior, I couldn't have been an astronaut. It’s just timing, and health, and circumstance and such. There’s always going to be some luck involved. 

I think if you have a burning desire, you have a huge amount of ability to work at something and then accept that there's luck involved, that's not a bad recipe for no matter what you’re dreaming of doing. 

[0:06:21.3] MB: One of the most famous things that you're kind of known for is this infamous spacewalk that you talked about in your TED Talk. Could you share that story with the audience? 

[0:06:33.1] CH: Sure. I’ve done two spacewalks to help build things orbiting the earth. I helped build part of the International Space Station. Spacewalks are hard. They take many, many years of training, development, invention, practice, but even while they're happening, they’re physically very demanding and very technically complicated. Nothing like you see in the movies ever. But stuff goes wrong during spacewalks all the time naturally. We try and keep it safe, because your danger is very hard and, touch wood, we've never lost an astronaut during a spacewalk to this point, but we recognize the risk and the danger of them. 

During my first spacewalk there was contamination inside the suit that got into one of my eyes, sort of stopped it from working. Suddenly I couldn't see out of my left eye. I just kept working, because I figured well maybe it will clear and I couldn't do anything about it anyway. I couldn’t rub my eye or anything. It’s stuck inside a helmet. My eye was irritated enough by the contamination. It was tearing up, and without gravity, the tears don’t go anywhere. They just stay in your eyes like this big ball of contaminated saltwater and tear. 

Eventually, that ball of contamination got big enough that unfortunately it bridged to the side of my nose and flowed this little bubble of contaminated stuff flowed into my other eye and contaminated my other eye. So then both my eyes were contaminated and I was blinded during my first spacewalk. That was a difficult thing to deal with, being outside, holding on to the outside of the ship suddenly unable to see. 

I think if we hadn't practiced, if we’ve taken it lightly, if we hadn’t done all the work in advance, that would've been cripplingly scary and unsolvable. I was outside with a guy named Scott Parazynski, a classmate of mine, really competent fellow, and we practiced for years and years and help invent everything we’re going to do out there. One of the things we had practiced is just in the category of if one of us becomes unable for whatever reason. You might have a loss of communication, so your suit might short out or you might lose oxygen or you might have a leak in your suit or whatever. You might have a heart attack. Who knows? We call that incapacitated crew rescue. 

Scott and I had practiced that. In fact it's one of the things you have to qualify at in order to be trusted to do a spacewalk. In this case I was incapacitated to some degree. I could talk. I could think. I was still fine. I could communicate with everybody. I just couldn’t see. Without being able to see, you really can't do the job out there. I talked to everybody and we ended up realizing that it might be something pretty serious contaminating my suit, and so I opened up the purge valve. The in-consultation with mission control down in Houston opened up the purge valve on my suit to let the contaminated atmosphere around my head flush and squirt out into space and then tapping into my limited reserves of pressurized oxygen in the suit. Listening to the oxygen hiss out of my suit alone out of the universe, and the universe is kind of bit to re-pressurize with one oxygen tank. I knew I was going to lose at that eventually. 

What it did was it brought enough fresh oxygen, and therefore atmosphere into my suit, that it allowed the contamination to evaporate around my eyes and sort of build a crusty ring around my eyes, and my eyes continued tearing. After a while the contamination got dilute enough that I could see again and could get back to work and my eye stopped tearing. 

It turned out just to be the anti-fog that we used on the visor, sort of a mixture of oil and a harsh soap and it’s as if someone had just squirted oily harsh soap into your eye. Your eye doesn't work anymore. Nothing super technical, just a thing, but enough that it definitely upped the danger and decreased our chances of success. We practiced and prepared enough that the mission control allowed us to continue and finish the entire spacewalk actually and got everything done. Since then we've changed the anti-fog solution that we use, when in truth we use Johnson’s No More Tears now, which probably what we should use right from the get go. That little problem manifested itself into me being blind, alone, out of my very first spacewalk, pretty interesting place to be. 

[0:10:57.6] MB: What goes through your mind in that moment when you completely lose your vision and you’re floating in outer space? 

[0:11:06.1] CH: Well, in my case it was, number one, what caused it. I’m thinking, “Okay. What can be causing — What’s irritating my eyes? Why am I struck blind by this?” I’ve studied all of the stuff very carefully. I know how all of the systems in the suit work really well. I’m trying visualize through all of the schematics and chemistry and everything of what might be causing this problem. Two; frustration, because I'm not able to do the things that I’m there for. I’m supposed to be building this huge robot arm to Canada onto the outside of the spaceship and now I’m useless and just there hanging on waiting for this problem to clear. I’m kind of frustrated at this event. 

Then, three, having to tell Houston, because I know just what a grenade that's going to be at mission control to tell everybody down there that I’m blind. They just have a real serious problem to try and give me good advice on. I’m just thinking about all of those things. 

The real bottom line is am I okay or not? As soon as you established yourself that, “Okay. I’m breathing. I’m fine. The only thing is I can’t see. So what? If you close your eyes, you can't see.” It’s just a matter of just something to deal with. Not a problem I wanted to deal with, and hopefully nothing that’s going to strike me permanently blind, but still just one sense out of five that I lost and let's try and solve the problem. Let’s work the problem and get to the solution of that. Let’s not going to worry and panic and overdramatic about the thing. Let’s deal with it and move on. 

[0:12:33.7] MB: How do you cultivate the mental toughness to be in such an incredibly high stress situation and maintain that kind of calm presence of mind to be able to problem solve and work your way through it? 

[0:12:48.9] CH: That’s why NASA hire the astronauts that they do. NASA is currently going through an astronaut selection, and 18,000 people have applied for like 8 or 10 slots, 8 or 10 positions. If you have 18,000 people to choose from, you don't just choose people that are fit or you don't just choose people that have a certain type of university degree. You try and choose people that not only are fit and have a certain type university degree, but also have a proven ability to make good decisions under really complex and high-stakes situations. Who would you hire? You’ll hire test plots, because test pilots are used to balancing all of that stuff, a very dangerous job. Test pilots are killed all the time, because the job itself is dangerous. Also, have that a learned and trained ability to deal with huge number of factors simultaneously. You’re flying the airplane, you're testing something new, you're dealing with unexpected circumstances and you still, at the end of it, have to somehow get home and land. 

Or we hire medical doctors, and not just run-of-the-mill medical doctors, but as competent as possible, or we hire people who have ran large stage of life, or not only do they have all the raw material, but they have the proven ability to make good decisions, but the consequences really truly matter. When you never have enough information, you’ve shown that you are the type of person that can be trusted to make the right call and not just get all panicked. Then that’s how we do it; the right type of people chosen and then years and years of training and preparation and study. 

I was an astronaut for 21 years, and I was only in space for six months. For 20-1/2 years I was training and studying and preparing and helping to support and invent space flight. That’s how you deal with it. 

[0:14:40.5] MB: Wow! That ratio, it really demonstrates the point which I think is vital that training and practice is so important. Talk to me a little bit more about that and how critical that is. For somebody who's — I’m trying to draw this back to almost an actionable insight for someone who’s listening in. How vital is training and how can people integrate that lesson of how they can build toughness in their own lives?

[0:15:05.2] CH: I think a lot of people just count on good looks and charm and luck and such. If you do that, that’s fine. Sometimes it will work and sometimes it won't, and if the consequences are low, then so what? It’s no big deal. So this didn’t work out. If the consequences of what you’re trying to do are life and death and also it meant financial consequence, or if you get this wrong, that you have wasted an entire shuttle flight or you’ve ruined a piece of equipment that cost a lot of people a lot of money. We take it immensely seriously. 

If that’s the type of thing you're trying to accomplish, then you don't just count on random events. You don’t just count on luck. It changes your entire job. Your job is now to do everything that is possible prior to this event happening so that you could optimize your chances of success. To do that, you don't visualize success. You visualize failure. Like in the book, my first book, the Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, what I call the power of negative thinking. There's not much point in just visualizing success, because if it happens it's great. If it doesn't, then visualizing it didn’t help. 

Visualizing failure serves you well. This is what I’m trying to accomplish. What is the most likely thing to go wrong and am I ready to face it, and how do I know? Let’s practice that thing going wrong and see if I can deal with it. If I can't, let’s practice it again and again and again until, “Okay. If that thing goes wrong, I now know how to deal with it, and then let’s move on to the next most probable thing to go wrong and let's practice that until we understand it and then the next and the next thing.” 

I don’t know. We practiced 10,000 different things, and that's what astronauts do for a living; visualize success. They practice for failure all the time. They live in a world of negative thinking, because then when something's coming along, like space fuck, and suddenly you’re struck blind. You’re like, “Okay. What’s really gone wrong here? What am I dealing with? What could have caused this? What are the impacts? What can I do next? What did we practice? What do we know about this and how can we improve it for the future?” It just changes what your role is. You don't count on luck. You count on your own learned and practiced ability to deal with the probable things that are going to go wrong, and that applies to everything. It applies to driving your car down the highway. 

Eventually in your life, Matt, driving down a road, you are going to have a tire go flat, but how many times have you practiced it? How many times have you actually look at your model of car, whether it's front-wheel-drive, all-wheel-drive, rear wheel drive. W type of steering do you have? What type of run flat tires do you have? All that information, you know in one minute you could look it up. What is the right thing to do if you’re going 60 down the highway and your front left tire blows? What should you do? It’s a thing that's going to happen sometime in your life and you can learn exactly what you're supposed to do in 10 minutes on the Internet and the next time you’re driving your car, you can practice it 10 times. Just say, “Okay. Right now my front left —” on some empty stretch of road while you’re just driving long anyway. “My front left tire just blew up. Okay. What are my actions? Do I break? Do I not break? Do I downshift? Do I go into neutral? What do I do? Do I go left? Do I go right?” Just practice it. After you've done it, looked it up and done it 10 times, then you just file that away inside yourself as, “Okay. this is one of the things I'm now ready for.” Astronauts treat everything, like that flat tire. That’s how we fly in space. 

[0:18:39.8] MB: It’s amazing that when you look across people who’ve been incredibly successful in various different disciplines. I’m thinking about Charlie Monger, Warren Buffett. The business partner, the cochairman of Berkshire Hathaway, a guy we talk about all the time on the show. I’m thinking about people like the ancient Stoics. They all have very, very similar lessons, which is this idea that it's not necessarily about focusing on and visualizing things can go right. It's about figuring out the most probable things that can go wrong and planning and optimizing and building a strategy so that you can minimize those things. 

[0:19:16.3] CH: Yeah. That’s the only way that NASA has been successful in putting people that are up on the space station right now and driving our probe through the plumes of Enceladus that are going around Saturn right now and flying out beyond Pluto and driving the probes around on Mars and all these stuff we’re doing. It is purely the results of setting ourselves a goal and then starting to visualize failure and then learning incrementally better and better, how to get closer and closer to what it is we’re dreaming of and not counting on luck. 

No astronaut launches for space with their fingers crossed. That's not how we deal with risk. That’s just not an actual way to step up to something, and anything we’re doing in life, the people that you just mentioned. They have a set of goals in life. Things that they value, things that they want to get done. Any of the choices that they make have risk. Whether it's personal, reputational, financial, life or death. Anything worth doing in life has risk. Then the real question is, “How are you changing who you are so that you have a better chance of succeeding when you’re faced that particular risk?” That's really the whole recipe for success in spaceflight and really, I think, in anything worthwhile in life. 

[0:20:35.8] MB: That brings up a couple of points that I want to dig into. One of them is the relationship between danger and fear. Being somebody who's been a test pilot, an astronaut, you’ve put yourself in some incredibly dangerous situations, I guess, by most people's estimations. How do you view the interaction between those two things and are they the same? 

[0:21:00.0] CH: People ask you all the time, “Was launch scary?” or “Boy! Doing a spacewalk, that must be scary.” I became aware years and years ago as a test pilot and then as an astronaut that things aren't scary, just people are scared and they’re fundamentally different. 

Some people are afraid of whatever; a mouse or some people aren’t. Some people are afraid of — I don’t know, marriage, and some people are afraid of flying. The thing doesn't change. The mouse doesn't change, whether you’re afraid of it or not, or the airplane or the idea of flight or whatever. The real question is, “What are you prepared for and what are you unprepared for?” 

If you're unprepared for something then, really, the only recourse that we have is to be afraid, because fear causes physiological changes in your body. When you’re afraid, your body changes; you shiver or the blood drains from some part of your body or adrenaline gets released into your veins. Your body recognizes that, “Holy cow! This guy isn't ready for the thing that's happening. This wildebeest that just jumped out of the woods at him, he wasn’t ready for that.” And so I need to change momentarily this person's physiology so that they could deal with it. We call that change of physiology fear, because it allows us maybe for a momentary period to be able to face up to a risk. You don't want to fly a spaceship just by using adrenaline in your veins. It’s harmful to your body, but also it’s transient. That's not exactly how we fly spaceships. It’s not relying on super quick muscle twitch and reaction. It relies on complex reasons, a practiced deep technical understanding of how to do things. 

You can draw the parallel to just about anything. I don’t know, learning to use a skateboard. First time you get on a skateboard, you're useless at it and you fall, and so you’re kind of a little bit scared getting on a skateboard at first when you're a kid or, even worse, as an adult, or you don’t have the skills yet and you have a pretty good chance of falling and least skin in your knee, if not breaking a leg or busting a tooth or something, because you are incompetent at it. 

If you spend a time and you turn your natural talent into a honed ability, if you practice skateboarding until you can get on one, not even think about it, and now you could start to do tricks and jumps and all the cool things that the good skateboarders can do, you get to a point where it is no longer scary at all. In fact it's just sort of freedom. It's a cool thing. The skateboard didn’t change. The skateboards exactly the same. The physics didn’t change. It’s just you that changed, and that’s the difference between fear and danger. Things aren't scary, just people are scared. The only reason you're scared is because you didn't do your homework, you didn't practice, you didn’t get ready. You’re just trying to count on luck to carry you through this thing. It will work for some things in life. 

I think that gives you then the choice of you can go through life afraid, and one of our ways of describing perpetual fear stress. You could be overwhelmed by it, but just pick off one thing at a time. What is the thing that I don't how to do that I wish I could that is causing me danger or causing me stress, and let’s try and get good at that today. Let’s spend the next hour getting good at that thing so I don't longer have to be afraid of that. Then let’s go on to the next thing and the thing after that and the thing after that. That’s how I trained as a pilot. I used to be a downhill ski racer as well, same thing. That’s how I t rained as a test pilot and that is the absolute essence of training to fly in space, is to recognize the difference between danger and fear and then use all the available time to be ready for the risk so that you optimize your chances of success. 

[0:25:05.7] MB: What a great point. I really, really like that idea, that fear is essentially lack of preparation. If you prepare enough, if you train enough, it's possible to overcome any fear. Really, in many ways, fear — The kind of logical conclusion of that, is that fear is simply a signal telling you that you need to do more preparation. 

[0:25:27.4] CH: Yeah, or don't do that thing. I’m afraid of heights. Just generically, I think everybody should be afraid of heights, because if you’re in a position where you can fall without any control, then you don’t have to fall for much higher than your own standing height do yourself damage. You can crack your skull just by falling from your own standing height. That’s kind of the limit of how tall evolution is allowed our bodies to be, because if you fall from any more of your own height, you did. 

If you're standing on the edge of a cliff and one tiny little random gust of wind or lack of attention will kill you, then your body should be screaming at you that this is not where you ought to be, and either anchor yourself to something or do something else, but don't put yourself at risk if there's no benefit to what you’re doing. 

If this is a thing you really want to do, if there’s some great benefit to it. This is accomplishing some goals for you, then that's a different set of circumstances and you need to build all the skills you have so that you won't fall. 

The raw idea of fear is really just trying to protect you against hurting yourself, against ending your life unnecessarily. So you should listen to fear, but you should not keep fear from allowing you to dictate the constraints of your life. If you can't, you should locate, “This is important to me, just because I'm afraid.” Well, the afraid part is just because I’m not good at this yet. Let’s start gaining skills so I can do this thing that’s important to me and not just spend my life being stressed and wringing my hands and crossing my fingers and being afraid. 

[0:26:57.9] MB: I’m sure if you're listening to this show, you’re passionate about mastering new skills and abilities, and that's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our sponsor this week, Skillshare. Skillsshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn everything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography, and you can get unlimited access to the entire catalog for low monthly price so you don't have to pay per class like many other sites. 

They have some really cool courses on there. They have a course on Evernote mastery. You know how much I love Evernote. Evernote runs basically my entire life and I highly recommend using it as a tool, but also checking out their course on how to do it. They have a really cool course on productivity planning and they have a course on mind maps. Mind maps are awesome. I have a mind map sitting on my desk that I'm looking at right now for the Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin. I love my mind maps. It’s an incredible strategy that speaks directly to your brain and your subconscious and it's a really cool tool to remember things. 

There's so many fascinating courses on Skillshare, and the cool thing is they’ve been so kind to the show, they've been an incredible sponsor, and they're giving all of our listeners a free month of access, so get in there. You can get free classes for up to a month completely for free. You can check out all of these courses, just go to skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month. 

[0:28:25.7] MB: Another example that you’ve shared around this is the idea of dealing with spiders or fear of spiders and walking through spider webs. Can you share that example? 

[0:28:34.2] CH: what I was trying to explain to folks how is it you can change your own threshold of fear. One of the examples that occurred to me was spiders, because a lot of people are afraid of spiders and there’s a good reason for that, of course, and that some spiders are quite venomous. The venom that they have has a really nasty negative effect and there are some that are really awful that can cause — That’s a neurotoxin or cause really bad damage to the human bodies. Black widow has a certain reputation or a brown recluse. They’ve even got bad names. 

Of course, most spiders are fine. Almost every spider on earth is just a little bug and it’s just being a spider and it’s terrified of you because you’re huge and can squish it any moment. If you have no understanding of spiders at all, then you could treat every single little thing in the corner of your eye that might turn out to be a spider as the most venomous spider that exists, and some people do. They treat every single little bug that they see as potential death, and that’s unreasonable, of course, because the odds of actually running into one of those spiders that does you harm is really low. Rather than spending your life screaming and running every time you see a bug, why not say, “Okay. Some spiders are bad for me, but most aren’t. Where I live, how many spiders are actually poisonous or venomous? How many actually do me harm? 

For a lot of the places in the world, you’ll find that the answer is none. There are spiders at all that exist where you live that are venomous, or maybe there’ just one or two, and you could look up where they actually exist. Maybe they’re only in a certain type of cave or at a certain type of circumstances and maybe they’re easily identifiable. Like a black widow has a great big red hourglass on its back. It couldn’t have a clear, like a danger marking on it just to let you know. 

Then say, “Okay. Now I know what the actual danger is. If it's just any other type of spider, I can treat it like a ladybug. It’s got the same threat to me as a ladybug, but there's a couple of spiders I have to watch out for, or this type, and what do their nest look like, and I won’t walk into one of those type of webs, like the small web, like a black widow that build close to the ground, often dark corners.” 

Then say, “Okay. Now I know what the risk is, but I still have this fundamental sort of gut reaction, my instinctive reaction of fear. Every time I feel a spider web on my face walking in the dusk, I feel that same raw animal fear.” Then say to yourself, “But that can’t be a venomous spider. They don’t build spider webs up here. That can't be it. So I'm just being silly.” 

To overcome it, what I recommend is walk-through spider webs deliberately. Find a spider web that you know actually isn't a threat and walk through it and then find another one and walk-through that. Go up to an attic where there’s a whole bunch of spider webs that are obviously not any sort of threat and just walk through to them. Get over your primitive, illogical, instinctive, fearful reaction and actually look into the information. Find out — Use your brain and figure it out and practice and practice and practice. After you walked through a hundred spider webs with no consequence, then you could start to change your fundamental instinctive reaction. You can start to control your own instinctive fear, and now you can make your decisions based on reality and not just on the same amount of intellect that a simplest forms of life put into their decision-making. 

We treat everything like that in the space business. How does this spider web, or how does this spider actually shape up as a threat? What’s the real threat? What is the real threat look like? How am I going to recognize the real threat from all the noise of the non-threats so that I don't overreact, because if you don't know what to be afraid of, then you're afraid of everything, and I don't think that’s a useful way to go through life. I just think it’s self-destructive. 

[0:32:47.6] MB: I love the example of forcing yourself to walk through spider webs, and I wanted to hear the story, because, to me, I personally am kind of afraid of spiders and so it was very relevant story. I almost instinctively hear, and maybe this is just a lack of knowledge, but I sort of instinctively hear myself saying like, “Yeah. That sounds like a great idea to go walk through some spider webs, but what if?” I think it's the what if that always gets me and like makes me more fearful. It’s like, “What if that web that I happened to walk through happens to be a dangerous spider?”

[0:33:20.4] CH: Right. That’s where your intellect comes into effect, and actually look and do the work in advance. Don't just count on randomness. If you are afraid of jaguars, that doesn't mean you need to be afraid of kittens, house cat kittens, but they’re both cats. You can spend your entire life terrified of kittens because you’re also afraid of jaguars, but it doesn’t make any sense. Yet, for whatever reason, you’re going to put spiders in the same category 

Just do the work in advance. If you have no information, then you have to assume the worst, but you have your whole life to gather information, so why not do it? Why just assume the worst all the time? 

[0:34:04.4] MB: The cat and the kitty jaguar example definitely brings that into light and shows sort of how ridiculous that framework of belief is. 

[0:34:12.0] CH: Yeah. It’s the difference between belief and knowledge. If you’re just running around instinctively reacting on belief, that you may as well be a pug. I have a pug. He’s a delightful dog, but he’s not a deep thinker and he just deals with stuff the best he can and just instinctively reacts to everything, but we’re not pugs. We are the most rational of all beings, and what do you choose to do with your ability to think I think has a big effect on what happens in your life. 

[0:34:42.7] MB: That kind of makes me think we’re transitioning a little bit into another thing that you’ve talked about which I fully agree with is this idea that dovetailing that concept of risk and danger, the Idea that most people's perception of how dangerous their lives are is actually totally disconnected from the reality that today we live in the safest, healthiest period ever in human history and the world is actually a much better place than people realize. 

[0:35:14.1] CH: Absolute. Everybody wants to feel significant, of course. It’s a fundamental human natural need, and that's good, and you should recognize that you are no different than everybody else. You want to feel worthwhile and significant. 

One of the ways to increase your own significance is to exaggerate the problems that exist. The people that hold up the sign the end of the world is coming, it's because the world has been here for 4-1/2 billion years and this person has painted a sign and stuck it up here in there, particular 75 years on earth, because they want this to be the most significant 75 years out of all the 4-1/2 billion, because it makes them feel good, but it’s kind of ridiculous. The world isn't about to suddenly end just because this person held up a sign. 

I think that natural lack of temporal perspective of yourself and the desire to feel significant tends to let you over exaggerate the risks that exist in your life. I never been harder to whatever, to raise children or to do anything, it’s never been harder than it is now. Boy! You shouldn’t have to go very far back in human history to find examples that counter that argument. Like gosh, the 400 million people died of smallpox in the last century, which is the population of Europe, or the number of people that were killed in World War I and how, or the influenza epidemic of 1919-1920 that killed millions and hundreds of millions of people around the world, or whatever, child disease. The number of people that make at their full natural lifespan now is higher than it's ever been for our species worldwide. The opportunity just in the cellphone you hold in your hand, you have the library of Alexandria. Some total of human knowledge available to you and we’ve eliminated a lot of the diseases that used to plague us all the time. 

Yeah, life isn't easy, but I think in an effort to sometimes — I don’t know, feel a little more significant, we tend to over exaggerate the problems that face us right now. Looking back into history of studying the problems that our predecessors faced, hopefully the helps put us into a little clearer image in the mirror. 

[0:37:29.1] MB: In many ways, it’s almost the same lesson, which is the idea that the more informed you are, the more you understand how reality really is, the less fear you have about sort of vague things that are out there that people are worried about and afraid of. 

[0:37:44.7] CH: Yeah, I think so. People say often to me, “Gosh! Would you take a one-way trip to Mars?” I sort of remind myself all the time that, “Hey, we’re all in a one-way trip,” that you can't get away from that. You get your years of then life is done. Get over that part. Don't pretend that you’re going to be the first person ever to never die. 

The real focus then is not to prolong some vestige of life for as desperately long as possible, but actually to do things that are important to you while you are alive. That's the real key. What is important to me and what should I be working on? Because there’s a randomness to life, and what should I be working on? How should I be trying to change who I am? What are the things that I love and that I want to do and that I hope to get done? Let's work on those and not just spend my life cowering under the pillows and hope that somehow that will extend my life by one more day. Deal with the difference between fear and danger and recognize that you are kind of the thinking link between those two so that one doesn't need to overpower the other. 

[0:38:56.0] MB: Let’s change directions. I want to talk about another kind of quote or idea that you’ve shared, which is the idea that the sky is not the limit. 

[0:39:03.5] CH: Yeah, I think it's funny when you see some advertising campaign and somebody says the sky's the limit. I’m going, “Wow! Have you ever looked through a telescope? Have you ever gone outside at night?” I’m just thinking, “What a funny phrase? The sky is the limit.” Maybe that made sense before the Wright Brothers got flagged at Kitty Hawk or before Yeager went through the speed of sound during, whatever, ’47, or Al Shepard flew in space in ’61, or Neil and Buzz walked to the moon and ’69, or Peggy, who’s commanding the space station right now when she did — This is her second time commanding the International Space Station. The sky is this ghostly reflection of light that is the tiniest of vestige of onionskin tin sheaf around the hard rock of our planet. That’s what the sky is. To think that sky is the limit, it just makes me laugh. 

[0:39:59.3] MB: I think that kind of hints at the — One of the things that I've heard a lot of astronauts talk about is this idea that viewing the earth from outer space fundamentally shifts your perspective and gives you a much deeper understanding of the shared journey that humanity is on and the fragileness of earth. Can you tell me a little bit about that experience and what that was like? 

[0:40:25.5] CH: Sure. Earth is incredibly tough. Earth has been here 4-1/2 billion year, which is an almost — It’s such a big number. It's almost infinity, 4-1/2 billion years, and we’ve recently found fossils on earth from 4 billion years ago, the earliest of the two worms that were growing at the rift at the bottom of the oceans. There's been life on earth for 4 billion years. Life tough and the earth is tough, but certain little styles of living. They’re transient, of course. They’re fragile, and the earth gets hit by big events, huge electromagnetic pulses from the sun and other stars and huge million year-long volcanic eruptions and caldera and asteroid impacts and stuff. The earth is tough. It withstood all of those. 

Life is precious, and the earth, as far as we can tell, is the only place that life exists so far. We haven’t found life anywhere else. There's lots of probabilities out there, but we have found no evidence of life anywhere except on earth so far, and we’re looking. Maybe we will find it, but we haven’t found it yet. I think you need to balance those when you’re onboard a spaceship and going around the world in 90 minutes. You can see the rugged, self-repairing, ancient nature of the world. You can see the onslaught of life and the flow of it and the undeniable rejuvenated nature of it, because you go from 56 north to 56 south and you see the whole planet has — Or our orbit is tipped from the equator. You get to really truly understand the world without anybody telling you what to think. You just actually get to see it. 

The common shared way that we set up towns and villages and cities. It doesn't matter whether you’re over Timbuktu or Timmons, or Phoenix, or London. It doesn't matter. That pattern of how we choose to live as people is the same worldwide. Our common goals, we have different cultures and languages and histories and religions and beliefs, but the stuff that is common to us way outweighs the stuff that is different amongst us. We tend to exaggerate the differences naturally enough. It’s just human nature, but I think orbiting the world, you are very much struck by the shared nature of human existence and the commonality of it and the transient nature of it, but also the necessity to cherish it. All of those part of being one of the human beings that gets a chance to orbit the world. 

Also, the reason you mentioned at the outset that I’m an author and a speaker and such is not squander that experience to let people see it as clearly as possible. To try and express it through words or images or music or whatever, to let people truly see where we live and the fact that we’re all breathing out of the same bubble. I think those perspectives are fairly new to us as a species. It’s the result of our new technology that allows us to see ourselves that way and what we do with that information I think is important. 

[0:43:49.1] MB: Another idea that you’ve shared is the concept of aiming to be a zero. Can you tell me about that? 

[0:43:55.4] CH: When I was a young man, I, of course, was very confident. Like a lot of young men, that’s sort of bravado and feeling of invincibility, and I was a downhill ski racer and a pilot and becoming a fighter pilot, and so you sort of become over-sure of your own decision-making ability and your own ability to do the right thing. Of course, you're nowhere near perfect and you make some good decisions and you make some bad ones, but you only see the world through your own eyes and sometimes it gets pretty distorted. 

I found the natural thing to do is, especially when younger, was to assume that no matter what I decided, it was probably right. The way I tried to explain it to myself was no matter what I do, I’m going to be a positive influence. If I come in to a situation and I look around and a bunch of people are doing stuff, what they really need is me to tell them what to do, or at least to express my opinion. That'll sort everything out. 

If I can be a positive, I called myself — Like I’m a plus one. No matter what I do, I come in as a positive plus one influence. Of course, if you're coming into a complicated situation that's been going on for a while, there are all sorts of subtle influences and factors and history and things that are going on that you’re unaware of and you’ll come blundering in with some ideal that just occurred to you as if you're the only person that could have thought of that idea, and everybody around you recognize that you’re not a positive. You’re a negative. You’re a minus one, and everybody around you immediately says, “Wow! I’ll wait till this guy leaves, because what an idiot.” 

I tried to be slightly more realistic in my own abilities and instead of just assuming I was a plus one, and inevitably under a lot of complex circumstances in effect being a minus one, I tried to do instead come in to a new situation deliberately saying, “Okay. I’m going to aim initially to be a zero here.” I’m just going to aim to actually not cause harm. To try and give myself time to notice what’s actually happening, to become informed, to become sensitive to the subtleties that actually dictate what's happening here, and then be a lot more selective and deliberate in how I'm going to try and be a plus one and be a positive influence. 

There are lots of times that won’t work. The classic example is if the building is on fire, it's not time for a nuanced interpretation of what needs to be done. You need to take action. Is something bad is happening, then you don't have time for consultation. You just have to go with everything you’ve learned to that point of take action and do your absolute best to be a plus one. But the building is very seldom on fire and yet we often treat it like it always is. 

I think it's good to have a bunch of tricks up your sleeve, but you are better served in life to come into a new situation deliberately targeting yourself as a zero than just assuming that you’re going to be a plus one. I think it'll serve you better, but it will also serve the environment around you a lot better. 

[0:47:02.0] MB: What is one piece of homework that you would give for somebody listening to this conversation that they could do to concretely implement some of the ideas that we’ve talked about today? 

[0:47:12.7] CH: Two things. One is find something that you’re really interested in, that you're passionate about, that expires you, that raises your pulse just to think about it, that makes you want to know more, and start using your free time to become more expert in that area. Actually, if you’re interested in — It doesn't matter what. If you're interested in — I don't know, trees. It doesn’t matter. Spend some time actually studying it, learn about it, become expert in one part of it and then another part of it. Start making expertise in the areas that you’re interested in part of who you are. Try and really tap into what naturally motivates you and then allow yourself the privilege of becoming expert and competent in the areas that motivate you. I think that will serve you well no matter what. 

The other is have a look at what it is that makes you fearful and don't just accept the fear, but actually say, “Why does that make — I could tell when I'm feeling fearful. That unsettled feeling in my gut, that I can feel the cleanliness of my skin. That makes me afraid just to deal with that.” Then start to treat it clinically. What is it about that that actually is the danger? What is the real problem that I'm trying to solve? How can I change who I am so that I could deal with that problem better? What skill am I lacking? Why am I allowing myself just to be a terrified little chihuahua here when I’m a functioning homo-sapiens? How can I change who I am so that I’m not just relying on fear to deal with that facet of my life? Because fear to me this is a destructive long-term solution to anything. It’s okay in the short term, but you don’t want to have that the way that you deal with something in life. 

I think if you balance those two things, that's probably enough homework for today. 

[0:49:10.0] MB: Chris, where can listeners find you and your books online? 

[0:49:14.7] CH: The books, of course, are available everywhere, any of the online booksellers; Amazon or something. They can go to chrishadfield.ca, Chris Hadfield, chrishadfield.ca, and all of the stuff is available there. Then there're all sorts of stuff available online as well. I perform music with symphonies and have various music available and ideas and the books. Then I speak all over the world. If you go to chrishadfield.ca, you can look under events and see where and when I’m going to be speaking somewhere nearby. Yeah, it’s a world of information and relatively easy to access, but I think you can just Google under my name, then that's probably the best place to start. 

[0:49:57.4] MB: Chris, thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing your incredible story and all of your wisdom, so many great lessons for the audience. Really, thank you very much. 

[0:50:06.7] CH: It was a pleasure to talk with you, and I look forward to seeing you in person. 

[0:50:10.2] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's matt@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. In fact I responded into a number of listener emails this morning from across the globe. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First, you’re going to get our exclusive Mindset Monday email. This is something that listeners have been loving. It's short, simple links, stories, articles, things that have us excited in the last week. Next, you’re going to get a chance to shape the show, vote on guests, change the intro music like we rolled out a couple of weeks ago, weigh in on guest questions and much more. Don't miss out on that opportunity. 

Next, you're getting an awesome free guide that we created based on listener feedback and demand, which is our most popular guide; How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with all the other perks of being on the email list by signing up and joining the email list today at successpodcast.com. If you join right now you’re going to get another exclusive bonus guide that's a surprise. It's pretty awesome. It’s actually one of favorites personally, and you can get it just by going to the website, signing up, or texting the word “smarter” if you're on the go, just text “smarter” to the number 44222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we talked about on the show and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get them at successpodcast.com, just to the show notes button right at the top. 

Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

Hack Your Biochemistry To Create Spontaneous Weight Loss and Improved Mental Health by Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary

In this episode we discuss how neurology's perspective on the brain fundamentally ignores the health of the entire system, we look at your gut biome’s role in depression, mood regulation and how the microbiome controls your behavior and emotions, we ask why it is so hard for people to break negative eating habits, talk about the biochemistry of addiction, the incredible importance of understanding your microbiome and gut health with Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary. 

Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary is a neuroscientist and Ayurveda expert. She has participated in over 20 clinical research studies working with new stem cell therapies for diabetic neuropathy and drug development for the treatment of ALS. Dr. Chaudhary is the author of The Prime: Prepare and Repair Your Body for Spontaneous Weight Loss, and is a regular guest on the Dr. Oz show!

• How Dr. Chaudhary’s personal experience led her down the path of integrative medicine

• The health of the brain is highly dependent on the health of the gut

• Auyerveda is the oldest recorded medical system in the world - one of the oldest forms of “lifestyle medicine"

• Why food is medicine

• The way you live dictates whether you are sick or healthy

• Disease is a result of imbalance and can be cured by changing habits

• How the Neurologist’s perspective on the brain fundamentally ignores the health of the entire system

• Dr. Chaudhary’s perspective on how eastern & integrative medicine can be integrated with western science to form a more holistic solution for health

• Tumeric is a great example of a spice that has scientifically demonstrated health benefits

• Micro-biome & gut health underpins huge medical issues

• Western medicine is just now catching up with insights from 5000 year old holistic medicines

• 90% of your serotonin comes from your gut and gut health is a major factor in depression

• Scientifically, the mind and mental health are deeply connected and directly related gut health

• Why is it so hard for people to break negative eating habits? Is it really just a question of willpower?

• The neurochemistry and biochemistry that underpins negative eating habits

• Your micro biome itself can shift your eating habits and make you desire and consume certain foods

• The science behind how addictions form in our brains (especially food addictions)

• Why 85% of people cannot change the way they are eating with willpower

• The biochemistry of addiction and food addiction & the role dopamine plays

• How food scientists have engineered junk food to produce massive dopamine spikes

• The dangers of overstimulated dopamine receptors and how they lead to addiction

• An obese person’s brain chemistry responds the same way to sugar as a cocaine addict responds to cocaine

• Environmental toxins and toxic inflammation and how they impact your body

• Enteric nervous system - the “brain inside your gut” which produces 95% of the serotonin and 50% of the dopamine in your body

• “The gut does most of the talking and the brain does most of the listening”

• Who dictates the content of what the gut says? The Microbiome

• "How smart is your gut?"

• How fecal matter transplants in mice can completely reverse genetically engineered personality traits

• Research clearly demonstrates that your micro-biome controls your behavior and emotions

• We are still in the infancy of discovering and understanding the microbiome - there is alot of “noise” that’s hard to understand

• The importance of taking an individualized approach to gut health - its not always about taking probiotics or fermented food

• The most foundational steps to implement in order to improve your gut health

• The simplest interventions are usually the most powerful

• How Tumeric has helped reduced Alzheimers disease by 75% in India

• Foods and spices are more interactive than the “unilateral” approach of western medicines - interacting with multiple cells and systems, rather than a hyper focused intervention

• We discuss a variety of herbs and supplements that Dr. Chaudhary reccomends to improve your gut health and microbiome

• The environment can interact with your genes to change genetic expression

• Dr. Chaudhary’s work as a neurologist revealed many of the same conclusions from Auyervedic medicine

• How your genes interact with the environment, including what you’re eating, to create the outcomes in your life

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better? 
Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

[Book] The Prime: Prepare and Repair Your Body for Spontaneous Weight Loss by Kulreet Chaudhary
[Website] The Chopra Center
[Personal Site] Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:12.1] MB: Welcome to the science of success, the number one evidence based growth podcast on the internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

In this episode, we discuss how a neurologist’s perspective on your brain, fundamentally ignores the health of the entire system. How your guy biomes roll in depression, mood regulation and how the micro biome controls your behavior and emotions.

We ask why it’s so hard for people to break negative eating habits. We look at the biochemistry of addiction. And, discuss the incredible importance of understanding your micro biome and your gut health and much more with Dr. Kulreet Chaudrhary. I want to give you three quick reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the home page. First, you’re going to get a curated weekly email from us every single week on Monday.

This is our mindset Monday email. People have been sending us emails, telling us how much they love mindset Monday, this is a quick list of articles, stories and things that have us excited right now.

Lastly, you’re going to get the exclusive opportunity to shape the show, vote on guests, change our intro music which we did recently based on listener votes for people who are on the mail list and be part of the community. Go to successpodcast.com and join the email list right now or if you’re on your phone, if you’re on the go right now, just text the word smarter to the number 44222.

In our previous episode, we discuss the darker side of h ow the US military influences human behavior. We touched on brainwashing, reading human body language, creating men sure in candidates.

How this one psychological bias can convince a stranger to murder someone and up to 80% of cases, how to profile someone and search for their weaknesses and much more with Chase Hughes. If you want to get to the darker side of influencing other people, listen to that episode.

Now for the interview.

[0:02:43.7] MB: Today, we have another fascinating guest on the show. Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary. Dr. Chaudhary is a neuroscientist and RU beta expert. She’s participated in over 20 clinical research studies, working with new stem cell therapies for diabetic, neuropathy and drug development for the treatment of ALS.

She also was the author of the Prime, prepare and repair your body for spontaneous weight loss and is a regular guest on the Dr. Oz show. Kulreet, welcome to the science of success.

[0:03:10.2] KC: Thank you so much Mat, pleasure to be here.

[0:03:13.1] MB: Well, we’re very excited to have you on today. I’d love to start out with a story that you share about your migraines and how that helped shape the journey that you’ve gone on to really dig into gut bacteria and how all that impacts our wellbeing and our neurology as well?

[0:03:31.6] KC: Sure, kind of like many stories of doctors who have gone into integrative medicine, it often takes a personal experience to kind of bypass all of the biases that you’ve been trained with and my story is no different, I was trained as a neurologist and shortly after I started practice, I developed migraine headaches which you know, for a neurologist seem like no big deal because I have all of the treatments that I could use to control them.

The doctor became the patient and I started myself on the different medications that I give to my patients and I was just absolutely horrified by the side effects, how off like, I could not figure out if the migraines were worse or the side effects from the medications were worse.

That really forced me to go back to my childhood and I turned to my mom as all good neurologist do when they can’t figure out what’s wrong with them, they go to mom.

I said, you know, I can’t seem to get this under control, I remember growing up, we were always exposed to different Ayurvedic remedies and she was the one who referred me to an ayurvedic practitioner.

You know, just as I kind of mentioned in the book, it was a bit of a culture shock at first because you know, I walk in this practitioner, is feeling my pulse to get an estimate of where my health was and the first thing he starts talking about is my digestion.

For me, I felt like you know, this is just some total quack, they don’t know anything about the nervous system because all he asked me was about my digestion. Since I had absolutely nowhere to go from there, I took his recommendations, everything I had done had failed.

So, at this point you know, what did I have to lose? I started working on my digestion and lo and behold within two months, my headaches were completely gone and so that forced me as a neurologist and neuroscientist, I had to take this seriously and look into this.

It forced me to take Ayurveda more seriously and take their perception of the nervous system as an extension of your gut health, that the health of the brain is highly dependent on the health of the GI tract and I started to study it and so that was kind of the beginning of this entire journey.

[0:05:52.7] MB: I want to dig in to a lot of those different concepts. Let’s start with, I’m sure I’m going to completely botch the pronunciation of this but ayurvedic medicine, what is that and how does it approach the human body and as a scientist and a doctor, how do you think about – 

You know, as you said, you had some sort of biases about that, how do you think about the perception or the belief that a lot of people have that it might be sort of woo-woo or out there or not really rooted in science?

[0:06:21.3] KC: Sure, we’ll start kind of with the one thing at a time so yes, first of all, what is it? The way I describe ayurvedic medicine is it’s really kind of the original lifestyle medicine on planet earth, it’s the oldest recorded medical system, originally located or originated I should say in India.

But, as we look at indigenous cultures all over the world, they had a very similar medical concept towards balance and health. I almost hesitate to even call it medical because it was really just a way of living. The basic principles of ayurvedic medicine is that food is medicine, that he way that you live will dictate whether you are sick or whether you are healthy and that there are certain imbalances that result to disease that can be reversed by changing certain habits.

If you look at really the fundamental aspects of ayurvedic medicine, it’s really not that different from a lot of the newer lifestyle medicine coming out today like functional medicine. In fact, functional medicine actually look heavily towards the history of ayurvedic medicine to help come up with some of the formulations and some of the protocols that they use. In terms of you know, how I look at it, what struck me the most, especially as a neurologist because we tend to look at the brain as this protected system in this hard scull.

That is somehow separate from the rest of the body and the biggest shift for me was realizing that the health of any one organ really depends on the health of the entire organism meaning us. You can’t look at disease in any particular area in isolation. When somebody’s sick, there’s a particular story to how the y got there and involves a lot of different systems. If you do not understand that story, you can never really get rid of the underlying disease process.

You bring up a really great question because if you would have asked me 20 years ago if I would be doing what I’m doing, I would have just laughed because I was this very hardcore scientist and people who go into neurology in particular like it because of how black and white it is.

It’s something that can be easily studied, it’s got all of these wonderful tracts and it’s a seemingly knowable system and so I would have said I would have been one of the last people to have immersed myself as deeply as I have but what is amazing really to me about ayurvedic medicine is how it sees the body and the whole person as a dynamic unit and how the environment impacts your body.

How emotions impact your body, it’s just such an unbelievably holistic way of looking at it and because it’s so holistic, there are so many different ways that you can approach an issue that takes into consideration rather than the myriad of symptoms like odd patients coming in with 10 symptoms and I see it as just one simple problem.

The last point you make is really fantastic about, well how is a scientist do you not look at this as kind of woo-woo and what’s been fascinating Mat and I wish I could have taken credit for knowing this and foresight when I first started.

But ayurvedic medicine is so scientific, it is so unbelievably comprehensive and science now is starting to catch up with it. A couple of really simple examples is just looking at the study of the spice turmeric.

I mean, it’s being studied for how many countless different diseases and it’s just a spice, it’s something that people just put in their food every single day. You know, another example is the microbiome. You know, looking at how the bacteria, particularly the bacteria in your gut affects so many different conditions particularly neurological conditions.

The funny thing is as a western scientist and seeing that we are just starting to catch up with the knowledge that was present 5,000 years ago.

[0:10:29.9] MB: That’s fascinating and I think the point that the western approach, in many ways is so dialed in to each specific component and the brain and just how it works with in many ways to the detriment of the understanding of the system at large is why some of these integrative approaches like ayurvedic medicine have really come back recently and started to be more studied and people are starting to understand.

Hey, these ancient cultures are actually on to something and there’s science behind why these herbal remedies, things like turmeric were so effective?

[0:11:05.9] KC: What’s particularly interesting for me Mat, you know, as a neurologist, expecting to see the types of shifts that I saw. What was particularly shocking was, how many psychological conditions that we’d have diagnosed people with were just simply related to their gut health.

Particularly the colony of bacteria that resided in your colon. I would have patients who would come in with you know, 20 year history of depression and I would say, you’re not depressed, you just have the wrong colonization of bacteria and it was so hard for them to believe that it could be that simple.

Sure enough, as we started implementing changes that would shift their bacteria from one population to a healthier population, the depression would simply resolve. Again, we’re just starting to find that out that 90% of the serotonin actually comes from your gut. I never learn that as a neurologist.

If 90% of your serotonin is coming from your gut and you have the wrong people, the wrong organisms growing in your gut and they’re no longer providing that serotonin, of course you’re going to have things like depression.

That was really kind of interesting to me is how deeply connected the mind is, not just when we’re talking about brain health like multiple chlorosis or Parkinson's but our mind, our mental health is directly related to our gut health.

[0:12:26.4] MB: That’s a great point and I think that’s a good segway to dig deeper into a lot of the conclusions from the prime and from your work around how gut health underpins so much more of our broader health.

I’d love to start with – before we dig into it, I absolutely want to get into how gut bacteria can impact things like depression and anxiety because those are topics we talk a lot about on the show.

I’d love to start with negative eating habits and you talk about how negative eating habits and changing them isn’t – is it just a question of willpower if I want to eat more healthily? Do I just not have enough willpower if I have an extra donut or don’t eat my kale salad?

[0:13:09.1] KC: Sure, again, this was another big surprise and this was the real advantage of having a scientific background and being involved in so many clinical trials is when I saw this happening in my practice, I immediately started to investigate deeper into this and say, well why is this?

When I first just started incorporating this information into my medical practice, you know, it seemed like the easiest thing that hey, I’ve got all of this new behaviors that reverse neurological conditions, just implement these dietary changes and you will feel better.

The result was that 15% of people couldn’t do it. 15% of people could not – only 15% could do it, 85% could not change the way that they were eating. I looked at this and you know, these were people who were extremely successful in other areas of their life.

I couldn’t say, well, it’s a lack of willpower, it’s a lack of discipline because they were so disciplined in other areas. Why would you be so disciplined in one area and unable to make a change in another?

The big difference here is the neural chemistry or the biochemistry that was underpinning why they were eating the foods that they were eating. These were not unmotivated people, I mean, they were unbelievably motivated to change because you know, they wanted to make these changes to reverse neurological conditions.

This is as motivated as a group as you could get. What I started to look at was what were the actual obstacles to change and I realized that it was a biochemical obstacle. The biochemistry of it was very well-known to the food industry who has taken full advantage of that biochemistry to make sure that people were tied into these food choices.

Really, the main reason for me writing the book was just to level out the playing field so that people understood what the biochemical challenges of changing the way that you eat in particular are.

So that you can overcome them. And a big part of this challenge again is that microbiome which dictates quite a bit of how you actually choose your foods by releasing certain chemicals that give you that high feeling when you eat certain foods that they need to survive.

If you’ve got the wrong guys in your gut, you can see how their response to a donut will suddenly make you feel so wonderful and elated versus you know, the response to vegetables that you passed by.

What happens is that as you begin to shift the bacteria first by changing the underlying biochemistry that determines which guys live in your gut, your choices for food actually begin to change spontaneously.

The worst part of it Matt is you know, the beginning you might say, okay, well the donut makes me feel good so I’m just going to keep eating it. But over time, there’s a process that happens in the brain called neuro adaptation where it’s no longer a pleasure response and you actually have to eat the donut just to feel okay.

It’s no longer a high, it’s that you actually feel low until that donut goes in. It’s a lot of the same thing that happens like with other addictions except this one is with food which for me is the most dangerous addiction because it’s the most widely available substance and it’s the most cheaply available substance and it’s something that we completely allow for the food industry to market towards us without any regulation.

[0:16:52.7] MB: So, tell me about the science behind how those addictions form in our brain and how we go from eating the donut to feel good to just eating the donut to feel okay?

[0:17:05.1] KC: Absolutely. This is the wonderful part is we’ve actually made quite a bit of progress in the biochemistry of addiction which is why we approach addiction so differently but we have not made the connection that food is also acting like an addicting substance.

Much of it has to do with the neurotransmitter dopamine in particular. Now, there’s many other neurotransmitters involved but it’s easiest to talk about the response to dopamine. Dopamine is our feel good neurotransmitter and we need it, if we didn’t have it, we wouldn’t survive.

Let’s say, you know, let’s go back several thousands of years ago. If you were to find a fruit tree in the middle of spring and you aid it and you got that sweet sensation, your brain would send you a signal that hey, this is good, go ahead and eat this now because later on, in the winter, this is not going to be available.

You would get a small response of dopamine in the brain and you would feel good when you ate it. If for example, if sex didn’t feel good, we wouldn’t do it and it’s the same thing. When you have sex, you release dopamine and that’s why it actually is pleasurable.

These things are present, this release of dopamine, this messages in our brain are present to sustain the human race basically. You know, if food didn’t taste good, we wouldn’t consume it, if sex didn’t feel good, we wouldn’t do it and we wouldn’t reproduce.

Now, fast forward to our modern world, and what has happened is that – there’s an actual industry called food scientist. They have figured out what is the most powerful combination of sugar, fat and salt that produces a massive dopamine spike.

Now, you might say, well, gosh that sounds fantastic because if a little dopamine feels good, imagine how wonderful a huge spike of dopamine would feel? The problem is, whenever your brain experiences something new, so out of balance, it sees it as a stress.

Even though dopamine is supposed to make you feel good, your brain sees this massive overstimulation as a problem and it is a problem because it’s basically overstimulating your dopamine receptors.

The brain, which is an incredibly intelligent organ, looks for a way to counteract this response. You’re eating the food and going, my god, this feels so good, I never had anything taste better than this glazed donut.

Every time you eat it, your brain is now dampening your dopamine response to the stimuli. Now, what happens over time Mat is now, the foods that would naturally cause that dopamine to rise a little bit to make you feel good, they’re not doing anything.

Now, when you have like just a fruit for example, it’s not even giving you a  little bit of pleasure or now, and this happens and often times in relationships, now, even being with a partner or  having sex is n to giving you that same dopamine.

Now you have to eat more and more of that particular substance to get the same response, except it’s not a response of pleasure, it’s a response to just feel normal.

We see this process happen with multiple different addictions but what our studies are starting to show and what our images of the brain are starting to show is that when you have somebody who is obese, they respond to sugar the same way that a cocaine addict would respond to cocaine.

We’re talking about brain chemistry here. When you start to look at the underlying neuro chemistry of why we are actually eating the way we are and you look at what’s happening in the brain, what’s happening in the gut, you realize, this is not just some simple process of hey, just shift how you’re eating.

If it was that easy, we would have figured it out but instead, people are spending billions of dollars to try to reverse this but they’re doing it by doing the hardest part first which is trying to change behaviors rather than just simply changing your biochemistry.

[0:21:28.7] MB: Before we dig in to more of the interventions to potentially remap the gut and help change this biochemistry, I want to bring in the other component of this which are toxins. Tell me a little bit about toxins in our environment and how they impact us?

[0:21:45.7] KC: This is becoming one of my favorite topics because it’s becoming such a huge issue and now, what’s interesting though Mat, it’s not just the toxins in our environment, although they play a huge part but it’s also the toxins inside of our body that we’re creating by simply eating the wrong foods.

There’s a general term for toxins in ayurvedic medicine called ama. We don’t have exactly anything that corresponds to that in the western world but I kind of summarize it as toxic inflammation.

Ama, or these toxins, they come from undigested products and one of the greatest things about ayurvedic Matt is it looks not only at physical body but how these toxins accumulate both and the mind as well as in your emotions.

You can have mental ama, you can have emotional ama, it’s basically anything that has been undigested. Let’s say you went through a very stressful time, maybe experience a loss or went through a divorce or something like that.

If there was something unprocessed from that, that would actually turn into ama that gets stuck in your body. One of the main premises in Ayurveda is that it’s the accumulation of these toxins or this ama that eventually becomes the night for disease as it accumulate into the different organ systems, they start to trigger autoimmunity.

Now, take just kind of life in the modern world, you know, let’s separate that just from the environmental toxins, we’re already under a lot of stress. Let’s say you lived in a perfectly pristine environment, you would still have a toxic accumulation just because of the amount of stress that we go through and how quickly people are eating your food.

The lack of connection really with cooking anymore but now add on top of that, all of the environmental toxins that we are simply being bombarded by and the bodies having a very difficult time just simply moving these toxins out.

There’s a process that happens in the body, particularly in the lyrical bio transformation and when there is a traffic jam, meaning there’s more toxins that need to be processed than availability within the lyric to remove them, what happens is these toxins just start to float around freely in the body and this is a tremendous trigger as I mentioned before for auto immunity and just damage to the organs.

[0:24:19.7] MB: How does that tie back in with dumb gut and leaky gut syndrome and all of t hose kind of symptoms or problems?

[0:24:29.2] KC: That’s a great question. One of the organ systems that gets damaged as these toxins start to bio-accumulate. When they can’t be bio transformed, they get accumulated in the body, is the GI tract. Because remember, your gut is where a lot of the external toxins that are present in your food.

For example, if you’re eating a lot of foods that have chemicals, our pesticides and a lot of people make the assumption that the chemicals placed in our food have been tested for safety and that’s not the case at all.

A lot of the chemicals that are sprayed on our foods is the same scenario, they’re not tested for safety. Your gut is actually seeing these toxins firsthand and it directly damages the gut mucosa and the gut mucosa is where all of the magic happens from your digestion.

It’s where the enzymes are secreted, it’s where food is actually transformed into nutrients, it’s where absorption occurs and so, over time, you start to damage this invaluable membrane and this is also the home of all your healthy bacteria that want to support you.

As it becomes damaged, you have more pathogens that begin to grow there but in addition to the toxins that you ingest that impact the gut, now your liver is trying to get rid of all the toxins that you’re breathing in from the air, that you’re putting on your skin from your skincare products.

A lot of people are shocked to find out that you actually absorb 80% of the things that go on your skin. My general advice is if you can’t eat it, don’t put it on your skin but your body’s absorbing all these toxins and it’s getting processed with liver and whatever the liver can’t process is also getting dumped into the GI tract.

The GI tract becomes kind of this common final pathway where a lot of these toxins get thrown into and then your GI tract can’t remove it either. It becomes this horrific cycle and so if you are accumulating what we would call ama in the GI tract, you start to build up a bio film and this is this thick mucosal layer where all of the pathogens begin to grow and it becomes very difficult to absorb nutrients from your food.

You’re getting a shutdown of one of the most important systems that provides nutrients to the entire body but it’s actually now starting to become a source of toxic exposure both directly from the actual toxins you’re absorbing but also the toxins being released now by these pathogenic bacteria that are now inhabiting your gut.

[0:27:09.0] MB: I’m sure if you’re listening to the show, you’re passionate about mastering new skills and abilities and that’s why I’m excited to tell you once again about our sponsor this week skill share.

Skill share is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography.

And, you can get unlimited access to the entire catalogue for low monthly price so you don’t have to pay per class like many other sites. They have some really cool courses on there, they have a course on ever note mastery. You know how much I love ever note.

Ever note runs basically my entire life and I highly recommend using it as a tool but also checking out their course on how to do it. They have a really cool course on productivity planning and they have a course on mind maps.

Mind maps are awesome, I have a mind map sitting on my desk that I’m looking at right now for the art of learning by Josh Weiskin. I love mind maps, the incredible strategy that speaks directly to your brain and your subconscious and it’s a really cool tool to remember things.

There’s so many fascinating courses on skill share and the cool thing is, they’ve been so kind to the show, they’ve been incredible sponsor and they’re giving all of our listeners a free month of access. Get in there, you can get free classes for up to a month, completely for free, you can check out all of these courses, just go to Skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month.

[0:28:37.3] MB: I think this is a good opportunity to tie in gut health back up to both sort of mental health and more broadly, general health. Tell me about, actually, before we do that, tell me about one of the key components of that which is you talk about the concept of the brain in your gut or the ENS. Tell me what that is and how that plays into this interaction?

[0:28:59.5] KC: Absolutely, so the ENS is the enteric nervous system and for some reason in neurology we don’t really study it very much but it is very much a part of the nervous system and it’s an incredibly important part and it basically is the brain inside of your gut and it helps to coordinate the production of different digestive enzymes, the functioning of different vales. If the enteric nervous system is not functioning properly there are certain valves that prevent gut bacteria from going into your small intestine for example that begin to dysfunction. 

So this enteric nervous system is this relay communication between your gut and your brain. Now the assumption was that the brain was doing most of the talking and the gut was doing most of the hearing but what our studies are showing is it’s the exact opposite that the gut is actually doing most of the talking and the brain is doing most of the hearing and so the next question should be well who’s doing all of the talking then? 

Who is dictating the content of what is being sent up through the enteric nervous system and what we’re finding is that micro biome or the host of bacteria and other microorganism that live in your gut are actually giving the content for the messages going to the brain and they do it in multiple different ways but there is a lot of neurotransmitters that are released from your gut and the neurotransmitters, you can look at them as the vocabulary words that are sent up to the brain. 

So you’re gut bacteria is actually sending 90% of the messages via the enteric nervous system to your brain. So you should start asking them, “Well how smart is your gut and that’s really the whole purpose and the prime is to make your gut a smart gut because if you have a dumb gut think about what messages are going up to the brain and it’s absolutely amazing even the studies that we have seen with animals, when you change the gut bacteria you can take a mouse that has been genetically bred to be confident and turn it into a timid mouse. 

Just simply by changing the gut bacteria through a fecal transplant from a mouse that has been genetically engineered to be timid. So there’s this personality traits that we have that we consider to be just part of us that we’re somehow inherently in control of it through willpower and it has more to do with the type of bacteria living in your GI track. 

[0:31:49.3] MB: The study about the mice I find really fascinating and I love to know more, I heard the fringes of bio hacking and other health once people talk about fecal matter transplants in humans. Is that something that you think is an intervention people should look at or do you think that they are still unproven? What is the science behind those and what do you think about them? 

[0:32:17.3] KC: Well I think it is something to consider in very, very extreme circumstances but what people don’t appreciate is how quickly your micro biome changes just simply to your own behavior. So for example, we’ve seen in studies that if you have a very stressful event your micro biome changes within 24 hours. Same thing is you start to introduce a very healthy habit your micro biome again changes within 24 hours. 

So that your micro biome is this unbelievably dynamic – it’s really like an organ, it’s like an organ with consciousness. It really is like having a second brain working with you but it very, very dynamic organism that changes and so most people who go for the fecal transplants and I know I have patients come into my office ready to do it, I said, “Okay but what have you done with your diet? What have you done to manage your stress? What have you actually done to change your micro biome?” 

And they did absolutely nothing. So those are interventions that I reserve when there’s a really severe pathogen that has completely colonize the colon and nothing else worked but that is not the case for the majority of people. For the majority of the people all you have to do is make some really very simple interventions and that’s essentially the entire program in the book. It’s just simple interventions that spontaneously change your micro biome. 

But it always amazes me that people are more willing to look into getting a fecal sample from another human being and importing that into your body before looking at simple changes they can make that will simple spontaneously change your micro biome. 

[0:33:59.0] MB: And I think the challenge is even from my own perspective thinking about there is so much out there about gut health, gut bacteria, your micro biome, probiotics, prebiotics, all of these information. It’s hard to distill or determine what are the right interventions, what are the wrong interventions and what actually produces the right results? So I love to hear your thoughts about how you delineate between those and maybe talk a little bit about some of the interventions that you found through research to be the most effective.

[0:34:31.8] KC: So that’s a great question and one of the gifts of Ayurvedic medicine is it gives very, very clear guidance for this. So what we are starting to find we are just in the infancy of understanding the micro biome and so people are in this discovery stage and what they are discovering is, “Hey I found out this works. I wonder if this works for everyone” and so they’ll make the assumption that if it works for one person, it works for absolutely everyone. 

And the beauty of Ayurvedic medicine is it’s extremely personalized, it’s extremely individualized. Even in the program in the Prime, I have suggestions for people who have more of this tendency they should do this or people who have more of that tendency should refrain from doing this intervention and so when we were talking about what is best for your micro biome, the first question that comes up is what are you talking about, which person are talking about? 

What are their tendencies and so Ayurvedic medicine makes recommendations for the micro biome that extremely individualized and there is a tremendous amount of confidence in a system that has lasted for so long. You know it’s been around just from a written standpoint for 5,000 years but even around much, much longer as an oral tradition and so a lot of the things that we are now just discovering about the micro biome has been written in Ayurvedic medicine for so long. 

But with the caveat that they explained who to give it to, when to give it to them and when not to give it to them. So instead of having to do all of these guest work and I totally agree with you and people are often times surprised when I say, “Whoa, no you should not be on any fermented food. Your gut is not in a state to tolerate any fermented foods” or I’ll have patients come in and I’ll look at some of the supplements they’ve started. 

And I’ll say, “You’re not even at a point where you can absorb or digest this” or you’ve added a supplementation for detoxification before you even entered the nutrients into your body to support the detoxification process. So there is this intelligence towards how you approach changing the micro biome, approaching detoxification and Ayurvedic medicine just has so many guidelines for that because it’s an extremely mature system. 

So as we’re starting to grapple with who should be eating what type of diet, in Ayurvedic medicine it’s already set there based on what’s your constitution, what season is it, what is your current imbalance, what were their genetic tendencies from birth and we take all of that into consideration and so what I put into the prime is basically a very, very, very foundational program that has worked for the majority of my patients which I then further personalized in the clinic. 

But it is such a foundational program for the micro biome that the majority of people can do it and again, it’s something that is done step by step by step and you don’t ever take the next step until your body is ready to do so.

[0:37:47.2] MB: So what are some of the – I know it is very individualized but what are some of the basic steps or interventions that you recommend as a starting place to implement some of these ideas and improve people’s gut health? 

[0:38:02.9] KC: Absolutely. So the absolute most foundational steps are what the entire program in the Prime are and people are usually shocked by how simple the steps are and yet how profound the results are and so one of the steps in stage one is an herb called Triphala and I am almost even hesitant to call it an herb because it is really a combination of three berries and it is something that is often times is found in the Indian diet and so we wouldn’t even consider it as a supplement per say. 

But it’s an herb called Triphala and it literary translates into three berries or three fruits and each one of these berries in it of itself has such a profound yet gentle impact on the body. Just an example is Amla or Amalaki is one of the berries and it is just one of the most powerful antioxidants on the planet. It has been shown to help to treat diabetes, it helps maintain blood sugar regulation, reduces inflammation. So just Amla on its own is so powerful but that’s just one of the three berries in Triphala. 

But when you take all three together, it just becomes this very, very powerful again but gentle tonic for the GI track and for removing all of these accumulated toxins. So that’s one of the things that we add into stage one. Another example is just a simple tea. Again, very easy to make, very gentle. It is a combination of cumin, coriander and fennel and you just take the seeds about a teaspoon of each, boil it in about four to five cups of water for about five to 10 minutes. 

Depending on how strong you like it, strain out the seeds and you just sip that all throughout the day but these three seeds, these three ingredients are amazing for healing the gut rekindling what we call Ugni or digestive fire in the GI track. So you can naturally begin to burn up the toxins in your gut and so there’s all of these simple types of interventions throughout the book that help you to essentially raise the IQ of your gut from a dumb gut to a smart gut. 

[0:40:24.7] MB: And you know I can hear a listener now thinking or saying to themselves, “How is that something as simple as coriander and fennel seeds can have such a positive impact on my micro biome?” so how do you think about that or how would you address a listener who might be thinking something like that? 

[0:40:44.8] KC: One thing that I have found in life and especially as I have gotten deeper and deeper into Ayurveda is that these simplest interventions are usually the most powerful and the more complicated we get with things, I mean if you look at just the complexity of our food sourcing now, what are often times recommendations people give when they want to get their health? They say, “Go back to eating really simple foods”. Go back to practicing really simple habits. 

So simplicity is quite powerful and given the way that we live can often times be very difficult. So even when it comes to relationships for example just the power of something like forgiveness can be so unbelievably transformative but it’s not necessarily and easy thing to do. So why would something so simple should have a great benefit? Well this is one of the things we’re asking even as a scientific community. So take turmeric for example. 

Scientists in America are starting to identify turmeric as potentially being one of the main spices in Indian cooking that has helped reduced Alzheimer’s disease in the Indian population by 75% compared to the US population. So why are these individual foods essentially so powerful? The reason is unlike our medications that have only one effect, so they go in and they have a single unilateral effect. So they will effect one particular bio chemical reaction and only in one direction. 

With these food and with these spices have the capacity to do is to change hundreds if not thousands of different biochemical reactions but not in a unilateral way. In other words, you can look at it as a scripted intelligence in food that goes in and actually interacts with your biochemistry, interacts with your DNA and describe it as have a conversation with your body to determine where is it most needed. So if we could create a pill that did that it would be unbelievably powerful. 

Another example is just simply looking at a study done with a particular type of mice that is genetically developed to have diabetes, have high cholesterol, have heart disease and all they did was feed the pregnant mice B12. That’s it, just a B12 vitamin and what they found is that the babies even though they still have the genetic mutation for all of those things didn’t have any of the disorders. So why are these simple interventions so powerful? 

Because they actually go in and interact and communicate with your body and then set forth a chain reaction that has the ability to benefit so many different cells through your body rather than just simply going in like our medications do and in fact, one particular reaction always in a unidirectional way. 

[0:44:01.2] MB: In many ways that almost mirrors the highly focused approach of western medicine to intervene and solve one particular thing as oppose to the broader holistically integrated approach that you are describing. 

[0:44:15.5] KC: Very much so and it’s interesting because as we start to study these Ayurvedic supplementations from the western standpoint like we are starting to study turmeric, Ashwagandha, Boswellia, so many of the different herbs it makes me laugh just a little bit because you know they’re finding all of these benefits but as an Ayurvedic practitioner, we would never give just a single herb. We’re always giving multiple different recommendations at the same time. 

So even though the scientists are absolutely amazed by the results, in terms of an Ayurvedic protocol it would be considered a very, very weak protocol because we always give multiple interventions at the same time that are all synergistic making it even a more powerful response. 

[0:45:02.9] MB: So one of the pieces from the book that I struggled to grasp and understand and I am curious to get your take on it, I totally follow the parts about the micro biome and how it impacts our mental health and the vital importance of really cultivating a really healthy micro biome but the part of the Doshas, that to me was the part that I really struggled with. Tell me a little bit about that and how you reconcile that piece of it with sort of science? 

[0:45:33.3] KC: Absolutely. So we’re starting to find out even in science through the field of epigenetics is that genes can be altered by the environment. In other words, you come with a certain percentage of genetic expression that would have a certain typical expression. So a certain type of physical expression but that the environment can interact with your genes to change that expression. So I look at the Doshas as essentially ways in which the ancient Ayurvedic practitioners were able to describe this process of a genetic predisposition interacting with the environment resulting in certain characteristics. 

So it’s really looking at the mind, body and emotional types as they interact with different stresses in the environment, different elements in the environment and again, what was so amazing about this and especially as I started going deeper and deeper into the field of epigenetics and again, I really look at Ayurvedic medicine as the original lifestyle medicine and so even the way that they described epigenetic changes, we see that in the different Doshas when they’re exposed to different environmental factors. 

The way that I really saw it in my own practice was even just how the seasonal changes would cause certain neurological conditions to be worst. So in certain seasons I always saw migraine headaches would suddenly become much more aggravated. In other seasons, we would see peripheral neuropathies get much more aggravated and this explains again how the Doshas were interacting with the environment to bring about certain imbalances. 

And so we actually started to proactively in our clinic send out emails to people who had migraine headaches one season prior just reminding them that this season has this impact. So it’s really nothing more, how I see the Doshas is it’s really nothing more than looking at how your genes are interacting with the environment including what you’re eating to create a certain physical, mental and emotional outcome.

[0:47:55.5] MB: So for me, I struggled with placing myself within a Dosha. I feel like my answers were very mixed with some of the different segments and so maybe that is part of the reason I struggled with as a framework because I felt that some of the answers were like spot on describing the way I felt about something but then the same answer for that Dosha for another one would be completely the opposite of the way that I think or feel. 

[0:48:20.1] KC: Part of it is most people have more than one dominant Dosha but you can also have a Dosha out of balance that it’s not your original genetic makeup and so those quizzes are really there to give you just a general introduction into the Doshas but the way that you actually answer this question is through an evaluation with an Ayurvedic practitioner. So the quizzes are just a little glimpse into that window but when you sit down with an Ayurvedic practitioner they do a full examination. 

They do a full history and then they also do what we call pulse diagnosis and through that process, that’s actually how we determine which Dosha is out of balance and which one we need to work on the most. So that’s explains why a lot of people when they take the test they’ll feel a little bit confused but again, it’s meant to be just kind of an example of how they Doshas may be expressed in your life but the true diagnostic tool is always sitting down with an actual practitioner to determine it. 

[0:49:24.2] MB: And just for listeners who have been listening to us for the last five minutes wondering what we are talking about, I’ll give my brief description but essentially my understanding is that Doshas are an Ayurvedic method that looks at different body types based on your weight and are you hot, are you cold, etcetera and prescribe specific diets around how to balance that depending on sort of different types of your body. Is that an accurate description or how would you describe that? 

[0:49:53.6] KC: That’s a partial description but the Doshas are actually tendencies in nature and because we’re seen as a part of nature, we have those particular tendencies as well but you can describe the different seasons in terms of different Doshas. You can describe different plants in terms of the different Doshas. So it goes beyond just a description of the human experience to more of a general description of nature like even the ocean has certain tendencies like being around the ocean. 

Your body will change in a certain way so it’s described in a way to have more than one particular Dosha than another. So the Doshas are really just an aspect of nature but what we attempt to do in Ayurvedic medicine is to determine which Doshas are out of balance and bringing them back into balance using different lifestyle recommendations. 

[0:50:47.3] MB: You know one of the last conclusions that I just wanted to touch on because we haven’t really directly stated this which I found fascinating about your work, you embarked on this path of Ayurvedic medicine first to discover sort of the under pining cause of many different mental health problems and neurological problems and yet one of the biggest side effects of that, the interventions that you recommended was that people actually had a huge amount of weight loss as well. Can you just talk about that then describe that for a moment? 

[0:51:18.2] KC: Sure, so I would have never guessed as a neurologist I would write a book that on the cover is advertising weight loss but what I found is my goal and the whole reason I created this program was for my neurological patients and the goal was really to change the micro biome, to remove these toxins from the body so that neurological disease can begin to heal and through the process what so many of my patients would say and these are patients that had weight to loss. 

I often get the question of, “I don’t have to lose weight. If I do this will I lose weight?” I’m like, “No, this is only if you have weight to lose that would it make you lose weight. If you don’t have weight to lose, it will just help to increase your energy and improve mental clarity and get all the other benefits” but one of the things that my patients would routinely come back and say is, “You know I started this and I lost 20” 30, 40 pounds. “If you would have told me this in the beginning, I would have jumped on even faster”. 

And so even though it’s a program for neurological repair, it was the weight loss that got people most excited and so there was a point in the process for many years I just kind of pushed it aside and just said, “Okay yeah that’s fine so you lost weight but that is really not what the program is about” and there was a point where I finally realized that if I just told people that up front just simply because of the way our culture tends to really focus on physical beauty. 

That if I told people that upfront they were even more motivated to begin. So I just decided instead of try to fight the current just to jump in and say, “Yes this will help you to lose weight” and that became one of the main reasons that people then became so compliant with it and the weight loss was not – I should say this, it’s not that it was unintended. It was just spontaneous. They weren’t trying to lose weight, it’s simply that as your body detoxes, as your micro biome changes weight comes off. 

[0:53:23.1] MB: So what would be a starting piece of homework that you would give for a listener who wants to implement some of the things that we’ve talked about today? Kind of a first piece of homework for them to begin down this path? 

[0:53:35.5] KC: Well the reason I wrote the book was it really contains all of the fundamental principles to understand why you need to do this and then gives you a tremendous amount of guidance of how to approach a program. So the book is a really starting point but for those who say, “Even the book would be too big of a step first” I would simply say start with the Triphala. It is very easily available. The brand that I use is from Mapi it’s called Digest Tone. 

It’s just Triphala and just start with that. Start with one tablet in the evening and then start with two tablets in the evening if you feel like you need to go up to two and just start with the tea recipe. Just those two simple interventions have such a profound healing effect and I think for most people once they start that, they say, “Hey this is actually working and I am not working hard at it. It’s taking me a total of a few minutes a day to implement this. I want to learn more”. 

[0:54:39.9] MB: And where can listeners find you and the book and all of these resources online? 

[0:54:45.5] KC: The book is very readily available on Amazon and I have a website, drkulreetchaudhary.com and I usually post all of my information there and I do consultations at the Chopra center and I will be there from now until next May and so you can call the Chopra center in Carlsbad California to schedule an appointment and then starting next May, I will actually be moving to India to head up an international team of physicians and scientists and ayurvedic wellness center where we’re going to be doing even deeper research into how to repair the nervous system using some of these even more ancient techniques from ayurvedic medicines.

I’m very excited about that and I’ll continue to write but from now until next May, I will be available at the Chopra center.

[0:55:41.4] MB: Well, Kulreet, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of this wisdom, there are some really interesting takeaways and I think the fundamental conclusion that our gut impacts our brain health and our mental health.

So much more than we know or realize is really powerful. Thank you for coming on here and sharing all of this.

[0:56:04.0] KC: It was my pleasure and Matt, I have to thank you. You asked really intelligent questions and I always appreciate it when somebody comes in armed with these very well-thought out questions. It really made this quite a bit of fun for me.

[0:56:19.7] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners master evidence based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the home page. First, you’re going to get exclusive, curated, weekly emails from us every single week. Including mindset Monday which listeners have been loving which is our list of our favorite articles, TED Talks, and ideas that we came across that week.

Next, you’re going to get a chance to shape the show, vote on guests, help us pick new intro music, like the new intro we rolled out a couple of weeks ago and much more. Be sure to not to miss out on that opportunity. 

Lastly and most importantly, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand. It’s our guide called, how to organize and remember everything. It’s our most popular guide which you can get completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide that you have to sign up to get by joining our email list. Just go to successpodcast.com, sign up right on the home page or if you’re on the go, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222.

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. Every single review, every single subscription, boosts our ranking in the iTunes algorithm and it really is super important.
 
Don’t forget, of you want to get all this incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we’ve talked about and much more, be sure to check out the show notes which you can also get at successpodcast.com. Just hit the show notes button right at the top.

Thanks again and we’ll see you on the next episode of The Science Of Success.

The Military Influence Training that Maps Out Human Weakness, Harnesses Confusion, and Triggers Obedience in Others With Chase Hughes

In this episode we discuss the darker side of how the US military influences human behavior - we touch on brainwashing, reading human body language, creating Manchurian candidates, how this one psychological bias can convince strangers to murder someone more than 80% of the time, how to profile someone and search for their weaknesses, and much more with Chase Hughes. 

Chase Hughes is the founder of Ellipsis Behavior Laboratories and the amazon bestselling author of The Ellipsis Manual. Chase previously served in the US Navy as part of the correctional and prisoner management departments. Chase speaks on a variety of topics including brainwashing and attraction and frequently develops new programs for the US Government and members of anti human-trafficking teams around the world.

We discuss:

• How seeing "how weak and vulnerable everyone was" transformed Chase’s worldview

• Is it possible to create real world Manchurian candidates?

• Why you’re grossly underestimating the work necessary to read human body language and understand human behavior

• Why the typical strategies of influence won’t work unless you can profile and understand the individual - and tailor what you’re saying and doing to meet that individuals weaknesses and needs

• One of the best things you can start doing every single day

• Simple questions you can use to “disengage someone from autopilot” and break the pattern they are stuck in

• How you can develop “FIC" to hack human behavior

• Focus

  1. Interest

  2. Curiosity

• The “RAS” - reticular activation system - constantly looking for things that are threats and things that are socially valuable

• Social authority and perceived authority are more important than influence in shaping human behavior

• How the Milgrim experiment fundamentally demonstrates the incredible power of the authority bias

• The one strategy that can be effective influencing strangers to commit murder more than 80% of the time

• The 5 key factors you can use to hack authority and trigger an “obedient” response

• Dominance / ambition

  1. Discipline

  2. Leadership

  3. Gratitude

  4. Fun / sense of adventure

• When we interact with authority we go through an “agentic” shift - our brain shifts responsibility for our own actions onto the person who instructed us to do it - you can make people take extreme behaviors if you get them to give YOU responsibility for their actions

• Master yourself first before you can influence others

• Master environment first

  1. Master your time - keeping a plan and sticking to it

  2. Master the mechanics of your habits

  3. Master your attention span

• Tactics for mastering authority today

• Express genuine interest in other people and make them feel INTERESTING not interested

  1. Remember the phrase - LEADERSHIP through SUPPORT

• The people who think they are alpha males are usually NOT the alpha male - big dogs don’t feel the need to bark

• The Columbo method - make deliberate social errors, be vulnerable, start with an insecurity - that helps open people up to influence

• Chase offers a challenge to you - Talk to a stranger every single day. And once that gets easy, you have to push out your comfort zone even further.

• The Texas crosswalk study - why wearing a suit makes you more likely to get people to follow you than wearing jeans

• Why you should ask unique questions and do unique things

• The 3 tools you can use to develop a profile of anyone

• Social Weakness Chart

  1. Human Needs Map

  2. Behavioral Table of Elements

• There’s no vaccination to being socially vulnerable - if you become socially invulnerable it makes you a nasty person - it diminishes your ability to connect with others and takes away your ability to feel empathy and anxiety for others.

• Be completely real with your self, and with others, as it can help build more genuine connections

• Trying to manage your own behavior and body language really starts to suck up alot of your own “CPU power” and Chase doesn't recommend it

• How you can watch a video of an interview or interrogation - using this special tool - and decode the behavior and determine

• Why a polygraph is usually no better than a coin toss and is typically biased against people telling the truth

• How Conan Obrien can help you become a better human lie detector

• Simple exercises you can use to start RIGHT NOW to develop an understanding of human body language and behavior

• The concept of embedded commands and how you can use them to make a person have a thought without it being conscious of it

• Confusion statements and embedded commands - they will go straight to the subconscious

• Why you should ask yourself "What does this person like to be complimented on, what makes them feel significant”

• And much more!

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go to www.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better? 
Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go to www.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

[Book] The Ellipsis Manual: analysis and engineering of human behavior by Chase Hughes
[Website] Ellipsis Behavior
[Image] Behavioral Table of Elements
[Blog] THE NEW HUMAN NEEDS MAP - Ellipsis Behavior
[Article] THE MILGRAM EXPERIMENT by Saul McLeod
[SoS Episode] Why Co-Pilots May Ignore Instinct and Let A Plane Crash
[SoS Episode] Weapons of Influence Series

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:12.0] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with now more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

In this episode we discuss the darker side of how the U.S. Military influences human behavior. We touch on brainwashing, reading human body language, creating Manchurian candidates. How this one psychological bias can convince strangers to murder someone more than 80% of the time, how to profile someone and search for their weaknesses and much more with Chase Hughes. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First; you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand. It’s our popular guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything, and you can get it completely for free along with another sweet surprise bonus guide by joining our email list today.

Next; if you join your email list, you’re going to get an email from us every single Monday, called Mindset Monday. It’s a short list of articles, videos TED Talks and ideas that have us fascinated and excited about evidence-based growth. Lastly, by being on the email list you get a chance to shape the show. Vote on guests, questions and even changing things like our intro music. When we launched our new intro music a few weeks ago, listeners like you on who are on the email list voted on it and that’s what we picked. 

Remember, you can sign up for the email list now by going to successpodcast.com and signing up, or if you're on your phone and you can’t get to it right now, just text the words “smarter” to number 44222. That’s “smarter” to the number 44222. Don’t make me use some of these influence tactics to get you to sign up. 

In a previous episode we looked at the question of human influence from a lighter angle. Surprisingly, with an FBI spy recruiter had hacked evolutionary psychology to learn how to change anyone's behavior. We discussed the five steps for strategizing trust. How to get someone's brain to reward them for engaging with you, the vital importance of self-awareness, the how are not keeping score and much more with Robin Dreeke. If you want to get more information on the lighter side of influencing others, listen to that episode. 

Now, for the interview. 

[0:02:41.4] MB: Today, we have another fascinating guest on the show, Chase Hughes. Chase is the founder of the Ellipsis Behavior Laboratories and the Amazon best-selling author of the Ellipsis Manual. He previously served in the U.S. Navy as part of a correctional and prisoner management department. Chase speaks on a variety of topics including brainwashing and attraction and frequently develops new programs for the U.S. government and members of antihuman trafficking teams around the world. 

Chase, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:03:10.8] CH: Thanks, Matt. It's good to here. Thanks for having me on. 

[0:03:13.4] MB: We’re really excited to have you on here today. For listeners who might not be familiar with you and your story, tell us a little bit about your background and the world that you come for. 

[0:03:21.6] CH: I’m in the military and I grew up in the military pretty much. I went to military school when I was a kid, and around the age of 19 I had this kind of epiphany experience to where I finally got the realization that I didn't really get human behavior and it was at a bar. I went home that night and I remember spending hours on Google just s printing out every document I could find. I just went on there, I typed in how to tell when girls like you. That was the catalyst that served for me learning all of these and just kind of getting so deep into this. 

[0:04:03.4] MB: You've obviously gone very, very deep in this. Tell me about —You named your book the Ellipsis Manual. Why ellipsis and what does that mean? 

[0:04:13.2] CH: We chose to name the company ellipsis, because I think it’s a grammatical or punctuation symbol where you have the three dots. The meaning of that is just removed or omitted language or language that isn't there. I also just thought it sounded cool. We use that as a company named just it because it kind of has a little cool back story to it. 

[0:04:36.8] MB: You mentioned that you kind of started going down this rabbit hole by Googling how to tell if women were interested in you. I find that really fascinating. Pick up and that kind of associated world is something that I've done a little bit of research and digging on and it's amazing all of the different kind of behavior patterns and things that you can really pick up. Tell me a little bit about how that informed your journey into understanding a lot of the nonverbal elements of human behavior and how to kind of design and engineer human behavior.

[0:05:08.7] CH: When I first got started in doing body language reading, it was very revealing, because I spent a lot of time on it and it. It got to a point where at first it's depressing almost at the beginning because you just see that every human being is suffering in one way or another. I think that we’re all suffering so much that seeing the way that someone hides their suffering is usually the most powerful and revealing piece of information you can get. 

After that period, it kind of just humanizes everybody to the point where you can see those weaknesses or those fears or insecurities and is not a point of looking down on so on, because you can see all that. It's a point of just that guy is just like me. That guy who used to be threatening is just as scared as I am in the situation, or just as flawed as I am. 

Seeing that was just a huge eye-opener for me that changed the way I see people forever. I wanted more of that, and it's very addicting especially when you really dig into it and spend some time learning behavior. It got to the point where I started social profiling and behavior profiling, and then I got into conversations into how to analyze what people are saying. Then it got into the hypnosis aspect of it, and then it got into behavior engineering and then interrogation started coming into it that kind of intertwined with some stuff I was doing. It was just kind of along a snowball effect of information that all kind of revolved around the main theme of trying to discover how vulnerable all of us are. In the end, it's kind of scary to see that we all walk around thinking that we've got some kind of firewall mechanism or some kind of antivirus systems to where we know BS when we see it, but we don't. Just seeing through the development phase, like just seeing how weak we all are or how vulnerable we all are is a truly shocking revelation. 

[0:07:32.8] MB: Tell me a little bit more about that. When you say seeing how weak and vulnerable everyone is, what does that mean and how did you come to that conclusion? 

[0:07:41.6] CH: I wanted to see with persuasion. I wanted to see how far we could go. I thought like the end, like the greatest thing — This was maybe 10 years ago. I thought the greatest thing that we might be able to do this by creating a Manchurian candidate in real life. It turns out it's been done before in a much different way where they used drugs and all kinds of dangerous stuff, but I thought maybe that there is some therapeutic applications of that. Maybe we could work on depression or even schizophrenia with that kind of stuff. Going through that with the vulnerability aspect that you just asked about, I specifically mean how we can be talked into doing things that are not in our best interest very easily. 

[0:08:31.4] MB: Give me an example. How can somebody be either sort of manipulated or hacked into doing something that's not necessarily in their best interest? 

[0:08:40.9] CH: A good example would be if you look up people that are hypnotist bank robbers that go up to the bank and use some really just preschool level skills. Of course, the guy might be really suggestible behind the counter, but I think an example of that would be you talking someone into doing something against their will, like buying something or going home with someone or using the skills for a business negotiation or at a job interview. 

[0:09:14.9] MB: I want to dig in to specifically some of the tools and strategies around how to engineer that type of behavior. What are some of the tactics that you’ve seen from your research, from your work in the military engineering human behavior that can help people either recognize when someone is trying to do that to them or use some of these strategies to influence others? 

[0:09:39.7] CH: Sure. I can give you guys some basic ones. I want to touch on this real quick if you don't mind me going off a little bit here, Matt. When we see like one of those articles online about learn body language quickly, or like quick tips to do X, Y, and Z, I think a lot of us grossly underestimate how much work is usually involved in mastering something or being really good at something. 

If you take a piano for example, there's plenty of videos on YouTube where you can just walk through a song. You know what I’m saying? 

[0:10:15.3] MB: Yeah. 

[0:10:16.3] CH: To where you could just walk through a song and you might be able to maybe impress a few people for 30 seconds at a party, but to get really good at this you'll need an investment and time. One of the things that I always kind of compare this to is like the first level would be like the paramedic. He knows some basic skills just enough to kind of be dangerous, and then you have a nurse who studied for several years, then you have a doctor who studied this in depth. Way down at the bottom, underneath the paramedic, you have the guy who watches like Gray’s Anatomy and thinks he's a doctor.

I think that just estimating how much time it will take is usually if you think it’s less than a year to get really good at this stuff. I would say more power to you, but this stuff is incredibly complex and it’s far more complex than a piano. In fact, if you can imagine mastering a piano and then every time you sat down at it, the keys were in different places. That’s kind of where we’re at with just basically human behavior engineering. 

With body language and behavior profiling, that's what makes the difference between really being able to influence someone and just knowing a few tricks, because if you read any influence book nowadays they’re going to give you all these methods that are supposed to work for all people, but every single person that you talk to is different and is fundamentally different from the core of their being. If you can't see that and you can't profile that and kind of tailor what you're saying and doing to meet that person's needs or their fears or weaknesses, whatever you’re trying to do with that person, you’re going to get some really basic level of success. That's why we tried to integrate every single part of this, every aspect inside of the ellipsis manual to be able to get that engineered scenario to where you can create an outcome that you'd like. 

For your listeners specifically, I would say one of the main things you need to start doing every single day is disengage people's autopilot response, and the autopilot response is basically the roles that we play or the hats that we put on. If you’re at work, you have a workout on and you talk to people as if you’re at work. It’s going to be completely different than the way you talk to your wife. It's going to be completely different than how you talk to your kids. 

We change roles throughout the day, and once we get into a roll, our neurons that have kind of connected for that role start to fire in sequence there just to where everything is kind of automated and we’re not really paying much attention to what's going on. When someone is in autopilot, it’s usually a role. So like an employee and a customer, that's one that you’re probably going to encounter every single day. 

I would say breaking someone's autopilot is the most fantastic way to start capturing that focus and the attention that you’re going to need, and breaking autopilot can be done with anything that breaks them out of their mental state. If you're getting a coffee at Starbucks and you ask really quickly which direction Northeast is, just to make them start — They've never been asked that question before. They start going internal to their head and they kind of break out of that employee mode for just a few seconds, and then you start doing what we call FIC, which stands for focus interest and curiosity, which you want to develop in sequence. A really good technique for developing focus is just talking about focus. 

Does that make sense? 

[0:14:06.9] MB: Tell me more about that. 

[0:14:08.8] CH: Okay. I didn’t know how far you wanted to go in here. 

[0:14:10.7] MB: Yeah. No, I want to dig in. I want to learn a lot. Tell me about FIC and tell me specifically about how we can kind of cultivate each of those pieces. Then I still want to drill down a little bit more as well and kind of how we can break someone out of a pattern. 

[0:14:24.4] CH: Okay. FIC is focus, interest and curiosity. The first part of that is focus, and the easiest way to establish or get someone to start focusing on you is to have authority. I know you wanted to talk about that, and this would be a great segue to that. 

[0:14:42.1] MB: Perfect. Let’s dig in to authority and then we’ll come back to FIC. 

[0:14:47.0] CH: Great. Let's talk about focus. The main way, the number one way that human beings start to focus on something or view it as important is when someone has authority. Authority is probably the most important thing that you can possibly master. There's a thing in our brains called a reticular activation system or the RAS, which is kind of like a precursor to the fight or flight response. This RAS is consistently looking for threats, things that are threatening to you or things that are socially valuable. If you're in a doctor’s office, all of your attention is going to go to the doctor. If you get pulled over by police, all of your attention is going to go to that person. If you're sitting in a restaurant and George Clooney walks in and starts talking to you, all of your attention, no matter what you were doing is going to go to George Clooney. That has to do with social authority or perceived authority.

My goal is to try to convince your listeners that authority is more important and more effective than influence. The main reason being that — Are you familiar with the Milgram Study? 

[0:16:03.0] MB: Oh, yeah. Definitely. 

[0:16:05.0] CH: Okay. Just for your listeners who haven't heard of this, this was done at Yale University. It was by a man named Dr. Stanley Milgram whose parents were refugees from the Nazis. He came to America and he did this study where a guy walks into a room and they say, “This is a learning experiment. There's a guy with a lab coat on and they're taking down notes on clipboard,” and he says, “You’re going to shock this guy in the other room,” and every time he gets this set of words wrong so to speak. 

The guy goes in the other room, gets hooked up to a shocking machine and this other guy who’s being experimented on is sitting there, he’s supposed to shock this guy on the side of this wall every time the guy gets words wrong. Td the guy just keeps repeatedly doing it and the guy continues to ramp up the voltage in accordance with the instructions of the guy wearing the lab coat. It turned out that almost 80% of the people who did this experiment shock the person on the other side of the wall to the point of death. To death. Social psychologist, before the experiment was conducted, estimated that .011% of people would shock someone to death, and it was almost 80%. 

A lot of people got some stuff out of that and they got a lot of scientific research out of that, but I took away something completely different. Of course, they got away like people who say, “I was just following orders,” like a lot of Nazis did after they're brought in front of a tribunal for war crimes. 

Think about the authority aspect of this. A guy just standing there in a gray lab coat tells you to shock another human being to death and you do it. Stand up and leave, you don’t protest. Of course, everyone — 100% of people would say, “No. I would never do that,” but then 80% of people do. 

A man with no medical name tag on, he has no identifying marks other than he’s just wearing a tie and a lab coat and he's uttering phrases, he’s not ordering anyone to do it. He just speak in phrases like it's important that the experiment continues or it's important that you continue. Just little phrases like that. 

Let's go back to influence and contrast these two things together. With influence, it might take you two hours to talk somebody into buying a new car per se. A guy in a lab coat in less than 45 minutes suggested that a stranger kill another person and they did it. 80% of people, which is better than most sales numbers. That's with no neurolinguistic programming. No hypnosis. No Robert Cialdini influence methods. None of that, and you just have that tiny bit of authority, just that perceived social authority. The guy was a nobody, he was just a volunteer who was an actor. Just that is enough to convince a stranger to commit murder, that tiny bit of social authority. 

[0:19:18.5] MB: That's fascinating. The Milgram experiment obviously is one of the kind of groundbreaking and fundamental experiments in psychology. For listeners who wanted to get it, we actually have a previous episode which I’ll link to in the show notes where we go super deep on the authority bias. I'm curious, tell me what are some — You write about and talk about the idea of hacking this sort of authority and how we can create it. What are some of the factors that we can use in order to hack authority? 

[0:19:45.1] CH: There are five basic qualities that dictate authority, and one of them is interchangeable. I’ll give them to you now. There are dominance, discipline, leadership, gratitude and fun, or just having a sense of adventure. The first one, dominance, does not mean being domineering. You can be dominant and still be completely supportive and nice to everyone around you. It's a common misconception that you have to be mean or serious all the time in order to be dominant. You can be a really fun person and just be a natural leader. 

The only thing that dominance can really be replaced with is ambition. If you think about like a starving artist who is opening a new art gallery or something like that. That's the only thing that we found that can be replaced. Those five qualities really dictate whether or not other people will respond to you, and especially the opposite sex. Whether or not you will have that automatic kind of obedient response, and it’s not necessarily an obedience response. What happens when we get exposed to authority, we go through what Dr. Milgram called an agentic shift. While this shift is taking place, our brain actually shifts responsibility for our own actions on to the person that's telling us to do something. That is profound, and I think a lot of people really look over that piece of information when they read the research. A person makes a shift to where they no longer feel responsible for their actions just in the presence of someone they think might be an authority figure. 

Developing that level of authority takes time and I it’s hard for me to get that point across to my students sometimes that somebody will come up and say, “Hey, man. I want to fly out there and do training with you for a few weeks.” Somehow they’ve got all the money to do that, but they're the type of person who's got a pile of dishes in the sink. They’ve got clothes piled up in their bedroom. I know for a fact this guy does not make his bed every day. He doesn't even trim his fingernails. He doesn’t even have his own wife together and he wants to come and learn how to take control of another human being. 

You have got some master yourself first, and with the students that I teach for private coaching, we have a few steps that you need to master environment first if you're trying to get this authority. It has to start with the environment. It has to start with cleaning your house, living in a clean place, hanging out with good friends, then mastering your time, keeping a planner and really sticking to it and starting to learn how to discipline yourself into habits, because discipline only needs to last long enough to get the habit done, and then you’re good. Then you can kind of cool off a little bit. You just only do one at a time. After you master the environment, then it becomes mastery of time, and after time you start to master your mechanics every day. What you're studying and mastering your attention span. You pick one thing to do every day. Today I’m going to study whether or not people are breathing from their chest or their stomach. Today I’m going to watch pupil dilation. Today I’m going to do X, Y and Z. 

Developing the authority is almost more important than learning any kind of influence method. I know a lot of people really are into influence and they’re into learning sales, but if you don't have that authority or you basically don't have your “shit together” you won't get the results you want. 

I would like to suggest if your listeners could just try this on for a month or two, that the results you want socially, the results you want from other people, especially when someone’s into studying influence, those things start to happen as a byproduct of you just making your life better and starting to master authority. 

We have one chapter in the Ellipsis Manual called authority, and it talks about this and it’s got a step-by-step system and it’s got a bunch of ways to kind of hack it. I'll give you a couple here if I'm not droning on too long here, Matt. 

[0:24:19.4] MB: No. That’s perfect. I'd love to hear some of those strategies. I think that’d be great. 

[0:24:23.3] CH: Okay. If you just want to start mastering authority today, start to express genuine interest in other people and make them feel interesting, not interested. Find out what they're excited about and remember the phrase leadership through support. Leadership through support. You have to make the other people understand that you are genuinely interested in them, and that level of interest will start to help you get more comfortable with having authority over other people. 

Because as soon as someone who’s new or just start studying this, they get that first taste of authority or somebody completely goes into the agentic state in front of them. It makes people immediately pull the plug and start to back out. It's a strange feeling, especially when it's your first time. Not necessarily having control over another human, but having that authority for the first time is strange, but it addicting, so it’s a good thing especially if you have good motives and you want to help others.

I would say especially with people who are the alpha male types who I would not describe as alpha males, but the people who we think are alpha males are usually not the alpha males. They’re the ones who want people to think they’re alpha males, because it’s usually the tiniest, the smallest dogs that barks the most. The Chihuahuas always worried about getting attacked, and the giant dogs don't really feel the need to bark. 

Dealing with those type of people, try what we call the Colombo method. I don’t know if you're familiar with that show, Matt. 

[0:26:08.7] MB: Yeah, the old detective show. 

[0:26:11.7] CH: Yeah, it is fantastic. I would say that is the point where you need to make some deliberate expression of insecurity. Then you can still have authority and you can still make deliberate errors, like maybe look insecure on purpose or make a deliberate social error, like your shirttail is hanging out or something like that. Those people need to feel dominant at the beginning of a conversation in order to relax. 

It works the same in an interrogation room. If I paid a police officer to yell at me like I was in trouble as I was walking in the room or I tripped on purpose or had a giant coffee stain on my shirt. It depends on who you're talking to. I would say start working on yourself immediately. That is going to be the game changer for you. We tend to seek things outside of us. All of these stuff we see on the Internet, we think the products or the things are going to make us better, but I strongly encourage your listeners to start from the inside out, especially when you're learning influence. That will help you basically to talk to strangers every day. I think using that level of social skill, you should be talking to a stranger every single day. You should make it a goal to discover a fact about a stranger in your area every single day. 

[0:27:38.5] MB: I love that strategy, and something that I'm a big fan of is kind of the idea or rejection therapy and the whole notion of constantly be sort of putting yourself out there failing, talking to people, pushing your comfort zone and even something as simple as talking to a stranger every day can be a great way to start to get outside that comfort zone and work on your ability to interact and connect and talk to people. 

[0:28:02.1] CH: Absolutely. I think the conference zone thing is really what's going to hold people back, and starting a conversation starts to get easy, then you need to take it to the next step, because you’re back in your comfort zone once it becomes easy. Then you need to start going further. 

[0:28:18.6] MB: Yeah, it's so key. As soon as it becomes easy for, you need to find kind of that next challenge and start pushing through the resistance. 

We talk all time on the show about how important it is to master new skills and abilities, and that’s why I’m so excited to tell you about sponsor for this episode, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn everything from logo designed, to social media marketing, to street photography, and they offer unlimited access for a single low monthly price so you don't pay per class. 

There's some really cool courses on Skillshare. They have an absolutely awesome course on Evernote mastery. You know how much I love Evernote. It basically runs my entire life. They also have a really, really cool course on productivity planning. They have a number of those actually. A course that piqued my interest when I was looking at it today that looks absolutely awesome, which is a course on how to create awesome mind maps. If you don’t what mind maps are, they’re so cool. It’s an amazing tool for note taking and remembering and summarizing things that speaks directly to your mind. It’s an absolutely fascinating strategy, and I use mind maps to record or kind of keep notes on things like book ideas or summarizing or even brainstorming. 

Skillshare is giving my listeners this month in month of unlimited access. You can get Skillshare completely for free for one month. All you have to do is to go to skillshare.com/success to redeem a free month of classes. I would highly recommend checking that out. If mind mapping sounds cool, go check out the mind mapping class. You can get all these course for free for a month. If you’re looking to add some new skills, if you want pickup to some productivity tips or even get into something like drawing, definitely check out Skillshare. 

Going back to these five key factors that you can use to hack authority, we got dominance, discipline, leadership, gratitude and fun/sense of adventure. Tell me about — I guess is leadership kind of encapsulated in authority as well or is that sort of a separate piece of the puzzle, and then what about gratitude and fun? I think those are kind of surprising things to see on a list of hacking social authority. 

[0:30:40.6] CH: I think that gratitude and self-discipline are both extremely contagious and they're both extremely visible on your body. Somebody else might call it energy, and I don't profess to know how. It just beams out of you, but it really does. You can tell when you meet somebody that's really got their stuff together. It just shines through everything that they do. It almost puts every person into kind of a followership role to where they want to keep experiencing that. Leadership and authority are very, very closely related. Authority is something you want people to perceive and leadership is something that you're doing internally, the thought processes that you have. 

[0:31:31.0] MB: What are those internal thought processes behind leadership? 

[0:31:35.7] CH: I would say the number one thing you can do is just continually ask yourself how can I lift this person up or these people up. The authority would be a natural byproduct of having your stuff together and just managing your life. 

[0:31:54.4] MB: Essentially, and tell me if I’m misunderstanding this, but essentially the idea is that if you have your life together, if you're firing on all cylinders, you’re having fun, you’re grateful, you have kind of positive energy beaming out from you, you’re organized, you’re getting things done, that sort of state naturally puts people around you into a mode where they defer to you almost or feel like they want to do what you tell them to do. 

[0:32:23.2] CH: Yes. We’re got a huge section on there on how to kind of hack that for lack of a better term. That definitely makes the agentic shift start to happen. Just as an example of this, how looks matter. They did a crosswalk, what they called a crosswalk study in Texas and this was decades ago. It’s been repeated several times, but this guy in a blue jeans and t-shirt in a downtown area, busy traffic, decides to break the crosswalk signal and just — Of course, the street is open, like there's no cars coming, but he goes against the crosswalk signal that tells him not to go. A couple of people follow him, and the same guy goes back to his apartment or wherever and changes into a really nice business suit and decides to break that crosswalk and go ahead and cross the street. The chances of people following him were increased by 89%, just because of his clothing. Just changing your clothes or changing that guy’s clothes made people break the law where they otherwise wouldn't have. 

[0:33:34.8] MB: Fascinating, and that's a really good sort of crystalline demonstration of the idea that even simple shifts in the way that people perceive you can lead to massive changes in the way that they react to you and their behavior. 

[0:33:49.3] CH: Absolutely, and it's not just how they perceive you just your clothing. You will, once you start getting that self-discipline, and you’ve got your social skills all these stuff start to get handled, you will walk differently. You don't need a tactic anymore. You don’t need conversation starter tactics anymore. Once all of these stuff happens and once you get those five qualities kind of hammered down, everything else starts to become a byproduct. The success is a byproduct of having that stuff figured out.

[0:34:19.4] MB: Let’s go back up to the concept of a FIC that you talked about before and how cultivating focus, interest in curiosity are keystones of hacking human behavior for lack of a better term. How does authority tie back into that? 

[0:34:35.2] CH: Okay. Authority activates that reticular activation system we talked about, which starts the beginning processes of interest. When a person becomes interested, that is when you would start to ask a really unique questions, you’d start to do something that is just unusual that they don't see all the time, even if you're asking them for help on a setting on your iPhone. 

The authority gives you permission to do that to where another person asking the exact same question with the exact same words won't get away with that. They can't get away with that. They don’t develop that interest. The curiosity — Imagine if you're saying, ask them what kind of book they like, and as the person talks about the book they like you respond with its incredible how easy it is to just become so captivated. When you say captivated, you touch your own chest. Like you're pointing toward yourself and completely get lost in something and you point at yourself one more time. You say the whole entire world around you just completely disappears. This is a very crude example here, but I want to give you the nuts and bolts so it makes sense. 

Everything around you just kind of disappears and you gesture away from yourself, and that would start to establish the curiosity. With the curiosity, if I asked you what kind of book was your favorite or what book did you really, really get totally wrapped up in. I'm literally sending electricity to all of those little memories and triggering them and getting them warmed up. I'm not even saying anything. You're doing most of the work, and this is just the first maybe 10 to 25 seconds of the conversation.

[0:36:21.5] MB: What happens after that? 

[0:36:23.1] CH: There is a very long process here depending on what you want to do. Then you would start to develop a profile of the person that you're speaking to, and we have three tools that we made for that. One is a social weakness chart based on who you’re talking to. It'll illustrate what type of weaknesses they have that you can either speak to or choose to avoid to develop a deep rapport. Then we use a human needs map. There's only seven needs on this needs map. If you can identify these needs, it will also identify fears and insecurities for that person. The needs map is publicly available on our website. It's on just Google images or wherever you want to look for it. Just type in Ellipsis needs map. Finally, with that profile development, you’re using the behavioral table of elements for seeing the effectiveness of your methods.

[0:37:14.8] MB: I want to dig in to each of those. Tell me about, when you say social weakness, what is a social weakness. What does that mean? 

[0:37:22.9] CH: A social weakness might be a fear of abandonment, a fear of public judgment or a fear that you will be emasculated in front of a large crowd. That would be a social weakness, and those are typically personality weaknesses we have that involve something being witnessed by multiple people.

[0:37:42.9] MB: And is this something you think that everyone has social weakness or only certain people have them? 

[0:37:47.7] CH: I think we all do. I think we’re hardwired to have social weaknesses that kept us in line 10,000 years ago when we’re kind of a nomadic tribes people, the average tribe was around 60 to 100 people. If people had no social consideration for what’s going on, they probably get killed pretty fast. 

[0:38:09.4] MB: Do you start out when you're kind of going down this journey, do you look at yourself and figure out what are my social weaknesses? 

[0:38:15.9] CH: Oh, yeah. Man! I dug into it really — It was a dark place, and I started seeing everything that I was doing. Of course, I got to work trying to fix everything and finally I got to the point where a lot of people ask if I manage my body language and I control all of these blinking and breathing and all that, like, “No. I made the choice to just let go.” 

[0:38:45.5] MB: For somebody who's listening that maybe wants to drill down and understand their own social weaknesses, what are the strategies or kind of exercise you might recommend to peel back the layers and start to understand what your fears are and how those are driving your behavior. 

[0:39:01.7] CH: Oh, yeah. I would say definitely use the needs map. If you don't have the Ellipsis Manual with you, the needs map, you can download, just put it on your phone. Have your friends go through the needs map and pick out what your needs are, and then you can look at that social weakness chart which has the needs associated with fears and insecurities and you can start to just go to work on all of that stuff. 

I would caution a lot of people that when I first started I thought if I worked on those needs hard enough, like I would just be a human that’s free of needs, like some enlightened Tibetan monk. It doesn't work like that. There's no vaccination to being socially vulnerable to other people. In fact if you become socially invulnerable to people it will just make you just a nasty person in general. 

[0:39:55.4] MB: Why is that? 

[0:39:56.5] CH: I think it diminishes your ability to connect with others and it takes away your ability to feel empathy and nervousness for other people during conversations. 

[0:40:07.8] MB: In many ways, being foldable and having these weaknesses are things that you can use to your advantage. 

[0:40:15.1] MB: Absolutely, I think being vulnerable isn't some tactic you could apply, although it's in the book. There's part of the book that tells you how to make confessions to other people about small little things that make you seem like a more caring person. I would strongly suggest that you just be actually vulnerable and say what's really going on and be completely real especially with your own self, so you’re not hiding anything. 

Not only just so you're a good person, but trying to hide stuff and manage her body language or manage any part of your behavior really starts to suck up some of your CPU power, so you're paying less attention what's going on, you’re paying less attention to your ability to influence the other person and you’re just kind of — You’re running on fumes at that point when it comes to your ability to influence, because you're managing herself so hard. 

[0:41:13.8] MB: You also talked about having your friends go through the needs map and figure out what your needs are. Why would you recommend doing that as supposed to doing it herself? 

[0:41:22.3] CH: I think like the old quote, “A fish under water and a man unto himself,” where I think we’re blind to a lot of our own idiosyncrasies, I’ll call them. I think our friends especially we’ll be able to pick them out faster than we can ourselves. I know my friends absolutely good. 

[0:41:42.9] MB: That’s a great quote, and I think it's such a true statement that often times it's so hard to see our own predicaments with the same objectivity that we have when we look at a friend coming to us for advice even if it's kind of the exact same scenario. 

[0:41:58.6] CH: Absolutely. 

[0:41:59.8] MB: Let's dig in to you. You touched on the behavior table of elements, and we talked about that before the interview began, but we haven't really dug in to it in this conservation. I found that to be one of the most fascinating concepts and pieces of the book. You go through everything from having your hands in your pockets, to whether your legs are crossed, the tilt of your head, your lip retractions, so many different elements. How do those all factored together, and what is that behavior table of elements and how do you use it in the work that you do? 

[0:42:31.1] CH: I originally designed this thing. I’ll give you one to put in the show notes. This thing looks like the periodic table, and we designed it to be a reference guide so people watching a video of an interrogation would be able to break down the lies that we’re told, the insecurities every time a person reached like a critical point where we knew they had more information. This thing kind of makes it into a universal or semi-universal grading system to where on the top of the behavior table you have the top of the head, on the very bottom you have the feet, and there's two rows that are disconnected that take place outside of the human body. 

Every little cell where you would see like tungsten or copper or nickel or something like that, every one of these cells is a different human behavior and they all have different deception ratings on them, and this is not that anyone gesture means deception, but a group of behaviors can mean deception. From the left to the right side of the table, it goes from least deceptive, or let's call it least stressful to the right side, which is the highest stress. 

[0:43:54.0] MB: There's a ton of stuff on the behavioral table developments. I’m looking at a copy of it right now. How did you come up with all the different pieces on here and how do you practically implement it when you're using it yourself? 

[0:44:08.0] CH: The bibliography for this thing alone was astounding. I went through a lot of research to make sure this was culturally relevant. Some of these I wanted to see like the no gesture is less common in Belgium when we shake our head no. 

All of the cultural implications had to be included in there, because I’d know where an interrogation was going to be taking place. The way that we put this together — I laid all of these stuff out in my living floor on little notecards and that was probably three years of going through these notecards and building the research. Every night I’d just pile them up and put a rubber band around them and the following morning I’d lay them all back out again and continue with the research. It was a long process. 

[0:45:03.5] MB: Using a tool like the behavior table of elements, for somebody that’s listening, how could they take this which is a very information-dense document and apply it or use it in their day-to-day lives? 

[0:45:17.2] CH: We found out a lot of people are doing that and it was never in my head that this would be a body language training tool, and it’s become one. With the evolution of the table, it started to become a training element for a lot of law enforcement teams and a lot of interrogation teams around the country. Basically, just reading through the behavior table and then reading through the book about every single gesture and then using that to either conduct post-analysis, so you go through your day, you take a bunch of notes on what you see your coworker is doing and then you want to go home and look up what it was, or you watch something on YouTube or you watch somebody who's like a suspected murderer get interviewed on a news television show and you go back through that video and start looking at the behavior table to figure out whether or not there was deception involved in the interview. 

Eventually your ability to see the table and see behavior at the same time starts to become a kind of like speaking a language, and this thing is just ultimately designed to be a quick reference for behavior now. It's got everything you could pretty much see another person do and you can locate it on here without knowing the meaning of what it is. You can tell whether it's deceptive, whether it's not deceptive or whether it's associated with being happy or sad or all kinds of other emotions. 

[0:46:49.6] MB: Is it possible to using a tool like this determine if somebody's lying? 

[0:46:54.6] CH: There is nothing that’s a hundred percent, and a polygraph is usually no better than a coin toss and is actually biased against people that are telling the truth. This gives you a fairly good estimation from what I've seen so far that it is accurate especially in interview situations and where there is a genuine conversation between two people. If it's one person talking to a group, it's probably 10 times harder to detect deception anyway. This really gives you the edge as far as profiling tools and lie detection tools go. This is probably your best bet. 

[0:47:39.1] MB: I think I remember you talking about a possible strategy for using something like this behavioral table of elements to hone your own ability to detect stress and potentially deceptive body language would be to watch interviews on YouTube and kind of seeing when guests react a certain way and jot it down, kind of go back and look through your notes and determine what you think they may or may not have been lying about. 

[0:48:06.5] CH: Absolutely. I was talking to Jordan Harbinger and I told him one of the videos that we really like to use in our training scenarios is videos of Conan O'Brien interviewing walk-on celebrities, and Conan has this incredible ability to just produce that just high anxiety, socially awkward situations on to people and the body language of on the right side of the behavior table, the more stressed-out body language starts to really ramp up with those interviews and it's really apparent. If you're just looking to spot stress and deception, Conan O'Brien is a fantastic place to start. 

[0:48:51.5] MB: Zooming out a little bit, and we talked about this earlier. I know what a long journey it can be really master a lot of these ideas and tools and truly understand the complexity of human behavior and try to decipher body language and understand what it means. For somebody who wants to just start out and kind of slowly begin internalizing a lot of these mental models, how would you recommend beginning the journey of studying human behavior and starting to build this knowledge? 

[0:49:25.7] CH: For that I would say grab a body language book. It doesn't have to be the Ellipsis Manual. I would recommend it just because you can flip to a number really quick that’s on the behavior table, but in the beginning you should spend several weeks, especially somebody that's beginning, if you have the time, you should take the time to just to observe behavior on its own without trying to interpret it, without trying to make meaning out of it. It’s like this person is crossing their arms. It doesn't mean you automatically assume they’re being defensive. It doesn't mean you think about the temperature in the room, whether or not the person is cold. Just notice that they do it. Just start to become mindful of the behavior, and then once you're mindful of the behavior, you watching behavior starts to become an unconscious process. Then work on the next conscious chunk. Then you’re going to start interpreting some of that. Then once you start interpreting most of behavior, it kind of becomes an unconscious thing. Ten grab the next piece. Then start with lie detection. 

I would say only focus on one jam. Use your conscious mind over and over again to jam a habit into your subconscious. Then once it's in there, boom, start on the next thing, which would be lie detection, behavioral profiling, deception or the influence stuff that we talked about in the Ellipsis Manual. 

[0:50:47.5] MB: I think you touched on this earlier, but one of the concepts that I was really curious about is the idea of embedded commands. Tell me a little bit more about that. 

[0:50:55.3] CH: On embedded command is something that was — I don’t want to say invented, but it was kind of made popular or conceptualized by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. Those guys are the founders of NLP, and embedded commands are a hidden command that's kind of couched inside of a sentence and it's designed to make a person start to take action or to have a thought without it being inside of their conscious awareness. 

I wouldn't say like if you mixed up like a confusion statement. Are you familiar with those? 

[0:51:34.1] MB: No, I’m not. 

[0:51:34.9] CH: One of the things that — Like to go to weapon that I teach for days at a time is how to use confusion and conversation. When you confuse a person, you can also throw an embedded command immediately after that and that goes directly to the subconscious part of the brain processing center. 

The theory with confusion is that a person that's drowning will grab onto the nearest solid object that touches their hand. Does that make sense? 

[0:52:06.0] MB: Definitely. 

[0:52:07.2] CH: With confusion, your brain is trying to make sense of what's going on. It’s trying to process a statement that is kind of confusing, and it will accept the first thing that it hears. I would say you can use embedded commands at any time, but they are 10 times more effective when you mix them in with confusion. 

An example, a confusion statement would be what is the difference between not thinking and realizing what you aren’t thinking about? 

[0:52:37.5] MB: That’s definitely confusing. 

[0:52:39.2] CH: Okay. On the end of that, so let's throw a small leading statement followed by an embedded command. This is an extremely powerful phrase right here if anybody wants to write it down. Are you ready, Matt? 

[0:52:53.3] MB: I’m ready. 

[0:52:54.5] CH: Alright. What's the difference between not thinking and realizing what you aren’t thinking about? Everyone knows the real difference is in choosing to let go and allow the world to spin or just surrendering and becoming in control of yourself. There were a couple of embedded commands in there and a lot of people say you're supposed to say the volume louder or supposed to space them out a little bit. It doesn't matter. 

[0:53:17.6] MB: I kind of felt when you said that like the first phrase obviously is very confusing, and then after that I was like, “Yeah, that didn’t make a lot of sense, but I'm going to go with this let go thing, because that makes sense and that’s like the next thing that he said.” 

[0:53:31.3] CH: Yeah. That would be a phrase that you would throw out there for somebody who was into yoga or something like that. If some into golf, I would throw a little golf metaphor with the exact same let go phrase. The only time you ever suck at golf is when you don't really let go. Does that make sense? 

[0:53:50.8] MB: Yeah. It definitely makes sense. 

[0:53:52.4] CH: Okay. That’s an example of an embedded command for anybody that’s not familiar with it. 

[0:53:58.5] MB: What would you use an embedded command for? 

[0:54:01.0] CH: You can use them for anything. An example for just the beginning of a conversation, if you said it's just really hard to focus right now. Focus right now is an embedded command, and you can maybe say it louder. That starts to get the subconscious mind in the direction that you’re trying to push it at the end of your outcome or whatever goal you're trying to achieve.

[0:54:25.9] MB: Got it. I think that makes sense. For someone who wants to drill down or maybe integrate some of these confusion statements into their strategies of influence, is there a resource or a way that they can kind of come up with or create more of them? 

[0:54:44.2] CH: Oh, man! There is a formula to do it inside the Ellipsis Manual, and I think there's like 20 or 30 examples there. 

[0:54:51.5] MB: Awesome. We’ll make sure to have obviously all the resources you talked about, the needs map, the behavior table of elements, everything in the show notes and links of the book as well. For listeners who’ve been listening to our conversation, want to start somewhere simply and easily, what would kind of one piece of homework that you would give to them be to just begin down this journey? 

[0:55:13.8] CH: For the next week, ask yourself the question internally, not externally, whenever you see another person, ask yourself the question; what does this person like to be complimented on and what makes them feel significant? Those two questions will start to get you to see the inner part of people. I want you to ask those questions to even the people that are annoying, some guy that cuts you off in traffic or the guy wearing the giant tap out fight shirt standing line in front of you in Starbucks. Start asking those questions and you’ll start seeing people differently. That will change you a lot if you do it for a week. 

[0:55:52.1] MB: Chase, this has been a fascinating conversation. So many different avenues and strategies and lots and lots of things to dig into the show notes, but thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all your wisdom. 

[0:56:03.4] CH: You bet, Matt. I had a good time. 

[0:56:05.4] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created the show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, say hi, share your story, shoot me an interesting article, tell me about your life, whatever you want to do, shoot me an email. I get them all the time. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s matt@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every listeners that reaches out to me. 

I’ll give you three reasons right now why you should sign up and join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up on the homepage. First; you’re going to get an amazing free guide that we created based on your feedback and listener demand called How to Organize and Remember Everything and it lets you keep track of all the information you get from reading books, article, podcasts, etc., and it's an awesome system. It’s a system I personally use to organize my entire life. You’d get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by joining the email list today. 

Next, you’re going to get an exclusive email from us every single Monday called Mindset Monday, where we tell you articles, stories, ideas, things that are fascinating us right now in the world of evidence-based growth. Lastly, you’re going to get a chance to shape the show, become part of the Science of Success, voting on guests, questions, changing our into music and must more. The new into we recently rolled out was from listener feedback like yours. So sign up on the email list, just go to successpodcast.com, sign up right in the homepage, or if you’re on your phone right now, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222, that’s “smarter” to the number 44222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referrals to a friend, either live or online. It really means a tremendous amount, and the way the show has grown is through word-of-mouth referrals from people like you. 

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. It really matters. Every single review impacts the iTunes algorithm. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all the information that we talked about in this episode; links, transcripts books, etc., be sure to check out the show notes. You can get them at successpodcast.com just by hitting the show notes button at the top of the page. 

Thanks again, and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

How This Government Agency Spy Recruiter Hacked Psychology To Change Anyone’s Behavior with Robin Dreeke

How this government agency spy recruiter hacked evolutionary psychology to learn to change anyone’s behavior, 5 steps for “strategizing” trust, how to get someone’s brain to reward them for engaging with you, the vital importance of self awareness, the power of not keeping score, and much more with Robin Dreeke. 

Robin began his career in law enforcement in 1997 after serving in the United States Marine Corp. Robin has directed the behavior analysis program of a federal law enforcement agency and has received training and operational experience in social psychology and the science of relationship management. Robin is currently an agent of the FBI and the author of “It’s Not All About “Me”” and the upcoming book The Code of Trust.

• How Robin went from being a hard charging type-a individual to learning the principles of actually inspiring people and changing behavior

• Robin’s main job was to recruit spies

• How manipulating, pressuring, bullying people doesn’t work - and why learning that lessons in counter-intelligence is one of the most powerful places to learn the lesson

• The Art Form of Inspirating Anyone and Getting them to do what you want

• The New Car Effect - and what that has to do with influencing and inspiring anyone

• "Strategizing Trust" - the five steps of trust

• How the old conception of leadership is flawed and ineffective

• How being hard charging, type-a, and in your face is backwards from what you need to be successful

• How the crucible of counter-ingellience doesn’t afford you the luxury of making mistakes - and the strategies that come out of that for influencing others

• When people don’t have to talk to you and don’t care about your title and position - you have to find the strategies that work

• The vital importance of self awareness and honest self assessment

• What you think you’re projecting to the world is often not what the world is seeing

• How ego, vanity, and insecurities can hijack what you say and do

• Listen to the people around you, take feedback, and learn how you can change

• How strategies of inspiration and influence focus almost exclusively on the other person

• Focus on other people, what their priorities are, and what’s important to them - that’s how you can change their behavior and influence them

• Why should someone want to talk to you, listen to you, and do what you want?

• Think in terms of inspiring other people, not manipulating them

• You have to know what someone’s priorities are, and you have to speak about things in relation to their priorities

• How seeking other people's thoughts and opinions can help you neurobiologically build trust with them

• Leaders don’t keep scorecards. Give and let go. And wait.

• When you honor the healthy and happy relationships - everything falls into place and flows very easily

• How to get someone’s brain to reward them for engaging with you

• Honesty is one of the critical factors

• Why you shouldn’t convince, cajole, and manipulate people

• How the FBI spy recruits hacked evolutionary psychology to learn to change anyone’s behavior

• What is manipulation?

• How the use of lies and deception can destroy trust forever

• Why it’s important to understand that Robin is not judging the right or wrong of any of these strategies - its just a question of what’s the most effective

• It cost nothing to make it about other people and its one of the simplest strategies in the world - and can have a huge impact on your ability to influence and inspire

• Become an available resource for other people’s prosperity

• How we can become non-judgemental and cultivate nonjudgemental validation

• Don’t judge, but seek to understand - everyone has a reason that they believe what they believe in

• When you dig in, you start getting context for someone’s understanding of reality, and that helps build tolerance

• You are the cause of most of the negative interactions in your life

• Most people do not care what’s important to you - they care about their own priorities

• How to recognize and prevent yourself from getting emotionally hijacked

• The core principles of the code of trust

• Great leaders are very empathetic and focused on OTHER people

• Why Robin doesn’t give advice or guidance, he only asks discovery questions

• The 5 principles of trust

• Suspend your ego

  1. Be nonjudgemental

  2. Honor Reason

  3. Validate Others

  4. Be Generous

• The CORE of the Code

• Happy healthy relationships

  1. open honest communication

  2. available resource for prosperity of others

• Why should discover the GREATNESS of others - don’t focus on what people are doing wrong, focus on their greatness and what they are doing RIGHT

• How to make relationships bloom - find out what other people’s priorities are, their needs, wants, aspirations and dreams.

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go to www.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better? 
Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go to www.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] It's Not All About Me: The Top Ten Techniques for Building Quick Rapport with Anyone by Robin Dreeke

• [Book] The Code of Trust by Robin Dreeke, Cameron Stauth, and Joe Navarro

• [SoS Episode] Simple Strategies You Can Use To Persuade Anyone with The Godfather of Influence Dr. Robert Cialdini

• [SoS Episode] Influence Anyone With Secret Lessons Learned From The World’s Top Hostage Negotiators with Former FBI Negotiator Chris Voss

• [Website] People Formula, LLC

• [Twitter] @rdreeke

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:12.7] MB: Welcome to The Science Of Success, the number one evidence based growth podcast on the internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

In this episode, we discuss how this FBI spy recruiter hacked evolutionary psychology to learn to change anyone’s behavior. We look at the five steps for strategizing trust. Talk about how to get someone’s brain to reward them for engaging with you. The vital importance of self-awareness, the power of not keeping score and much more with Robin Dreeke.

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the home page. First, you’re going to get a curated weekly email from us every single Monday called Mindset Monday which our listeners have been loving.

These are TED Talks, articles, ideas, things that have us excited and we want to share them with you, it’s super short and easy to digest. Next, you’re going to get listener exclusive content and a chance to shape the show. Vote on guests, change our intro music, vote on guest questions, et cetera. The new intro that we just recently rolled out was voted on by people who are on our email list. 

Lastly and most importantly, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand. Our most popular guide is called, How to Organize and Remember Everything and you can get it completely for free along with another sweet bonus guide that we’re not going to tell you about until you sign up.

By joining our email list today. Again, you can join it by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the home page or if you’re on your phone right now, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222.

In our previous episode, we asked, do you have to be ruthless in order to succeed? We examined how compassion is powerfully linked with success. We discuss the essential task of challenging your own world view and seeking evidence that you disagree with.

We talked about learning how to ask great questions and much more with Dr. Chris Cook. If you want to learn more about the power of compassion and how it can make you successful, listen to that episode. Now for the interview.

[0:02:27.4] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show. Robin Dreeke. Robin began his career in law enforcement after serving in the United States Marine Corps. He has directed the Behavior Analysis Program of a federal law enforcement agency and received training and operational experience in social psychology and the science of relationship management.

Robin is currently an agent at the FBI and the author of It’s Not All About Me and the upcoming book The Code Of Trust. Robin, welcome to The Science Of Success.

[0:02:55.7] RD: Hey, thanks Matt. Excited to be here, excited to be sharing with you and your audience, all the great things I’ve learned in my life and I’m sure everything that you all learn in your life as well.

[0:03:05.0] MB: Well, you have an incredible background and story and some of the work you’ve done at the FBI is fascinating. Would you share kind of your journey with the listeners?

[0:03:14.3] RD: Yeah, sure Matt. It’s actually pretty funny and remarkable. Not in the things I’ve achieved but because in what I’ve done with my life and career, completely opposite of what my biological and genetic coding is for and what I mean is this.

You’ve read part of it, you know, my bio and background, yes, I’m a naval academy graduate, Marine Corps officer. I came into law enforcement and the FBI 1997, I served in New York City Norfolk, FBI headquarters, Quantico, I ran our behavioral team, all those things. 

You know, they sound pretty neat on paper and they kind of scream at you, “Hard charging, type A.” But in reality, which I am, there’s no doubt. In reality, when you work in the world of counterintelligence like I do. It’s completely backwards from the behavior you really need for success.

What I mean by that is what I learned, when I first got assigned to New York City, working counterintelligence, I was very fortunate that I got on a squad of individuals that had probably 20, 25 years in the FBI all doing that job and working counterintelligence is different than anything else in the FBI really in the world.

It is related mostly anywhere else, to sales. I basically sell a concept that protecting America is a great idea and the way I’m going to compensate you for that is through a great relationship with me mostly, not much else, you know, government funded me, is what it is.

It really comes down to this feeling of patriotism and having a great relationship that’s going to be the inspiration behind why people are going to want to cooperate with you.

Also, working in counterintelligence, it’s all leadership because the people that I interact with, day in and day out, they don’t commit crimes. I mean, it’s very rare that my main job in New York was to recruit spies. 99.99% of the time, they’re just getting regular information.

Open source information and sourcing it to an individual so it has value. Most of the information like I said, is open source. Who it comes from, makes it valuable. The people I interact with are great American citizens as well.

The challenge is alright, if you’re a hard charging type A that’s used to trying to convince and coerce and manipulate people into giving you things it doesn’t work, it just does not work because you know, as soon as someone walks away from any engagement with you, think to themselves, “Wow, I really wonder what he really wanted?” You’ve totally failed.

Because there’s doubt, there’s subterfuge and people are very keen to pick up on these things because what generally happens and we’ve all experienced it whether it’s been a shady car salesman or any other kind of salesman, that is actually there for profit and gain, to take advantage of you. People pickup on that because there’s incongruence between people’s words and the things they say.

Which they might be saying all the slick lines, everything really great but their body language becomes very incongruent with what they’re saying and our inter mammalian brain really picks up on these things and it gives us that creepy feeling.

Well, when you’re actually genuinely make it about everyone else and that’s what The Code Of Trust Is About, how to make it about everyone else but yourself. But you have a lot of clarity, you know, the destination that you hope to move to but you’ve realized that you can only do that through being an available resource for the prosperity of others.

That’s what the whole thing is about. I did the three years on the street, I got on our behavioral team and again, I’m not a naturally born leader, not naturally born doing this but I was surrounded by greats that were showing me and modeling the way.

You learn these things through on the job training, osmosis and observation. But what really started happening was I started writing because I was asked to write about it and when I got down to Quantico, when they started asking me to teach about it.

You start making this artform as it is and a personal artform of a paint by number. You start getting labels and meaning of things so people can start recognizing the behaviors, they’ve already been doing.

I call it the “new car effect” and I always get a puzzled look when I say that. But really, what it comes down to, you know, the day you buy your new car or any car, all of a sudden you start seeing that vehicle everywhere.

I own a Tundra, the day I bought my Tundra, I swear, I think 300 people in my town bought the same darn truck because it has that label and meaning. That’s all I do is I give labels and meanings to all the behaviors that we do when we’re having a great relationship, so you can repeat that behavior. And understand also, the ones that you might have failed at or are more challenged at.

To understand exactly what you were and weren’t during those situations so you can stop doing those behaviors. That’s been the journey, probably The Code Of Trust came about around 2013. I was running our behavioral team and someone asked me to do an article again on counter intelligence and I said well, “I can’t really talk about hooky spooky spy stuff,” but I said, “Let me talk about what my team does.”

I had never really sat down and contemplated. You know, when I sit down and strategize any kind of operation I’m doing, “What am I actually doing?” Then I reflected on every instance in my entire life, my career, in the Marine Corps, in the naval academy and with my friends, family, kids.

I started realizing that “Wow, in ever encounter, all I’m ever doing is strategizing trust.” I came out with The Five Steps Of Trust and all of a sudden, when I gave myself that “Green Tundra effect,” as I call it or the “New car effect.”

I started seeing the code of trust everywhere. It’s become my guiding light in my life, I live it every day and it creates amazing prosperity as a byproduct but if you – the core thing of the code of trust is, if you focus on yourself, it undermines the entire process so it really comes down to first and foremost, good, healthy relationships, open eyes communication and being an available resource for the prosperity of others.

When you want those things first, everything else falls into place. That’s kind of a brief overview of almost 49 years of my life.

[0:08:59.0] MB: You know, the funny thing about and there’s so much to unpack there, there’s a number of things I want to ask you about. One of the most fascinating things to me about fields like counterintelligence is that there’s no room for error, right? 

These tactics have to work and in many cases, literally life and death situations and so, I think it’s such a beautiful format for really – it’s almost a crucible for cultivating the absolute, most effective strategies for doing something. You know, you talked about how your old sort of perception of what leadership meant isn’t necessarily what actually works and actually changes behavior.

Can you tell me about how that transformation took place and how the old conception of kind of the hard charging, manipulating, pressuring, bullying, framework of leadership doesn’t really work?

[0:09:44.9] RD: Yeah, absolutely. You know, my form of leadership is what I witnessed. You know, the things that we witnessed between ages of nine and 19, you know, really form our generational outlook on the world because our prefrontal lobes are not fully developed yet. The emotional impresses we have really form how we see the world.

You know, during those years, you know, I wanted to go to naval academy. I want to be navy pilot, aerospace engineer, an astronaut, you know, my form of leadership is what I watched in the movies and TV.

The first movie I saw in leadership that I thought was strong leadership was you know, was Patton and you know, screaming at people, yelling, kick him in the butt, poke them in the eye. I figured leadership was getting people to do what you want and so that’s what I – 

That’s the behaviorized modeling and at a young age, you know, many people get rewarded for that kind of behavior because just think of sports teams you’ve been on or clubs or any other kind of position where you know, an adult or a superior asked you to accomplish something with a group of people and you ask politely all the group of people to do what was asked.

No one goes along with what it is you want them to do and so, you now get chastised for being a weak leader, now, next thing you do is you yell and scream and these people do what you want them to do and now you’re rewarded for being a good leader.

The negative behavior on convincing and condoling gets rewarded. So you start at a young age thinking that’s the way in order to get things done. In reality, what you just did is, you manipulated people through fear and reprisal to take action and the action they’re giving you is probably about five, maybe five to 10% effort.

Just to get you to shut up and go away and that can work fine in situations where there is a position of reprisal that people can take against you but again, you’re not going to get the best out of anyone because you know, loathing starts seeping in against you and people are just going to stop performing.

That makes the now leader, you know, look extremely bad and can’t be productive and that leader now thinks, “Well, what’s happened, why am I not being productive, why am I no longer getting promoted?”

Well, they now think they’ve gotten soft and so the way to undo getting soft, they think they have to get harder. This is where the bully in the workplace starts and that kind of leadership.

In reality, what I found, both in the Marine Corps and coming in the FBI, especially working like you said, counterintelligence where you know, I get up every day open, I don’t make a mistake and cause myself a humbling moment because every relationship is potentially you know, helping our national security protect our country, protect my community.

I don’t have the luxury of making mistakes. I mean, I’m extremely hyper critical of myself and all my conversation dialogues. I care passionately about not making a mistake and what I found is especially when you work in the world as I described to you.

There are no criminals, very few are criminals and even if someone is manipulated, good naturedly, by accident by someone trying to take advantage of them. They’re very unwitting that they’ve even done anything wrong. So, in my entire life and career, the last 20 years, I’ve never made an arrest in the area I’ve done.

I’ve only done things that you know, hopefully build relationship strong enough so we can garner the information we need to protect our country. When people don’t have to talk to you and you can’t rely on your title and position.

You better know what to do and that’s – the only thing I really found out too is that people do not care about your title and position whatsoever. I mean, being an FBI in New York City, knock on their front door and see what people think about you if you start showing a badge and everything.

Really comes down to your title and position but how you treat them. If you treat them and talk in terms of their priorities, you validate them, you validate their context, you don’t argue their point of view on things and you genuinely and this is the real key, you got to be genuine and sincere about your desire to understand them as a human being. Their motivations and priorities in life.

[0:13:37.5] MB: Before we get in too deep into that because I really want to go deep down that track. Tell me about, you mentioned the importance of kind of really honest, self-awareness and self-assessment.

[0:13:49.8] RD: Yeah. I was in Marine Corps, there was a 14th leadership principle I learned was “Know yourself and seek self-improvement.” One of my more humbling “Aha! Moments” in life was I remember I was stationed at Cherry Point.

I was in the air wing but on the ground side and so weren’t really bottom, we had a lot of junior officers and I think we had about 14 or 15 of my rank, the second lieutenant. I remember my first assessment, I was ranked last of them all.

I remember you know, walking up to my major that rated me and said, “Alright, I get it, I’m doing something wrong. What am I doing?” And all he could say was, “You just need to be a better leader.”

It was very subjective and so, I didn’t understand what that meant but it bothered me, I was like “Alright, I am doing something wrong.” And what I started discovering was, and everyone has this ,that what I thought I was projecting to the world was not what the rest of the world is seeing.

Taking an honest self-assessment is actually hearing the word people say about you and to you but really, ideally about you where you can be a fly on the wall and hear people’s honest impression of you. This is not a self-loathing or “Woe as me,” if you hear something you don’t like.

It’s an assessment of what people see when they see you. It’s funny, I often – anytime I bump into someone I knew 25 years ago, I usually give them a big hug and thank them for tolerating me 25 years ago in their lives.

The one thing that I’ve heard when I apologize for being a self-centered jerk years ago, they said, “No Robin, you were just intense.” When I hear something twice, I do an assessment of it and so I analyze what intense looked like to other people.

Intense look like just me being a good guy to me because very rarely do people get up in the morning and say, “Alright, today, I’m going to treat people really horribly and be a jerk.”

Ultimately, that happens sometimes, not because we want to but because there’s this incongruence again between what we feel and what almost get hijacked out of our mouth because of ego, vanity and insecurities.

I define that, I looked at that intentionally and actually saw what that meant. It’s a typical type A response and it’s, you know, “You have something you’re trying to achieve, a goal of some sort, a very tangible means goal…” I call them instead of an ends goal. Ends goals are states of mind and I’ll tell you more about that later maybe.

But a means goal is you know, “I want a promotion, I’m trying to do well on this project. I want to better salary, I want to move.” All those things are very specific and we become so focused on them that we totally disregard, not by intent, but by our genetic design that anyone else around us is doing anything.

We’ve gone wholly focused on what we’re trying to do and again, we’re not regarding really people around us that are actually might be working on other things, that you’re not making yourself available to. Or pretty much ignoring. And you combine that with a tempo that is out of sync with the others around you because again, you have that higher tempo of activity.

It really becomes off-putting to other people. It looks like a narcissistic maniac jerk. Was that in the heart and soul of the individual, the type A? No, they are totally clueless about this until you actually have those “Aha! Moments,” and listen to the people around you. Take feedback and ask yourself, “Is that the behavior I want to be exhibiting or not?”

If it’s not, what can I add to myself to have that behavior stop being that way. Again, especially when you’re working in areas and fields where whether you’re in sales and doing cold calls or, or people who are already dealing with individuals and companies that give them products and services. So why should they want to go with you, why should they even listen to you?

You come across with that kind of intensity, people are just going to shut down. Because you’re not really regarding them, you’re more focused on what you’re trying to do, rather than being a resource for all those to reach prosperity.

That was probably the first time where I had the, I’ve had multiple – you know, I think everyone does, you know, multiple moments in your life where you create yourself a humbling moment. You know, every day I wake up and I hope I don’t cause another one that day.

I haven’t had one in a while and it’s important to get that ego and vanity in check because when you don’t, the mouth will run up and away and you become self-centered and unfocused and there’s no reason why anyone, any individual should want to listen to you, if you’re not talking in terms of what’s important to them.

[0:17:55.4] MB: I think that segways into one of the other really important things that you mentioned and you write and talk a lot about; which is all of these strategies and influences that – sorry, not influence because we talked about this before the show. But all of these strategies have a root in not focusing on yourself and focusing really deeply on the other person. Can you tell me about the importance of that?

[0:18:18.1] RD: You know, the influence. Influence is important to understand how to influence and what influence is but what I found is, this is part of where all these things came from, focusing on others. Influence still has a connotation in my mind when I use the word.

Again, this is purely me, there is no right or wrong, it’s just definitions. It’s not a connotation of influencing another individual to do something that’s in my mind. When you understand, you know, how that works and what’s going on there and you want to be more effective at influence, what happens is, you start realizing that “Wow, I just need to move beyond influence because I need to focus on other people in what their priorities are and the resources for them,” because then what you do is you start moving into a realm of inspiration.

When you’re in the realm of inspiration, it’s completely about the other person. So here’s how this process works and why it’s important. Individuals you know, you go back to ancient tribal man where tribes of 30, 40 or 50. It was the first form of social welfare, healthcare and survival, if you were not part of the tribe, the likelihood of your genetic coding being passed on was extremely low.

Our brain rewards us for being valued and part of a collective and a group and a tribe and so, if we use language that demonstrates value and demonstrates that we are vested in you and your prosperity, however the individual defines prosperity, they are naturally going to keep listening to you and keep regarding you and want to collaborate. Because it’s in their best nature, because it’s in their best interest to do so.

You know, anytime I have a project or something, again, this isn’t, you know, you can make it all about someone else and many people in life do but they then get accused of being a carpet and being walked over. That’s where The Code Of Trust comes in and make sure that doesn’t happen and in the sense that the first step in The Code Of Trust is, understanding what your goals and priorities are, what it is you’re trying to accomplish?

The second part of that first question of what your goal is, is reversing it now and think in terms of, “Why should someone want to?” Here’s the difference between that influencing and manipulating or anything like that, people then start thinking, “How can I make them want to do that or how can I influence them to do that?”

But The Code Of Trust is what I’m talking about in order to make it about the other person is, I don’t think about that at all, I start reversing. I think in terms of, “How can I inspire them to want to?” That’s the key. If I’m thinking in terms of inspiring someone to take action – because I know what my goals are. I give myself my own new car effect by naming and stating the things I’m hoping to achieve. Now I completely let go of those because I reverse it, just like you don’t have to try to see the car once you bought it.

You just see it. That’s why giving labels and meanings to things that are important to you, that’s all you have to do. You don’t have to try to make an effort because if you make an effort on your own behalf, you’re now manipulating or influencing anything because it’s all about you and you’re only slightly regarding the other person.

I let go of it, it’s got label and meaning, now you reverse it, I think in terms of, “How can I inspire someone to maybe align with me?” In order to inspire someone, I have to know what their priorities are, long term, short term, personal, professional. 

I have to talk in terms of those priorities. I have to demonstrate their value and I demonstrate value by four really simple statements, I always include in conversations, emails, I’m going to seek thoughts and opinions because when I demonstrate that I’m seeking your thoughts and opinions, I’m demonstrating you have value.

Human beings do not ask other human beings what they think unless there’s – they have value. When you do that, people’s brains are rewarded with dopamine because you’re demonstrating their affiliation when they’re affiliated, that means it’s good for their survival, dopamine’s released in the brain, oxytocin, catenin, all the pleasure centers are far in because you’re demonstrating value and you’re demonstrating affiliation. 

Next, I’m also going to talk in terms of their priorities. If I don’t know what their priorities are, I’m going to ask them what are their priorities. Next, I’m going to validate them and validation, it’s a beautiful, very broad term that demonstrates that you’re trying to understand without judgment the human being you’re engaging with.

It doesn’t mean you necessarily agree, because this isn’t about agreeing with them, just play cadence, it’s about validation. It means understanding. And finally I empower you with choice. Again, we do not give people choice unless we value them and there’s affiliation.

Now, here’s the fun part. If I know what your priorities are and I make myself an available resource to your priorities and your prosperity and I already know what mine are because I’ve already labeled them before I’ve engaged.

When I empower someone with choice, I’m empowering them a choice with naturally overlapping priorities, mine and theirs. Then it’s up to them whether they accept it or not and if they don’t, that’s fine too.

Because it’s all about them, their timing, their perspective and here’s what I can guarantee, I can absolutely guarantee you if I know exactly what your priorities are, as I said, again, long term, short term, personal, professional and I’m making resources available for you, your success and prosperity in those areas.

I guarantee you’re going to take that action. There hasn’t been a time yet when it hasn’t. Now, what happens is, most time triggers is the need to reciprocate by other individuals that you’re a resource for their prosperity. You can’t keep a scorecard, one of my things I love to say is “Leaders don’t keep score cards,” because then there’s an expectation on process and then you really did it for you and not them.

I don’t keep a scorecard, I give, I let go and I just wait and it’s really been pretty ridiculous when you honor the core of the code which is that healthy professional or happy relationship and you’re an open, honest communications, everything falls into place. It just – it flows very easily and the more you create these healthy relationships with more and more people.

They actually have – it’s also very common effect on your own mind because you can’t really engage people successfully if you’re emotionally hijacked all the time. You know, stress, anger, discontentment, resentment, frustration, all those things cloud our judgment. The code of trust clears the cloud and you can actually objectively see exactly path to where you're trying to go. More importantly, where others are trying to go.

[0:24:02.0] MB: One of the things you touched on, again, there’s so many things I want to get into from that, but one of the things you touched on was this idea that in the counterintelligence world, in many cases, people either don’t want to reach out to you or explicitly are trying to avoid contacting you.

You have to almost reverse engineer them wanting to reach out to you. Can you talk about that strategy and more broadly, about the strategy of getting someone’s brain to reward them for engaging with you?

[0:24:32.0] RD: I’ll start with your last question first because it will be easier to answer the first and if I lose track of it because as you can tell man, I can talk forever about this. I get sidetracked in my own brain on it, so I apologize if I do.

The goal for me at every engagement with everyone, is to get their brain to reward them chemically for engaging with you and we’ve already covered how that works, you know?

If you demonstrate value and you demonstrate affiliation and you understand someone’s priorities and you talk in terms of their priorities and even more importantly, if you have resources for them to move forward on those priorities and their own prosperities they define, their brain’s going to reward them, guaranteed.

I guarantee you, shields will be down, there will be no resistance and there will be a great dialogue in conversation. Where it goes from there is really up to them and their tempo. It’s a very simple concept that I just keep my mind is that you know, what does every human being I’m engaging with, what do they need, want and dream of.

Just make sure that I’m talking in terms of those things. Honesty is really the key of this too because if you’re making stuff up, do people pick up on that, absolutely. You know, that’s where you start to get that incongruence of you know, the mind and the heart and the mouth of what’s going on.

When I do validation, I only start out conversations, especially if they’re going to be a little more challenging than others or it’s a brand new person I’m meeting. I always start out with a specific, non-judgmental validation of a strength attribute or action that I’ve witnessed in their life.

Or in that immediate time or anything. If I have nothing to validate in that opening statement, the biggest thing I’m going to do is I’m going to validate their time because people’s time is very valuable and to have them share it with me, I am beyond grateful for it. So if I have nothing that I can validate at the start, I’m going to validate the time because again, I’m just very grateful for it.

Now, translating that into you know, working in counterintelligence, to me it’s really working anywhere that sometimes you’re going to deal with people on that might not want to have a relationship with you. That’s completely okay. Matter of fact, one of the most challenging…

You know, every now and then, you hit this situations where you got to cold call to try to get a piece of information or just a question and answer on something and people do not want to engage with you.

The first thing I do in those situations is I validate that “Yeah, I can honestly, I understand how you don’t want to deal with someone like me from the United States government. I completely understand.”

“If you want me to leave you alone, if you just respond to this and tell me to leave you alone, I’ll do it but if not, if you can provide this and here’s reason why I’d like that, it might be of a help to others, is that something that interest you? Let me know.”

“Again, just respond to me if you don’t want me to engage you and I’ll leave you alone.” That way, at least get a response and what did I just do? I talked in terms of them, their priorities because what’s their priority? “Leave me alone.”

Again, I don’t judge. I can’t judge whether that priority is aligned with yours or not, who cares, it’s all about them. Those are the ones that are resistant but in all honesty, the times that happens are exceptionally rare.

Because again, if you’re talking in terms and figuring out what someone’s needs, wants, dreams and aspirations are in their personal, professional. And you’re talking in terms of those, you seek and understand those, you’re validating those and you bring to bear resources to further those for them. Why wouldn’t they talk to you?

The only reason they wouldn’t is either they lied about their priorities, their subterfuge or some other thing that they didn’t make you aware of. Again, it’s not what you did or didn’t do, it’s all on them. It’s not going to be a very good relationship anyway because they don’t want one, so why force it? You know you can save a lot of time and just break contact. Then even in those instances you’ve got to leave them feeling better for having that with you and having engaged with you, those brain rewards and why? Branding is everything. You know I have no problem if someone tells me they don’t want to talk or they don’t want to share. 

They don’t want to cooperate because you know what? It’s not you, it will be someone else and I will never get anyone else if you break contact with me and I ruined your day. I mean just think about this, say you met me and we had a conversation at 09:00 or 10:00 in the morning and it went horrible. I tried to convince you of things, I could try to cajole you, try to manipulate you and you just walked away feeling horrendous. 

Whether we even talked about me or not for the rest of the day it put you in a bad mood. Now everyone you touch, in your entire sphere of influence that entire day, or even a couple of days, maybe a week, maybe a month who knows? They’re touching you and seeing stress, anxiety all the negative emotions you caused and it leaks out where it came from. It came from this engagement with this Robin guy. Now contrary to that, if I leave you feeling better for having met me and I made you feel great for the conversation. 

Your brain is rewarding you, I demonstrated your value. I am talking in terms of your parties, even if you say no you don’t want to cooperate or have a relationship or if you’re in sales and buy what you are selling. If you are completely fine with that and you let it go now for the rest of the day, weeks and months again, someone is leaving the engagement with you with a very positive emotion in a great state of mind and people like to feel that way. 

And so they are going to start seeing that. So in other words, you caused the common effect here. It is going to cause a common effect on the entire sphere of influence and again, that goes to branding. So I never think ever about just the one person I’m engaging with. I think about the entire sphere of influence from that point on. I always want good branding and again, if someone doesn’t want to engage that’s fine. It’s fine because when you empower people with choice with walking away and not dealing with you. 

You know how many times I’ve actually had someone walk away and not want to deal with me? Zero so far since The Code Of Trust and why? Because I keep talking in terms of them. Think about this, on average think to yourself how many times a day do you hear words in every single statement that someone says they are completely about you? Meaning is someone asking your thoughts and opinions? Is someone talking in terms of your priorities? 

Is someone empowering you with choice? Is someone validating your thoughts, ideas and context on how you see the world in every single statement you say? No, on average I think even our closest friends and family maybe do it 2% to 5% a day. You know when you actually do that 100% of the time when you’re engaging with someone. So every statement that comes out of your mouth, your brain, is rewarding them for you for being around you. Why wouldn’t they want to be around you? 

[0:30:41.8] MB: And so what are the core principles of aspiring people, is the idea that you just talked about which is essentially this notion that if you focus really deeply on other people making your statements about them, speaking in terms of their priorities, seeking out their thoughts and opinions. In a very biological sense their brain is releasing hormones and chemicals that are making them like you, want to engage with you and want to be part of what you’re doing. 

[0:31:06.7] RD: 100% and again it goes to evolutionary psychology. You know the ancient tribal brain it’s rooted in us. The best analogy I can give without going into I think it was April around 2012 at Harvard, did the study where they actually wired up people’s brains and saw that when people are talking about themselves and their priorities dopamine was released. But the easiest demonstration you can do with this is, I always ask this question with a crowd that I am engaging with and training. 

I always ask how many of you have actually travelled overseas for pleasure. A lot of hands go up, I say, “Great. What happens when you bump into another American?” And without fail everyone starts smiling and laughing and yeah because what you initially do is you ask where are you from and if they’re from anywhere even near your state, you start collaborating and thinking about things that you’ve been doing in the same areas. You start thinking about places you might have travelled in the same time frame. 

Then you actually start talking about do you know so and so, you keep trying to build linkages because your brain is saying, “Ah someone from my tribe and it brings comfort.” So we keep trying to build that comfort. That’s why when you go to a new place and you’ve taken training or you’ve given a conference or even in a crowd, we generally coalesce into our mini-tribes. When I give training to law enforcement or something, all the different apartments they sit together. 

You don’t have to tell people where to sit. People clump together according to their comfort and their tribe. It is just a naturally human reaction and so knowing that, you can actually use your language to demonstrate that affiliation and that’s what people do all the time. I mean every one time someone shares a story or an anecdote, which is most of life when engaging, all you’re doing is demonstrating value and demonstrating affiliation. 

And people are just so anxious to tell their side of the story, to tell the thing that they did on the weekend because they are seeking that validation and acceptance as well. They’re not even listening to anyone else. They are just waiting for people to shut up, so they can tell their story again because their brain is saying, “Go-go-go!”

[0:33:00.1] MB: We talk all the time on the show about how important it is to master new skills and abilities and that’s why I am so excited to tell you about our sponsor for this episode, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, in business and much more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography and they offer unlimited access for a single low monthly price, so you don’t have to pay per class. 

There’s some really cool courses on Skillshare. They have an absolutely awesome course on Evernote mastery. You know how much I love Evernote. It basically runs my entire life. They also have a really, really cool course on productivity planning. They have a number of those actually and a course that piqued my interest when I was looking at it today, that looks absolutely awesome which is a course on how to create awesome mind maps. 

If you don’t know what mind maps are, they’re so cool. It’s an amazing tool for note taking and remembering and summarizing things that speaks directly to your mind. It is an absolutely fascinating strategy and I use mind maps to record or keep notes on things like book ideas or summarizing or even brain storming. Skillshare is giving my listeners this month a month of unlimited access. So you can get Skillshare completely for free for one month. 

All you have to do is to go to Skillshare.com/success to redeem a free month of classes. I would highly recommend checking that out. If mind mapping sounds cool, go check out the mind mapping class. You can get all these courses for free for a month. So if you are looking to add some new skills, if you want to pick up some productivity tips or even get into something like drawing, definitely check out Skillshare. 

[0:34:45.8] MB: You also mentioned that you never lie to anybody. It’s funny because a previous guest, you may be familiar with this, a gentleman names Chris Voss. 

[0:34:53.1] RD: I know Chris Voss, yeah. 

[0:34:54.7] MB: Yeah, he’s a hostage negotiator for the FBI for a long time and he had the same principle. His was a little bit different, which is never lie to anyone that you’re not going to kill. But I find it fascinating that someone who we encountered, tells us that as a recruited spy essentially, you never lie to anyone. 

[0:35:13.2] RD: Yes, now I don’t ever lie. So let me first describe, I define manipulation because understanding manipulation first – because I think people can agree if someone is discovered to have been attempting to manipulate you, it destroys trust, does it not? Yeah it does and so identifying what manipulation is, manipulation is attempt of control with use to sub-diffuse, lies and deception because some people do need to control certain situations. 

But if you do so openly and honestly explaining why, if you do have time, but if you have trust established that’s no problem. But it is the use of deception that really can blow trust because as soon as it’s discovered you will never have it again and I have done a lot of undercover work especially when I was in New York. Undercover work is lying. I remember thinking to myself at the time, “Oh these are genuine relationships, these are real and true,” and to me they were. 

But they were based on a lie and as soon as they were discovered, there was no trust. It never would have been again. So all the things that come to believe and I live now with The Code Of Trust, it’s an evolution that I have to do those types of things in the past, sure because it will help me understand the cause and effect of – if you actually are using deception anyway. You can have very short term gains if you need to and again, I am not judging the right or wrong on any of these things because there isn’t. 

It is just a very, very causal effect in every single action. I can guarantee you if you’d lie and use manipulation, when discovered and it will be at some point whether it’s today, tomorrow or when you die. When it’s discovered, trust will be extinguished and the likelihood and improbability of ever coming back is slim to none. So that’s why I just don’t do it. It’s just a complete waste of your time because you know, Chris is so funny. He is such a good guy. 

He’s got such mad skills doesn’t he? Another guy Robert Cialdini wrote a book Influence and one of the principles in his, that is so sound and so easy to follow, as well as The Code Of Trust is you’ve got to answer three things on the first engagement with anyone. Is who you are, what you want and when you’re leaving. If you are using deception or any of those things, you have no trust and it’s just I also remember sitting on consults as well when we’re talking with case agents trying to come up with strategies for them to engage people. 

I remember, it’s great to come up with these great outlandish undercover operations and using all these different resources but in reality working and whether you were in a company or government or anywhere. The number of resources that you have allocated to are generally pretty slim. So as simple and easy as you can make it for another person to an act, a strategy for developing a relationship and trust the better. So that’s why, I am straight up honest with you from the get go. 

And if I can’t tell you something, I’ll tell you exactly why I can’t tell you. Again, open and honest because anything else will just backfire on you. Whether it’s there tomorrow. And then it’s branding. You lied and deceived someone, you try to convince, cajole and manipulate in anyway, once that’s found out what does that do your branding? You’re done. 

[0:38:07.7] MB: I think you made a really, really good point which is that you are not judging whether these strategies are right or wrong. It’s only a question of what are most effective strategies and these happen to be some of the most effective ways to change or impact people’s behavior. 

[0:38:23.7] RD: Because one of the core principles of The Code Of Trust is to not judge, be non-judgmental because as soon as I start judging someone else’s behavior of the things they do, what goes up? Shields, they don’t want to engage and they start judging me because they think they are not affiliating or valuing their tribe and their input or anything like that. And that is counterproductive to The Code Of Trust. So it’s just understanding the cause and effect of how you’re going to engage with a human being. 

Because again, I keep going back to what does every human being on the face of this planet –as long as you follow in the normal patterns of human behavior, you don’t have too many malformations or the brain chemical imbalances, and you start edging up towards the fringes –every human being seeks and craves non-judgmental validation and acceptance for who they are. Their thoughts and opinions, ideas in how they see the world. 

If you don’t demonstrate that through your language their shields are going to be partially up. If you don’t demonstrate that at all, their shields are going to be completely up. They are not going to hear any word you are saying. If you dishonor their priorities, if you use deception, I guarantee you are going to blow trust and there isn’t any instance in life even driving down a highway where you’re trusting the other person in the opposite direction isn’t going to hit you. 

Everything in life, where you’re dealing with another human being, you have to have some sentiment of trust. So why not maximize it the best you can for every situation because it costs you nothing to do. I mean talk in terms of someone else’s priorities, not arguing their context with them, not judging them, what does that actually cost you? It cost you nothing. So why not do that? One of the questions I love asking law enforcement when I do this training, I always start out with law first. 

“Alright, how many of you in the audience are every gotten a criminal to confess,” and all the hands go up. I say, “Great, why do they confess to you? Is it because you sat across that table and judged what they did?” All heads start shaking no and I say, “Yeah that’s right and what did you do? You actually sat there? You help them rationalize what they did? You don’t project the blame if you can? You help them minimize the impact of what they did and then you talk in terms of priorities and options.” 

“And you talked in terms of what their choices were and you made yourself you were the available resource for them to be able to facilitate those options and priorities and so you didn’t judge.” So all the heads are nodding they say, “Yeah that’s what I was doing.” I say, “Alright so why do we do anything else with anyone else in our lives?” It really is that simple. If you just know how to make it about everyone else, again with those four statements that I build in. 

Carry everything I say as right, why not? It caused nothing to make it about other people and it’s really the simplest thing in the world. The last thing I would say about this is people ask me all the time, “So Robin if your dopamine is released,” again I have mentioned this before, roughly 40% of every day we spend talking about our own thoughts, ideas and priorities. They find out through that same research about the dopamine flow.  

If you take your 40% and give it over to someone else, you are now doubling the potential for developing a relationship and trust and someone once asked me, “Well Robin if you take your 40% and give it over, when do you get your dopamine hit?” I say, “That’s really easy, what happens when you achieve goals?” And they say, “Yeah, dopamine hit.” I said, “What if your goal is to be an available resource at the prosperity of others?”

That’s where leadership – well they always say “Leaders make it about everyone else.” The very subjective thing to say unless you actually understand the steps to it, this is the steps to it. When you make it about everyone else and you’re an unavailable resource to their prosperity and again, don’t keep the score card. And you understand where your destination is as well, you sense that that ties them to your priorities. If they eventually want to reciprocate or not, it’s up to them, that’s what exactly happens. 

[0:41:54.7] MB: So tell me a little bit about – you talked about non-judgmental awareness or non-judgmental validation. Tell me how can we cultivate that ability to be non-judgmental? 

[0:42:06.9] RD: It’s hard, someone laughed at me once. They said, “Robin only you could write a book you know?” My first one, 10 Techniques To Equip Rapport and the next one the Code Of Trust. I say, “Why is that?” He said, “Because you are only one who could actually articulate how not to be you.” Because I started out life, especially at the naval canvass, as extremely judgmental. We’re taught at a very young age to judge everyone, you know our parents and rightly so. 

You know our parents get us to be safe in life the first nine to 10 years of our lives, by teaching us morals, ethics and our moral code and our compass, personal compasses according to them and according to how they judge the world around you and everyone’s got a different one. The hard thing is to get beyond that. I mean it was forced on me because it worked. Every time something happens in the world and I am told to go out and interview a bunch of people from that country. 

That region that belief system. If I go in pre-judging what I think of them and their point of view and their beliefs or anything else what’s the likelihood I can inspire them to want to share information? They won’t, I guarantee you they won’t and so my saying I use, “I will never take a side because once you take a side half the world is going to line up against you and that goes against The Code Of Trust.” The thing I do because it was a learned trait was to not judge but to seek to understand. And that is what validation is. 

So everyone in this world has a very firm belief in things they believe in and there is a reason they do. Find out that reason because most of the time when you start digging deep, without judging, how they came across about feeling the way they feel, what you start getting is context and when you get context of how the other people sees the world through their optic – that’s when tolerance starts rising incredibly. So you start understanding different points of view. 

Different visions of the way they think things should be and again, what are you doing when you are doing that? You are validating, what’s validating? You are demonstrating the value and you’re demonstrating the affiliation and again it has nothing to do with agreeing with someone. People aren’t necessarily looking to be agreed with. They are looking to be heard and when you are doing these things what are you doing? You are hearing their point of view without challenging it in any way. 

[0:44:12.2] MB: And I think it goes hand and hand with this, but another one of the core principles that you write about and we talked about earlier in the conversation, is suspending your ego. As someone as you self-describe as somebody that’s very type A – hard charging, how are you able to suspend your ego put it on the back burner to be able to implement some of these strategies?

[0:44:34.2] RD: A few things. I got – like I think many people get is you get sick of being angry. You get sick of being frustrated, you get sick of all the negative emotions and then when I sat back and analyzed, “Well what is causing this emotion, why am I feeling this way?” You start understanding it was actually you that caused that situations because what causes stressful confrontation with someone else? Easy you are arguing a point of view. Someone wants you to do something you don’t think you could do it that way. “I want to do it this way.”

Well what are you actually doing? If you let vanity get in your way because you think you are better than someone else, you think you are more important, you think your opinion matters more, what a bunch of hog wash. So when I decided that I no longer wanted to be frustrated with life, combined with the fact that I started learning that the more you are talking about yourself and what’s important to you, most people do not care whatsoever. 

So how was that working out for me? So you combine those two things together and you start realizing, “Wow, it was my ego and vanity. It was actually my hindrance all along not the people around me. It was completely a 100% me.” I called The Code Of Trust flawless because The Code Of Trust is completely flawless. Because when you honor those three things as I said open honest communication, having healthy relationships and being an available resource and prosperity of others – The Code Of Trust becomes flawless. 

The only thing that causes it to derail itself is when your ego and vanity getting away. So here’s a trapping of the code, you will have and I have had amazing successes because of living The Code Of Trust and what happens is all of a sudden you say, “Hey look, I got this stuff down now. I can wield the power of the code for my benefit.” Well what did you just do? Your ego and vanity got in the way and you start using it for self-gain and I guarantee you, the code will derail immediately. 

[0:46:25.6] MB: So what were you able to do to kind of coach your ego in check? 

[0:46:30.6] RD: So it’s a checklist. So one you understand what you do when you get emotionally stressed and whatever emotion it is, negative emotion you have – recognize it. As soon as – what’s happening is when you get stressed, fight or flight kicks in and you go into survival mode. When you do that’s when the mouth starts running without cognating on what’s coming out of it. We get defensive, we get insecure, whatever it is the mouth starts running and usually the statements coming out are very, very egocentric statements. 

Again which are not inspiring trust in anyone. So the way to overwrite that and not get into emotional high jacking, when you are hitting fight or flight is to immediate recognize when you’re getting emotionally high jacked, so understand what behaviors you do. For me, my assertiveness spikes when I get emotionally stressed and so as soon as I recognized it, I immediately go to The Code Of Trust. So what I do and I say to myself, then the core of the code is – happy healthy relationships, open house communication and available resource and prosperity of others. 

So I then ask myself as soon as I recognize the emotional high jacking is, “What I’m about to say and do and coming out of my mouth going to help or hinder those core principles of The Code Of Trust?” And if they are going to hinder it, I shut up and again, that’s my regulatory way of maintaining cognitive thought and maintaining the statements and everything I am doing completely about them. What happens is, like anything in life, you do something where you keep repeating behaviors. 

You build muscle memory for it. It just doesn’t happen anymore because I become so sensitive to negative emotions. I rapidly won’t do them and identify the cause of point of it and I eliminate it. Another reason why I do it and why ego is such an underminer of The Code, especially with leadership, is leaders are about everyone else and one of the things that leaders do is they are very empathetic. Great leaders are very empathetic and The Code Of Trust is very empathetic. 

All the ways we’ve talked about interacting with another human being, is all about the other person which creates empathy. But if you get emotionally attached to other people’s decisions, you start riding the rollercoaster with them and leaders don’t. Leaders maintain objectivity and that’s what this little technique, I just told you does. When I can recognize emotional high jacking, it allows me to pull back and go back to The Code. 

And when I pull back and go back to The Code, it allows me to maintain objectivity so I can see and be compassionate about the destination you are trying to go to but I am being objective about the questions I can ask you to help you discover your path. Because that’s another thing that’s really key in the code too, is I don’t get to give advice or guidance ever. I ask a lot of what I call discovery questions. Discovery questions are questions that naturally come to mind when you know someone’s destination; where they’re trying to go to and your objective about it. 

I just ask questions simple, like I ask myself. “How is the action you’re going to take help or hinder where you are trying to go?” So it helps yourself and it helps others to maintain that objectivity because you have an ability, because of this technique, to keep yourself from getting emotionally high jacked and suspending your ego. 

[0:49:37.6] MB: And just so listeners can get a sense one more time, would you share briefly the core principles of The Code Of Trust? 

[0:49:44.8] RD: Sure I articulate them in different ways. I am going to give the five principles of trust and then I am going to tell you if you have a second, the three things I honor. The five principles is very easy: are suspend your ego and we talked about that. The second is be non-judgmental and we talked about that. Three is honoring reason and honoring reason is basically how you keep from your ego getting involved in things and being objective, that’s what that is. 

Validation of others and we talked about that and finally five is being generous and that’s where you are making yourself an available resource of the prosperity of others, without keeping a score card. Those are the five principles of trust and how to make it about someone else. But the core of The Code that I live and honor are those three things: Happy healthy relationships. I do and say everything that’s congruent with those. 

Open honest communication, is the honesty factor, and the third is available resource for the prosperity of others. Those are the three things I honor above all and if something gets in the way of it, a material thing in some way or anything else, I will never ever ruin a relationship over a thing with anyone. I will always let go of the thing and honor the relationship first. 

[0:50:52.8] MB: What would be a piece of homework or starting point you would give to somebody listening that wants to concretely implement some of these ideas? 

[0:51:01.4] RD: Great question. There’s two things I think will keep people on the path they are if they’re doing things really well in their lives and they can reflect on why their relationships going well and then think about the times when you’ve had some challenging ones and this is very simple. The first thing I like to do is I love discovering the greatness in others. In other words don’t focus your time on trying to figure out people are doing wrong and commenting on it and gossiping about it. 

Just focus on their greatness. Every human being has greatness somewhere from their perspective, whether it’s work related or person related, find their greatness. Take time to discover it. And the second thing I would do is practice this with everyone and I guarantee you, relationships are going to start blooming with much greater trust. Find out what other people’s priorities are in their lives. Their challenges, their needs, wants, dreams and aspirations. 

If you take time and do this without judging them either, take time to figure out what someone else’s priorities are. I am telling you, who doesn’t want to talk to someone who isn’t actually interested in the things that they are important to them? You do those two things and I guarantee you, you’re going to start inspiring trust around you. 

[0:52:03.9] MB: And where can listeners find you and the books online? 

[0:52:07.3] RD: My first book, It’s Not All About Me is on Amazon and a few other places. The one coming out, The Code Of Trust will absolutely be everywhere but you can get links to them as well as my Twitter feed as well as LinkedIn. My website which is www.peopleformula.com and my Twitter handles @rdreeke. Things I post, I don’t self-grandiose on these things. If I see great research and great ideas by others, those things I do. 

I am not the guy who is going to wear you out with overwhelming amount of tweets or anything. Just a couple of them that are inspiring as life comes along but also I’d take any questions that anyone wants as well. That’s it. 

[0:52:50.2] MB: Well Robin thank you so much for coming on here and sharing all of these wisdom. You have a fascinating background and story and I think it’s amazing what lessons have come out of your vast experience. 

[0:53:01.6] RD: No, I can’t thank you enough. You have some really great deep questions and I thank for the time because yeah, it’s compiling an entire lifetime of learning into a couple of minutes is not all of that easy but you did a great job of getting it out of me. So I appreciate that and I appreciate you sharing with your listeners as well. 

[0:53:18.4] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners master evidence based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the home page. First, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand called How To Organize And Remember Everything, which you can get completely for free along with another awesome bonus guide that’s a surprise by joining the email list. 

Next, you’re going to get an exclusive curated weekly email from us called Mindset Monday. This includes articles, TED Talk, videos things that are top of mind for us that we find really exciting in the world of evidence based growth. Lastly, you are going to get a chance to vote on and shape the show, impact our guests, change our intro music and much more. The new intro we recently rolled out was voted on by listeners who are on our email list. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. Every single review, every single subscription, makes a huge impact on the iTunes algorithm and we would appreciate every single one that you give us. 

Now don’t forget, of you want to get all the incredible information on this episode, links, transcripts, everything we discussed and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get them at successpodcast.com by hitting the show notes button at the top. Thanks again and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

Do You Have To Be Ruthless To Succeed? The Truth About Survival Of The Fittest with Dr. Chris Kukk

In this episode, we ask "do you have to be ruthless to succeed?”, we examine how compassion is powerfully linked with success, we discuss the essential task of challenging your own world view and seeking evidence you disagree with, learn how to ask great questions, and much more with Dr. Chris Kukk. 

Dr. Chris Kukk is a former counter intelligence agent, now a professor of Political and Social Science at Western Connecticut State University. He is the founding Director of the Center for Compassion, Creativity, and Innovation. He is the author of the newly released book The Compassionate Achiever and has been featured on NPR, NBC, The Economist, and more

• Social and emotional learning and how Chris is using that to transform early childhood education

• How positivity and compassion can spread from the bottom up to change schools

• The neuroscience behind how compassion helps children learn more effectively

• Why cultivating personal awareness is the first step to mastery

• With meditation you catch more than you miss, without it, you miss more than you catch

• What did Charles Darwin have to say about how compassion impacts the “survival of the fittest”

• How a focus on helping one another moves society forward

• Why the conception of compassion as “soft” or “weak” is completely wrong

• How compassion is powerfully linked with success

• Mother Theresa’s “Ripple of Kindness”

• Do you have to be ruthless in order to succeed?

• Compassion enables you to have sustained success

• Lessons from Enron

• What psychology and neuroscience studies show about extrinsic focus vs intrinsic focus on your achievement

• How Utah has saved money by pursuing a policy of compassion in solving homelessness

• The “4 step program” for cultivating compassion that you can start implementing right now

• The power of “LUCA”

• The power of listening to learn instead of listening to reply

• The definition of compassion - understanding and taking action

• How we can “understand to know” and build a deeper mosaic of understanding to find common solutions to our problems

• Connecting to capabilities, reaching beyond yourself to help people with the human potential hidden in plain sight

• The essential task of challenging your own world view and seeking disconfirming evidence

• All feedback makes you stronger, ideology fears the truth, wisdom seeks it

• The buddhist concept of “fierce compassion”

• Remember, water cuts through rock over time

• What are “knownaughts” and “noxxers”?

• The power of connection to make your success limitless

• How do we ask great questions (and why its so important to do that)?

• The great question is like the lens of a camera, the aperture shapes what you see on the other side

• The words that you use frame the way you see a problem

• How silence can open up doorways for deeper understanding

• Lessons from counter intelligence interrogations about how we can become better listeners

• The power of "nondoing"

• Practical steps you can implement right now to begin walking the path of compassion

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] The Compassionate Achiever: How Helping Others Fuels Success by Christopher L. Kukk

• [Personal Site] Chris Kukk

• [Book] The Moral Molecule: How Trust Works by Paul J. Zak

• [Twitter] Chris Kukk

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success with your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.9] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet, with now more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

In this episode we ask; do you have to be worthless to succeed? We examine how compassion is powerfully linked with success. We discussed the essential task of challenging your own worldview and seeking evidence that you disagree with. We learn how to ask great questions and much more, with Dr. Chris Kukk. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. The first; we send out a curated weekly email every single week to our listeners called Mindset Monday. Listeners have been loving this email. We get tons of great feedback. It’s short simple and has some really interesting stuff that we've been digging for the last week. 

Second; you get the chance to shape the show. You can vote on guests. You can help us change parts of the show. For example, the new intro that we rolled out last week was voted on by listeners like you, so make sure you get on the list if you want to have a chance to impact and change the direction of the show. We reach out all the time and ask for your feedback and ideas. 

Lastly, and most importantly, you get an awesome free guide if you join our email list and it's something we created based on listener demand. It's our most popular free guide and it’s called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another awesome bonus guide, which is secret, but when you sign up you'll find out what it is and I know you’re going to like it, by joining the email list. 

Once again, you can go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage, or if you're on your phone, you can text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. That's “smarter” to the number 44222. 

In our previous episode we discussed habit loops, how they form, what they are, and we looked at why you can't stop picking up your phone. We talked about the habits and routines that research shows are the most correlated with success. We looked at how to bake mental models into your brain and much more, with Charles Duhigg. If you want to break you phone addiction, listen to that episode. 

Now, for the interview. 

[0:02:36.9] MB: Today we have another amazing guest who has the honor of being the very first guest to do a return interview on the Science of Success, Dr. Chris Kukk. Chris is a former counterintelligence agent, now, a professor of political science at Western Connecticut State University. He's the founding director of the Center for Compassion Creativity and Innovation and he’s the author of the newly released book, The Compassionate Achiever. He’s been featured in NPR, NBC, The Economist and much more. 

Chris, welcome back to the Science of Success. 

[0:03:06.8] CK: Wow, Matt. Thanks for having me on again, and the first guest. It’s a true honor. I love your show. Thank you for having me back on.  

[0:03:13.1] MB: We’re very excited to have you back and to share some new wisdom. For listeners who haven't been following what you're up to lately, what have you been doing since we last chatted? 

[0:03:22.6] CK: Oh, man! Everything from working again in the Dalai Lama, back to campus for students and outreach to schools on social emotional learning. Just came back. Tough gig in Hawaii working with schools out there on getting kids to have their lessons, really, in math and science, woven with social and emotional learning, so that kids — This idea of looking out for others becomes kind of a natural habit, what they were born with. 

Babies are not looking to take someone else down, right? Everyone’s looking to cooperate, and we learn like Jean-Jacques Rousseau said, we learn kind of these bad habits through society of looking out for ourselves and not caring about others. It’s getting the kids — The kids, once they understand that looking out for others is part of being a human, part of being part of humanity. They literally flow right into it and they bring it home to their parents. We had talked with parents about what we’re doing in school and the parents are so excited about it. 

There’s this emphasis now, I think, back in the schools and parents were involved in schools of getting kids back into a community. Not focused on just testing. That's what we've been focused on in the last decade or more, is kids in testing. We should be talking about kids and being a part of communities, and that’s what we’re doing lately. 

[0:04:48.2] MB: Tell me more about that. What exactly is social and emotional learning? 

[0:04:52.8] CK: Social and emotional learning, the shorthand of it is really having self-awareness about yourself and how you feel about a certain situation and how your emotions, what your emotions are when they first come up about a certain situation. Then having awareness about other people’s perspective on their emotions and their feelings and then working with that together. Really, think about it — The way I think about it is I played lots of sports in high school and through college and it's about getting a team moving forward. You know when you're part of a community or part of a team, you can do more when everyone's working together. 

It’s even part of what I went through in the service as a counterintelligence agent. The best squads in counter-intel were the ones that even if the people didn't personally like one another, they just thought — I don’t know. Back in my day you were either a Dallas Cowboy fan or a Pittsburgh Steeler fan, and it’s getting those two teams and two fan bases together to work together. In the military, even if you didn’t like someone, you always had their back. You always help them through things, and it's getting that idea like, “Okay, kids nowadays. I guess just go Yankees, Red Sox. One is a Yankees fan, another is a Red Sox fan. They may not personally get along in terms of baseball, but when they're in a classroom, they’re looking out for each other and they’re looking to say someone’s down and giving them a high-five or checking in and see what's up with them. Is there anything they can do to help, and it’s building that community, that sense of trust, and we know that when it starts on the local level, on the very individual to individual level, it tends to spread. It becomes a contingent, just like negativity is a contingent. Positivity is a contagion as well, and if we can get kids to do it, also parents do it, and that’s what we’re finding out. It just spreads from, literally, from the bottom up, and now teachers are getting involved in it, because they're seeing these kids are in a classroom and it’s full of compassion. Their scores go up, and it may not be rocket science, but it’s definitely brain science, right? 

When you're in a compassionate environment, dopamine starts to flow. You get this reward chemical, and as neuroscience has shown, dopamine acts like a post-it note for memory. Kids are starting to memorize better. They’re starting to learn more and retain more. There’s this cool circle, this 360 degrees circle all starting with good compassion about learning and about succeeding. To me, that's just going to create a better world all the way around. 

[0:07:31.1] MB: I love how you started with the concept of personal awareness and how important that is. That, to me, a recurring theme that we see again and again on the show, which is being self-aware and figuring out, “What am I feeling emotionally? Where am I right now?” is really the first step to unlocking so much more. 

[0:07:52.1] CK: It is. I think we are in such — We’re in a time where everyone wants to move fast and we’re in a moment in history where we’re talking about globalization and global connections, but there is a paradox in there. We’re connecting globally, but we’re not connecting locally. We’re not connecting individually to each other. 

What I mean by that is that, yeah, we can contact friends or the mighty country of Estonia through Skype. It’s the country where Skype actually came from, was Estonia, and we can communicate with people out there. When we’re talking to each other, how many times do you see people taking out their cell phones and looking at their cell phones instead of looking eye to eye into someone else, right? We forgot the importance of looking into the windows of the soul, and that's another person's eyes, and you can read so much and learn so much from someone just by looking at them while you're talking. We’re in such a rush lately in terms of individuals that we’re missing each. We’re creating that kind of — You know when you’re on that train and the train is going by, the place is really fast. Everything is like a blur. That’s what we’re doing to each other. We’re creating blurs and we wonder why our society is weakening, civil society is kind of crumbling and I don't think it's complicated and maybe complex, but it’s not complicated. I think we just need to realize that the time we take with each other and with ourselves, you and I talked about this before, we both meditate, and when I meditate in the morning, I swear, everything for the rest of the day is everything — It’s like when you're hitting a baseball and you're on. Everything's in slow motion. You catch more than you miss. When I don't meditate, I miss more than I catch. I think we’ve been doing that with each other as well. 

[0:09:57.5] MB: You talked about, and I think some of these stems from your military work, from the work you’ve done in schools, the importance of looking out for each other and building trust. I know we touched on this briefly in our previous conversation as well, but tell me about how that interacts with people who think about the world from the framework of survival of the fittest and how — Are those ideas mutually supporting or are they opposed? 

[0:10:24.5] CK: Oh, man. That’s a great question, because first of, let’s clear up a misconception about survival of the fittest. When we normally talk about survival of the fittest, we think in Cliff Notes version of Charles Darwin on origin species. That’s where he hypothesized something like survival of the fittest, but he never coined the term survival of the fittest. It was a guy named Spencer that did. 

What you find out with survival of the fittest when you actually read Darwin and you go through The Dissent of Man, for example, which is later on after he's done a lot of his research, you find out that Darwin says that the species that will move up the evolutionary ladder most efficiently and the most effectively is the species has that has the highest number of its members, and this is his words, that are sympathetic to each other. Sympathy, Paul Ekman, has found out by going through a lot of the research as well, is that he means altruism. It means compassion. It means empathy and different passages of The Dissent of Man. 

He uses the synonym sympathy for those three other words, and when we think survival of the fittest, we think — It’s like the playground scenario. When kids play King of the Hill, they have to push down someone else in order to get on top. It's a zero-sum game. If one person wins, that means another person has to lose. That’s how kind of shorthand a survival of the fittest as a society, and that's not what Darwin was ever talking about. Darwin was talking about how people helping one another will actually move that species, that community along and move it forward. When you talk about economics, because people think when you talk about compassion, it’s supposed to be week. It’s supposed to be soft, and that’s so backwards. Just an example, water which is considered soft, can cut through rock, which is considered hard. If you have this image of being kind is soft and weak, you have already started losing ground in whatever you think you want to achieve. That's the one thing I want to kind of get across. 


Paul Zak shows in his work, and he calls himself a neuro-economist, and he writes some great stuff, the book called like The Moral Molecule. He shows that communities that have high levels of trust, and he takes it back to even measuring oxytocin in the blood, and compassion, when you think in a compassionate way, you actually increase oxytocin. Those communities that have a high level of oxytocin create that trust, and it’s a kind of — It feeds in on itself, trust and oxytocin, once you start to get it going. It builds up more and more. 

Those societies that have the greatest and committees that have the greatest levels of trust also have the strongest economies, because everyone can trust — The contracts are not written necessarily on paper. They’re written literally in blood through the oxytocin, and people can help each other move forward more efficiently and effectively when you have that trust. If you think you need a contract every single time you need to do something, you’re going to slow things down. You’re going to slow down because you need to do the bureaucratic paperwork that needs to be done to guarantee that you need to move forward. 

Mat, I remember when a handshake accounted for everything. Now, we have to have lawyers looking over many different things and people looking for the one eye that isn’t the auditor, the one tee that isn’t crossed. That's up to us to bring that handshake back to each other and to create that positivity and that level of trust, and that level of trust, the byproduct. It's not the purpose that you do it, but the byproduct is success. 

[0:14:40.8] MB: Tell me more about that. Tell me about the idea that compassion is not soft or weak, and specifically about the link between compassion and success. 

[0:14:53.4] CK: Oh, man! It’s so much. That’s what the books is about. The Compassion Achiever is literally about that link. It starts — Let me give an example of what I mean by that. First off, the compassion-trust angle, if you're part of a community, and all of us are, and you build — And it starts with one person. I call that a ripple effect, and other people have used ripple effect. Mother Teresa is called the Ripple of Kindness in moving forward and how that engulfs other people, it moves everyone forwarding and then creates the trust, which then creates that strength. 

It's more than that, because in the service, in high school sports, I was told you, “Kukk, you have to be ruthless in order to succeed.” I noticed that not just in sports, but in economics and in other fields that work jerks or people who really just focus about themselves, they may gain some success, and I’m not saying they’re not going to win certain battles. They will, and that's what happens, but their success in terms of the people who are selfish and self-interested exclusively will flameout. It's not sustainable success, because, Matt, we all fall. We all inevitably fail at sometimes. Even when we’re on a roll, there are things that don't work out. 

When we fall in you’ve been compassion you’ve been helping other people, what I find out is that a lot of the people around you won’t let you fall away to the ground, or if you do, they’re there to pick you up immediately not to stay down. We fail to give that, I think, enough credence and enough credit. We kind of — You think you have to achieve a certain level, and then you’ve done it and it’s over. I think true achievement includes the word sustainability. That you have to have sustained success, because anybody, any jerk can attain a certain level of success. 

I think the real achievers are the ones who sustain success across a long period. Just as an example, look at Enron. Enron was a company that was focused on — It’s exclusively its bottom line, so it drove electricity into the ground so it could drive its profits up. It was supposed to be the model. Great reporters and political economists, they were using Enron as an example of a successful company. Enron is no longer in existence, but you have businesses like Patagonia who are out in the community making their communities better, giving back to the communities who have a much, I would argue, greater level success, but also a more sustainable level of success. 

When you have that that idea of compassion moving forward as your main goal, it’s an intrinsic motive. We know through psychology studies, we know through neuroscience that if your focus is extrinsic, that means that you're looking for material gain. You're looking for monetary gain. You're looking for a promotion. It’s an extrinsic value. It’s something outside you that you may get it, but you’re not going to keep it for long. 

The intrinsic values, like patriotism, like compassion, as you move through life, and those are your values, those are your motivating — I call them motivating verbs. Then your byproduct is sustainable success, and it’s just —You can go through any field. We just did business, but over and over again you see that, and it’s not the superstars and the individual superstars who are NBA team, it’s the teams that usually win NBA championships. It’s from sports to businesses across the board where you think compassion doesn't matter. Academics, compassion matters, it matters for sustainable success. 

[0:19:09.6] MB: That’s such a great point, and something we've dug into previously on the shows specially when we had Dacher Keltner on here to talk about the science of power, and so much research validates this idea that people who achieve and maintain power are often people who are the most compassionate, the most emotionally intelligent. They’re not these sort of caricatures of ruthless leaders. Occasionally and recently, especially that can happen, but to have it truly be sustainable, it has to be driven from a place of compassion. 

[0:19:43.9] CK: Without a doubt. In Keltner’s work, in The Greater Good, they do some great studies there, and I cite some of their work actually in the book, in the Power of Paradox. I actually bought, haven’t read it yet, but I have it on my bookshelf to the red. 

Yeah, I think science shows it more and more, Matt, and I think your show also highlights in many different ways, in many different perspectives, that angle, and my book simply brings together a lot of those different angles and puts them into one perspective as the compassion achievers, if we all were compassionate achievers, I think we’d have a society that would be unstoppable in terms of success and achievement at all levels. I’m talking local, state, national level. We have some states moving forward on that, like solving homelessness. You turn on some cable TV stations and they characterized the homeless as being lazy, as being weak, as being non-caring, and it’s so not the case. 

Everything from family who went bankrupt because of medical issues, to individuals having mental issues that simply just need to have some type of help. You have states like Utah who are bringing the homeless down to a zero number, pretty close to a zero number as you can possibly get by actually building homes for the homeless so they have an address when they apply for a job. They can actually put an address down and then get a job. There’s this weird tough circle to get into that you can’t have a job unless you have an address and they can check on you when they do the interviews to send mail to, and homeless don't have that option. 

You have Utah making a big change and successfully. You're just focused on the extrinsic value, the bottom line. Utah has shown over the last 10 years now, it’s a little back over that now. Actually it’s been 12 years, that they’ve been saving $8,000 per person on that. The bottom line, they’ve been spending less on homeless by actually giving them a home to start with, and the Hawaii's now moving forward and allowing medical doctors to prescribe homes to the chronically homeless there in Hawaii. It’s a more compassionate angle rather than trying to sweep the homeless under the rug, trying to help the homeless, our fellow Americans the kind of move on up. Our fellow, in my case, fellow veterans who come back from war and have a hard time adjusting, to have compassion for them. These are our fellow citizens, and some cases, many cases, fellow warriors who went to battle this country instead of turning our backs or making pretend the problem doesn't exist. We are having states show that you can actually save money by being more compassionate to others. It’s just across the world and across categories, Matt. Being compassionate achieves levels of success that you didn’t think you can achieve before. 

[0:22:56.1] MB: I think that’s an incredible point. I love the idea of looking not just that personal development, but looking across public-policy business, all these different spheres. There's many different examples of how kindness cannot only be great for you, but also great for, as you said, sort of the bottom line. 

[0:23:14.6] CK: Yeah. The bottom line isn't just the money. I would also argue the bottom-line is our civil site, because a great democracy rests on the foundation of a strong civil society. When you weaken that, I don’t care if you’re the president, I don’t care if you’re a member of congress, I don’t care if you're a local citizen. Going to your town hall meeting, you all, we all have the ability to make our country, our town, our states stronger just by looking out for one another. When we start putting down one another for whatever reasons and not helping one another, we take down our own democracy. It’s by the people. It’s for the people, and it’s of the people. 

We lose sight of that, we will lose. What I would argue is the greatest democracy the world has ever seen, and it will not be because of one person, because we, the American people, didn't care enough about each other, we let each other down. About how we should either stand up for each other or are we going to stay silent when it comes to — When other people are pushed down or pushed away even. 

[0:24:32.7] MB: How do we cultivate compassion and build a more compassionate world? 

[0:24:40.4] CK: Wow! Okay. I think there's a lot of different ways that you can do this, and you and I talked about this before, Matt. We meditate. I do compassion meditation, but for some people, meditation happen to be their thing. I came up with a four-step program that anybody can do at any time. It’s not something that's outside of any kind of traditional realm or conventional realm that a society thinks it is. I am looking just to have practices that anyone can follow. For example, the first step is listen. 

Before we get into the steps, actually, I should say think of the name Luca, L-U-C-A. Luca in many different languages is a name that means bringer of light. It also stands for in science and various subjects in science, it stands for the last universal common ancestor, Luca. I argue that compassion is that kind of last universal common virtue value, or in my case, I believe it’s a verb. The last verb that we call can tie on to to achieve success. 

Luca, the first part of it stands for listening, listening to learn. The reason I think this is a big important first step. If someone asked me, “What can you do — What’s the first thing you should do to build more compassionate?” I’d say, “Listen,” because we don’t listen anymore. We seem to — If we do listen, we listen to reply. We don't listen to learn. We don’t listen to learn about someone's issues or problems. We don’t listen to the words they're saying. We tend to jump in and interrupt each other rather than getting the full lesson from hearing, taking the time to really listen, to give a focused attention to someone else. 

I think if we listen to learn, we can then acquire an understanding of not just the person's problem, but of the person's perspective, and that's where that social emotional learning comes back. It’s not only your own self-awareness, but it’s the awareness about how other people are feeling. If you don't listen, you're never going to get to that level of understanding, because compassion is defined really by kind of two aspects. Compassion is defined as this 360° kind of holistic understanding of a problem or suffering of another, and then the second aspect of it is then you take action. You have a commitment to do something, to help that person, to address the issue that they're going through. Listening is that first part. It’s about taking that — You’re trying to go for that understanding of another, and we don't do that anymore. 

Listening to learn, and then the second step is understanding to know, which is a key aspect of compassionate. You’re understanding what you need to know in order to help them. If you don't listen, I don’t know how you’re going to get to that understanding to know, and so you're trying to gather as many different pieces of information as you can. I see that as creating a mosaic of a problem. You’re putting together pieces as you’re listening and that image and a picture comes to mind of what the actual problem is on how the person is seeing it. The way I describe it is the way you're seeing it is through their eyes. You’re seeing the mosaic through their colors, their emotions, their feelings. 

Listening to learn, understanding to know, and then the third is C, connect to capabilities. Sometimes you have the ability to help someone to address their issue, and that other times you need to connect them to other people or other organizations. For example, I had a young man who was an Iraq, Afghan veteran who’s just having a time that I hope no one ever has to go through, where he was losing his wife, he was losing his daughter both to either a car accident or medical issues. He was trying to finish school and he couldn't. I knew I was his last — He came to me as this kind of a last cry for help just so someone would listen. I knew that his problems were bigger than what I could handle, so I had to get him to the counseling center. 

I had to connect him to someone who had the capabilities to truly help him. He trusted me enough so that I could walk him over there. Now he's graduated. His wife is fine. His child is fine. They were there for graduation. He has his own business. 

Those are the stories that we seem through daily life that gets swept away, but those are the stories and those are the people who make a difference in the world because they’ve been down, but then we all have that potential to connect people that are going through tough times to connect them to others that can really help them. Connect to capabilities. 

Finally, you’re acting to solve. You're actually taking the steps. You’re not just understanding, you’re not just listening, but you are making those connections if you need to make this connections. You're taking action to make that solution go away — I mean that solution to happen. Sorry. The problem to go away.

That’s basically the forceps, and I go over different ways that you can do that. For example, listening. Listening, I bring up podcasts, and bringing up podcast that actually challenge your notion and actually sitting through a podcast that maybe you disagree with, but listening to the whole argument, not shutting it off, not walking away. It’s simple things like that that we all can do in practice and buid our compassion muscle I call it. 

[0:30:51.7] MB: I want to dig into several of these, but before we do, the last point you made is something that I think is so relevant and has been very very top of mind for me, with the way that the internet has evolved and the way that our society has changed in the last 10 years, everyone lives in a bubble where all of the information that they get is curated to tell them what they want to hear and to make them feel how they want to feel. If you really want to understand reality, if you want to get down to the kernel of truth of what's actually happening, if you want to cultivate a deeper understanding of the world, you have to seek out disconfirming evidence. 

We were talking about Charles Darwin earlier. This is one of the core tenants and premises of all of Darwin's work, which is the idea that you have to seek information that challenges what your perception of the world is. You have to listen to people who disagree with you. You have to go and find information from all kinds of different sources and really try to uncover, “Okay. What's true? What's false? How much of this is spin?” I think it's so important to do that in our world today and too many people live in a silo where they’re here only ever comforted by their self-selected pool of information. I absolutely love that advice that we need to find things you disagree with and really challenge our own worldviews. 

[0:32:15.1] CK: Yeah. I think it even goes — Yes, without a doubt. I also think it goes further than that. I think that a lot of people — I know that you do this, Matt, because we've had offline discussion before too, that those challenging bits of information are not the Jenga pieces in your ideology or your philosophy. 

A matter of fact, they turn out to be quite often new structural beams in your philosophical house, if you will, right? This idea that — I start the book with Darwin, basically, that the critics, when I was first getting in public talks about compassion would always bring that up, and I decided, “You know what? I’m going to read all of Darwin. I’m just going to get all the books. I got them electronically, I got them in hard copy, and I’m just going to sit down and take notes and learn from the great master himself rather than reading interpretations of them. I think this is the other thing. 

We get news through an interpretative lens. It’s not our own lens, and I think we need to go back to the classics and we need to read the original documents from what they are. I would argue that with the constitution as well, not just science. Then, for me, Darwin has turned out to be a pillar of support for compassion. Not the Jenga piece in my house of compassion that I thought it was initially. My critics were spot on, and I learned so much from the people who gave me true criticism of it and it helped me to dive deeper into the science of it all and to really understand what Darwin meant by the fittest. He didn’t mean by someone pounding someone else down. He meant that they are fit for one another, but they fit together. It’s a totally different way of looking at it. 

If I didn't listen to the critics who gave some spot-on points, I don't think I would've taken as much time and gathered all the books that I could possibly get and sit down and go over it. I think you’re right on, Matt, that we don't do that enough. I think, in my classes, when I teach, for example, political economy for a week, I’m a mercantilist, because I want my students to know the best of mercantilism. Another week, I’m a classical economic liberal, not liberal the way Americans define it. Liberals the way the rest of the world defines it, that’s someone who’s for free trade. 

Then as funny as it is, and students sometimes don't remember my life as a counterintelligence agent during the Cold War, but for a week a former counterintelligence agent becomes a true Marxist, to give them a sense of what the Marxist thought about economics, because think every idea has its strengths and weaknesses including mine, including the compassionate achiever. I think we learned from each other by having these discussions, what's weak, what’s strong, can improve on something or is something so bad that I miss something that maybe when I read a scientific study, someone said, “You missed this part of it,” we can build each other up. 

What I mean about being compassionate is that you're not a Pollyanna. In Buddhism there’s this phrase called fierce compassion, and I love that idea, because I think a compassionate achiever has that fierce compassion. You are not a pushover. You're not a doormat for anyone else when you have compassion. Remember that water cutting through rock idea, because that's what I certainly remember. 

You can achieve more by being compassionate to others, and that achievement builds strength, not just in you, and we know it through the neuroscience and the first types of blood works, everyone from Dr. Tonya Singer, to Paul Zach, to Dach Ketlner have all proven, but we have yet to talk about it like we are talking about it, Matt, in a popular kind of social science way that everyone can understand. It’s been hidden by science. 

One of the things I love about your show that you constantly do week-in and week-out is you bring science to the light of society so that everyone can understand what the heck is going on in recent research, and that's what I tried to do with this book, so that everyone could see that the science is there to support that compassion is about strength. It's not about weakness. That survival of the fittest is about how we fit together, not how we divide one another. 

If we can get that message through and show the benefits of that, I think that we can ride the ship that’s going on right now in the world in terms of having to look past one another or not acknowledge that there are issues like homelessness that need to be addressed and that everything from education to healthcare to do business. I think there's more to it. Then, this basic achievement, I think it swells to a wave, this tidal wave of success that lifts all boats together and it’s not a dream. It’s actually from proven from Darwin on up. 

[0:37:47.1] MB: I think the idea that feedback makes you stronger, and if your ideas, if you're scared of pursuing or looking at ideas that you don't agree with, because you think you might be wrong, you need to encounter those ideas so that you can find the truth. Ideology fears the truth and doesn't want to discuss it. Doesn't want to look at the evidence, only wants to believe what it believes. Wisdom seeks the truth. Wisdom tries to find out what are the best ideas regardless of what I think the best idea should be. What is the data actually bear out as the best ideas? What is the research shows us or the true things that we need to really understand and focus on. I think that quest for all evidence, whether you like it or not, whether you want it to be true or not and really trying to understand the truth is so important. 

[0:38:39.5] CK: Oh, man. Yes, it is. That's the thing. I call people like that, and this definitely comes from my — How should I say it? Addiction, affliction to Dr. Seuss books. I call them know-nauts, knowledge astronauts, because I think you're willing to dive into the universe of knowledge no matter where that starship that you’re on takes you, that you’re willing to go to the widespread, the furthest universe of knowledge that you could possibly can and grab all of that together and that excites you. 

The idea that there are “alternative facts” muddies the water so much and dilutes this idea of wisdom in ways that just hurt not only individuals, but I think our country. When you see the facts that are out there and you're going for wisdom, one of the things that you really see is — I’m a big fan of complexity science, to show the connections between what happens — It’s like the butterfly effect. The butterfly's wings flaps and we’re in the Halifax, somewhere else, showing those connections between different things. When you have the facts and you slide them in, and we’ve learned new facts and quantum physics has given even more new facts that are what Einstein called weird, but are true. That they connect dots between things that we thought weren’t connected. 

As we forward in terms of science, in terms of knowledge, and more importantly I think what you brought up, is in terms of wisdom, you see that more and more things connect to each that we never thought connected. This idea compassion is based on connections. It’s based on human connections. I would argue even further, it’s based on more than that. We know that psychopaths and serial murderers start killing animals before they start killing fellow human beings. 

How you connect with the world around you I think will also not just tell everyone what type of person you are, but also will either limit or make your success limitless just by how you connect and how you understand those connections, how you act on those connections. I don’t think we think about that enough. Once you sit down and kind of look at the wisdom that’s gathering storm and that’s moving forward, it is about connecting the dots and it’s sitting back and seeing how those different connections work. 

Yeah, I think that knowledge is crucial, but how you used a knowledge and how you connect the knowledge, that either creates understanding or it creates misunderstanding which then leads you on the path towards wisdom or further away from wisdom. 

[0:41:49.3] MB: Let’s circle back, and I want to dig in to some of the specific strategies within your framework for cultivating compassion. One of the components of listening to learn is asking great questions. Tell me about that. How do we ask great questions? 

[0:42:05.1] CK: Oh, man! There’s many different ways, and in the book I kind of go into one way. I see great questions and I write about this as a great question is like a great photographer, because a great question can bring out the essence of not just the problem, but of the person experiencing the problem. It’s kind of like a light bulb moment for some people when you ask the question, because you’re not giving them the answer. You’re asking them a question, it’s like E.E. Cummings. It’s not about getting to the answers about asking better questions. When you ask a great question or a better question, the person going through the problem actually comes up with the solution themselves and it’s empowering to them, because you’re not looking to empower yourself necessarily. You’re looking to empower them to help them get through their problem as well. 

A great question, I see it as the lens of a camera. It’s that aperture. How open or close is the aperture when you take the picture matters on how clear that image is or how murky that can be or if it’s smudged, if it’s light and it’s smudged. Also, the aperture makes all the difference in terms of what you see. I think a great question, whether it’s open or closed will also give you that same type of benefit. It’s going to show you what you can see by simply the question you asked. 

For example, a closed question is one that has a very short answer. It’s a yes or no or I don’t know. Very tight closed way of answering it, it’s short. An open question is a question that is literally limitless. It’s wide open. That a person can answer it in many different ways. There’s not one way to do it. 

In classes, I try to start off the first part of every semester getting to open and close questions. I’ll have a statement up on the board, a very short statement and then I’ll have students write a question, usually a closed question. I start them off the close questions. They’ll write the close questions and I’ll give them five minutes to do it, working with partners. Then have them change those close questions to open questions, and to hear them go through that process is awesome, because like, “Wait a minute. The way they see that statement changes dramatically between a yes and no question to one that can be a why question or a how question.” 

I want them to understand that the words that they use frames the way they see a problem, and questions do that to everyone. I think some of my greatest teachers that I had from grammar school all the way through college did that instinctively, and I wanted to harness that in a chapter in the book, because I think we don’t give the due diligence to the words we use and the questions we ask. I give this example in the book, how you and when you use words matters to people and it matters from their perspective. For example, if you’re counseling a couple going through marriage and you ask them the word, “Oh, what do you think triggered the experience that kind of set you apart and drifted you off?” is very different than asking a parent who lost somebody, and we just had another example, the school shooting lately, “What do you think triggered the shooters?” 

Just using that word takes the person you’re trying to help away from any help. They have an emotional reaction simply to the words that you were using, and you shut down any chance of success moving them forward at least from the temporary time being, maybe for a long time. I think we have to take note of that in the context that we’re in and learn how to connect with people through great questions. I think those great questions, I call them brooms and light bulbs, because they can sweep away problems and they can give aha moments to the people that you’re asking. Great questions to me are simple as open and close questions, and it’s a dance, Matt. You just don’t — I went through a psychology course in college that gave me the funnel. You start with open questions and you end with close questions, and that’s the way you do it. It’s so formulaic. I was like, “That just can’t be right. It just sat wrong with me.”

Going through counterintelligence, working on Wall Street, being a professor. It’s a dance. Knowledge, wisdom is a dance and sometimes you do open with open questions and close, but it’s not that formulaic, because you’re listening to the person that you’re questioning towards. Sometimes you can read their body language. Maybe they’re struggling because they don’t want to open up, because it’s going to — For them, they think it’s going to lead to the wrong roads. 

So then you have to adjust your way or questioning by the responses that you’re getting, and it’s not a formula. It’s not the funnel way that I learned in psychology 101. It’s more of a dance, and I think you could see it as a dance. You’re going to get further through the song of life if you do, because, man, people open up in ways that make you feel stronger as well. 

The open-close questions are like photographers, because I think for the moment that you both are in, you can either get the essence or turn it into a giant blur and move on, and I think the more we blur each other the more hurt each other and the more we weaken our chances of achieving success in whatever level that you think want to achieve. 

[0:48:13.0] MB: Another strategy you talked about is the idea of appreciating silence. Tell me a little bit about that. 

[0:48:20.1] CK: Yeah. I think we try to fill the gaps in on each other. You can read body language about silence. A lot of people need time to simply gather their thoughts and people tend to fill in to silence gap, because it’s considered awkward. It kind of goes back to the point that you’re bringing back up to and highlighting, Matt, about criticism. 

Criticism, some people think you have to defend against all criticism. One of the points that I think you’re bringing out and highlighting is that you can absorb that criticism and it makes you stronger. That’s the same thing with silence. People want to avoid silence. They think that awkwardness creates a sense of weakness. A lot of times, that silence generates new answers. It generates new answers not just in what the person will eventually say, but also in their body language. We don’t look at each other enough, and we started the show by talking about that, by looking and gathering all the pieces of information that you can gather, and some of those are in body language and how a person looks, which way they look. Are they twiddling their thumbs or their fingers? Are they looking at you? All those are pieces of information that if you’re not looking at someone while the silence is happening, because you’re trying to figure out a way to fill in the void. Then you’re not going to get the information that you need, right? 

One of the great quotes I had from one of the people I interviewed for the book, Sir Richard Dearlove said, “A lot of times —” and he’s specifically talking about getting information against an enemy, a terrorist or in his case it was the IRA. He says torture doesn’t work and he goes, “Torture doesn’t work because you get the information you want, not the information you need.” It ties back to everything we’ve been talking about. It ties back to wisdom, because if you get the information you want, not the information you need, are you truly getting the understanding of the problem? You’re not. 

Silence provides some of that information that we tend to overlook. We try to raise with the words that we try to fill in the silence. In music, I played bass guitar, trumpet, trombone and guitar. I remember once what Mozart said about silence. It’s all about the silence. Music is all about where the rest are put. He calls it kind of the foundation of music. Silence, the pauses. Think about the great songs in popular culture or even movies, like Jaws, “Dun-dun! Dun-dun!” We remember those pieces, even the short pieces, because of where the silence is put in, the same thing in our conversations. 

Conversations not only are made up of the words that people use, but where they place the silences. It’s understanding why someone went silent and putting an emphasis on that can give you new knowledge about a problem.  

[0:51:45.8] MB: So many great points. The concept of — Even the meta concept of listening to learn the idea, don’t listen to reply, don’t listen to get out what you want to say next. It’s about listening to build understanding. Once you cultivate that understanding, it opens the pathway for connection. Once you have that, you have so much more that you can work with. So many different things that you can do. It’s a great point. 

[0:52:14.8] CK: Thanks, Matt. I kind of see it like a combination. There’s so many different combinations out there to move forward, to address a problem. Sometimes when you address a problem you’re not totally solving it, but yet you’re learning, right? That’s also what I want to incorporate in there. Failure is okay. Failure is a part of life, and you learn from that failure. I think we become a culture that’s afraid to fail, but all the great innovators in history have failed more than they succeeded, but yet their success is built on those failures. We tend to sweep that under the rug as well. 

One of the things I do for students, especially the honor students, because they’re all type-As and they think they have to succeed all the time, is I give them assignment where they can’t. I want them to learn that it’s okay to learn from failure, because in the real world, as you and I both know, Matt, that’s where you tend to learn a lot is through those failures. We’ve created — Because of our education system based on test, that they didn’t have, and my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Peck, how to work through failures. These students are really good at jumping through hoops, but they’re not good at adjusting to failures on many different levels, because they never really had a chance to fail, because if they did, they didn’t think they moved up to the next level or they couldn’t succeed on the next test. The test of life, man, is so much more about failures than it is successes. The irony of it all is that our successes are based on the failures, and we don’t talk about that enough either. 

[0:54:00.9] MB: I think one of the biggest failings of our educational system is exactly what you described. It teaches people how to jump through these hoops, but it doesn’t teach them that it’s okay to fail. It doesn’t teach them how to learn and accept mistakes and that having flaws and imperfections and making errors is part of the learning process and a necessary component to getting better. 

[0:54:22.5] CK: Without a doubt. 

[0:54:24.1] MB: What are the other concepts that you touched on that I found really interesting, was the idea of the power of non-doing. Tell me about that. 

[0:54:30.8] CK: Yeah. It’s not the same thing. The power of non-doing is not the same thing as doing nothing. It’s that inner reflection. It’s taking time, and I use mirrors to kind of explain this. Just like we look at a mirror to either adjust our hair or to find that we have green if we just ate a salad in our teeth an we’ve been smiling and one of those awkward moments where you get this giant leaf in the front of your mouth. You use a mirror to kind of clean that up, right? Realize that there’s something these that needs to be addressed. 

We don’t take enough time for internal mirrors, that inner reflection. Taking time to take account of what we have done, what we are doing and maybe what we will be doing. It’s about building that internal mirror. Mirrors in the real world, not only for the reflection that just looking at ourselves to make ourselves — Outward appearances to be better, but mirrors are used in solar panels to generate energy. They’re used — A mirror was placed on the moon to measure the length from earth to the moon. They’re used for so many different things, and we don’t take the time to simply reflect and create that self-awareness that we began the show with at all. 

To simply take 10 minutes even of your time, and I do it right after I go for a run or right after I workout. It helps me calm down. It also then brings up, and when I’m running I think of a lot of different ideas, and in that meditation it kind of, in a way, taking time to inner reflect and have that meditation, it cleans and consolidates the thoughts that I have and makes things a bit clearer for me in the world. I use people from different parts of the world to kind of explain that idea, the active non-doing, one, is taking that time to have inner reflection. 

Then, also, as a dad, it’s about purposefully not jumping in to do something for another. You’re purposely holding back. For my son, one of my sons had a rare medical issue, and it turns his voice into Darth Vader type voice, because he’s having hard time breathing. He’s able to go back to school once we got the oxygen levels back right. I wanted to go to school and kind of set the stage for his class so he wouldn’t be picked on or wouldn’t be bullied. 

I talked to him about it and he said he wanted to do it. As a dad, you kind of want to — Your initial instinct is to kind of help your children in any way you can, but sometimes the best way you can help them is through the purposeful act of non-doing. I purposefully had to hold myself back so that he could go in and do it, and he did an awesome job. His teachers called us later and said they were nervous about it, because he made jokes about being Darth Vader with it. The kids has settled right in. He knew his problem better than anyone else, including me. He knew the context it was in better than anyone else, including me. 

As a dad, listening to that, I have a sense of pride for him, but also there are times where you’ve got to let the people that you love and you care about around you to handle their own issues and hopefully you ask them the right questions to help them come up with the ideas. 

Another example I talk about that, about another instance of actual bullying. That active non-doing is not only just that inner reflection, but it’s purposeful act of allowing someone to resolve their own problems. That’s compassion, because you’re getting an understanding about them, not just about the problem. Hopefully later on, I have more information that I can use to help not only my son, but others in that situation. We constantly always think we have to do something to help another. Sometimes the best act is the act of non-doing. 

[0:58:59.3] MB: What would be one simple actionable step somebody listening today could implement that you would give them as home work to start down the path of compassion and to implement some of the ideas that you’ve talked about today? 

[0:59:14.1] CK: After our conversation, I’m going to give two now. Usually I just give lesson to learn, like practice learning. Going and going to a friend, listening to the problem and not jumping in. Not saying that you have the solution to it. Jump in with questions, not with solutions. Listen to not reply. Listen to learn to them. 

After talking with you right now, that understanding of wisdom that you highlighted I think is equally as important, is to go out and get those different perspectives. Sit down and listen to a podcast of someone who’s diametrically opposed you and listen for what you are bringing up before the truths, because every perspective, every ideology is based on some type of truth even if you don’t want to mimic, it is. That could be a bridge to learning about a friend or about starting a constructive dialogue, not a debate dialogue. Something where both parties can learn. 

I talk about this a little bit more when I talk about knoxers, I call the knowledge boxers, that any new knowledge that against them or their ideology, they fight off. One of the ways that you can actually have a constructive dialogue with a knoxer, a knowledge boxer, is to actually start with one of their basic truths and agree with it, but you won’t learn what those basic truths are unless you actually listen to them. 

After listening to you in our conversation today, I would say get down and sit down to a podcast, maybe one of the people that you interviewed that maybe someone said, “You know what? I’m not going to listen to that show, because I disagree with that person.” Listen to them. Go through the entire episode and listen to what they’re saying, not listening to reply, because I think you’ll find out surprisingly enough, and people don’t do this enough, is that there is something that you agree with with them, and that can create a bridge of understanding that we also need right now. Listening to learn and get out there and listen to different perspectives.  

[1:01:30.1] MB: Chris, were can people find you and your book online? 

[1:01:34.2] CK: I’m at chriskukk, Chris — and that weird last name — kukk.com, and you can find a lot of my talks there, upcoming appearances and also the book, but you can find the book at any book seller. Barnes & Noble, the indie book shops, Amazon, iTunes. It’s also on CD. It’s also on audio. The book is anywhere you can buy a book. You can get out there and I can — If you want, you can connect with me on chriskukk.com. We can have a discussion. I’d be more than happy to link up with anyone to have a talk about compassion. Chriskukk.com and any book store.  

[1:02:11.8] MB: Chris, thank you again for coming back to the show and, once again, sharing some incredible wisdom and insights. It’s been a pleasure to have you on here once again. 

[1:02:20.9] CK: Well, Matt, I’m honored to be the first guest that’s back the second time. Thank you so much for that honor. 

[1:02:26.9] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. 

I love hearing from you, if you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s matt@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every listener email. I’m going to give you three reasons once again why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right there on the homepage. 

The first, you’re going to get exclusive curated weekly emails from us including our Mindset Monday email, which listeners have been loving. It’s a short and sweet summary of some research, TED Talks or videos that we found really interesting within the last week. You’re also going to get a chance to shape the show, that means voting on guests, questions that we ask the guest, changing key pieces of the show, like our intro music. The new intro that we just rolled out was voted on by listeners like you. If you’re not on the email list, you’re missing out on opportunities to do that. 

Lastly and most importantly, you’re going to get an awesome free guide when you sign up to join the email list. This a guide we created based on listener demand. It’s our most popular guide and it’s called How to Organize and Remember Everything. It helps you keep track of all the books, ideas, podcasts, concepts, etc., that you have cluttered around in your mind. I know I have them cluttered on my mind, and this system is the system I personally use to organize and remember all of my information. You can get it completely for free along with another sweet bonus guide that you have to sign up to discover what it is by joining our email list. Just go to successpodcast.com, put your email in right on the homepage, or if you’re out and about and on your phone, you can just text the word “smarter”, that’s “smarter” to the number 44222. 

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend, either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. Don’t forget, if you want to get all the incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we discussed in this episode and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can find them at successpodcast.com by hitting the show notes button at the top. Thanks again, and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

Break Your Phone Addiction (& Your Other Bad Habits) With Charles Duhigg

In this episode we discuss habit loops, how they form, and what they are, we look at why you can’t stop picking up your phone (I know that’s definitely a challenge for me), the habits and routines that research shows are most correlated with success, how to bake mental models into your brain, and much more with Charles Duhigg.

Charles is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and senior editor at The New York Times. Charles is the author of “The Power of Habit,” which spent over two years on the New York Times best-seller list, and more recently “Smarter Faster Better,” also a New York Times best seller. Charles graduated from Yale University, Harvard Business School and has been featured in This American Life, N.P.R, Frontline, and much more.

We discuss:

• Habit Loops, what they are and how they form

• 40-45% of what we do every single day is not a decision its a habit

• Emotional cue for checking your phone and "novelty seeking"

• How your brain makes that behavior automatic, becaues its delivering a reward

• How to break habits

• What Reward are you seeking? Get as specific as possible

• Figure out the REWARD, then reprogram the HABIT

• Keystone habits and how they can transform your identity and create a chain reaction

• Why it's that the most successful people work harder, they just think differently

• The rituals and habits of people who are more productive

• Why its not being smarter, its not working harder, its not going to the right schools - the research shows that what correlates the MOST with success is that the people who are most successful tend to have “contemplative routines”, habits in their lives that push them to think more deeply

• Journaling is a great example of a contemplative routine that can make you be more productive

• Being busy and being productive are not synonymous

• Thinking has alwasy been the killer "productivity app"

• The story of Quantas Flight 32

• Maintaining focus while in the middle of a crashing airplane and how to cultivate situational awareness

• How Firefighters develop ESP

• Building a story, a mental model of a situation, and how that can shape your situational awareness

• The vital importance of building mental models

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This weeks episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Brilliant! Brilliant is math and science enrichment learning. Learn concepts by solving fascinating, challenging problems. Brilliant explores probability, computer science, machine learning, physics of the everyday, complex algebra, and much more. Dive into an addictive interactive experience enjoyed by over 4 million students, professionals, and enthusiasts around the world.

You can access courses online for free right now! however, Brilliant is offering The Science of Success Listeners 20% OFF THEIR FULL SUITE of classes and course simply go to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess in order to claim your discount and start learning these incredibly important skills today!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Wiki Page] Charles Duhigg

• [Book] Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity by Charles Duhigg

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success with your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:12.5]MB: Welcome to welcome to the science of success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than 1 million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. In this episode we discuss habit loops, how they form, what they are, and we look at why you can't stop picking up your phone. I know that’s definitely a challenge for me. We talk about the habits and routines that research shows are the most correlated with success, and we talk about how to bake mental models into your brain and much more, with Charles Duhigg. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. The first is exclusive curated weekly emails from us including Mindset Monday, which listeners have been loving. The second is that you get to listener exclusive content and a chance to shape the show. That means voting on guests, changing our interim music. Yeah, if you're on the email list, you have an opportunity to vote on the song that we use for the new intro in the episode today, and you get awesome free guides that we create based on listener demand, like our most popular guide; how to organize and remember everything, which you can get for free along with another sweet bonus guide that you have to sign up to find out what it is by joining our email list today. Again, you can go to successpodcast.com and join the email list right on the homepage, or if you're on your phone, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. That's “smarter” to the number 44222. 

In our previous episode we discussed how you can fall into cycles of self-sabotage and constantly reset your happiness down to where you think it should be. We discussed lessons learned from coaching over 20,000 people. Talked about how to crush your upper limit problem and break through the beliefs that are holding you back. We look at the questions you need to discover and live in your zone of genius and much more, with Dr. Gay Hendricks. If you want to flush self-sabotage, listen to that episode. 

You know how much we talk about the concept of mental models on the show and I think it's an incredibly important and super vital strategy to build a toolkit of mental models that can help you be successful and achieve your goals. That's why I'm once again excited to tell you about or sponsor for this week, brilliant.org. 

Brilliant is a math and science enrichment learning tool that makes mastering the fundamentals of math and science easy and fun, and there's something special there for Science of Success listeners which you can get by going to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. Mastering the fundamentals of math and science is a super important component of building a powerful toolkit of mental models, and Brilliant is an incredible way to get started with that. 

Now, for the episode. 

[0:02:51.5] MB: Today we have another incredible guest on the show, Charles Duhigg. Charles is a Pulitzer prize-winning columnist and senior editor at the New York Times. He’s the author of The Power of Habit and Smarter, Faster, Better, both of which are New York Times bestsellers. Graduated from Yale and Harvard Business School and has been featured in This American Life, NPR, Frontline and much more. 

Charles, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:03:13.1] CD: Thanks for having me on. 

[0:03:14.5] MB: We’re very excited to have you on here. To start out, I'd love to — I know both of your books cover such fascinating topics and I want to get as much out of this conversation as we can. To start out, tell me a little bit about — Let’s start with the power path. Tell me about habit loops. How are habits formed and how can we change our habits? 

[0:03:33.6] CD: One of the big insights that’s happened in the last 15 years in neurology is really understanding what a habit is. I think we tend to think of a habit as sort of one thing, right? It’s that instinct that I have to eat cookies when I don’t need to, or to bite my nails. What researchers have discovered is that every habit has three components. The first part of a habit is the cue, the trigger, that sets off this urge, this instinct to almost do something automatically. 

Then after that trigger, the cue, there comes that routine, which is the behavior itself. Then, finally, there’s a reward, and every habit has a reward, and that reward is why your brain latches on to this behavior and makes it automatic. 

This happens all the time. In fact, there was a woman named Wendy Wood at Duke University who followed around hundreds of people for an entire year and what she found was that about 40% to 45% of what we do every single day is not a decision, it’s a habit, right? When you are backing your car out of the driveway and you’ve done it so many times you don’t really have to pay attention to it. That’s a habit. When you remember leaving home and you’re at your desk but you can’t exactly remember the drive along the freeway because you were thinking about something else. That’s because you were able to do that by habit. 

We have mental habits that occur almost every minute. Habits are how we as species have survived and have thrived so well. In every single one of those habits, there’re thousands of little habits that come into play every single day, almost half of what we do, all of them have a cue, a routine, and a reward.  

[0:05:15.0] MB: Tell me about each of those. What is the cue, what is the routine, what is the reward and how could we leverage that knowledge to change our negative habits or to build positive habits? 
 
[0:05:27.0] CD: It’s different for every single habit, right? What habit do you have that you struggle with? 

[0:05:32.3] MB: I’d say a good one might be maybe checking my phone too frequently or checking Reddit or something like that and wasting time on social media. 

[0:05:39.3] CD: Okay. When you feel that urge to check your phone, what’s going on? Paint a picture of what’s happening. For instance, where does it usually happen? 

[0:05:52.1] MB: I would say all over the place, right? To me, maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it feels like my brain is screaming out for some sort of novelty dopamine, give me something new. Give me something exciting, and I’ll kind of pick up my phone and then wake up 15 minutes later and be like, “What have I just been doing?” 

[0:06:11.1] CD: All cues for the most part fall into one of that categories. It’s usually a particular place, a certain time of day, the presence of certain other people, a particular emotion or a preceding behavior that’s become ritualized somehow. It sounds like, for you, what the cue for checking your phone is, is it’s probably a particular emotion, which in this case would be kind of boredom, right? What psychologists would call novelty seeking, that you’re feeling like you need like a burst of something interesting. When you have this fair moment, when you feel a little bit bored, you feel this certain emotion, you pick up and you check your phone. We’ve got the cue diagnosed. 

The activity is pretty much the same way every single time. You pick up the phone, you kind of turn it on. Do you find that you tend to go to the same apps on your phone? 

[0:07:01.2] MB: Yeah, absolutely. Probably Reddit is one that is a huge time sync.

[0:07:05.9] CD: Okay. We’ve got the routine down. You’re grabbing your phone, you’re hitting the Reddit app or you’re opening up a browser and you’re checking Reddit. Then now the question becomes; what is the reward? Because we know that every single habit has a reward. Sometimes those rewards are hard to identify. Sometimes they’re very subtle, but the only reason your brain makes that behavior automatic is because it is delivering some kind of reward and without knowing what the reward is, you can’t begin to diagnose and therefore change the behavior. 

What reward do you think it’s delivering when you check Reddit? 

[0:07:44.3] MB: I think it’s, as you said, sort of novelty. It’s new information. It’s kind of some — I don’t know. It’s hard to describe. It’s like dopamine. I always want to know what’s the new thing, what’s going on? It’s kind of the same impulse of checking the news, right? 

[0:07:57.7] CD: It’s definitely not dopamine, right? Because we know that neurotransmitters are very, very complicated, that what actually happens inside your brain can’t be reduced to just sort of one neurotransmitter. 

Now, the other thing you said is you said it could be novelty, it could be — I think you said you wanted to learn something new. Those are actually two different rewards, and understanding exactly what’s going on is important at really trying to figure out how to fix this. Typically, if had more time, what I would say is, “Look, you should start experimenting.” The next time you feel the urge to check Reddit, you should, for instance, just check YouTube and look for something dumb on YouTube. Something that doesn’t have any informational value, whatsoever, but it’s just kind of visually entertaining. Figure out, does that satisfy that craving, because then you know that the reward that’s driving these habits, it’s novelty seeking. 

Then I would say the next experiment is maybe instead of checking Reddit, go to like CNN and read some kind of dry article and see if that satisfies the craving, because if that does, then it means it’s not novelty seeking that’s driving this habit, it’s instead sort of this thirst for knowledge, for learning something new. Then you can even get smaller and smaller and smaller. 

If it is novelty seeking, my guess is that it’s novelty seeking. My guess is that you would not be a satisfied going to, for instance, like the American Journal Pediatric Surgery as you would be going to Reddit, because Reddit sort of has things that are more fun and more interesting, and it’s not exactly news you need to know. It’s just news that’s kind of interesting. 

My guess is that novelty is a huge part of it, then you can get even more specific and you can try and figure out, “Okay, is it just that you need like something completely different?” If you conducted an experiment and you went to YouTube instead of Reddit and you just watched flashing lights, which are very, very novel, or picture or videos of penguins, which is very novel. Would that satisfy the urge, or does it need to be something that’s kind of funny. Does it need to be something that’s kind of interesting? 

The goal there is to figure out what exactly are you actually — What reward is this habit delivering for you? Get specific as possible in what kind of reward this is [inaudible 0:10:18.9]. Now, it might be that you’re totally wrong, that it has nothing to do with the content, with the value of the content. That it doesn’t matter if it’s funny or if it’s newsy. Actually, all that you need is you just need some way to like kind of catch of breath and stop thinking about whatever problem you’re trying to solve and you’ve fallen into the habit of looking at Reddit as kind of a mental reset, and you could look at anything for that matter. 

Once you understand what reward that habit is delivering, then you can reprogram the habit. Then you could say, “Okay. Look.” I’m just going to make this up, but let’s say what’s going on here is that when I feel a cue of boredom, I turn to Reddit, and the reason why I turn to Reddit is because Reddit delivers me some type of reward that makes me feel smart. It doesn’t feel like procrastination. It feels like I’m learning something. 

Then the next question becomes, “Okay. What else can you do that would correspond to that old cue and deliver something similar to that old reward, but it actually more healthy.” Is it something that you feel like is quite as much a waste of time? What would that be? 

[0:11:31.6] MB: Yeah. I think that’s a great analogy. I can answer that for myself, but I want to focus on delivering value to the listeners, and I know we have tight time constraints in this interview. I want to kind of advance beyond this. Tell me a little bit about, just briefly, what is a keystone habit and how are those important in terms of shaping and kind of impacting the behavior? 

[0:11:55.2] CD: A keystone habit is a habit that seems to set off a chain reaction when it begins to change itself. For many people, exercise for instance, is a keystone habit. When people start exercising, they tend to start eating differently often times without even thinking about it. For most of us, I think that makes sense, because for whatever reason we feel like, “Oh, I went for a run this morning, and so it’s easier to eat a salad for lunch rather than a hamburger.” 

What’s interesting is that according to studies, when people start exercising habitually, they also start doing things like using their credit cards less. They tend to do their dishes earlier in the day. They procrastinate less at work. Then there’s something about it for many people, not for everyone, but for many people, that exercise is a keystone habit that changes how they see themselves. As a result, it sets off a chain reaction that changes other patterns in their life. 

For you, this habit of checking Reddit. If it’s something that you find sort of really bothers you, right? It’s something that seems to dominate your day. You find yourself doing it and, “Oh, God! Why am I doing this again? I wish that I could stop.” Then that might very well be a keystone habit for you. We tend to identify keystone habits. Again, a keystone habit is different for each person by the emotional content of it rather than merely by the role that it plays in our life. 

[0:13:24.4] MB: One of the biggest things that I’m a huge fan of on the show are mental models. You’ve heard me talk a lot about mental models and how critically important it is if you want to be successful to build a toolkit of mental models that can help you better understand reality. 

One of the topics and many of the topics actually that are critical to developing an amazing and rich toolkit of mental models is a deep understanding of mathematics, science, physics, chemistry, etc. The hard sciences are some of the backbones of the most useful and effective mental model toolkits, and that's why I'm super excited to announce that our sponsor for this episode is brilliant.org. 

Brilliant.org is a math and science enrichment learning website where you can learn concepts by actually solving fascinating and challenging problems. I'm really, really excited about this, because I'm a huge fan of STEM learning; science, technology, engineering and math, and I think that it’s something that America in general needs to do a better job of and it's something that I really want you, the listeners, to be improving and getting these skills and getting better at things like science and math. 

Too many people in our society have lost the ability to quantitatively understand reality, and the mental models from a hard sciences are some of the most powerful in describing what happens in the real world. I personally am super psyched about Brilliant. The courses on there are amazing, and I'm going to through and take a bunch of them to re-up my understanding of things like probability, games of chance, problem-solving and they even have some really cool stuff, things like machine learning. 

Right now brilliant.org is offering our listeners an additional 20% off of their premium plan. This discount is only for Science of Success listeners and you can unlock it by going to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. That’s brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. You can sign up using our custom link and then you’ll get the 20% premium membership which comes with all of their courses and you can use this to learn about probability. You can increase your mathematics abilities. You can learn more about the hard sciences, like physics and chemistry. If you want to build a toolkit of powerful mental models, I cannot recommend enough using something like brilliant.org to improve your quantitative understanding of the world and how it works. Again, you can go to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess to get this 20% discount.

[0:15:40.6] MB: Let’s dig into some of the lessons from Smarter, Faster, Better. Tell me about — One of the core concepts of that book is the idea that it’s not that most successful work harder, it’s that they do things differently. Tell me about that idea.  

[0:15:52.7] CD: It’s not that they do things differently. It’s that they tend to think differently, right? 

[0:15:58.8] MB: Yeah. Exactly. Sorry. Maybe I’m mis-phrased that. 

[0:16:02.0] CD: In general, the most productive people, they tend to be people who think more deeply than everyone else. They spend more time thinking about the choices that they’re making. They’re trying to figure out why they have certain priorities and how to focus on those priorities. How to motivate their teams and how to motivate themselves. 

That’s what the book explains, is that there are these mental habits that prepare us to think more deeply about the choices we’re making, particularly when thinking is hard. 

[0:16:30.1] MB: What are some of the thought patterns that people who think differently that are more productive follow and implement? 

[0:16:38.1] CD: Do you feel like you’re a pretty productive guy? 

[0:16:41.9] MB: I mean I’m decently productive. 

[0:16:43.8] CD: Why do you think you’re productive? What do you do to help yourself become productive? 

[0:16:48.5] MB: I think it’s a lot of the things you talked about in the book, right? I spend a lot of time — I carve out and cultivate space in my life for thinking about what I’m doing for setting my goals, for creative time that is outside of kind of the constant churn of responding to emails and doing busy work. I constantly trying to cultivate that sort of quadrant of important, but not urgent work and spending time on that, spending time journaling and thinking. I hope that even though those activities seem like they’re sort of not getting things done, in many ways they refocus on what you do in such a way that it’s actually much more high-leveraged than just seeming like you’re busy all the time. 

[0:17:28.2] CD: Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. Do you set aside time for that? Do you have a block of hour, an hour to set aside on Sunday? Do you do it when you’re feeling like it? How do you structure creating that time? 

[0:17:40.1] MB: Yeah. I try to cultivate that time every morning. I set aside time in the mornings before I have meetings, then I can sort of think, journal, think about big picture things and try to figure out what can I do to be more effective. 

[0:17:54.1] CD: Yeah. I think that this is the big insight that we’ve learned from research into productivity about why some people in some companies, but people in particular, why some people get so much more done than other people do. Why they seem to succeed faster? 

The conventional wisdom has always been, “Oh, those people must work much harder. They chain themselves to their desks,” or maybe that they’re much smarter or that they went to the right schools and so they have more advantages. 

What the research shows is that doesn’t tend to be true. Certainly, working hard is great and going to the right schools doesn’t hurt, but that doesn’t seem to correlate with success. That what actually seems to correlate with success is that the people who are most productive and most successful, they tend to have what researchers refer to as contemplative routines, as habits in their life that push them to think more deeply. 

You mentioned journaling. Journaling is a great example of this, because the act of journaling often times forces us to sit down and to try and make sense of how we spent our time recently. What our goals actually ought to be as supposed to what we happen to just get obsessed with or fixated on right now, and how we should arrange our life so that those priorities, so that our energy and our activity is actually focused on our priorities rather than instantly responding to life’s many sort of busy work request. 

The basic insight here is that, particularly now, being busy and being productive are not synonymous. You can spend an entire day being busy. You can spend an entire day replying to emails and not getting anything important done. That’s kind of a new thing, right? As late as the 1960s and 1970s, busy and productive were kind of similar, but that’s changed in this economic revolution that we’re living through. They’ve now become disjointed. 

The people who are most successful are the ones who recognize that and who say, “Look! I need these routines in my life.” I need these habits in my life that push me to think about what my goals should be. Whether I need to change my priorities today. Whether I’m actually spending time on my priorities, or instead I’m just doing stuff because it’s the easiest thing to do, because it makes me feel productive instead of actually be productive.

One of the things that the core of Smarter, Faster, Better is that Smarter, Faster, Better walks through these eight parts of life that seem to be most deeply correlated with productivity and success and sort of unpacks, okay. What is the habit that you need to build that allows you to think more deeply about things like, for instance, generating motivation when you most need it? What do we know about the neurology of motivation? What do we know about remaining focused at work? What is that habit that people employ so that they don’t get distracted by minutia, that they don’t get distracted by things that don’t matter, so that they set priorities actively and push themselves to think about those priorities rather than getting complaisant and just looking at your to-do-list and doing whatever comes next even if that’s not the most important thing. 

What do we know about why some teams succeed more than others, and therefore how do we empower leaders of those teams to create the right team habits that makes success more likely? At the core of each of these is this basic principle, it’s hard to think, right? It takes time and energy and work and it’s easy to forget to think. 

Throughout history, thinking has always been the killer productivity app. The key is to build these routines, these habits into your life that push you to think a little bit more deeply about the things that matter, like goals and teams and innovation and to think in certain ways so that you’ll end up being more successful. 

[0:21:55.4] MB: Tell me the story of Qantas Flight 32. 

[0:21:58.7] CD: Qantas Flight 32 is a flight that took off from Singapore Airport, headed towards Sydney, Australia. They had a midair catastrophic mechanical injury and the pilot ended up prevailing because he was able to shift his mental model. He was able to shift the story he was telling himself inside his head that helped him think about how he ought to harness his attention in the right way. 

Did you read the story? 

[0:22:29.6] MB: I listened to a recent speech of yours when you talked about it. I thought it was riveting and it was a fascinating story, that’s why I wanted to dig in to some of the lessons from what happened. 

[0:22:40.9] CD: Why parts of it stood out to you? 

[0:22:43.2] MB: I think one that sort of a narrative structure of being in the midst of this plane malfunction and how they were able to recover from it. Specifically, the concept of situational awareness and how they sort of practiced these routines and even before the accident, even the car right over there kind of rehearsing and talking about what are we going to do when and if something goes wrong. You mentioned that the flight recording of the cockpit, it almost sounds like a rehearsed scripted play even in the midst of what seemingly is a crisis. 

[0:23:21.2] CD: Yeah. One of the big important things that we know about how people marshal their attention and don’t get distracted, why some people are able to maintain focus, whether you’re in an emergency in an airplane cockpit or whether it’s just a busy day at work and you’re sitting at your desk and there’s emails coming in and there’s phone calls and there’s people asking you to come to some meeting unexpectedly. 

The people who are able to maintain their focus the best are the ones who kind of have some story in their head, some story that they’re almost telling themselves about what’s going on as it occurs. We know these about firemen for instance, the best firefighters. There’s always firefighters that almost seem like they have ESP. They could almost detect what’s going to happen in a burning building before it occurs. 

As researchers have gone and talked to those folks and they’ve asked them how they do that, what they tend to say is the same thing over and over again. They say, “When I walk into a burning building, I start telling myself a story about what I expect to see. I walk into a room and I expect to see flames in one corner, because corners always burn faster than everything else. I know there’s a staircase off to the left and I expect to see a lot of flames on top of that staircase, there’s usually an air gap under staircases and so they burn fast. Then when I walk into a room and the story in front of my eyes, it’s different from the story inside my head. For instance, there’s less flames than I expect to see on that staircase. It causes me to suddenly take a second and say, “Wait, something is wrong. Pay attention to that staircase. Don’t go over there. There’s something off about that.” 

The reason why they know where to focus and what they can ignore is because they have this story inside their head, right? Psychologists call this the act of building mental models, and mental models are how our brain almost unconsciously decides what to focus on and what to ignore. All of us do this. This is like second nature for one degree to another. Most of us, when we think about our day, we think like, “Oh, I have a meeting at 10 o’clock and then I’ve got to meet Jim for lunch at 11:30, so I need to leave by 11,” and we build these mental models or we play out a conversation that we’re going to have, a tough conversation in our head. 

We have a natural instinct to create mental models, but the people who are most successful, they tend to build mental models that are just half a degree more specific than everyone else. Instead of saying, “I have a meeting at 10 o’clock, I need to leave by 11.” They say, “Oh, I’ve got a meeting at 10 o’clock and it’s probably going to begin with Jim saying that dumb idea that he brings up at every meeting. Then Mary, Mary is probably going to disagree with him, because Mary hates Jim, so she always want to disagree. You know what I should do? Then I should jump in with my idea, because, I’ll be you, everyone will be relieved to hear me bring up something sensible at that point. I’ll kind of win the meeting.” 

That’s what the most productive people do. They build these mental models, these kind of visualizations of what they expect to have unfold that are just a little bit more detailed than everyone else. It doesn’t take much time. It takes 30 seconds, maybe two minutes to envision your entire day that way. 

What it does is it builds a mental model that allows your brain to anticipate what’s going to happen. More importantly, focus on what really matters and not get quite as distracted as small little details from everything else.  

[0:26:49.2] MB: Charles, thank you so much. I know you’re tight on time today, but we really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing all of your wisdom. 

[0:26:56.3] CD: Thanks for having me on. 

[0:26:59.0] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created the show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based personal growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email, which I give out at the end of every episode, is matt@successpodcast.com. That's matt@successpodcast.com. I read and respond to every single listener email. 

I’m once again going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list right now by going to successpodcast.com and signing up at the top of our homepage. First, you’re going to get exclusive curated weekly emails from us every single week including a Mindset Monday which listeners have been raving about. Next, you’re going to get listener exclusive opportunities to change the shape of the show, vote on guests, change our interim music, questions that we’re going to ask for guests and give us feedback that help shape the direction of the Science of Success. The new intro that you heard today was voted on by our listeners who are on our email list. 

Lastly, you’re going to get awesome free guides that we build based on listener demand, like our most popular guide; How to Organize and Remember Everything, which you can get for free for signing up on the email list along with another sweet bonus guide that you have to sign up to find out what it is by joining our email list today. You can join at successpodcast.com right on front of the homepage, or if you’re on your phone, just text the word “smarter”, that “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, that’s “smarter” to 44222. 

The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps us more and more people discover the Science of Success. 

Lastly, don’t forget, if you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in this show, links, transcripts, everything we discussed, and much more, be sure to check out our show notes which are also at successpodcast.com, you can just hit the show notes button at the top. 

Thanks again, and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success. 

How You Can CRUSH Self Sabotage with Dr. Gay Hendricks

In this episode we discuss how you can fall into cycles of self sabotage and constantly reset your happiness down to where you think it should be, lessons learned from coaching over 20,000 people, how to crush upper limit problems and break through the beliefs holding you back, the questions you need to discover and live in your zone of genius, and much more with Dr. Gay Hendricks. 

Dr. Gay Hendricks is the president of the Hendricks Institute, he earned his Ph.D in counseling psychology from Stanford and taught at the University of Colorado for 21 years and conducted seminars across the globe. He is also a multi best-selling author, having written more than 40 books and his work has been featured on CNN, CNBC, Oprah, and more.

We discuss:

• Gay’s "encounter with destiny" and how it “knocked him out” of his usual way of thinking

• Lessons from training thousands of counselors and coaches to help people transform their lives

• Lessons from counseling and coaching over 20,000 individuals!

• How Gay went from 300+ lbs, smoking 2-3 packs of cigarettes per day, and transformed his entire life

• The two “big ideas” from the Big Leap

• Upper Limit Problems

  1. Occupying your Zone of Genius

• What are "Upper Limit Problems?"

• How to Occupying your “Zone of Genius"

• Success is not just financial - focusing only on financial success puts your out of balance

• Often times its not the lack of business skills that stifle us, its lack of heart centric communication skills

• If you’re able to bring forth what is within you, it will pave the path to success - but if you keep your emotions in, you stifle yourself

• How a tiny bit of misalignment can create echos and rattles throughout your life

• How we fall into cycles of self sabotage to “reset” our happiness down to where we think it should be

• We often manufacture fears, stresses, and anxieties to stop ourselves from feeling good

• The core fears you experience underpinning that Upper Limit Problem

• #1 The Fear of Outshining

• #2 The Fear of Being Fundamentally Flawed

• Upper limit problems are rooted in fear - unless we come to terms with those - we cannot actualize our full potential

• How to explore, lovingly, your own fears and limitations

• The concept of having enough vs having plenty

• #3 The Fear of Leaving Behind or being disloyal to the people you care about

• Do you ever feel like “things are going too well, now something bad is going to happen”

• Focusing on what can go wrong is useful if we TAKE ACTION about it, but if we can’t act on it, its just useless worrying

• The “quick fix” for blame and criticism - get underneath the blame, own what you’re afraid of that is causing that blame and talk about it openly and honestly

• How to fix broken relationships and heal communication problems in 10 minutes or less

• Self criticism is rooted in FEAR - something you’re afraid of in yourself, or something your afraid to communicate to someone else - what is it that im basically afraid of?

• The role shame plays in self criticism and how to find your original shaming

• Is Life Suffering as the Buddha said?

• Can honesty (with ourselves and our relationships) reduce suffering?

• Begin an open hearted, open mind inquiry into what you really want

• Ultimate success mantra - I expand in love, abundance, creativity, and success every day as I inspire other people to expand in love, abundance, success, and creativity!

• The idea of happiness thermostat

• Shine in your life the way you want to shine, not in reference to other people

• Human beings have no idea what their full potential is once they shatter their upper limits

• Using a Lear Jet to plow a potato field

• The Zone of Incompetence vs The Zone competence vs the Zone of Excellence vs the Zone of Genius

• The questions you need to discover and live in your zone of genius

• Even the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies have blocks to their zones of genius

• “All of human beings problems come from an inability to sit in a room by ourselves doing nothing”

• Your zone of genius is a positive addiction - focused on actualizing your life’s purpose

• How to get out negative addictions like worrying and overeating

• The success mantra you can use to push yourself into your zone of genius every day

• And much more!

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This weeks episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Brilliant! Brilliant is math and science enrichment learning. Learn concepts by solving fascinating, challenging problems. Brilliant explores probability, computer science, machine learning, physics of the everyday, complex algebra, and much more. Dive into an addictive interactive experience enjoyed by over 4 million students, professionals, and enthusiasts around the world.

You can access courses online for free right now! however, Brilliant is offering The Science of Success Listeners 20% OFF THEIR FULL SUITE of classes and course simply go to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess in order to claim your discount and start learning these incredibly important skills today!

SUCCESS Live: Learn. Develop Achieve.  SUCCESS believes success is possible for every person who seeks it.  Find it at SUCCESS Live, a two-day event, open to the public, taking place in Long Beach, California on September 8th & 9th 2017. SUCCESS Live features some amazing guest speakers including Keith Ferrazzi, Peter Diamandis, Jocko Willink, and More

Ticket packages are still available to the public at https://www.successliveevent.com/! Don't miss the chance to learn the inner workings of your mind, reignite your passions, and become a better leader by becoming a better YOU! JOIN US, members of The Science of Success team at SUCCESS LIve by going to https://www.successliveevent.com/ today!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level by PhD Hendricks Gay

• [Book] The Corporate Mystic by Gay Hendricks

• [Book] Conscious Loving: The Journey to Co-Commitment by Gay Hendricks and Kathlyn Hendricks

• [Book] Conscious Loving Ever After: How to Create Thriving Relationships at Midlife and Beyond by Gay Hendricks and Kathlyn Hendricks

• [Book] Healing the Shame that Binds You by John Bradshaw

• [Article] Writing to heal By Bridget Murray

• [Personal site] The Hendricks Institute

• [Website] Foundation for Conscious Living

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success with your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:12.6] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performers tick with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode we discuss how you can fall into cycles of self-sabotage and constantly reset your happiness down to where you think it should be. Lessons learned from coaching over 20,000 people. How to crush upper limit problems and rake through the beliefs holding you back? The questions you need to discover and live in your zone of genius, and much more with Dr. Gay Hendricks. 

The Science of Success continues to grow with now more than a million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries, being nominated for the 2017 People’s Choice Podcast Awards and much more. I get listener comments and emails all the time asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all these incredible information?” 

A lot of her listeners are curious about how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge I get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to awesome podcasts, and more. Because of that, we’ve created an epic resource just for you. It’s a detailed guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything, and you can get it completely for free by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, it's a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything, and all you have to do to get it is to text the word “smarter”, that’s “smarter”, to the number 44222, or you can just join our email list at successpodcast.com. As bonus we send out exclusive weekly updates to all the listeners on our email list, so be sure to join. 

In a previous episode we looked at why your definition of success might be hurting you and how you can redefine it in a much healthier way. We examined the power in what some humility, talked about what it means to provide value and how to do it. We went deep into the power of listening, why it’s so important. We discussed three strategies you can use to become a better listener. We explored the concept of brilliance and how you can use it to unlock your own brilliance in 30 seconds and much more with Simon T. Bailey. 

If you want to unleash your inner brilliance, listen to that episode. Don’t forget, if you want to get all the incredible information in this episode, links, transcripts, all the notes for everything we talk about and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get them at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button at the top. 

[0:03:00.5] MB: You know how much I talk about the concept of mental models and how vital it is to build a toolkit of mental models in order to be successful and achieve your goals. That's why this week I'm super excited to tell you about one of our sponsors, brilliant.org. 

Brilliant is a math and science learning enrichment tool that makes mastering the fundamentals of math and science easy and fun. They’re offering a special promotion for Science of Success listeners, which you can get it at brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. 

Mastering the fundamentals of math and science is such an important component of building a toolkit of mental models, and Brilliant is a great way to get started with that. 

Another sponsor for this episode is the Success Live Summit, which as we hinted at is not actually the Science of Success, but Success Magazine puts on an awesome life summit and they’ve been kind enough to sponsor this episode as well as hook us up with some sweet guest speakers which will be coming on the show in the next couple of weeks. 

This summit is actually pretty awesome and I'm kind of bummed out that I'm not to get to go to have it. I have an immovable schedule conflicts, but my producer, Austin, who's here in the studio with me will be able to attend and he’s going to be there. 

[0:04:04.1] AF: Yeah, we’re super excited, and if anybody listening to this right now wants to meet up, shoot me an email, austin@successpodcast.com. We’d love to chat, shake hands, take pictures, it’d be awesome. I think it’s really important for people that are striving to become more successful, to become more fulfilled, looking into the science of success, to be around other people with those same goals. This time around, the event is two days. It’s in September 8th and 9th in Long Beach, California. There’s ticket packages available and they’ve got some amazing speakers, Matt. 

[0:04:29.5] MB: They really do. There’s people like some of my favorite authors, Keith Ferrazzi, Never Eat Alone, which is literally sitting on my desk right here. I constantly keep it in front of me because it’s probably the greatest book ever written about networking. They’ve got Peter Diamandis, incredible thinker and leader. People like Brendon Buchard, Mel Robbins, really phenomenal line up. 

[0:04:47.0] AF: Yeah. It’s going to be great, and they’re speaking on a ton of things, from success, how to become a leader, find balance in your life. If you’re a CEO of a company you really got to find time to recharge, time to hit the gas. Just finding balance and mental strategies to making yourself bigger and better and your business bigger and better. Really hitting on all cylinders here. It’s going to be a great, great event. 

[0:05:05.8] MB: You can learn more and get tickets at successliveevent.com. That’s successliveevent.com. Definitely check it out. If you’re in Long Beach, I would highly recommend checking it out, or if you’re looking for a really cool event, September 8th and 9th, Long Beach, California, successliveevent.com. You can find all the information you need. 

[0:05:25.1] AF: Success Live: Learn, Develop, Achieve. Go to successliveevent.com today to your ticket. 

[0:05:29.9] MB: Now, for the episode. 

[0:05:30.1] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show, Dr. Gay Hendricks. Gay is the president of the Hendricks Institute. He earned his Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Stanford and he taught at the University of Colorado for 21 years, has conducted seminars across the globe. He's also a multi-best-selling author having written more than 40 books and his work has been featured on CNN, CNBC, Oprah and much more. 

Gay, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:05:57.9] GH: Thanks, Mat. Really good to be with you. 

[0:05:59.8] MB: We’re so excited to have you on here today. For listeners who may not be familiar with you and all of the work that you've done, tell us a little about your story and, specifically, I love to hear about kind of one of the inflection points that changed your life early on. 

[0:06:16.1] GH: Yes. I was going one way in my life until I had a big encounter with destiny when I was 24 years old. What happened before that is I was born, I had a lot of medical problems growing up. I was very obese. There was something wrong with my glandular system and I was taken around lots of different experts, but I never could get the problem handled until when I was 24 years old. I had what you might call not an out-of-the-body experience, but it was definitely an out of Hendricks experience.

I was, at the time, in really toxic relationship and I didn’t like my job and I was 120 pounds overweight. I weigh about 180 pounds now. At that time, I weight a little over 300 pounds and I was smoking two or three packs of cigarettes a day. Things were just not going well in my life. 

One particular day I slipped on the ice. I was walking down a road in New England and I slipped on the ice and I kind of slammed down. I didn’t knock myself out, but as I say, I knocked myself out of my usual way of thinking and in that moment I laid there and I realized I could've died here because where I landed was about 6 inches from this real jagged rock on the side of the road and I was realizing I could've easily taken myself out really before I ever had a chance to have my own life. 

In that moment, I had a vision of what was possible that there was an element inside us, a pure consciousness that didn't have anything to do with our programming and that at any time we could begin to create an entirely different life by making entirely different choices. 

That was this moment of real aliveness this for me. Afterwards, I really clung to that moment and I started eating only foods that fed that new consciousness. I quit eating all the old foods that I ate and I lost more than 100 pounds within a year. Got rid of my tobacco addiction and got out of that relationship. I basically changed my whole life. It was a real pivot point for me. I’ve gone on to do lots of different things since then, but to look back over my whole life, that was a moment that really changed everything. 

At the time I didn't really know anything about relationships, how they worked or anything. I kind of just stumbled into them, but I started really paying attention to the dynamics of my relationships until finally I had obviously learned enough about relationships by 1980 that I met the love of my life, Kathlyn Hendricks, also known as Katie, and she and I have been together for the past 38 years. As a matter of fact, right now she's on a seminar tour of Europe teaching about the very same things I'm talking to you about right now. We’ve had this great discrete working relationship as well as love relationship for the past 38 years. 

All of the things that are in the Big Leap particularly, which is my most popular book especially in the coaching industry and among people who are interested in success, I really discovered those two main principles that are in the Big Leap which I'll talk more about shortly. But I really began to discover the elements of those in my close relationship with Katie. 

The two big ideas in the Big Leap are one that we have an upper limit problem of how much love and abundance and success we allow ourselves to have, and I was able to discover the underlying underpinnings of what causes the upper limit problem. The second thing that the Big Leap is about, is about how to occupy your zone of genius, and that part of yourself which is completely full of good ideas, it never has a shortage of good ideas, it’s completely in harmony with who you are as a person, that I think each of us has this largely undiscovered zone of genius inside us where that if we work it right we can uncover that zone of genius and begin to express it in the world. 

Katie and I for the past 38 years had been really committed to spreading those ideas throughout the world and our other books such as Conscious Loving, that was actually what the first got us on Oprah’s  show and other talk shows like that. 

Let me pause and catch my breath and let you ask me any questions you want to ask. 

[0:11:03.3] MB: I definitely want to dig into both the concept of upper limit problems and how we can get into our zone of genius. Before we do that, one of the things that you talked about in the book that I think is vitally important to understand is that — And even on the show broadly, is that when we talk about success, a lot of people are sort of preprogrammed to think that that necessarily means financial success or monetary success. I think there’s that you talked, there's a much bigger and broader picture to that. There's more facets to success. Can you can you elaborate on that? 

[0:11:37.4] GH: Yes. I’ve had the opportunity, for many years I did a lot of business coaching with the executives after my book, The Corporate Mystique, came out about 20 years or so ago. I did a lot of work with high-powered people in executive suites around the country and one thing I found is that unless you can have what I call success of the heart along with success of the wallet, it puts you out of balance and almost always causes misery that keeps you from enjoying your success. 

I was able to work with over the years one powerful executive after the other who had gone overboard in the direction of success in the financial realm but at the sacrifice of closing their heart to their own deeper needs and also not allowing as much love into their lives as they possibly could. 

For me, my definition of success has to do both with the expansion of our abundance, but also the expansion of the love and the creativity that we have flowing in our lives. When I would work with executives that were experiencing stress or troubled lives in various ways, it was almost never a shortage of business skills in the charts and graphs arena. What it was was a shortage of heart-centered communication skills. 

I’ll give you an example of that. I once worked with one of the top executives at a big well-known computer firm that everybody knows the name of and his problem wasn't that he didn't have enough business skills. He was one of the most awesome business people that I've ever seen, but his problem had to do with oftentimes he would blow his stack in communication and he would get angry at someone and then they would be scared of him. For him, his anger it would blow over in five minutes and he never thought about it again. For other people, he hadn’t considered the fallout from his anger. 

We have a moment in conversation with him where I was able to point out that his anger explosions were basically the underlying feeling was one of hurt or sadness or disappointment and he didn't know how to express that, so he would blow his stack instead. I showed him some simple ways to express hurt and anger and disappointment in appropriate businesslike way and it really changed the man's life. It really changed him from being basically what everybody described as a hot head to being a person who was able to communicate in a straightforward level about the emotions that were underneath his anger. 

If you think about it, that's an essential thing for any relationship whether it's a business relationship or a relationship at home, because if you're able to bring forth what's within you, what's within you will actually save you, will actually pave the way to your greater success, but if you don't bring forth what is within you, if you keep your feelings concealed inside and if you keep your genius concealed inside, then nothing works right in life. 

I compare it to a car. Let’s say you bought a new car and you drive out of the showroom and this actually happened to a friend of mine. Drove her new car out of the showroom, and because it was a little bit wider than her old car, the first corner she took she dinged the back wheel of the car. She hit the curve and dinged the back wheel and knocked the wheel out of alignment. Here she is with a brand-new car driving down the street and it’s got a shimmy in it because the back wheel is out of alignment. It only takes a tiny little bit of misalignment in ourselves to cause that off-center rattling sensation inside. What we do like in the book, The Big Leap, what I lay out is all the places that take us out of alignment and how to fix those so that you can have a nice smooth easy ride into your zone of genius. 

[0:16:20.3] MB: Let’s dig into that now. Let's start with upper limit problems. What does that mean and how do people experience upper limit problems? 

[0:16:29.9] GH: Yes, the upper limit problem. I began to notice that first in myself long before I wrote the book The Big Leap. People ask me how long sometimes it took me to write The Big Leap, and I said, “Well, it took me actually 30 years,” because from the moment I first started noticing the upper limit problem and the zone of genius, it took me a long time of working with people and myself on that before I finally in the early days of this century sat down and wrote the book. 

What I noticed was I would tend to sabotage myself when things were going well. At the time I had my girlfriend, I was a graduate students at Stanford at the time working in the counseling psychology department and I was getting my Ph.D. This goes back to the early 1970s. I would notice with my girlfriend at the time that we would get along well for a few days and then one of us would start an argument and then the other person would get into the argument and then sometimes it would take us a couple of weeks to get out of that cycle and back into a state of feeling harmony together. I barely begin to notice that we would often sabotage ourselves when things were going really good. 

On another occasion, at the time my daughter had just started for the first time a three-day sleep away camp. She was only five or six years old at the time and she was going to sleep overnight for the first time. I was a single parent at the time and so I never had a night where she spent a night out of my house. I was very nervous about it. 

I took her over to the camp and later on in the day I started getting images in my mind of her feeling alone and homesick and sitting by herself or something in a dining hall. I called the director of the camp who is this really lovely lady and I told her my concerns and I said, “Is Amanda okay?” The camp director, she said, “Yes. I can see her right now. She's out in the field here playing soccer with a bunch of the girls. That's what they are doing this hour.” The images in my mind were completely unreal. I had manufactured them myself out of my own fears about her and her well-being. 

What I realized was I was feeling really good right up until the moment I started manufacturing those images of her feeling lonely at camp, which turned out to be completely bogus. They had nothing to do with what she was actually feeling. I started wondering, “Hmm, I wonder if we have this human tendency to sabotage ourselves when things are feeling good or when things are going well.” I began to pay attention to that and I begin to work with it in my clients and that's how the original discoveries were made about the upper limit problem. 

Now, where I made my biggest breakthroughs was where I started seeing that the upper limit problem was based on certain fears that human beings carry around inside ourselves, and so I began to look at what those fears were. One of the biggest ones interestingly enough in helping people, in helping guide people toward success as I've done over the years, is to realize that a lot of us have a fear of outshining other people. 

What you can sometimes see in the psychological literature is the fear of outdoing someone, and I call it the fear of outshining, because it does have to do with our choice whether to really let ourselves shine or to keep ourselves a little bit hidden and concealed. 

When I looked into it and started reading the scientific literature that had to do with early childhood, I often found that successful people were often still concealing an element of their genius inside and still upper limiting themselves by that fear of outshining. That wasn't the only fear though. I noticed that in some of my clients that they also had a fear of — That there was something fundamentally wrong with themselves. We call it fundamentally flawed. That a lot of people think they've done something wrong in life that they have to apologize for, or that they feel some kind of shame about something that happened a long time ago. 

That a lot of people carry around this feeling that there's something fundamentally wrong with them and they never address that fully so that they can allow themselves to fully shine. As I started working with the upper limit problem, Matt, I realized that it’s really rooted in fear and that unless we can come to terms with our fundamental fears in life we don't have really a good hope of actualizing our full potential. 

I always say to my students — I’ve trained trade about a thousand of so coaches over the years to do our work through the Hendricks Institute. Not only that, but I trained about 1,200 counselors and therapists when I was teaching at the University of Colorado for 21 years in the counseling psychology program. I always say that in order to be a success as a coach you really need to open the door to exploring lovingly your own fears and limitations, because you can only take your clients as far as you've gone yourself. To really go to the full element of success, I’ve really needed to get underneath a lot of my old fears about myself. 

I have one other story. Do I have time to tell another story about financial success? 

[0:22:42.3] MB: Absolutely. Yeah, we love stories. 

[0:22:44.7] GH: Okay. Good. Let me take you back to the early days of my relationship with Katie, which was in the early 1980s. I met her in 1980. We've been together for a year or two and we weren't doing well financially. I was broke when I met her because I've just taken six month sabbatical to travel around and learn new things in different settings. I'd taken half a year off from my university position. I was pretty much flat broke. In fact, I was underneath flat broke. I owed American Express $800 and they had just repossessed my card. I was really in the hole. 

Katie had $300 in savings and an old Mustang. That was for her dowry when we got together. Anyway, we didn’t have a lot of good financial prospects, but we had started developing an idea that, “Wow! If we could somehow get out from under our old programming that maybe we might be able to create something brand-new.” 

One night, it was winter in Colorado, and I couldn't go outside and exercise, so I was pedaling furiously on my exercise bike and suddenly I had a realization that through my mind was running a series of thoughts that said, “I wonder if we've got enough money to make it through to the end of the month?” That's what I was obsessing on. Do we have enough money? I was kind of adding up things in my mind, but I was pedaling along on my exercise bike and suddenly I realized that's the exact same conversation I heard around me all the time growing up, was people saying, “Oh my God! Are we going to have enough to make it through to the end of the month?” 

It occurred to me as I was on my exercise bike, “Did I just take that on as my overall programming for life, how life had to be, that I always had to worry about making it through to the end of the month?” I jumped off my exercise bike and I ran and I talked to Katie and I shared this realization with her and I said, “What if we — Instead of running off of our old programming, what if we sat down and figured out exactly what we want to create and where we want to go and what we want to have in our lives and that would take us out of our old programming?” It was kind of similar to what I've done to lose all the weight, but I'd never thought of doing it really in my financial or abundance or success area. 

We went out to lunch and had a salad at this place, and ironically the name of the restaurant we went to, Matt, was called Poor Richards in Colorado Springs, Colorado. That restaurant might even still be there for all I know, but I thought it was ironic that we did our success planning in a restaurant called Poor Richard. 

We sat down and we had a salad and plotted out how we wanted our future to be. Listen to what we came up with. We said we want enough so that we never have to worry about money. Then we realize, “Wait a minute. Why did we use the word enough?” because it had that idea of having just enough so that we didn't have to worry. We changed that word to we always have plenty of money so that we never have to think about money when we consider buying something. That was the basic idea that we started out with, that we always have plenty of money to do whatever we want to do so. 

We started writing down that idea and actually posting in different places. Then we came up with a practical thing, and this will tell you exactly how long ago this was. We came up with this outrageously expanded idea. We said, “What if we had a thousand dollars saved up in a savings account and we never touched that? We always had at least that $1,000 and we just agreed never to touch that for basic needs?” This was this outrageous idea. We said, “Wow! Is that even possible?” 

Interestingly enough it only took us — Gosh! A matter of months to create that once we got our attention on it and then we set this really outrageous goal, “Wouldn’t it be great if we had $10,000 dollars that we just had in an account and we never touched it.” 

Then it took us, I think, a couple of years to manifest that, but then we set it one notch higher, “Let’s create $100,000 that we never touched.” Anyway, we started our whole investment portfolio based on those kinds of ideas, and so by the time we had been at this for a couple of years we had created a significant amount of wealth simply by keeping focused on those core ideas. We really never — We founded the Hendricks Institute in 1989 as I was kind of winding down my university career. After we were on Oprah a couple of times and that kind of thing, I felt guilty about doing all the traveling we were doing and I felt guilty about that I wasn't doing my university a full hundred percent job. I wound down my career there and we set up the Hendricks Institute. We’ve never really had a bad year. We’ve gone through every recession and everything like that in a steady upward track. 

I really feel solidly committed to teaching these principles because I know for a fact that they work at home here for me and my family and people that I've worked with. so that gives me a sense of real solidarity about that when I stand up in front of a group and talk about these things, that I can say definitely that I've used them myself to create the kind of magic I wanted in my own life. 

[0:28:47.4] MB: You touched on guilt a second ago, which makes me think about some of the other features that can often underpin an upper limit problem, specifically the idea of either abandoning people or sort of moving beyond what peoples expectation of you are. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

[0:29:07.5] GH: Yes. One of the big fears that successful people have, even people who are already successful but are not yet at their full measure of success. One of the big fears is that if I go to my full measure of success, if I go to my full level of success, that will mean I will have to leave behind or be disloyal to people that I love and care about. They’ll think bad thoughts about me because I've gone to another level of success. 

Many of us grew up in a family where success wasn't something that happened very often. I think I told a story in The Big Leap about when I wrote my first book and published it in 1975, which was a small book about education. I'd written it because I thought that like when my daughter was in the first grade and the 2nd grade, I thought they wasted a lot of their time just trying to get kids organize, and so I created this whole new curriculum of relaxation exercises and things that would help kids kind of get centered and focused and would help them get centered before tests and that kind of thing. I was able to create this curriculum. Prentice Hall ended up publishing it as a book. 

I remember, nobody in my family ever published a book before and I remember when I took the book and showed it to my brother and my mother they both just kind of looked at it and resumed their conversation. Neither one of them either said congratulations or wow or that's cool or anything like. I remember being kind of flabbergasted by that. Later on I realized that nobody had ever done anything like that and so they didn’t have a way to think about it and so it probably touched on buttons for them that I was getting too big for my britches or something like that and they needed to cut me back down the size. My family was kind of like that. It is that people would always — If you were going around feeling happy, somebody would say, “Okay. Don't worry. Something bad is about to happen,” and I think that's where the upper limit problem gets its origin in that kind of early programing. 

[0:31:25.1] MB: One of the biggest things that I’m a huge fan of on the show are mental models. You’ve heard me talk a lot about mental models and how critically important it is if you want to be successful to build a toolkit of mental models that can help you better understand reality. 

One of the topics and many of the topics actually that are critical to developing an amazing and rich toolkit of mental models is a deep understanding of mathematics, science, physics, chemistry, etc. The hard sciences are some of the backbones of the most useful and effective mental model toolkits, and that's why I'm super excited to announce that our sponsor for this episode is brilliant.org. 

Brilliant.org is a math and science enrichment learning website where you can learn concepts by actually solving fascinating and challenging problems. I'm really, really excited about this, because I'm a huge fan of STEM learning; science, technology, engineering and math, and I think that it’s something that America in general needs to do a better job of and it's something that I really want you, the listeners, to be improving and getting these skills and getting better at things like science and math. 

Too many people in our society have lost the ability to quantitatively understand reality, and the mental models from a hard sciences are some of the most powerful in describing what happens in the real world. I personally am super psyched about Brilliant. The courses on there are amazing, and I'm going to through and take a bunch of them to re-up my understanding of things like probability, games of chance, problem-solving and they even have some really cool stuff, things like machine learning. 

Right now brilliant.org is offering our listeners an additional 20% off of their premium plan. This discount is only for Science of Success listeners and you can unlock it by going to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. That’s brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. You can sign up using our custom link and then you’ll get the 20% premium membership which comes with all of their courses and you can use this to learn about probability. You can increase your mathematics abilities. You can learn more about the hard sciences, like physics and chemistry. If you want to build a toolkit of powerful mental models, I cannot recommend enough using something like brilliant.org to improve your quantitative understanding of the world and how it works. Again, you can go to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess to get this 20% discount.

That’s something that that's one of the reasons I love Big Leap and that particular fear really resonated with me and I feel like I'm naturally very analytical person, very — I don’t want to say pessimistic, but my mind naturally thinks about, “Okay. What can go wrong? how can things go wrong?” That fear of, “Oh! Things are going well. Something bad has to happen now or something bad is looming around the corner,” is really been something that I've dealt within my own life and had cropped up again and again. How do we battle that fear or how do we break down the underpinnings of it? 

[0:34:18.7] GH: Yes. That’s really a good one for me to talk about, Matt, because I have exactly that same issue and I’ve turned it into something that I think is very useful. What happens is when I get in a situation, like my daughter, for example, is in the midst of — Now, this is not the six-year-old version of my daughter. This is now forty years later, but she’s in the process of buying a house boat up in the Bay Area to fix it up plans to live on it for several days of the week, which is what’s allowed in her particular marina. 

Immediately, as soon as she said it, I started thinking of all the possible things that could go wrong. Now, that's a useful thing in a way if you don't turn it into an obsessive thing. I just wrote those things down and asked her if we could talk about those and has she considered those. That's a useful use of that particular way of thinking, but what's not useful is if we don't do anything about it. 

I think a lot of the things that trouble us wouldn't be troubling to us if we just took some action about it. For example, if you go around all day obsessing about some friend that said something to you that you didn't like, that's a 10 second problem. It takes 10 seconds to pick up the phone and call your friend and say, “Hey, I’d like to talk over something with you.” 

See, most of the things that I discovered were problems in relationships. Some of them are 10-second problems but none of them are bigger than 10-minute problems, because the 10-minute problem is the problem where you can get two people together and say, “Hey, I was angry about this. I'm scared about this. I'm sad about this. I was hurt by this.” When two people can talk at that kind of raw level of honesty, I've never seen a problem yet that couldn’t be cleared up in 10 minutes of communication like that. 

Sometimes — Gosh! I’ve had couples in here. I'm remembering one that’s coming to mind right now. Very successful couple but they fought constantly. Didn’t enjoy their wealth because they were always fighting, and when I really worked with them, when Katie and I worked with them for an hour, we realized in that first hour that they've been having essentially the same argument for the whole 30 years that they've been together. It always went the same way. One of them would conceal some feeling, like I'm angry at you or I was hurt by something you said or I'm scared about something we’re doing. 

One of them would conceal that, usually anger, and then they would start criticizing the other person. Then the other person would start criticizing them back and they would get into a cycle of blame and criticism. That's why Katie and I and both our original book, Conscious Loving and our more recent book for midlife couples called Conscious Loving Ever After, we have a whole chapter on how to end blame and criticism in close relationships. We show you, we pick apart blame and criticism and show you the quick fix for it. 

The quick fix is to get underneath the blame and own whatever it is that you're afraid of and talk about it on that level rather than continuing to criticize and blame the other person. When two people can talk about their fears openly and honestly, they stop blaming and criticizing each other. That's important because when people leave relationships and they ask them, “Why did you leave this relationship?” One of the things they almost always say is, “I got sick and tired of all the blame and criticism. I figured if I was going to get blamed and criticized I might as well go ahead and move out and letter him or her blame and criticize me 24 hours a day.” 

The same thing works in business. When I was doing business consulting I ended up spending a lot of my time helping people fix broken relationships that it happened as a result of some kind communication glitch. Again, Matt, I haven’t found one yet that couldn't be completely healed up and cleared up and set on the right track in 10 minutes of clear communication. It’s trying to get those 10 minutes put together though that sometimes takes hours or years. 

[0:38:48.8] MB: On the concept of criticism, another topic that you dig into a little bit in Big Leap that really resonated with me was also the underpinning of that and the idea of self-criticism. My natural state again is kind of being very hard on myself, very critical, and you talked about how to deal with that. Can you elaborate on that? 

[0:39:08.5] GH: Yes. Again, that’s another one that I’ve worked on a lot personally in addition to — I’ve worked with about I think a little over 20,000 individuals now. Frankly, I haven't found very many of those that didn't have that self-critical function. We’ll do a couple of things. First of all realize that self-criticism and criticizing other people both come out of the same toothpaste tube, and the toothpaste tube it comes out of is something that you're afraid of in yourself or something you're afraid to communicate to someone else. So I needed to get underneath that whole issue and find out what is it that I'm basically afraid of? 

In my own case, I don't know if this is true for you or others that you’ve worked with, but in my own case I grew up with a lot of kind of shame-based parenting. In other words you should be ashamed of yourself for that or whatever possessed, what family are you from? Anyway, the idea of shaming people was very important at least in this section of the world I grew up in and many families have that function built into it. We need to look underneath that. 

Like my old friend and colleague, John Bradshaw, says in his famous book Healing The Shame That Binds You, we need to look and find out what the original shaming was of, because it usually didn't start with us. You look at what was my family ashamed of and what did people shame each other for? 

If you look into some of those original kinds of programming things, you will see where many of us got that sense of feeling bad about ourselves. If you look into even early religious scriptures, whether it's in the Hindu religion or Christian or Jewish or Buddhist or wherever you look, the first line of Buddha's Four Noble Truths says life is suffering. 

Well, I always had trouble with that because that's one element of life, but why are we suffering? Well, we’re suffering because we're not honest in our relationships. We’re not honest with ourselves. The moment we start being honest with ourselves and honest in our relationships, life stops being purely about suffering. It begins to be about the possibilities of success, the possibilities of having more love in our lives. 

What we need to do when we notice these limitations in ourselves is begin an openhearted, open-minded inquiry down deep into ourselves into our own hearts and minds and find out what it is that we really want and what it is we’re really here to do and what it is we're really here to contribute. 

In the Big Leap I print out what I call sometimes my universal success mantra or my ultimate success mantra, which is the idea that I expand in love and abundance and creativity and success every day myself as I inspire other people to expand in love and abundance and success and creativity. 

The idea is that I want to have my life be about a constant expansion of the things that are dearest to me and I think are dearest to all of human beings, which is increasing the amount of love in our lives, increasing the amount of abundance in our lives, increasing the amount of success and increasing the amount of creativity, because without that spark of creativity in our lives, life doesn't have the juiciness that I like my life to have. 

Also, Matt, I think it's important especially for many of us that are in the line of work that you and I are in and many of the people who are listening are in which is the business of helping people an themselves be more effective in their work and being more effective as leaders and being more effective in creating abundance for their families. We need to realize that it's not just a process of opening up more to yourself. It’s inspiring other people by your actions, because I found that life is really only at its best when I'm not only expanding my own love, abundance and creativity, but also inspiring other people to open up more to theirs every day. I feel very blessed because 30 or 40 years ago I created a job that I would never want to retire from. As you can probably hear, I’m just as excited about it now at age 72 as I was age at 32 when I began to first catch on to some of these ideas. It gives me a great deal of pleasure to be able to talk about them in a way that helps people learn more about how to make more of their lives a daily miracle for themselves. 

[0:44:24.9] MB: I want to go back a little bit and explore one of the concept you talked about at the beginning of the Big Leap, which is the idea of sort of a happiness thermostat and that we have a setting that's been programmed into us one way or another about how happy we think we’re allowed to be and how we naturally sort of push ourselves or subconsciously reset ourselves back to that level. 

[0:44:48.3] GH: Yes. Think of the upper limit problem as kind of like the governor on a car. Let's say you had a governor installed on your car that wouldn’t let you go beyond 40 miles an hour and that every time you came up to 40 miles an hour it would slow you back down again. That's exactly how the upper limit problem works. 

I tell the story in the Big Leap about a man who was in the real estate business and he’d never made more than $200,000 a year and he said that every time he had gotten up to $200,000 a year he found some way to sabotage himself. We talked about that and so I asked one of the questions that all good coaches and therapists ask is; how is this problem familiar? Have you ever known anybody else that had a similar problem? 

It had never dawned on him, but he said, “Oh! My dad's in real estate and he's never made more than $200,000 a year,” and so it became obvious that it was a fear of outshining. That if he made more than $200,000 a year that it would somehow mean that he was going beyond his dad and his dad would feel bad about that. 

When we work together I was able to help him reframe it by saying, “Maybe instead of that, it'll inspire your dad. That he’ll feel proud of you or maybe it will inspire him to make $300,000, but it doesn't really have anything to do with you. Your job is to shine in your life the way you want to shine not in reference to other people.” 

It was interesting, I think I told the end of the story in the Big Leap where I didn't see him again for a while and then one day I happened to bump into him or see him across the crowd at a July 4th parade and he kind of gave me a high five and he shouted across, “It worked!” Meaning that he broke through the $200,000 mark. 

I love stories like that, because what it tells us is that — And what I deeply believe is that human beings really have no idea about what our full potential can be once we start overcoming our upper limit problem. The way I talk about it in the Big Leap, I said it’s like we’re born with the Learjet, but we use the Learjet to plow potato fields with. We taxied back and forth across the potato field and use it for that purpose rather than soaring. What I want us to do is get ourselves studying the upper limit problem in yourself so you can begin to notice it. Unwinding those fears it’s based on and letting your genius flow 24/7. 

[0:47:32.4] MB: There's there so many topics I want to get into and I know we don’t have a ton of more time, but tell me a little bit — We haven't dug into yet, what is the zone of genius and what are the other zones of competence and excellence, etc., and how can they prevent us from getting to our zone of genius? 

[0:47:48.5] GH: Yes. If you look about what you do, look at what you do every day on a daily basis, you'll notice that it falls into one of four zones. One is you’re doing things you're not good at doing, but you persistent in doing them anyway. I call that the zone of incompetence. The zone of competence is when you're doing things that your good at but somebody else could do just as well. 

The zone of excellence is where you're doing things that your excellent at, you’re better at them than other people, but it doesn't represent who you are at your most expanded. I call that the zone of genius. When you're functioning in your zone genius, you're doing what you love to do and you're doing it in such a way that it creates the maximum amount of abundance and satisfaction for you. 

The zone of genius is when you're in the groove of what you love to do and you're in the groove of doing those things that create satisfaction and abundance for you and your family and your business. That's really the zone of genius. Some good ways to find out that zone of genius, the first big question is to start asking yourself, “What do I most love to do and how can I set up my life so I do more of that every day?” 

I start people with 10 minutes a day. I have them identify their zone of genius, like when I’m coaching executives here in my office or when I'm out teaching seminars or on television. I ask people to start first with 10 minutes a day. That's all you need to start with. Find a way to put 10 minutes on the calendar today of sitting in a room by yourself usually doing something that's related to your zone of genius. Maybe you don't know what your zone of genius is, but if you go in a room for 10 minutes and just write the question a dozen times, “What is my zone of genius?” “What do I most love to do?” I lay out those questions in the Big Leap. If you just take those question in a room by yourself and write them down or say them out loud or record them into your phone, but just the active inquiry into what your zone of genius is gets the process started. 

[0:50:11.7] MB: That's something that I thought personally it seems really simple and easy to figure out, “Okay, what do I love doing? What am I good at doing or what am I great at doing?” But I feel like there’s some — I think a lot listeners will hear that and say, “ That sounds great and all, but it's got to be more complicated than that.” How do I tie my zone of genius into making money or does it have to be within just my job or can it be something completely different? All of these sort of various different questions. I’m curious, how do you sort of answer somebody who is concerned for something like that? 

[0:50:47.2] GH: Yes. Well, I’ve worked with that extensively, because believe it or not I work with CEOs of big companies that everybody had heard of and when I opened up the subject with them even if they have blocks to their zone of genius. I can remember one conversation it's coming to mind right now where all I was trying to do was get this executives to carve out 10 minutes a day to go in a room by himself and just sit and think. Because here's what he told me, he said very wistfully one day, “You know, in the beginning I could just sit and think and figure things out. Now, I never have chance to do that. I'm always responding to other things.” 

What I do is I get very practical. I help the person get out their calendar and I say, “Okay. Today, from 1:15 to 1:25 I want you to close out the world and just go in a room and sit and think.” You wouldn't believe how much resistance. He said, “Oh! No. I can’t. I just don’t have time to do that kind of stuff anymore,” but we did it. We blocked out 10 minutes, and I sat there with him and all we did was breathe together. It changed that guy’s work life, because he was able to see that he would be able on a daily basis to commit at least 10 minutes to his zone of genius. Well, pretty soon he got to doing more and more of that. It was no longer satisfying to do it just 10 minutes. You have to start somewhere. 

There's a great quote from the philosopher Blaise Pascal several hundred years ago. He said, “All of human beings problems come from an inability to sit in a room by ourselves for 10 minutes doing nothing.” I started with a 10-minute rule that I ask people to go in a room and just do nothing but think about their genius for 10 minutes. It's harder than you think, but you can't really argue with it until after you've done it. My suggestion is if anybody argues with it, just go-ahead and sit down and do it. All you’ve got is 10 minutes to lose and you’ll be blown away by what happens. I'm thinking also too of — There have been a number of studies, like there's a psychologist named James Pennebaker who did a famous study where all he did was ask a group of college sophomores to sit down for 15 minutes now and then four times a week and just write down what was going on in their life and the various stresses they were having and what issues and stuff like that, to just journal about those things for 15 minutes four times a week. Then he followed up those people and he found that over the next year they had significantly fewer visits to the doctor, to the health center, that kind of thing. 

Just think. In an hour a week, you can change your health of doing nothing except drilling. Imagine what you could do if you committed your first 10 minutes a day, an hour a week in other words to focusing on your zone of genius. Next week you might want to do an hour and a half the week after that. That's how I started. When I first started these I realized that I was spending 90% of my time not in my zone of genius, not doing what I love to do. I just started increasing and I set the goal first of having 50% of my time in my zone of genius. That took me a few years to accomplish, but that was 20 years ago. I worked up from there. 

Now, basically, I spend all my time in my zone of genius and some of my time getting around from place to place and sleeping and eating and that kind of thing, but the rest of my life is all structured around my zone genius. 

[0:54:42.4] MB: What about someone who maybe has multiple unique abilities or zones of genius. Is it possible to have — Does the zone of genius very tight and confined or can it be lots of different things that sort of flow together? 

[0:54:57.4] GH: I think it’s very likely to be lots of things that float together. Our great American poet, Walt Whitman said, “I am large and contain multitudes,” and so if we think of ourselves that way, we have a multitude within us, I think that if you really boil it down though you'll find that there is something really essential at the heart of your zone of genius. 

I was working with a group of advanced students who were here last week that my wife and I were working with that come to work with us a few times a year, here at our place in Southern California. I was working with them on this concept and one of the things that all of them had discovered as they began to work more in their zone of genius is that it's a positive addiction. You want to do more. Once you start locking in on your zone genius it has a natural positive ability to want you to do it more and more, and that's a good thing because what we want to do is get out from under our negative addiction, such as to worry and bad habits and drinking too much and eating too much and smoking too much and watching too much TV, all the things that human beings to do to distract themselves from their life purpose. What we need to do is get ourselves focused on actualizing our life purpose and develop positive addictions that feed that kind of lifestyle. 

For example, for me, I started working out five or six years ago doing resistance training three days a week. If you'd ask me 10 years ago if I’d ever spent time in a gym with a trainer, I would laugh in your face because I hated stuff like that. I’m a golfer and a bicyclist. The idea of going into a gym and pumping iron for an hour seem like a really retrograde. 

Five or six years ago I discovered how much that feeds my genius. The more I increase the liveliness in my muscles and I’ve really restructured my body for being a kind of pear-shaped fat intellectual look 40 years ago to, now — I have essentially the same physique. I weigh about the same and look about the same as Tiger Woods, one of my golf heroes. That was my goal was to look like Tiger Woods by the time I was 70 years old. By doing a lot of working out I’ve kind of adopted the Tiger stereotype physique rather than the intellectual pear-shaped physique. 

[0:57:33.8] MB: For somebody who's was listening to this interview that wants to start concretely implementing some of these ideas in their lives, what's one kind of piece of homework that you would give them as a starting point? 

[0:57:45.0] GH: Get hold of the arm universal or ultimate success mantra that’s in the Big Leap and go in a room by yourself for 10 minutes and do nothing, but say that mantra, that affirmation over and over again in your mind. Just get comfortable with this idea of using your life to expand every day in your love, your abundance, your creativity, your success at the same time as you inspire others by your actions to do the same. Just start with that fundamental idea and get comfortable with having your life be about that. That’s probably the simplest thing you can do to get started. 

[0:58:29.9] MB: For listeners who want to find out more about you, who want to find your books and resources online, where can they do that? 

[0:58:36.9] GH: Probably the easiest places to go to hendricks.com. That’s Hendricks.com, and we also have the foundation for conscious living, that’s our nonprofit foundation. That’s at foundationforconsciousliving.com. But probablyhendricks.com is the jumping off place for all that kind of thing because there you can see excerpts from interviews with us and get different techniques and things like that that are the main areas of interest that we’re in. 

[0:59:05.4] MB: Gay, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all these incredible wisdom. Big Leap is a book that really resonated with me and one that that spoke to a lot of the struggles and challenges that I faced in my life. Thank you so much for being a guest. 

[0:59:20.6] GH: My pleasure, Matt. Thanks a lot for the good conversation. 

[0:59:25.3] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. Your support is what drives us and keeps us creating great new content, adding value to the world and interviewing amazing guests every single week. 

The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe brings us joy in fuels our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's matt@successpodcast.com. 

I would love to hear from you and I read and respond personally to every single listener email. The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps us in the algorithm and gets more and more people discovering the Science of Success. 

I get a ton of listeners asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all these information?” Because of that, we’ve created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. You can get it by texting the word “smarter”, that’s “smarter” to the number 44222, or you can just go to successpodcast.com, that’s successpodcast.com and joining our email list. 

Don’t forget, if you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we just talked about in the show and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. Just go to successpodcast.com and hit the show notes button at the top. 

Thanks again and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

How You Can Come Alive And Unleash Your Brilliance with Simon T. Bailey

In this episode we look at why your definition of success might be hurting you - and how you can redefine it in a much healthier way, examine the power of intellectual humility, talk about what it means to provide value and how to do it, we go deep into the power of listening, why its so important, and discuss 3 strategies you can use to become a better listener, we explore the concept of brilliance as well as how you can unlock your own brilliance in 30 seconds, and much more with Simon T. Bailey.

Simon T. Bailey is the CEO of Simon T. Bailey International an education company that specializes in creating learning and development content for individuals and organizations. Simon is a hall of fame keynote speaker and is one of the top 10 most booked corporate speakers on Leadership, Change, and Customer Experience and will be the emcee at the upcoming SUCCESS Live Event in September!

• Why your definition of success might be hurting you - and how you can redefine it in a much healthier way.

• Why success is about others and not just yourself

• Intellectual humility and why it’s so important

• Questions to put yourself on the path towards true success:

• What would I do if I knew that I couldn't fail?

  1. What would I do if no one paid me to do it?

  2. What makes me come alive?

• Don't ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive - the world needs people who come alive

• When you stop chasing money, money will chase you.

• How to create an “exit strategy” to test your ideas and pursue your dreams

• Can (and should) you quit your job and play videos games all day?

• We are now in a recommendation economy - people will tell other people if you are excellent

• What it means to provide value to the world and how you can do it:

• Going above and beyond, exceeding expectations, doing more than people expect of you

  1. Listen and discover ways to exceed expectations

• Meta Listening and why you should often slow down in order to speed up

• Hearing is a courtesy, listening is a compliment

• The 3 levels of listening & Why listening shows the person that they matter

• Why it’s not good to “need to be the smartest person in the room”

• Why needing to prove something can be one of your greatest mistakes

• People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care

• How to practice intellectual humility

• Release the need to be right

  1. Understand the power of diversity of opinion & perspective

  2. Find someone who is willing to say no and challenge your ideas

• How to step outside your comfort zone and seek disconfirming opinions

• 3 Exercises you can use to step outside your comfort zone

• Simon’s strategy for reaching 1 billion people around the globe

• Brilliance - what it is, why its important - and what Harvard research says about it

• How society has eroded our innate brilliance

• Within the next decade millions of knowledge worker jobs will be eliminated due to automation

• How you can unlock your own brilliance in 30 seconds

• There will never be a perfect time for you to do it, just do it

• The concept of emotional congruence

• Language is the software of the mind - your words carry energy and create worlds

• How to rehearse the future in the present

• "15-7-30-90"

• You decide your habits, and your habits decide your future

• Answer the question “WHY AM I HERE?”

• Do you have a 20 year strategic life plan?

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This weeks episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Brilliant! Brilliant is math and science enrichment learning. Learn concepts by solving fascinating, challenging problems. Brilliant explores probability, computer science, machine learning, physics of the everyday, complex algebra, and much more. Dive into an addictive interactive experience enjoyed by over 4 million students, professionals, and enthusiasts around the world.

You can access courses online for free right now! however, Brilliant is offering The Science of Success Listeners 20% OFF THEIR FULL SUITE of classes and course simply go to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess in order to claim your discount and start learning these incredibly important skills today!

SUCCESS Live: Learn. Develop Achieve.  SUCCESS believes success is possible for every person who seeks it.  Find it at SUCCESS Live, a two-day event, open to the public, taking place in Long Beach, California on September 8th & 9th 2017. SUCCESS Live features some amazing guest speakers including Keith Ferrazzi, Peter Diamandis, Jocko Willink, and More

Ticket packages are still available to the public at https://www.successliveevent.com/! Don't miss the chance to learn the inner workings of your mind, reignite your passions, and become a better leader by becoming a better YOU! JOIN US, members of The Science of Success team at SUCCESS LIve by going to https://www.successliveevent.com/ today!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] Release Your Brilliance by Simon T. Bailey

• [Book] Shift Your Brilliance: Harness The Power Of You, INC. by Simon T. Bailey

• [Book] Brilliant Living: 31 Insights to Creating an Awesome Life by Simon T. Bailey

• [Book] Wild at Heart Revised and Updated: Discovering the Secret of a Man's Soul by John Eldredge

• [Book] Living a Life that Matters by Harold S. Kushner

• [Personal Site] Simon T Bailey

• [Publication Listing] Christian Mirescu - Publications

• [PDF Article] Sleep deprivation inhibits adult neurogenesis in the hippocampus by elevating glucocorticoids by Christian Mirescu, Jennifer D. Peters, Liron Noiman, and Elizabeth Gould

• [Report] Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy By James Manyika, Michael Chui, Jacques Bughin, Richard Dobbs, Peter Bisson, and Alex Marrs

• [Press Release] Intentsoft - “McKinsey on Automation of Knowledge Work”

• [SoS Episode] Discover Your Hidden Emotional Insights & What’s Truly Valuable To You with Dr. Susan David

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success with your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:12.6] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performers tick with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode we look at why your definition of success might be hurting you and how you can redefine it in a much healthier way. We examine the power of intellectual humility, talk about what it means to provide value and how to do it. We go deep into the power of listening, why it’s so important and discuss three strategies you can use to become a better listener. We explored the concept of brilliance as well as how you can unlock your own brilliance in 30 seconds, and much more with Simon T. Bailey.

The Science of Success continues to grow with now more than a million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries, hitting number one New and Noteworthy and more. I get listener comments and emails all the time asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all these incredible information?” 

A lot of her listeners are curious about how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge I get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to awesome podcasts, and more. Because of that, we’ve created an epic resource just for you, a detailed guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything, and you can get it completely for free by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, it's a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything, and all you have to do to get it is to text the word “smarter”, that’s “smarter”, to the number 44222, or visit successpodcast.com. That’s successpodcast.com and join our email list.

In our previous episode we asked what really produces success by looking at what separates truly successful people from the rest. We examined many common and conflicting success maxims and looked at what the data actually says really works. We went deep into the vital importance of knowing yourself and your own strengths. Looked at the power of aligning your work with your environment and discuss the dangers of constantly over committing your time, with Eric Barker. 

If you want to know the science of what really makes you successful, listen to that episode. Don't forget, if you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we talked about in this episode and much more, be sure to check out or show notes. Just go to successpodcast.com and hit the show notes button at the top. You know how much I talk about the concept of mental models and how vital it is to build a toolkit of mental models in order to be successful and achieve your goals. That's why this week I'm super excited to tell you about one of our sponsors, brilliant.org. 

Brilliant is a math and science enrichment learning tool that makes mastering the fundamentals of math and science easy and fun. They’re offering a special promotion for Science of Success listeners, which you can get it at brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. Mastering the fundamentals of math and science is such an important component of building to toolkit of mental models, and Brilliant is a great way to get started with that. 

[0:03:12.6] MB: Hey everyone, I've got Austin with me again to talk about our sponsor for this episode, The Success Live Summit, and Austin is actually going. Any Science of Success listeners that go to the event can meet up with him in person, which should be really awesome. 

[0:03:27.4] A: Yeah, absolutely. We’ll be there. My email is austin@successpodcast.com. If you’re going, drop me a line. We’d love to meet. I think, largely in pursuing success, a big part of that is surrounding yourself by other people that are also striving to the level of success you are and there’s no better time to do that than at events like this, especially at Success Live. 

Now, they held one earlier this year in April and it was in Dallas, Texas. It was a great success, but this time they’re extending it over the course of two days. The event is going to be September 8th and 9th in Long Beach, California and it’s open to the public. There’s some really, really amazing speaker, thought leaders, and experts coming in; Brendon Burchard, Peter Diamandis, Keith Ferrazzi.

[0:04:03.5] MB: Yeah, there’s a great crew coming including friend of the show, Simon T. Bailey. 

[0:04:08.8] A: You didn’t see him. 

[0:04:09.7] MB: Yes, and I am devastated. I was planning on going and I have an immovable schedule conflict, so I can’t make it, but I think it’s going to be an awesome event. Like I said, Austin and another member of the Science of Success team are going to be there in person. I would definitely recommend checking it out if it sound like something you’re interested. You can find out all the information at successlieveevent.com. Again, this is successliveevent.com. You can find everything you need to know. You can find all the ticket packages. You can find the dates. You can find everything. The event is in Long Beach, California, September 8th and 9th and it’s the Success Live Event. 

[0:04:42.3] A: It’s going to be great. Some of these thought leaders, these are big names in their industry, going through these like leader strategies, building mental models, building your business and just kind of finding balance as you pursue excellence, which is becoming a better leader and a more success individual in general. Definitely recommend checking it out, successliveevent.com. Get your ticket today.

[0:04:59.1] MB: And now to the show. 

[0:05:00.1] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest of the show, Simon T. Bailey. Simon is the CEO of Simon T. Bailey International, an education company that specializes in creating, learning and development content for individuals and organizations. Simon is a Hall of Fame keynote speaker and is one of the top 10 most booked corporate leadership on leadership, change and customer experience, and he will be emceeing the upcoming Success Live Summit in September. 

Simon, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:05:28.2] SB: Hey, good to be with you. Thank you for having me, Matt. 

[0:05:30.9] MB: Thanks so much for going on here and sharing all of your knowledge. Tell me a little bit, I’d like to start out with what is success mean to you. 

[0:05:40.8] SB: Success is really understanding how do I make a contribution to society every day, every way, everywhere, and leave society better when the way I found it. Leave a company, a business, my family, my friends better than when they first came into my life. That’s success. It's not just about you, but everyone and everything that you touch. 

[0:06:08.7] MB: Wow! That’s a great definition, and it’s something that, obviously, the title of our show is the Science of Success, and I think success in many ways gets kind of a bad rap and people hear success they think money, fame, all these sort of materialistic things. In many ways, I think success to be so much more, and that definition really does a great job encapsulating a much richer and full definition of what I think success really can be. 

[0:06:34.5] SB: Yeah. I’ve learned this the hard way. For many years I was just pursuing what I thought was success, but I had no significance. I was chasing money, but I had no meaning and I was in pursuit of status, things and stuff, but I had no satisfaction. When my head hit the wall a few times, I kind of woke up out of my fog and said, “There’s one thing to be successful, but there’s a whole another thing to have significance success,” and significant success is how do I help the least, the last, the lost. How do I make sure that it’s about others and not just myself? How do I being to understand intellectual humility and not have to be the smartest person in the room? In the past, success was very outward-inward, now it’s inward-outward. 

[0:07:32.2] MB: For somebody that might be kind of struggling on that treadmill of material success or pursuing status and money, etc., how do you kind of make that transition and what would be some strategies you’d recommend for someone to begin that journey?

[0:07:48.3] SB: Yeah. My journey started back — I used to work for Disney for years, and Disney sent me over to Paris a few years back. While I was in Paris I had this epiphany and I asked myself three questions, and question number one; what would I do if I knew that I couldn’t fail? What would I do if no one paid me to do it? What makes me come alive? That third question came out of a book I was reading at the time written by an author named John Eldredge. In his book, Wild at Heart, John says, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive,” because what the world needs are people who come alive.

When I read that it was like the 4th of July fireworks went off in me and what I begin to recognize is 30 years ago a number of people went to work and they settle for a chair, a check and a cup of coffee in cubicle farm and woke up 30 years later and said, “This is not it.” 

From that, I developed some poor strategies. Number one; finding out what makes me tick? 9What’s my core areas of strength? Where do I shine? Where do I really move into the flow? The second strategy that I quickly recognized is when you stop chasing money, money will chase you. What is it that thing that you would do if nobody paid you to do it? That you can wake up at 3:00 in the morning and do it, because it’s just who you are at the core. 

Then probably the third strategy is how do I put together what I would call a start, stop and continue list, or what some might call a start, stop and accelerate list? What are the things I need to stop doing that blocks success? What are the things I need to start doing? For instance, I need to get up an hour earlier. I need to put myself into a new circle of learning that stretches me, because sometimes you can have a 50x60 dream, but you associate with people that have 8x10 thinking. How do I begin to put myself in a new circle? Then the third thing is really thinking about how will I measure how I’m doing and hold myself accountable on this journey? 

[0:10:08.0] MB: There’s a lot that I want to unpack from that, and I think those are really, really good questions in terms of kind of concretely applying these ideas, “What would I do if I couldn’t fail? What would I do if no one paid me?” What do you think the best way to go about doing that? Is journaling kind of the best way to really dig in and think about those questions? Tell me a little bit more about the idea of what makes you come alive and how someone can kind of discover something within themselves that really truly makes them come alive? 

[0:10:36.8] SB: First of all, I would start with journaling. My journey, my backstory is I had worked in corporate America for a number of years, but reached a place where I really sensed it was time for me to move on to that next chapter. I was 34 years of age. When I started to answer the question, “What would I do if no one paid me to do it?” I said I want to speak, write, train, consult and coach.

When I wrote those things down I said, “Okay, how would that show up in the world? Because, let’s just be real. I got a mortgage to pay, a family to take care of.” I had to kind of adjust and say, “Okay, I can’t quit my job at Disney right away. What if I create an exit strategy?” 

When I came back from Paris I created an exit strategy that I would use vacation time to go on and moonlight and put a toll in the water to see if the speaking, writing, training, consulting, if I could actually turn it into something. 

For those that are listening right now, after you write it down, you got to beta test it and say, “Okay. What if I try something?” You don’t have to quit your job tomorrow, but having that exit strategy gives you the confidence that, “You know what? If it doesn’t work, then maybe that’s not it,” but if it does work, you get a little activity. Then how can you invest more, do more to move in that direction? That would be my recommendation. 

[0:12:04.5] MB: Tell me about this idea that when you stop chasing money, money will chase you. I want to reconcile that with — And maybe this is kind of a shallow interpretation of it, but for somebody — I’m just going to use an example. Someone who, let’s say, loves to do something, like play video games and they say, “Oh! I’m not going to chase money. I’m just going to play video games all the time.” Do you think that that’s a sustainable or realistic kind of expectation? Tell me about kind of in a concrete sense how that principle works.

[0:12:33.8] SB: Yeah. I’m so glad you came back to that. What I quickly realized is when I left this corporate job, I turned down four other jobs to go on and do my own thing. Now, let me just be real. Yes, I had bills to pay and people that were depending upon me. What I quickly recognized when I left on January 31st, 2003, hang up my single February 1st, 2003 to say, “Hey, I’m now a consultant.” I still had to pick up the phone and dial for dollars, but what I didn’t do is I didn’t appear to be desperate over the phone that if I didn’t get the deal I wasn’t going to be able to keep the lights on. 

What I did in preparing my exit strategy, I knew I had about a three-year runway to make it work and if after three years it didn’t work I would have to go back and get a JOB. When I say don’t chase money, people can sense desperation. They can sense it in your voice. They can see it on your face. They can tell by the way you shake hands if you’re desperate. When I say don’t chase some money, come from a place of, “How do I provide value? How do I become a solution to a problem that they can’t live without?” When you go in and delivery and over deliver value, you can actually charge your premium. You can charge a higher margin, because now it’s not just about the deal. It’s not just about the money. It’s about how do I exceed your expectation. When people see that you come from a place of excellence, they don’t mind becoming your unofficial marketing department because of the experience that they just had with you. 

[0:14:24.2] MB: I think that’s a great point. I love the idea about don’t focus on the kind of financial aspect. Focus on exceeding expectations, because in many ways, that’s how you build reputation. That’s how you build referrals, etc., that can really help ultimately kind of get you to where you want to be. 

[0:14:41.8] SB: Absolutely. I think everyone listening to us is going to recognize, and I know they do, that we are now in the recommendation economy. In the recommendation economy, when you develop a reputation for being excellent, for being the subject matter expert in your area and doing great work, people will tell everybody about it. Literally, that’s how I’ve built my business in 15 years. 95% of our business is referral or recommendations from people who have seen us or have referred us. It’s a wonderful model, and you can charge a premium. Here’s the deal, there are some that can’t pay it, and that’s okay. Let us know when you can, or I might broker a deal, but what I recognized is I never cheapen my work by feeling that if I let this dollar slip through my fingers, that’s the end of the world. No. No. No. No. No. I go the opposite way. I provide great value and you’re going to get it in a result that’s sustainable. Oh, by the way, you’re going to pay me X, Y, Z. 

[0:15:46.9] MB: That’s another term that I think gets thrown around a lot is — I think it’s super important to do it, but it’s also really hard in some instances to kind of contextualize it. What does it mean to you to provide value? For somebody who’s thinking about how they can provide more value to the world, what are some ways to kind of get clarity about that or think about truly delivering value? 

[0:16:12.4] SB: Yeah. This is such a great question. I tend to be a storyteller, so I’m going to give you three quick stories. First story is I was in the Cayman Islands a couple of years ago and I went to the front desk to check in and they said, “I’m sorry. We don’t have your room ready, but if you wait in the lounge we’ll let you know when it’s ready.” Sure enough we sat there in the lounge and a guy by the name of Howard comes over to me and he says, “Hey, Mr. Bailey. I’m going to take care of you while you’re here.” I’m like, “Okay. Great.” We just talked and have a conversation. He says to me, Matt, “How is your trip to Halifax, Nova Scotia?” The Scooby-Doo in me says, “Huh? How did this guy know I was in Halifax, Nova Scotia?” He says to me, “Oh! I went on your Instagram feed and I happen to be from Halifax, Nova Scotia.” I’m like, “No way.” We start just yapping it up, talking and everything. 

I get my room, I check in and he gives me his card. He says, “If you need anything while you’re here, call me.” I had a button missing. I need to have button replaced on a jacket. I call Howard. He comes, picks it up, brings it back. I want to give him a tip. He says, “No. This is on me.” 

The next night, I’m taking clients out to dinner. We run into Howard in the lobby. He says, “Where are you going to dinner?” I said, “Oh, we’re going to such and such restaurant.” He said, “Oh! That’s a Canadian restaurant, and you got to order the flying monkey beer.” Sure enough we go to the restaurant, we order the beer. We’re like, “Oh my God! Howard is the man.” 

Here is my whole point. I could have just been a regular Joe Shmoe at this hotel checking in, but somehow, Howard, went above and beyond to do the work to find out who I was and create this moment. That’s what I mean providing value. He went the extra step. He went beyond what they hired him to do, and when he saw us in the lobby, he says, “Let me give you this recommendation.” He didn’t have to do that. It’s always looking for ways to listen for free information to exceed expectation that becomes a surprise and delight, and people were like, “Whoa! That’s incredible.” 

[0:18:24.1] MB: I think that’s great. In many ways that ties back into what you were talking about before. It’s all about exceeding expectations, and that’s one of the great ways that you can kind of provide value for people.

[0:18:36.1] SB: Totally. Yeah, it’s really listening at a whole another level. One of the things that I’m teaching right now is we have to move to meta-listening, and meta-listening is we’re listening between the sentences and we understand that the same letters that spell the world listen spell the word silent. Intuitively, we’re tapping into what we’re hearing in the moment and we’re saying, “Matt, I heard you say this.” “Austin, I heard you say this. Did you mean that?” Have you thought about, it’s that taking what is in front of you and coming from a place where you slowdown in order to speed up, because hearing is a courtesy, but listening is a complement. How do we just listen at that meta-level to really connect at a deeper point? 

[0:19:28.1] MB: You know, one of my favorite stories about the idea of slowing down in order to speedup, there’s an old military saying from the sniper corps that slow is smooth and smooth is fast. I always tell that to people, and I think it’s a great way to think about. I totally agree with your point that in many instances when you slow down and kind of really take the time to do something right, it ends up actually being a much better way to do it. 

[0:19:54.6] SB: Totally. You show the person that they matter, and that it’s not about me, but it’s about we and how can we help each other. 

[0:20:08.8] MB: Somebody who’s listening in, how they can become better listeners and prove the skill of meta-listening? 

[0:20:18.0] SB: Yeah. There are three levels of listening. The first level of listening is polite listening. If someone’s talking to you, you kind of give them the screensaver face. You got to move away from polite listening to really ensuring that the person knows that you understand where they’re coming from. That’s the first level. 

The second level of listening is distracted listening where people are just waiting for another person to shut up so they can jump in and make their point. How to overcome distracted listening is to intentionally, as you’re listening, do what I call three, two, one, and in your head, “Three, two, one. Okay, they said this. All right, what does this mean?” and either take notes, but somehow book in and say, “Okay. Here’s what I heard you say. I just want to make sure I got it.” 

The third level of listening is really probably the most important, and that is intentional listening. That is listening with your eyes. It’s listening with your ears. It’s listening with your heart and it’s allowing that person to get everything out. Then after they get everything out, before you say anything, you pause to let them know that you’ve got it and in that pregnant pause, that it just hangs for a moment, it lets them know that what they have shared is important. That’s showing intentionality, that you’re being intentional about them, not letting you shove your opinion down their throat. I think if we practice that a lot more, we would accomplish a lot more as well. 

I think probably if I can add just maybe a fourth idea to this, is to also understand that when people know that they are listened to and somebody values what they have to say, they will provide even more information. It’s almost saying, “Tell me more,” because they know that you got it and you want to hear more, and then you get people on a role and then they want to keep going. 

Now, you may have some individuals who are socialized introverts who may not be asked forward coming. You’ll have to also understand how they’re wired and how they perhaps receive or retain information. That’s beginning to understand a person’s learning style. Are you sensing that they’re auditory, hands-on, kinesthetic, and then engaging them in the manner in which they learn or they want to engage with you. Literally, listening provides so much free data that if you’re just paying attention, you move from communication to deeper connection. 

[0:23:00.5] MB: Yeah. That reminds me. One of the things that I really try to focus on when I’m meeting somebody, when I’m having a conversation, I spend a tremendous amount of time, almost all my time really trying to understand them, what they’re saying, what they’re talking about, where they’re coming from, their position, their point of view. To me it’s almost like the old example of if you’re going to chop down a tree, if you have five hours, you spend the first four hours sharpening your axe.

To me, if I can really deeply understand where somebody is coming from, what their problems are, etc., it’s very simple and easy to kind of figure out what the next step is or what they need help with or kind of how you can potentially provide value for them.  

[0:23:41.9] SB: Exactly. 

[0:23:43.4] MB: I want to go back to something you touched on earlier in the conversation, and you mentioned the idea of intellectual humility. Tell me more about that and why it’s so important. 

[0:23:52.5] SB: We are living in a world right now where if over the last 100 years we’ve moved from the cultural age, to the industrial age, to the knowledge age, to now the age of transformation, right? Everybody at some level in different industries are trying to stand head and shoulders above anybody else because of automation, disruption, change, and living in what many might call a VUCA environment. VUCA, the acronym stands for volatility, ambiguity, uncertainty, and complexity. 

In this VUCA world everybody has the need to be the smartest person in the room, and what that does is men and women who may want to contribute to the conversation, because someone has a need to prove a point or a need to advance their career or a need to get a deal done, the person who screams the loudest and talks the most appears to be the smart one. What I’m saying, that is not true. Intellectual humility simply says if I know, I don’t have to tell, because if I tell, perhaps I don’t know. 

Intellectual humility understands how to spend 80% of your time listening, 20% of your time responding, because the person who has more time to respond because they are reflecting, they’re taking it in, that’s the person that has intellectual humility, because they don’t have anything to prove, but they understand the power of gaining by listening. 

[0:25:49.2] MB: I think that’s great. That kind of ties back into all of the listening that we are just talking about. I think the other point that you made that’s really important is how critical it is, or how much more powerful it is when you come from a place of not having anything to prove or not feeling like you need to prove anything. 

[0:26:09.6] SB: Yeah. One of the greatest mistakes when I got promoted to my leadership role, corporate American Express card on the door, thought I was hot stuff. The reality is I was a jerk of a boss, and how it was proven that I was a jerk, I went through a 360-degree feedback of my peer leader’s direct reports, rated me on my performance and 5.0 is the highest, 1.0 is the lowest. The threshold for leaders at the time had to be at 4. or higher. I came in the 3.5, 3.0 in many of the categories, in many of the questions. Such questions as, “Do you trust your leader? Does your leader spend time with you? Does your leader give you feedback on your performance? Does your leader walk a mile in your shoes?” 

My boss called me in the office and he said, “Walk me to a typical day when you come in the office.” I’m like, “Well, I come to the office, read my email, then I’m off to meetings.” He says, “Do you ever stop to take time to engage the cast members —” At Disney, employers were called cast members. “To engage them in dialogue?” I said, “Dude! I’m from Buffalo, New York. I don’t care what they did this weekend. I don’t care what the name of the dog, the cat, the niece, the nephew, the son, the daughter. You got the email. You got the memo. For forth and create magic. That was my attitude.” He looked at me and said, “That would be your problem right there.” 

For the next 18 months I had to go to the Disney University, which is internal training of the company. This has stayed with me all these years later, is that people don’t care as you know until they know how much you care. Knowing how much you care about them doesn’t mean I have to outtalk them or outthink them or prove to them that I’m right. I really believe when you practice intellectual humility, what you’re really saying is three things. Number one; I release the need to be right. Number two; I understand the power of diversity, which is diversity of opinion and the diversity of perspective. Number three; I don’t need a bunch of yes people in my life. I need somebody who’s willing to say no and will back it up and tell me why, because then that stretches my thinking. I learned this the hard way. I was able to change my behavior, but this whole thing of intellectual humility just burns really deep.

[0:28:29.3] MB: You know, I think that specifically the power of the diversity of opinion is something that I think our society really struggles with today. The idea that we all can live in these sort of self-curated echo chambers where we only ever get information that validates and verifies what we already believe, consciously stepping out of that and trying to find opinions. People who would say no, people who would disagree with you, people who would challenge your ideas. That’s the only way that you can get smarter and the only way that you can ultimately craft your ideas and get the sort of seek truth and what actually is real and what’s really going on in the world. 

[0:29:07.1] SB: Now, if you see me, I’m giving you a first bump high five, because I so believe that, because there’s too much noise. There’s a lot of talking, but not a lot of listening and connecting, and I’ve been telling people, “If everyone in your circle looks like you, your circle is too small, because we’re in a global world.” 

I was just on the phone before I talked to you with a friend of mine in Japan. Just like, “What’s happening in Japan?” I don’t want to read in local media here in the United States about what’s happening in Japan. You tell me what’s happening in Japan. It broadens my perspective to get out of my bubble and understand what’s happening globally. 

[0:29:52.6] MB: That’s something that I think about a lot. How can we can more people to step outside of their own limited perspectives and seek disconfirming opinions, seek people who are going to actively challenge what they think and believe? 

[0:30:07.8] SB: I think everyone listening to us is they’ve got to think about at least, if not weekly, monthly or quarterly. Go on a fieldtrip to another business, another industry. Put yourself in a place where you’re uncomfortable. Give me an example. 

Last week I was invited by a gentleman that I met at a conference and he said he found out that I was a Buffalo Bill’s football fan, so he said, “Why don’t you come up. We’ll go to a Patriot’s game in Foxboro Stadium. I’ve got 50-yard line seats. You can come with me and my family.” I said, “You know? I’m going to do it,” and I did it. We tailgated. Had a great time and he said, “You know what? I started this manufacturing company and I’d love to introduce you to a hundred of my CEO friends in manufacturing.” 

I know nothing about manufacturing. Talking about a fish out of water, but I decided to go last week, and they took me a tour to their facility. His place of business and another place of business. Five pages of notes and one simple little thing that I walked away that I said, “I can apply that to my life and my business.” They manufacture parts for the aerospace industry, and because they are on a journey of quality improvement every day, he asked every employee to share what did they improve the day before and what were they going to improve that day? He didn’t stop there. He says, “What you got to improve it, learn it and share it.” 

You’ve got people in a circle saying, “Here’s what I improved yesterday. Here’s what I learned, and let me share it with the rest of the team.” Now, this embedded and engrained in this culture. Then I’m like, “Oh my goodness! I got to share that with my team.” 

Here’s the whole point, Matt, it would have never happened if I would stay to my bubble and not went on this field trip, not went in and build the rapport with him. I said to him, I said, “Ray, dude. You’re a white guy. I’m a black guy. I feel like we deal with some of the same challenges, but because we never talk to each other, we don’t know.” He says, “We got to do more talking.” It was wonderful, then I met all of his CEO friends and it was just a fabulous conversation, but it would’ve never happened if I didn’t get out of my comfort zone of playing it safe. Everyone listening to us, quarterly, go on a field trip.

Secondly, what would it be like to pick up a magazine that you don’t normally read? A magazine that will challenge you that’s out of your comfort zone? Number three, what would it be like to take up an activity or do something that you’ve never done before? 

I have a friend of mine who, every year, sets aside $1,000 to invest in a hobby. I recently got together with him for breakfast and I said, “What’s the new hobby that you’re going to invest a year in?” He only sets aside a thousand dollars. He says, “You know what? I’m investing in wine futures.” I was like, “How in the world do you do that?” He said, “Oh, here’s how you do it. You have to look at the wines.” 

He gave me all of these education, literally an hour breakfast meeting about his hobby of wine futures, and that’s not even a support industry. My whole point is he found a way to do something that took him out of his comfort zone and it really challenged me to begin to think through, “How do I move out of my comfort zone and not just settle for the status quo?”

[0:33:52.9] MB: That’s a great point, and I’m a huge fan of pursuing new hobbies, and kind of from sort of a nerve science perspective, especially in the idea of kind of rewiring your brain, getting some new neurons firing and getting out of your comfort zones. One of the things that I’ve recently taken up is drawing and sketching which is something that I’m really fascinated with. I used to love as a kid and now I can barely draw a stick figure. 

It’s great to kind of just use different parts of your brain and form these novel connections, because that’s really — If you look a lot of the neuroscience, the root of creativity is when you feed all kinds of diverse information into your brain and your subconscious recombines it into new configurations. 

[0:34:34.7] SB: That’s so true. Think about this, Dr. Christian [inaudible 0:34:36.7] at Princeton University’s psychology department says in his research, when the brain is worried, the brain slows down. When the brain slows down, it doesn’t create neurogenesis, which is the process of growing neurons, which grows the brain. 

I looked at that and I say that the brain slows down because of worry. Worry has a BFF called stress, and stress has a first cousin called fear. When stress, fear and worry get on the same page they slow down the human operating system. 

To your point, this ability to introduce a new idea or a habit, or a hobby, it allows the neurons to grow, which then connects to your confidence, which then impacts your results. 

[0:35:24.1] MB: I’d love to change gears a little bit. One of the things that stuck out of me immediately when I was looking at your website is your purpose statement, the idea of teaching a billion people to be brilliant in the average world. I may be paraphrasing that a little bit, but I just thought that was a really cool, and I found to be a really motivational purpose statement. 

[0:35:44.1] SB: If we can reach a billion people, a billion people can impact everyone in their sphere of influence with this just simple message that you aren’t born to fit in. you were born to be brilliant, because the days of average are over, done, history. That dog will not hunt anymore. Everybody’s got to find out wherever they are in society. How do I be my most brilliant self and make the best and the most important difference than I can make for those who depend upon me? Now, that’s success to that person, and that person can say, “Oh my goodness! If it can happen for me, it can happen for them.”  

Our whole goal of reaching one billion people is how do we touch people every day, every way, everywhere, every device, 24/7, 365, no matter where they are in the globe. 

[0:36:45.1] MB: Tell me more about that. How are you — Billion is obviously very ambitious, and I love how kind of big that goal is, but how are you concretely or tactically pursuing that, kind of strategy of reaching a billion people?

[0:37:00.9] SB: We have decided that over the next decade we are going to begin to identify and select people who’ve already come to us who have asked to be mentored, to be certified, to teach our brilliance methodology. We’re going to begin to take some of — I’ve written nine books and many of them have the brilliant or brilliants theme. We’re going to certify people on the four corners of the globe to begin to now teach this whole brilliance process. 

I am just a guy from the ghetto of Buffalo, New York who just happened to have life happen and I had to figure it out. I experienced a lot of failure before I experienced success. Now, we’re going to pay it forward over the next decade. That’s the first thing. 

Second thing that I’m really excited about is we have partnered with LinkedIn learning and launched a course called Building Business Relationships, and that course in just less than a year or so has reached a half a million people in a hundred countries. They’ve asked for me to come back to do some more online things with them and we have agreed to do that. 

What we quickly recognized is that there are platforms that we can now upload our content in addition to certified people. We’re going to leverage platforms to reach people in a fresh way and obviously keep tabs on how we’re doing that. 

The third thing that we’re going to do is we’re digitizing everything that we currently offer as a way of disseminating it into the world and giving people permission to use it, to experience it, and then give us feedback as to what’s working. 

As people begin to download and access all of things, we’ll be able to identify our reach in the world, but the goal is — I’m still very young, but if I was to transition in the next decade, I would still be talking from the grave and I would still be able to reach a billion people even though I’m not here, because we’ve put these different things in place. 

[0:39:20.5] MB: One of the biggest things that I’m a huge fan of on the show are mental models. You’ve heard me talk a lot about mental models and how critically important it is if you want to be successful to build a toolkit of mental models that can help you better understand reality. 

One of the topics and many of the atomic actually that are critical to developing an amazing and rich toolkit of mental models is a deep understanding of mathematics, science, physics, chemistry, etc. The hard sciences are some of the backbones of the most useful and effective mental model toolkits, and that's why I'm super excited to announce that our sponsor for this episode is brilliant.org. 

Brilliant.org is a math and science enrichment learning website where you can learn concepts by actually solving fascinating and challenging problems. I'm really, really excited about this, because I'm a huge fan of STEM learning, science, technology, engineering and math, and I think that it’s something that America in general needs to do a better job of and it's something that I really want you, the listeners, to be improving and getting the skills and getting better at things like science and math. 

Too many in our society have lost the ability to quantitatively understand reality, and the mental model from a hard sciences are some of the most powerful in describing what happens in the real world. I personally am super psyched about Brilliant. The courses on there are amazing, and I'm going to through and take a bunch of them to re-up my understanding of things like probability, games of chance, problem-solving and they even have some really cool stuff, things like machine learning. 

Right now brilliant.org is offering our listeners an additional 20% off of their premium plan. This discount is only for Science of Success listeners and you can unlock it by going to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. That’s brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. You can sign up using our custom link and then you’ll get the 20% premium membership which comes with all of their courses and you can use this to learn about probability. You can increase your mathematics abilities. You can learn more about the hard sciences, like physics and chemistry. If you want to build a toolkit of powerful mental models, I cannot recommend enough using something like brilliant.org to improve your quantitative understanding of the world and how it works. Again, you can go to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess to get this 20% discount. 

You touched on the brilliant methodology. You’ve obviously written a ton and talked a lot about brilliance. What does brilliance mean to you? 

[0:41:46.2] SB: Brilliance is your insight. It’s your potential. It’s your genius. It’s your flow. When I first started writing and talking about brilliance, I based it on some of the research work of Dr. Howard Gardner, who is a professor of education at Harvard. Dr. Gardner, he and a senior researcher, did an interesting study over a 20 plus year period and what they discovered is that children up into the age of four are operating at the genius level. 

The same group of children who were studying in their early 20s and only 10% were still operating at the genius or brilliance level, and in their late 20s, early 30s, only 2%. The question is, “Where did this genius or brilliance go?” It didn’t go anywhere, but it became buried by a society that says, “Color within the lines. Sit down. Give it back, you can’t do that.”

The more people continued to hear what they can’t do, where they can’t go and who they cannot become, there is a neurological path that is created in the brain that causes individuals to shut down. People has this potential, this insight, this genius. They want to move into flow but they’re out of flow and their brilliance is blocked. When I talk about your talent, your gift, your ability, that’s what brilliance is at the core. It’s when you have the alignment of head, heart and hands. When you have that alignment and you’re in flow and you’re living form the inside-out, instead from the outside-in.

[0:43:15.5] MB: That’s fascinating research. I totally agree with that conclusion, which I feel like the structure of our educational system, our society in so many ways is almost designed to stamp out creativity. 

[0:43:30.5] SB: If you think about it, when the educational system was created, it was created to put people into a job, and a job stands for just overboard, or in some circles they say just over-broke. Years ago, the education system wants to raise people up to go to a job, work 40 hours, buy the white house with the picket fence and then retire and obviously get an education along the way. 

Now, in a so disruptive world, we are reeducating folks to understand that according to McKinsey Consulting, within the next decade, 250 million knowledge worker jobs will be eliminated because of automation. Now we have to recognize the word education comes from a Greek word which means educari, that means to draw out, not about putting in. We’ve got to draw out creativity. We’ve got to draw out intelligence. Intellect is in the mind, but intelligence is in the heart. How do we begin to draw out of people what’s in them and say, “Matt, what can you do? How can you reinvent yourself?” 

I’ll give you a quick example. I was in Philadelphia a few weeks ago and I got into this Uber car. A guy picks me up and he’s all inked out, tattoos everywhere and I’m like, “Wow! This is a different kind of guy.” I said, “I’m going to strike up a conversation with him. I’m not going to prejudge him.” 

It turns out I end up talking to this guy all the way to the airport. I said, “What’s your story? How did you end up driving for Uber?” He says I worked as a glass blower and my job was eliminated and the company closed and I still had rent to pay.” He said, “A friend of mine said, “Hey, go drive for Uber.” He says, “I started driving for Uber,” but then he said, “I was talking with a buddy of mine who lives out in California and he has 4 million subscribers on YouTube, and YouTube pays X-amount of dollars once you reach a certain threshold in subscription.” 

He said to me, his friend said to him, “Hey, start a YouTube channel. I’ll tell my 4 million subscribers to start following you and you can build up your subscriber base.” I said, “How many subscribers do you have?” He said, “I have 150,000.” I’m like, “What are you talking about?” He says, “I just talk about whatever I want to and I get a check from Uber monthly.” And I’m like, “No way.” He says, “I didn’t stop there. A buddy of mine told me about Instacart where you can make $500 a week in tips by delivering people’s groceries.” He said, “I’m going to do that.” He says, “I’ll never going to work for anybody else.” 

I’m listening to him and all I heard was this guy has found a way to shift his brilliance, because he’s got bills to pay. He’s got things to do and find a creative way to still matter in society.

[0:46:33.7] MB: For someone listening, how they can kind of dust off all of these clutter that society has placed on them and start unlocking their own brilliance? 

[0:46:43.6] SB: I think first of all you got to take out a sheet of paper and you time yourself 30 seconds, and I want you to write down in 30 seconds everything that’s right about you, because society tells us what’s wrong with us. I want you to say what’s right. If 30 seconds is not enough time, then that lets you know you’ve got to do some deeper work. 

The second thing I want you to identify is who in your life is your biggest fan? What is it that they tell you that you talk about often? Solving a problem in the world, starting a business, growing a business, getting promoted, whatever that is. What’s that ongoing dialogue that you are having out loud, that those who know you say they can put a mirror in front on you and reflect back to you that ongoing reoccurring thought. That’s the second thing. 

Third thing I would invite you to think about is let’s say you want to do something new. Before you literally jump ship or change course, what would it be like to put a toll in the water and invest in it, experience it before you go and do it? Because let’s say it doesn’t work, at least you haven’t cost time, effort. You invest it but you didn’t go all in. 

Now, don’t do what I did. I totally like cut bait, but I had the extra strategy that I was working on. I would say have an exit strategy, because that exit strategy will allow you to forecast, analyze what do you need to make happen. Here’s the last thing I’ll say about this. There will never be a perfect time for you to do what you want to do. At some point you’re just going to say, “I’m going to have to go for it,” and find your wings on your way down so you could become airborne. 

[0:48:42.6] MB: Yeah. I totally agree with that, and I think it’s so important to try little ideas, little test and experiments, and if something doesn’t work, just move on to the next thing. If it starts to get traction or it starts to work or really starts to pick up steam, then that’s when you double down and invest and continue to kind of move down that path. 

[0:49:03.0] SB: Oh, totally. Everyone listening to us, I think, Matt, they got to know. Fail big. Fail often. Fail early. I was working with a client a couple of years ago and every quarter he gives out the failure award in his company, whoever had the biggest failure. I am here to tell you, I’ve had a lot of failures and I like failure, because I discovered an addiction, failure comes before success. When I started embracing failure, I realized that you could fail forward. You can fail up. You can fail through. Do not be afraid to fail. Go for it. Fail miserably, because I’m telling you, when you figure it out, OMG. 

[0:49:46.0] MB: Even this podcast is a great example of something that — I’ve tried a down or more side projects and things and this started out a couple of episodes and kind of a partnership with a friend of mine. We said, “Hey, we’ll try it out. We’ll do it, and if anything kind of picks up steam, then we’ll keep going.” Here I am almost two years later and the show has got over a million downloads and we’ve grown tremendously, but there’s a graveyard of failed ideas that you don’t hear about that we’re on the road the show eventually coming to life. 

[0:50:17.7] SB: Congratulations on over a million downloads in two years. That has to be a record. The reality is you also built confidence behind every failure. It built that confidence and that resilience to keep moving forward. 

[0:50:33.8] MB: I want to kind of move back of something you mentioned earlier, which is this idea of — I think you described it in some previous works and speeches, is the idea of emotional congruence. Tell me more about that. 

[0:50:45.8] SB: yeah. I learned this concept from Rabi Harold Kushner who wrote the book What Matters the Most in Life. What Rabi teaches, he says emotional congruence is when everything that you think, everything that you say and everything that you feel is in alignment. He says however, when you’re not in alignment, you’re operating an emotional incongruence and there’s a split in your soul and you’re pulled in a million different directions because you’re having to go after every shiny object. 

How you come to a place of emotional congruence is first of all quieting the clutter that sometimes comes in our minds through thoughts and really beginning to filter those thoughts and say, “If they are negative, how do I harness them and turn them into a positive thought, or how do I make the most a situation so I’m coming from a place of being healthy, happy and whole?” IT’s the first thing. 

Then, second thing, in operating an emotional congruence is understanding my verbal software. Language is a software of the mind. It’s almost 10 million words in the English world. The average person uses about 2,000 to 3,000 words. If you drill down even more, there are 200 or 300 words that we all use on an ongoing basis. If I’m going to come from a place of emotional congruence, I have to recognize that my words carry energy and my words create worlds. If my words create worlds, how do I begin to understand that emotions run the show and how do I begin to reinvent my world through the power of speech, through the power of language? 

Then the third thing is years ago there was a song written called Feelings, Nothing More Than Feelings. Feelings are so powerful, because you can feel things intuitively before they actually manifest on the outside. That’s the whole phenomena of what many call deja vu. When you come from an emotional congruent place, you literally are rehearsing the future in the present by emotionally saying, “How do I harness my potential by quieting my mind, monitoring my speech and in spirit and in my soul coming from a healthy place where I just believe? When you do that, that’s when you’re in congruence, emotional congruence. 

[0:53:25.0] MB: When you talk about quieting the mind, are you referencing meditation? 

[0:53:29.7] SB: Yes. Definitely meditation. In fact, everyone listening to us, I would invite them to capture these numbers, 15-8-30-90. What would it be like to take the 15 minutes and to chunk it down into three five-minute segments, and the first five minutes meditate. Just get quiet. There’s a lot of different approaches to meditation. There’s apps on meditation. How I suggest you meditate is what works for you. 

Finding that five minutes to get quiet. Second five minutes to read or listen to something that inspires you, and that third five minutes to stretch and get in line with the day. Here’s how the formula works and here’s why meditation is so powerful.

15 minutes a day creates 7 days a week. 7 days a week creates 30 days. 30 days creates 90 days. If I want significant success, I have to reverse engineer. How did I get to this quarter or this 90 days? It’s the result of what you’ve done 30, 60, 90. How did you get there? What have you done the last 7 days? How did you get there? 15 minutes a day. If I want significant success that is sustained, overtime, how do I really master the 15 minutes a day, and that’s where the rubber meets the road and really being emotionally congruent. 

[0:54:56.8] MB: I think you bring up another great point, which is the power of reverse engineering, and it’s such a tremendous mental model. It’s something that I use all the time, which is kind of thinking back to not only how did you get to where you are, but also where you want to be and then kind of reverse engineering what needs to happen in order for you to get there. 

[0:55:16.8] SB: And also recognizing that you don’t decide the future, you decide your habits, and your habits decide your future. The secret of true success to your point, reverse engineering, it’s hidden in your daily routine. When you begin to examine the daily routine, that’s when you begin to see the gremlins of brilliance and can begin to extract those out of your life so that you have to sustain success. 

[0:55:52.6] MB: For someone who’s listening to this conversation, we’ve given out a number of kind of tactics and strategies. What would be one kind of action item or a piece of homework that you would give them as a starting point to implementing many of the ideas we’ve talked about today? 

[0:56:08.4] SB: Yeah. There are three things. Number one; I want to invite everyone to answer the question why am I here. One my mentors said to me a number of years ago, he said, “The greatest strategy in life is not death. The greatest strategy in life is to be alive and not know why.” 

Really answering the why am I hear question, then begs the second question what can I do. As the next step, I want everyone to think about what can I do? We are now in the era called do something. Nobody is going to do it for you. The best hand that will feed you at the end of the day is the one at the end of your wrist. What can I do? Because the what I can do question then leads to the third question, and that is where am I going? 

I was in Harae, Zimbabwe not too long ago with one of my mentors. He said to me, he said, “Do you have a 20-year strategic life plan?” I said, “Why do I need a 20-year strategic plan?” He said, “Because in 20 years you are going to be older but will you be better?” When he said it, it was like, “Whoa!” 

Now, I have a 20-year strategic life plan. I say to everyone that’s listening to us, when you answer that very question, where am I going, you’ll discover that some people plan their vacations better than they plan their lives. Whatever age you are right now, add plus 20 to it and then say, “In 20 years, where do I want to be?” Reverse engineer and say, “How am I going to get there?” Then every single day, begin to say, “I’m going to put one foot in front of the other to make where I’m going a reality.

[0:57:59.5] MB: Where can listeners find you and all your books and all of these resources online?

[0:58:05.7] SB: Yeah. They can go to simontbailey.com, Simon T. — T for terrific — Bailey. That’s a bad joke, T for terrific, right? Bailey.com. Simontbailey.com. All our information is there. 

[0:58:17.7] MB: Perfect. Simon, thank you so much for coming on the show sharing all of these wisdom. So many great insights and stories. It was a pleasure to have you on here.

[0:58:26.4] SB: Thank you for having me. Good to be with you, Matt. 

[0:58:29.1] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s matt@sucesspodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every listener email. 

The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover The Science of Success. 

I get a ton of listeners asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all these information?” Because of that, we’ve created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. You can get it by texting the word “smarter”, that’s “smarter” to the number 44222, or by going to successpodcast.com, that’s successpodcast.com and joining our email list. 

Don’t forget, if you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we just talked about in this episode and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. Just go to successpodcast.com and hit the show notes button at the top. 

Thanks again, and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong with Eric Barker

In this episode we ask what really produces success by looking at what separates truly successful people from the rest, we examine many common and conflicting “success maxims” and look at what the data actually says really works, we dig deep into the vital importance of knowing yourself and your own strengths, look at the power of aligning your work with your environment, and discuss the dangers of constantly overcommitting your time with Eric Barker.

Eric Barker is the creator of the blog “Barking Up The Wrong Tree” - with over 290,000 subscribers.  His work is syndicated by Time Magazine, Business Insider and he has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and more. Just recently, his new book Barking up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong was named a Wall Street Journal Bestseller.

• The future is already here, its just not evenly distributed

• How Eric took a myth-busters approach to success maxims and figured out what really works

• Vital importance of knowing yourself and your strengths

• Why you need to align with a context and environment that rewards your skills

• What really produces success? What separates the very successful from the rest of us?

• We take alot of the common maxims we hear that conflict about success and look at what the DATA actually says about them

• What are intensifiers and why should you know about them?

• When are negatives positives? How can you know when it’s important?

• Context really reveals when and how these maxims work or not

• Do nice guys really finish last? What does the science say?

• Why, in some contexts, being a jerk can pay off (and when it can backfire)

• Strategies to improve self knowledge and know yourself more deeply

• Pursuing your passion doesn't always lead to happiness, but pursuing what you’re good at more frequently does lead to happiness

• Research is clear - focus on what you’re good at - and find a way to compensate for your weaknesses.

• Understanding your strengths allows you to plan the right way to go about achieving your big picture goals

• Deluding yourself is often worst situation of all and you frequently end up working against yourself

• Do quitters never win? Should we quit or persevere? How do we think about Grit?

• The vital importance of opportunity cost - we only have so much time in the day - we have to focus in on the biggest things

• Strategically quitting is not the opposite of grit, but enables you to focus in on the most important things

• People consistently over-commit their time and don’t understand how little time they have

• We consistently make the error that in the future we think we will have more time

• Find a balance - look at what’s producing results - show grit with those things - things that aren’t producing results

• Why you should absolutely dedicate 5-10% of your time to what Peter Simms calls “little bets”

• The key litmus test on whether or not you should apply GRIT or QUIT

• What research reveals (Richard Wiseman in the UK) on how you can improve your luck!

• How do we “walk the tightrope” between confidence and delusion? How often should we “believe in ourselves”?

• Confidence as a whole is a problematic paradigm, confidence follows success, it doesn’t lead to success - it has NO effect on outcomes, only impact on trying to build confidence is that it increases narcissism

• Confidence is often either delusional (detached from reality) or contingent (which can crash your self esteem)

• Self compassion provides all the benefits of self confidence with none of the drawbacks

• How to change the way you talk to yourself and cultivate self compassion

• The simplest and easiest cure for the “plague” of procrastination you can use right now!

• The more you work, if you’re actually doing deliberate practice, the better you do

• What’s more important HUSTLE or work life balance?

• There is an, essentially linear, relationship between time and skill development

• 10,000 hours alone is proof of nothing - its all about deliberate practice - our current understanding of skill development is grossly oversimplified

• Difference between obsession and passion?

• In living a truly successful life - relationships, alignment, and fulfillment are essential

• And much more!

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This weeks episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Brilliant! Brilliant is math and science enrichment learning. Learn concepts by solving fascinating, challenging problems. Brilliant explores probability, computer science, machine learning, physics of the everyday, complex algebra, and much more. Dive into an addictive interactive experience enjoyed by over 4 million students, professionals, and enthusiasts around the world.

You can access courses online for free right now! however, Brilliant is offering The Science of Success Listeners 20% OFF THEIR FULL SUITE of classes and course simply go to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess in order to claim your discount and start learning these incredibly important skills today!

SUCCESS Live: Learn. Develop Achieve.  SUCCESS believes success is possible for every person who seeks it.  Find it at SUCCESS Live, a two-day event, open to the public, taking place in Long Beach, California on September 8th & 9th 2017. SUCCESS Live features some amazing guest speakers including Keith Ferrazzi, Peter Diamandis, Jocko Willink, and More

Ticket packages are still available to the public at https://www.successliveevent.com/! Don't miss the chance to learn the inner workings of your mind, reignite your passions, and become a better leader by becoming a better YOU! JOIN US, members of The Science of Success team at SUCCESS LIve by going to https://www.successliveevent.com/ today!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Personal Site] Barking Up the Wrong Tree

• [Book] The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done by Peter F. Drucker

• [Book] Barking Up the Wrong Tree by Eric Barker

• [Audiobook] The Luck Factor: The Scientific Study of the Lucky Mind by Richard Wiseman

• [HBS Faculty Profile] Boris Groysberg

• [Stanford Faculty Profile] Jeffrey Pfeffer

• [Website] Authentic Happiness

• [SoS Episode] Why You Shouldn’t Follow Your Passion & The Rare Value of Deep Work with Cal Newport

• [HBR Article] Managing Oneself by Peter F. Drucker

• [HBR Article] How Leaders Become Self-Aware by Anthony K. Tjan

• [Stanford Faculty Profile] Robert I.Sutton

• [Wiki Article] Gabriele Oettingen

• [Article] The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman

• [Website] Self-Compassion with Dr. Kristin Neff

• [Personal Site] Sam Harris

• [Article] The 75-Year Study That Found The Secrets To A Fulfilling Life By Carolyn Gregoire

• [Article] Good genes are nice, but joy is better By Liz Mineo

• [Stanford Course] Life Course Studies Program

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success with your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:12.6] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performers tick with a focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion. 

In this episode we ask what really produces success by looking at what separates truly successful people from the rest. We examined many common and conflicting success maxims and look at what the data actually says about what really works. We dig deep into the vital importance of knowing yourself and your own strengths. We look at the power of aligning your work with your environment and discuss the dangers of constantly overcommitting your time, with Eric Barker. 

The Science of Success continues to grow with now more than a million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries, hitting number one New and Noteworthy and more. I get listener comments and emails all the time asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all these incredible information?” 

A lot of her listeners are curious about how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge I get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to awesome podcasts, and more. Because of that, we’ve created an epic resource just for you, a detailed guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything, and you can get it completely for free by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, it's a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. All you have to do to get it is to text the word “smarter” to the number 44222 or go to successpodcast.com and join our email list, that’s successpodcast.com and join our email list. 

In a previous episode we discussed why people struggle to reach outside of their comfort zones and why it’s so critically important that you do. We explored the five core psychological roadblocks stopping people from stepping outside of their comfort zones. We went deep on how you can become tougher, more resilient and embrace discomfort and how you can master the art of small talk, what you need to cultivate the skill of global dexterity and much more, with Dr. Andy Molisnky. If you want to finally make progress on something that's been holding you back, listen to that episode. 

Also, don't forget. If you want to get all the incredible information we talked about in this show, links, transcripts and much more, and believe me, there's a ton of short notes for this episode. Be sure to check out or show notes that success podcast.com. Just hit the show notes button at the top. 

Lastly, you know how much I talk about the concept of mental models and how vital it is to build a toolkit of mental models in order to be successful and achieve your goals. That's why this week I am super excited to tell you that one of our sponsors, brilliant.org. Brilliant is a math and science enrichment learning tool that makes mastering the fundamentals of math and science easy and fun. They’re offering a special promotion for Science of Success listeners, and can get it at brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. Mastering the fundamentals of math and science is such an important component of building to toolkit of mental models, and Brilliant is a great way to get started on the path. 

[0:03:16.6] MB: Another sponsor for this episode is the Success Live Summit, which as we hinted at, is not actually the Science of Success, but Success Magazine puts on an awesome live summit and they’ve been kind enough to sponsor this episode as well as hook us up with some sweet guest speakers, which will be coming on the show in the next couple of weeks. But this event is actually pretty awesome and I'm kind of bummed out that I'm not going to get to go to it. I have an immovable schedule conflict, but my producer, Austin, who’s here in the studio with me will be able to attend it and he’s going to be there. 

[0:03:45.7] A: Yeah, we’re super excited. If anybody who’s listening to this right now wants to meet up, shoot me an email, austin@successpodcast.com. We’d love to chat, shake hands, take pictures. It’d be awesome. I think it’s really important for people that are striving to become more successful, to become more fulfilled, looking into the science of success to be around other people with those same goals. 

This time around the event, it’s two days. It’s in September 8th and 9th in Long Beach, California. There’s ticket packages available and they’ve got some amazing speakers, Matt. 

[0:04:10.7] MB: They really do. There’s people like some of my favorite authors, Keith Ferrazzi, Never Eat Alone, which is literally sitting on my desk right here. I constantly keep it in front of me because it’s probably the greatest book ever written about networking. They’ve got Peter Diamandis, incredible thinker and leader. People like Brendon Buchard, Mel Robbins. Really phenomenal lineup. 

[0:04:28.7] A: Yeah, it’s going to be greatest, and they’re speaking on a ton of things, from success, how to become a better leader, find balance in your life. If you’re a CEO of a company, you really got to find time to recharge, time to hit the gas. Just finding balance and mental strategies to making yourself bigger and better and your business bigger and better. Really hitting on all cylinders here. It’s going to be a great, great event. 

[0:04:47.7] MB: You can learn more and get tickets at successliveevent.com. That’s successliveevent.com. Definitely check it out. If you're in Long Beach, I would highly recommend checking it out, if you're looking for a really cool event, September 8th and 9th, Long Beach, California, successliveevent.com, you can find all the information you need. 

[0:05:06.6] A: Success Live: Learn, Develop, Achieve. Go to successliveevent.com today to get your ticket.

[0:05:11.9] MB: Now, for the episode. Today, we have another amazing guest on the show, Eric Barker. Eric is the creator of the blog Barking Up The Wrong Tree with over 290,000 subscribers. His work is syndicated by Time Magazine, Business Insider and he's been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and much more. Recently, his new book, Barking Up The Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success is Mostly Wrong was named a Wall Street Journal bestseller. 

Eric, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:05:42.2] EB: Thanks so much. It’s great to be here.

[0:05:44.0] MB: We’re super excited to have you on. As I was telling you kind of before we got started, I’ve been a long time reader of your blog and a big fan. I got to ask you at the beginning, how do you pronounce the name of it and what's the story behind the actual kind of — I'm going to botch it terribly, like bakadesuyo or badakaseyo. I don’t know how to say it. Tell me the story behind what that is and why you initially named the blog that. 

[0:06:06.7] EB: I started the blog on a lark. I didn’t even really know what I was doing with it at first. Basically, I took Japanese as my language in undergrad and I found out the first day of class that my last name means moron in Japanese, so I’ve been to Tokyo three times. I’ve never had a Japanese person forget my name. 

Basically, in the Japanese language you usually use last names, what [inaudible 0:06:33.0] means I am Barker. What [inaudible 0:06:36.4] that’s also means I’m an idiot. They’re the same exact sentence. Basically, from a URL, that is either me emphatically saying my name or me emphatically saying I’m a moron. However anybody chooses to interpret it. Perhaps not the best marketing choice on my part for a URL, but definitely has a fun back story. 

[0:06:56.6] MB: That’s awesome. I didn’t know that story, so that’s really funny. Tell me a little bit about how did you initially kind of get involved in this path and what drew you to really wanting to understand the science behind what makes people successful. Obviously, that’s the name of this podcast, and so I think there’s a ton of synergies between what you write about and what we love to dig into on the show. 

[0:07:18.7] EB: Yeah. I’ve been doing a blog now for about eight years and basically I started just coming through the RSS feeds of academic journals and kind of broadened it out. I was just looking for, initially, interesting stuff, and then eventually stuff that we could use to kind of improve our lives, because there’s a great William Gibson quote I love where he said that, “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” I think that’s true. A lot of questions we ask ourselves about success, about life, we think they’re mysteries. The truth is a lot of these things have been solved by scientific studies, most of those are not terribly fun or pleasant to read. 

I started doing that for a number of years and then I was lucky, blog kind of took off and people encourage me to write a book. I’ve had a very unconventional career of myself. I was a screenwriter at Hollywood. I worked in the video game industry, then I was a blogger, and I just saw that a lot of the ideas we have about success, these pithy little maxims we hear, like nice guys finish last, and it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. I saw that in a lot of situations these just didn’t apply to my career. I didn’t think they necessarily applied to other people or at least they were incomplete. 

Given that my blog was focused on personal development and success in many areas of life, everything from happiness, to productivity, to relationships and negotiation, I kind of wanted to tackle those head on and give them the Mythbusters treat and basically kind of look and see were they true, were they not true, and trying to get both sides of the story almost like a court case and hopefully make it fun and tell some engaging stories that people can relate to while trying to break down these myths. That was kind of the path I was on. 

[0:08:56.3] MB: I think that’s a great approach, and I love the structure of the book, which is as you said, to kind of take all of these maxims that we hear and people kind of casually toss out and say, “Hold on a second, is that even true?” In many cases, these maxims are directly contradictory. What does the data actually say? What is the research say about these strategies? That’s a genius approach to kind of cracking that walnut. 

[0:09:20.9] EB: It was really interesting for me, because in some — Maybe in a prior era, these things were more true, but now life is so complicated. We have so many options, so many possibilities that it’s hard to believe one pithy sentence, like nice guys finish last, is really going to sum up — is going to just include the sum total of anything. There’s definitely some insight in a lot of these, but I wanted to really look at what the experts and the academics had to say. It was educational for me as well and my intention here was to write the book I wish I had 15 years ago and to kind of have fun with it, because with everything I write on the blog, my attitude with everything is just try and — It’s like it better inform me or it better entertain me and preferably it’d better be both. 

[0:10:10.4] MB: You opened the book with a question of what separates the truly successful from everybody else. What did you see when you actually looked at the research and the data and figured out what are those key things. What are the differentiators that separate someone who’s really successful from someone who doesn’t achieve that?  

[0:10:30.4] EB: What I found was really interesting. Some insights that came from — The 10,000 foot overview were some insights that came from Gautam Mukunda and Boris Groysberg, two professors at Harvard Business School. The kind of the basic formula being, first, to know thyself. It’s really understanding your signature strengths, and that’s a funky academic term for knowing what your unique skills are, what you can really bring to the table that makes you standout. Knowing your interest, knowing your passions, knowing your signature strengths. Then aligning that with an environment that rewards those, those incentivizes those, because you can be really good at something, but if you’re not at a place that respects and values that, you’re probably not going to be very successful. 

On the flipside, you might work for a great company or a fantastic organization, but if you don’t really bring something to the table that’s unique and stands out, again, you’re probably not going to do so well there either. Once we look at those signature strengths and we find a place that rewards them, believes in those, you can really use something. 

What’s interesting there, and I discussed this in both the introduction and the first chapter, is what Harvard professor Gautam Mukunda calls intensifiers, and those are basically qualities that in general are negatives, but in the right environment can actually be positives. They can actually be the incredible competitive advantages. The example I used in the book is I want to talk about the story of Jure Robič who was the dominant participant in the Race Across America, which is this bicycle race that literally goes from Atlantic City to San Diego. They crossed the entire United States. Unlike the Tour de France, which has breaks, the Race Across America does not stop. The minute the clock starts, it does not stop, meaning if you stop to go to the bathroom, if you stop to sleep, if you stop — Anything, your competitors can pass you. People usually complete the race in 9 to 12 days. Two people have died trying to do this. It is just a relentless monster of an event. Outsize Magazine just declared it the most grueling ultra-endurance event there is. 

Jure Robič was the most dominant athlete in this sport, and the reason that he was so dominant is he would literally lose his mind. He would actually go crazy. He would hallucinate. He would become paranoid. He just start crying. He would hop off his bike and get in fist fights with mailboxes. He would lose his mind, but that disassociation allowed him to cope with just the unimaginable pain and discomfort of riding a bike for 9 days straight and he was so dominant he would actually — The difference between him and first place and the guy in second place was 11 hours. Literally, he would pass the finish line and you’d have to wait half a day to see number two cross the finish line. 

I think when I was a kid, my high school guidance counselor didn’t tell me that losing my mind and getting in fist fights with mailboxes was a path to success if anything. That’s where we get into the complexities of it where it’s just not so simple as played by the rules, get good grades, eat your Wheaties and everything is going to work out for you. We need to look at those times where when our negative is positive, and that’s why, like I said, when I talk about knowing yourself and finding the right environment, that doesn’t necessarily mean the typically prescribed things, like good grades and be sweet and nice. It’s that alignment between who you are and where you are that really produces success, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be those things that we were all told in elementary school. Sometimes the most biggest of negatives, like losing your mind, can actually be a positive, and that’s where I think we need to broaden how we think about what results in success, because when we talk about qualities like stubbornness, and stubbornness is a negative. 

If you’re an entrepreneur trying to do something really difficult, stubbornness is called grit and all of a sudden we think it’s fantastic. Grit and stubbornness can be the same exact thing, but that quality in you when you align it with the right environment, it’s a fantastic positive. For entrepreneurs, it’s probably essential. When you put it in a wrong environment, like a typical corporation where a group think is really a big thing, being stubborn and difficult can be problematic. It’s more about alignment in the big picture than it is about the positives or negatives of any particular quality in the abstract.  

[0:15:03.9] MB: I love that nuance and that story really highlights the example that context is vitally important. Another story that you’ve talked about is the story of Pixar, which I thought was really powerful. 

[0:15:16.3] EB: Yeah, basically it was right after Finding Nemo and Steve Jobs was concerned that they were going to lose their edge. That they had broken new ground. They had stepped aside from the typical animation, animation way of doing things, like Disney and the others, and they’ve been phenomenal, and they brought in Brad Bird to direct the next movie and he wanted to do things differently and try and make sure that they stayed innovative and they stayed edgy, and he didn’t do that by bringing in new people. He didn’t do that by only taking the top tier talent. He did that by telling the heads of Pixar, Steve Jobs and Ed Catmull. He said, “Give me all the black sheep.” He said, “Give me all the people who want to do things differently. Give me all the people who are probably headed out the door or going to get fired.” 

With those guys, Brad Bird, they managed to do things the studio had never done before they managed to accomplish things more cheaply. They did it quicker. In the end, they ended up making the film The Incredibles which not only grossed, I think, over $600 million, but also won The Oscar for best animated feature. Again, they did this by embracing the different attitudes that some of these people had rather than looking at them through the typical corporate lens of, “Oh, those guys are difficult.” No. Those guys might have a very different but good way of looking at things. Now, that doesn’t mean that different is always good. Different can definitely be bad, but we need to be very careful about just labeling anything that is outside the norm or doesn’t align with the current values of upper management as bad, because I think that’s something we’re seeing now more than ever is just corporations love to talk about, “Oh, we want to innovate.” “Oh, we went outside the box.” Yeah, but we also don’t want to change. That doesn’t really work. Being able to look at what the qualities are, sometimes qualities that on the surface seem like negatives in the right environment can be positives.  

[0:17:16.9] MB: I think the point about context too really reveals why many of these traditional success maxims are so limited, because as you pointed out, in a specific context that skillset or that ability might be really powerful, but in many other contexts it could dangerous, it could be disastrous or it could be problematic. It could be inhibiting you from achieving what you’re trying to achieve. 

[0:17:41.3] EB: No, absolutely. I think that’s a lot of — One thing I was very cognizant of when I was writing a book was I just didn’t want it to be this — We’ve seen a lot of business books that just hold up one concept and they say, “This is the and all be all answer. This quality is always good in every situation everywhere for the rest of time. It has no downsides. No negatives. No side effects, so all we need to do is have this one thing and everything is going to be great and live happily ever after.” Life doesn’t work like that. Plain and simple, life doesn’t work like that. 

For instance, when talking about the research in terms of nice guys finish last. A huge distinction is short term versus long term. In the short term, being a jerk can really payoff, and anybody who has seen a jerk get promoted or a jerk become CEO knows this at least in their heart of hearts. In the short term, you see this and so many experiments that have been done in terms of theoretical constructs, like the prisoner’s dilemma, a lot of Robert Axelrod’s research, you see that in the short term being bad can be very, very good. You see things like Jeffrey Pfeffer’s research at Stanford Graduate School of Business where kissing your boss’s ass, the research shows is far more effective than actual hard work. Again, that’s in the short term. Over the long term, we gain a reputation. Over the long term, that reputation is going to affect you. It depends on that context, again, where used car salesman doesn’t expect to see you again, and that’s why they have the reputation they do and why they use the methods they do. Your mom hopefully is going to be with you the rest of your life, and that’s why moms have the reputation they do. They’re really looking out for you. 

It’s critical to understand, when we try to make everything one-size-fits-all, one simple answer, that’s usually not the case, but to understand, “Well, gees! I’ve seen good guys get ahead and I’ve seen bad guys get ahead. Is it just random?” No. It’s not random. In that particular case, it’s usually often an issue of short term versus long term. 

I think to understand nuance, to understand the importance of context really allows us to really start to get our brain around how success really works in the real world. 

[0:20:02.0] MB: I think the other characteristic that you identified about what makes the successful standout and the vital importance of knowing yourself, that’s something we delve into a lot on the show and one of the most recurrent themes received from across the board, even looking at people like Buddhist teachers, meditation teachers, etc., it's so critical to understand yourself. 

[0:20:25.7] EB: Yeah. I think that it's something we pay a lot of lip service to, but I don’t think it’s something that a lot of people really to sit down and think about. Hey, our brands are filled with cognitive biases and many of us can be overconfident or not so self-aware, but to sit down and actually think about that, you look at the research in terms of self-awareness has some really powerful advantages to it. There are ways to go about it. Management guru, Peter Drucker, talked about feedback analysis where taking the time to make predictions and then see how they work out in terms of, “Am I going to do this well? Am I going to do that well?” 

Overtime you’ll see patterns, you’ll see trends, or if you’re a little bit more brave and are a little bit more thick skin to do an informal survey of your friends, of those closest to you, to get an idea. Of course, with friends who you believe will be honest with you, to get an idea of what they see your strengths and weaknesses are, because if you ask, say, 10 friends, yeah, there’s going to be some randomness, some noise in there. My guess is in terms of strengths and weaknesses, you’re going to hear a handful of things over and over again. Those are the things that you should really kind of hone in on because it not only does it make us obviously more successful to do things we’re good at. That’s pretty intuitive. 

On the flipside, when you look at the research at University of Pennsylvania on signature strengths and surveys done by Gallup, both of them show that the more time you spend on things that you are good at, the happier people are, the more respected feel. There’s just overall in terms of subjective well-being increases dramatically. Past that, if you look at some of the work by Cal Newport at Georgetown, you see that our passions — Many people have the typical passions. They want to be a professional athlete. They want to be a singing success. There’s not a lot of spots for those things. Pursuing your passions doesn’t always lead to happiness. 

However, there’s a good body of research that shows that when you pursue the things you’re good at, that you become happy, that passions don’t necessarily lead to success, but when you do things that you are successful, you become passionate about that. You become happy that you’re doing and you enjoy them more. 
Those are definitely some tips we can use there in terms of the power of self-awareness. 

[0:23:00.4] MT: How do you think about balancing the kind of advice to focus primarily on improving your strengths versus improving your weaknesses and repairing your weaknesses. 

[0:23:11.7] EB: The research is pretty consistent on that one. Again, Peter Drucker wrote a fantastic piece to the Harvard Business Review a number of years ago that you’re going to do much better by trying to improve on your strengths and trying to bring up your weaknesses. Your first goal, it’s going to be easier. You’re probably more passionate about it and you’re going to spend time on it. It’s going to be much — You’re going to see bigger gains, larger marginal returns. Beyond that, also bringing up your weaknesses is going to be very difficult. 

If you look at Drucker’s book, the Effective Executive, which is a fantastic book in general, he says that it’s much better to focus on the things you’re good at and then find a way to compensate for the things you’re bad at. In other words, if you are extremely creative and dynamic and innovative and you’re always coming up with really powerful new ideas, but you are a complete disorganized mess, it’s far better for you to double down on being creative and coming up with interesting ideas and to hire an assistance to keep you organized than it is for you to sit down and study a bunch of productivity books and trying to do something that is just completely kind of going against the grain. 

To point to specific examples, Bob Sutton, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, when I interviewed him he talked about the fact that this is exactly what many successful chief executive officers have done including Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg is they didn’t say, “Oh, I’m going to bring up my weaknesses and try and be this incredibly well-rounded renaissance man.” 

What they did was they said, “I’m going to focus on what I’m good at, and when I round out the rest of my senior management team, I’m going to make sure that they fill in those gaps that I’m not so good at so that those things are being addressed, but I’m not the one who has to address them.” 

[0:24:56.9] MB: I think the great word there is compensate, right? People might get confused when they think about focusing on the strengths versus focusing on weaknesses. If you find a way to compensate for your weaknesses, then that enables you to focus deeply on your strengths. 

[0:25:11.1] EB: Absolutely. Any system or tool that you can leverage to do that is fine. Where if you see people who, because of their time at an organization or with a particular boss or mentor or maybe their time in the military, they develop certain good habits and they might not be the most organized person, but because they were at an institution or in the military that thought them a number of habits, then they can pick those thing sup. Training yourself in terms of habits can be a personal way to compensate for your weaknesses. They use certain technology, tools, or aps that help you compensate. 

Again, if you’re an entrepreneur or if you’re an organization where you have direct reports, you can be cognizant of this and hire to attempt to deliberately compensate for your weaknesses, because you’re going to see in general much greater returns from focusing on your assurance. 

[0:26:09.4] MB: That’s circles back to the importance of knowing yourself. Again, if you really have a clear understanding of where you’re strong and where you’re weak, it’s that much easier to say, “Hey, I suck at being organized, or I suck at this particular piece of the business. This is what I need to find somebody. Their skillset is exactly this.” 

[0:26:28.1] EB: Yeah. It’s funny you say that, because that’s exactly what Drucker says in Effective Executive where he says, “WE all know those people who they just — They’re few and far between, but we all know someone who is able to take on a project and pretty much they may not know what they’re doing, but they know how to approach it. They go ahead and it seems they’re always a phenomenal success and we’re envious of these people. 

Drucker says one of the reasons that people can do that is because once you are really aware of your strengths and weaknesses, you’re very quickly able to diagnose a situation and say, “Oh! This naturally aligns with my strengths, so I’m just going to sit down and do what I usually do,” or “This is not so aligned with my strengths, but knowing that my strengths are, then I can find the right kind of solution to this. I can get help from the right people because maybe I’m a better communicator than I am researcher. Okay, well then. I’m going to get on the phone and I’m going to talk to some experts who really — Or maybe I’m a bookwork, but I’m not a great communicator. Okay, well then. I’m going to real all the great books on this and I’m going to focus on putting something like this down on paper as supposed to merely talking to people.” 

Just understanding your strengths allow you to plan the right way, to go about achieving a goal, because there’s many different strategies you can take. Once you kind of know the meta goal, what’s the overall big plan, there’s often many different ways to get there. When you know your strength, you’re able to better plan. When you don’t know your strengths, you’re kind of rolling a dice. If you’re diluting yourself, then you actually might be in a worst situation of all, which is maybe you actually working against your best interests. 

[0:28:13.4] MB: I’m super excited today to tell you about our sponsor for this episode, brilliant.org. Brilliant.org is absolutely awesome website that’s focused on math and science learning and making it super easy and approachable. You know how big of a fan I am of mental models and building a toolkit of mental models. In many ways, one of the core word things driving this show is helping you build a toolkit of mental model so that you can better understand the world so that you can master the art of decision-making. That's why brilliant.org is so awesome, because you can integrate a lot of these mental models around probability, math and science into your day by using something like brilliant.org. I've got my producer, Austin, here to join us and talk a little bit about brilliant. 

[0:28:58.4] A: Yeah. I’ve been taking some of the courses and I’ve been diving in. It’s absolutely great. You say math and sciences and a lot of people, you have an idea on your head about this course and you’re going to be like, “They’re fun. They’re interactive and they keep you going. They have streaks.” Probability is one of the course that really caught my mind. They sort of approached it from what’s one of the foundations of probability, which is games of chance. Things like poker, rolling the dice, casino blackjack, things like that. 

The way they framed all of these math and science, framed it in a way that you can kind of understand it and apply it in real life. It’s not just memorizing equations and numbers, but still very impactful. 

[0:29:32.2] MB: I'm a big poker player, which you’ve heard me talk about sometimes on the show. I’ve been on a few poker podcast and that kind of thing. Austin sometimes comes to my poker game that I host, and I can tell you he definitely needs to brush up on some of these probability courses. 

[0:29:47.4] A: That’s why I’m going with brilliant.org to learn more how I can come here and take your money. We have one tonight even. 

[0:29:52.0] MB: We do. I don’t know if you’re coming to the game or not. 

[0:29:53.5] A: We’ll see. 

[0:29:55.7] MB: Yeah, it’s amazing. Again, I think it's so important and so few people really understand math and science, and America is falling behind in those categories. I don't want you to be left behind, and that's why I think something like brilliant.org is such a great sponsor for this show. We’re super excited to have them, and it's an incredible place where you can go and brush up and build these science and math skills. 

The cool thing is they’re actually offering 20% off of their premium plan to anybody who’s a Science of Success listener. You can get that at brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. That's brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. I highly recommend checking it out. You know how important math and science skills are, and if you want to build a toolkit of mental models, understanding things like chemistry, physics and probability are some of the cornerstones of that and I'm definitely going to be spending a lot of time on Brilliant brushing up on some of these fields that I already have a pretty good understanding of, but you can always use a refresher. 

[0:30:53.4] A: Yeah. There’re already four million students, professionals and enthusiasts, just like you all out on Brilliant learning, brushing up on these skills and taking advantage of the software. 20% on their premium plan when you go to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess.

[0:31:06.5] MB: Alright, back to the episode. 

Let’s segue into some of the other lessons from the book. One of the ones that we hear about all the time is the idea of persevering, should we stay with it? Do quitters never win, or is grit the important factor, or should we cut our loses, move on quickly and find things that are successful? 

[0:31:30.4] EB: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting, because grit is kind of having a moment now. It’s kind of its time in the sun, and there’s a good reason for that. Obviously, a lot of people do have trouble persisting with their goals over the long term, so that is critical. I think we do a disservice by acting like grit is the answer to everything, because if that was the case then I would still be in tee-ball and playing with action figures, because that’s what I was doing when I was seven and I decided to stick with that. 

No. We all change. We all grow. We all evolve, and increasingly the modern work world, people are having multiple roles in completely different careers, in completely different industries, so adaption is critical. 

Grit is really powerful, and we can see the research from Martin Seligman and others that shows that optimism promotes grit. That taking things and perceiving them, using a frame, a game-type frame where it’s a game of sorts can help promote grit. On the flipside, we need to look at the advantages of quitting. We need to see. If you look at the economic principle of opportunity cost, we all only have 24 hours in a day and if you just keep being gritty with things and you keep adding new skills, well eventually you’re just not going to have time for them all. 

The truth is that strategically quitting is not the opposite of grit. It is complementary to grit, because the more things you quit, the more time, energy, money resources that you have to devote to the things that you want to be gritty with, that you want to focus on, because there’s research, one of the studies in the book where when you ask people, people are consistently conservative with estimating money. People don’t think that they’re going to be a millionaire tomorrow. They’ll be conservative in terms of committing themselves to spending lots of money. 

However — And this is the opposite of the time equals money perspective. However, we don’t look at time like that. People will consistently overcommit in terms of how much time they have. If something seems further away, if I ask you to do something three months from now, well you just seemed sure and positive that in three months you’re going to have more time where it’s probably much more realistic, unless it’s an exception. It’s probably more realistic for you to look at your last week. Think about how busy you were, and it’s probably how busy you’re going to be three months from now. Yet, we consistently make the error that in the future we’ll have more time. In the future, sadly, the days are still going to have 24 hours. In a week, there’s still going to have 7 days. We really need to be cognizant of those timing issues and use that to our advantage when we’re planning, we’re trying to figure out how to be successful. 

[0:34:12.6] MB: So true. Literally, just thinking about it now, I feel like I will have more time in three months, and it’s very hard to kind of dislodge that bias from my mind, but logically I know that that’s probably very unlikely. 

[0:34:27.5] EB: No. It’s critical to think about that, because time used is really big in terms of grit. You’re not going to have more than 24 hours in a day. Being able to quit, being able to think. So what it comes down to really, what I recommend in the book, is finding a balance where it’s looking at what’s producing results. What’s not producing results? The things that producing results are getting you where you want to go, that’s where you want to show grit. The things that aren’t producing results, and sometimes those are hard to face. You want to try and like go up, but you always want to be devoting five to 10% of your time to what Peters Sims calls little bets, and that is little low-cost investments to kind of see what can work out. See what might be able to come of that and be trying new things, because the world is changing fast, so we need to be changing with it, and to find that new opportunity, that new hobby, relationship, whatever, we always need to be trying new things. 

Another thing that people can use that’s really powerful, a research by Gabriele Oettingen at NYU, she talks about a great little acronym called WOOP, and what that is is wish, outcome, obstacle, plan, and that is whenever we’re dreaming about something we want, some goal we have in the future, to walk through those four steps. To first, think about what you’re wishing for. The second is to think of the concrete outcome, what you would actually like to happen specifically. The third, and this is critical, is to think about the obstacles. What’s in the way, so that you’re not merely wishing and dreaming. You’re not daydreaming. You’re thinking about the obstacles. What’s in the way? Fourth is to make a plan based on that. That really helps people be much more realistic about their goals and create a plan to get to them. 

What is fantastic, really interesting, is that a secondary effect that she found with this research was that it actually became a litmus test for whether to apply grit or quit. When people went through the WOOP plan, when people went through wish, outcome, obstacle, plan, if they felt more energized afterwards, if they’re walking through it, if they felt like, “Wow! This is great. I can certainly do this.” Then that was probably something that they should apply grit too over the long term. 

However, if people went through it and they felt a little down. They felt de-energized, then the plan probably wasn’t realistic and it’s probably either a goal that they needed to discard or a goal that they needed to kind of reframe, that they needed to think about what the meta goal was and find a different way to go about achieving it. 

[0:36:53.2] MB: I love the idea of little bets. You know, it’s funny. I was thinking about I know this podcast basically came out of a little bit. I had a buddy suggest to really put a few episodes out on the internet and kind of slowly took hold. As you said at the start of the interview, your blog started out the same way. These are two very concrete examples of how you should always be out there trying new little things and dedicating a little bit of time to sort of low-risk opportunities and activities that may take off and they may not. That’s why I always kind of had an issue with the idea that you should never quit, because I think you should be testing lots of little things and seeing what’s getting some traction and what’s not and then double down your bets and the things that are actually working. 

[0:37:39.9] EB: That’s critical. When people talk about luck, what’s interesting is there’s research on luck. Now, I don’t mean luck in terms of magic, but luck in terms of seemingly random good things, positive things happening to you. Richard Wiseman, a professor in the UK did some research and he found a few things that you can actually do to improve luck. 

One of them was the idea of being open to new experiences, trying new things, because it’s intuitive. We don’t usually think about it, but it’s only rational intuitive. If you lock the door to your house, don’t answer the phone, don’t go on the internet, how many random good things are going to happen to you? Not too many. Versus if you’re out there exposing yourself to possibilities, yeah, negatives can happen, but playing positives can happen as well. That’s the kind of thing we need to be thinking about is trying new things, exposing ourselves to new experiences, because you can’t guarantee that great things are going to happen to you, but there are certainly things you can do to increase or decrease a possibility of those little serendipitous moments occurring. 

One of the best ones is little bets, little low-cost, low resource, low time investment, things that could produce great results. I dare to say that in the modern era, that is sort of essential, because the world is changing. We’re going to have to change, and that’s something that we need to keep doing a certain percentage of our time just to make sure that we’re keeping up with the natural changes in the world. 

[0:39:12.2] MB: Tell me about what are the other topics that you wrote about that I thought was really interesting was how do we, as you put it, walk the tight rope between confidence and delusion, and how often should we really focus on believing in ourselves? 

[0:39:26.9] EB: It’s really interesting, because confidence is — There’s no doubt that confidence, first of all, makes us feel good. Second of all, confidence has an enormous impact on how others perceive us. Confidence was a really interesting thing to explore, because I’ve never heard anybody say, “I’m trying to decrease my confidence.” 

We don’t see a lot of books about how to reduce your self-esteem in five easy steps. That’s probably because the book wouldn’t sell, but you just don’t hear anybody talking about the downsides of confidence. Part of that is because we have a separate word we use. We’ll talk about narcissism, or hubris, or we’ll call it over confident, but nobody kind of gives less confidence what its due and we — Again, because we have another word for it often, which we often label like humility, which is a positive quality because when we are less confident, we’re open to learning. We’re more open to new ideas. We don’t alienate other people by being know-it-alls.  

When you look at it, what you’ll often find is that confidence as a whole is a problematic paradigm, because when you look at the research, confidence usually follows success. It doesn’t lead to success. When California launched a state initiative to try and increase the self-esteem of students because they thought it would increase grades, decrease drug use, all these other things, what they found is that it had almost no effect at all. In fact the only effect it probably had was increasing narcissism, because confidence usually follows success. It doesn’t always lead to it. 

What we can find is that often that’s because confidence is very often either delusional or contingent. Delusional in the sense that people are overconfident and that usually leads to failure eventually, because eventually reality gives us a kind of market correction in the form of a metaphorical punch in the nose, or confidence is often contingent. Self-esteem is contingent, where basically you have this vision of yourself and in order to realistically maintain it, you feel you need to wake up and slay a dragon everyday so that you can continue to feel good about yourself, and this just keeps you on a treadmill of you keep having to achieving just in order to feel good about yourself. That’s exhausting, but not only is that exhausting, you’re going to have an off day. One day you’re not going to slay that dragon and your self-esteem crashes, and that’s how we end up on this rollercoaster of emotions having to work so hard to feel good about ourselves and then not feeling good about ourselves, and it’s a double down. 

What we see is when you look — Going back well over a thousand years, is the Buddhist concept of self-compassion, which Kristin Neff at the University of Texas at Austin has done a bunch of academic research showing that this isn’t just a philosophical concept. It’s actually a really good kind of alternative to self-confidence is self-compassion. Basically what that is, is rather than with self-confidence or self-esteem, trying to build yourself up to be something greater than you’re not. Self-compassion is seeing the world more realistically and being far more open to forgiving yourself when you’re not Superman, when you don’t achieve. Taking a realistic perspective and then understanding, sometimes you’re going to fail. That’s human, and forgiving yourself and moving on. That keeps us out of that contingent treadmill cycle and keeps us out of delusion. What her research has shown is that self-compassion provides all the benefits of self-confidence without any of the negatives and it’s a very powerful tool that we can all use to get us out of the self-confidence track.  

[0:43:02.2] MB: That’s amazing, and self-compassion is something that we talk a ton about on the show. Again and again it comes up as such a vital skill to cultivate. How do you — From what you saw, what are some of the best ways to cultivate self-compassion? 

[0:43:18.6] EB: The first real step is we all have that voice in our head that’s so critical and we’re quick to beat ourselves up when we make mistakes and it’s really changing that voice. Changing the way you talk to yourself, where instead of being so negative and critical, is to just have more of a grandmotherly sort of forgiving attitude where instead of, “Oh! I get this thing in late, and I’ll — I’m so stupid. How do I do this every time?” As supposed to, “You know what? I made a mistake. It happens. I’ll do my best to correct it, but this happens and it’s okay. It’s not the end of the world,” to take that perspective. 

What’s interesting is you look at the research in terms of something we all suffer from, kind of a plague, is procrastination. We’re also inclined to beat ourselves up for procrastination, but what the studies show is that forgiving yourself for procrastination is actually a much better — It leads to people getting things done and on doing stuff. We feel like we need to punish ourselves, but that kind of keeps us in that loop here we’re punishing ourselves and we see ourselves as procrastinators and we’re still tied up as supposed to letting it go, letting the fear go, letting the concern go and just getting something done. So much of procrastination comes from fear, from this kind of negative anticipation and just taking that voice in your head. When you hear that critical voice, just trying to soften it. Just trying to say, it’s like, “Yes. Hey, I make mistakes. That’s human. That’s natural,” and forgiving yourself again, as supposed to when we take that self-confidence vision of, “I’ve got to be Superman. I’m this awesome super thing.” That can only lead to two places; having that insane, over the top, I’m 150% attitude, that can only lead to you being utterly diluted and completely cutoff from reality, because it’s not who you are. It’s impossible, or to you just crushing your self-esteem because seeing unrealistic standards, and then when you see the results are not 150%, then you feel terrible about yourself. I don’t think anyone of us wants to, A; feel terrible about ourselves, or B; be utterly diluted and cutoff from reality. It’s much better to develop that sort of softer, quitter, forgiving voice in our head and to just catch ourselves whenever we’re too critical, whenever we’re beating ourselves up. That’s a really good first step to self-compassion. 

[0:45:48.0] MB: That makes me think about something that I think about a ton, which is the balance between almost this Buddhist sense of non-attachment with ambition and achievement. How do you strike a balance between those two things? I know you don’t necessarily directly address that in the book, but I’m curious what your thoughts are about how those two things kind of balance each other and how self-compassion plays into that.  

[0:46:12.0] EB: One of the things I do talk about in the 6th chapter of the book is just that hard work really does pay off. Hard work really does payoff in terms of skills and stuff like that. It’s not necessarily rewarded in an organization, but when you look at the greats in terms of any area of skill-based individual achievement, yeah, the more you work, if you’re actually doing deliberate practice, it pays off. What does that mean? That means that somebody who works nine hours a day is going to do better than someone who works eight hours a day. Somebody who works 16 hours a day is going to be — It can almost become a prescription for workaholism and that can be dangerous. 

In the subtitle to the introduction, I talk about the decoding what successful people do so that we can learn to be more like them or so that we can learn why it’s good that we aren’t, because I would say the heights of success, you’re going to find a lot of workaholics and you’re also going to find a lot of people who are extraordinarily successful but not necessarily happy. 

When we look at the idea, the Buddhist ideas of kind of non-attachment, yeah, it’s like you want to reach the heights of success, the extremes. That may not be aligned with a much more modest forgiving, but would you be happy as a millionaire or do you have to be a billionaire? Those are the kinds of questions we need to ask ourselves, and that’s sort of the work-life balance question, because if you take it that there’s a more or less linear relationship between hard work and skill development, that’s going to lead you towards a workaholic attitude. If you take the attitude that, “I need to be enjoying myself. I need to have downtime. I need to have some fun.” Then that is going to take you away from the very, very heights potentially of success. 

It’s a decision we all need to make for ourselves. I quote Sam Harris in the book talking about, “If you want to reach the extremes of success,” he says, “is that align with those kind of Buddhist kind of more mild, not necessarily.” But on the other hand, as Harris says, “But do we need to be torturing ourselves as much as we do? Do we need to be as non-self-compassionate as we are?” The answer to that is probably no. We can definitely glean something from those more moderate detached Buddhist attitudes. In the end, as I talked about in the book, you need to have a personal definition of success. The standards that are presented to us in the media these days are statistical anomalies and not replicable for most people. If we hold ourselves to those standards, it’s almost a prescription for clinical depression. We need to say, “What’s going to make me happy? What is good enough?” That I think is very well-aligned with some of the more Buddhist ideas you’re talking about.  

[0:49:12.5] MB: How do you think about the idea — That I totally understand and agree with the — I’m a huge fan of deliberate practice and that these sort of direct relationship between time spent practicing and skill development. Zooming out or thinking about that kind of a different perspective, how do you think about the application, the 80-20 principle and sort of the nonlinear relationship between results produced and time spent, right? Because it’s not necessarily — If you’re looking at achievement broadly, or financial success, there’s a lot of other factors that go into that than sort of just raw time spent. 

[0:49:46.4] EB: That’s one of the things I think the biggest mistake people make when they haven’t really read the literature. It’s just, “Oh, 10,000 hours.” It’s like, “Well, no. It’s not 10,000.” I’ve definitely driven a car for 10,000 hours. That doesn’t prepare me to go into Formula One or NASCAR, because that wasn’t deliberate practice. I was not actually pushing my limits and trying to get better. I may have spent 10,000 hours washing my hair in the course of my life. I’m not an expert hair washer. 

First and foremost, realizing that 10,000 hours alone is just proof of nothing. It is the issue of deliberate practice. Again, there’s a lot of other factors as well. There are issues. If you’re 5 foot 4, you can spend 10,000 hours. I still don’t think you’ll be in the NBA. There are physical limitations, natural limitations, and also there’s always going to be diminishing marginal returns where the further along you go, the harder it’s going to be to improve your first year or two at anything you’re going to make. If you are using deliberate practice and spending a lot of hours, you’re going to get very good very fast. After those 10 years, it’s going to require enormous amounts of energy and effort and time just to move the needle a recognizable amount. 

I think very often when we’re talking about skill development, it’s grossly over simplified and because that’s what most people want to hear, but it is more nuanced than that and we need to be realistic about some of the limitations and some of what’s involved. I don’t think it’s surprising that many of the people who do reach the heights of skill development and success in arenas, even if they have natural gifts, there is usually a fair amount of obsessiveness involved. It’s seen again and again and again that we love to use more positive-spin words, like “passionate”, but when you look at a lot of the daily routines and habits of people who are extremely successful in sports, music, writing, etc., even science and other areas, the word obsessive rings a lot more true than passionate. When Jeffrey Pfeffer looked at top success executives in business, so you don’t have to be talking about the arts. He said that here’s a number of qualities you absolutely need to be in the top of your game. 

The first thing he listed was energy and stamina, because he just said you’re going to be working a lot. You’re going to be working hard and things are going to be thrown at you and if you don’t have energy and stamina, yeah, there’s a lot of great qualities you can have, but you’re just going to need to keep going. I think we have a lot of illusions about what it takes to get really good, but it’s a lot more nuanced than just a work hard. 

[0:52:40.3] MB: In the conclusion of the book you asked the question, “What makes for a successful life?” I’d love for you to share that wisdom with the listeners. 

[0:52:48.1] EB: In terms of a successful like, it’s like we really need to be thinking about that concept of alignment, of your signature strengths and picking the right environment. We need to really think about relationships. Relationships are really critical, because that is part of that environment, is the relationships you have. When you look at the results of the Grant study, which fall a number of men, I believe started in the 1930s and followed men throughout their entire life, in college, throughout, you saw that George Valliant who led the study for a few decades, when interviewed, he said that the most important thing in life is your relationships, full stop. That was critical. 

When you saw similar results out of a German study, which was another longitudinal study that followed people throughout their entire lives, because it’s very easy to do a sample of 100 undergrads for a month or two, but to follow people from their teen years or their youth all the way throughout, relationships are really critical. 

Obviously, in business, in one of the chapters I talk about networking and how important that can be. In terms of our lives, how you feel about other people. The interesting thing is those people with good relationships who felt loved, who gave love, actually were more career successful as well. That idea of aligning your signature strengths with your environment is really important, but if we’re not thinking about relationships and our connections with other people, we don’t — I don’t think any of us look forward to having deathbed regrets. What you see is when people are on their deathbed, in an informal study, that most of the things were not about work, not about career and financial success. In fact, quite the opposite. One of the top five deathbed regrets was, “I wish I had not worked as hard.” We need to be thinking about those relationships, because in the long term they seem to be much more important than the immediate finance or career successes. 

[0:54:49.3] MB: For somebody who’s listened to this interview and they want to concretely implement some of the advice and the wisdom that you shared, what would be one piece of homework that you would give them as a starting point to do that? 

[0:55:02.0] EB: I would say what we talked about in terms of know thyself. I would say to do an informal survey of your friends. The friends who aren’t just going to tell you what you want to hear. Who you know are — Who, in general, those friends are perhaps a little too honest. They have good news for you now. To ask 5 or 10 friends to tell you what they think your strengths and weaknesses are. Like I said, you’re going to hear some random things, but I think you’re going to hear a number of things repeated. 

Once you start to identify what those are, then you can start to think about your environment, and if you’re up for a career shift, you can think about an organization or a company that might respect those things. If somebody says, “You’re really organized. You’re fantastic with logistics,” then being a painter might not be the best choice. However, working for FedEx or UPS might be a fantastic choice if you’re really organized, time efficient and good at logistics.  

By the same token, to just understand wherever your strengths might lie, if you can align those. In the same way, even at home, with your partner, with family, to realize what you’re good at, what you’re not good at can really help your relationship in terms of dividing duties and tasks around the house or with kids in terms of your partner as supposed to both of you doing things which it’s inefficient for you to be handling when you have advantages elsewhere.

First and foremost, I would try and survey those friends. Try and get an idea of those strengths and then start thinking about who rewards those. What groups, organizations really reward and value those things, and then you can start to see to pick the right pond, to basically find the place where you fit in and you are valued and respected. I think that’s really critical. 

[0:56:58.7] MB: For listeners who want to find you, read of what you’ve written, where they can find you, your blog and the book online? 

[0:57:06.7] EB: Because my URL is a little hard to spell, I think the best thing is to probably either Google Barking Up the Wrong Tree, that’s my blog. Barking Up the Wrong Tree blog, or Google my name, Eric Barker. The best way to keep up with what I’m doing is to join my email list. You’ll get one email a week with my latest post in terms of the research and stuff I’ve been looking at. My book, Barking Up the Wrong Tree is available on Amazon and other retailers. They can find those there. 

[0:57:34.7] MB: We’ll make sure to include all of those in the show notes as well as all the studies that you talked about. There’s tons and tons of notes for this episode that I know listeners are going to want to dig into. 

Eric, thank you so much for coming on the show. As I’ve said, I’ve been a huge fan of your blog for years and years and it’s so great to have you come on and share all these knowledge with our listeners. 

[0:57:52.7] EB: Thanks so much, Matt. It was really a pleasure. 

[0:57:54.1] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. Your support is what drives us and keeps us creating great new content, adding value to the world and interviewing amazing guests each week.

The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s matt@sucesspodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every listener email. 

The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes, because that helps more and more people discover The Science of Success. 
	
I get a ton of listeners asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all these information?” Because of that, we’ve created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. You can get it by texting the word “smarter”, that’s “smarter” to the number 44222, or by going to successpodcast.com, that’s successpodcast.com and joining our email list. 

Don’t forget, if you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we just talked about in this show and, believe me, this particular interview with Eric Barker has a tremendous amount of show notes. Be sure to check out the show notes, you can to successpodcast.com and hit the show notes button at the top. 
 
Thanks again, and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

How To Demolish What’s Holding You Back & Leave Your Comfort Zone with Andy Molinsky

In this episode we discuss why people struggle to reach outside their comfort zones – and why it’s so critically important that you do, we explore the 5 core psychological road blocks stopping people from stepping outside their comfort zones, we go deep on how you can become tougher, more resilient, and embrace discomfort, how you can master the art of small talk, what you need to do to cultivate the skill of “global dexterity” and much more with Dr. Andy Molinksy.

Dr. Andy Molinsky is a professor of Organizational Behavior and Psychology at Brandeis University. Andy is the author of Reach: A New Strategy to Help You Step Outside Your Comfort Zone, Rise to the Challenge and Build Confidence, as well as Global Dexterity: How to Adapt Your Behavior across Cultures without Losing Yourself in the Process. He has been featured in Inc., Psychology Today, The Harvard Business Review, and was named one of LinkedIn’s Top Voices for 2016.

We discuss:

• Lessons from interviews with students, teachers, police officers, rabbis, priests, entrepreneurs, goat farmers - and the common lessons of WHY people struggle to step outside their comfort zones

• Why do people struggle to reach outside their comfort zones?

• The vital importance of stepping outside your comfort zone

• The 5 core psychological road blocks / challenges that make it hard to step outside our comfort zones

• Authenticity/Identity/Self image

  1. Likability

  2. Competence

  3. Resentment

  4. Morality

• Imposter Syndrome and how it can trap you in your comfort zone

• Our “amazing capacity” to avoid discomfort and seek relief

• What happens when people avoid uncomfortable situations

• How we can often create imperfect substitutions for situations we want to avoid

• How our minds rationalize excuses so that we can avoid uncomfortable things

• “Fear is about predicting the future” and we are often poor predictors of our own futures

• If you want to achieve your goals you usually have to step outside your comfort zone

• Specific tactics and strategies you can use to step outside of your comfort zone

• How conviction can help you step outside your comfort zone and push you

• Customizing and tweaking situations to make them slightly more bearable can help you take that first step

• The danger of “catastrophizing” and always assuming the worst case scenario

• The power of clarity and getting clear on the truth about what you want, and what the worst case scenarios are

• How we can build resilience and make the pursuit of discomfort stick

• The power of a learning orientation and growth mindset to give you the ability to step outside your comfort zone

• Stepping outside your comfort zone starts in your mind

• The power of desensitizing yourself to things outside your comfort zone, and what happens when you continue to have experiences outside your comfort zone

• How to deliver bad news to people, fire someone, and have tough conversations

• The dysfunctional conversations that might arise if you don’t know the right way to deliver bad news

• The vital importance of mastering the art of small talk & strategies for mastering small talk

• Why every meaningful relationship you’ve ever had (other than family) started with small talk

• Focus first on building camaraderie and rapport, then trust

• Listening, making connection, asking questions in an open ended way

• Developing global dexterity and learning to act outside of your cultural comfort zone

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go to www.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better?

Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go to www.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners, That Moment Podcast. That Moment explores the pivot that changes everything: moments that open doors for discovery and growth, but also bring the looming possibility of failure. Each show features different leaders and innovators sharing their stories of taking risks in business and in life. That Moment is produced by Pivotal, who believes when change is the only constant, people and businesses must be built to adapt. Get the details of their first episode "It Was Essentially Disrupting Ourselves" here and check them out on iTunes, Google Play, and Soundcloud.

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] Reach by Andy Molinsky

• [Book] Global Dexterity by Andy Molinsky

• [Website] Rejection Therapy with Jia Jiang

• [Personal Site] Andy Molinsky

• [LinkedIn] Andy Molinsky

• [SoS Episode] Embracing Discomfort

• [SoS Episode] Research Reveals How You Can Create The Mindset of a Champion with Dr. Carol Dweck

• [Book] Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success with your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:12.6] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performers tick with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode we discuss why people struggle to reach outside their comfort zones. Why it’s so critically important that you do. We explore the five core psychological roadblocks stopping people from stepping outside their comfort zones. We go deep on how you can become tougher, more resilient, and embrace discomfort. How you can master the art of small talk. What you need to do to cultivate the skill of global dexterity, and much more, with Dr. Andy Molinsky. 

The Science of Success continues to grow with now more than a million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries, hitting number one New and Noteworthy and more. I get listener comments and emails all the time asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all these incredible information?” 

A lot of her listeners are curious about how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge I get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to awesome podcasts, and more. Because of that, we’ve created an epic resource just for you, a detailed guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything, and you can get it completely for free by texting the word “smarter to the number 44222. Again, it's a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. All you have to do to get it is to visit successpodcast.com and join our email list or text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. That “smarter” to the number 44222. 

In our previous episode, we discussed an old trick palm readers use the you can leverage to get people to do what you want. Why persuasion does not lie just in the message itself, but rather in how the messages presented. What the research reveals about why the context matters as much, if not more than the content itself. Why you shouldn't ask people for their opinion, but instead ask someone for their advice. How small differences that seem trivial make huge impacts on human behavior, and much more, with the godfather of influence himself, Dr. Robert Cialdini. If you want to master the tools to influence anyone and listen to a titan of psychology, be sure to check out that episode. 

Don't forget, if you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we’re going to talk about in the show, and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. Just go to successpodcast.com and hit the show notes button at the top. 

Lastly, your support is what drives us and keeps us creating great new content, adding value to the world and interviewing amazing guests every single week. You can become part of our incredible mission and help us build an even better future by becoming one of our patrons on Patreon. We just launched on Patreon, and if the Science is Success is valuable to you we would love if you would sign up and become one of our patrons, and we offer some sweet bonuses for you if you sign up as well. Join us today and become a part of our mission to unleash human potential. You can join now and become a patron by going to successpodcast.com/patreon, that success podcast.com/patreon, or just hit to the Patreon button at the top of our website. 

[0:03:32.2] MB: Today we have another awesome guest on the show, Andy Molinsky. Andy is a professor of organizational behavior and psychology at Brandeis University. Andy is the author of Reach: A New Strategy to Help You Step Outside Your Comfort Zone, Rise to the Challenge and Build Confidence, as well as Global Dexterity: How to Adopt Your Behavior Across Cultures Without Losing Yourself in the Process. He’s been featured in Inc., Psychology Today, The Harvard Business Review and was named one of LinkedIn’s top voices of 2016. 

Andy, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:04:06.0] AM: Hey, Matt. Thanks for having me. 

[0:04:07.2] MB: We’re very excited to have you on here today. For listeners who not be familiar with you and some of your work, tell us a little about yourself and share your story. 

[0:04:16.6] AM: Sure. I’m a professor at Brandeis University, the international business school and I’m also in the psychology department. I kind of got in to all these just at a personal interest. When I went to college, I never studied psychology. I might have taken psych 101, but very little. After college I went and I lived abroad and I was in France working for a French company and became just fascinated by interpersonal communication, cross-cultural communication, stepping outside your comfort zone and so on, and I came back to the US and I was trying to figure out what this was. At the time I don't have words to describe like, “Oh! That's clearly social psychology and organizational behavior.” I didn’t know any of that. 

I was trying to search for what this was and I found it and I just became so fascinated that I decided to go off and do a Ph.D., and the rest is history, and now I’m a professor and I do a lot of academic writing and also very practical writing and speaking and consulting and so on. 

[0:05:15.2] MB: One of the topics that we are incredibly passionate about here on the show, and actually one of our very first episodes was about the idea of — As we called it, embracing discomfort, but that he whole notion of stepping outside of your comfort zone, and it's such a vital thing to do and so important, and I love to dig into that concepts. Tell me a little bit why do you see people struggling to step outside of their comfort zones? 

[0:05:43.3] AM: I should say, my new book Reach is about exactly this topic about stepping outside your comfort. You might think that I’m some expert on stepping outside my comfort if I wrote the book on it, but I definitely am not. I struggle as well, have always struggled, in fact, stepping outside my comfort zone. In college, I was the kid who never spoke in class, whose heart was beating in the back of the room thinking about maybe raiding the hand but never doing it, or I’d sign up for networking events and not go to them, or I’d avoid giving speeches for years and so on. 

I think it's important, if we want to grow and develop, especially around transition points in our lives when we move from high school to college, college to the “real world”, when we’re considering taking chances in our professional careers when we’re moving up, when we’re getting promotions, new responsibilities, new tasks, considering something entrepreneurial, and so on. In order to achieve that personal growth you’re going to have to step outside your comfort zone, but it's easier said than done. It's very hard. It’s legitimately hard. 

[0:06:52.8] MB: I completely agree and it’s something that — One of the things I’ve worked to cultivate in my own life is sort of starting with an awareness of when are those tension points or moments when I see myself kind of entering an area of discomfort or exiting my comfort zone and how do I recognize that moment and step away from it or push myself into whatever that discomfort might be. What do you see being the common sort of themes or challenges that people have when they fail to step out of their comfort zone or when they’re sort of trapped within their comfort zone and they can’t get to the next level, they can’t grow and they can’t improve because of that? 

[0:07:35.8] AM: Yeah. In my book I interviewed and worked with people from all sorts of professions to answer that exact question and others. I talk with entrepreneurs, executives, managers, teachers, students, police officers, lawyers, rabbis, priests, circus performers, even a goat farmer in all sorts of situations to try to kind of find some common denominators. What I found across all these cases was that there were five core, I called them psychological roadblocks, or psychological challenges, that keep us inside our comfort zones or make it hard to step outside our comfort zones. 

The first one is authenticity. It's the idea that when stepping outside my comfort zone, this fear that — Or not even a fear. It could be legitimate that I don't feel like myself. This is not me. This is not who I am. Of course, that’s perfectly natural when you're stepping into a situation that you’re not comfortable with. Very few of us want to feel inauthentic, and so that can hold a lot of us back. 

Confidence; the idea that you don't feel like you do it well, whatever this happens to be. Frankly, that other people can see that you don't do it well, and as a result of feeling inauthentic and may be incompetent, you may feel like a poser, like an imposter, like “Who am I to be doing this kind of thing?” or want to be. That, again, is a very uncomfortable feeling to have. 

A third one — You got authenticity, you got confidence. Another one is likability. The worry that people won't like or respect or will hate this new version of me. They’ll hate me if I deliver that bad news or if I act more assertively or if I speak my voice or whatever it might be. We all want to be liked. Likability; the fear of not being liked is a real deterrent. 

Resentment; I find a lot of people feel, logically, they know that they need to adapt to just and act in a certain way, but more unconsciously or psychologically they feel resentful about the fact that they have to do it. 

I spoke with a lot of introverts as part of this research and a lot of people who were introverted feel resentful, that why can’t the quality of my work matter? Why do I have to schmooze? Why do I have to network? Why do I have to go off and play golf with these people in order to get the deal? Why can't quality of my work just stand on its own? 

I imagine a lot of us would agree that the work world of today is kind of geared towards extroverts. It’s sort of an extroverted world in a sense. Self-starters, and assertiveness, and leadership, or at least leadership as its conventionally understood. I think it can be challenging for introverts to make their way and a lot of people feel resentful having to step outside your comfort zone. 

Finally, morality. You’ve got authenticity, you’ve got confidence, you've got likability, you’ve got resentment. Last one is morality. Of course, you’re not going to experience this every single time you step outside your comfort zone, but I encountered a lot of situations where people worried for ethical or moral reasons that what they were doing was just wrong. In fact, I opened my book, Reach, with the story of the young woman who had to fire or decided she had to fire her best friend from her startup, and she experienced any number of these conflicts in, definitely, the morality conflict around that as well. 

Those were the psychological roadblocks I found holding people back, and you can see why it's hard to step out. It’s really legitimately hard to step outside our comfort zones. 

[0:11:10.7] MB: The one that rings especially true for me is the — As you call it, authenticity, or I would almost conceive of it as identity or self0image. When we have this image of ourselves of, “I'm not good at small talk,” or, “I'm not good at handling X, Y, Z situation.” It is a very powerful thing that controls the way you think and feel and it's such a challenging thing to break out of. That one to me in particular really stood out. 

[0:11:38.8] AM: I remember talking to some young entrepreneurs who are telling me that when they had to pitch their ideas to venture capitalists to try to get funding for their businesses in sort of a shark tank type of situation and they would stand up there with a suit and tie, and of course they never wore suit and ties, and they would have to put on their grown-up voice that they called it and how incredibly inauthentic they felt. 

I remember actually myself too — This isn’t about small talk as you mentioned, but for me I remember so well my first moments as a professor 20 years ago or so, I was at the University of Southern California and I stepped into a classroom for the first time teaching MBA students and I was pretty young and I stand there and I’m thinking to myself, “Who am I to be standing here and saying these things?” I felt like a complete, complete imposter. 

[0:12:30.1] MB: Is imposter syndrome kind of a part of what something the traps us within our comfort zones? 

[0:12:36.8] AM: Absolutely. Absolutely. I think I sort of feel imposter syndrome is that combination between authenticity and competence, really. It is very hard to when you're feeling like an imposter, like you don't belong, like you’re not worthy in a sense. You’re swimming upstream, put it that way. You’re swimming upstream psychological. 

[0:12:55.5] MB: In Reach, you talk about our amazing capacity to avoid. Tell me a little bit about that and how that factored. How all of these factors kind of play into that? 

[0:13:05.6] AM: If you’re feeling inauthentic and confident, you're worrying that you're not going to be liked. You’re feeling maybe resentful deep down and perhaps you feel a morality conflict, it's quite tempting to avoid, right? When you think about it, there's a positive side to avoidance, that’s why we do it. Of course, the positive side of avoidance is relief. You get to avoid the thing that you're afraid of. You’re afraid of snakes and you avoid the snake. You know what? That’s great. It’s awesome. You don’t have to encounter the snake, but the problem is is that the next time that the opportunity to encounter a snake comes around, it’s probably going to be that much harder, unless you're in the Amazon or in a snake field are and working in the wilderness. It's not that important probably to be able to encounter and come face-to-face with the snake. If your sort of metaphorical snake is making small talk, or networking, or speaking up at a meeting, or selling, or whatever it might be, the more you avoid, the more difficult it becomes. 

Now, that said, people are really good at avoiding. Me too, by the way. I find a variety of ways that people avoid it. People would avoid — Simply, sometimes, they would simply just avoid the thing. They would avoid whatever it is that they’re afraid of. Sometimes they would do the task, but only do the parts that felt most comfortable, so they sort of like kind of avoid certain parts of the task. You see that with the feedback a lot, people who have to be a critical negative feedback. The classic feedback sandwich approach where you deliver positive feedback, “You are doing so well. We really are happy to have you,” and then negative feedback, “There’s just one little thing,” and then the positive feedback again, “But in general, we’re really happy to have you there.” 

If you're really super conflict avoidant in a real people pleaser, the meat in that feedback sandwich might shrink smaller and smaller and smaller to the point that someone might not even hear that critical feedback. 

Sometimes, people — I did what I call inappropriate or imperfect substitutions, is a way of avoidance. If you’re a small business owner and you’re not very comfortable networking at a local event, even though, by the way, as a small business owners, it’s really critical for you to know people in your community. Maybe you’re afraid and you send your assistant do it, or maybe you decide, “You know what? I’m just going to put out an email blasts, or I’m going to post it on Facebook,” or something like that. By the way, posting on Facebook or an email blast aren’t bad inherently, but they’re probably an imperfect substitute for what you probably should be doing if you want to grow your business. 

A lot of us just say, “You know what? It’s just not that important. We rationalize.” “Working really isn’t that important. I don’t really have to do it or whatever it might be.” “Speaking up in a meeting, it’s not really that important. If I just sort of knockout really good report, I’m going to be just fine,” and so on and so forth. 

People, of course, can do a combination of these. They can avoid and they can maybe deliver only a part of the feedback and rationalize of sort of like an interesting cocktail of avoidance. I think the bottom line is that many of us are good at avoiding. That the more power/autonomy you have, I think, in your job, the more able you are to avoid. If you’re at the very top of an organization with very few people supervising you, or if you’re a freelancer, or if you’re on your own, there are fewer checks and balances. It’s much easier to craft a life where you can avoid things outside your comfort zone. 

[0:16:51.6] MB: One of the really interesting things to be behind all of these is the evolutionary biology underpinning a lot of this and the idea that our brains were designed not to thrive and survive in modern-day society, but in the hunter-gatherer society of tens of thousands of years ago, if not millions of years ago. 

All of these fears and things that create self-sabotage are in many ways hardwired into the brain, but at the same their fears and anxieties and things that we’re concerned about are often — There's very little downside to doing them in reality and there's a tremendous amount of upside. 

[0:17:31.1] AM: Yeah, it's true. It’s very functional. Fear can be very functional. If you are in the jungle and a bear is coming at you, you don't want to sit there and start reasoning to yourself, “Well, this bear is not that bad. Bears are often very nice,” and stand there while the bear comes over and mauls you. 

I think the fight-flight reaction is very functional, obviously, throughout the sort of lifecycle of our species. Yeah, nowadays if you sort of take that core tendency and you apply it to situations that are fearful, but really fearful in anticipation. Fear is predicting the future. Fear is about predicting the future, and I think we’re oftentimes very poor predictors of our psychological future, so to speak. 

That said, we perhaps can talk about this later. I wouldn’t say my point of view is that for everyone listening to this to go run out the door do everything possible outside your comfort zone. That’s not the message, but I think the message is that it is worth taking a hard look and sort of do a psychological inventory of yourself and see where — Or maybe there is a bit of room for growth. 

[0:18:43.7] MB: I think there're so many negative consequences, and I agree with what you’re saying that it's not about just being ridiculous and doing things that are crazy over-the-top. It's more about, if there are opportunities in your life or things that you want to achieve and you're not taking the steps that are necessary or you’re rationalizing to yourself, “Oh, I don't need to do that,” or you're substituting, as you said, an imperfect substitute and not really doing what's necessary to achieve it, it's time to take a step back and look at yourself and look at the way that you're acting and push yourself to jump outsider or to leap outside of that comfort zone and get uncomfortable. 

[0:19:21.8] AM: Yeah. It’s sort of hard to do on your own as well, purely on your own. That's why I wrote this book, frankly, is sort of a way to give people, hopefully, a resource that they can use to understand themselves, to jumpstart the process. I think, often times, we very functionally rely on close friends, on a spouse. Someone to sort of help inspire us, help us see that we’re rationalizing perhaps. Someone who we really care about and trust who can be honest with us. 

I think that these journeys, I think the spark of it needs to be from inside of you, but it's very useful to have a tool like the book I wrote or perhaps there are other useful tools out there. Also, someone you care about. Someone you trust. Someone you like. Someone you feel comfortable with to help you step outside your comfort zone. 

[0:20:16.2] MB: Let’s dig into that a little bit. What are some of the specific strategies that you recommend for helping people step out of their comfort zones? 

[0:20:25.5] AM: Yeah. Across all the — Of course, that would be like a really bad book, wouldn’t it, if I sort of talked about all the challenges and then how we avoid them and say, “Oh, end of book.”  

I really wanted to spend a lot of time carefully listening to people's stories trying to figure out across all these different professions, across all these different contexts what distinguish people who are successful from people who weren’t successful in stepping outside their comfort zone. 

I found three main things. The first was conviction. Now, this isn’t rocket science. You’re probably going to say, “Yeah, of course,” but I have to tell you this was essential. Conviction is that sense of purpose. That sense that this is something that I really feel I need to do. Something that's going to push you to say yes whenever your psychological bone in your body is saying no. People locate it and embrace their source of conviction for many places. Sometimes it’s very professional. 

I’ve always dreamed of being an entrepreneur. Ever since I was a kid I’ve always wanted to be one. I desperately want this to work. Whatever I need to do, whether it's making a sale, whether pitching venture capitalists, whether it's promoting myself, speaking up at meetings, networking, whatever it is. I’m going to push myself to do it because I deeply care about this professional goal. That’s a professional thing. 

Of course, it blends into the personal and sometimes it gets quite personal. There are other kinds of sources of conviction that are very personal. I'll share with you my source conviction that I often rely upon, which is I am a parent, I have two kids, a 10-year-old and a 12-year-old and I'm always wanting to have my kids step outside their comfort zones, and for them it's not easy. I’m trying to cajole them. I’m trying to inspire them and so on. Then when I took a hard look at my life in situations that I encounter, say to myself, “Hey! I got to practice what I preach here.” I want to be a good dad. I want to be a role model and so on. That's my source of conviction. Of course, I have a professional conviction as well, but that would be an example of personal conviction. 

Whatever it is, wherever it comes from, whatever is meaningful to you, I think it’s very important to find, locate, embrace that source conviction for yourself. That’s number on. Number two is what I call customization. I have to say this is probably the most interesting, surprising, in some ways inspiring aspects of what I found in this work, in this this research, was that people were able to customize, personalize, tweak in a way the situation that they were in in a way to make it just that little bit more comfortable for themselves. 

I guess a good analogy might be like a tailor. Like let’s say you buy a pair of pants at the store and very few of us can put on a pair of pants and they fit perfectly around the waist, at the legs and so on, usually we need to tweak them here or there and may be go to the tailor. It’s still the same pair of pants, but you’ve tweaked it a bit. 

As a metaphor, you can think about that in terms of adapting and adjusting your behavior. I found people were able to tweak in a lot of different ways and make interesting slight but very meaningful customizations for themselves. Sometimes it was through body language. Sometimes it was from prop, bringing a prop. What I mean by that is, for instance, when I was — Earlier on in my career, I was afraid of public speaking. Of course, it’s really bad if you’re a professor and you public speak like three or four times a week in multiple situations. Now, I love public speaking. Back then, not so much. 

I used to wear a ring, a lucky ring, and it was a ring that had a stone in it, and that stone was found in the beaches of the South Pacific in World War II by a great uncle of mine. When he brought it back, he had it made into a ring and I always admired it as a kid. Eventually, I inherited it. It always represented courage to me because of what he had to do to find that stone. I wore it and I always remembered that and I had the sense of courage, that it sort of gave me this little boost in some way when I was going off to do something outside my comfort zone. No one knew it at the time. Of course, you all do now, but no one knew, but it was meaningful to me. 

Sometimes you can tweak or adjust the context. You’re afraid of public speaking, we just talked about that. Maybe you go early to the event and meet a few people and maybe so then you’re not public speaking in front of a crowd of unknown people. You’re public speaking in front of a crowd of people who you do know a little bit. You’re afraid of networking. You’re afraid of loud, busy, noisy, intense networking situations. Well, a lot of people are. Maybe you play with time a little bit and you go at the very, very beginning, which I’ve done before, because a loud, noisy, intimidating, huge networking event is less loud, less noisy, less intimidating, less huge at the very beginning. 

We could go on and on, but what’s interesting is the myriad of ways people find to customize, tweak in subtle ways to make that situation just a little bit more comfortable for them. That’s customization. You’ve got conviction, you’ve got customization. 

The last one is clarity. Clarity is pretty simple. It’s the idea that in these situations outside our comfort zones that are scary, legitimately scary to us, we often do what psychologists call catastrophizing. We look at the worst possible outcome, the worst possible scenario, “I’m going to give that speech. I’ll be a total flop. It’ll be awful.” Or we look at the extreme on the other end, the idealistic unrealistic positive extreme that, “I’m only going to give this speech if I’m a TED Talk extraordinaire, or I’m only going to start this business if it’s a billion-dollar business,” or something like. I think anxiety and fear can drive us in these extreme directions. 

What I found for people who were successful at stepping outside their comfort zone is that they're able to claim that much more realistic grounded middle case, right? For example, “I’m probably not going to be the best Ted Talker in the world and I probably also won't faint on stage, but I’ll kind of be somewhere in the middle. Next time around I'll probably would learn a lot and I’ll probably do a little bit better,” and so on and so forth. Claiming that, sort of grounding yourself in some sense of clarity was really critical. That’s it. Those are the tools that I found; conviction, customization and clarity. 

[0:27:28.6] MB: Are you a professional looking to get a leg up at work or just someone who loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better? You want to add some impressive skills to resume? This episode in the Science of Success is sponsored by Skill Share. Skill Share is an online learning community with over 16,000 courses in design, business and more. You can learn everything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography. Unlimited access to all of these for a low monthly price and never pay per class again. 

There are actually some really cool courses on here. I’ve recommend several of the courses on implementing the GTD method, getting things done, which if you're not doing that is a really, really highly effective productivity strategy to several different people I work with, and I've recently gotten into drawing. There are some awesome looking courses on sketching, ink drawing, doodling and drawing the human figure that I'm really interested in taking. 

Skill Share is giving my listeners a free month of unlimited access all. All you have to do is go to skillshare.com/success and redeem your free month. I definitely recommend checking this out. It’s a really cool website with a ton of awesome and interesting classes. 

In a world where change is one of the only constants, people and businesses must be adaptable. This episode of The Science of Success is sponsored by our partners at That Moment, a new podcast from Pivotal about the pivot that changes everything. Sometimes we recognize the need to seize the moment and change course. Other times, we have no choice but to pivot. 

During these rapidly changing times, pivots can bring uncertainty, fear, and the looming possibility of failure, but can also open doors for discovery, growth and change. In each episode of That Moment, business leaders and entrepreneurs share their stories of taking risks and finding success at work and in life. 

In the latest episode of That Moment, a race car driver tells his story of racing towards the Indy 500 only to veer terribly off course, and then how his accident helped him find a new track as an entrepreneur. Followed by a conversation with Carol Jewell, and executive leader in technology who talks about the need for diversity in tech and how her choice not to take an AP class changed her life and the fate of a Fortune 500 company. Listen now wherever you listen to podcasts. 

[0:29:46.7] MB: What are some of the ways that we can build resilience and make sure that we can keep these habits around once we start implementing them? 

[0:29:57.5] AM: Yeah. You don't want to be a one hit wonder, and I think that's really important. I think there're some basic core building blocks of resilience. One is to actually go off and do it at some reasonable pace, like frequency, or pace. For example, if you deliver bad news and you use customization, you use clarity, you use conviction and so on and you’re able to do it, but then you’re not delivering bad news for another 17 months. Chances are it's not going to stick. You’re not going to build that resilience, so you want to try to find ways of practicing even if you're not in an actual consequential scenario or situation. I use the term adjust right type of situation. Anyone who’s a parent who has a kid who’s learning to read will recognize this idea, the just right book, where the teachers of your children or maybe you as are looking for a book that’s just right. It’s like a bit of a stretch, but it’s not too scary and intimidating and it’s going to stretch your skills and give an opportunity to kind of buildup that resilience. Looking for just right opportunities to practice, get feedback from others and also sort of take your own pulse about the situation and then adjust accordingly. Revisit your senses conviction. Revisit opportunities for customization. Revisit this idea of clarity. 

I think one other thing that's really critical for building resilience, ideally, is having what I call a learning orientation. A Stanford psychologist named Carol Dweck who’s written a book called Mindset, and she also did a lot of psychological research, and some of the listeners might be familiar with it. It’s just the idea that a learning mindset versus a performance type of mindset is very important, ideally, to have in these types situations outside your comfort zone where you can see slipups and faux pas and mistakes as part of a learning process as supposed to some sort of testament about your inherent inability to do this. 

I would say that’s important to cultivate, but even as I say that, you might be thinking to yourself, “Well, that’s easier said than done. If not born with a learning orientation, if I’m really a performance oriented person it’s pretty hard to get. It’s pretty hard to adapt. In and of itself that’s maybe stepping outside my comfort zone.” Ideally, you’d have or at least you’d try to push yourself to have a bit more of a learning perspective. 

[0:32:26.5] MB: We are huge fans of Carol Dweck on the show. We've done a couple of episodes about Mindset and we actually had a recent interview with her as well. That's probably one of, if not the single most impactful books that I've ever read in my life. I can't recommend enough kind of thinking about and orienting your life around a focus on learning instead of a focus on proving yourself. 

I’m curious, are there any sort of kind of specific exercises or strategies you use or recommend to help people in a very simple way? Kind of start pushing the boundaries and getting outside of their comfort zone?

[0:33:04.5] AM: Yeah. I feel like I honestly don’t mean to be an infomercial for my book, but I thought of that exactly when I was writing it. At the very end of the book, I have actual tools that you can use to operationalize every single element of the book for yourself. That’s really my best suggestion. 

I think even before that I would say in terms of trying to pick a situation, trying to think about a situation, we’re good at rationalizing why things are worth stepping outside our comfort zone for, but do a little thought exercise for yourself. Think to yourself, if you had some sort of magic eraser and you could erase the fear and anxiety at least in a thought experiment just for a moment, think to yourself and be honest with yourself, is this something that you actually would like to be able to do? Maybe you’re rationalizing it away, but if you're honest with yourself and the fear and anxiety went away just for a moment, if you could snap your fingers, would this be something you would be interested in adding to your repertoire and learning to do? If the answer is yes, this might be a good candidate to at least start thinking about stepping outside your comfort zone. 

The next thing I would do is I would start to imagine. Imagine yourself in this situation. Imagine what those fears or worries are. Trying to understand and process them and understand what perhaps your psychological roadblocks are. Imagine what it's like if you could somehow make those roadblocks disappear. Imagine what it’s be like if you could be successful in this situation. 

Now, I think that often times, stepping outside our comfort zones starts in our minds in terms of thinking exercises and thought exercises before we even take those little baby steps towards changing our behavior. Those are two things you can do if you’re listening in the car right now. 

[0:34:58.0] MB: One of my favorites — This is sort of specifically within more of a social context, but one of my favorites is the concept of rejection therapy. Have you ever heard of that? 

[0:35:09.6] AM: I probably have, but save more an maybe it will ring a bell. 

[0:35:14.7] MB: Basically, what rejection therapy is, and we’ll put a link to it in the show notes for people who want to explore this idea, but it's essentially a game where every single day your goal is to get rejected by one person and you kind of continually sort of escalate the things you’re doing to push yourself more and more. Going to Starbucks and ask for a free cup of coffee, or ask somebody out on a date or make a cold call and get rejected, but the goal is, basically, every single day do something or keep doing something that's more and more outside of your comfort zone until somebody rejects you. 

It's a really good way to kind of build that tolerance and it’s also something that I know you talk about, the notion of desensitization and how that repeated exposure outside of our comfort zone can help us become more comfortable with that. I’d love for you to dig actually to the concept of desensitization and tell us a little bit more about that as well. 

[0:36:06.7] AM: Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking about when you said rejection therapy, that it’s almost like a specific case of the grander idea of desensitization. I think what happens is that when you are able to take that leap and to actually try something and to try it multiple times, I think that you often start to discover things about yourself that, of course, you would not be able to discover if you were on the other side of fear, on the other side of not having taken the leap. 

What I found in people's stories and examples and also, of course, reflecting of my examples and my stories, was that there were two main sort of pieces of discovery that you got from repeated exposure and one of them was that this isn't as hard as I thought it was. Another one is, “I’m actually a bit more capable than I thought I was.” 

Those are two very powerful ahas, personal ahas, and then if you're able to then repeat the situation to some degree and with some degree of frequency, those feelings and those discoveries can stick. I think that's really important. I think that desensitization often times in the psychological literature has sort of this connotation of numbing, that you get numb to something. The idea that a doctor performing a painful bloody procedure gets desensitized and after 30 times doesn't even hear the screaming of the child or something like that. That’s possibly true. 

I think that there’s other more growth oriented elements to repetition and practice and experience that are important to consider alongside the desensitization effect, and that’s what I was talking about, those discoveries. 

[0:38:01.5] MB: I’d like to dig in not to maybe one or two contextual examples of how we can step out of comfort zone, and one of those that I know you've written about is the notion of delivering bad news. Can you talk about how people struggle with that and how that's a concrete example of this? 

[0:38:20.7] AM: Yeah, it’s interesting. When I ask people about situations outside their comfort zone, this is one of the very first ones that pops up, the idea of delivering bad news. I have a colleague, a friend of mine from graduate school; Joshua Margolis, and we were grad school friends at Harvard Business school and he’s now a faculty member there, and I’m at Brandeis, and we collaborated for many, many years on this topic of delivering bad news and we studied managers and executives delivering bad news. We studied doctors performing painful procedures, pediatric physicians and delivering bad news. We also studied police officers delivering bad news or evicting people from their homes, which essentially is delivering bad news. 

I was actually the one who went on those interviews and also the site visits where I went with two police officers during an entire day of evictions and we evicted — I didn’t actually evict them, but I was there with my bullet proof vests and everything, evicting 20 people from their homes and delivering bad news. 

We’re very interested in the challenges that people faced in delivering bad news. In the psychology of literature, in the organizational behavior literature, the focus typically is on the victims, on the recipients of bad news for a good reason of course, but there was very little on the performers, and so that’s what we’re interested in in that area of research. 

We did research for many years about the challenges that people face in delivering bad news, and a lot of those ideas, I think, have found their way into my book, Reach, about the dysfunctional conversations that people can get in when trying to deliver bad news. For example, you can never let bad news become an argument. You can never let bad news become a negotiation, because you're going in there to deliver a fait accompli. You really need to do that even to treat someone with dignity and respect. You can't let it become an argument or a negotiation if that's not your intention to begin with. 

You have to avoid them but why dynamic. There's always this, if you’re delivering bad news and someone says, “But why? But why?” and you have to figure out a way to make sure that you can deliver the message in a clear consistent but compassionate way to avoid that dynamic and the conversation playing out when the reality is that it can't play out. 

What I’ve always been told by human resources managers is that if people are surprised in a corporate context with a firing or a layoff, for example, the you’ve done a really bad job, because “bad news” or critical feedback should be something that’s delivered on an ongoing basis so that people understand where they need to improve and they’re given opportunities and performance plans to actually achieve that. 

Unfortunately, because delivering bad news is often outside people's comfort zones, many people and many organizations fall short on that. I think delivering bad news is a very challenging situation. I can tell you, if we’re interested in like a social media perspective as an indicator of how popular the topic is. I had a post on LinkedIn maybe last year that got over a hundred thousand views of delivering bad news, because I think it just really resonates with people.

[0:41:37.5] MB: I couldn't agree more about the premise that firing should never come as a surprise to anybody. You should be having very clear conversations on an ongoing basis well before that conversation about your performances and up to par. We need to do the following things or we’re going to have a more serious conversation. That needs to happen several times down the road, and then when you finally get to that, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone if firing is happenings. I totally agree with your analysis and I think that’s very important. Many people in many different walks of life have to deliver bad news in one way or another, and so that's a great skill to kind of pick up and cultivate 

The other example that I know you’ve talked about in the past is small talk, and that’s something, being somewhat of an introvert myself, that’s definitely something that I’ve had to push myself out of my comfort zone and develop that skillset. Can you tell me — Share with me that example and how that challenges people.

[0:42:33.5] AM: I think it’s interesting. I spent many years, in fact, my first book was called Global Dexterity, dictionary which is acting outside your cultural comfort zone. I still do a lot of work and a lot of training and teaching and consulting and so on and speaking, but acting outside your cultural comfort zone. 

One thing that you might not know if your listing is that the United States is one of only a few cultures where it's very, very common to make small talk with people you don't know. I have people from other countries. For example, they cannot believe that at the market you’d be there with a couple mangoes, a loaf of a bread, bananas, milk or whatever it is and someone would start to chit-chat with you about what you’ve bought and then very quickly learn that they just had a divorce or whatever it might be. That’s somewhat of an extreme example, but frankly not all that extreme. That’s sort of a social example. In the corporate world or the work world, small talk is very important for building a quick sense of trust and bonding, which can have lots of implications down the road for who gets favored, who gets plum assignments, who gets cut slack and so on and so forth. 

Small talk is really a critical skill, but it's very hard for a lot of people to engage in conversations with people around small talk. It’s hard to start a small talk conversation for a lot of people. Then once you learn how to start a small talk conversation, it’s very hard for a lot of people to continue it, to make it not just sort of stop, to not just be like, “Oh, how is the weather?” “Good.” “Yeah. Oh, it sounds great.” “Yeah,” and then have that uncomfortable stop to actually sort of continue it, and then, of course, to end it. Some people are comfortable ending small talk fearing that the other person will think that they're not interested in continuing to talk and so on. 

It’s actually quite an art, and I’ve written a lot about it. I think small talks in some ways — I can understand why a lot of people struggle with it and they can get frustrated and resentful about its importance. I think it’s also important to remember that, probably, every meaningful relationship that you have with someone that you're not related to begin with small talk. 

I met my wife through small talk. I met some of my very best friends through mall talk. As superficial and seemingly meaningless as it is, it's a very important catalyst to engaging people but also outside many people's comfort zones. 

[0:45:06.0] MB: That's a great point and that’s something I’ve actually never thought about, the idea that every meaningful relationship outside of your blood relative essentially is a result of small talk and just underscores the importance of it. 

One of the things that I've found to be really helpful with cultivating small talk is focusing on kind of a deep curiosity and wanting to really understand the other person and just asking them lots of questions about themselves, getting them talking about themselves and then once they start answering that gives you more material to then pull from and continue to get more and more questions. 

[0:45:40.8] AM: Yeah. I think that's right. I think that being a careful listener, knowing how to share as well as listen and to also share — I wouldn’t say personal information, but I would almost call it quasi-personal information about yourself is important, because you're trying to build a sense of camaraderie in a sense. First, camaraderie, at first rapport, and then ultimately, over time, perhaps a bit more of real trust and a real relationship. 

I think that it’s a skill. It's really a skill, being able to listen to try to make connections, to ask questions in an open-ended way as supposed to a closed-ended way. In other words, if you ask a question that invites a yes-no answer, it oftentimes can be a small talk killer. If you ask the very same question in an open-ended way, it you can invite the other person respond in a more elaborated way which then can bring more potential information for you to hook on to and to connect to. There’s an art to it.

[0:46:47.8] MB: You talked about your previous book; Global Dexterity. Tell me briefly, what is that concept and what is kind of the core message of that book. 

[0:46:56.2] AM: Global Dexterity is about acting outside your cultural comfort zone. For many years I have studied and worked with people adapting behavior across cultures. In fact my Ph.D. dissertation in graduate school was about Russians learning to interview and network in the United States and how hard it was for them and how it wasn't just merely understanding the cultural differences. It was learning to adapt and adjust their behavior in light of those differences and that’s the critical point about global dexterity. 

Listeners have probably heard or read a blog or even a book or an article about how Chinese are different than Americans, or Germans are different than French, and so on and so forth , which is important and useful to know. It’s really critical to be able to learn how to adapt and adjust your behavior in light of those differences. That's the key point. 

In the business world today, there’s a lot of rhetoric about globalization and about companies going global, but the reality is that, of course, companies are going global, but the people who are actually going global aren’t the companies, it’s the people. It’s the people negotiating contractors. It’s the people making small talk, as we’re talking about, networking and so on. It’s really critical to be able equip people with the ability to sort of adapt and adjust their behavior across cultures. 

In some ways now that we’ve talked a lot about Reach and my new book, in a lot of ways global dexterity is a very specific application or case of Reach, but to the cross-cultural environment. That’s in a nutshell about what global dexterity is about. 

[0:48:37.2] MB: For somebody who’s listening to this that wants to really implement some of these ideas and start stepping out of their comfort zone. What would a small piece of actionable advice that you would be able to — Kind of one piece of homework that they could start on immediately. 

[0:48:53.3] AM: I think that would be to do what we talked about before, to try to identify a situation, something where they can try to — There might be a lot of noise in their head around rationalization, very strong impulsive defenses that they're putting up about, “No. No. No. That's not that important.” “No. No. No. I don't really need to do that.” “No. No. That's not that important.” That kind of thing. The more you seem to be sort of defensively rationalizing, the better probably that is a candidate for stepping outside your comfort zone. I take a hard look at that situation, whatever it is for you. I’d think to yourself, if you could erase fear and anxiety in that situation just for split second. Consider whether minus fear and anxiety or at least minus tremendous fear and anxiety. It might be something worth doing. That might be a candidate for stepping outside your comfort zone, and that’s something anyone can do at any point. You could do that right now. I think that would be probably the immediate actionable step. 

Of course, I’d love people to check out my book and the tools and so on and I think it genuinely is really helpful, but I think minus that, simply trying to identify a situation that you might want to work on would be a great first step. 

[0:50:09.1] MB: Where can people find you and your books online? 

[0:50:12.2] AM: Yeah. I have a website, www.andymolinsky.com. It’s spelled AndyMolinsky.com. I love to connect with people on social media, and I have my email address there. I’m happy to communicate with anybody, with listeners. There are links my books. There are also some great stuff there as well. There's a free guide to stepping outside your comfort zone. We just talked about cultures. There’s also a free guide to the cultural codes of 10 different cultures around the world. I try to make my website, like hundreds of articles and so on, and quizzes, and I try to make my website a fun place to visit. I hope you visit it. 

[0:50:55.4] MB: Awesome. We’ll make sure to include all of those links in the show notes for everybody to be able to check out. 

Andy, thank you so much for coming on here and sharing your wisdom today. We really appreciated having you as guest. 

[0:51:06.8] AM: I really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me on. 

[0:51:09.9] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. Your support is what drives us and keeps us creating great new content, adding value to the world and interviewing amazing experts every single episode. Now, you can become part of our incredible mission and help us build an even better future by becoming one of our patrons on Patreon. As well as unlocking some awesome bonuses including exclusive guides, a personal video message from me and much more. We’d love if you join us today and become one of our patrons by going to successpodcast.com/patreon. That’s successpodcast.com/patreon, or just click the Patreon button at the top of our website. 

The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s matt@sucesspodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every listener email.

The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes, because that helps more and more people discover The Science of Success. 
	
I get a ton of listeners asking, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all these information?” Because of that, we’ve created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. You can get it by texting the word “smarter”, that’s “smarter” to the number 44222, or by going to successpodcast.com, that’s successpodcast.com and joining our email list. 

Don’t forget, if you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we just talked about in this show and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. Go to successpodcast.com and hit the show notes button at the top. 

Thanks again, and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

Simple Strategies You Can Use To Persuade Anyone with The Godfather of Influence Dr. Robert Cialdini

In this episode we discuss an old trick palm readers use that you can leverage to get people to do what you want, why persuasion does not lie just in the message itself, but rather in how the message is presented, what the research reveals about why the context matters as much, if not more, than the content itself, why you shouldn’t ask people for their opinion but instead ask someone for their advice, how small differences that seem trivial make a HUGE impact on human behavior, and much more with Dr. Robert Cialdini.

Dr. Robert Cialdini is the president and CEO of INFLUENCE AT WORK. He is the multi best selling author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, and his latest book Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way To Influence and Persuade and he is currently a Regents Professor Eremites of Psychology and Marketing at the Arizona State University. Commonly referred to as “The Godfather Of Influence” Robert’s work has been featured around the world with clients such as Twitter, Microsoft, London Business Forum, SXSW, and more.

We discuss:

• How very small differences can have very big effect on human behavior.

• How researchers boosted their response rate from 29% to 77.3% with one simple question

• How can a photo change your ability to solve problems more effectively?

• How to create a state of mind in your recipient that makes them more open to your request!

• This one trick palm readers use that you can leverage to get people to do what you want

• The Power of persuasion does not lie just in the message itself, but rather in how the message is presented

• How did a small change in communication greatly affect the United Kingdom's tax collection.

• Context matters as much as or more than content

• How can you ethically leverage the concepts of pre-suasion?

• One thing you can do to hack job interviews using this simple tactic

• Why you shouldn’t ask people for their opinion but instead ask someone for their advice

• Ask yourself “What is it about my message that will make it most wise for people to say yes to it”

• Is it possible to use pre-suasion on ourselves?

• How changing a simple image can greatly improve your ability to solve problems.

• "Tell me what you’re paying attention to, and I'll tell you who you are"

• And much more!

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go to www.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!
 

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better? 
Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go to www.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners, That Moment Podcast. That Moment explores the pivot that changes everything: moments that open doors for discovery and growth, but also bring the looming possibility of failure. Each show features different leaders and innovators sharing their stories of taking risks in business and in life. That Moment is produced by Pivotal, who believes when change is the only constant, people and businesses must be built to adapt. Get the details of their first episode "It Was Essentially Disrupting Ourselves" here and check them out on iTunes, Google Play, and Soundcloud.

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Website] Influence at Work

• [Book] Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini

• [Book] Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade by Robert Cialdini Ph.D.

• [SOS “Weapons of Influence Series”] Series Playlist

• [SOS “Weapons of Influence Series”] Why An Almost-Empty Cookie Jar Is More Valuable Than A Full One

• [SOS “Weapons of Influence Series”] Why Co-Pilots May Ignore Instinct and Let A Plane Crash

• [SOS “Weapons of Influence Series”] Why Ugly Criminals Are 2X As Likely To Go To Prison

• [SOS “Weapons of Influence Series”] Why You Should Always Ask the Guy in the Blue Jacket for Help

• [SOS “Weapons of Influence Series”] The Power and Danger of a Seemingly Innocuous Commitment

• [SOS “Weapons of Influence Series”] How To Triple the Rate of Your Success With One Simple Question

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success with your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:12.6] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performers tick with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode we discuss an old trick palm readers use that you can leverage to get people to do what you want. Why persuasion does not lie just in the message itself, but rather in how the message is presented. What the research reveals about why the context matters as much, if not more than the content itself. Why you shouldn't ask people for their opinion, but instead ask someone for their advice. How small differences that seem trivial can make a huge impact on human behavior and much more with our guest, Dr. Robert Cialdini. 

The Science of Success continues to grow with, now, more than a million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries, hitting number one New and Noteworthy and more. I get listener comments and emails all the time asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all these incredible information?” A lot of her listeners are curious about how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge I get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to awesome podcasts, and more. 

Because of that, we’ve created an epic resource just for you, a detailed guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything, and you can get it completely for free by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, it's a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. All you have to do to get it is to visit successpodcast.com and join our email list or text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, that “smarter” to the number 44222. 

In a previous episode we discussed what to do if you don't know what you want to be when you grow up. We looked to the concept that you only have one a true calling. We learn how to become a better big picture thinker. We looked at the superpowers you can develop by being a multipotentialite, how to master rapid learning and cultivate beginner's mind. The fallacy behind the phrase jack of all trades and much more with Emily Wapnick. If you want to learn how you can have it all in your life and career, listen to that episode.

If you love this episode and you want to go deeper into some of Dr. Cialdini's work, be sure to check out our Weapons of Influence series where we go deep on all six key principles of influence, which you can find along with all other links, transcripts and information we’re going to talk about today's show in our show notes. Just go successpodcast.com and hit the show notes button at the top. 

Your support is what drives us and keeps us creating great new content, adding value to the world and interviewing amazing guests every single week. You can become part of our incredible mission and help us build an even better future by becoming one of our patrons on Patreon. If the Science of Success is valuable to you we would love for you to sign up and become one of our patrons, and we offer some awesome bonuses if you sign up as well. Join us today and become a part of our mission to unleash human potential by going to successpodcast.com/patreon. That’s successpodcast.com/patreon.

[0:03:31.8] MB: Today we have another legendary guest on the show, Dr. Robert Cialdini. Robert is the president and CEO of Influence at Work. He’s the multi-best-selling author Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, and his latest book, Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade. He’s currently a Regent’s Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at the Arizona State University. Commonly referred to as the Godfather of influence, Robert’s work has been featured around the world with client such as Google, Microsoft, IBM, the Department of Justice and more. 

Bob, welcome to the science of success. 

[0:04:03.0] RC: Thank you, Matt. I’m pleased to be with you and your listeners. 

[0:04:06.8] MB: We’re incredibly excited to have you on here today. I’m sure, many long time listeners will be familiar with you and a lot of your work. I want to focus on your new book, Pre-Suasion. We’ve talked — We’ve done a whole series on the show about the principles of influence and how vital those are. Tell me a little about how did you go from the six principles of influence to the concept of pre-suasion? 

[0:04:32.2] RC: It took me a long time. It was 30 years between the writing of the book influence and pre-suasion, and the truth is I never had an idea big enough to compete with the impact that influence had had. I didn't want to plan to push next to this tree that influence had become. I wanted to wait until I had another seed for a tree, and that didn't arrive until the idea for persuasion. 

Opposed to influence, which covers what best to build into a message to get agreement, pre-suasion describes the process of gaining agreement with a message before it's been sent, and although that may seem like some form of magic, it’s not. It's established science. 

[0:05:21.6] MB: Tell me a little bit more about that idea. How can we get someone to buy into an idea before we’ve even presented it to them? 

[0:05:30.5] RC: There is a key moment that allows a communicator to create a state of mind in recipients that is consistent with the forthcoming message. It's the moment in which we can arrange for others to be attuned to our message before they encounter it. That's a crucial step for maximizing desired change. 

For example, in one study, when researchers approached individuals and asked for help with the marketing survey, only 29% agreed to participate. If the researchers approached the second sample and preceded that request with a simple pre-suasive question, “Do you consider yourself a helpful person?” Now, 77.3% volunteered. Why? Because when they were asked before the request if they were helpful, nearly everyone said yes. Then when the request occurred, most agreed to participate in order to be consistent with the recently activated idea of themselves as helpful people. 

[0:06:40.1] MB: That’s fascinating, finding — Basically, more than doubles the effectiveness by simply asking a question which leverages the commitment consistency tendency. 

[0:06:50.6] RC: Right, and there's a further study that shows that it's not simply getting people to make a commitment publicly. It's getting them to reflect on a particular trait that they might have. In another study, people were asked to try a new soft drink. Somebody walked up to them on the street, handed them a flyer that asked them to try a new soft drink. To do so, they had to give this stranger their email address. Under those circumstances, only 30% were interested in doing that. If at the top of the flyer there was a question, “Do you consider yourself an adventurous person?” Now, 55% gave their email address to a stranger so that they could access something new. What these researchers did was put people in touch with their adventurous side simply by asking the question, and then people behaved in a way that was congruent with that adventurous side. 

[0:08:04.4] MB: I believe you’ve talked about in the past how you used to be a palm reader, and this is similar to the lesson that fortunetellers and palm readers used to get people to sort of agree with what they're about to say. 

[0:08:16.7] RC: Exactly. I learned how to be an amateur palm reader, and I tried using the system in various ways to see how accurate it really was and I found that it wasn't any good at all at describing who people were, what their fortunes were. It was very accurate at getting people to reflect on a particular aspect of themselves, that I could claim I saw in their palm. 

For example, supposed I was reading your palm and I bent back your thumb and I said, “Matt, I can tell from the resistance here that you are very stubborn person. If somebody tries to push you in the direction that you don't want to go you're going to push back.” You might do more than just refuse, you might do the opposite out of resistance and reactants. 

What that will do is send you down a memory shoot of the times when you were, indeed, stubborn and resistant and you will say to me — You’ll hit some instances and you’ll say to me, “Yeah, that's right.” That's who I am.” 

If instead I bent back your thumb, very same thumb, and said, “You know, Matt, I can see that you're actually a flexible individual. You're willing to change your mind if you encounter information to suggest that you've been wrong in the past.” That will send you down another different memory shoot where you will encounter times when you were flexible and you will look up to me from that palm that I'm reading and you'll say, “That's right. That's who I am.” 

I can get you to focus on a particular trait or capacity that you have, and as result, make you more likely to think of yourself as that kind of individual. There's an old saying that; tell me what you're paying attention to and I'll tell you who you are. If you're always watching sports on ESPN, I can tell that you’re a fan. If you're always reading gourmet magazines, I can tell that you’re a foodie by what you're paying attention to. 

Well, with the new behavioral science tells us is that getting you to pay attention to something doesn't just reveal who you are, it makes you who you are in that moment. I can make you a flexible individual. I can make you a stubborn individual by what I focus you on first. 

[0:11:23.0] MB: It's fascinating, and even when you're saying those examples, as you’ve said it, I sort of felt myself almost in a reaction just starting to think about all the time that I've been stubborn. Then when you switched to flexible, I started thinking about, “Oh, yeah. All these times I’ve been flexible,” and then I caught myself and I was like, “Hold on, I'm getting primed to think about these things.” 

[0:11:43.4] RC: Right, and that's the trick that palm readers use, but it's now something that is available to communicators to move us in various directions. We have to be very careful. When we encounter a message, not simply to look inside the message for evidence of the persuasive strategies of the communicator, we have to ask ourselves what happened just before I received that message. 

I’ll give you an example, there was a study done of an online furniture store that specialized in sofas. For half of their visitors to their website they sent them to a landing page that had as its background wallpaper fluffy soft clouds. For the other half of the visitors, they went to a landing page that had small coins, pennies, as the landing page depiction, background depiction. Those people who saw the clouds then rated comfort as more important in buying a sofa than before. They then searched the site for comfort related information and they preferred to purchase more comfortable sofas. 

Those were sent to the background landing page of small coins, pennies, rated cost as more important in their decision of buying a sofa. Search the site for price information and preferred to purchase inexpensive sofas, and when they were asked afterward, “Did those clouds or coins make any difference in your choices?” They laughed. They said, “Of course not. I’m a freestanding entity. I decide based on my personal preferences of who I am and what I want.” They didn’t recognize that the clouds and the coins changed who they were and what they wanted in that moment. 

[0:14:08.8] MB: I think you’ve raised two really, really important point, and I wanted to dig into each of these. One sis this idea that the importance, the notion that the persuasion doesn't necessarily lie just within the message, but rather the context of the message is presented in the things that happened before the message. Then the second thing you just brought up, which I think is vital and really underscores how important, how powerful, and sometimes how insidious this can be, is the idea that people consciously have no awareness of the fact that they're being primed to think these certain ways and make certain decisions based on what they would consider consciously to be completely irrelevant factors. 

[0:14:48.8] RC: Exactly. I’ll give you another example. A study was done in France where they went to a shopping mall and had a very attractive young man walk up to young women who were strolling along through the halls of the shopping mall. He stopped them, gave them a compliment and asked them for their phone number so he could call them for a date later. 

Under most circumstances, his success was dismal, where they were passing various kinds of stories. Only about 13% of the time did he get a phone number, even though he was selected to be very attractive movie star looks kind a guy, but if they were passing one particular kind of shop, his success doubled. It was a flower shop, because flowers are associated with romance and not one of these young men when asked afterwards recognized what had happened to them. 

[0:15:53.0] MB: That reminds me of another example, which I think tell me if this is the same sort of psychological tendency, but I think it was when people were purchasing wine in a wine store, if they put on German music, it was like 70% of the purchases would be German wine. If they put on French music, 70% of the purchases would be French wine, and yet when they asked consumers if the music have any impact on the wine purchase, everyone said that it had no impact on then. 

[0:16:17.7] RC: Exactly. Right. This is a dangerous stick of dynamite that we have now in the idea of pre-suasion. That's why we have to be so ethical about the use of this. We have dynamite. We can people in our direction and they won't even recognize it. We have to be very careful that we take the ethics and their interests into account as communicators. On the recipient side, we also have to be very careful that as recipients of this information we don't dismiss the context in which the information was presented. 

[0:17:05.7] MB: That gets back to the first point I talked about, which I want to dig into a little bit more, the idea that the message itself is not were all the persuasion takes place, and it can take place around the message or before the message. Tell me more about that phenomenon, that notion.

[0:17:20.5] RC: Yeah. Remember the idea from back in the 70s, the medium is the message? This notion that the channel in which you send the message can be a message itself. If you meet somebody face-to-face, versus you call them on the phone or you send them an email, that's a message itself that you've taken the time to meet with them face-to-face rather than send them an email. The message is partially the medium. 

What we've learned since then is that not only is the medium the message, the messenger is the message. Sometimes, simply establishing one's credibility as a communicator, as an honest and informed a broker of information can be enough to be the message. It's often the case that people say yes to something simply because of the credentials of the communicator. There was a sort of alarming study that was done that measured brain activity when people were given communications about a particular economic decision that they could make. 

When it was just sent to them by an unknown communicator, those sectors of their brain associated with cognitive analysis lit up just as you would expect. When they were told that the communicator was a distinguished professor of economics at the University of Chicago, their analysis sectors of their brain shut down, they flat-lined. Instead, another's sector of the brain lit up which had to do with attribution of responsibility for messages. Who is this person essentially? 

The messenger was the message, the context. Before there was even a message sold the audience. There is another way in which we can think of it. The multitude is the message. Not only is the medium the message, or the messenger the message, the multitude is the message. If a lot of other people are doing something, that's an indication that it's the right thing to do before you have even encountered the message.

For, example in the United Kingdom, they have a problem with people who pay their taxes late and they send them message, the tax office, that says, “If you don't pay in a certain time, here will be the consequences,” and they get about 68% of the people responding by paying their taxes after getting that message. 

If instead they say the great majority of UK citizens do pay their taxes on time, now this goes to 73%. If instead they go even further and say, “The great majority of taxpayers in your community pay their taxes on time,” it goes to 79%. Learning what most others are doing is a message itself. All context to the content of the message that is yet to come. 

[0:21:19.7] MB: The word context, that’s a great way to kind of succinctly capture this notion, which is the idea of the context matters as much, or maybe more than content in many cases. 

[0:21:31.5] RC: Often, more than content. 

[0:21:35.6] MB: Are you a professional looking to get a leg up at work or just someone who loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better? You want to add some impressive skills to resume? This episode in the Science of Success is sponsored by Skill Share. Skill Share is an online learning community with over 16,000 courses in design, business and more. You can learn everything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography. Unlimited access to all of these for a low monthly price and never pay per class again. 

There are actually some really cool courses on here. I’ve recommend several of the courses on implementing the GTD method, getting things done, which if you're not doing that is a really, really highly effective productivity strategy to several different people I work with. I've recently gotten into drawing. There are some awesome looking courses on sketching, ink drawing, doodling and drawing the human figure that I'm really interested in taking. 

Skill Share is giving my listeners a free month of unlimited access all. All you have to do is go to skillshare.com/success and redeem your free month. I definitely recommend checking this out, it’s a really cool website with a ton of awesome and interesting classes. 

In a world where change is one of the only constants, people and businesses must be adaptable. This episode of The Science of Success is sponsored by our partners at That Moment, a new podcast about the pivot that changes everything. Sometimes we recognize the need to seize the moment and change course. Other times, we have no choice but to pivot. 

During these rapidly changing times, pivots can bring uncertainty, fear, and the looming possibility of failure, but can also open doors for discovery, growth, and change. In each episode of That Moment, business leaders and entrepreneurs share their stories of taking risks and finding success at work and in life. From autonomous cars to new sensor technology, the insurance of driving is changing. 

In the latest episode of That Moment, hear about how Allstate is leveraging new technologies to test, learn, and develop more quickly. Then, Naomi Starkman tells her story about walking away from the New Yorker to become a farmer. Why did she make this pivot, and what is she doing now? Find out on the latest episode of That Moment, available wherever you listen to podcasts. 

[0:23:54.0] MB: How can we leverage some of these principles? Let’s think about for those who are operating kind of ethically in a sound way, how can they leverage these principles to influence people in the way that they want to? 

[0:24:08.7] RC: Let's take the workplace as an example. Suppose you're applying for a job and there is a meeting that you have with an evaluator. Sometimes it's a team of evaluators, sometimes just a single person, and you go in and what we've always been taught to say is, “I'm very happy to be here. I want to answer all of your questions that you would have for me. Here’s I'm going to suggest we do.” We also say, “But I’m curious. I have a question for you. Why did you invite me here today? What was it about my resume that was attractive to you?” Here's what they will do, they will begin by focusing on your strengths. The context for the interview will be your strengths. That will be the starting point for the interview. They will search your resume. They'll say, “Well, it's because your credentials are what we want, or it's because your values that you indicated fit with our value statement.” That will be the launching point now. You’ll also be informed about what it is that they think is most important. You’ll be able to build on that. 

I have an acquaintance who claims he's gotten three straight better jobs in a row using this tactic. Okay.  Now let's say you got that job and you've got a new initiative that you want to develop, but you know you need they buy-in of a colleague of yours to send this idea forward. You approach that person, maybe give that individual a draft or a blueprint of your idea and ask for that person's advice. That's a mistake, not to include this individual, and you ask for that person's opinion. I'm sorry. I meant to say a a pin. You ask for that person's opinion. It's a mistake to ask for that person's opinion because when someone is asked for an opinion, that person takes a half step back from you and goes inside intra-specs and separates. Instead, if you change one word pre-suasively and ask for that person's advice rather than opinion, that individual takes a half step toward you psychologically, sees him or herself as a partner in this process. 

The research shows that person will now become more supportive of your idea than if you ask for an opinion. There's a saying; when you ask for someone's advice, you're usually looking for an accomplice. Here’s what the behavioral science says. If you get that advice, you usually get that accomplice, and that's what you want when you want something forward in an organization. 

Okay, and then one last thing. Now let's say you've got a meeting to present your idea and it's got a particular budget and you have figured out the budget so that it will be $75,123 to accomplish your idea, to get it launched, and what you typically do is to reduce that to 75,000. You round it off to $75,000. That's a mistake, because if you say — Research shows, if you say 75,123, people assume that you have done your homework. You have figured this out. You are knowledgeable about the pros and cons of the budget. You've got it down to the dollar. Even though it will be more money by $123, then $75,000 figure, people will be more likely to accept that budget under those circumstances. 

I saw another study recently, remarkable. Back the UK, again, with the tax office. They got this idea, “Hey, let's tell people that the majority of taxpayers pay on time.” They sent one message that said nine out of 10 of the people in your community to pay their taxes on time. For another group, they sent a message that said 88% pay their taxes on time. The 88% message got twice as much tax payments because it was a precise number, rather than a rounded one that seemed like it was pulled out of the air. That's one thing you can do before you even begin, begin with a budget. Put it at the top of your proposal that has a precise number rather than a rounded one. 

[0:29:53.6] MB: It's fascinating and I think it can't be overlooked that the small differences that seem so trivial to someone who’s not consciously applying the principles of influence, the principles of pre-suasion, they seem so irrelevant and yet they make a tremendous impact on human behavior. 

[0:30:12.3] RC: You're precisely right about that, man. I'll tell you something how I decided to write this book, pre-suasion. I had been seeing studies in the research literature suggesting something like this, but I haven't really put it together till one day there was a knock at my door. I answered it to find the man who was asking me to contribute to a cause. After school programs for children in my district whose parents were working, who would have to get child care for them and so on. We would have education opportunities for them after school. 

He didn't show me any credentials to indicate that he was from the school district and I hadn't heard that the school district was initiating such a program, and yet I gave him more money than I would've given to someone from the United Way or the Cancer Society that I normally give. After I closed the door, I remember thinking to myself what just happened here? I realized it wasn't the content of what he said. It was the context. He did something first that made me want to give money to this cause. He brought his seven-year-old daughter with him and was focused on children, and children's issues, and children's needs, and children's challenges. He put me in touch with that side of myself that became top of mind now and made me who I was in that moment, and I thought to myself, “Oh, there's a book here.” 

[0:32:08.4] MB: That’s fascinating, and I think those are some great examples of how just by being a little bit conscious of it by thinking ahead and saying, “How can I set up my environment, or the presentation of the context for this particular piece of information to make it more effective?” There are so many lessons and strategies that can come out of that.

[0:32:29.2] RC: Yeah. I think the way to do it in an ethical fashion is to say to yourself as a communicator,” What is it about my message? What dimension of my message? What feature of it? What aspect of it will make it most wise for people to say yes?” That's what I should put. That concept is what I should put at top of mind in my audience before I send them the message. Something that will cause them to focus on a feature of what I have to offer that makes it wise for them to choose it.” 

If we go back to that furniture store, that online furniture store example. If the best thing about the furniture at this store is the price of it, that's then pennies should be the first thing people encounter. Even though the more comfortable furniture may produce a bigger profit margin for the store, to be ethical they should not put clouds on their background wallpaper. They should put pennies, because their strength is the value, their low-cost. That's where we should send people if we’re going to use this ethically. 

[0:34:06.4] MB: I’d love to look at another angle of the concept of pre-suasion. Is it possible — And what are some ways that we potentially could apply pre-suasion to influencing ourselves? 

[0:34:18.9] RC: Yeah. This is really a good question, because it's what I think I've been able to use it for since I started thinking about this. Here's what I've done. If I have a task that requires me to be very thoughtful, there is a particular image I put at the top of my computer screen that research shows increases the likelihood that people will solve a difficult problem correctly. It's an image of Rodin’s The Thinker. 

Research showed if you give business students, business school students a set of difficult problems and you asked them to solve those problems with a variety of different images, a nature scene and so on, the kind of thing you usually have as your screensaver or your background wallpaper. That's not as successful as if you give them an image of Rodin’s The Thinker. They actually solve 48% more problems correctly. We can do this to ourselves. We can put ourselves in a state of mind that is congruent with the goal of our message. 

There's another study that shows that if you want people to expend a lot of energy in a task, persist at it and be energy driven with this task, show them a picture of a runner winning the race and that will increase their performance on that kind of task. What I do now is depending on the goal I have for a particular task, I choose an image that's congruent with that goal and put it there on the corner of my screen as I perform the task. We can do that.

[0:36:29.1] MB: That’s a great and such a simple strategy to implement that everybody listening could immediately put in place right now to sort of prime themselves with just the smallest thing in their environment to help them move towards whatever they're trying to achieve. 

That said, what is one really simple piece of actionable advice you would give, almost as a form of homework to our listeners for them to implement some of the concepts we’ve talked about today? 

[0:36:55.4] RC: Here’s a very simple thing. Very often, when we want people to move in a particular direction, we want them to change. It requires change. Here's what the research shows. If we ask them for change on a Monday or Tuesday will be more successful than if we asked them on a Thursday or Friday. 

If we asked them for change on the first or second day of the month will be more successful than if we asked them on the last day of the month, or second to the last. Why? Because at the beginning of things, change is in — It's something new. Something has just changed, and change is in the air. 

There's a study, for example, that showed that armed forces personnel here in the United States are often asked to contribute to a retirement plan so that when they retire they will have a good amount of money available to them and they’ve been resistant to that as a rule, except at one time after they have just changed locations to a new base. Then they become significantly more open to the idea of doing something new, of getting away from their old habits and moving to something new. 

If as communicators we are interested in getting change, we can increase the likelihood that people will change in our direction by picking the right time. Once again, the context, rather than the content of our message is vitally important.

[0:38:52.1] RC: Where can people find you and your books online for people who want to do more research and dig in and learn more? 

[0:38:59.6] RC: Yeah, probably the best place is on our website, influenceatwork.com, that's all one word influenceatwork.com, and they can get access to our books, our videos and so on, and opportunities for speaking or consulting, training, those kinds of things are available. 

[0:39:23.5] MB: Bob, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all these incredible wisdom. We are huge fans of you and your work and it's truly been an honor to have you on the Science of Success today. 

[0:39:34.5] RC: Thank you, Matt. I enjoyed being with you. It was a good set of questions, I have to say.

[0:39:39.7] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s matt@sucesspodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every listener email.

The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes, because that helps more and more people discover The Science of Success. I get a ton of listeners asking, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all these information?” Because of that, we’ve created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. 

You can get it by texting the word “smarter”, that’s “smarter” to the number 44222, or by going to successpodcast.com and joining our email list. If you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we just talked about in this show and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get them at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button at the top. 

Lastly, your support is what drives us and keeps us creating great new content, adding value to the world and interviewing amazing guests every single week. If the Science of Success has been valuable to you, we would love if you would become one of our patrons on Patreon and support the show. You can go to successpodcast.com/patreon and support the Science of Success. 

Thanks again, and we’ll see you on the next episode of The Science of Success.

Can You Have It All In Career and Life? Learn the Secrets of Multipotentialites with Emilie Wapnick

In this episode we discuss what to do if you don’t know what you want to be when you grow up, we look at the concept that you only have one true calling, we learn how to become a better big picture thinkers, we look at the super-powers you can develop by being a “multi-potential- ite ,” how to master rapid learning and cultivate beginners mind, the fallacy behind the phrase “jack of all trades,” and much more with Emilie Wapnick.

Emilie is a speaker, career coach, founder of the popular blog Puttylike, and author of the book How To Be Everything: A Guide for those who still don't know what they want to be when they grow up. Her TED talk has been 3.7 million times and translated into over 36 languages. Her work has been featured in Fast Company, Forbes, Lifehacker, and more.

• How Emilie’s diverse interests and passions lead her down the path of creating a community of people who wanted to do more than just focus on one thing in their lives

• What does it mean to be “puttylike”

• Who are Multi-potential-ites and what makes them so interesting and powerful?

• Do you have a destiny, one true calling?

• How the industrial revolution shaped our language and understanding of “what you do” being who you are (and why that’s wrong)

• The idea that there is one specific thing you should master is a socially reinforced illusion & narrative

• Do you have to focus on one thing to be able to be successful?

• The assumption that you can either be a master of one thing or a jack of all trades is fundamentally flawed

• There are non-linear and multi-connected and multi-faceted domains of knowledge that multi-potential-ites thrive in

• The diminishing returns and 80/20 principle behind mastering knowledge in different domains

• The Superpowers of Multipotentialites

• Idea Syntehsis

  1. Rapid Learning (and passion)

  2. Adaptability

  3. Big Picture Thinking

  4. Relating and translating

• How to cultivate the ability to be a better big picture thinker

• Pattern recognition underpins many of these super-powers

• How to master rapid learning and cultivate beginners mind

• The power of exploring other fields and domains and how that can bring back new knowledge to the field you’re an expert in

• The 4 common approaches that multi-potentialities use to succeed financially in today’s world

• The “group hug” approach - combining all your interests into one thing

  1. The “slash” approach - creating separate and distinct revenue streams that you focus on fractionally

  2. The “Einstein” approach - find a job that supports your true passion

  3. The “Phoenix” approach - diving deep into a field, then pivoting out into something completely else

• What you do for money isn’t necessarily more valuable than the other things you do in your life

• Failure Celebration Week and taking the stigma away from failure

• If you had 10 lives what would you want to be in each of them?

• How to cultivate the variety you need in your life and career

• The importance of getting everything out of your head and onto paper

• And much more!

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners, That Moment Podcast. That Moment explores the pivot that changes everything: moments that open doors for discovery and growth, but also bring the looming possibility of failure. Each show features different leaders and innovators sharing their stories of taking risks in business and in life. That Moment is produced by Pivotal, who believes when change is the only constant, people and businesses must be built to adapt. Get the details of their first episode "It Was Essentially Disrupting Ourselves" here and check them out on iTunes, Google Play, and Soundcloud.

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Article] Are you a scanner personality? Maybe all you need is a good enough job. By Douglas Eby

• [Blog Post] Failure Celebration Week Begins! #failweek By Emilie Wapnick

• [Website] Marketing for Hippies

• [Book Site] How to Be Everything by Emilie Wapnick

• [Website] Puttylike

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success with your host, Matt Bodnar.

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:12.6] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performers tick with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode we discuss what to do if you don't know what you want to be when you grow. We look at the concept that you only have one true calling. We learn how to become a better big picture thinker. We look at the superpowers you can develop by becoming a multipotentialite. We talk about how to master rapid learning and cultivate beginner’s mind. The fallacy behind the phrase the jack of all trades and much more with Emilie Wapnick. 

The Science of Success continues to grow with, now, more than a million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries, hitting number one New and Noteworthy and more. I get listener comments and emails all the time ask me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all these incredible information?” 

A lot of her listeners are curious about how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge I get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to awesome podcasts, and more. Because of that, we’ve created an epic resource just for you, a detailed guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything, and you can get it completely for free by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, it's a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. All you have to do to get it is to visit successpodcast.com and join our email list or text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, that’s “smarter” to the number 44222. 


In a previous episode we discussed emotional agility and how you can cultivate it. Discovered that beneath your emotions are the signposts of the things that you value most, learn how to make space for motions and abrasive a willingness to experience difficult emotions. We talked about why it's vital to understand the distinction that emotions are meaningful but not always correct. We talked about how you can piggyback your habits to create very powerful strategies to live more aligned with your values and much more with Dr. Susan David. If you want to uncover the incredible truths hidden behind your emotions, listen to that episode. 

Lastly, if you want to get all the awesome information, links, transcripts, everything we’re going to talk about this episode and much more be sure to check out or show notes. Just go to successpodcast.com and hit the show notes button at the top. 

[INTERVIEW]

[0:02:58.6] MB: Today, we have another fascinating doesn't show, Emilie Wapnick. Emily is a speaker, career coach, found her of the popular blog, Puttylike and author of the book How to Be Everything: A Guide for Those Who (Still) Don’t Know What They Want to Be When They Grow Up. Her Ted Talk has been viewed more than 3.7 million times, translated into over 36 languages. Her work has been featured in Fast Company, Forbes, Life Hacker and many more places. 

Emily, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:03:28.0] EW: Thanks so much for having me. I’m man excited to be here. 

[0:03:30.7] MB: We’re very excited to have you on here today. For listeners who may not be familiar with you and some of the work you do, tell us your story and how you got started on this journey. 

[0:03:41.2] EW: Sure. Growing up, I had a lot of different interests. I played guitar and sang in a band. I was into various artistic mediums. I like English, kind of build websites, stumped around a lot. Actually, I went to law school, I’ve got 2 law degrees. I'm not listing all these things up to brag. It’s more to say that I was very confused and that I was very curious and had a lot of different interests. 

Looking back, I see how this enriched my life and how I picked up all kinds of amazing skills all over the place, but at the time it really caused me a lot of anxiety and I didn't really understand what was going on or why I couldn't stick with one thing. I worried a lot about my career and what I was going to end up doing and being and how I would ever stick with one job forever. 

In my mid-20s I had this moment where I kind of made the choice to stop fighting this impulse, to stop fighting my desire to do and be and learn about many different things and to instead say, “Okay. This is how I’m wired. I’m going to try and figure out how to make it work, practically speaking.” 

I started blogging and I started sharing my ideas and learning from other people who are doing many different things. How they were making it work, financially speaking, and sharing what I was learning and I had this idea like maybe I can create a community of people who don't want to just do one thing and we can figure this out together. That was in 2010. I've been at that for a while now. It has turned into a few different things. Yeah, that’s kind of my story in a nutshell. 

[0:05:27.2] MB: Tell me about that community that you created. I’m assuming that’s Puttylike. 

[0:05:33.0] EW: It is. 

[0:05:33.0] MB: What exactly does it mean to be Puttylike? 

[0:05:36.6] EW: Yeah. To be Puttylike means to be malleable, flexible, adaptable. I kind of like used the metaphor of putty, which changes shape. It’s malleable. The other word that I use a lot is multipotentialite, which is kind of my word for someone like this. I coined the term. There are other terms that people use to kind of connote the same idea, like polymath, or generalist, or Renaissance person, but I use multipotentialite or multipod for short sometimes. 

Yeah, it just means that you’re curious about a number of unrelated subjects and you don't necessarily feel like you have one true calling in life. Maybe there's a lot of different things that you want to do or try or experience. Yeah, unlike, say, a polymath, who is someone who’s very accomplished in multiple disciplines. Being a multipotentialite is really about being curious and just wanting to explore. 

[0:06:37.9] MB: That word is definitely a mouth-one. When I was reading up on you and doing some of the research before the shows, I was like multipotenta — I have a little bit of mouth dyslexia. That threw me for a loop. 

[0:06:49.4] EW: You can split it up into three parts, and that helps a little bit to go like multi-potential-lite.

[0:06:55.5] MB: Got it. No. I like the term. I think once you contextualize it and say, it's kind of the same thing as a Renaissance person or a polymath. It's someone with a lot of diverse interests that likes to tinker around and explore all kinds of unique and different things, essential. 

[0:07:14.2] EW: Yeah. Exactly. It actually comes from the word multi-potentiality, which is a term in psychology used to refer to people who display aptitudes across multiple disciplines. It’s kind of a play on that. 

[0:07:25.0] MB: Awesome. Tell me about — One of the age-old questions that people always get asked when they’re growing and even the age — As you’ve shown in your Ted Talk, age of 3, 5, etc., what are some of the dangers of asking somebody, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” 

[0:07:42.8] EW: Yeah. It's funny when you get asked this question as a little kid. It’s seen as like this fun, innocent little game, like the kid will be like, “Oh, I want to be a dinosaur when I grow up,” and everyone will be like, “Oh, that’s so cute.” 

As we get older, this question gets asked of you again and again and it gets to be like a more serious question and people expect like a real practical answer. One of the problems with this question is that you can't really answer it with five or six different things. Especially as you get older, people will kind of be like, “Okay. But, no. You have to choose.” You start to learn that you need to kind of narrow things down and pick one of your interest and kind of deny all of your other passions and let them go. 

That actually isn’t true. If you look around at the world and you look at successful people, really prominent cultural figures, people in your community, you’ll see that a lot of people do multiple things and are actually really good at multiple things. We grow with this idea that you need to specialize. You need to really just narrow-in on the one thing, like your destiny. It's almost a romantic notion. 

[0:08:55.6] MB: I definitely self-identify with this sort of multipotentialite idea, because even in my bio I’ve described myself as an investor and an accident podcaster. Those two things in and of themselves are very kind of disparate and not necessarily connected. There's deep things that sort of connect them once you understand how and why, but I definitely struggle with even answering the fundamental question which I’m sure you talk about as well, it’s the idea of what do you for a living. That caters to this sort of specialist understanding of the world. When in reality, I do a lot of different things and that they’re very diverse and some ways connected and some ways totally disconnected. 

[0:09:37.1] EW: Yeah, for sure. I think that we’re really encouraged in our culture to kind of identify with what we do for money. Whatever that thing is that is what you are, that is who you are, and that can be really inaccurate and also really hard to explain if you derive income from a number of different sources.

[0:10:00.4] MB: Tell me more about this idea that the social narrative that often gets reinforced, that we have this destiny, this one true calling. How do people get misled by that and what can we do to combat against that? 

[0:10:15.7] EW: It’s everywhere. It’s in our school systems. We’re asked to do a major. We hear things about not being a quitter and jack of all trades, master of none, and it's just like really in our vocabulary. The funny thing is it actually is a very — It very much comes from a specific time in history, so it really stems from at least the modern version of it. It stems from the Industrial Revolution, because back then we all had to be a cog in the system and that is how industry flourished. Through globalization, that model was brought to our school systems. We think of it as this kind of innate thing, but really it's social, it's historical and it's everywhere. It’s quite ubiquitous. 

In terms of combating that, I think just kind of realizing that it isn't like some sort of natural state. It's culturally based. There other times throughout history when the opposite was the ideal. Like during the Renaissance period, for example, you wanted to develop your mind in all areas. Those were the people that everyone looked up to. 

Also, I think, realizing that if you have many different passions and curiosities, there's something wrong with you, Actually, there a lot of other people that are like this who are making it work. I think that goes a long way to help kind of combat this. 

[0:11:43.5] MB: I want to attack this from a different angle a little bit, and I’m curious what your thoughts are, because anybody who listen to this is either thinking this or has heard this if they are a multipotentialite. The idea that deep focus is necessary to be successful and that people who have very different and sort of maybe disconnected interests just lack focus and they’re sort of drifting around without clarity in their lives. Tell me about how do you respond to someone who says you have to be focus specialist in order to succeed. 

[0:12:17.3] EW: I think there's a little bit of a confusion or a misconception there, which I think multipotentialites are actually very good at focusing. When we’re into something, we go quite deep and we kind of dive in and we learn really fast because we’re just so passionate about it. I think that this is where people confuse kind of multipotentialites with ADHD. It maybe looks the outside world like we’re unfocused, but really we are quite focused. We just have a lot of different interests. 

Also, you might find a multipotentialite who goes really deep, like spends their entire career going into one field. If that field is very multifaceted. Maybe it's the field like urban planning, or sustainable development where there are so many different areas that you need to understand just to work in that field. We don't look at that person and say, “Multipotentialite.” We say, “Oh, specialists.” Actually, they're using a lot of different skills in their work. 

What I find when I look around at the world, and I’ve spent a lot of time talking with successful multipotentialites, that they tend to be quite focused and they tend to even be experts. I think we assume that you can either be really good at one thing or you're just totally terrible at everything. Actually, there's a huge middle ground there. It is entirely possible to be very good at several things.

[0:13:48.2] MB: What a great distinction. You’re right. The language we use around this almost precludes the understanding of it from that perspective, which is this jack of all trades, master of none. In reality, people are so unique and different that it’s entirely possible to be a deep expert in several different things at the same time. I feel like we often fall prey to the presumption that just because you have varied things you're interested, it's not possible for you to be well-versed in several of them. 

[0:14:21.4] EW: Yeah. For sure. I think people look at it in this theoretical mathematical way, like if you spend 10,000 hours on this, but you only spends 2,500 — Whatever, hours on something else, like you’re going to be more skilled at this. Actually, it doesn't really work that. People are combining their skillsets and their interests and we’re creating new things at the intersections and we’re integrating our ideas and connecting them. It's not this linear thing. Technical skill isn't all that matters. Sometimes it's about creativity and innovation and what you do differently as supposed to just being the world-class or technically speaking. 

[0:15:07.3] MB: I think that really segues into what you’ve talked and written these super powers that multipotentialites have. Before we dip into that, another thing that that just kind of brought to mind for me is the idea and the interrelationship between the 80-20 principle in the concept of diminishing returns, which is if you can kind of step into an area, a domain of knowledge that interest you and you can get that 20% of knowledge that carries 80% of the freight for understanding and connecting and working with those ideas, there is massive diminishing returns to spending the other — Mastering the other 80% of that information that you're only going to get an additional sort of 20% of leverage out of.

[0:15:50.1] EW: Yeah. That’s a really good point. That makes me think of Tim Ferriss, and he talks a lot about how you can become world-class, if that is your goal in a much quicker time frame than people think. He is someone who goes very deep, but he also has a lot of different skills and he’s done a ton of different things. 

[0:16:12.0] MB: Let’s dig in to those super powers now. Tell me about what are some of the positives or the upsides, as you call them, super powers, that multipotentialites have and that they can leverage to succeed. 

[0:16:25.5] EW: Yeah. I go through five in the book, and I'm sure that there are others, but the five that I go through are idea synthesis. Taking two ideas or subjects that don't normally go together and creating something new at the intersection. We tend to be really good at kind of connecting those dots because we have all these different backgrounds. 

One of the examples that your listeners might be familiar with, in Steve Jobs' commencement speech at Stanford he talks about how he dropped out of college and then he sat in on calligraphy class. Just one random calligraphy class, but that class became the inspiration for the beautiful typeface of the Apple Computer years later. There's an example of kind of mushing two things together that don't normally go together and creating something new and unique. 

The second one is rapid learning, and that just means we are so used to being beginners and jumping into new things that it becomes kind of second nature to us and we’re used to stepping out of our comfort zones and kind of diving in and getting past those early sticking points because we’ve done it some many times. We also tend to be really passionate about things we become interested in. Like I mentioned earlier, we really dive in and learn all that we can in a short timeframe. 

The third one is adaptability. We can kind of take on different roles and perform different kind of tasks depending on what's required, depending on the market even. If you’ve got a variety of different skills and things kind of dry up in one area, you can lean on those other skills. We’re quite adaptable. We’re kind of good at kind of taking new challenges, taking on new challenges and using our old skills and build on them to pick up new skills. That’s a huge asset in an economy that is changing so quickly. 

The fourth one go into I believe is big picture thinking. We tend to be kind of the ones seeing the big picture. We have these big ideas. There is a huge overlap between multipotentialites and entrepreneurs and I think this is why we sort of have this idea of how things could be because we see how everything is linked up and we can spot kind of these bigger systematic problems. Multipotentialites tend to be passionate visionaries a lot of the time. 

Then — What was my last one? Yeah, relating and translating. We’re really fascinated by people, all kinds of different people. We love learning about different things and we’re really good at relating to people in different fields both because we’re interested and because we might have a background in all those different things. You can usually find something to talk about with someone if you're really curious. We’re also very good at translating between people. 

If you're working with a big interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary team and you’ve got designers over here talking one language and kind of the tech people, programmers over here talking another language. If you understand both worlds, because you may be experienced both or you have skills in both areas, you can kind of help each team understand what the other one is saying and you can bring that bigger vision to life. 

[0:19:52.0] MB: I’d love to dig into to some of these and talk a little bit more. Tell me about — One of the ones that fascinates me is big picture thinking. For somebody who’d listening, how can we cultivate the ability to be better big picture thinkers and why is that such an important skillset? 

[0:20:10.5] EW: Yeah. I think it’s about the ability to kind of zoom out and see problems more holistically and to kind of — Pattern recognition is a big one, I think, for a lot of these superpowers. I think just like paying attention. Again, I feel like I've been asked how do you come up with an idea for a business, but paying attention to the problems and to what's going on and how it's affecting different people and how you can help and kind of learning to zoom out to see the broader context of what's going on. I’m not sure if that’s very helpful, but I’m trying to think if there are specific skills. I think it’s just a matter of practice and just learning to notice things and to spot those connections and those patterns. 

[0:20:57.6] MB: Specifically, in the bucket of idea synthesis, the famous kind of story about Steve Jobs and calligraphy. There are so many unconnected or interconnected things that if we experiment in  different fields of study or different areas of knowledge, we can often draw these connections and bring things together that may not have been initially linked or create these whole new opportunities. 

Another story that — We had some previous guests, Art Markman and Bob Duke who came in and talked about the decoration of the Dyson vacuum cleaner. The founder went to a lumber mill and saw how they were sucking up all the sawdust and said, “Hey, that's really interesting technology. I wonder what other applications of that may be.” Eventually, decided to turn into a vacuum cleaner and because a very successful company. 

There’s all of these really interesting ways that Steve Jobs says, “You can’t always know looking forward, how the various pieces of knowledge the you pickup are going to connect.” Looking backwards, it's makes a lot of sense. 

[0:22:02.5] EW: Yeah. I think that’s comforting to think about because a lot of the times, when we lose interest in a field, we might be like, “Oh, well. That was a waste of time and maybe money,” but you never know how that knowledge is going to come back around and where you might apply it. 

[0:22:17.7] MB: In a world where change is one of the only constants, people and businesses must be adaptable. This episode of The Science of Success is sponsored by our partners at That Moment, a new podcast about the pivot that changes everything. Sometimes we recognize the need to seize the moment and change course. Other times, we have no choice but to pivot. 

During these rapidly changing times, pivots can bring uncertainty, fear, and the looming possibility of failure, but can also open doors for discovery, growth, and change. In each episode of That Moment, business leaders and entrepreneurs share their stories of taking risks and finding success at work and in life. From autonomous cars to new sensor technology, the insurance of driving is changing. 

In the latest episode of That Moment, hear about how Allstate is leveraging new technologies to test, learn, and develop more quickly. Then, Naomi Starkman tells her story about walking away from the New Yorker to become a farmer. Why did she make this pivot, and what is she doing now? Find out on the latest episode of That Moment, available wherever you listen to podcasts. 

[0:23:24.6] MB: Talk to me more about this, the idea of rapid learning and adaptability and how can somebody who’s listening that maybe isn't a multipotentialite or even those who are, how can they master this skill of rapid learning and cultivate it more effectively? 

[0:23:41.4] EW: Again, I think that it's practice. I think that it’s really about getting comfortable with that early learning curve where you just feel really awkward and incompetent and realizing that that is the first stage to being like kind of good and being better and then eventually mastering it. Just doing that again and again and again and it's pretty uncomfortable, I think a lot of people don't want to do it. If you're interested in something and you've got this curiosity, it can help you kind of — Can push you to do that. 

I really think it's just practice. There are kinds of techniques out there to learn faster, but I think that having the passion. For me, anyway, that is what has fueled my learning and if I'm not passionate about something, I have a much harder time learning it. 

[0:24:32.3] MB: In many ways, it’s almost like the idea of cultivating beginner’s mind again and again when you're rapidly transitioning between different areas of knowledge, you're having to cultivate the skillsets and the abilities to start from scratch and say, “Okay. What are the big pieces I need to master first so that I can kind of, again, going back to almost that 80-20 thing again? How can I master the big chunks of knowledge that are the easiest to pick up that are going to give me most of the heavy lifting to really start to understand how the pieces fit together in this particular world?” 

[0:25:07.1] EW: I think you’ll also find that as you acquire more skills and dive into more things, it gets easier, because you start to see, “Oh, this thing here is kind of like that other thing that I did.” You’re not really starting from zero. 

[0:25:20.8] MB: Tell me about — For somebody who’s listening that is some more of a — What’s the opposite or sort of a specialist? Is that what you could call somebody? 

[0:25:29.9] EW: That’s the easiest way to frame it. It’s a little bit challenging though, because multipotentialites can sometimes look like specialists, the outside, and really they’ve got like a project, like a business, or like I said, they’re working in an interdisciplinary field. They’re using a lot of different skills, but to the outside they looks like they're specializing. Yeah, I guess it's someone who really just has one focus and isn't interested in many other things and isn't particularly curious and just really likes going deep in one area and is pretty content with that. 

[0:26:08.0] MB: I guess what I'm trying to draw out is, is for people who are listening that aren’t multipotentilites, what lessons can they draw from multipotentialites that might help them in whatever field they're really going deep on? 

[0:26:23.0] EW: I think that exploring other things outside of your main works can be really beneficial. It can give you new ideas. It can kind of make your work stand out and make it a little bit more unique. It can also provide a nice break, which is good for energy levels. I do think that specialists and multipotentialites make really good teams, because you’ve got someone who's kind of scanning the horizon and bringing in different ideas and then you’ve got another person who's implementing and going really deep. I think they both have value. 

[0:26:57.2] MB: I think there's two breakpoints there. One of them is this idea that just dabbling in something else, another field of knowledge, can help you bring back some really interesting lessons that you can cross-apply to your primary domain of expertise. The second one which is something we haven't really necessarily touched on but has underpinned most of the conversations is the idea that being either sort of a specialist or a multipotentialite, no one is better than the other. In fact, it’s really that they both very mutually complementary and when you can put these things together, figuring out do you lean more towards multipotentiality or do you lean more towards specialization and find people who complement your skillset so you can really create a situation where one plus one doesn't necessarily equal two when you're combining forces like that. 

[0:27:47.6] EW: Right. Yeah. 

[0:27:49.1] MB: One of the other topics that you’ve talked about and written about is how can a multipotentialite I be financially successful in today’s world and what are some of the strategies that they can use, because our economic structures in many ways are geared more towards rewarding specialization? What are some of the specific strategies that multipotentialites can use to really succeed financially in today's world? 

[0:28:17.0] EW: Yeah. This was the main question I wanted to answer when I started researching and working on my new book, and what I did was I interviewed about 50 multipotentialites who self-describe as being both happy and financially comfortable and then I sent out a couple of surveys and I got a few thousand replies to those. I had a lot of data to work with. I wanted to know how multipotentialites make a living. What I found is that there's no Holy Grail career. I guess it’s not that surprising, but there’s no one job that works for every multipotentialite, and I was meeting people in all different fields, doing all kinds of different work. 

What I was able to do is I realized that there are kind of these four work models, these four commonly used work models that multipotentialites use. Before I go into the four, I want to just point out that it is entirely possible to be a hybrid, and I never like to tell people to just choose one thing, especially not my audience. You can mix and match these. You can customize this stuff. I did find that there are kind of these four approaches. The first one is what I call the group hug approach, and this is where you combine your interests in one multifaceted job or business. Maybe you work at a company that maybe it's a smaller company where you get to kind of step out of your job description a little bit and propose different project and ideas and wear many different hats, Maybe you're working in an interdisciplinary field where you're integrating your various interests and skills just to kind of work in that area. Maybe you’re running a business, because running a business means wearing a lot of different hats especially at the beginning. There's so much that goes into it. There's product development, customer service, legal, finance, all these stuff. That's one approach. 

The second commonly used work model is the /approach, and this is where instead of combining your interest, you’ve got a few separate distinct revenue streams that you kind of flip between over the course of a week or a month. This is someone who is a program/teachers/stand-up comedian. They’ve got these very discreet jobs or businesses, these part-time things that they do. The people that I've spoken to who use this work model, they tell me that part-time is kind of the dream. They love each of their different jobs for different reasons, but wouldn't want to do anyone of them full-time. This is a way to stick with a few different things and to still get that variety, because that’s the piece that’s really missing in a lot of conventional career advice, the need for variety which is huge for multipotentialites. 

The third commonly used work model is the Einstein approach, and I called it that because Albert Einstein worked at the patent office for several years who is basically employed by the government. He had this very stable day job that took care of his financial needs, and then he explored his theories on the side. 

This is what author Barbara Sher refers to as a good enough job, is where you have a job or even one narrow lucrative business that will do it, where it pays the bills and then it also leaves you with enough free time and energy to pursue your many passions on the side. This is someone — I interviewed a guy for the book named Charlie Harper who is an IT director by day, just straight up 9 to 5, and then he leaves the office and he goes to musical theater practice or acapella practice and on the weekend he builds furniture and he just recently built a boat. 

The beauty about this approach is that you don't have to worry about monetizing all of your little interest and everything that you become interested in because we’re very curious. That can really take the pressure off. It doesn't work for everybody, but for some people the Einstein approach is a really good fit. 

Then we’ve got the fourth commonly used work model, the Phoenix approach. This is because if you think of a Phoenix, kind of lives this glorious life and at the end they are up in flames and are reborn from the ashes. This is someone who dives into a field, builds a career, and kind of when they feel like they have gotten their feel, they kind of, “Yeah. I’ve got this. I’m ready for a new adventure.” They transition and begin a new career in a totally new field and kind of moves through their passion in a sequential way, so one after the next after the next often with several years between each switch as opposed to maybe a couple of hours as with someone using the /approach.

[0:33:17.5] MB: It’s so interesting and I find it fascinating that you’ve interviewed all of these different people to pull up this knowledge, because I still — It's so socially conditioned that focus is good and distraction or having lots of little things going on is bad, that I keep sort of circling back to this question or fear of doubt of like, “But what about the fact that if I just focused on something I could be more successful?” 

[0:33:46.2] EW: Right. You could be, but if you're multipotentialite, at some point you might become bored and you might feel like you're not actually being challenged very much and you’re just doing the same thing again and again and again. 

[0:33:56.4] MB: I think Tony Robins said that success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure. 

[0:34:02.0] EW: There you go. 

[0:34:03.9] MB: Another good example that even in just the naming of that approach, the Einstein approach. If you look at somebody like Einstein, tremendously successful individual and live on in the history books for millennia probably. He was somebody who his income was divorced from what he actually did. 

[0:34:25.4] EW: Yeah, for sure. That’s the thing. We have this idea that what we do for money is more valuable than the other things that we do in our lives and profitability does not necessarily equal value. There are a lot of other rewards to engaging with our interests. Personal development and acquiring other skills and just enjoyments and connecting with other people, there’s a lot of things that we can get out of something even if it isn't paying the bills. It's okay to kind of separate the money from the meaning and the variety as long as you have all those elements in your life. 

[0:35:10.1] MB: I think that echoes in many ways some of the same lessons that Tim Ferriss talks about in The 4-Hour Workweek, which is the idea of get a business and get it where it can support you so that you can go do whatever you want to do. 

[0:35:21.8] EW: Yeah. I would say that that book really defines the Einstein approach with a self-employment slant to it, so kind of that good enough business where you’ve got. It’s paying the bills, you’re working as little as possible for it to support you and you really define your financial goals. Then you have all of these free time to go explore and to do all these amazing things. 

[0:35:47.7] MB: One of the other topics the you’ve written about, it's not directly related to what we’ve been going in, but I think it's very relevant to a lot of this, which is the idea of celebrating our failures. Can you tell me a little bit about the concept and what that means to you? 

[0:36:01.9] EW: Yeah. Actually, a few years back we did this thing called failure celebration week on Puttylike, and the idea was to just kind of take the stigma out of failure, because we all have to try things and “fail sometimes” to learn. Often, what looks like failure is really just feedback, that's what people say and is just the sign, “Okay. Maybe I need to shift my approach and try something else,” and it's really a necessary step on the way to learning. 

For failure celebration week we all kind of shared — People wrote different blog posts about their spectacular failures and often they were what led them to where they are now. They were just an integral part of their ultimate success. It was cool too. We had people using the #failweek and they were like, “Oh, I was doing the dishes and I got water all over my dress shirt, #failweek.” We’d be like, “Yey! Way to go,” and just to kind of take that stigma out of it and to be like, “Everyone fails all the time and it's okay and it's necessary.” 

[0:37:12.2] MB: It’s a great point. One of the things that we’ve talked previously on the shows is this idea that, as Charlie Monger said, who, again, is somebody that I’m a huge a fan of. We talk about him all the time here. He said that you only need to get rich once. If you think about that, what it means is you can fail a ton of time, but if you just succeed one time, that’s all that matters. If you just hit it. If you just hit a home run once in the financial sense, that’s it. Then you’ve made it. 

We're so evolutionarily programmed in our biology and our minds are structured in a way that we want to avoid and minimize failure because of all the social repercussions and everything else. When it today’s society, today’s world, in almost every instance, it just doesn't really matter. In fact, fear of failure over a longer time horizon is actually much much worse for you than trying and failing at a bunch of different projects. 

[0:38:14.6] EW: Yeah, absolutely. You can't hit that one win if you're not going to fail a bunch first. I do think it's quite true that if you look at a lot of really successful people, they have a string of failures before they kind of figure out what works. 

[0:38:34.7] MB: What advice would you have for somebody who's listening that still doesn't know “what they want to be when they grow up”?

[0:38:42.2] EW: Well, I would say get a piece of paper out and start writing down all of your interests and passions and skills and getting it all out on paper. When I do this exercise with people in workshops and whatever, I always tell them like, “If you’re becoming interested in something and even if you’re not that good at it yet, write it down. Get your interests on there too. If you're not sure whether to include something, included it. Just get everything out on paper.” 

From there you can starts taking a look at what kind of work model would be a good fit for you and what that might look like. If you're thinking that the group hug approach, it sounds really nice to kind of combine your interest. What goes well together? Could you bring knowledge from one area of interest to an audience related to another interest of yours? 

There’s a guy who has a really neat business called Marketing for Hippies, and he’s got background both in marketing world and in the kind of green holistic nonprofit world. He takes marketing principles and translates it into a language that his audience can relate to, because typically marketing principles do not appeal to the hippie audience. 

There something like that for you. Can you bridge a gap between two things that don't normally go together? Is there a field that exists out there that is kind of an amalgamation of several of your interests? When it comes to the other work models for the /approach, you might think like which one of these skills can I monetize and what would that look like if I paired three of these together, and maybe picking three different ones just to kind of change it up so you’re not doing the same thing all the time just to get that variety. 

For the Einstein approach, you may think like, “What is the “practical interest” on this page? If I were to show this to a regular career counselor, what they say? What would they tell me to do?” That's often a good way to start thinking about some good enough jobs or you can do kind of the Tim Ferriss approach and be like, “Which one of these skills is the most lucrative? Which could I turn into a really profitable business even if it's super narrow?” 

With the Phoenix approach, my favorite exercise for that is to pretend you've got 10 lives and to just make a list of what you would be in each of those lives, and that's a really cool way to start thinking about if I want to have one career for 6 to 10, I can you do that and then switch to something else, and here’s what that might look like.

[0:41:23.5] MB: That's a great questions. I love questions that pull you out of your own ego and kind of the things you used to distract yourself and talk yourself out of doing things and really give you clarity about where you want to go, and that's a great example of, “Okay. If I didn't have all the social and emotional baggage that’s telling me that I need to do X, what would I do with 10 different lives?” That's a great way to kind of break through some of that and really get clarity about the opportunities the you want to pursue. 

[0:41:54.4] EW: Yeah. I think that the main issue here is that variety is not considered — I mean it’s not just a priority in a lot of conditional career models. If you know you're multipotentialite or you think you might be one, then variety is really important to you. You need to kind of figure out how you’re going to get that variety, and that's what I really like about these work models is I found that this was what people were using to get the variety they need in their lives and in their careers. I think just keeping that in mind that you don't need to choose one thing. You can have variety and also have the financial stability at the same time. 

[0:42:38.5] MB: What one piece of actionable advice or kind of homework you would give to a listener who wants to concretely implement some of the things we’ve talked about today? 

[0:42:50.2] EW: I think that the exercises that I just went through is a really good one. I think it's really important to get everything out of your head and on to the page. Just something visual that you can see, you move things around because it can be a little smooshie if it's just ideas in your head. I think, yeah, just kind of thinking about your different backgrounds and where things have led you and maybe some of the different skills that you've acquired and have implemented, laterally, in other fields and just taking stock of all of the things that you know and all of the things that you've learned and all of the things you're curious about and how that diversity has really enhanced your life and maybe getting a little bit clear on that and journaling a little bit on that can help. 

[0:43:38.2] MB: For listeners who want to follow you and learn more, where can people find you and your blog and your book online? 

[0:43:46.3] EW: Yeah, they can learn more about the book at howtobeeverything.com and if they want to swing by the community, check out the blog. That can be found at puttylike.com.

[0:43:59.5] MB: Awesome. Emilie, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all your wisdom. As a multipotentialite myself, this has been really interesting and a lot of these has resonated with me personally. Thank you for sharing all of your knowledge with me. 

[0:44:15.5] EW: Great. Thanks so much for having me, Matt. 

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[0:44:17.6] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s matt@sucesspodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every listener email.

The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes, because that helps more and more people discover The Science of Success. 
	
I get a ton of listeners asking, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all these information?” Because of that, we’ve created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. You can get it by texting the word “smarter”, that’s “smarter” to the number 44222, or by going to successpodcast.com, that’s successpodcast.com and joining our email list. If you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we just talked about in this show and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. Just go to successpodcast.com and hit the show notes button at the top. 

Thanks again, and we’ll see you on the next episode of The Science of Success. 

[END]

Discover Your Hidden Emotional Insights & What’s Truly Valuable To You with Dr. Susan David

In this episode we discuss emotional agility and how you can cultivate it, discover that beneath your difficult emotions are the signposts to the things you value most, learn how to make space for emotions and embrace a willingness to experience difficult emotions, talk about why its vital to understand the distinction that emotions are meaningful but not always correct, how you can “piggyback” your habits to create very powerful strategies to live more aligned with your values and more with Dr. Susan David.

Dr. Susan David is an award winning Psychologist at Harvard Medical School, co-founder of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, and CEO of Evidence Based Psychology. She is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Emotional Agility and has had her work featured in several publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and TIME magazine. Susan’s work and research have led to her consulting and working with several top organizations including the United Nations, and the World Economic Forum, and much more!

• How Susan’s experience growing up in apartheid South Africa led her down the path of studying emotional resilience and agility

• The tyranny of positivity and how it can actually harm us

• How focusing too much on your happiness can make you less happy over time

• How surpassing your emotions increases depression and anxiety and decreases your chance at achieving your goals

• Beneath your difficult emotions are signposts to the things we value most

• Research psychology reveals the power of the “amplification effect” when we push our thoughts and emotions aside

• Emotional contagion and how the behavior of others - even people you’ve never met and who are far removed from your life, can have a huge impact on your behavior and your life

• If someone in your social network - even if you don’t know them - puts on weight or gets divorced, you are more likely to do those things!

• Between stimulus and response, there is a space, in that space is our opportunity for agency

• What happens when you bottle and brood on your emotions

• Who’s in charge, the thinker or the thought? Who’s in charge, the emotion or the person feeling them? This story, or you the person who can experience many stories?

• What is emotional agility? How can we cultivate it?

• How to make space for emotions and embrace a willingness to experience difficult emotions

• Life’s beauty is inseparable from its fragility

• Our emotions are not good are bad, they just “are”

• Strategies for developing self compassion

• Imagine yourself as a child approaching yourself as an adult - how would you treat that 3-4 year old who has failed, been rejected, struggled, etc?

• We are all trying to do the best we can with the resources we have in an imperfect world - expecting perfection from yourself when the world itself is imperfect is unrealistic

• Emotions are meaingful, but not RIGHT (emotions are DATA not direction)

• Its critical to cultivate space between stimulus and response

• Emotions are important but they aren’t necessarily correct - tap into the wisdom they offer us, but don’t necessarily go in the direction they want us to go in

• The vital importance of cultivating an “observer” view of our emotions to help us step out from our emotional reactions and create space between stimulus and response

• Why you should use language like “I am noticing that I am feeling X” and “I am noticing the emotion of fear”

• Accurately labeling your emotions, digging in beyond just the surface, taps into and helps deal with negative emotions - the field of emotional differentiation

• If I was asking the wisest person on the world for their advice on this issue - what would they say?

• Every day we get to make a choice - do we move towards our values or away from our values?

• Values are qualities of action and they protect us from social contagion

• How do we discover our values?

• “What did I do that was worthwhile?”

• How you can “piggyback” your habits to create very powerful strategies to live more aligned with your values

• Root out and destroy “Have To” language in your life

• 4 Simple strategies you can use right away to become emotionally agile

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners, That Moment Podcast. That Moment explores the pivot that changes everything: moments that open doors for discovery and growth, but also bring the looming possibility of failure. Each show features different leaders and innovators sharing their stories of taking risks in business and in life. That Moment is produced by Pivotal, who believes when change is the only constant, people and businesses must be built to adapt. Get the details of their first episode "It Was Essentially Disrupting Ourselves" here and check them out on iTunes, Google Play, and Soundcloud.

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life by Susan David

• [Personal Site] Susan David

• [Handbook] Oxford Handbook of Happiness Edited by Ilona Boniwell, Susan A. David, and Amanda Conley Ayers

• [Article] How to Manage Your Emotions Without Fighting Them by Susan David

• [Article] Emotional Agility by Susan David and Christina Congleton

• [Book Site/Quiz] Emotional Agility

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success with your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:12.6] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performers tick with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode we discussed emotional agility and how you can cultivate it. Discover that beneath your difficult emotions are the signposts of the things that you value most. Learn how to make space for motions and embrace a willingness to experience difficult emotions. We talk about why it's vital to understand the distinction that emotions are meaningful but not always correct. How you can piggyback your habits to create very powerful strategies to live in a more aligned way with your values and much more with Dr. Susan David. 

The Science of Success continues to grow with, now, more than a million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries, hitting number one New and Noteworthy and more. I get listener comments and emails all the time ask me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all these incredible information?” 

A lot of her listeners are curious about how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge I get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to awesome podcasts, and more. Because of that, we’ve created an epic resource just for you, a detailed guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything, and you can get it completely for free by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, it's a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. All you have to do to get it is to visit successpodcast.com and join our email list or text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, that “smarter” to the number 44222. 


In our previous episode we discussed how her perception of reality dramatically shifts what actions we take. Why you should embrace 2000+ years of wisdom to be happier and more productive. How to stop judging yourself and others based on your achievements and root your identity in something within your control. We look at how you can cultivate a more humble and resilient worldview, discuss strategies for connecting with top-tier mentors and much more with Ryan Holiday. If you will learn how to crush your obstacles, listen to that episode. 

Lastly, if you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we talked about and much more, be sure to check out or show notes. Just go to successpodcast.com and hit the show notes button at the top. 

[0:02:50.4] MB: Today, we have another guest on the show, Dr. Susan David. Susan is an award-winning psychologist at Harvard Medical School, cofounder of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital and CEO of evidence-based psychology. She's the author of the number one Wall Street Journal bestseller, Emotional Agility and has had her work featured in several publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Time Magazine. Susan's work and research have led to her consultant working with several top organizations including the United Nations and the World Economic Forum as well as many more. 

Susan, welcome to The Science of Success. 

[0:03:25.4] SD: Thank you so much. I’m so grateful to be here. 

[0:03:28.4] MB: We’re super excited to have you on here today. For listeners who may not be familiar with you and your story, I love to hear about how your experience growing up lead you down the path that you’re on today. 

[0:03:40.9] SD: Absolutely. My core research and my core focus is essentially on this key question; what does it take internally in the way we deal with our thoughts, our emotions, and the stories that we tell ourselves that help us ultimately to thrive in the world? Because what goes on inside of us impacts everything; our relationships, our careers, how we interact in our everyday lives and, really, every aspect of how we love, live, parent, and lead. 

To your question, I first became interested in these ideas when I was growing up in Apartheid South Africa. While I was a white South African and therefore not subject to the same chaos and trauma as so many of my fellow South Africans, it was nonetheless a time of great complexity. For instance, when I was growing up, your chance as a female of being raped was on average higher than your chance of learning how to read and write. This is just to give an example of this very complex environment. 

From a very early age I became interested in this question; what does it take internally to help us to thrive in a world that is often unpredictable. where even today many decades later and in different countries, we are facing unprecedented global challenges, political challenges, regulatory challenges, technology, and so on? I became interested in these questions very, very early on. Then when I was 16 years old my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer and I experienced what so many of us experience today, which is this narrative of, “Just be positive, everything will be okay. Just think happy.”

While I could try to pretend to be happy and have a positive attitude, the reality was that my father was dying and then dead. I experienced this interaction with this remarkable teacher who invited me to keep a journal. What I realized afterwards was it was that. It was the showing up to my emotional experience that ultimately was a key component in my resilience and thriving. That’s sparked my entire career, my interest in emotions, my Ph.D. in the topic, my postdoc, all of these centered around these key ideas. What does it take internally to thrive and how so often the messaging that we get in the world is at odds with that? 

[0:06:33.3] MB: I’d love to start with that, which is the idea that we’re often told, be positive, stay positive. Just be positive. What are the dangers in that advice or that kind of framework? 

[0:06:48.0] SD: There are a number of issues with it. The first, and I'll give this is an example again, which is a friend of mine recently died of stage IV breast cancer and she said to me, “This is the tyranny of positivity, that if it was just a case of being positive, that the friends in my stage IV breast cancer support group would be alive today. They were the most positive people I ever met.” 

The implication and the narrative that if we can just be positive, we’ll be able to climb out of anything. She said to me, “It makes me feel implicated in my own death, that somehow I wasn't able to think positive enough and heal myself.” “What this does for me,” she said, “is it takes me away from the authenticity of my experience and my ability to make real choices based on the reality of what I’m facing.” 

One the key downsides of this just think positive narrative is that it promotes the idea that every aspect of our well-being, of our success, of almost everything lands up being located in us as individuals and in our thoughts. What's really interesting is when you look at individuals, and there's a fair amount of research supporting this, that when people set goals around their happiness and just thinking positive, that those people actually become less happy over time. 

There's this idea that in just thinking positive, what we often do is we take away, we steal from ourselves the capacity to, number one, recognize that even though difficult emotions, like sadness, or fear, or disappointment, or frustration in my job, even though those emotions are difficult, they actually are fundamental to our ability as human beings to adapt and be agile to a complex world. A world in which life's beauty is inseparable from its fragility. The way that we are able to adapt is often by recognizing that our emotions, while they are not fact, are often signaling to us and are helping us to adapt and thrive. That’s one key component of why this happiness narrative doesn't work. 

Another key component is that what it actually can lead to is suppressing of our difficult emotions where we push our experiences aside. We say to ourselves, “I’m unhappy in my job, but at least I’ve got a job, so I’m just going to get on with it.” That way of being when used characteristically is actually associated with lower levels of well-being, high levels of anxiety and depression as well as lower levels of success and goal attainment. 

Then a number of reasons for this narrative to not be helpful — And I just want to be clear here, I’m not empty happiness. I’m a very happy person and I actually edited an 80 chapter handbook called Oxford Handbook of Happiness. Really, the point that I make here is that so much of the narrative around just be positive can, when taken at face value, lead us to go down a path that is not ultimately helpful to us. 

[0:10:19.0] MB: What happens and what are some of the ways that people can, when they suppress their emotions, end up actually causing those emotions to echo and come back up and even more deeply and more intensely? 

[0:10:31.8] SD: That the really powerful question, and it's a really important question, because what happens is beneath our difficult emotions we know that those difficult emotions often signposts to things that we value. For example, someone who is upset because their idea was stolen at work. What signals to them is that they value equity and fairness, or if I’m feeling guilty because I’m not spending enough time at my children, that guilt, again, will not affect — It’s not, “I’m guilty, therefore I’m a bad person.” That guilt signals to me that I am valuing and see important presence and connectedness with my kids. 

The first way that pressing emotions leads to difficulties is that what it ultimately does for us is it pushes away our values aligned intentions in our lives and leads us to not cultivate a life that feels congruent with who we truly want to be. 

Another thing that we know, and many of your listeners will have experienced this, is in psychology there’s what we call an amplification effect. You’re on a diet and you say to yourself, “I am not allowed to each chocolate cake.” What do you want? You want chocolate cake. What do you dream about? You dream about chocolate cake. You crave chocolate cake. 

We know that this happens with our thoughts and our emotions as well. When we push our thoughts and emotions aside, those often have a rebound effect. For example, imagine a leader who says, “I’m really upset with my team, but I’m just not going to do anything about it and I’m not going to think about it because we’ve got the big project that we’re trying to focus on.” 

We know that that leader will often think about the upset, sometimes up to 30 or 40 times a minute and we also know that that leader when he or she goes into a team meeting, even though the team doesn't know that that leader is suppressing emotion, the team actually experiences increased blood pressure. It’s a fascinating line of research, but effectively showing that when used in an ongoing characteristic way, that suppression of emotions and thoughts doesn't work. 

[0:13:03.8] MB: The example you just used of the team and the blood pressure, that kind of ties into something else you’ve talked about, which is this idea of emotional contagion. Can you share that concept and how it impacts people? 

[0:13:16.6] SD: Yes, absolutely. There’s this fascinating idea of emotional contagion and, really, we’ve all again experienced this. We get into an agreement with someone or we’re in a situation at work where everyone's stressed or everyone's agreeing on something, everyone excited about something. We start to experience that same level of excitement or that same level of stress. There's also social contagion which is a counterpart to that, which is how we slightly pick up on other people's behaviors without even knowing it. 

For instance, you get in an elevator and everyone is looking at their cell phones and so you take out your cell phone as well and you start looking at your cellphone, or we know that when people are on an airplane, if they try to be healthy and they decide that they really, really don't want to eat candy, but if they see a partner buys candy, they are more likely, 30% more likely to buy candy as well. 

There’s this fascinating body of research that great shows that we pick up very subtly on the behaviors and emotions of other people and in ways that have far-reaching implications. If someone within your social network, you do not even need to know them, puts on weight or gets divorced, you are more likely to put on weight or get divorced. 

We all experience this, and most likely and most often it comes about when we’re on social media, we see someone driving a particular car or experiencing a fancy holiday, and so we want the same. Now what’s fascinating in this is that this can often, again, take us away from living the life that we value. Everyone’ stressed at work, so we become stressed and we stopped contributing, or it impacts in our ability to be productive. 

Yet, again, what we know is that when people connect with their values, who do I want to be in the world? What is important to me? I spend a little bit of time thinking about these value-based questions. It actually protects them from social contagion. That's one of the core ideas, the four key ideas that I talked about through this process of emotional agility, but this idea of walking your why, knowing what your values are and taking steps that is connected with those values is a key part of that. 

[0:15:59.4] MB: Before we go deep into emotional agility itself, one of the other concepts that you talk about at the beginning of the book that goes back to kind of the core of psychology is how we often conflate stimulus and response. Can you sure that? 

[0:16:14.1] SD: Yeah, absolutely. It’s so critical, because so often every single day we feel something or think something and then act on that. For example, I am feeling undermined in this meeting. I’m just going to be quiet. I think I may not get this job, so I’m just not going to apply. I’m going stop up the presentations, so I’m just not going to do it. 

So often we have what is called a fusion or a conflation between stimulus and response. We think something, we feel something, or we have a story about something, who we are, what we can achieve, what kind of relationships we are worthy of, and we start to treat those as fact and then start to act on them. 

In emotional agility I talk about this as being hooked. The idea that we are driven by a our full-time emotions and our stories in ways that don't serve us, in ways that take us away from who we truly want to be in the world in all aspects of our work and our relationships. 

[0:17:24.3] MB: Some of the other concepts that you’ve shared about how we often suppress emotions or the ideas of bottling and brooding. Can you elaborate on each of those? 

[0:17:34.5] SD: Yes. When I talk about in emotional agility is how when we are hooked, and this is beautiful, beautiful, Victor Frankl phrase that has been attributed to his ideas, which is between stimulus and response there is a space, and in that space is our power to choose and it's in that choice that lies our growth and freedom. 

When we are hooked, there’s no space between stimulus and response. So often when we are hooked, we try to deal with that difficulty whether it's the difficulty of the situation that we’re facing, disappointment in a relationship, or any other aspect of our lives that in an everyday where it isn't working out as it should or as we think it should. We often deal with that in one of two ways. The first is by bottling our emotions. This is this idea that I spoke about earlier which is we push our emotions aside. We say, “I’m unhappy in my job, but at least I’ve got a job,” or “I really need to have this very important and very difficult conversation, because it's critical to my overall relationship, but I’m not going to go there.” What we do when we bottle emotions as we push those emotions aside, and as mentioned there’s this amplification effect. 

Another way that we often deal with difficult emotions is we brewed on them, so we go over and over and over them in our minds. I’m unhappy in my job. This is terrible. This is awful. This is not the way that I want my job to be. What starts to happen in that situation is, again, the thought or the emotion is owning you. It is the master, because so much of your time and space is being taken up by that thought or the motion, or by the story. 

Really, what we start to get into the space up here is; who's in charge, the thinker or the thought? Who’s in charge? The emotion, or me, the person who is big enough and brave enough to experience all of my emotions? Who's in charge? This one story or, me, the person who is able to experience many different stories, and in fact has many different identities and many different ways that I can choose to be in the world? 

[0:20:03.9] MB: What happens when a thought or emotion becomes our master? 

[0:20:08.5] SD: A number of things. Firstly, that thought or that emotion takes up so much space that we are so in our heads, that we are not in the world. We’re not actually achieving our goals, being in our relationships in ways that are present. Also, we are not living our lives in ways that have values a lot. For example, if you truly value growth, or learning, then being fused by, “Gee! I would love to put my hand up for this particular project, but I’m worried about it and I’m worried about my ability to be successful at it, so I’m just not going to.” What you’re doing in that moment of being driven by your thought or your emotion is you are moving away from your value of growth and learning. If giving feedback to someone is truly aligned with the value of yours, which is one about fairness, then this idea of not giving feedback, how fair is that to the individual? How fair is that to the team? How fair is that to you? If you’re hooked by your thought, which is, “I think I just want to avoid giving this feedback because It makes me uncomfortable,” then again what you’re doing is you are taking yourself away from that value. More importantly is that experience, while you might say, “Well, it's just one interaction,” we know that every single interaction that we have when it becomes a tendency, when it becomes a habit, if that habit is not aligned with your values, then what you have ultimately, if you put all those different frames together, you have a very different movie of your life. You have relationships that feel dishonest or you have a career that you've been in for five years that ultimately is not fulfilling to you. 

In the moment you might say, “This one thing doesn't really matter, but when that becomes a habit, when it becomes a tendency that is not aligned with your values, ultimately it takes you away from a life that is one of thriving and connectedness and being in the world that is truly based on who you want to be and how you want to be successful, what that looks like on your own terms. 

[0:22:42.9] MB: Cultivating emotional agility is one of the ways that we can battle back against bottling, brooding, suppressing our emotions. How do you define the concept; what is emotional agility? 

[0:22:54.9] SD: Emotional agility is actually fundamental to, as I mentioned before, every aspect of our relationship, our work, and so on. It's, really, how do we deal with our inner world in a way that is effective and that enables us to, then, be effective and successful and thriving and happy in life. 

The way that I describe emotional agility is that emotional agility is the ability to be with yourself, your thoughts, your emotions, your story in ways that are courageous, which is critical here because sometimes we don't like what we see. That is compassionate, because we need to be able to be kind to ourselves, and self-compassion is one of the core aspects of the ability to move through life effectively. That is around this idea that when we deal with our emotions and ways that are curious, compassionate and courageous, curiosity being also a core component, then we also want to be able to take steps in ways that our value is congruent. 

The way that I sum up in describing what emotional agility is, is it’s being with ourselves in ways that are curious, compassionate, and courageous, and taking actions that are aligned with our values and who we truly want to be in the world. 

[0:24:30.5] MB: In a world where change is one of the only constants, people and businesses must be adaptable. This episode of The Science of Success is sponsored by our partners at That Moment, a new podcast about the pivot that changes everything. Sometimes we recognize the need to seize the moment and change course. Other times, we have no choice but to pivot. 

During these rapidly changing times, pivots can bring uncertainty, fear, and the looming possibility of failure, but can also open doors for discovery, growth, and change. In each episode of That Moment, business leaders and entrepreneurs share their stories of taking risks and finding success at work and in life. From autonomous cars to new sensor technology, the insurance of driving is changing. 

In the latest episode of That Moment, hear about how Allstate is leveraging new technologies to test, learn, and develop more quickly. Then, Naomi Starkman tells her story about walking away from the New Yorker to become a former. Why did she make this pivot, and what is she doing now? Find out on the latest episode of That Moment, available wherever you listen to podcasts. 

[0:25:41.5] MB: Let's dig into the first pillar of emotional agility, the concept of showing up. Tell me little bit about that. 

[0:25:47.1] SD: Showing up goes, again, against this idea that we’ve just got to pretend to be happy all the time and really talks to this idea that when we are able to enter into a space with ourselves, where we stop saying to ourselves, “I shouldn't be upset. I shouldn't this. I shouldn’t feel that. I shouldn’t think this.” Instead, what we do is we just make space for these emotions in our heart. We embrace a willingness to experience difficult emotions with the recognition that life’s beauty is inseparable from its fragility. That we are young, until we are not. We are in careers we love, until we don't. We are in relationships, that are working until they’re not. 

Showing up is the really recognition that our emotions are not good or bad, they just are. In fact, there are critical ways that we as human beings have evolved to help us to adapt and thrive. 

A core aspect of showing up is quite literally this idea that we in any struggle we have within ourselves, about our thoughts, about our motions, about our stories, by dropping the rope. Not seeing them as good or bad, but just as they are. 

A second component of emotional agility, this idea of showing up is to recognize that so often we live in a world that would have us believe we are in a never ending, I’m man or I’m woman competition, where we’ve got to be hard and disciplined and we’ve got to keep going, going, going and almost ignoring the signs and signals within our body and within our psychology. 

The idea of being self-compassionate can seem very woo-woo and very soft. People might think, for example, that being self-compassionate is about being lazy or it's about being weak or it’s about going easy on yourself. 

In fact, the research shows the opposite. The research shows that when people create a self-forgiving and safe psychological space within themselves, that those individuals tend to be more experimental, more able to take risks and to take chances, because they recognize that if they fail, that they still save their self-face. That individuals who are self-compassionate tend to be less weak, less lazy and, in fact, more honest with themselves and are able to get through setbacks and transitions more effectively. 

Showing up is really about a willingness to be kind to yourself and a willingness to embrace the full spectrum of emotions whilst recognizing that emotions contain very important data about our values, but they’re not directions. We don't need to believe every emotion that we experience and we don't need to necessarily act on every emotion. Emotions are data, not directions. 

[0:29:08.4] MB: Intellectually, I understand the need for self-compassion. What I struggle with personally, and I’m curious how you’ recommend cultivating it better, is how do we develop the felt emotional sense of self-compassion and acceptance? 

[0:29:22.7] SD: There are a couple of ways. The first is to recognize how you might speak to yourself, because, of course, we all speak to ourselves. We all have inner dialogue. Some studies show that we have something like 16,000 spoken thoughts every single day and many, many, many, thousands more course through our minds. So many of these thoughts are about ourselves. We will have a dialogue with ourselves where we will say, “You’re such an idiot,” or, “You’re being a fraud,” or, “You are not cut out for this.” A lot of our language is lacking in self-compassion, where we would not use that language with people who we truly love and yet we use it with ourselves. 

A first aspect of cultivating self-compassion is simply become aware. Simply start noticing the language that you use to actually attack yourself, and that's really critical. A second part of creating this felt experience of self-compassion, there are many different ways, but one of the ways that's frequently very powerful is when you’re going through a setback or a difficulty and you’re starting to be really hard on yourself, is to imagine yourself as a very young child running to yourself as, you, the adult and saying, “Oh my goodness! This happened to me today,” and imagine in yourself how you would treat that very young child, that three or four year old who's failed at something, who's done wrong at something and to imagine the kind of love that that child actually needs and the experience that that child actually needs of someone reaching out and giving a huge. That can be really powerful. 

Another aspect of self-compassion is that we are all part of a humanity that is imperfect, where all of us in our human being of being are all trying to do the best we can with what we've got, with who we are, with the childhood that we had, with the resources that we've got in what is ultimately an imperfect world. Trying to expect perfection of ourselves when the world itself is imperfect and where every human being is imperfect is unrealistic. Recognizing that core part of humanity that is both beautiful and fragile and imperfect is a very powerful and profound. 

[0:32:12.1] MB: I think that’s a great strategy, and I love the idea of envisioning yourself as a young child and seeing how you would react. I think one of the other things that you talked about that's really important, and I want to hear you expound upon a little bit is this idea that emotions are meaningful, but they're not necessarily correct the or they’re not right and that they’re data but they’re not the direction we’re going in. 

[0:32:35.4] SD: This is critical again. This idea, again, connecting with Victor Frankl between stimulus and response, there is a space. When we are hooked, there’s no space between stimulus and response, we’re just acting. We need to be able to recognize that our emotions contain really important data. They are beacons to things that we value, but they are not fact. Our emotions are transient. All of our emotions pass overtime and all of our thinking passes overtime. 

Being able to tap into the wisdom of our emotions is critical, these emotions are data piece, but also recognizing that we are not just an emotion. We are not just a thought. That we are able to make choices, we've got our values, we’ve got our intentions, we've got who we want to be in the world. When I talk about emotional agility off to showing up, I also talk about this idea of stepping out, that we are able, as human beings, to create space between the thinker and the thought. Me, the person, who experiences the emotion and the emotion itself. 

Let me give you a practical example. When you say to yourself, “I am anxious,” or, “I am stressed.” Really, what you’re saying is, “I am. All of me. 100% of me is stressed.” When you’re doing that, there’s no space between you and the emotion, you have been enveloped by the emotion. 

A critical part of our ability to be effective and thrive in the world is being able to develop and observe a view of our emotions. We’ve all experienced this. You’re really angry with a customer service agent and your phone bill is wrong yet again and you finally get hold of a human being and you want to let that person have it. You’re feeling angry, but there’s that little voice in your head that says, “Susan, if you just tell this customer service agent how you feel about him or her, they will conveniently lose your file. They will make sure that this issue is never solved.” So you’re experiencing the emotion, but you also have this ability to observe the emotion, or you might be really, really angry with a loved one and you may hear yourself say to yourself, “She doesn't love me,” and then if that little voice inside your head that says, “Of course she loves you. You know that she loves you.”

Again, what you’re doing there is you’re experiencing this observe of you. This is one of the aspects of human being this that separates us from animals most likely and that is key to our ability to perspective take, to experience empathy, where you’re generating someone else's perspective. It’s key to our ability to move forward in fruitful ways in all aspects of our lives. This ability to create this observer perspective is, again, critical. In emotional agility, I talk about some very practical ways that we can create an observer perspective. 

[0:36:16.6] MB: Tell me about a couple of those practical strategies. 

[0:36:19.3] SD: One example might be if you’re saying to yourself, “I am stressed. I’m stressed. I’m stressed.” What is it that you are really experiencing? You’re experiencing, often, a thought, an motion, or a story. Simply noticing that thought, emotion, or story for what it is. I am noticing that I am feeling anxious. I’m noticing the thought that I’m being undermined. I’m noticing the emotion of fear. I’m noticing that this is my I’m not good enough story. Simply prefixing the I’m noticing the thought, I’m noticing the story, I’m noticing the emotion, creates a linguistic but a very powerful space between you and that stimuli. 

Another way that we can start creating space is to recognize that so often when we are experiencing something, we label that with very non-nuanced black and white labels. We’ll say, “I’m stressed. I’m stressed. I’m stressed.” The next day you come home from work, “How was your day?” “Oh! It was stressful. Stressful. Stressful. Stressful.” 

But there's a world of difference between stress versus anger, or stress versus disappointment, or stress versus frustration, or stress versus, “I thought that I would be in a completely different space in my career right now and I’m so sad at this lost legacy.” 

Imagine if I was working with a CEO who said to me, “I’m just stressed. I’m stressed. I’m stressed. I’m stressed.” I would do the default, which is help the person to delegate more. What if what’s really beneath that person's statehood, emotional experience, is, “I thought that my career would've been so different, and in fact I’m in the wrong career.” At that point, tips on delegation aren’t even going to cut it. The conversation would be completely, completely different. 

A critical part then of creating space between you and your emotion is accurate labeling. If you say to yourself, “Right, I’m saying that I’m stressed, but what are two other options? What are two other emotions that are beneath this first statement of stress?” What you can start tapping into is you can start tapping into, “Gee! What are the values that underlie this emotion? Why is it that I’m really stressed?” What we know again from the research in this field, it’s a field called emotion differentiation. Is that people who do this very simple, but very important, more complex naming of their emotions tend to have higher levels of well-being, lower levels of anxiety. Even more fascinating is that this accurate labeling actually starts to activate the readiness potential in our brains. We start to make goals. We start to shape our behavior in ways that are truly aligned with the reality of what's going on for us so that we can shape our world and be adaptive and agile and to thrive. 

Those are two examples. I give others very practical examples. Very simply, for example, if you’re stuck in something and you say to yourself, “I’m stuck. I’m stuck. I’m stuck. I just can't see my way through it.” A very powerful way to help you to step out of that experience is to say, “If I was asking the wisest person in the world for their advice on this issue, what would they say?” It’s a very simple strategy, but we know that it brings you into a different perspective. You’re experiencing your emotions but you’re not treating them as directions. You're able to gain this observer perspective.

[0:40:30.3] MB: I think that’s a great point. The idea that the labeling has to be more than just, “Oh, I’m stressed. I’m stressed.” You have to dig in a little bit and you have to understand more deeply what's underpinning that? What differentiates stress, from anxiety, from fear, from disappointment, etc. I think that's a great point. 

[0:40:49.1] SD: If your listeners are interested in that particular idea, I actually just recently wrote a blog for Harvard Business Review on it. If people do a search on my name, Harvard Business Review, they’ll see that I dig into the digging into of emotions and it’s power in aspects of our work and our life. 

[0:41:07.1] MB: Perfect. We’ll make sure to include that in the show notes. Tell me a little bit about walking your why. 

[0:41:13.7] SD: Walking your why is fundamentally this idea that once you've shown up to the reality of your experience or your story and then you’ve been able to get an observer perspective, that we need to be able to make values aligned choices. This is, again, between stimulus and response there as a space, and in that space is our power to choose. What are we choosing? What are we choosing? Who do we want to be? How do we want to act in this situation? 

These choices, values aligned choices become really critical. This idea that we are subject as human beings to social contagion, and yet we also know that when people spend just a little bit of time thinking about who do I want to be in the circumstance? That that is really powerful. 

I can give you some examples. Very often, when we’re talking about difficulties that we’re experiencing, whether it's at work or at home, people become very hooked on the idea of being right, “I am right and that person is wrong.” “My coworker really is an idiot,” or “My boss really is a slacker,” and so we become very focused as human beings, very hooked by this idea of right and wrong. 

You still — It’s a very interesting way that we as human beings are and it can be devastating. Wars are made and broken by the idea of being right. We've all had that experience where you have a fight with your loved one and, finally, the calm defense on the family and there’s something of a truth and then you go to bed and something compels you one last time to turn on the light and tell them why you are right and they are wrong and then chaos breaks loose again. 

We have this tendency to hold on to being right, and one of the things that I explore in emotional agility is imagine if the gods of right came down and said, “You are right. The other person is wrong. You are right. We give it to you. We will let you be right in the situation.” You still, even if you are right, get to make a choice. You get to make a choice whether with you still want to reach out to the person, whether you want to still have a relationship with the person. You get to have the choice even if you are right and your coworker is an idiot. Whether you still want to contribute to this very important project. 

This idea of walking your why is really about starting to recognize that values are so often seen as these abstract cheesy labels that are put on walls in businesses telling us all how we should act. Actually, personally held values are qualities of action that every day we get to make a choice, “do I move towards my value of healthy by choosing a salad, or do I move away from the value by choosing them muffin? Do I move towards my value by still contribution, or do I move away from it?” 

This idea that values are qualities of action and they protect us from social contagion and from the many kinds of implicit biases that we all experience at work; gender biases, exterior types, and even our own biases, the stories that we tell ourselves. 

[0:45:05.4] MB: How can we discover what our values are? 

[0:45:09.2] SD: There are a number of questions that I talk about in emotional agility. For example, asking yourself some very simple questions at the end of the day, at the end of today. What did I do that was worthwhile? Note, I use the word worthwhile, not fun. Now what did I enjoyed, but worthwhile, because there are lots of things that we might experience that are fun. Going to parties might be fun, but beneath what is worthwhile, what was worthy of your time today if today was your last day on earth, that starts to clue you into your values. 

Another thing that might be of help to your listeners is that I’ve got a free quiz, which is an emotional agility quiz, and that quiz actually has a whole list of potential values and descriptions and it really helps listeners to understand the way they are emotionally agile or ways that they could adjust to become more emotionally agile and it gives people a 10 page report. That’s a free quiz, and I can give you the URL if that would be helpful. It’s susandavid, S-U-S-A-N-D-A-V-I-D.com/learn. That takes about five minutes and it’s a free 10 page report. 

In the book, I talk about questions you can ask yourself, ways that you can think about if this was my last day on earth, what would be worthwhile? When I’m feeling a difficult emotion, when I’m experiencing sadness, what is that sadness actually telling me is important? All those kinds of questions will start to clue you in to what your values are. 

[0:46:57.1] MB: Perfect. We’ll make sure to include that quiz in the show notes as well for listeners to be able to check that out. 

[0:47:02.2] SD: That sounds great. 

[0:47:03.2] MB: Tell me a little about the last kind of component that you talk about, the idea of moving on. 

[0:47:08.3] SD: Moving on is how do we be emotionally agile on the ground in terms of how we cultivate our mindsets and our habits and the specific tasks that we do on a day-to-day basis? I mentioned earlier how we can often get into ways of being that are habitual, but that are not aligned with our values. There are other ways that we can create habits that are aligned with our values and that ultimately free us up to when we’re stressed, when we are time poor, to still take actions that are values concordant. 

I talk about different, again, very practical strategies that enable us to be emotionally agile in the moment, in the reality of our everyday life. An example is imagine you are a parents but you could apply this to any other situation, a meeting at work, or an interaction with a loved one. Imagine you are a parent and what you truly value is presence and connectedness with your children and yet you find that you come home from work every day and you've got a precious hour with them and during that precious hour you bring your phone to the table and you are answering emails because you’re stressed, and so you’re neither doing those emails in an effective way nor being present and connected. 

Now imagine you’ve got a habit that already exists. You come home from work and you put your keys into a particular drawer. There’s this very powerful habit creation strategy called piggybacking, and piggybacking is the idea that you’ve got a pre-existing habit and what you do is you add a new values aligned habits to that. You come home from work and you put your keys in the drawer and now you also put your cellphone in the drawer as well. What you’re doing is you are creating this very powerful way of being that is habitual but that is connected with your values. 

Another aspect of walking your why and then moving on to this moving on part, this very practical part is thinking about ways that you are in the world where you have crawled into what I call have to language, “I have to be on dead duty today.” “I have to go to this meeting.” “Oh! I have to give this person feedback.” 

When we are in have to language, we often feel resentful. We are often not present and focused and giving of our best in that situation, and we often do the action in a way that is not effective. We give the feedback, but we don't give the real feedback or the person is left with a fractured relationship. We so often do this. We all do this, “I have to. I have to. I have to.” We know that there is incredible power in in-state thinking about what is the want to goal that can be surfaced out of the have to? What is the values aligned want to that is beneath being on dead duty? It’s that I have this precious moment with my children, or giving feedback. It's that I truly value fairness and so giving feedback is truly important to me, or going into this meeting. I really want to give a good quality experience to this customer. 

The power when we start surfacing our want to goals rather than our have to goals is profound. We know that when people, for example, have a goal, like, “I have to lose weight. That's done out of a sense of obligation and shame. They are less likely to be able to lose that weight. 

When people, instead, are able to surface the I want to lose weight so I can spend a longer, more quality-based life with my loved ones, that want to goal actually sustains motivation, leads to longer-lasting habits and ultimately helps us to create a life of real thriving. Those are just some examples, but in emotional agility I speak very practically about ways that we can cultivate a mindset, motivations and habits that are aligned with our values and allow us to be emotionally agile. 

[0:51:58.8] MB: What would be kind of a simple piece of homework that you would give to somebody listening to this interview to concretely start to implement some of these practices?

[0:52:07.5] SD: I’ll give one concretes for each step. Showing up; are there emotions that you tend to push aside? Ask yourself if you can just be with that emotion a little bit more. Stepping out; if you’re struggling with something, ask yourself what would a wise person advise you to do? Walking your why; are you connected with your values? If not, start asking yourself questions about what are one or two things that are truly important to me about how I want to bring myself to the world? You don’t need to spend a long time doing it, very simple question. 

Number four, moving on, thinking about ways that you wrap yourself in a prison of have to language and try to connect with what your want to is in that situation and how you can surface that want to into your life. Those are just some practical ideas around it. 

[0:53:13.4] MB: Where can listeners find you and your book online?

[0:53:16.6] SD: They can find me on my website, susandavid.com. There are lots of links to articles, Harvard Business Review articles. The New York Times article, teaching your child emotional agility. There are lots of resources on that. On my website again is the quiz, susandavid.com/learn. It’s a five minute quiz, a 10 page free report. Of course, the book itself is available at all booksellers as well as in the usual online places; Amazon, Barnes & Nobles and so on. 

[0:53:47.5] MB: Susan, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all these incredible wisdom. So much knowledge about our emotions and how we can best interact with them. 

[0:53:56.5] SD: Thank you so much. I’m grateful to have been here. 

[0:53:59.0] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s matt@sucesspodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every listener email.

The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes, because that helps more and more people discover The Science of Success. 

I get a ton of listeners asking, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all these information?” Because of that, we’ve created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. You can get it by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222, or by going to successpodcast.com, that’s successpodcast.com and joining our email list. 

If you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we just talked about and much more, be sure to check out our show notes at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button at the top. 

Thanks again, and we’ll see you on the next episode of The Science of Success.